Time-Europe - 06.29.2001

 

 

Time-Europe

Vladimir Putin: Master of the Moment

The Russian president reveals poise and passion in a three-hour interview, but he is short on solutions for his country

BY PAUL QUINN-JUDGE MOSCOW

After almost three hours with Vladimir Putin, you realize why Boris Yeltsin and George Bush were so impressed. He is articulate, fiercely well-briefed, attentive to his interlocutors and, when he feels the need, faintly self-deprecating. But you also wonder whether either man fully sensed the knuckle inside the glove. A long meeting with Putin last week offered a small group of U.S. journalists an unusual chance to observe him up close. It also let Putin fine-tune his message for the Bush Administration: if things go well while he is in office, Putin will be a charming colleague; if things go badly — in arms control, Chechnya or any other area where he feels Russia's honor and survival are at stake — he will be unflinchingly ruthless. Fascinating though it was, however, the meeting offered no insight into how this fluent speaker could pull Russia out of its many crises.

He arrived almost two hours late, straight from his fourth appointment of the day, and talked for nearly three hours. Toward 11 p.m., when his press secretary announced the meeting was over, Putin issued a mock-dramatic "Thank God." He was in charge the whole time, despite the odd modest aside or the playful complaint that it was unfair to ask him a question while he was eating a pastry. His quips were well-rehearsed, his relaxed demeanor the result of intense discipline. He looked each questioner deeply in the eye. Irritation surfaced only briefly. When a reporter posed a repetitious query about U.S.-Russian consultations, the President snapped that he'd already answered — then caught himself and responded at length. When an interpreter asked him to repeat a word, he barked it out impatiently.

The meeting offered a distilled version of Putin's worldview: his jealous concern for Russia's international prestige, and thus his own. His anxiety about the threats to his country from within, like Chechnya, and without, like terrorism. His anger at the way state power was undermined by privatization and humiliated by the Chechnya debacle. His long comments on these subjects came close to being a repudiation of his patron, Boris Yeltsin.

The main theme, however, was that Russia should not be taken for granted. Moscow has no illusions about its reduced situation since the breakup of the Soviet Union, he said, but it is not prepared to accept second-tier status. "On the world stage everyone is equal," said Putin. If one power tries to dictate to the rest, they will unite against "the potential imperialist." If the U.S. wants to work with Russia on fixing the flaws in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, that is fine. If the U.S. goes it alone, so will Russia. If necessary, it will rearm its strategic missiles with multiple warheads. "This will cost a paltry amount, hardly anything," he warned. U.S. protests about Russian technology transfers to so-called rogue states like Iran are motivated by the desire to stop Russia from selling its weapons overseas, he complained, not by proliferation concerns. He even asserted that U.S. businesses are already in contact with the Iranian government. "We know who, where and when they have meetings," he said. "I gave President Bush some names." To Putin, the gap between critic and enemy is narrow. He said the justification for the war in Chechnya — that separatism and terrorism present a mortal danger to Russia's territorial integrity — is so self-evident that he is tired of repeating it. Any "campaign" in the press against Chechnya "is simply a conscious effort to use the Chechen situation to shake the foundations of the Russian Federation."

Putin's inspiration is not Gorbachev's humanism or Yeltsin's laissez faire, but what he called the frondeur — faintly rebellious — atmosphere of the KGB's external intelligence in the 1980s, when young officers like him first saw the outside world contradicting the "brainwashing" they'd received at home. They rejected the propaganda but retained their "patriotism and love for the Motherland," he said. Lines like these help keep his popularity high. But Russian opinion is a strange thing: love can swing, almost overnight, to scorn when people decide that their leader is a boltun, a wind-bag. Putin's performance last week gave no hint as to how or when he would actually start producing the change Russia needs, instead of just wowing his visitors.