Complete control: Vladimir Putin’s grip on power in Russia seems unassailable

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/02/2017 (3174 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Michael Flynn’s resignation as U.S. national security adviser is one more lightning bolt from the miasmic cloud hanging over the presidency of Donald Trump.

Its name is Vladimir Putin.

Flynn’s disclosure of future U.S. policy to the Russian ambassador hardly surprises after intelligence reports that Russia hacked the election to favour Trump were eclipsed by intelligence reports that Russia had blackmail material on him.

Through it all, Trump and Putin have sent bromance notes to each other through the media, while Trump promised to weaken NATO, a key Putin objective.

All the Kremlin’s Men paints a clear, detailed and timely picture of Putin and how he has shaped the grim reality of post-Soviet Russia and its neighbours.

Canadians who are exposed to Russia only through brief news reports will find this book fills an important void in their knowledge of this world power.

Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar has interviewed many of the central figures of the Putin era. He brings us behind the scenes to learn about the networking that really counts in such a political environment — who stayed at Putin’s dacha by the Black Sea, who worked with him at the secret police, who studied judo with him.

Even his childhood friends are among the group of confidantes that have benefited by having positions of power — sometimes entire state-owned companies, handed to them with the proviso that their first loyalty is to the man who gave them the job.

Nowhere is the cronyism more evident than in the Russian oil and natural gas business, tightly controlled and used as a foreign policy weapon by Putin.

Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was CEO of ExxonMobil when it won a big slice of that pie. Tillerson was awarded the Medal of Friendship by Putin, a rare honour.

Russia is still nominally a democracy. Zygar demonstrates how a supposed democracy can devolve quickly into one-man authoritarian rule.

Control of the media is one of the first goals. Pro-Putin TV news organizations are allowed to operate freely; stations that present a balanced view, especially if they try to investigate official wrongdoing, are shut down.

Some liberal newspapers are allowed to operate. But a Putin appointee who wrote a frank opinion piece about security matters was publicly demoted.

As president, Putin engineered control of the Duma, the Russian parliament, through a series of alliances and betrayals early in his march to power. When faced with the same two-term limit as a U.S. president, Putin simply promoted a yes-man to president and made himself prime minister. In the late 1990s, outgoing Russian president Boris Yeltsin chose Putin to be his successor.

At first Putin, the former agent of the KGB secret police and head of its successor, the FSB, hewed a moderate line. He courted former British prime minister Tony Blair and U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

After 9/11, he was the first foreign leader to call Bush. He allowed the U.S. to use bases in Kyrgyzstan to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But when Blair supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Putin became disillusioned with the West — destabilizing Iraq did not serve Russia’s interests. The American and British misadventures in Iraq emboldened Putin to the point he seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2012, facing sanctions in return, but no armed intervention by the West.

When a leading opposition figure, Boris Nemtsov, was gunned down near the Kremlin a few years ago, many suspected Putin was behind it.

Zygar concludes that Putin probably did not know about the planned assassination in advance, but that it was likely ordered by a Putin loyalist. Putin obligingly appointed a chief investigator known for previous murder cases in which he declined to pursue who ordered the hit.

The book was written before Donald Trump’s ascent to power in the U.S. As a chronicle of what happened to Russia, All the Kremlin’s Men is disturbing enough.

As a foreshadowing of what could happen now that the United States appears to be run by some of the Kremlin’s men, this book is truly frightening.

Donald Benham is manager of hunger and poverty awareness at Winnipeg Harvest.