Figuring Putin in Bonn

During a recent trip across Scandinavia, I noticed many locals (especially in Copenhagen, Denmark), being extremely critical of the Russian President Vladimir Putin. My previous trips in these wonderful countries had not seen anything like this, so I was rather curious to know why Putin had become such a villain.

I had a feeling that this had something to do with the crisis in Ukraine. But the underlying hostility against Russia in these appropriately rational and stable European polities was intense enough for me to finally ask a bartender in Copenhagen what the fuss was all about.

He laughed and then produced the day’s paper from a nearby table. In the inner pages was a picture of American/Nato tanks rolling along somewhere in Denmark. He pointed at the photo and smilingly said, ‘We fear Russia again ...’

In his broken English, he managed to explain that the crises in Ukraine is creating ‘Cold War type of a situation in Europe’. To him the situation was mostly due to ‘Russian hostilities’ and that these had forced the Nato troops to return.

What exactly prompts Putin’s image as a villain for his own countrymen and not a hero?
My next stop was Bonn in Germany where I was invited to the annual Deutsche Welle (DW) World Media Forum. The Forum was being attended by journalists (both print and electronic) from dozens of countries.

The highlight of the conference was the launch of Deutsche Welle’s 24/7 English TV channel that will be competing with the likes of BBC and CNN, especially in Asia.

DW’s president explained that instead of coming down to the level of the sensationalist trends that have ravaged electronic journalism in the past many years, DW will aspire to pull up its audiences to a higher level. This philosophy, he explained, was behind the new channel’s rather telling short slogan: ‘Made for minds.’

The conference offered a number of sessions on media and how, it was being influenced by (and influencing) international politics. But being a South Asian, I was surprised that not much was said in this regard on certain recent unprecedented happenings in South Asia.

For example, though there was much talk about the civil war in Syria and the consequential emergence of groups like Daesh, there was nothing on the possible paradigm shift taking place in flash-points such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Pakistan military’s all-out push against extremist groups is a first in this country that just might change (for the better) Pakistan’s traditionally cold ties with strife-torn Afghanistan.

There was also nothing said or discussed about how the election of a militaristic right-wing government in India is once again hotting up Indo-Pak relations.

Apart from Syria, the other consistent topic at the conference was, of course, Ukraine.

During one such session I began to make frantic notes on my notepad to build a question that I planned to ask a very articulate British journalist who was on the panel. He was explaining why Putin had become such a threat to both Russia as well as to the rest of Europe.

Unfortunately, by the time the Q&A session began, I had filled up four pages and was unable to convert these notes into a single, coherent question.

Nevertheless, I did finally organise these notes on my iPad in my hotel room and am publishing them here.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union (and Soviet Communism) in December 1991, Boris Yeltsin rose to become President. During his two regimes (1991-99), he presided over a radical change of system that was almost entirely driven by ‘crony capitalism’ that triggered maddening inflation and a dramatic rise in unemployment, poverty and crime. By the late 1990s, Russia had become one of the most corrupt countries in the world!

Yet, I hardly remember him receiving the kind of criticism (from Western media) that Putin is. Mind you, this is a question and not a statement.

Is a weak, corrupt and crumbling Russia a more acceptable and ‘safe’ Russia? Or, to put it more sardonically, is it then a more ‘democratic’ and likable Russia? Again, just a question.

Over the last decade I have met many Russian travellers in various countries of Europe, Asia and the Americas, and without fail, all of them seemed to adore Putin. How come?

When Putin replaced Yeltsin in 1999, Russian politics, society and economy had become hostage to overnight oligarchs, monopolists and various mafias who had all helped Yeltsin stay in power because he was good for them — especially his economic policies that had replaced an obsolete and worn-out ‘communist system’ with a rather anarchic model of capitalism akin to sheer thuggery!

After coming to power in 1999, Putin began to reign-in the all-powerful oligarchs and reintroduced the practice of nationalisation when he brought a number of major Russian industries under state control. Most of these had been privatised by Yeltsin at throwaway prices.

Indeed nationalisation to most seemed to be a relic of the past, but as one Russian journalist (in Singapore) explai ned, it was Putin’s re-nationalisation of Russia’s vast oil industry that helped the state to amicably utilise the rise in international oil prices in the early 2000s. ‘Otherwise, the new money would have been squandered by the oligarchs and we would have become like oil-rich but poverty-stricken Nigeria,’ he had told me.

It was this that helped Putin dramatically reduce Russia’s growing poverty rate and bring it down to just 13 per cent in 2011. This figure is taken from UK’s respectable monthly, The Economist, and not from any Russian publication.

Putin also used the profits from oil to increase payments of pensions by 60pc. He cracked down hard against corruption that was rampant and almost untouchable in the 1990s. His policies against terrorism too seemed more effective.

He did manipulate the country’s constitution to remain in power; bring the media under state control to avoid criticism; centralised authority, degraded certain democratic rights and his appeal to Russian nationalism has increasingly become militaristic. But the question is: With the fragmentary and implosive nature of Russian politics, economy and society in the 1990s, I wonder, would Putin have been able to rectify much of his country’s multiple problems as a more likable Yeltsin Mark: 2?

Again, this is a question and not a sweeping endorsement of Putin’s ways.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 19th, 2015
Source: Smokers’ Corner: Figuring Putin in Bonn