(Dobbs) But What About The Russian People?

Putin might be riding a legacy unique to Russia.

Life in Russia is better than it used to be. 

Something as simple as that might explain why, although Vladimir Putin has done damage to their lives— carving away at their short-lived freedoms, plunging their country into a costly and punishing war, and making their nation a pariah in half the world— the mass of the Russian people don’t appear, from what we’ve seen, to have turned against their president. 

Not even in the flash of the moment when Yevgeny Prigozhin looked like he might seriously threaten Putin’s leadership.

Of course it might be the depletion of those freedoms, long-cherished and hard-won when the Soviet Union disintegrated, that accounts for Putin’s lasting power. First, because people these days can only publicly protest the president’s performance at risk of imprisonment or, as in a few cases the past few years, something even worse. And second, because the media inside Russia has reverted to its role in the era of Soviet rule, a tool of the state, which limits what people actually know about their country’s plights.

But from my experience when I went to cover news in the Soviet Union, and later Russia, there is a third explanation for Putin’s survival at the top of the byzantine Russian pyramid: history. 

With the very brief exception of the Soviet Union’s collapse when freedoms flowered— when citizens could boldly speak their minds and demonstrate in the open, when political parties blossomed and media could speak out against the government— the Russian people have never had anything to smile about. From oppressive rulers to oppressive wars to oppressive weather, Russians have endured hardship on a scale that’s hard in the Western world to imagine.

Even in modern times— beginning exactly a century ago with seventy years of Soviet sovereignty— everything from the repressive rule of government to the inferior standard of living was a crushing weight on the population of the nation. Once I had to meet with a Soviet dissident in the middle of the night in a darkened warehouse to hear his grievances about the Communists who ran the country. Once I had a man crawl toward me along a riverbank, looking over both shoulders every second, to complain about inadequate funding for the fire station near the Kremlin where he worked. A trip to the grocery store was a seminar in shortages: vegetables were unappetizing and scarce, meat was unpalatable. If local residents or storekeepers didn’t plow snow from a sidewalk or side street during a blizzard, it didn’t get plowed.

Some conditions changed in the 30+ years after the Soviet Union disappeared. Socialism gave way to capitalism. Western brands, from Chanel to Louis Vuitton, from Nike to Apple to McDonald’s, became almost ubiquitous. Moscow, long a capital city of cheap cars and empty streets transformed into a city of streets clogged with costly cars— before the war in Ukraine, Russia was continental Europe’s biggest market for the Rolls Royce. 

And repression gave way to forbearance. I’ll never forget about a dozen years ago when, driving with a camera crew through Moscow, we came across a small group of men with placards, protesting the construction of a building on dirt plot they’d used for a parking lot when they went to work. They were allowed their sidewalk protest, but were aware enough of the thin line of tolerance that they took care not to step on the grass that abutted the sidewalk, for that could lead to an arrest for trampling public property.

What also changed though was the embrace of the state. In Soviet times, citizens had a safety net. It was flimsy, but everyone had a job no matter how menial, everyone had an apartment no matter how shoddy, everyone had medical care no matter how deficient. Then came the collapse and a scramble for advantage. Opportunists who grabbed the brass ring and took control of Soviet industry became the oligarchs. But the government cut its subsidies and everyone else was left in the dust.

Vladislav Zubok, the author of Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, wrote yesterday in Foreign Affairs that for all its cultural and scientific achievements, there has actually been little change in Russia for half a millennium, since the rise in 1533 of the “sovereign of all Russia,” Ivan the Terrible.

“A nuclear power with a sophisticated urban population, robust digital economy, and resilient financial system,” Zubok writes, “Russia remains strangely antiquated when it comes to its sociopolitical structures and institutions, in some ways less modern even than the Soviet Union. Every time Russia begins to more closely resemble modern Europe, some jolt sends the country back to its medieval origins.” And he quotes a Russian writer in exile, Vladimir Sorokin, who wrote last year, “The principle of Russian power hasn’t even remotely changed in the last five centuries.”

It is a principle based on nationalism, which runs through Russia’s DNA. And today, it also is based on the ambition that Vladimir Putin proclaimed at a rally I once covered outside of Moscow: We were a superpower once, we can be a superpower again. Thus his meddling in the Middle East, his “friendship without limits” with China, his war in Ukraine.

When I met with that dissident in the darkened warehouse, he told me, “We don’t want everything you have in America because while you can be rich beyond our wildest dreams, you also can be impoverished beyond our worst nightmares. What we want that you have and we don’t are your freedoms.” Today’s Russia is not quite comparable to yesterday’s Soviet Union— or the Tsarist empire before that, or bloodthirsty reign of Ivan the Terrible— but it has been sliding in the wrong direction. 

It is necessary to ask, even if he is hounded from power or if he dies in bed, who will follow Vladimir Putin? Even if Yevgeny Prigozhin had a chance to replace Putin, he has lost it, which might be just as well. Known for his own ruthless brutality, he would have been no prize. And what about Dmitry Medvedev, who served as Russia’s president more than a decade ago when Putin became prime minister, then until three years ago was Putin’s prime minister again? No prize either. He has threatened to use nuclear weapons as often as his boss. “Our main goal is to deliver a devastating defeat to all of our enemies,” he has said on social media. ”It’s time for us to finally reclaim our lands and permanently protect all our people.”

Here in the West, we don’t have the slightest idea of what’s happening right now behind the imposing walls of the Kremlin. Anything you see or hear or read is at best extrapolation, at worst, guesswork. We don’t know if Putin is weak or strong, we don’t know if his generals are renegades or loyalists, we don’t know if Ukraine has yet to see the worst from Putin or whether his forces have already given it their best shot. 

The head of a quasi-independent polling agency in Moscow, called Levada, once told me that when asked their perception of the tyrant Joseph Stalin, 40% of Russians thought that his iron rule had brought “more good than bad.” Meanwhile, Levada measured Vladimir Putin’s approval rating just last month at 82%. As an increasingly autocratic ruler, Putin may be riding Stalin’s strongman legacy.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.v