routine crimes and even murders in exchange for their fealty. To bind Russians together, he encouraged a campaign of sometimes frightening nationalism and xenophobia against non-Russians in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere. Hate crimes soared. According to the SOVA Center, a Russian activist group, that kind of violence killed thirty-three people across Russia in the first three months of 2008, compared with seventy-two in all of the previous year. Racist attacks tripled in four years, SOVA reported. But that was the nation’s Faustian bargain—acquiescence to a much-compromised, all-powerful state in exchange for the freedom to emerge from their homes, sweep away the rubble from their streets, and send their children to school.
The fresh pride that Putin instilled in his people bore resemblance to the feel-good mood that Ronald Reagan inspired in many Americans with a famously successful political slogan. Vladimir Putin created what a clever Moscow ad man might have marketed as “It’s Morning Again in Russia.”
The more confident Putin became about Russia’s ascendancy, the more willing he seemed to rattle Europe occasionally and poke America in the eye with some frequency. He bluntly criticized the invasion of Iraq and complained about U.S. unilateralism. His assertiveness drew occasional scolding in America, which seemed to say, well, what can one expect of those impossible Russians?
But Putin’s increasingly disagreeable manner was not simply a Russian being difficult. It was at least in part a result of the West’s condescending attitude toward Russia when it was still deep in the throes of economic crisis. Russia’s sense that it had been humiliated when it could least defend itself helped set the stage for worsening relations as the years wore on.
Putin had begun his presidency ready to find a way to reconcile Russia’s profound differences with the West and develop friendly relations. As they did with Yeltsin, the policies of NATO would become an irritant for Putin. When the West, in the 1990s, began proceedings to absorb Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Baltic states into its military alliance, Russia objected. In nationalist circles, the NATO expansion was seen as a potential move to blackmail Moscow militarily should it mount any serious challenge to Western aims in the region. But Putin regarded the NATO dispute differently. He thought Washington simply didn’t understand the basis for Moscow’s opposition, according to Viktor, the Kremlin insider I consulted. If he was patient and made every effort to explain, Putin told his aides, “they’ll see we’re normal people, and we’ll have a different relationship,” Viktor recalled. So Putin sat for hours with major and minor Western visitors—a government minister, a vice minister, whoever was willing to hear his thoughts on Chechnya, NATO, and energy.
By the beginning of 2000, the NATO expansion was well under way. Putin met with President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, and floated a question: What would be the West’s attitude toward Russia applying to join NATO? Putin was serious, according to Viktor. He saw dual benefits to NATO membership: Russia could integrate more tightly with the West, and, more important from Moscow’s point of view, have an opportunity to “reform” the Cold War–era organization from within. Like the other nineteen NATO members, Moscow would wield a veto. Among other things, it could stop the alliance from repeating acts Russia opposed, such as the bombing of Serbia.
As Viktor recalled the strained moment, Berger suddenly found a fly on the window to be extremely intriguing. Albright looked straight ahead. Clinton glanced at his advisers and finally responded with a diplomatically phrased brush-off. It was something on the order of, If it were up to me, I would welcome that.
Not dissuaded, Putin’s entourage raised the idea again with visiting congressmen. But they reacted similarly, getting “this tricky expression on their faces and saying, ‘Ah, you want to destroy NATO from within,’” Viktor recalled.
The congressmen had a point, of course. If Russia had been a NATO member in 1999, for example, Serbia would have simply overrun Kosovo as it and its surrogates had previously done with Bosnia and Herzegovina. It made sense to exclude Russia from NATO, notwithstanding the organization’s absorption of other members of the former Soviet bloc, I thought. But Viktor had been offended at the American suggestion that Russia’s motives were disingenuous. So too, apparently, had Putin. My mind wandered to Shakespeare’s admonition about protesting too much. Only minutes earlier, Viktor had openly stated that Putin wanted to join NATO in part to “reform” it. But I presume there was something irritating about Russia not being given the benefit of the doubt and instead being accused of deception.
A truly serious outrage came after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Viktor said. Putin was among the first to reach President George W. Bush with condolences and an offer to provide any needed assistance. It wasn’t long before Bush requested that Russia acquiesce to the establishment of a U.S. military presence in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, from which an offensive would be mounted against the Taliban- ruled government in Afghanistan. The American president promised that the bases were temporary and only for the Afghan attack, said Viktor. He recalled Putin giving a positive response, saying, “We’ve got to help our friends.”
A year and a half later, the active phase of the Afghanistan campaign was concluded. The Kremlin asked when the United States intended to withdraw. Viktor paraphrased the American reply: “This is a zone of our strategic interests and we’re not leaving.”
Vyacheslav Nikonov, a dapper fifty-one-year-old historian and Kremlin insider, said America’s assertion that it intended to stay in Afghanistan pushed Putin beyond his threshold of patience. “I heard it from the Kremlin, ‘We’re fed up,’” Nikonov told me. Putin increasingly felt that Russia had made too many unrequited concessions since the Gorbachev years. “It’s, ‘You guys do what we Americans want or the relationship is terrible.’ This is what the relationship has been for the last fifteen years,” Nikonov said. “We did what the U.S. wanted, and it got us zero.”
And that was the end of Putin as sometimes-friendly interlocutor. If Washington and the rest of the West were going to treat Russia as a second-class country, well, Putin had his own message to deliver. He told off Washington, saying it had “overstepped its national borders in every way.” When the United States said, in 2007, that it would install anti-missile devices in Poland and the Czech Republic, Putin’s commander of missile forces threatened to re-aim Moscow’s nuclear rockets at the installations. Then Putin struck the West’s true soft underbelly: energy. He forced both Royal Dutch Shell and France’s Total to sell controlling shares in their Russian oil properties to state-run companies at low prices, and warned that a similar fate might await Britain’s BP and the biggest company of all, ExxonMobil.
The West called Putin belligerent. But his disparaging remark about the extent to which America had extended its presence seemed altogether reasonable to me—the United States clearly had overreached around the world. America’s reaction to Putin’s complaint showed once again that it could be just as thin-skinned as the Russians, tending to vilify any outspoken critic abroad.
Viktor found it telling that Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin—two wholly different people—started out and ended up at the same point in their attitudes toward the United States: hopeful at first, quite disenchanted and antagonistic in the end. What Viktor might have added was that their separate journeys reflected Russia’s historic problem since Ivan the Terrible: Much of the world felt uncomfortable with Russian ways and kept the country at arm’s length. Russia’s modern ruling elite recognized the dissonance, yet thought that over time other nations might become more accepting. Putin in particular thought that Moscow’s willingness to shelve its misgivings and bow to the West in certain situations would motivate the West to reciprocate in other instances. When the West largely failed to do so, he was hotly resentful.
The story line put forth by Viktor and Nikonov presupposed that Russia and Putin wouldn’t have adopted their chin-out attitude if the West had behaved differently. While it must be recognized that the West does not have entirely clean hands in all of this, I am not as confident as my two Russian informants. There is no way to dial back, but my own experience in the former Soviet Union is that Russia is predisposed to some amount of bullying self- importance. Russia and the West quite likely would have ended up in the same spot no matter how much more accommodating the West had been. The West likely would never accept certain Russian demands, and vice versa. For instance, it is difficult to imagine Russia willingly acceding to the West’s Balkan policy, specifically the independence of the region of Kosovo. Likewise, it’s improbable that Washington will abandon its determination to see NATO expand all the way to Russia’s borders. No matter how many diplomatic courtesies might have been exchanged during the post-Soviet years, these two issues would have remained incendiary in Russia and resulted in continuing antagonism.
Part of Putin’s in-your-face defiance may be the lawyer in him. In a 2007 interview with
