(Dobbs) What Drives Vladimir Putin?
One answer is the need to survive at the top of his pyramid.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine… and maybe long before that… we’ve all tried to get our heads around the forces that drive Vladimir Putin. It’s about as hard as figuring out the forces that drive Donald Trump.
All we can do is guess.
My guess is, Russia drives Vladimir Putin. The Russia that was the first nation to put a man in space. The Russia that was the incubator for cultural treasures like Leo Tolstoy and the Bolshoi Ballet. The Russia that has never gone long without struggling with war and weather, antipathy and poverty, but which prides itself for historically and heroically digging out. The Russia that became a nuclear superpower and in the spirit of longtime Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev, pounded its shoe on the table to make sure we knew it.
My guess is, Vladimir Putin is driven by the hunger to pound that shoe again. Now, the megalomaniac is pounding it to remind the world that Ukraine is an historical part of the Russian motherland.
He is proud of the empire Russia once was. He is proud of its will to survive, proud of its power, proud of its history. By that measure, Putin is a nationalist.
But not in a good way, because he is hellbent on creating that empire again. In most people, nationalistic pride is not a bad thing. It might be pride in your nation’s innovations. It might be pride in its global standing. It might be pride in its soccer team. But Putin’s pride is perverted. He will do anything to put his country back on top.
A few weeks ago, in front of a Colorado audience for a speakers series called the Vail Symposium, I interviewed a man who, by sitting for several years in the unenviable position of Vladimir Putin’s Public Enemy #1, has studied the Russian president as much as anyone. He is Bill Browder, author of two best-selling books about Putin and Russia: “Red Notice — A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice,” and “Freezing Order — A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath.”
Think about those words: Vladimir Putin’s wrath. Here’s what they mean. Before entering the auditorium for Browder’s appearance, everyone had to go through metal detectors. Inside, we had security guards at the rear of the auditorium and behind us backstage. For Bill Browder, that’s what it takes to survive Vladimir Putin’s wrath.
He earned it when his investment business in Moscow uncovered massive corruption, which was enriching the Russian oligarchs who owe their wealth to Putin at the expense of the Russian people who depend on him. Browder’s Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, testified in a Moscow court about what they found, after which he was arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. Browder wrote his books for a global audience and exposed it all. What he believes is, Putin isn’t a nationalist, he is a psychopath. “If a child was being tortured right in front of him,” Browder told the audience, “his heart wouldn’t beat any faster.”
There is more than a ring of truth to that. Ukraine is being tortured before his very eyes and what’s worse, he is the torturer. But from all we can see, his heart doesn’t beat any faster. When the victim screams, he doesn’t pause the torture, he steps it up. It probably never costs him a night’s sleep.
But whether he’s a deviant psychopath or distorted nationalist or both, Vladimir Putin is a product of Russia, a nation we’ve never been able to understand. As longtime foreign correspondent Roger Cohen put it this month in The New York Times, “Russia… looks familiar to an American or a European, yet it is not.” And that might explain why we don’t understand. As a journalist who occasionally reported from Russia and the Soviet Union before it, what I learned was that there are as many mysteries about the country and its people as there are certainties.
It is, as Winston Churchill described it nearly 85 years ago, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The thing is, in those 85 years, that hasn’t much changed.
One enigma to us— and this is not unique to Russia— is that corruption there is not a dirty word. It is a way of life. A way of life for the oligarchs. A way of life for Vladimir Putin.
By Bill Browder’s telling, “What drives Putin is money. In order to understand Vladimir Putin, you have to be a criminologist, not a Kremlinologist.” The Kremlin says Putin’s annual income is about $140,000. But Browder did some calculations six years ago and concluded that “Putin was worth $200 billion, which would have made him the richest person in the world at the time.” His wealth comes, Browder says, from the oligarchs. “The deal was, ‘You give me 50% of your wealth and I’ll let you keep the other 50%.’” So Browder’s figure was simple to reach. As Forbes put it, “He added up the net worths of all the Russian oligarchs and divided by two.” Putin’s fortune is said to be invested in posh yachts and private jets, sumptuous villas and Swiss bank accounts.
Another enigma is the expectations of the Russian people. A member of Russia’s parliament, a descendent of the novelist Leo Tolstoy, told The Times’s Cohen, “Our values are different. For Russians, freedom and economic factors are secondary to the integrity of our state and the safeguarding of the Russian world.” That’s something Vladimir Putin understands. The “integrity” of the nation and its “safeguarding” are central to his public justifications for the war in Ukraine.
That might explain why, in The Times story, a vehicle mechanic in Siberia who was himself injured in the war said about Putin, “He was sent to Russia by God.”
I reported from eight different wars over the years, and concluded that all were started for a handful of reasons: regional rivalries, territorial conflicts, irreconcilable ideologies, ethnic arrogance, religious dogma, economic ambitions, dreams of empire, megalomania, and greed.
Today you could take most of those and find that they are part of what drives Putin.
And now, add a new impulse: survival. From my experience covering dictators around the world, survival is their driving force. They will oppress their citizens and wage their wars to stay at the top of the pyramid because, unlike American presidents, if they lose power, they don’t go off to live out their lives behind a white picket fence. As Bill Browder related it to the symposium, “Putin understands very clearly, if he is not in power, he is dead.”
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.
Thank you Greg. Excellent reminder that Putin now has one imperative: to be the last man standing in a can’t win fight to the death.