Scott Horton: What Does Putin Want?

The two presidents—George W. Bush and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin—make a remarkable study, side-by-side, and so do the nations they embody. There is much similarity between them. Andrei Sakharov, back in the seventies, taught that the looming prospect of violent confrontation between the Americans and Soviets would most likely be avoided through a process of steady convergence. Examining the situation now with a bit more distance from the dramatic events of 1992-93, Sakharov's prognosis has proven very accurate, though I doubt he ever would have imagined the course things have followed since his tragic death in 1989. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but its principal successor state, Russia, is a dark approximation of the United States—it reflects America of the Gilded Age in a sense. Income inequality is dramatic, the social net is unraveling, and it has a robust, wannabe authoritarian leader. Meanwhile, the United States, preaching an aggressive, Wilsonian doctrine of liberal democracy, has turned steadily against basic values and has grown dramatically less liberal. Income inequality is racing back to pre-Depression levels, the power, authority and prestige of the Congress and Courts are radically eroded as an authoritarian president busts out of the constraints of an Enlightenment-era constitution. Indeed, America and Russia are much more alike than they were twenty years ago. And yet is there not something seriously menacing in this turn?

Both presidents are nearing the end of their terms of office, and historians will be drawing conclusions about them. While Putin will end his term as president, no serious observer expects him to disappear as a powerful, perhaps dominating, force on the political stage. With Bush, however, the public if not the punditry, couldn't be more eager for him simply to disappear. No matter how you do the tally, no matter how critical you are of Putin and his dark aspirations, his presidency cannot be termed anything other than a success. Putin clearly understood some fundamental rules of statecraft, particularly the advantage of setting realistic, realizable goals and achieving them. On this point, Bush couldn't be more of a contrast.

America, it seems to me, has a very weak grasp of Putin's personality and politics. That's even the case for most foreign policy pundits who write about him. It reflects, perhaps, the diminished engagement of American intelligentsia with Russia, weakened language skills generally and a world analysis grown flabby in the wake of American unilateralism. And for this world, the New York Review of Books has an essential elixir: Sergei Kovalev's essay"Why Putin Wins."

This is, without a doubt, the most important study of things Russian to be published in a popular journal in the United States in quite some time. It is a study of Putin, but more importantly, it is a snapshot of the Russian popular spirit at a critical juncture. ...