Fooled by Putin
A sample of the smart people who were fooled into believing that Putin was a reformer who embraced capitalism and democracy.
Under Stalin’s reign of terror, there were many notable Americans who continued to believe that communism was an ideal political and economic system for ending class distinctions and achieving equal results, or in today’s euphemism, “equity.” During Putin’s early presidency of Russia, there were many notable Americans who believed that capitalism and democracy would bring Russia into the Western orbit and that Putin was a reformer who shared their values.
Both groups had idealism and naiveté in common. Let’s look at some of the people and publications in the second group.
The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times
In the December 2003 Russian parliamentary elections, Putin’s United Russia party took nearly half the seats. The above newspapers lauded Russia’s move toward a liberal democracy but overlooked the rigging of the election and the scoundrels who were elected.
The Los Angeles Times went so far as to say that Putin’s parliamentary control was an opportunity for him to “push through additional reforms, including cleaning up the entrenched corruption.”
By contrast, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe questioned Russia’s commitment to European election standards. The National Post of Canada went further with this headline: “Racists, killers, and criminals run for Duma.” And an editorial in The Economist declared the death of democracy in Russia.
(Source: The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, by Masha Gassen, Riverhead Books, 2012.)
American Presidents and Presidential Candidates
Over the years, Putin has gotten into the heads of American presidents and presidential candidates, who have had wildly inconsistent views of him and who have been driven to partisan divisiveness by his actions. Examples follow.
(Trigger warning: Democrat and Republican partisans will find something to vehemently disagree with the following.)
When George W. Bush met Putin for the first time in June 2001, he said that he “had looked the man in the eye” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Putin not only didn’t return the compliment but warned that the hostility between the West and Russia that began with the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999 was far from over.
It didn’t take long for Bush to change his first impression and for the relationship between the two presidents to become increasingly strained, especially over the Republic of Georgia, Iraq, and NATO expansion.
When President Obama was running for re-election in March 2012, a live microphone picked up what he whispered to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at a meeting in Seoul: that it was important for incoming President Putin to “give me space” on missile defense and other issues, because he (Obama) would have “more flexibility” after the election.
On October 22, 2012, Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama had their final debate of the presidential election. Trying to portray Romney as inexperienced in foreign policy, Obama said: “A few months ago, when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. Not al-Qaeda. You said Russia . . . the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”
Four years later, while campaigning for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Obama criticized Donald Trump’s “continued flattery of Mr. Putin and the degree to which he appears to model many of his policies and approaches” after those of Putin.
Hillary Clinton would go on to blame her election loss on Putin meddling in the election, and she and her campaign would trigger the Muller special investigation with the hawking of the Steele dossier and the fantastical story of Trump paying prostitutes to urinate on a hotel bed in Russia.
After assuming the presidency, and before a meeting with Putin, Trump blamed Obama for sour relations with Russia. He tweeted, “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”
Recently, in response to the invasion of Ukraine, Senator Mitt Romney called Putin a “small, evil, feral-eyed man.” He also said that Russia is “circling the drain” due to a declining population and that former Senator John McCain had been right when he said that he had looked into Putin’s eyes and seen the KGB.
William Browder
William Browder is an investor who went to Russia to help establish a capitalist economy and make a lot of money in the process. His strategy was to take a financial stake in mismanaged Russian companies and make them more profitable and valuable by rooting out corruption. He thought he had Putin’s backing in this.
Browder’s Hermitage Fund became the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia.
Browder is married to a Russian woman and is the grandson of the former head of the Communist Party USA. Angry over how his grandfather had been persecuted during the McCarthy era, he relinquished his U.S. citizenship in 1998 and became a naturalized British citizen in 1999.
America was pretty good to him. After getting a degree in economics from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the Stanford School of Business, he went on to work for the Boston Consulting Group and Salomon Brothers before starting the Hermitage Fund.
Russia was also pretty good to him, at least initially. Then, under Putin’s direction, it was pretty bad to him.
On November 13, 2005, Browder was declared a threat to Russian national security and deported to the UK. Over the next two years several of his associates and lawyers, as well as their relatives, became victims of crimes in Russia, including severe beatings and robberies. For example, Hermitage Capital’s offices in Moscow were raided by agents of Russia’s Interior Ministry. Other agents raided the Moscow office of Browder’s American law firm, Firestone Duncan, seizing the corporate registration documents for Hermitage’s investment holding companies.
Sergei Magnitsky, the head of the tax practice at Firestone Duncan, later discovered that while those documents were in the custody of the authorities, they had been used to fraudulently re-register Hermitage’s holding companies in the name of an ex-convict. For exposing this fraud, Magnitsky was arrested by Russian authorities, spent eleven months in pretrial detention, and died in prison on November 16, 2009, allegedly from mistreatment and abuse.
In response to international outrage over Magnitsky’s death, the U.S. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, which was signed into law by President Barack Obama on December 14, 2012. Under the act, Russians who had a hand in the ugly affair were prohibited from entering the United States and using its banking system.
It’s ironic that Browder’s grandfather was a communist, that Browder had renounced his U.S. citizenship over how his grandfather was treated, and that he had his property stolen and rights violated by a Russian government and its president that had a similar disrespect for property rights and civil rights as the communist government of the former Soviet Union.
Andrei Illarionov
It’s not only liberals and conservatives who were fooled by Putin. The libertarian Andrei Illarionov was also fooled.
Illarionov was a member of the St. Petersburg economists’ club when Putin appointed him in 2000 to be his economic advisor, apparently to send a message to American businesses and investors that he believed in a market economy, given that Illarionov was such a staunch proponent of free markets.
At the same time, Illarionov shared the common belief among free-market thinkers that market reforms adopted by an authoritarian state would lead to a liberalization of the political system.
He misjudged Putin.
He got crosswise with Putin in a private meeting in which he took issue with Putin’s military intervention in Chechnya, saying that he thought that Russian troops were committing a crime. He eventually became persona non gratis and resigned. He would go on to become a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC.
The book The Man Without a Face summarized Illarionov’s misjudgment as follows: “At base, Illarionov had a difficult time imagining he might be systematically deceived—which is exactly what allowed him to be deceived for a rather long time.”
That applied to a lot of Americans and Europeans when it came to Putin.
