Vladimir Putin: a Sphinx without a riddle

MOSCOW - His cold smile and athletic stride convey a sense of energy and authority. It is not an accidental impression. Vladimir Putin, the newly elected Russian President, wants to convince Russians and foreign leaders alike that at last there is a firm hand on the tiller in the Kremlin.

So far, for a man who was unknown in Russia seven months ago, he is not doing badly. The Chechen war could be presented, at least to voters at home, as Russia's first political or military success since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It was solely thanks to the war that Putin faced so little effective opposition in the presidential election. Other potentially serious candidates withdrew or never entered the race. It is a striking achievement for a man who had the support of just 2 per cent of Russians when he was President Boris Yeltsin's surprise choice as Prime Minister last August.

Putin was and is a man of mystery, but he and his advisers have skillfully used his enigmatic exterior to his advantage. His lack of a visible past, which might serve as a guide to his future conduct, fits in well with his 16-year-long career in the KGB. It veils his apparent lack of achievement in any job he has ever held. It allows people to imagine that he may know the secret of how to lift millions of Russians out of economic misery and political insecurity.

Admittedly, Yeltsin is not a hard act to follow. Simply by standing upright and staying sober, Putin looks like a welcome change from his predecessor. Nor is this entirely a delusion. Yeltsin presided over a strange medieval court where personal favourites, business oligarchs and members of the President's family competed for favours. Under the new regime, power will probably be less fragmented.

Ever since his meteoric rise started six months ago, Russian commentators and foreign Governments have speculated about the personality of the new leader. Does he have one at all? One sour Russian joke, adapting a jibe often used against Soviet leaders in the past, asks: "Will there ever be a Putin personality cult? No, because for such a cult you must first have a personality." For the moment, however, this is all to Putin's advantage. Russians are being presented with a blank screen on which they can see reflected whatever they want.

So far, the new Russian leader has done very little. One Russian observer, commenting on Putin's Sphinx-like demeanour, said: "Yes, he is like a Sphinx, but a Sphinx without a riddle. His only known policy is to fight a war in Chechnya. Apart from that, all he has done is to call for a restoration of moral values and raise the price of vodka."

The mockery may be superficial. Putin is hardly the first politician in Russia or the West to come to power because better-known opponents had checkmated each other. As when John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher as British Conservative Party leader in 1990, his very lack of visibility made him less of a target against which rivals could concentrate their fire.

Putin's track record is little help here or, put another way, what we see may be exactly what we are going to get. Journalists, diplomats and intelligence services, picking over the details of his past, have produced a meagre haul. Apart from his ability to rise from job to job, Russia's President-elect has had an unexciting career. He made little impression on his contemporaries either as a KGB spy in East Germany in the 1980s or, after 1991, as a shadowy but influential bureaucrat in St Petersburg.

One theme does emerge, however, from Putin's early life in his home city of St Petersburg, where he was born in 1952. An only child and the son of a manual labourer, he wanted, from an early age, to be close to people with power.

"Putin wanted to work in the KGB from his childhood," one of his former KGB bosses said. "After he finished school, he immediately came to our department in St Petersburg with a question: 'How can I join the service?"' The KGB told Putin, then just 17 years old, to go away and get a university education.

Putin, after qualifying at Leningrad University law faculty, went on to join the KGB and was posted to Dresden. It was on his return to Leningrad (which was shortly to resume its old name of St Petersburg) that another theme in Putin's character became evident. He was always loyal to his boss and had a talent for winning the trust of men notorious for not trusting anybody.

After 1991, Putin became the lieutenant of Anatoly Sobchak, the Mayor of St Petersburg, a politician always fearful of personal betrayal. He also came to know Anatoly Chubais, the architect of privatisation and a powerful oligarch, who was to play a critical role in Putin's rise from obscurity.

At the time he worked there, St Petersburg was notoriously corrupt. Putin is not known to have personally benefited from the jobs he held. Russian journalists looking to see if he had a luxury dacha hidden in the woods, or other dubiously acquired property, could only find a small wooden cottage with a tottering outdoor toilet and an ill-kempt garden on a lake outside St Petersburg.

But the Russian political and economic elite - largely the old Soviet nomenklatura transformed into capitalists by looting state property at knock-down prices - probably has little to fear from Putin. He may be personally honest, but he has always been closely associated with those who are not and he has never shown any tendency to do anything about it.

On leaving St Petersburg for Moscow, he joined the Kremlin Administration, notorious for its insider dealings. By 1998, he had become head of the FSB - the successor organisation to the KGB - where he showed his unswerving loyalty to Yeltsin and his family. When Yuri Skuratov, the Prosecutor-General, pursuing corruption in the Kremlin, was shown on television allegedly cavorting with two prostitutes, Putin promptly confirmed the authenticity of the damning video.

The decisive moment in Putin's rise came last year. Yeltsin, his family and associates, looking forward to the presidential election in 2000, were desperate to keep their opponents out of the Kremlin. They feared for their fortunes and their liberty. They considered all options. Sergei Stepashin, the Prime Minister at the time, says that from March, plans were going ahead for the invasion of Chechnya. Kremlin advisers also discussed the beneficial political impact of a Chechen terrorist bombing campaign in Moscow.

Yeltsin appointed Putin Prime Minister last August. Events played into the Kremlin's hands so immediately as to create the suspicion that they were secretly orchestrated by Moscow. The day after Putin's appointment, a Chechen Islamic group invaded Dagestan. A month later, bombs started to explode in Moscow and other cities killing 300 Russian civilians.

The surge of fear and rage which followed gave the necessary popular support for launching a patriotic war against Chechnya. On October 1, the Russian Army crossed into Chechnya. Russian liberals have denounced the undoubted brutality of the Russian occupation of Chechnya and Putin's authoritarian rhetoric at home as evidence of "modernised Stalinism" triumphing in Russia.

A better parallel with Putin's approach can be found in the United States. The politician the new Russian leader most clearly resembles is Richard Nixon. Like the late American President, he is a secretive man with an unrelenting desire for power, agile in appealing to nationalist sentiment and unscrupulous in denouncing his opponents as unpatriotic.

In the Duma elections last December, Putin played the patriotic card with a will. The media, controlled by oligarchs, supported him, relentlessly smearing his most dangerous adversaries such as Yevgeny Primakov, a former Prime Minister, and Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow. Victory in the Duma elections was decisive for the Prime Minister. Yeltsin and his family had finally found their man. On New Year's Eve, he replaced Yeltsin in the Kremlin and the election was brought forward by three months.

There is a limit to what Putin or anybody else can do about the widespread poverty in Russia. He was appointed as the candidate of the status quo. As President he may have more room to manoeuvre, but he has limited ability to take radical initiatives.

Putin may talk of restoring power to the Russian state, but this may prove impossible. Fragmentation of authority has gone too far. Surviving industry is decayed. No real political revolution took place when the ruling elite switched from communism to capitalism. Its priority is to cling on to the wealth it acquired and it will fight anybody who threatens its interests.

This is not to say that Putin cannot rearrange the pieces on the political chessboard. He can curtail the power of regional governors, who often act as if they ruled independent dukedoms. He can squeeze the financial oligarchs. He is already putting his own men in place.

Putin probably does think that he can restore Russia as a powerful state. But there is nothing in his career which gives the impression that he knows how to do so.

- INDEPENDENT