Violence Stoked Fear to Fuel Putin’s Rise to Power: Book Review

Bloomberg

More than 300 hostages — half of them children — were killed in a Beslan schoolhouse in 2004, following a firefight between their Chechen captors and Russian troops. Ten days later, President Vladimir Putin announced a sweeping overhaul of Russia’s political system.

He declared that regional governors as well as the mayor of Moscow would be appointed by the president rather than elected. Members of the lower house of parliament would also be appointed. Political parties would have to re-register, making it all but impossible to get on a ballot without Kremlin approval.

The upshot of the changes was to undermine — if not obliterate — the quasi-functioning democracy that had taken root in Russia since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, writes Moscow-based journalist Masha Gessen in her engrossing and insightful book, “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.” From then on, the president would be the only directly elected federal-level public official.

After consolidating his power through eight years as president and four as prime minister, Putin was returned to the presidency on March 4 with about 64 percent of the vote. Having convinced his fellow lawmakers to increase the length of the presidential term to six years, Putin could head his country until 2024.

Control, Vengeance

Gessen sees Putin as a man driven by control and vengeance, not ideology. When he was first elected president in 2000, he said his aim was “strengthening vertical power,” and Gessen shows that he has attained his goal.

The heartbreaking massacre at the Beslan schoolhouse is only one of a series of ghastly and, Gessen argues, suspicious events that enabled Putin to use fear to consolidate his hold on Russian society.
In 1999, just after Putin left the secret police to become prime minister, a series of explosions leveled entire apartment houses in several Russian cities. And in 2002, there was the three-day-long hostage-taking at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater, which left 129 dead.

Gessen manages to reconstruct these formerly opaque chapters in recent Russian history. She is not so reckless as to allege that Putin was somehow behind these events. She does charge, however, that “once the hostage-takings occurred, the government task forces acting under Putin’s direct supervision did everything to ensure that the crises ended as horrifyingly as possible — to justify continued warfare in Chechnya and further crackdowns on the media and the opposition in Russia.”

Khodorkovsky, Browder

By imprisoning one-time oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky and harassing fund manager William Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital Management, Putin made crystal clear that independence and criticism had its limits. (Sergei Magnitsky, a Browder lawyer who alleged a government attempt to defraud Hermitage, died in prison in 2009. A Kremlin human-rights committee said last year that he was probably beaten to death.)

Sprinkled through the book are other stories of intimidation and murder. The lawmaker Sergei Yushenkov was shot dead in broad daylight while investigating the theater siege, dissident agent Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London by radiation poisoning and Yuri Shchekochikhin, an outspoken politician who had also been investigating the theater siege, died after ingesting an “unknown toxin.”

Gessen doesn’t see these events as random or unconnected. “Putin’s Russia,” she writes, “is a country where political rivals and vocal critics are often killed, and at least sometimes the order comes directly from the president’s office.”

Heady Times

Gessen came of age in the late 1980s as Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, or openness, spawned groups of “informals” where people would talk about politics and social issues. Those were heady times.
While Russia was convulsing, Putin was a KGB functionary stationed in East Germany. In January 1990, he watched a crowd storm the Stasi building in Dresden. Putin told his biographer that he phoned the Russian military representatives, only to be told nothing could be done until they heard from Moscow, but that “Moscow is silent.”

“I realized that the Soviet Union was ill,” he said. “It was a fatal illness called paralysis. A paralysis of power.”

Power and Prestige

He felt abandoned, Gessen says. When he returned to Leningrad, the people he “and his colleagues had kept in check and in fear — the dissidents, the almost-dissidents and the friends of friends of dissidents — now acted as if they owned the city.”

Putin spent much of the 1990s as a rising government official, first in St. Petersburg and later in Moscow, resenting the surge of the new democrats almost as much Russia’s loss of world power and prestige.

Recalling the tone Putin set early in his presidency, Gessen observes that “Soviet instincts, it seemed, kicked in all over the country, and the Soviet Union was instantly restored in spirit.”

“The Man Without a Face” is published by Riverhead in the U.S. and Granta in the U.K. (314 pages, $27.95, 20 pounds). To buy this book in North America, click here.

(Leon Lazaroff is a reporter for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.) buy over the counter medicines hairy girl https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php www.zp-pdl.com займы онлайн на карту срочно