I say this confidently after spending a bit–a very modest bit–of quality time with the Russian president. His press office invited me and eight other Western correspondents to hear his spin on the Slovenian summit with George W. Bush. But we talked about a lot more than that, going beyond missile defense to oil, to China, Chechnya, press freedom and his own lessons from life in the KGB. After nearly three hours of give and take, I left the room impressed with a man unnervingly in control of his job–even if I wasn’t always convinced by his arguments.
Unlike President Bush, who declared Putin to be “trustworthy” after looking deep into his eyes, I can’t claim to know anything about the Russian president’s soul. I’m reasonably sure that whatever we managed to see of him was only what he wanted us to see. That included plenty of eye contact. He spoke hunched over the table in his trademark dark suit and tie, his dark blue eyes seeking us out and boring in whenever he connected. You could not help but feel the full force of his personality, and it wasn’t always reassuring. This was a projection of pure intensity of self-conviction.
Putin’s career as a spy helped make him the politician he has become. “To be able to work effectively with people, you have to know how to set up dialogue and make contact,” Putin told us. “You have to activate all that is best in your partner.” He said this partly in reply to a question I had asked about his time as a foreign intelligence agent with the KGB. How did his training there, I wanted to know, help him govern Russia today? A bit defensive at first, he soon warmed to the subject. It taught him how to work with people from a variety of backgrounds, he said. The KGB instilled “patriotism and love of the motherland,” even as postings abroad fanned his disillusion, by showing that life in the West was better than in the USSR. And then there was the quality that emerged most clearly during our meeting–“the skill of selecting what is most important from a large flow of information, processing it and knowing how to use it.”
Putin’s focus is remarkable. Again, what strikes you in meeting him is not merely his ability to stay on message, but also his agility and sense of his audience. He criticized both Russian and U.S. intelligence services for indulging in political intrigues rather than cooperating to solve common problems, such as tackling the threat of Islamist terrorism. He spoke of Germany as a country that has found a policy of restraint and self-denial to be more profitable than neoimperial ambition. It was a deft way of advancing his bona fides as a politically correct, postimperial Russian even while criticizing the Bush administration’s penchant for unilateral action. In an argument I’ve never heard him use before, he accused separatist leaders in Chechnya of “publicly calling for the extermination of the Jews,” relegating critics of his war to the ranks of anti-Semites.
By the end of the evening I found myself recalling the astute diagnosis of a friend: “He doesn’t just speak fluent German; he speaks fluent Western, too.” Yet Putin is clearly not of the West. Take his thoughts on freedom of the media. Why was coverage so critical of his policies in Chechnya? It’s “some sort of campaign… a deliberate attempt to exploit the situation, to get the Russian Federation off balance. There is no other possible explanation,” he complained. Then he launched into a detailed indictment of corrupt oligarchs who had used their ill-gotten media enterprises to “blackmail the authorities” in pursuit of their own selfish interests. Case in point: NTV. Earlier this year, Putin explained away the battle over Russia’s last privately owned TV network as a business dispute. With us, he scripted it as a chapter in his fight against corrupt oligarchs.
All that poses some big questions. Would Putin really have us believe that he is a democrat, reluctantly forced to sometimes behave undemocratically? Or does he think that many Westerners are secretly prepared to tolerate a new authoritarianism–if only so that the central government can regain some control over the country? None of us came away with an inkling of an answer. Yet Russia’s future depends on it.
