Meet Mr. Adamov

David Aikman

The Bush-Putin meeting brings back memories of Putin’s earlier career.

At the beginning of July, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with President Bush in the Bush family summer retreat at Kennebunkport, Maine. It could turn out to be one of the most crucial meetings in Russian-US relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Mr. Bush caused a lot of eyes to roll among experienced Washington Kremlinologists when he first met Putin in June 2001, in Slovenia. Speaking at a press conference afterwards, he said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Kremlinologists had a right to be skeptical; looking into the soul of a man who had been a KGB colonel and one of whose first acts as president was to toast the memory of Stalin might have seemed a hazardous business. Perhaps, at the time, it was. But in the short term, it certainly paid off.

In September 2001, of course, 9/11 happened. When, a few weeks after that, the U.S. needed overflights of Russian airspace to position troops and supplies in Central Asia close to Afghanistan, Putin overruled the objections of his entire military staff and agreed to allow them. He, presumably, had glimpsed President Bush’s soul and realized that, in the immediate term, there was no threat to Russia under Bush.

But six years is a long time in international politics. America’s abandonment of the ABM Treaty, its invasion of Iraq despite opposition by Russia in the UN, the expansion of NATO into former member-republics of the Soviet Union: all these served to irritate Moscow and to remind the Russians that they have stopped being a decisive factor in world politics.

But if the world has changed, probably no major country in it has been more significantly transformed during those six years than Russia. In 2006, its GDP growth was approximately 6.7 percent, higher than any other G-8 nation. Russia’s economy today, fueled by the high prices of oil and natural gas, which it exports mainly to Western Europe, is far from the weakened state it was in 2001 when Putin first met Bush. Russia now extracts more petroleum daily than Saudi Arabia, amounting to 14 percent of the global total. Russian foreign exchange reserves are estimated to be the third highest in the world. A recent Goldman Sachs projection indicated that by 2050 Russia would be among the four leading economies of the world. The others? India, China, Brazil. Even if that doesn’t happen, growing Russian economic self-confidence has fueled an increasing belligerence towards the U.S., and the West in general, that is disturbing.

Russia’s immediate gripe against the U.S. at the June 2007 G-8 meeting in Rostock was that Washington was planning to introduce a missile shield by 2010 into the Czech Republic and Poland as a way to protect Europe from an eventually nuclearized Iran. Putin fumed that such a move would be a direct military threat to Russia and that, in response, all of Western Europe would be re-targeted within Russia’s ballistic missile strategy. Within hours of the G-8 meeting, on his return from Germany, he told some two hundred senior Russian and international executives at a meeting in St. Petersburg that Russia’s plan was to develop a new center of global finance that would rival the U.S.-dominated World Bank and IMF. Already, Russia is conducting increasing amounts of its international trade in euros rather than in dollars, which is obviously an international currency in trouble. It may seem far-fetched, but Russian speculation about the development of a new global financial center favorable to Russian interests isn’t to be taken lightly. Already, the European Union is dangerously vulnerable in its energy dependency on supplies of natural gas from Russia.

The new Russian economic well being has certainly bolstered Russia’s self-confidence. It has also emboldened Putin in his natural instincts (a martial arts champion in his youth and a current black belt in judo) to punch back at adversaries when he feels threatened.

As a KGB spy in Dresden during the Cold War, Putin operated under the cover of “Mr. Adamov,” director of a Soviet-German Friendship Institute. He certainly no longer needs “cover” in his international dealings, but he hardly seems to have abandoned the mindset he had when working for the KGB. Since he became president of Russia on Boris Yeltsin’s resignation in 2000, not only has Russia become far more autocratic, it has also become a more dangerous place to work, if one is critical of the government. Journalists investigating the Chechen war have been murdered (Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006), and former Soviet intelligence agents who have defected overseas have been assassinated by poisoning (Aleksandr Litvinenko in November 2006). A few days ago, Putin lectured Russia’s history teachers not to be too critical of past events—the Stalin terror of the 1930s, for example—in their own country. “Many of our textbooks are written by people on foreign grants,” Putin told teachers at a conference outside Moscow few days ago. “They are dancing a polka ordered by those who pay for it. This is undoubtedly an instrument for influencing our country.”

That comment was part of a pattern of an emerging hypersensitivity, perhaps even paranoia, about criticism of Russia from any foreign quarter. Reacting to President Bush’s remarks at the unveiling in Washington of a monument to the victims of Communism, Putin said that Russia’s own past was far less blood-soaked than that of the U.S. He told reporters in Moscow this month,

“But you know the problem. It’s not even a problem, it’s a real tragedy. The thing is that I am the only [democrat], there just aren’t any others in the world. Let’s look at what happens in North America—sheer horror, torture, the homeless, Guantanamo, keeping people in custody without trial or investigation. Look what’s going on in Europe, the harsh treatment of demonstrators, the use of rubber bullets, tear gas in one capital or another, the killing of demonstrators in the streets.”

Putin, the world’s only democrat? I don’t think so. As for the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, the few hundred held there, while they certainly deserve an eventual conviction or exoneration, pale into insignificance in comparison with the millions who perished in the Soviet Gulag. Mr. Putin has indeed come a long way from Mr. Adamov. The Russian president, however, is the same man who joined the world’s largest security and intelligence organization out of motives of Soviet patriotism. In his government he has surrounded himself with “siloviki” (“strong ones”), former officers from the military or the intelligence services. Though Putin has said he will step down when his second elected term ends in 2008, there is worrying talk of a “stalking horse” president being elected next year to keep Putin’s seat warm for a return to power once he is eligible again, in 2016.

Let’s hope that Mr. Bush, when he met “Mr. Adamov” in Kennebunkport, remembered what Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko said of Mikhail Gorbachev on introducing him to the Politburo in March 1985: “He has a nice smile, but iron teeth.” The difference is this: Putin has already demonstrated that he can bite.   

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Global Culture, War and Peace, Fri 13 Jul 2007