The Age of the Strongman: Understanding Putin, with Catherine Belton (Part One)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event, The Age of the Strongman: Understanding Putin, recorded at Smith Square Hall in Westminster. This was the first event in our new series, The Age of the Strongman, in which Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator for the FT, Gideon Rachman, speaks to leading experts about the political leaders defining our times.

To kick off the series, we wanted to begin with the archetypal strongman leader, Vladimir Putin.

In recent years, Putin has waged a relentless campaign to expand his influence beyond Russia's borders and to undermine Western democracy. War in Ukraine, interference in democratic elections, the sponsorship of extremist politics to destabilise Europe. But how did he come to have such control over Russia? And what is it that he really wants?

Gideon was joined in conversation with Arkady Ostrovsky, Russia editor for The Economist, and Catherine Belton, reporter on Russia for The Washington Post and author of Putin's People, who joined live from Kiev. This episode is coming to you in two parts. If you want to listen to the live recording in full and ad-free, why not consider becoming an Intelligence Squared premium subscriber? Head to intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership to find out more or hit the IQ2 extra button on Apple.

Now let's join our host, Gideon Rachman, with more. Hello, welcome everybody to this evening on the age of the strongman and specifically on Vladimir Putin.

Before I introduce our panelists and the subject I've been asked to say a few words about the series that intelligence square is putting on on the age of the strongman Which is I think kind of partially based on a book I wrote which came out three months before the Russian invasion of full-scale invasion of Ukraine so

I think it'd be a good idea to just sort of briefly rehearse what I meant by a strongman leader before we try to put Putin into that context. When I was writing the book, one of the things that I thought was

an issue I had to deal with was was it really legitimate to put a pure autocrat like Xi Jinping in the same category as democratically elected leader like Donald Trump or Erdogan in Turkey or even a sort of semi-autocratic leader like Putin? Was there really a common framework? And the argument of course I made since I wrote the book was yes. And

Trying to identify what they had in common I think I came up with like three simple things that tend to happen with a strongman leader the first is that there's a cult of personality a sense that this Particular leader wants to encourage that they are uniquely qualified to lead the country as Trump said in a speech in 2016 to the Republican Convention I alone can fix it and

And in different ways, that's Putin's proposition, Xi's proposition, and so on. And the second thing is that there is a state of emergency, that the country is in terrible trouble, and that is why they need a strongman leader. Trump spoke about American carnage. We'll hear tonight about the kind of sense of crisis that Putin evoked in Russia. And then once you've said, okay, the country is in crisis,

And you need a strong man leader. That then leads to the third stage, which is to say, and we really can't afford to play by the normal rules of democracy, which is far too slow moving. You need to take tough, decisive action. And that can be an assault on liberal institutions, or it can be, as we discovered with Putin, the invasion of a neighboring country. So those were the common propositions. But I wrote that book.

few years ago now and a lot's happened since then I think you know if Trump had lost this time you might have said well the age of the strongman was coming to a close but I think unfortunately it's got a new lease of life so it still remains a very pertinent subject and last word

On this, I mean, it's totally appropriate that we start with Putin because I think he was the archetype. Almost too symbolically, he comes to power on the first day of the new millennium. That's, I think, his first full day as president.

And because we weren't in that point really aware of what a strongman leader was, we thought we were history had ended. Everyone was going to become a liberal democracy. A lot of Western leaders initial reactions to Putin was, well, he's a bit rough around the edges, but he is the guy who's going to complete the modernization of Russia.

And that turned out to be a total misreading. And in fact, he turned out to be an archetype for a whole bunch of other leaders who, to some extent, have modeled themselves off him and regard him as showing an alternative to the liberal model.

So with that, let me turn to the real experts on Putin. We have a fantastic panel. Catherine Belton, who unfortunately for us can't be here. She was going to be here tonight, but she's sitting there in Kiev and is author of, I think, the best biography of Putin and one I lent on pretty heavily when I wrote my own book. So Catherine, welcome.

And to my left, Arkady Ostrovsky, who from The Economist, author of prize-winning book, The Invention of Russia, and a great podcast series next year in Moscow. So Arkady also here. So I thought I'd start before we go back in time and look at how Putin emerged and how he's changed, if he has.

But just by starting with the here and now, Arkady, as Putin surveys the world right now, how do you think he's feeling? Do you think he's optimistic? Thank you. Thank you, Gideon, and good evening. I was just thinking, listening to your introduction about the strongman, and just suddenly flashed in my mind, I mean, I'm sure we'll come back to that, but I just couldn't help myself thinking and saying it now, is of course Putin was appointed on that first, you know, on the new millennium as a weakman.

He came, his job was to be a weak man when he got the job and that the transition, you know, he was supposed to be just carrying on the legacy of Yeltsin years. How he will be feeling now, I have no idea, I'm not in his head, but I imagine he will, he would have had, you know, he'll have a sense of validation and the idea that he is, what he sees his historic mission

and his predictions are working and that he is the one who's been chosen by history. He was not a man who fought for that power but was placed in that power position to drive this extraordinary change and it's not just about Ukraine. I think there is a degree to Putin which he says openly

Most recently I think on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. He doesn't like revolutions He doesn't like kind of Lenin idea but in terms of the interesting when one talking on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution He was comparing the scale of change that he brought into the world with that of the Bolsheviks that he is changing the world order and

that the world order is changing in front of us, that Donald Trump and all those other strongmen who are doing exactly what he said they would do, and that old liberal world order which emerged not, you know, 30 years after the end of the Soviet Union is over, and it's extraordinary revision. In that sense, his war

is not just war, it is a revolution in its effects, that it's much, much bigger. And I think he's looking at this world now and seeing Donald Trump doing this America changing, the transatlantic alliance under enormous strain. And that's exactly what he set out to do and he said would do back on the same forum in Munich in 2007 as JD Vance spoke years later. Yeah.

So, Catherine, I'd like your take on that question of how you think Putin will see his situation right now. But also, Arkady said in his initial answer that Putin was elected or not elected, he was appointed as a weak man. And that's something you write about very interestingly in your book. So how did he come to power and how did he make this transition from weak?

appointee of the power system in Russia to something that he is today. I mean, it's a huge question, but a kind of brief summary of how that happened would be great to get us kicking off.

He was certainly seen as a weak man, but probably he wasn't actually a weak man because one of the things that Putin was always particularly skilled at was acting like a chameleon. He would reflect back to others exactly what they wanted to see in him. And that's one of the reasons why he was trusted so

with taking over the regime because of course Yeltsin's family wanted somebody who wasn't going to put them in jail and they thought that he was going to continue Yeltsin's legacy. They forgot to look into the dark nooks and crannies of his KGB past and his past as the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg where essentially he ruled the city hand in hand with organised crime and with his KGB cronies.

Putin was always tough, but he was seen as weak. And right now, of course, he has got to feel validated. He's got to feel pretty elated. Everything that he hoped for really does appear to be falling into place.

You know, there's still a lot that we don't know about his relationship with Donald Trump. There's still an awful lot for us to investigate, unfortunately, and that's going to keep us busy probably for many years to come. But what we do know is that these are people who do share the same world viewpoint. As you said, they're strong men, leaders, and they believe that the world should be carved up between great powers.

As after Trump came to power, you had many of Putin's allies crowing that this is the end of liberal democracy. We're on the cusp of a new era, or in fact, we have entered this new era in which the great powers, Russia, US and China, get to carve up the world and the rest of us don't matter. So, yeah, we were in for some interesting times. But I still think, you know, we're in for one last test.

Because right now, of course, it does look like everything's going Putin's way. But some, if you're going to be charitable towards Donald Trump, you might suggest that once he and Ukraine have agreed a consolidated position, there are still risks for Putin if he doesn't agree to a peace deal. I guess the test is still ahead.

Is Trump really owe some fealty to Putin? Is he going to follow completely and realign Washington with Moscow? Or are there some risks still if Putin doesn't agree to a peace plan and wants to continue his war? I guess we still have to see. Yeah, and you raise a subject I'll come back to, which is the nature of his relationship with Trump, which we were just discussing earlier. But Catherine, just a quick follow up before I come back to Arkady. I mean, you said...

You know, he was appointed as a weak man, he was kind of a chameleon figure, and yet here he is 25 years later, and master of all he surveys inside Russia for the moment. How did that happen? Was there a moment when he sort of emerges, or is it a gradual consolidation of power? And do you think he had a plan, or does it just, in the way of history, just kind of things fall into place one after the other?

Yeah, he was for sure. He was lucky. He was in the right place at the right time. But he was also very skilled at being the right person at the right time. You know, he rose very quietly through the ranks of the Kremlin after moving there in 1996 after Yeltsin's re-election. He rose pretty rapidly because he was skilled at what he did.

He was a very effective manager. And in the eyes of Valentin Yumashev, who was Yeltsin's chief of staff and later son-in-law, he thought that Putin distinguished himself by being distinctly unambitious. I think I remember at one point,

Putin had come up to him and said, well, you know, he was already deputy head of the Kremlin administration. And he'd said, well, I don't think I can rise anymore. I think it's time for me to resign. And that only kind of embellished him in the eyes of Yumashev, who then promptly appointed him first deputy chief of the Kremlin administration. And Putin really was clever at being a comedian because there was another moment when he went to Yumashev and he said, look,

This was at the time of the height of the war between the Yeltsin family and the prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, who was a former spy master, the person they saw as a Soviet dinosaur who would drag Russia back into its Soviet past and imperialist past, as we're seeing now. But Putin came to Yamashchev and he said, I'm

Primo Kovac asked me to do a terrible thing. He's asked me to bug the offices of one of the leading democratic leaders. Of course, I couldn't do that because, you know, we'd be going back to the worst of the KGB practices. Of course, I'm not going to do that.

And of course, now knowing everything that we know about Putin, I don't for a minute believe that he was shying away from doing that, but he was just ingratiating himself with somebody who was in a position to really propel his career. ♪

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I mean, Arkady, I suppose, you know, we all look back at events and reinterpret them in the light of what happened later. But do you think that we missed the early signs or a lot of people missed the early signs of how violent Putin could be? I mean, the Chechen war starts more or less as he comes into power. And then war is more as a constant theme. There's the war in Georgia, then the annexation of Crimea and now this.

Yeah, I think, I don't know whether there was, I mean, hindsight is a great thing. And I think a lot of people were looking at Russia and the transition. There is a Putin paradox, which is, it's quite rare, I think, in history when somebody comes to carry on the legacy of the previous regime, which actually is a continuation figure, sort of consolidate the 90s, the Russia's transformation, emergence from Russia.

communism who then becomes a revolutionary figure. I mean, it's, there are several iterations of Putin in historic terms, you know, he's both Napoleon and he is the, he is the revolutionary who comes from a, from a different task. But, um, in terms of violence, uh, yes, I think the war in Chechnya was the moment. I mean, there was the most crucial moment, I think. Um,

There were two wars, there was the first war in '94, '96, which Yeltsin was effectively forced to stop because he was, for better or worse, a democratically elected leader and had faced elections in '96, and the war was unpopular and the media was free.

And under pressure, basically had to end it on conditions which were favorable to Chechnya. And Putin restarted, basically the war restarted in '99 and became the seminal point for Putin. That is Putin, the emergence of Putin, the strongman. You know, rhetorically, in terms of the imagery, that's when we first see him and hear him say, you know,

will pursue terrorists and rub them out in a shit hole, all that stuff that people start relating to. I think you're absolutely right. I think war has been in a way the foundation of Putinism. In fact, Russia has been fighting wars. I mean, we think about 2022 as this new moment, but Russia actually has been fighting wars every seven, eight years.

After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, it's only, what, between 1989 to 1994, right? To the beginning of the Chechen War. Then the second Chechen War in 1999. Then the war in Georgia in 2008. Then Ukraine, the first Ukraine. Then Syria. Now this. So actually war is a constant thing. I can tell you what I missed.

I mean, I saw, we saw the signs, and Catherine and I were working in Moscow at the same time. And, you know, I did see the KGB. I did see how they were spreading into every part of the country. Still, when you look to, you know, life outside, life, you know, there was economic growth. You know, Russia was modernizing. There was social modernization. One thing which perhaps I dismissed as just kind of...

talk is how Putin's regime was transforming the narratives of wars. When the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Afghanistan,

That was a moment when every color was relieved because there was a ridiculous war Nobody understood this purpose. It's gone together with the communism and on the whole the people You know the veterans who returned from from the war in Afghanistan war were seen as the not the outcast being at the joint the mafia You know, there was a lot of they were not heroes. They were not heroes even the fighters in the first Chechen War and

in 1946, 94, 96, were more victims of the stupidity of the regime to send them there. Very, very early on, if you look at what Putin was doing, I think pretty much all of us missed it.

because it was just not the stuff that mattered on the streets and mattered in the economy. They started reframing the idea of war, and they started heroicizing first the fighters of Afghanistan and linking them into the Second World War, then the fighters of the first Chechen War, and Putin started building the narrative

of all of this being the continuation of one great war, the war which gives legitimacy to Russia, to the Soviet Union and to Russia still today, the war on which everything predicates, the victory in the Second World War. And he started putting all those wars into that narrative, which he continued doing. So if you look at how this current, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was portrayed,

Structurally, it's continuation to the soldiers who are fighting this war are carrying on the heroic deeds of their grandfathers. It's all continuation of one big war that started in 1941.

And that's the narrative which is built. And that reframing of the war is not something that certainly I haven't been paying attention to at the time. Yeah. I mean, still, Catherine, I remember, you know, the outbreak of the full scale just before the full scale invasion in 2022.

Lot of Russia experts who knew the country a lot better than I did Was still saying I don't think Putin will do this because it's a crazy risk We know that he's ruthless. We know he doesn't mind having you know fighting wars But this is such a roll of the dice And it would be such a rupture with the West he won't do this and

Why was that? Well, obviously it was a misreading, but do you think it was a break with the previous Putin in the sense that it was a kind of a much bigger risk than he'd ever taken before? And there's one theory that was, you know, again, people have...

kind of interpreted it subsequently saying he went a bit odd during the pandemic. He spent too much time in the Kremlin archive thinking deeply about Russian history, his own role in it, and then kind of flipped and that was where the invasion came from. What do you think?

Well, I definitely agree with your previous earlier analysis. I thought, too, that it would be too much of a risk for him to take on the West in such a violent way because he'd always before retained some degree of plausible deniability when carrying out attacks on the West, whether it was mercenary.

to murder Sergei Skripal or killing Alexander Litvinenko or any of these other acts that we've found out about, there was always a degree of deniability, whether plausible or not. But when you're sort of going straight in and actually killing that tens of thousands of innocent civilians, of course, it was a massive shock.

And nobody, including like billionaires in Moscow, ever thought that he would go so far. But again, as Arkady says, with hindsight, you can see the patterns a lot better. And I think, you know, I think it was something...

that he was always meant to do, unfortunately. And you hear this even when he gave his first ever public interview in 1992. I think he considered it even then his mission to, well, be part of something, not if not lead it, but be part of something that would restore the empire. Because when he was appointed governor,

deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, he gave his first interview. And in that interview, he blamed the Bolsheviks. He blamed the Bolsheviks for tearing up the empire into republics that didn't exist before, i.e. Ukraine. And along with other progressive members of the KGB, he believed that they were at fault for the collapse of Soviet empire and for the economic collapse

failings. And I think as well, you know, when there was the Orange Revolution in 2004, when Ukraine made its first tilt towards the West, that was a very big shock to him. We heard from some insiders that he thought he should resign then he didn't. And then in 2014, of course, we had the same kind of buildup of forces on the border with Ukraine. But then,

It seemed he was rational enough not to invade, but it may have been actually a rational decision then too, because he knew his economy was not prepared enough to withstand the full brunt of sanctions and it needed time to prepare. And he also needed more time to infiltrate and undermine our democracies.

to the degree that we see now where some countries such as America are willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities. I mean, Al-Qaida, I mean, it was a massive roll of the dice and for a while it looked like it was going wrong. I mean, I guess the hype, you know, they don't take Kiev in a week.

And then the high point of thinking maybe it's a disaster is when Prigozhin briefly marches on Moscow. How secure do you think Putin is now? I think he's probably quite secure. Can I just go back a step? Just listening to Catherine, I slightly disagree. I mean, again, hindsight is a great thing. We have to remember that actually at the very beginning when Tony Blair flies over,

to Moscow, to St. Petersburg, and they go to the opera together, and Putin is not even president yet, to hear War and Peace. When Bush looks into his soul, when Putin becomes host G7, G8 in St. Petersburg, all those, and when Putin says, basically he wants to be part of this West, desperately wants to be part of the West, actually craves its attention.

The narrative you hear, as I'm sure Catherine has many times as I have, from people who were in the presidential administration at the beginning of Putin, was all about being offended. It's insult. It's that we've been insulted. We've been offended by the West because it's rejected us.

because it rejected us on the basis that we were somehow inferior. We dressed the same way, we were rich, but they talked about values, although they actually were completely hypocritical themselves. So a lot of this conflict actually came out from the resentment that has built inside the system of the West. And it's actually, paradoxically, it was their craving of it.

the desperation to be recognized that then flipped into into this I think you've also said to me may unless I misunderstood you when we were just outside there that you thought that the decision to invade was also partially driven by his fear of Domestic opposition. Yes. So what I think then started happening is from quite early years from about 2004 he

Realized that because Putin basically never believed in any values Or in anybody's agency and everything has to have a plan and a structure he saw he started seeing the West rather than being Kind of a partner, you know kind of just real politic He started to conceive the West as a threat because there was the process of modernization in Russia and

that started happening, the societal modernization, that actually people wanted to be part of a normal life, that Russia was getting more integrated. And he started seeing what he interpreted, and then 2004, Orange Revolution, which he interpreted as the encroachment of the West onto Russia. So he interpreted it, something that Fiona Hill wrote very eloquently about, the whole security problem was that he ascribed

the events which he was seeing, be it modernization in Russian society, be it the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, he ascribed it to somebody's will, to somebody undermining him, the West actually doing it to him while saying, yeah, we can hold J-8 meetings together. And he saw this encroachment, he saw the threat of Russia integrating with the world

as incompatible with his idea of Russia as an empire and the great power. And I think from that moment onwards, those two trends, the trend of social modernization in Russia and on the periphery of the Russian Empire, and the trend of his reasserting Russian great power were on a collision course. And what gave me the, you know, intellectually I understood that the war was coming when

It was not my idea. It was the idea of Andrei Sakharov, the creator of the thermonuclear device, who basically came to the conclusion, and that's what he got his Nobel Prize for, that the country which will disregard the life of its own people and will

abuse their human rights inside the country will disregard the lives of people around, you know, other countries and abuse of people inside Russia will lead to aggression outside.

And these two things are linked. And it's when Putin started shutting down Navalny, it was after Navalny's poisoning, it was when he banned the Navalny organization, when he started going after Memorial, the biggest and the oldest human rights organization started by Sakharov, that I thought, okay, this is actually what's happening. And the first time we put the war and Putin on the cover was in March or April 2021.

and it was linked to Navalny sort of pogroms. Yeah. I mean, Catherine, how do you see that, the connection between what was happening domestically in Russia and Putin's foreign policy and his decision to go to war? I think, yes, to some degree, al-Qadi was right. In the beginning, he did want to be accepted by the West, and he was in awe of Western leaders. But, of course, by now he's seen five U.S. presidents come and go and God knows how many U.K. prime ministers.

But you still, even then, he, first of all, he had a very transactional view of the world. He thought, if I do a favor for the West, they should do favors back for me. But of course, he was ignored and that kind of increased interest.

his sense of humiliation, which had always been there since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I mean, we all know the story about how he stood almost shaking his fist at Gorbachev for giving up Russia's, the Soviet Union's position in Europe. He said then, I wanted something different to be offered in its place, but nothing different was offered. We just walked away and gave it all up.

So he always wanted to restore empire, that was clear.

But we didn't know the lengths he was going to go to restore it. But I do think that his past in the KGB, it kind of imbued him with this Cold War paranoia. I think, of course, things could have gone differently, perhaps, had the West embraced him, had they not sort of ignored Russia as a weak regional power. But

That was the course of history. And Putin reacted in the way he did. And his background in the KGB made him see the West through paranoid lenses. So every color revolution and the former Soviet Republic was always going to be the hand of the West.

every opposition group inside Russia, he believed his own Kool-Aid about this. He believed that they were being manipulated and funded by the West and it was all being directed to weaken and destroy Russia. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Cirenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts.

Don't forget, Intelligence Squared Premium subscribers can listen to the event in full and ad-free. Head to intelligence-squared.com/membership to find out more or hit the IQ2 Extra button on Apple for a free trial. For tickets and more information on the events we have coming up in the Age of the Strongman series, you can click the link in the episode description. Or visit intelligence-squared.com/attend to see our full live events program.

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