In Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy have offered six individual identities or personas for Vladimir Putin (Statist, History Man, Survivalist, Outsider, Free Marketeer and Case Officer) to explain how history, culture and politics interact to inform Russia’s current political system. Putin uses these various personas to address different audiences and to justify his varied political actions. In somewhat similar fashion, Angela Stent in Putin’s World. Russia Against the West and with the Rest has argued that “in Russia the past haunts the present more vividly than in most other countries” (18). This is a similar approach used by Masha Gessen in her National Book Award winning The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen argues that Putin is a product of his society, one that values its own cultural and political history. In this context, I would like to add Fyodor Dostoevskii’s Grand Inquisitor to the list of Putin’s personas to explain why, until recently, the average Russian citizen has been willing to forgo basic civil rights for a sense of personal security.
In the novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov presents a provocative idea that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immorality, then nothing would be immoral; everything would be permitted. This concept is further developed within the novel and has been extrapolated to mean that if there is no God (no overarching authority), then everything is lawful (chaos ensues). This exploration of a perceived nonexistence of God has a distinctly timeless quality and many Russians have interacted with and reformulated these ideas over time.
In 2005, President Putin declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Although these comments marked Putin’s shift toward a more authoritarian government, it also introduced an officially sanctioned nostalgia for the Soviet era, practically an official invitation to re-remember the best qualities of the Soviet Union. Just as significant, Putin’s comments were made two days before a verdict was expected for the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodarkovskii, who had just endured a show trial in which he had been accused of (and would be convicted of) fraud as head of Yukos, one of the largest Russian oil companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the Presidency of Boris Yeltsin.
At odds were Putin, with his return to authoritarianism via a rehabilitation of the Soviet past, and a business-elite who had emerged from the lawless 1990s, wealthy but vulnerable to legal prosecution. This lawless period had been devoid of strong central leadership and moral fortitude, but now Putin was offering social and economic stability in the place of personal freedom. In Putin’s Annual Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, economic stability was intertwined with a sense of Soviet morality that had been lacking in the intervening years between the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of Putin’s government (Putin 2005).
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By 2007, Russia had reached an impasse with powerful oligarchs and an unbending political leader. These two extremes reflected Russia’s conundrum, vacillating between the results of ultimate freedom (lawless 1990s) and the promise of future stability (law-and-order society). Russian citizens were invited to accept Putin’s new national unity that relied heavily on sanitized memories of a Soviet past; a Soviet Union that had demanded that citizens renounce personal freedom in order to enjoy collective economic and social stability.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Karamazov is completely debauched, and it is rumored that one of his three sons will eventually kill him: Dmitrii is in the military, Ivan is a student in Moscow and Alyosha is a seminarian at a local monastery. After the father’s murder, all circumstantial evidence points to Dmitrii. In fact, it is Fyodor’s illegitimate son Smerdyakov, upon the impetus of Ivan, who is the murderer. Ivan’s philosophical position that everything is permitted is taken by Smerdyakov as am invitation to kill. Even though Smerdyakov commits the actual murder, Dostoevskii implies a collective guilt for the killing of Fyodor.
Ivan, the intellectual, had rejected the existence of an all-powerful benevolent God. Consequently, he also rejected God’s rule on earth. To demonstrate his ideas, Ivan told his brother Alyosha a prose poem that he had written called “The Grand Inquisitor.” In this poem, Christ returns to earth during the Spanish Inquisition and is arrested. That night the Grand Inquisitor interrogates Him. The Grand Inquisitor argues that the Church now provides for the people and has even corrected the precept that truth shall set you free as people do not want to be free. The Church has vanquished freedom to make people happy, providing them with bread, mystery and someone to worship. The Grand Inquisitor intends to burn Christ as a heretic the next day but releases Him and tells Him never to return. Ivan expressed in his poem the idea that mankind is too weak to bear the struggle for spiritual self-perfection. It should not be given the free choice between good and evil.
Putin as the Grand Inquisitor
As Hill and Gaddy have noted, Putin’s 2012 Presidential campaign was not run against a political opponent, but rather against the past, the lawless 1990s (6). Arguably, Putin was the antidote to the anarchy and free-wheeling period of banditry and the rise of the oligarchs; a period of absolute free will. This period was explained as a modern-day Time of Troubles (1598-1613; period of lawlessness; political anarchy; issues of succession). Democracy and free-market capitalism were synonymous with western individualism, anathema to the tradition of the Russian collective society. What Russia needed, according to Putin, was a strong central government (the vertical of power) in which the people served the State, not vice-versa; the same role played by the Church according to the Grand Inquisitor.Since his Millennium Message (1999), Putin had argued that Russia was weak when its people were divided. This is why western individualism with its concentration on personal rights and freedoms had failed in Russia. It had only resulted in anarchy. In its place, Putin offered his own type of post-Soviet Socialist Realism (a romanticized near-future Russia). This would mean a return to the stability of an authoritarian government that limited individual rights, but that protected Russian citizens from the burden of free will.
Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor had argued that mankind was weaker and lower than Christ had estimated and that the Church had enslaved mankind to save it from itself. Putin was essentially offering a similar explanation for this near-future Russia. And, over his first two terms as President, he restored the respectability of the security forces, reduced the power of the oligarchs, brought an end to the second Chechen war, strengthened the vertical of power and successfully branded himself as the “law and order” President. In return, Putin also reduced the personal freedom of Russian citizens, to protect them from themselves. The culmination of this approach was witnessed in Bolotnaya Square during the “March of Millions” (2012) protest during Putin’s inauguration for a third term as President, which resulted in mass arrest and criminal cases brought by the government against those participating in a public (legal) demonstration.
By adding this persona to those offered by Hill and Gaddy, we can better understand why Russian citizens were largely willing to accept this grand bargain early in Putin’s presidency. The “Statist” favored a strong State and promised an end to unruly western democracy. The “History Man” learned lessons from the past and argued that Russia was only unified when it had a strong (authoritarian) leader. The “Survivalist” promised that the Russian people could suffer, but still prosper, despite the chaos of the 1990s. And with Putin as the “Grand Inquisitor,” there would no longer be any lawlessness because he would be the regulator of human free will. For many Russians who had barely survived the most-recent Time of Troubles, Putin’s offer of stability over ultimate freedom was a deal that they were willing to accept. However, over the ensuring decade, this argument that Putin would protect Russians from themselves, became less effective as a younger generation lacked memories of the free will of the lawless 90s.
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Works cited:
Dostoevskii, F. M. Brat′ia Karamazovy. In Polnoe sobranoe sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh.
Vols. 14 and 15. Leningrad: Nauka, 1976.
Gessen, Masha. The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. New York:
Riverhead Books, 2017.
Hill, Fiona and Clifford G. Gaddy. Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. New and expanded
edition. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013.
Putin, Vladimir. “Annual Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation.” (25 April
2005) Kremlin.ru, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22931. Accessed 20 October
2023.
Stent, Angela. Putin’s World. Russia Against the West and with the Rest. New York: Twelve,
2019.
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