Know Thine Enemy

Vladimir Putin and the Russian Political System

Vladimir Putin has held power in Russia as either president or prime minister since 1999, dealing with every U.S. president from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. He first met Clinton only after Clinton had left office, likely when Bill was probing Putin’s intentions toward the incoming Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Soon after, during a visit to the U.S, a reporter put George Bush on the spot when he asked him if he trusted Putin.  Not to offend the Russian president during a joint news conference, Bush called him, “very straightforward and trustworthy.”  Putin then outmaneuvered Obama, and later Biden, both of whom failed to prevent his aggressions in Crimea and Ukraine.

When Donald Trump took office in 2017, Putin’s Syrian client, Bashar al-Assad, launched a chemical attack on his own civilians—a move that could not have occurred without Putin’s approval.  Like a Russian chess-master, Putin timed the assault for the day Chinese President Xi Jinping was visiting the White House.  Trump responded with a Tomahawk missile barrage partially destroying Syria’s Shayrat Airbase, killing hundreds of Russian advisors & soldiers in the process. The strike was widely seen as a blunt message to Putin: “Don’t embarrass me, and I won’t embarrass you.” Putin never openly tested Trump again.

By contrast, after Joe Biden publicly called Putin “a killer” he hesitated when Putin amassed his troops along the Ukraine border. Putin read Biden’s caution as weakness and launched a full-scale invasion, bringing us to the current crisis.

What the West Must Understand

Historically, Russian politics have centered on a single dominant figure—Tsar, Communist Party General Secretary, or today, the president. Unlike the United States, Russia has no tradition of checks and balances. Institutions such as the Duma, courts, and regional governments exist, but all are subordinate to the executive.

Power depends less on ideology than on loyalty. Patron–client networks have always dominated Russian politics, and today, oligarchs and apparatchiks remain secure only so long as they serve the Kremlin. Elections are stage-managed, opposition is marginalized or crushed, dissent is silenced, and state-controlled media reinforces narratives of patriotism, stability, and Western hostility.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia was in chaos: the nation had little tax revenue, food and medicine were in short supply, the currency was losing its value to inflation, and a collapsing life expectancy fell to just 57 years.  Even the price of gas had quadrupled overnight, despite Russia’s abundant energy.  Corruption thrived in this no rules economy while Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president, was proving himself to be incompetent, venal, and increasingly unstable from heavy drinking.

Meanwhile, when the collapse  began, Vladimir Putin was a lackluster KGB bureaucrat posted in East Germany.  But as a bureaucrat he well- understood Russia’s power structures.  Returning from Germany he felt humiliated and was incensed at what he was seeing.  Nonetheless, he aligned himself with Boris Yeltsin as his, for lack of a better term, hatchet man.  Putin earned Yeltsin’s favor by reining in the oligarchs and was again rewarded first by being appointed  Deputy Chief of the Presidential Staff in 1996 and then Director of the FSB successor to the KGB, in 1998.  Less than a year later he received national recognition for the brutal, Stalin-like suppression of Chechen separatists and was appointed Prime Minister for his efforts.

Meanwhile, desperate for hard currency, Yeltsin sold Soviet industries for pennies on the dollar, creating the oligarch class that we see today.  Facing corruption scandals and deteriorating health, Yeltsin named Putin “acting president”—a title that did not officially exist, but the quid pro quo was clear, i.e., after the “election,” as the new president, Putin would protect Yeltsin and his family from prosecution.

Once in power, Putin turned on his former friends, the oligarchs. Those who resisted were jailed or exiled; those who pledged loyalty kept their wealth by sharing it with him.  It’s been estimated that Putin’s net worth is roughly $200 billion – not too bad for a mid-level bureaucrat with a penchant for murder.  And by consolidating control over the FSB, the courts, and Russia’s energy giants, Putin elevated himself above the oligarchs and established a system of absolute vertical power.

Conclusion

Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Soviet empire, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” and framed the world order as a period of Russian humiliation and decline with a promise to restore great-power status to the Russian Federation.  This is the man Donald Trump must deal with—a once humiliated, angry and obscure bureaucrat with an axe to grind, who rose from relative obscurity to become the master of Russia by ruthlessly exploiting chaos, loyalty, and fear.

Quote of the Day: “For Russia, power is vertical.” — Common Kremlin phrase describing Putin’s centralized control.