Mark Galeotti, “Yuri Andropov Would Drop Assad Like a
Hot Kartoshka”, Foreign Policy, January
7, 2016.
And four
other lessons Putin could learn from his hero, the Soviet Union’s most ruthless
reformer.
Vladimir Putin knows that
Russia is in trouble, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do about it. In both
his recent epic three-hour press conference and his New Year’s address, the
normally bullish Russian president appeared uncharacteristically sober. Instead
of the bombastic, confident tsar, we saw an engaged chief executive doing his
best to reassure stockholders of his resolve. “The Russian economy has
generally overcome the crisis,” he said. Debt is down and the population is up,
he added — “a very good figure that speaks of the people’s [positive] state of
mind.” But if he was seeking to calm jittery citizens, it was with limited
success. Putin seems to realize that Russia is teetering on the brink, its
assertive global agenda held together by momentum, bluff, and duct tape. The
country has had two years of recession; real incomes have taken a beating;
labor unrest is on the rise. Yet there is no strategy beyond waiting for world oil
prices some day to recover.
With Putin facing an economy
in crisis, a restive public, and an elite more interested in furthering its interests
than those of the state, maybe it’s time he took some unexpected lessons from
one of his heroes: the ruthless reformist Yuri Andropov. Putin has made no
bones about his admiration for Andropov, the man who headed the KGB when Putin
first joined the organization and who served as Soviet general secretary for
just over a year, from November 1982 to February 1984. One of Putin’s first
acts when he became prime minister in 1999 was to reinstate the plaque to
Andropov on the former KGB headquarters building (now home to its successor,
the FSB). In 2004, to mark the 90th anniversary of Andropov’s birth, Putin had
a 10-foot statue erected in the town of Petrozavodsk, where Andropov had led
the underground resistance against the Nazis.
Andropov was a complex figure
— hard to like, but impossible to ignore. He could be vicious in his unswerving
commitment to the Communist Party. As KGB chief, he had dissidents locked up in
psychiatric hospitals, whistleblowers silenced, and journalists hounded and
muzzled, while before that, as Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had
been instrumental in the crushing of the Hungarian uprising against the country’s
neo-Stalinist government. At the same time, Andropov was equally responsible
for the relatively liberal economic system that Budapest was subsequently
allowed to adopt in 1962, which meant that Hungarians enjoyed a quality of life
greater than elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. He had been appointed to head the
KGB precisely to drag it out of Stalin’s shadow, to professionalize and
modernize it. Rather than thugs and sadists, the KGB began recruiting the best
and the brightest from Soviet universities, and while still an agency of
repression, its watchword became to pre-empt rather than to punish, whenever it
could. He was also pivotal in engineering the rise of a new generation of
liberalizing reformists, including Mikhail Gorbachev, who probably would never
have made it to the Kremlin without his patronage. This helps explain why
Andropov is still positively regarded in unexpected quarters such as imprisoned
liberal former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who, in published correspondence
from 2008 to 2009 with Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, expressed his
respect for Andropov “despite his excesses in some situations.”
But Putin, despite his
admiration, seems to appreciate only some of Andropov’s qualities — his
intellect, his determination, and his ruthlessness — while ignoring the
steadying traits that helped temper his character. Worse, he has adopted the
worst tactics of Andropov-the-Secret-Policeman — not least, the targeted
repression of a few in order to deter and dismay the many — when what he really
needs now is to take some lessons from Andropov-the-Leader.
Here are few to get him
started. Tackle corruption at the top. (That means you, Vladimir.)
Putin talks tough on how
corruption “erodes society and the state system” — but then does nothing
against the senior figures engaging in the kind of embezzlement that is
bleeding the country dry. Part of the problem, of course, is that Putin himself
has been closely involved in corrupt businesses ever since he got into politics
at the start of the 1990s (whether or not he is indeed personally worth $200
billion, as outspoken Kremlin critic Bill Browder alleges). By contrast,
Andropov was distinctive among his peers for his ascetic lifestyle and his lack
of interest in so many of the perks available to top party bosses. When one of
his deputies presented him with a crate of cognac to mark the KGB’s
anniversary, Andropov — who was not much of a drinker and was notoriously
unwilling to accept self-serving gifts — contemptuously refused it.
As a recent panegyric
documentary put it, “One suit, one overcoat, and his children and grandchildren
rode the metro.” Even before coming into power, the anti-corruption zealot used
his control of the KGB to launch a campaign that would go into overdrive once
he was general secretary, cutting a bloody swath through the upper echelons of
the government. He sacked 15 ministers, including the interior minister. By
tackling corrupt officials at the top of the system, not only was he trying to
attack a real problem, but he was also showing ordinary Soviet citizens that this
was not just a PR exercise.
In part, Andropov was driven by
personal zeal, but he also understood that the Soviet economy by the late 1970s
was in serious decline, not least thanks to a fall in world oil prices. (Sound
familiar?) Then, as today, the masses were forced to swallow austerity. Unlike
then, however, under Putin the elite is getting off lightly. Russian oligarchs
hit by Western sanctions, for example, are compensated by the government even as
pensions and welfare payments fall behind inflation, ostensibly due to a lack
of funds. This disparity of treatment is at the heart, for example, of recent protests by truckers forced to pay a new
tax; the contract to collect this tax went to the son of one of Putin’s
cronies. Not a good look — and the sort of thing Andropov took great pains to
avoid.
Realize that Russia loses from
conflict with the West
Andropov was a Marxist-Leninist
hard-liner who mistrusted the West and everything for which he thought it
stood. Nonetheless, he realized that he needed to improve relations. The Cold
War was dangerous and unaffordable: Moscow could not withstand a lengthy
confrontation with a richer, more dynamic West. He made, for example, the first
serious overtures aimed at extracting the Soviets from their war in
Afghanistan, opening up tentative lines of communication with Washington even
before Moscow was willing to admit that it was fighting there. He was willing
to sacrifice a questionable and erratic foreign ally in the name of ending a
commitment that was costly, not just economically and militarily but — more importantly
— politically. (Assad, are you listening?)
And even still, Andropov made
only limited progress in foreign relations. Ideological blinkers, mutual
suspicion, and sheer bad luck all led to stumbles, especially after the 1983
shootdown of a South Korean airliner that had wandered into Soviet airspace. By
then, the West wasn’t willing to trust him, and by that stage Andropov was
already too ill — in February 1983, he had suffered total renal failure and
never recovered — to restart his campaign from scratch.
Putin, who likewise is trying to
challenge the West and reshape the global order on the back of an ailing
economy and a corrupt, inefficient system, should take heed. He has his own
undeclared, unacknowledged war in Ukraine, which continues to cost him dearly
in international credibility, and even his own downed airliner: Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17, shot down by his Ukrainian proxies in 2014. His most recent
adventures in Syria were meant to help rebuild bridges with the West, but so
far even leaders, such as France’s François Hollande, who want greater
cooperation with Russia are acting out of pure pragmatism. A Pew Research
Center survey released in August 2015 found trust
in Putin around the world at its lowest ebb — even lower than that for Russia
as a whole.
It’s the economy, Vlad
One of the main reasons for
Andropov’s interest in improving relations was that he understood that Western
investment, technology, and know-how would be essential to turning around an
economy in stagnation that was excessively dependent on oil and natural gas
exports. Andropov adopted initial solutions that were
contradictory and ineffective. On the one hand, he allowed some abortive early
steps toward small-scale liberalization. At the same time, he took
authoritarian measures to improve budgeting and quality control, and he pushed
to overhaul the major industries. It didn’t work, but he was working against 60
years of Soviet orthodoxy; the key was that he started trying to do something about a problem talked to death
over the previous decade.
Today, economic reform is again
being talked to death under Putin. He squandered the opportunity to invest and
diversify in the 2000s, when oil prices were high, and today he seems more
interested in protecting his cronies than addressing real challenges.
Monopolies and cartels abound, and the Kremlin turns a blind eye. The
commercial arbitration courts, one of the few bright lights in the Russian
legal system, have been rolled back into the corrupt regular courts. Even
former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, a personal friend of Putin, has warned that
there has been a complete lack of reform of the economic system: “We need
another economic model,” he said. Same as it ever was.
Build a broad-based team, not a
group of clones
Three months into his tenure,
Andropov’s kidneys failed; six months later, he was plugged permanently into a
dialysis machine. But Andropov still managed to make a difference even from his
hospital bed, from which he laid the groundwork for Gorbachev’s rise. How? In
part, he pulled together a broad-based reform team, ranging from
liberal economists and party reformers to nationalists and hard-liners, who
were disgusted by the corruption or convinced of the need for change. They
differed on what that change should be but at least agreed that the status quo
was unsustainable.
Although Putin originally was
willing to appreciate multiple perspectives, over time he has steadily narrowed
his inner circle, which is now composed, generally, of people
like him: veterans of the security apparatus, equally as cut off from the
reality of life in Russia. Putin — who reportedly prefers to not even come into the Kremlin
these days, instead running Russia from his country palace — appears
increasingly to live in an echo chamber, producing much reassurance but few new
ideas.
Face the facts, however difficult
Putin’s team of clones is just a
symptom of his wider unwillingness to see the world — Russia included — as it
really is. It is hard to know precisely what Putin is told by his team, but
word is that Kremlin employees have learned that you do not prosper by taking
bad news or contrarian opinions to the tsar’s table. Thus, he can reel off
macroeconomic statistics on everything from grain output (103.4 million tonnes)
to projected new electricity generation (4.6 gigawatts) at his press
conference, yet his off-the-cuff remarks increasingly betray an inability to
understand the pressures and realities of life in today’s Russia. He angered
the protesting truckers, for example, by essentially accusing them of making
money off the books, instead of addressing the very real concerns that are
driving many of them out of business.
One of Andropov’s defining
characteristics, by contrast, was a willingness to go beyond the propaganda
that not only swaddled ordinary Soviets but also infantilized an elite who
chose to believe its comforting lies. Official crime figures, for example,
skyrocketed during his time as general secretary. It was not that the streets
were any more dangerous; rather, for years the party had artificially
downplayed the problem. Andropov was not willing to continue this charade.
He did not always get it right,
not least because of his Marxist-Leninist prejudices.
Yet he broke with tradition in
his public acknowledgment that even his ideology
still did not have all the answers. Even as general secretary he was willing to
admit this: “Frankly speaking, we have not
yet studied properly the society in which we live and work, and we have not yet
fully discovered the laws governing its development, especially economic laws.”
In short, he was willing to see the problems ahead rather than be blinded by
propaganda and flattery.
* * *
Of course,
Andropov was one of the last defenders of a moribund and oppressive system. His
specific prescriptions were probably too little, too late even 30 years ago,
and they would do little to help today’s Russia reform into the kind of modern,
liberal state that could best meet the aspirations of its people, who at heart
are neither comfortable with kleptocracy nor eager for
empire. Putin’s Russia is a product of the 2000s, a decade of high
hydrocarbon prices and a West wholly distracted by the post-9/11 threat. Those
years are gone. Putin can no more bring back his glory days than even a healthy
Andropov could have saved the USSR. But if he learns some of Andropov’s lessons
— the need to cleanse the system from the top, build the economy, and listen to
the kind of eclectic team that will give it to him
straight — then there is still the faint chance Putin will do more than preside
over a slide into a stagnation only temporarily masked by flashy and risky
foreign adventures.
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