Putin’s Political Power
I spent a year in Moscow fifteen years ago, right at the time that Vladimir Putin was consolidating his power. He dramatically re-organized the country by dividing Russia into large districts and installing powerful local governors loyal to him. He modernized the military, the police and the intelligence agencies. He restructured political parties to fragment the opposition. He squashed local autonomy of non-Russian minorities (most notably in Chechnya). He redefined Russia’s role as America’s rival in post-Cold War Europe. And he secured control over the country’s oil and other major industries by taking down powerful oligarchs who refused to fall in line. However, the most important part of Putin’s strategy to consolidate power was to take control over the media.
Although Russia had a long tradition of state-run propaganda, Putin was still faced with a unique challenge posed by the introduction of the Internet and online media. Rather than relying on old-fashioned methods of censorship, Putin recognized that the emergence of new technology required a new strategy and new methods to ensure consolidation of power. As early as 2000's, Putin learned not to resist but to embrace the promise the Internet.
The rise of Putin’s authoritarianism appeared to most in the West to be a contradiction. After all, it coincided with the defeat of the communist ideology, the disintegration of the official Communist Party apparatus, the privatization of the economy, the opening of the boarders and even a genuine increase in individual liberty when compared with Soviet-era totalitarianism. Nowhere was this contradiction more apparent than in the expanding world of online media. The proliferation of the Internet was in 2000’s heralded as a new form of democratization, reaching all-the-way-down and making it impossible for any state to maintain the kind of control over information that had enabled totalitarian states like the Soviet Union to maintain power in the past.
So 15 years ago, when I first travelled to Russia to study the politics of Putin’s rise to power, it became clear to me that the key to Putin’s success was his ability to appropriate the power of online media. Rather than fight the proliferation of the Internet, Putin’s strategy was to take control over off-line and on-line sources of news information and then to manipulate those sources to his advantage. This involved a multi-prong approach that included buying out private media organizations, using police to cease physical resources of independent media (servers, studios, offices), intimidating journalists, and even exiling or assassinating political opponents who tried to resist him and support free speech. In important ways, Putin also transformed what one might consider a political campaign apparatus into a permanent tool of active state propaganda aimed at systematically discrediting sources of opposition while promoting Putin’s brand as synonymous with new Russian nationalism, stronger than ever before.
Building on the success of his domestic efforts to control the media, Putin applied his methods to further Russian national security policy abroad. He modernized the existing state apparatus of foreign intervention to engage far-right, isolationist parties in Western Europe, while propping explicitly pro-Russia, Communist-successor parties in Eastern Europe. Most importantly of all, he applied the mindset of the Cold War-era KGB to craft and deploy covert strategies to destabilize his political opponents abroad as he had done previously at home.
Given Putin’s history, it should not have been surprising to learn that the Russian intelligence services may have intervened in the 2016 US election to help secure Donald Trump’s victory over President Obama’s expected successor, Hillary Clinton.
