Life Inside Russia

The Stasi had infiltrated all parts of life. It kept secret files on more than six million East Germanys; in Dresden alone, the files the secret police compiled would stretch almost seven miles. According to the regime’s own records, the East German government employed 97,000 people and had another 173,000 working as informants. Nearly one in every 60 citizens was somehow tied to the state’s security apparatus.

The ties that bound the Stasi and the KGB were plain to anyone. The East German officers referred to their Soviet counterparts has “the friends.” Indeed, the KGB station where Putin worked was across the street from the Stasi’s offices. After the Berlin Wall was breached, Putin and his colleagues set about covering their tracks. “We destroyed everything—all our communications, our lists of contacts, and our agents’ networks. I personally burned a huge amount of material,” Putin later recalled, “We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.”

“Actually, I thought the whole thing was inevitable,” Putin later said, referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I only regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls and dividers cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They [the Soviet Union]  just dropped everything and went away.” Putin longed for the strong, sovereign Russia state that had once been. 

Although, he did not spell out how this stability would be achieved, Putin’s plan gradually revealed itself. If there is one defining characteristic of Putin’s brand of authoritarianism, it is the centralization of power. If Russian politics had become too noisy, divisive, and tumultuous, Putin set out to tame it. Among Russia’s political and economic institutions, the Kremlin would not settle for being first among equals; everything would be subordinate to it.

Putin began with Russian tycoon businessmen. Within two months of Putin’s inauguration, the Kremlin warned these businessmen that they would be either loyal or out of business. Those who challenged this advice quickly found themselves in exile or prison.

The country’s regional governors followed. In 2005, Putin did away with the direct election of Russia’s governors, opting instead to give himself power to appoint them. In addition, their finances would now be supervised by Kremlin loyalists, whose ranks were drawn from Putin’s friends in the KGB.

At the beginning of Putin’s presidency, only one of the top three television networks was state owned. Three years later, the Kremlin controlled all three. Kremlin cronies also began to buy up the largest-circulation newspapers and magazines. Today the Russian government controls roughly 93% of all media outlets.

Until recently, a senior Kremlin official met with the directors of the three major TV channels every Friday to plan the news coverage for the week to come. Television managers reportedly received a steady stream of phone calls throughout the week, honing how the coverage should be presented, even delving sometimes into how a particular news story should be edited.

From as far back as his Millennium Statement, Putin always stressed the need for political and social unity. But Putin and his team did not wish to crush all opposition with a single dominant ruling party. Rather, they engineered space for a small handful of opposition parties to exist and in some instances invented the parties out of whole cloth. These parties—typically referred to as the systemic opposition—ostensibly play the role of regime critics while never pushing their criticisms beyond the boundaries set by the Kremlin. In their ideological orientation, these opposition voices are intended to represent social interests—namely, nationalists, the poor, and older voters—who may feel neglected or dissatisfied with the ruling party, United Russia.

Source: The Dictator’s Learning Curve. Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (2012) by William J. Dobson.

What Putin did to Russia he is probably going to do Ukraine. Yea, one nice guy.