What Putin Really Wants
Putin Munich
“Have you been to Mamayev Kurgan yet? ” Minin asked me. He was referring to another hill  where the battle was so intense  it changed the hill’s shape. Now the Motherland Calls statue stands there  a 170-foot concrete woman raising a sword to summon her countrymen into battle. It’s where Nazi Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus was captured  Minin noted with reverence  and looked into the sunny distance. “You know  it’s important to see how young people defended their homeland.” When we got to the cafeteria  I saw that it  too  was haunted by its Soviet past. Grouchy middle-aged women in hairnets dished out bland  greasy cuisine. If it weren’t for students tapping at their smartphones  it would have been hard to tell that the 21st century had ever arrived. I sat down at a table with a team from Astrakhan and told them I had been to their hometown once  a romantically shabby old city by the Caspian Sea. The students smirked. “Everyone wants to leave ” a third-year named Anton said. “There’s nothing to do there ” his teammate Sergei added. “We did an amazing job … creating the illusion that  Putin  controls everything in Russia … Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to  him . Anton was hoping that Minin could help him get his foot in the door at one of the state security services. “It’s prestigious  they pay well  and the work is interesting ” he said. If he were accepted  he could hope for a salary of 50 000 rubles (less than $900) a month  which was almost double the average salary in Astrakhan. Was he motivated by any feelings of—“Patriotic conviction? ” Anton finished my sentence  and started to chuckle. “No ” he said. “I don’t care what government I work for. If the French Foreign Legion takes me  I’ll go!”
But most Russians don’t recognize the Russia portrayed in this story: powerful  organized  and led by an omniscient  omnipotent leader who is able to both formulate and execute a complex and highly detailed plot. Gleb Pavlovsky  a political consultant who helped  Putin  win his first presidential campaign  in 2000  and served as a Kremlin adviser until 2011  simply laughed when I asked him about  Putin ’s role in Donald Trump’s election. “We did an amazing job in the first decade of  Putin ’s rule of creating the illusion that  Putin  controls everything in Russia ”  he  said. “Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to  him . A businessman who is high up in  Putin ’s United Russia party said over an espresso at a Moscow café: “You’re telling me that everything in Russia works as poorly as it does  except our hackers? Rosneft”—the state-owned oil giant—“doesn’t work well. Our health-care system doesn’t work well. Our education system doesn’t work well. And here  all of a sudden  are our hackers  and they’re amazing?” The election hack “was a very emotional  tactical decision.” The Kremlin was “very upset about the Panama Papers ” which cast light on Putin’s wealth. In the same way that Russians overestimate America  seeing it as an all-powerful orchestrator of global political developments  Americans project their own fears onto Russia  a country that is a paradox of deftness  might  and profound weakness—unshakably steady  yet somehow always teetering on the verge of collapse. Like America  it is hostage to its peculiar history  tormented by its ghosts.
None of these factors obviates the dangers Russia poses; rather  each gives them shape. Both  Putin  and  his  country are aging  declining—but the insecurities of decline present their own risks to America. The United States intelligence community is unanimous in its assessment not only that Russians interfered in the U.S. election but that  in the words of former FBI Director James Comey  “they will be back.” It is a stunning escalation of hostilities for a troubled country whose elites still have only a tenuous grasp of American politics. And it is classically  Putin   and classically Russian: using daring aggression to mask weakness  to avenge deep resentments  and  at all costs  to survive. I’d come to Russia to try to answer two key questions. The more immediate is how the Kremlin  despite its limitations  pulled off one of the greatest acts of political sabotage in modern history  turning American democracy against itself. And the more important—for Americans  anyway—is what might still be in store  and how far  an emboldened Vladimir Putin  is prepared to go in order to get what  he  wants. Jeff Elkins; Alexey Kurbatov and Muti “It wasn’t a strategic operation ” says Andrei Soldatov  a Russian journalist with deep sources in the security services  who writes about the Kremlin’s use of cybertechnology. “Given what everyone on the inside has told me ” he says  hacking the U.S. political system “was a very emotional  tactical decision. People were very upset about the Panama Papers.”
In the spring of 2016  an international consortium of journalists began publishing revelations from a vast trove of documents belonging to a Panamanian law firm that specialized in helping its wealthy foreign clients move money  some of it ill-gotten  out of their home countries and away from the prying eyes of tax collectors. (The firm has denied any wrongdoing.) The documents revealed that  Putin’s  old friend Sergei Roldugin  a cellist and the godfather to  Putin’s  elder daughter  had his name on funds worth some $2 billion. It was an implausible fortune for a little-known musician  and the journalists showed that these funds were likely a piggy bank for  Putin’s  inner circle. Roldugin has denied any wrongdoing  but the Kremlin was furious about the revelation.  Putin’s  spokesman  Dmitry Peskov  whose wife was also implicated  angrily ascribed the reporting to “many former State Department and CIA employees” and to an effort to “destabilize” Russia ahead of its September 2016 parliamentary elections. The argument was cynical  but it revealed a certain logic: The financial privacy of Russia’s leaders was on par with the sovereignty of Russia’s elections. “The Panama Papers were a personal slight to  Putin  ” says John Sipher  a former deputy of the CIA’s Russia desk. “They think we did it.”  Putin’s  inner circle  Soldatov says  felt “they had to respond somehow.” According to Soldatov’s reporting  on April 8  2016   Putin  convened an urgent meeting of  his  national-security council; all but two of the eight people there were veterans of the KGB. Given the secrecy and timing of this meeting  Soldatov believes it was then that  Putin  gave the signal to retaliate.
It was almost like one of Minin’s hacking competitions  but with higher stakes. The hackers are not always guys in military-intelligence uniforms  Soldatov told me; in some cases they’re mercenary freelancers willing to work for the highest bidder—or cybercriminals who have been caught and blackmailed into working for the government. ( Putin  has denied “state level” involvement in election meddling  but plausible deniability is the point of working through unofficial hackers.) American officials noticed the same messy and amorphous behavior as the summer of 2016 wore on. A former staffer in Barack Obama’s administration says that intercepted communications between FSB and military-intelligence officers revealed arguing and a lack of organization. “It was ad hoc ” a senior Obama-administration official who saw the intelligence in real time told me. “They were kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would stick.”
When the Obama administration began to realize  in the summer  that the Russians were up to something more wide-ranging than what they’d done before  the White House worried about only half the problem. At that point  the most alarming development was Russian probing of states’ voting systems. The dumps of hacked data and the churn of false stories about Clinton seemed less troubling  and also harder to combat without looking political. In September  Obama approached  Putin  on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou  China  and told  him  to “cut it out.” That fall  National-Security Adviser Susan Rice hand-delivered a warning to the Russian ambassador to Washington  Sergey Kislyak. The White House tasked the Treasury and State Departments with exploring new sanctions against Russia  as well as the publication of information about  Putin’s  personal wealth  but decided that such moves might backfire. If the White House pushed too hard  the Russians might dump even more stolen documents. Who knew what else they had? Nevertheless  with just a month to go until the election  the Obama administration took the extraordinary step of alerting the public. On October 7  2016  a joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said  “The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails” from U.S. political organizations. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”
A forgery  a couple of groups of hackers  and a drip of well-timed leaks were all it took to throw American politics into chaos. Whether and to what extent the Trump campaign was complicit in the Russian efforts is the subject of active inquiries today. Regardless   Putin  pulled off a spectacular geopolitical heist on a shoestring budget—about $200 million  according to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. This point is lost on many Americans: The subversion of the election was as much a product of improvisation and entropy as it was of long-range vision. What makes  Putin  effective  what makes  him  dangerous  is not strategic brilliance but a tactical flexibility and adaptability—a willingness to experiment  to disrupt  and to take big risks. “They do plan ” said a senior Obama-administration official. “They’re not stupid at all. But the idea that they have this all perfectly planned and that  Putin  is an amazing chess player—that’s not quite it.  He  knows where  he  wants to end up   he  plans the first few moves  and then  he  figures out the rest later. People ask if  he  plays chess or checkers. It’s neither:  He  plays blackjack.  He  has a higher acceptance of risk. Think about it. The election interference—that was pretty risky  what  he  did. If Hillary Clinton had won  there would’ve been hell to pay.” Even the manner of the Russian attack was risky. The fact that the Russians didn’t really bother hiding their fingerprints is a testament to the change in Russia’s intent toward the U.S.  Robert Hannigan  a former head of the Government Communications Headquarters  the British analogue to the National Security Agency  said at the Aspen Forum. “The brazen recklessness of it … the fact that they don’t seem to care that it’s attributed to them very publicly  is the biggest change.”
That recklessness nonetheless has clear precursors—both in  Putin’s  evolving worldview and in  his  changing domestic circumstances. For more than a decade  America’s strategic carelessness with regard to Russia has stoked  Putin’s  fears of being deposed by the U.S.  and pushed  him  toward ever higher levels of antagonism. So has  his  political situation—the need to take ever larger foreign risks to shore up support at home  as the economy has struggled. These pressures have not abated; if anything  they have accelerated in recent years. II. The History When it is snowing  as it was on this spring afternoon  the gray crags of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations blend into the low-slung  steely sky. This is where the Soviet state once minted its diplomats and spies. Here they mastered the nuances of the world before stepping out into it. Today  the university’s role is much the same  although it has been watered down by corruption: The wealthy often buy their children admission. I had been invited to listen to a lecture by one of the institute’s most prominent faculty members  Andranik Migranyan  who himself graduated from the school in 1972. Migranyan spent much of the past decade in New York  where he ran the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation  a Russian think tank reported to have ties to the Russian foreign ministry. Among his old classmates is Sergei Lavrov  the foreign minister  whom he still counts as a friend.
This afternoon  Migranyan was lecturing on  Putin’s  speech at the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy  a speech that seems to be Russia’s sole post-Soviet ideological document—and key to understanding how the relationship between Russia and the U.S. reached today’s nadir.  Putin   still a painfully awkward speaker at the time  was seven years into  his  now nearly two-decade reign. Eighteen years prior  in 1989   he  had been a KGB officer stationed in Dresden  East Germany  shoveling sensitive documents into a furnace as protesters gathered outside and the Berlin Wall crumbled. Not long after that  the Soviet Union was dead and buried  and the world seemed to have come to a consensus: The Soviet approach to politics—violent  undemocratic—was wrong  even evil. The Western liberal order was a better and more moral form of government. For a while   Putin  had tried to find a role for Russia within that Western order. When Boris Yeltsin  Russia’s first post-Soviet president  named him his successor in 1999  Russia was waging war against Islamist separatists in Chechnya. On 9/11   Putin  was the first foreign leader to call President George W. Bush  hoping to impress on  him  that they were now allies in the struggle against terrorism.  He  tried to be helpful in Afghanistan. But in 2003  Bush ignored his objections to the invasion of Iraq  going around the United Nations Security Council  where Russia has veto power. It was a humiliating reminder that in the eyes of the West  Russia was irrelevant  that “Russian objections carried no weight ” as Migranyan told his students. But to  Putin   it was something more: Under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights  Washington had returned to its Cold War–era policy of deposing and installing foreign leaders. Even the open use of military force was now fair game.
In 2007  speaking to the representatives and defenders of the Western order   Putin  officially registered  his  dissent. “Only two decades ago  the world was ideologically and economically split  and its security was provided by the massive strategic potential of two superpowers ”  Putin  declaimed sullenly. But that order had been replaced by a “unipolar world” dominated only by America. “It is the world of one master  one sovereign.” A world order controlled by a single country “has nothing in common with democracy ”  he  noted pointedly. The current order was both “unacceptable” and ineffective. “Unilateral  illegitimate action” only created “new human tragedies and centers of conflict.”  He  was referring to Iraq  which by that point had descended into sectarian warfare. The time had come   he  said  “to rethink the entire architecture of global security.” This was the protest of a losing side that wanted to renegotiate the terms of surrender  16 years after the fact. Nonetheless   Putin  has spent the decade since that speech making sure that the United States can never again unilaterally maneuver without encountering friction—and  most important  that it can never  ever depose him. “You should have seen the faces of [John] McCain and [Joe] Lieberman ” a delighted Migranyan told his students  who appeared to be barely listening. The hawkish American senators who attended  Putin’s  speech “were gobsmacked. Russia had been written off! And  Putin  committed a mortal sin in  Munich :  He  told the truth.”
The year that followed  Migranyan said  “was the year of deed and action.” Russia went to war with neighboring Georgia in 2008  a move that Migranyan described as a sort of comeuppance for nato  which had expanded to include other former Soviet republics. But Western encroachment on Russia’s periphery was not the Kremlin’s central grievance. The U.S.  Migranyan complained  had also been meddling directly in Russian politics. American consultants had engineered painful post-Soviet market reforms  enriching themselves all the while  and had helped elect the enfeebled and unpopular Yeltsin to a second term in 1996. The U.S. government directly funded both Russian and American nongovernmental organizations  such as the National Endowment for Democracy  to promote democracy and civil society in Russia. Some of those same NGOs had ties to the so-called color revolutions  which toppled governments in former Soviet republics and replaced them with democratic regimes friendly to the West. The Rose Revolution in Georgia  the Orange Revolution in Ukraine  the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan—“Russia looks at this with understandable mistrust ” Migranyan told his students. He pointed out that the United States  by its own admission  had spent $5 billion in Ukraine to promote democracy—that is  to expand the liberal Western order. Through this prism  it is not irrational to believe that the U.S. might be coming for Moscow—and  Putin —next. This is why  in 2012  Russia kicked out USAID. It is why Russia banned the National Endowment for Democracy in 2015  under a new law that shuttered “undesirable” organizations.  Putin  is said to have watched the video of Qaddafi’s lynching over and over  obsessively.  He  feared the Americans would come for  him  next.  Putin’s   Munich  doctrine has a corollary: Americans may think they’re promoting democracy  but they’re really spreading chaos. “Look at what happened in Egypt ” Migranyan said  beginning a litany of failed American-backed revolutions. In 2011  the Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak stepped down following protests the U.S. had supported  Migranyan contended. But after “radical Islamists” won power democratically  the U.S. turned a blind eye to a military coup that deposed the new leaders. Then there was Libya. “You toppled the most successful government in North Africa ” Migranyan said  looking in my direction. “In the end  we got a ruined government  a brutally murdered American ambassador  chaos  and Islamic radicals.”
“If we count all the American failures  maybe it’s time you start listening to Russia? ” Migranyan said  growing increasingly agitated. “If [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] has to go  then who comes in  in place of Assad? … Don’t destroy regimes if you don’t know what comes after!”  Putin  had always been suspicious of democracy promotion  but two moments convinced  him  that America was coming for  him  under its guise. The first was the 2011 nato intervention in Libya  which led  ultimately  to the ousting and gruesome lynching of the Libyan dictator  Muammar Qaddafi. Afterward  many people who interacted with  Putin  noticed how deeply Qaddafi’s death troubled  him .  He  is said to have watched the video of the killing over and over. “The way Qaddafi died made a profound impact on him ” says Jake Sullivan  a former senior State Department official who met repeatedly with senior Russian officials around that time. Another former senior Obama-administration official describes  Putin  as “obsessed” with Qaddafi’s death. (The official concedes  “I think we did overreach” in Libya.) The second moment was in November 2013  when young Ukrainians came out onto the Maidan—Independence Square—in the capital  Kiev  to protest then-President Viktor Yanukovych pulling out of an economic agreement with the European Union under pressure from  Putin . The demonstrators stayed all winter  until the police opened fire on them  killing some 100 people. The next day  February 21  2014  Yanukovych signed a political-reconciliation plan  brokered by Russia  America  and the EU  but that night he fled the capital. To  Putin   it was clear what had happened: America had toppled  his  closest ally  in a country  he  regarded as an extension of Russia itself. All that money America had spent on prodemocracy NGOs in Ukraine had paid off. The presence of Victoria Nuland  a State Department assistant secretary  handing out snacks on the Maidan during the protests  only cemented his worst fears.
“The Maidan shifted a gear ” Ben Rhodes  Obama’s deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications  told me. “ Putin  had always been an antagonist  and aggressive. But  he  went on offense after the Maidan. The gloves were off  in a way. To  Putin   Ukraine was such a part of Russia that  he  took it as an assault on  him .” (A source close to the Kremlin confirmed this account.)  Putin  and Lavrov were known within the Obama administration for their long tirades  chastising the American president for all the disrespect shown to Russia since 1991—like the time in 2014 that Obama listed Russia and Ebola as global threats in the same speech. Yanukovych’s fall made these tirades far more intense. “For two years afterwards  there wasn’t a phone call in which [ Putin ] wouldn’t mention it ” accusing the U.S. of supporting regime change in Ukraine  Rhodes recalled. Regime change in Libya and Ukraine led to Russia propping up Bashar al-Assad in Syria. “Not one more” is how Jon Finer  former Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff  characterizes  Putin’s  approach in Syria. It also led inexorably to Russian meddling in the U.S. election: Russia would show the U.S. that there was more than one regime-change racket in town. III. The Player For Russia  a country relentlessly focused on its history  2017 was a big year. November marked 100 years since the Bolsheviks  a radical minority faction of socialists  brought guns into a fledgling parliament and wrested Russia onto an equally radical path. That bloody experiment itself ended in 1991  with the collapse of the Soviet Union; December 2016 marked its 25th anniversary. Both anniversaries were largely ignored by the Kremlin-controlled media  because they are uncomfortable for  Putin . Bolsheviks were revolutionaries and  Putin   a statist to his core  loathes revolutions. But he was also raised to be a person of the Soviet state  to admire its many achievements  which is why he famously referred to the fall of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
 Putin  governs with the twin collapses of 1917 and 1991 at the forefront of  his  thinking.  He  fears for  himself  when another collapse comes—because collapse always comes  because it has already come twice in 100 years.  He  is constantly trying to avoid it. The exiled oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky has publicly spoken of deposing  Putin   and until recently did not eschew violent means. People like Alexey Navalny  the opposition leader  openly talk about putting  Putin  and his closest associates on trial. The Russian opposition gleefully waits for  Putin  to fall  to resign  to die. Every misstep  every dip in oil prices  is to them just another sign of his coming personal apocalypse. The hungry anticipation is mirrored in the West  especially in the United States.
Fear of collapse is also why Russian propaganda is intent on highlighting the bloody aftermath of revolutions the world over. Things may not be great in Russia now—the country has struggled mightily since 2012—but  the country’s news programs suggest  things can always get worse. That’s what Russians are told happened in the 1990s  in the nine frenetic years between the Soviet Union’s collapse and  Putin ’s ascent to power. “When you have two governmental collapses in 100 years  people are scared of them ” Migranyan told me. Many Russians remember the last one personally. But the number who do is shrinking. One in four Russian men dies before the age of 55.  Putin  turned 65 in October  and is surrounded by people who are as old as  he  is  if not older. Russia is now “in an autumnal autocracy ” Ekaterina Schulmann  a political scientist in Moscow  says. “The more it tries to seem young and energetic  the more it obviously fails.” As Aleksey Chesnakov  a former Kremlin insider  told me  in Russia “the most active voters”—the people who buy in most fully to what  Putin ’s selling—“are the pensioners.” To  Putin ’s supporters   his  regime isn’t an autocracy  exactly. “It can be described as demophilia ” Migranyan explained. “It is not a democracy  but it is in the name of the people  and for the people.  Putin ’s main constituency is the people. All of  his  power comes from  his  rating with the people  and therefore it’s important that  he  gives them the fruits of  his  rule.” The Kremlin calls it “managed democracy.”
This  too  is crucial to understanding why  Putin  acts as  he  does  and how  he  is likely to think about new campaigns against the United States. The Kremlin’s direction of the press  the close eye it keeps on polls and approval numbers  and especially its foreign policy—they all exist to buttress  Putin ’s legitimacy  to curry favor with  his  144 million subjects. It’s a complicated  hiccuping feedback loop designed to guarantee that  Putin ’s authoritarian rule remains popular and unthreatened. This is why  Putin  insists on having elections  even if the result is always predictable. “Without renewing the mandate  the system can’t survive ” Chesnakov said. “According to polls  two-thirds of Russians don’t want a monarchy. They want a democracy. But they have a different sense of it than Americans and Europeans.”  Putin ’s third presidential term is up in the spring of 2018.  He  didn’t bother to declare that  he ’d run for reelection until December 6 (the election is in March) and  he  likely won’t campaign.* This is  Putin ’s carefully cultivated image at home: the phlegmatic leader who hovers coolly above the fray as it churns on beneath  him . But in the past year or so  the fray has given  him  reason to worry. On a chilly afternoon this spring  I watched college students standing on the steps of a nondescript building off Volgograd’s central square  waiting to meet with Alexey Navalny. The opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader has captured the imagination of many young Russians  as well as that of Westerners who see him as a potential rival of  or even replacement for   Putin . Navalny has declared that he is running for president in the upcoming election. Police had blocked off the street in front of the building  which housed Navalny’s local campaign office. They stood groggily watching as Cossacks  members of a southern Russian tribe who have historically acted as the state’s vigilante enforcers  strolled up and down the block  casually swinging their black-leather whips. Angry-looking young men in track pants and sneakers—the other fists-for-hire preferred by the Kremlin—paced around the students  eyeing them menacingly. Young women in vertiginous heels—plainclothes cops—milled around. Every few minutes  they took out identical camcorders tagged with numbered yellow stickers and filmed the students standing on the steps  zooming in on their faces. Navalny had recently been attacked by progovernment thugs who splashed “Brilliant Green ” a Soviet-era antiseptic  on his face. His supporters subsequently posted an image of The Motherland Calls  the giant statue commemorating the Soviet victory at Stalingrad  with its face Photoshopped green  to publicize his rally in Volgograd. The image touched a nerve in a country where the government fetishizes World War II. Within hours  pro-Kremlin social-media accounts were using the image to fuel local outrage. By the time Navalny arrived in Volgograd  from Moscow  the youth wing of Putin’s party was waiting with a protest. The students standing on the steps of the campaign office found the manufactured outrage funny. They were at an age when most things were funny  even when the state was clearly watching them. The FSB had recently sent a summons to the home of Vlad  a fourth-year student at Volgograd State University who had previously picketed in support of Navalny’s Progress Party. Roman  a bespectacled third-year student in veterinary science  had been called into the dean’s office for participating in a protest. “The dean said  ‘Don’t go to Navalny’s protests. His political position is wrong ’ ” Roman told me  shrugging and shoving his hands into the pockets of his puffy red jacket. These young men would soon graduate into an economy that had only recently started to grow again after a five-year malaise. But the growth is barely perceptible  while prices for basic goods have soared. Some of their neighbors and family acquaintances hadn’t been paid in months  they said. “Our parents say things have gotten worse ” Roman told me. But their parents also knew the potential cost of openly opposing the government  and weren’t happy that their sons were at the rally that day. They also believed  from watching state TV  that Navalny was an American agent. The young men laughed at this  too. Navalny had begun to build his base about a decade earlier  with a blog on LiveJournal that carefully documented how government officials supposedly carved thick slices off the state budget and stashed the money in Moscow mansions or real estate abroad. A few years ago  Navalny launched a YouTube channel where he posts slickly produced videos describing alleged government corruption schemes. On another YouTube channel  Navalny Live  he and his team at the Anti-Corruption Foundation host talk shows about politics  the kind of programming that would never be allowed on state-controlled television. Together  the channels have more than 1.5 million subscribers  and the videos have collected hundreds of millions of views. As the students and I stood chatting  a retinue of preschoolers marched past the office with their teachers. The college students broke into laughter and cheers. “Everyone says that Navalny’s supporters are really young  but I didn’t know they were this young! ” Roman said. But things quickly lost their comic lightness when a young man in track pants started loudly arguing with an older Navalny supporter  saying Navalny was funded by the U.S. State Department and noting the personal offense he took at the green-faced Motherland Calls statue. “It’s a monument to a great victory!” his friend  another angry young man in track pants  screamed. “It was built on bones! My grandfather fought for Stalingrad!” (His grandfather  he later admitted to me  had been born in Georgia in 1941.) Suddenly  scores of anti-Navalny protesters appeared  some with brooms  as if preparing to sweep him out of their city. “Navalny  come out!” a middle-aged man with a shaved head screamed into a megaphone as the protesters surged across the sidewalk toward the campaign office. “Navalny  come out!” they yelled in response. The college students packed in tightly on the campaign office’s front steps  ready to defend their leader. The two camps started pushing and shoving  the crowd swaying violently. The cops watched. I looked up and saw Roman’s red jacket. He had taken off his glasses and stood on the top step  blinking and squinting into the noise. The swagger and irony had gone off his face. He looked vulnerable  like a child. Navalny emerged at the top of the steps  calm as ever. Part of the crowd started chanting  “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Navalny invited the man with the megaphone and his comrades up the steps to talk with him calmly  face-to-face. They came up and grabbed him by the legs and started to drag him toward the hostile part of the crowd. Finally the cops acted  freeing Navalny and pushing the crowd back toward the street. Navalny escaped into his campaign office  where  for the next three hours  he fielded questions in a room so packed with supporters that his hair was soon dripping with sweat. He spoke about the contrast between government elites’ luxurious lifestyles and the region’s sagging wages; about rising utility fees  despite falling energy prices; about the pitiful state of the roads. “Alexey!” one of his supporters yelled out. “There’s nothing left in our city since 1945 except the victory!” Everyone clapped. Navalny laughed at the state’s accusations that his supporters—the hundreds of people sweating with him in the room—had been paid by the U.S. State Department to show up. “This is the real political force of the country ” he said. “And we will win. We are destined for victory  because in any culture  in any civilization  people like us win  because they lie and we tell the truth.” I wiped clear a small rectangle on a fogged-up window. There was nothing left of the angry crowd  not even the police. They had vanished as quickly as they had materialized. Two days later  on March 26  Navalny rushed back to Moscow  where thousands of people had heeded his call to come out and protest state corruption. Tens of thousands more came out in nearly 100 other Russian cities and towns  across Russia’s 11 time zones—an unexpected showing that grabbed international headlines. Earlier that month  Navalny had posted an hour-long exposé on YouTube about the extensive luxury-real-estate holdings of the prime minister and former president  Dmitry Medvedev—who in 2008 had lamented that a sum equivalent to a third of the Russian federal budget had disappeared to corruption. Navalny contrasted the opulence of Medvedev’s many homes  filmed by drones  with his awkward call for austerity to the residents of Crimea  who  on joining Russia  had lost access to a steady supply of water  electricity  and reasonably priced food. “There’s no money ” Medvedev advised them two years after the annexation  in 2016  “but you hang in there.” By the time of the mass protests  the exposé had been watched almost 12 million times. A couple of schoolboys climbed up on a lamppost in Moscow’s iconic Pushkin Square  packed with protesters  and called to the cops trying to get them down  “There’s no money  but we’re hanging in there!” In recent years  as the economy has struggled   Putin  has purchased  his  popularity with a series of tactical measures.  Putin  pays extremely close attention to  his  approval ratings to see what works and what doesn’t.  He  and  his  advisers are addicted to polls. According to Alexander Oslon  who runs the Public Opinion Foundation  which does polling for the Kremlin  “They can’t live without them.”  Putin ’s approval rating surged in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea—and  by extension  Russia’s return to imperial grandeur. It was a risky maneuver  the equal  perhaps  of  Putin ’s later interference in the U.S. election. And it paid off  at least in the short term. Russians rallied behind the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine—and behind  Putin   their audacious president. “There was a spike in loyalty” toward “every organ of the state ” Kirill Rogov  a political analyst in Moscow who studies Russian polling  told me—“a conservative shift in all directions. People started paying more attention to the news  they watched more TV  and they became more indoctrinated.” For a decade  a majority of Russians had told pollsters that they would rather be well-off than live in a great power. In 2014  those preferences flipped. But the rush of patriotism provided by the Crimean annexation proved fleeting. Connected by land only to Ukraine  Crimea is hard to supply from Russia. The peninsula is facing severe water shortages in its near future  and tourism  a mainstay of the local economy  has plummeted. On a recent trip there  I was told by even the most ardently pro-Russia locals  Cossacks who had staged protests supporting Moscow in 2014  that they had come to regret their stance. The violent lawlessness and corruption of Moscow had reached their home  and life had become much harder as Russian citizens. In some ways  they missed being Ukrainian. Meanwhile  the already sluggish Russian economy has lost cheap Western financing  following the imposition of American and European sanctions.  Putin ’s response to those sanctions—banning food imports from the United States and the EU—made food prices climb by double-digit percentages. The economy sank into recession. By the beginning of 2017  the government’s approval numbers had nearly returned to pre-annexation levels. “It’s the brand of the year ” Minin said of Russia’s hackers. “It’s a good thing when  aside from oil  we have cutting-edge specialists” whom the whole world talks about. Russia’s intervention in Syria  which began in the fall of 2015  offered another flag-wrapped distraction. As America shrank from its traditional role in the Middle East  Russia expanded its own  making an ostentatious show of fighting Islamist terrorists on behalf of a reluctant Western Christendom. Shortly after the Syrian army  aided by Russian airpower and commandos  retook the ancient city of Palmyra from the Islamic State  the Russian military flew the Mariinsky Orchestra in from St. Petersburg for a concert in front of the city’s historic ruins—and a dozen press cameras. (Russian TV barely covered the loss of the city by Russian-backed forces to isis half a year later.) There will inevitably be a reckoning for the Syrian adventure  too. For the entirety of his reign   Putin  has struggled to contain an Islamist insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus mountains  from which terrorists have launched attacks on Moscow. But on a trip this spring to Dagestan  a mostly Muslim enclave in the heart of the mountains  I found that the region  once extremely violent  was peaceful. Worried about potential terror attacks in nearby Sochi during the 2014 Olympics  the Russian secret services had allowed hundreds  if not thousands  of Islamist rebels  all of them Russian citizens  to go to Syria. According to one report in Novaya Gazeta  the FSB even provided some of them with a passport and transportation to the Russian border. It was a shortsighted counterterrorism strategy. Two Dagestani men who traveled to isis-controlled territories in Syria in order to bring back their children told me that they heard as much Russian as Arabic on the streets of isis cities. An October report by the Soufan Center  a security-intelligence nonprofit  showed that more foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria came from Russia than from any other country. What will become of these Russian fighters  now better trained and battle-hardened  as isis territory continues to shrink? Some 400 have already returned to Russia  according to the Soufan Center report  but even those who don’t return home can wreak havoc: In April  a suicide bomber blew himself up at a St. Petersburg metro station  killing 13 people. Russian speakers outside the country who had joined isis were suspected of having radicalized him. Russia’s interference in the U.S. election was just as shortsighted. At first  Donald Trump’s victory seemed to be a great coup for  Putin . Kremlin loyalists celebrated Trump’s inauguration in Moscow  including at a live watch party with free-flowing champagne. And it conferred on Russia prestige of a sort. When I asked Victor Minin  the former Russian-government cybersecurity specialist who runs hackathons across Russia  about the effect of American media coverage of Russian hackers  he said  “It’s the brand of the year. It’s a good thing when  aside from oil  we have cutting-edge specialists and the whole world is talking about them.” But this victory has burned out even faster than the others. The fingerprints that the Russians left behind  once discovered  raised an uproar in Washington. Congress  in a rare near-unanimous vote  stripped Trump of the ability to unilaterally lift American sanctions on Russia. They will very likely remain in place indefinitely  a prospect Medvedev bemoaned in a Facebook post the day Trump reluctantly signed the bill into law. Unable to get back the two diplomatic compounds in the U.S. that had been seized during the last days of the Obama administration  the Russians plunged headfirst into a destructive tit for tat—which resulted in the seizure of three more Russian diplomatic posts. Ironically  one of the Russian institutions to suffer the most blowback for the Russian hack is the FSB  one of the agencies believed to be behind the 2016 interference. “Before 2016  the FSB had a good reputation in Washington ” Andrei Soldatov  the Russian journalist  told me. The head of the FSB “was considered a reliable partner in fighting terrorism.” But “it all ended in 2016  and it ended very badly.” FSB officers were put on the FBI’s most-wanted list for cybercriminals  an unprecedented retaliation. The head of the FSB’s elite cyber unit and his deputy were forced out; two other top officers from the unit ended up in Moscow’s most notorious jail. “They’re now under incredible pressure both from the inside and the outside ” Soldatov said. “Sometimes ” says Michael Hayden  a director of the National Security Agency under George W. Bush  “you have successful covert operations that you wish hadn’t succeeded.” Meddling in the U.S. election might have destabilized the American political system  but it is unclear how carefully  Putin  considered the potential consequences for  his  country.  His  goal is to stay in power another day  another year  and to deal with complications when—and if—they arise. The protests sparked by Navalny are a complication that has  for now  been dealt with. Police arrested 1 043 people on March 26 in Moscow alone. On October 7  following another  smaller round of protests  they arrested hundreds more. Navalny will not be allowed on the election ballot  according to various reports and one Kremlin insider I spoke with; a recent court finding against him following trumped-up charges of embezzlement will most likely be used to disqualify him. These were hardly the first protests that  Putin  has weathered. Massive prodemocracy  anti- Putin  demonstrations rocked Moscow in the winter of 2011–12—and were followed by a violent police crackdown on May 6  2012  the day before  Putin  was sworn in for a third time. Dozens of people  some of them first-time protesters  were given multiyear prison sentences. The Kremlin soon raised the penalties for participating in any kind of unsanctioned protest. Several people are now in jail simply for sharing or liking posts on social media. Olga Romanova  who founded the NGO Russia Behind Bars to provide Russians with legal assistance  told me that the lesson the government is preparing for this new batch of young protesters “will be bigger and harsher” than the one in 2012  and that “it will last years.” She said the state was threatening to separate protesting minors from their parents. The feared Investigative Committee “is calling in school principals  school psychologists  teachers for questioning ” Romanova said. “And they testify against the kids.” (This summer  under pressure from the Russian government  Romanova fled to Western Europe.)
“Have you been to Mamayev Kurgan yet? ” Minin asked me. He was referring to another hill  where the battle was so intense  it changed the hill’s shape. Now the Motherland Calls statue stands there  a 170-foot concrete woman raising a sword to summon her countrymen into battle. It’s where Nazi Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus was captured  Minin noted with reverence  and looked into the sunny distance. “You know  it’s important to see how young people defended their homeland.” When we got to the cafeteria  I saw that it  too  was haunted by its Soviet past. Grouchy middle-aged women in hairnets dished out bland  greasy cuisine. If it weren’t for students tapping at their smartphones  it would have been hard to tell that the 21st century had ever arrived. I sat down at a table with a team from Astrakhan and told them I had been to their hometown once  a romantically shabby old city by the Caspian Sea. The students smirked. “Everyone wants to leave ” a third-year named Anton said. “There’s nothing to do there ” his teammate Sergei added. “We did an amazing job … creating the illusion that  Putin  controls everything in Russia … Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to  him . Anton was hoping that Minin could help him get his foot in the door at one of the state security services. “It’s prestigious  they pay well  and the work is interesting ” he said. If he were accepted  he could hope for a salary of 50 000 rubles (less than $900) a month  which was almost double the average salary in Astrakhan. Was he motivated by any feelings of—“Patriotic conviction? ” Anton finished my sentence  and started to chuckle. “No ” he said. “I don’t care what government I work for. If the French Foreign Legion takes me  I’ll go!”
But most Russians don’t recognize the Russia portrayed in this story: powerful  organized  and led by an omniscient  omnipotent leader who is able to both formulate and execute a complex and highly detailed plot. Gleb Pavlovsky  a political consultant who helped  Putin  win his first presidential campaign  in 2000  and served as a Kremlin adviser until 2011  simply laughed when I asked him about  [TGT] ’s role in Donald Trump’s election. “We did an amazing job in the first decade of  [TGT] ’s rule of creating the illusion that  Putin  controls everything in Russia ”  he  said. “Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to  [TGT] . A businessman who is high up in  Putin ’s United Russia party said over an espresso at a Moscow café: “You’re telling me that everything in Russia works as poorly as it does  except our hackers? Rosneft”—the state-owned oil giant—“doesn’t work well. Our health-care system doesn’t work well. Our education system doesn’t work well. And here  all of a sudden  are our hackers  and they’re amazing?” The election hack “was a very emotional  tactical decision.” The Kremlin was “very upset about the Panama Papers ” which cast light on Putin’s wealth. In the same way that Russians overestimate America  seeing it as an all-powerful orchestrator of global political developments  Americans project their own fears onto Russia  a country that is a paradox of deftness  might  and profound weakness—unshakably steady  yet somehow always teetering on the verge of collapse. Like America  it is hostage to its peculiar history  tormented by its ghosts.
None of these factors obviates the dangers Russia poses; rather  each gives them shape. Both  Putin  and  his  country are aging  declining—but the insecurities of decline present their own risks to America. The United States intelligence community is unanimous in its assessment not only that Russians interfered in the U.S. election but that  in the words of former FBI Director James Comey  “they will be back.” It is a stunning escalation of hostilities for a troubled country whose elites still have only a tenuous grasp of American politics. And it is classically  Putin   and classically Russian: using daring aggression to mask weakness  to avenge deep resentments  and  at all costs  to survive. I’d come to Russia to try to answer two key questions. The more immediate is how the Kremlin  despite its limitations  pulled off one of the greatest acts of political sabotage in modern history  turning American democracy against itself. And the more important—for Americans  anyway—is what might still be in store  and how far  an emboldened Vladimir Putin  is prepared to go in order to get what  he  wants. Jeff Elkins; Alexey Kurbatov and Muti “It wasn’t a strategic operation ” says Andrei Soldatov  a Russian journalist with deep sources in the security services  who writes about the Kremlin’s use of cybertechnology. “Given what everyone on the inside has told me ” he says  hacking the U.S. political system “was a very emotional  tactical decision. People were very upset about the Panama Papers.”
In the spring of 2016  an international consortium of journalists began publishing revelations from a vast trove of documents belonging to a Panamanian law firm that specialized in helping its wealthy foreign clients move money  some of it ill-gotten  out of their home countries and away from the prying eyes of tax collectors. (The firm has denied any wrongdoing.) The documents revealed that  Putin’s  old friend Sergei Roldugin  a cellist and the godfather to  Putin’s  elder daughter  had his name on funds worth some $2 billion. It was an implausible fortune for a little-known musician  and the journalists showed that these funds were likely a piggy bank for  Putin’s  inner circle. Roldugin has denied any wrongdoing  but the Kremlin was furious about the revelation.  Putin’s  spokesman  Dmitry Peskov  whose wife was also implicated  angrily ascribed the reporting to “many former State Department and CIA employees” and to an effort to “destabilize” Russia ahead of its September 2016 parliamentary elections. The argument was cynical  but it revealed a certain logic: The financial privacy of Russia’s leaders was on par with the sovereignty of Russia’s elections. “The Panama Papers were a personal slight to  Putin  ” says John Sipher  a former deputy of the CIA’s Russia desk. “They think we did it.”  Putin’s  inner circle  Soldatov says  felt “they had to respond somehow.” According to Soldatov’s reporting  on April 8  2016   Putin  convened an urgent meeting of  his  national-security council; all but two of the eight people there were veterans of the KGB. Given the secrecy and timing of this meeting  Soldatov believes it was then that  Putin  gave the signal to retaliate.
It was almost like one of Minin’s hacking competitions  but with higher stakes. The hackers are not always guys in military-intelligence uniforms  Soldatov told me; in some cases they’re mercenary freelancers willing to work for the highest bidder—or cybercriminals who have been caught and blackmailed into working for the government. ( Putin  has denied “state level” involvement in election meddling  but plausible deniability is the point of working through unofficial hackers.) American officials noticed the same messy and amorphous behavior as the summer of 2016 wore on. A former staffer in Barack Obama’s administration says that intercepted communications between FSB and military-intelligence officers revealed arguing and a lack of organization. “It was ad hoc ” a senior Obama-administration official who saw the intelligence in real time told me. “They were kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would stick.”
When the Obama administration began to realize  in the summer  that the Russians were up to something more wide-ranging than what they’d done before  the White House worried about only half the problem. At that point  the most alarming development was Russian probing of states’ voting systems. The dumps of hacked data and the churn of false stories about Clinton seemed less troubling  and also harder to combat without looking political. In September  Obama approached  Putin  on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou  China  and told  him  to “cut it out.” That fall  National-Security Adviser Susan Rice hand-delivered a warning to the Russian ambassador to Washington  Sergey Kislyak. The White House tasked the Treasury and State Departments with exploring new sanctions against Russia  as well as the publication of information about  Putin’s  personal wealth  but decided that such moves might backfire. If the White House pushed too hard  the Russians might dump even more stolen documents. Who knew what else they had? Nevertheless  with just a month to go until the election  the Obama administration took the extraordinary step of alerting the public. On October 7  2016  a joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said  “The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails” from U.S. political organizations. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”
A forgery  a couple of groups of hackers  and a drip of well-timed leaks were all it took to throw American politics into chaos. Whether and to what extent the Trump campaign was complicit in the Russian efforts is the subject of active inquiries today. Regardless   Putin  pulled off a spectacular geopolitical heist on a shoestring budget—about $200 million  according to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. This point is lost on many Americans: The subversion of the election was as much a product of improvisation and entropy as it was of long-range vision. What makes  Putin  effective  what makes  him  dangerous  is not strategic brilliance but a tactical flexibility and adaptability—a willingness to experiment  to disrupt  and to take big risks. “They do plan ” said a senior Obama-administration official. “They’re not stupid at all. But the idea that they have this all perfectly planned and that  Putin  is an amazing chess player—that’s not quite it.  He  knows where  he  wants to end up   he  plans the first few moves  and then  he  figures out the rest later. People ask if [TGT][TGT]  plays chess or checkers. It’s neither:  [TGT]  plays blackjack.  [TGT]  has a higher acceptance of risk. Think about it. The election interference—that was pretty risky  what  [TGT]  did. If Hillary Clinton had won  there would’ve been hell to pay.” Even the manner of the Russian attack was risky. The fact that the Russians didn’t really bother hiding their fingerprints is a testament to the change in Russia’s intent toward the U.S.  Robert Hannigan  a former head of the Government Communications Headquarters  the British analogue to the National Security Agency  said at the Aspen Forum. “The brazen recklessness of it … the fact that they don’t seem to care that it’s attributed to them very publicly  is the biggest change.”
That recklessness nonetheless has clear precursors—both in  Putin’s  evolving worldview and in  his  changing domestic circumstances. For more than a decade  America’s strategic carelessness with regard to Russia has stoked  Putin’s  fears of being deposed by the U.S.  and pushed  him  toward ever higher levels of antagonism. So has  his  political situation—the need to take ever larger foreign risks to shore up support at home  as the economy has struggled. These pressures have not abated; if anything  they have accelerated in recent years. II. The History When it is snowing  as it was on this spring afternoon  the gray crags of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations blend into the low-slung  steely sky. This is where the Soviet state once minted its diplomats and spies. Here they mastered the nuances of the world before stepping out into it. Today  the university’s role is much the same  although it has been watered down by corruption: The wealthy often buy their children admission. I had been invited to listen to a lecture by one of the institute’s most prominent faculty members  Andranik Migranyan  who himself graduated from the school in 1972. Migranyan spent much of the past decade in New York  where he ran the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation  a Russian think tank reported to have ties to the Russian foreign ministry. Among his old classmates is Sergei Lavrov  the foreign minister  whom he still counts as a friend.
This afternoon  Migranyan was lecturing on  Putin’s  speech at the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy  a speech that seems to be Russia’s sole post-Soviet ideological document—and key to understanding how the relationship between Russia and the U.S. reached today’s nadir.  Putin   still a painfully awkward speaker at the time  was seven years into  his  now nearly two-decade reign. Eighteen years prior  in 1989   he  had been a KGB officer stationed in Dresden  East Germany  shoveling sensitive documents into a furnace as protesters gathered outside and the Berlin Wall crumbled. Not long after that  the Soviet Union was dead and buried  and the world seemed to have come to a consensus: The Soviet approach to politics—violent  undemocratic—was wrong  even evil. The Western liberal order was a better and more moral form of government. For a while   Putin  had tried to find a role for Russia within that Western order. When Boris Yeltsin  Russia’s first post-Soviet president  named him his successor in 1999  Russia was waging war against Islamist separatists in Chechnya. On 9/11   Putin  was the first foreign leader to call President George W. Bush  hoping to impress on  him  that they were now allies in the struggle against terrorism.  He  tried to be helpful in Afghanistan. But in 2003  Bush ignored his objections to the invasion of Iraq  going around the United Nations Security Council  where Russia has veto power. It was a humiliating reminder that in the eyes of the West  Russia was irrelevant  that “Russian objections carried no weight ” as Migranyan told his students. But to  Putin   it was something more: Under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights  Washington had returned to its Cold War–era policy of deposing and installing foreign leaders. Even the open use of military force was now fair game.
In 2007  speaking to the representatives and defenders of the Western order   Putin  officially registered  his  dissent. “Only two decades ago  the world was ideologically and economically split  and its security was provided by the massive strategic potential of two superpowers ”  Putin  declaimed sullenly. But that order had been replaced by a “unipolar world” dominated only by America. “It is the world of one master  one sovereign.” A world order controlled by a single country “has nothing in common with democracy ”  he  noted pointedly. The current order was both “unacceptable” and ineffective. “Unilateral  illegitimate action” only created “new human tragedies and centers of conflict.”  He  was referring to Iraq  which by that point had descended into sectarian warfare. The time had come   he  said  “to rethink the entire architecture of global security.” This was the protest of a losing side that wanted to renegotiate the terms of surrender  16 years after the fact. Nonetheless   Putin  has spent the decade since that speech making sure that the United States can never again unilaterally maneuver without encountering friction—and  most important  that it can never  ever depose him. “You should have seen the faces of [John] McCain and [Joe] Lieberman ” a delighted Migranyan told his students  who appeared to be barely listening. The hawkish American senators who attended  Putin’s  speech “were gobsmacked. Russia had been written off! And  Putin  committed a mortal sin in  Munich :  He  told the truth.”
The year that followed  Migranyan said  “was the year of deed and action.” Russia went to war with neighboring Georgia in 2008  a move that Migranyan described as a sort of comeuppance for nato  which had expanded to include other former Soviet republics. But Western encroachment on Russia’s periphery was not the Kremlin’s central grievance. The U.S.  Migranyan complained  had also been meddling directly in Russian politics. American consultants had engineered painful post-Soviet market reforms  enriching themselves all the while  and had helped elect the enfeebled and unpopular Yeltsin to a second term in 1996. The U.S. government directly funded both Russian and American nongovernmental organizations  such as the National Endowment for Democracy  to promote democracy and civil society in Russia. Some of those same NGOs had ties to the so-called color revolutions  which toppled governments in former Soviet republics and replaced them with democratic regimes friendly to the West. The Rose Revolution in Georgia  the Orange Revolution in Ukraine  the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan—“Russia looks at this with understandable mistrust ” Migranyan told his students. He pointed out that the United States  by its own admission  had spent $5 billion in Ukraine to promote democracy—that is  to expand the liberal Western order. Through this prism  it is not irrational to believe that the U.S. might be coming for Moscow—and  [TGT] —next. This is why  in 2012  Russia kicked out USAID. It is why Russia banned the National Endowment for Democracy in 2015  under a new law that shuttered “undesirable” organizations.  Putin  is said to have watched the video of Qaddafi’s lynching over and over  obsessively.  He  feared the Americans would come for  him  next.  Putin’s   Munich  doctrine has a corollary: Americans may think they’re promoting democracy  but they’re really spreading chaos. “Look at what happened in Egypt ” Migranyan said  beginning a litany of failed American-backed revolutions. In 2011  the Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak stepped down following protests the U.S. had supported  Migranyan contended. But after “radical Islamists” won power democratically  the U.S. turned a blind eye to a military coup that deposed the new leaders. Then there was Libya. “You toppled the most successful government in North Africa ” Migranyan said  looking in my direction. “In the end  we got a ruined government  a brutally murdered American ambassador  chaos  and Islamic radicals.”
“If we count all the American failures  maybe it’s time you start listening to Russia? ” Migranyan said  growing increasingly agitated. “If [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] has to go  then who comes in  in place of Assad? … Don’t destroy regimes if you don’t know what comes after!”  Putin  had always been suspicious of democracy promotion  but two moments convinced  him  that America was coming for  him  under its guise. The first was the 2011 nato intervention in Libya  which led  ultimately  to the ousting and gruesome lynching of the Libyan dictator  Muammar Qaddafi. Afterward  many people who interacted with  Putin  noticed how deeply Qaddafi’s death troubled  him .  He  is said to have watched the video of the killing over and over. “The way Qaddafi died made a profound impact on him ” says Jake Sullivan  a former senior State Department official who met repeatedly with senior Russian officials around that time. Another former senior Obama-administration official describes  Putin  as “obsessed” with Qaddafi’s death. (The official concedes  “I think we did overreach” in Libya.) The second moment was in November 2013  when young Ukrainians came out onto the Maidan—Independence Square—in the capital  Kiev  to protest then-President Viktor Yanukovych pulling out of an economic agreement with the European Union under pressure from  Putin . The demonstrators stayed all winter  until the police opened fire on them  killing some 100 people. The next day  February 21  2014  Yanukovych signed a political-reconciliation plan  brokered by Russia  America  and the EU  but that night he fled the capital. To  Putin   it was clear what had happened: America had toppled  his  closest ally  in a country  he  regarded as an extension of Russia itself. All that money America had spent on prodemocracy NGOs in Ukraine had paid off. The presence of Victoria Nuland  a State Department assistant secretary  handing out snacks on the Maidan during the protests  only cemented his worst fears.
“The Maidan shifted a gear ” Ben Rhodes  Obama’s deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications  told me. “ Putin  had always been an antagonist  and aggressive. But  he  went on offense after the Maidan. The gloves were off  in a way. To  Putin   Ukraine was such a part of Russia that  he  took it as an assault on  him .” (A source close to the Kremlin confirmed this account.)  Putin  and Lavrov were known within the Obama administration for their long tirades  chastising the American president for all the disrespect shown to Russia since 1991—like the time in 2014 that Obama listed Russia and Ebola as global threats in the same speech. Yanukovych’s fall made these tirades far more intense. “For two years afterwards  there wasn’t a phone call in which [ [TGT] ] wouldn’t mention it ” accusing the U.S. of supporting regime change in Ukraine  Rhodes recalled. Regime change in Libya and Ukraine led to Russia propping up Bashar al-Assad in Syria. “Not one more” is how Jon Finer  former Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff  characterizes  Putin’s  approach in Syria. It also led inexorably to Russian meddling in the U.S. election: Russia would show the U.S. that there was more than one regime-change racket in town. III. The Player For Russia  a country relentlessly focused on its history  2017 was a big year. November marked 100 years since the Bolsheviks  a radical minority faction of socialists  brought guns into a fledgling parliament and wrested Russia onto an equally radical path. That bloody experiment itself ended in 1991  with the collapse of the Soviet Union; December 2016 marked its 25th anniversary. Both anniversaries were largely ignored by the Kremlin-controlled media  because they are uncomfortable for  [TGT] . Bolsheviks were revolutionaries and  Putin   a statist to his core  loathes revolutions. But he was also raised to be a person of the Soviet state  to admire its many achievements  which is why he famously referred to the fall of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
 Putin  governs with the twin collapses of 1917 and 1991 at the forefront of  his  thinking.  He  fears for  himself  when another collapse comes—because collapse always comes  because it has already come twice in 100 years.  He  is constantly trying to avoid it. The exiled oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky has publicly spoken of deposing  Putin   and until recently did not eschew violent means. People like Alexey Navalny  the opposition leader  openly talk about putting  Putin  and his closest associates on trial. The Russian opposition gleefully waits for  Putin  to fall  to resign  to die. Every misstep  every dip in oil prices  is to them just another sign of his coming personal apocalypse. The hungry anticipation is mirrored in the West  especially in the United States.
Fear of collapse is also why Russian propaganda is intent on highlighting the bloody aftermath of revolutions the world over. Things may not be great in Russia now—the country has struggled mightily since 2012—but  the country’s news programs suggest  things can always get worse. That’s what Russians are told happened in the 1990s  in the nine frenetic years between the Soviet Union’s collapse and  [TGT] ’s ascent to power. “When you have two governmental collapses in 100 years  people are scared of them ” Migranyan told me. Many Russians remember the last one personally. But the number who do is shrinking. One in four Russian men dies before the age of 55.  Putin  turned 65 in October  and is surrounded by people who are as old as  he  is  if not older. Russia is now “in an autumnal autocracy ” Ekaterina Schulmann  a political scientist in Moscow  says. “The more it tries to seem young and energetic  the more it obviously fails.” As Aleksey Chesnakov  a former Kremlin insider  told me  in Russia “the most active voters”—the people who buy in most fully to what  [TGT] ’s selling—“are the pensioners.” To  [TGT] ’s supporters   [TGT]  regime isn’t an autocracy  exactly. “It can be described as demophilia ” Migranyan explained. “It is not a democracy  but it is in the name of the people  and for the people.  [TGT] ’s main constituency is the people. All of  [TGT]  power comes from  [TGT]  rating with the people  and therefore it’s important that  he  gives them the fruits of  his  rule.” The Kremlin calls it “managed democracy.”
This  too  is crucial to understanding why  Putin  acts as  he  does  and how  he  is likely to think about new campaigns against the United States. The Kremlin’s direction of the press  the close eye it keeps on polls and approval numbers  and especially its foreign policy—they all exist to buttress  [TGT] ’s legitimacy  to curry favor with  [TGT]  144 million subjects. It’s a complicated  hiccuping feedback loop designed to guarantee that  [TGT] ’s authoritarian rule remains popular and unthreatened. This is why  Putin  insists on having elections  even if the result is always predictable. “Without renewing the mandate  the system can’t survive ” Chesnakov said. “According to polls  two-thirds of Russians don’t want a monarchy. They want a democracy. But they have a different sense of it than Americans and Europeans.”  [TGT] ’s third presidential term is up in the spring of 2018.  [TGT]  didn’t bother to declare that  [TGT] ’d run for reelection until December 6 (the election is in March) and  [TGT]  likely won’t campaign.* This is  [TGT] ’s carefully cultivated image at home: the phlegmatic leader who hovers coolly above the fray as it churns on beneath  [TGT] . But in the past year or so  the fray has given  [TGT]  reason to worry. On a chilly afternoon this spring  I watched college students standing on the steps of a nondescript building off Volgograd’s central square  waiting to meet with Alexey Navalny. The opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader has captured the imagination of many young Russians  as well as that of Westerners who see him as a potential rival of  or even replacement for   [TGT] . Navalny has declared that he is running for president in the upcoming election. Police had blocked off the street in front of the building  which housed Navalny’s local campaign office. They stood groggily watching as Cossacks  members of a southern Russian tribe who have historically acted as the state’s vigilante enforcers  strolled up and down the block  casually swinging their black-leather whips. Angry-looking young men in track pants and sneakers—the other fists-for-hire preferred by the Kremlin—paced around the students  eyeing them menacingly. Young women in vertiginous heels—plainclothes cops—milled around. Every few minutes  they took out identical camcorders tagged with numbered yellow stickers and filmed the students standing on the steps  zooming in on their faces. Navalny had recently been attacked by progovernment thugs who splashed “Brilliant Green ” a Soviet-era antiseptic  on his face. His supporters subsequently posted an image of The Motherland Calls  the giant statue commemorating the Soviet victory at Stalingrad  with its face Photoshopped green  to publicize his rally in Volgograd. The image touched a nerve in a country where the government fetishizes World War II. Within hours  pro-Kremlin social-media accounts were using the image to fuel local outrage. By the time Navalny arrived in Volgograd  from Moscow  the youth wing of Putin’s party was waiting with a protest. The students standing on the steps of the campaign office found the manufactured outrage funny. They were at an age when most things were funny  even when the state was clearly watching them. The FSB had recently sent a summons to the home of Vlad  a fourth-year student at Volgograd State University who had previously picketed in support of Navalny’s Progress Party. Roman  a bespectacled third-year student in veterinary science  had been called into the dean’s office for participating in a protest. “The dean said  ‘Don’t go to Navalny’s protests. His political position is wrong ’ ” Roman told me  shrugging and shoving his hands into the pockets of his puffy red jacket. These young men would soon graduate into an economy that had only recently started to grow again after a five-year malaise. But the growth is barely perceptible  while prices for basic goods have soared. Some of their neighbors and family acquaintances hadn’t been paid in months  they said. “Our parents say things have gotten worse ” Roman told me. But their parents also knew the potential cost of openly opposing the government  and weren’t happy that their sons were at the rally that day. They also believed  from watching state TV  that Navalny was an American agent. The young men laughed at this  too. Navalny had begun to build his base about a decade earlier  with a blog on LiveJournal that carefully documented how government officials supposedly carved thick slices off the state budget and stashed the money in Moscow mansions or real estate abroad. A few years ago  Navalny launched a YouTube channel where he posts slickly produced videos describing alleged government corruption schemes. On another YouTube channel  Navalny Live  he and his team at the Anti-Corruption Foundation host talk shows about politics  the kind of programming that would never be allowed on state-controlled television. Together  the channels have more than 1.5 million subscribers  and the videos have collected hundreds of millions of views. As the students and I stood chatting  a retinue of preschoolers marched past the office with their teachers. The college students broke into laughter and cheers. “Everyone says that Navalny’s supporters are really young  but I didn’t know they were this young! ” Roman said. But things quickly lost their comic lightness when a young man in track pants started loudly arguing with an older Navalny supporter  saying Navalny was funded by the U.S. State Department and noting the personal offense he took at the green-faced Motherland Calls statue. “It’s a monument to a great victory!” his friend  another angry young man in track pants  screamed. “It was built on bones! My grandfather fought for Stalingrad!” (His grandfather  he later admitted to me  had been born in Georgia in 1941.) Suddenly  scores of anti-Navalny protesters appeared  some with brooms  as if preparing to sweep him out of their city. “Navalny  come out!” a middle-aged man with a shaved head screamed into a megaphone as the protesters surged across the sidewalk toward the campaign office. “Navalny  come out!” they yelled in response. The college students packed in tightly on the campaign office’s front steps  ready to defend their leader. The two camps started pushing and shoving  the crowd swaying violently. The cops watched. I looked up and saw Roman’s red jacket. He had taken off his glasses and stood on the top step  blinking and squinting into the noise. The swagger and irony had gone off his face. He looked vulnerable  like a child. Navalny emerged at the top of the steps  calm as ever. Part of the crowd started chanting  “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Navalny invited the man with the megaphone and his comrades up the steps to talk with him calmly  face-to-face. They came up and grabbed him by the legs and started to drag him toward the hostile part of the crowd. Finally the cops acted  freeing Navalny and pushing the crowd back toward the street. Navalny escaped into his campaign office  where  for the next three hours  he fielded questions in a room so packed with supporters that his hair was soon dripping with sweat. He spoke about the contrast between government elites’ luxurious lifestyles and the region’s sagging wages; about rising utility fees  despite falling energy prices; about the pitiful state of the roads. “Alexey!” one of his supporters yelled out. “There’s nothing left in our city since 1945 except the victory!” Everyone clapped. Navalny laughed at the state’s accusations that his supporters—the hundreds of people sweating with him in the room—had been paid by the U.S. State Department to show up. “This is the real political force of the country ” he said. “And we will win. We are destined for victory  because in any culture  in any civilization  people like us win  because they lie and we tell the truth.” I wiped clear a small rectangle on a fogged-up window. There was nothing left of the angry crowd  not even the police. They had vanished as quickly as they had materialized. Two days later  on March 26  Navalny rushed back to Moscow  where thousands of people had heeded his call to come out and protest state corruption. Tens of thousands more came out in nearly 100 other Russian cities and towns  across Russia’s 11 time zones—an unexpected showing that grabbed international headlines. Earlier that month  Navalny had posted an hour-long exposé on YouTube about the extensive luxury-real-estate holdings of the prime minister and former president  Dmitry Medvedev—who in 2008 had lamented that a sum equivalent to a third of the Russian federal budget had disappeared to corruption. Navalny contrasted the opulence of Medvedev’s many homes  filmed by drones  with his awkward call for austerity to the residents of Crimea  who  on joining Russia  had lost access to a steady supply of water  electricity  and reasonably priced food. “There’s no money ” Medvedev advised them two years after the annexation  in 2016  “but you hang in there.” By the time of the mass protests  the exposé had been watched almost 12 million times. A couple of schoolboys climbed up on a lamppost in Moscow’s iconic Pushkin Square  packed with protesters  and called to the cops trying to get them down  “There’s no money  but we’re hanging in there!” In recent years  as the economy has struggled   Putin  has purchased  his  popularity with a series of tactical measures.  Putin  pays extremely close attention to  his  approval ratings to see what works and what doesn’t.  He  and  his  advisers are addicted to polls. According to Alexander Oslon  who runs the Public Opinion Foundation  which does polling for the Kremlin  “They can’t live without them.”  [TGT] ’s approval rating surged in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea—and  by extension  Russia’s return to imperial grandeur. It was a risky maneuver  the equal  perhaps  of  [TGT] ’s later interference in the U.S. election. And it paid off  at least in the short term. Russians rallied behind the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine—and behind  Putin   their audacious president. “There was a spike in loyalty” toward “every organ of the state ” Kirill Rogov  a political analyst in Moscow who studies Russian polling  told me—“a conservative shift in all directions. People started paying more attention to the news  they watched more TV  and they became more indoctrinated.” For a decade  a majority of Russians had told pollsters that they would rather be well-off than live in a great power. In 2014  those preferences flipped. But the rush of patriotism provided by the Crimean annexation proved fleeting. Connected by land only to Ukraine  Crimea is hard to supply from Russia. The peninsula is facing severe water shortages in its near future  and tourism  a mainstay of the local economy  has plummeted. On a recent trip there  I was told by even the most ardently pro-Russia locals  Cossacks who had staged protests supporting Moscow in 2014  that they had come to regret their stance. The violent lawlessness and corruption of Moscow had reached their home  and life had become much harder as Russian citizens. In some ways  they missed being Ukrainian. Meanwhile  the already sluggish Russian economy has lost cheap Western financing  following the imposition of American and European sanctions.  [TGT] ’s response to those sanctions—banning food imports from the United States and the EU—made food prices climb by double-digit percentages. The economy sank into recession. By the beginning of 2017  the government’s approval numbers had nearly returned to pre-annexation levels. “It’s the brand of the year ” Minin said of Russia’s hackers. “It’s a good thing when  aside from oil  we have cutting-edge specialists” whom the whole world talks about. Russia’s intervention in Syria  which began in the fall of 2015  offered another flag-wrapped distraction. As America shrank from its traditional role in the Middle East  Russia expanded its own  making an ostentatious show of fighting Islamist terrorists on behalf of a reluctant Western Christendom. Shortly after the Syrian army  aided by Russian airpower and commandos  retook the ancient city of Palmyra from the Islamic State  the Russian military flew the Mariinsky Orchestra in from St. Petersburg for a concert in front of the city’s historic ruins—and a dozen press cameras. (Russian TV barely covered the loss of the city by Russian-backed forces to isis half a year later.) There will inevitably be a reckoning for the Syrian adventure  too. For the entirety of his reign   Putin  has struggled to contain an Islamist insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus mountains  from which terrorists have launched attacks on Moscow. But on a trip this spring to Dagestan  a mostly Muslim enclave in the heart of the mountains  I found that the region  once extremely violent  was peaceful. Worried about potential terror attacks in nearby Sochi during the 2014 Olympics  the Russian secret services had allowed hundreds  if not thousands  of Islamist rebels  all of them Russian citizens  to go to Syria. According to one report in Novaya Gazeta  the FSB even provided some of them with a passport and transportation to the Russian border. It was a shortsighted counterterrorism strategy. Two Dagestani men who traveled to isis-controlled territories in Syria in order to bring back their children told me that they heard as much Russian as Arabic on the streets of isis cities. An October report by the Soufan Center  a security-intelligence nonprofit  showed that more foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria came from Russia than from any other country. What will become of these Russian fighters  now better trained and battle-hardened  as isis territory continues to shrink? Some 400 have already returned to Russia  according to the Soufan Center report  but even those who don’t return home can wreak havoc: In April  a suicide bomber blew himself up at a St. Petersburg metro station  killing 13 people. Russian speakers outside the country who had joined isis were suspected of having radicalized him. Russia’s interference in the U.S. election was just as shortsighted. At first  Donald Trump’s victory seemed to be a great coup for  Putin . Kremlin loyalists celebrated Trump’s inauguration in Moscow  including at a live watch party with free-flowing champagne. And it conferred on Russia prestige of a sort. When I asked Victor Minin  the former Russian-government cybersecurity specialist who runs hackathons across Russia  about the effect of American media coverage of Russian hackers  he said  “It’s the brand of the year. It’s a good thing when  aside from oil  we have cutting-edge specialists and the whole world is talking about them.” But this victory has burned out even faster than the others. The fingerprints that the Russians left behind  once discovered  raised an uproar in Washington. Congress  in a rare near-unanimous vote  stripped Trump of the ability to unilaterally lift American sanctions on Russia. They will very likely remain in place indefinitely  a prospect Medvedev bemoaned in a Facebook post the day Trump reluctantly signed the bill into law. Unable to get back the two diplomatic compounds in the U.S. that had been seized during the last days of the Obama administration  the Russians plunged headfirst into a destructive tit for tat—which resulted in the seizure of three more Russian diplomatic posts. Ironically  one of the Russian institutions to suffer the most blowback for the Russian hack is the FSB  one of the agencies believed to be behind the 2016 interference. “Before 2016  the FSB had a good reputation in Washington ” Andrei Soldatov  the Russian journalist  told me. The head of the FSB “was considered a reliable partner in fighting terrorism.” But “it all ended in 2016  and it ended very badly.” FSB officers were put on the FBI’s most-wanted list for cybercriminals  an unprecedented retaliation. The head of the FSB’s elite cyber unit and his deputy were forced out; two other top officers from the unit ended up in Moscow’s most notorious jail. “They’re now under incredible pressure both from the inside and the outside ” Soldatov said. “Sometimes ” says Michael Hayden  a director of the National Security Agency under George W. Bush  “you have successful covert operations that you wish hadn’t succeeded.” Meddling in the U.S. election might have destabilized the American political system  but it is unclear how carefully  Putin  considered the potential consequences for  his  country.  His  goal is to stay in power another day  another year  and to deal with complications when—and if—they arise. The protests sparked by Navalny are a complication that has  for now  been dealt with. Police arrested 1 043 people on March 26 in Moscow alone. On October 7  following another  smaller round of protests  they arrested hundreds more. Navalny will not be allowed on the election ballot  according to various reports and one Kremlin insider I spoke with; a recent court finding against him following trumped-up charges of embezzlement will most likely be used to disqualify him. These were hardly the first protests that  Putin  has weathered. Massive prodemocracy  anti- Putin  demonstrations rocked Moscow in the winter of 2011–12—and were followed by a violent police crackdown on May 6  2012  the day before  Putin  was sworn in for a third time. Dozens of people  some of them first-time protesters  were given multiyear prison sentences. The Kremlin soon raised the penalties for participating in any kind of unsanctioned protest. Several people are now in jail simply for sharing or liking posts on social media. Olga Romanova  who founded the NGO Russia Behind Bars to provide Russians with legal assistance  told me that the lesson the government is preparing for this new batch of young protesters “will be bigger and harsher” than the one in 2012  and that “it will last years.” She said the state was threatening to separate protesting minors from their parents. The feared Investigative Committee “is calling in school principals  school psychologists  teachers for questioning ” Romanova said. “And they testify against the kids.” (This summer  under pressure from the Russian government  Romanova fled to Western Europe.)