Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

On a wintry January day in 2001, Vladimir Putin, German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and their wives climbed into a red troika, the traditional Russian sled, driven by a man in elegant livery and pulled by three horses wearing bells that jingled as they rode through the snow. They toured the sixteenth-century royal Kolomenskoye estate in Moscow with its red wooden houses and onion-domed churches. Without hats or fur coats, they bundled up in blankets, obviously enjoying the ride. They admired a portrait of Peter the Great in the estate house. 3The Schroeders had arrived in Russia to celebrate Russian Orthodox Christmas with the Putins, and together they visited the fourteenth-century Sergiev Posad monastery, which is regarded as the spiritual center of Russian Orthodoxy, and were greeted by women in traditional folk dresses and a choir chanting solemn Russian liturgy. There they met with Patriarch Alexy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. 4The sleigh ride not only captured the spirit of Christmas but also carried the spirit of the new relationship between Russia and Germany.

Putin was new on the job. He had been in power for barely a year. Schroeder had come into office in 1998 vowing to eschew the “sauna diplomacy” of his political opponent Helmut Kohl. In his opinion, Kohl had developed too cozy a relationship with the erratic Russian president Boris Yeltsin—including sharing a sauna with him—and Schroeder vowed to take a more critical stance toward Russia. 5But things were moving in a decidedly different direction. For Schroeder was fast developing a close relationship with the new German-speaking young Russian president. Three years later, he and his then wife adopted a Russian child from a Saint Petersburg orphanage, and later another one from the same place.

German-Russian business ties flourished, and the two countries agreed to build the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which would carry Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine, through which all of Gazprom’s exports to Europe had flowed until then. Shortly before his defeat in the 2005 election by Angela Merkel, Schroeder had proposed extending a government-backed $1.1 billion loan to finance the pipeline. Soon after he left office, Schroeder would be named chairman of the shareholders’ committee of the Nord Stream pipeline, making him a business partner of Russian magnates close to Putin. 6Nord Stream’s managing director is Matthias Warnig, a former East German intelligence official and a close associate of Putin. 7Schroeder’s appointment created considerable controversy, but it also symbolized how close political and business ties between the two countries had grown since Putin entered the Kremlin. 8In 2004, when asked whether Putin was a Lupenreiner Demokrat (crystal-clear democrat), Schroeder said, “Yes, he is.” 9At Putin’s inauguration for his fourth term in May 2018, Schroeder stood in the front row, next to Prime Minister Medvedev and Patriarch Kirill, and was one of the first VIP guests to shake Putin’s hand and congratulate him.

Fast-forward to the 2014 G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, seven months after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent launch of a war in Southeastern Ukraine, and after Russia’s expulsion from the G-8. Chancellor Angela Merkel, the pastor’s daughter from East Germany who speaks fluent Russian and had been instrumental in leading the EU’s imposition of sanctions on Russia, met a tense Putin for a one-on-one meeting. It dragged on into the early morning hours. They failed to agree on how to resolve the Ukraine crisis and talked past each other. The next day, none of the G-20 leaders would sit with Putin at lunch. Resenting the isolation, he abruptly left the summit early, but not before exchanging sharp words with the Australian prime minister and accusing the Europeans of “switching their brains off” when they imposed sanctions. He also said he needed to get some sleep. 10

After the summit ended, Merkel gave an unusually blunt speech in Sydney, eschewing her normally cautious style. Putin, she said, had apparently lied to her about Russia’s intentions in Crimea just before Russian troops moved in there. 11Warning that there were forces in Europe “which refuse to accept the concept of mutual respect,” she accused Russia of flouting international law:

Russia is violating the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of Ukraine. It regards one of its neighbors, Ukraine, as part of a sphere of influence. After the horrors of two world wars and the end of the Cold War, this calls the entire European peaceful order into question. 12

The close Germany-Russia partnership that had been the cornerstone of post–Cold War Europe was shattered. Sanctions disrupted the economic relationship, and political ties dramatically deteriorated. Merkel felt that whatever trust had existed between her and Putin had been eroded by his prevarication and repeated failure to carry through on promises he made.

Since the Crimean annexation, Germany has divided into two camps on Russia. Major segments of the German population no longer trust Russia and criticize both its policies in Ukraine and its domestic clampdown on freedoms. Public opinion data show that 64 percent of Germans believe that Putin is not a credible partner, and the same percentage believe that relations with Russia are “rather bad.” However, 33 percent favor closer cooperation with Russia. 13The latter are the Putin-Versteher . The verb verstehen in German means literally “to understand” but more specifically “to have understanding for.” Thus, the Putin-Versteher interpret Russia’s arguments and actions from the Kremlin’s point of view, often blaming the West for the Ukraine crisis because it threatened Moscow’s vital interests by carelessly offering Kyiv an EU Association Agreement. The story of how German-Russian relations deteriorated from the Schroeder-Putin sleigh ride to the Merkel-Putin standoff epitomizes Russia’s gradual estrangement from Europe under Putin. Yet this remains a complex and close relationship. Putin has the distinction of being the first Russian leader who has lived and worked in Germany, and his experiences there had a profound influence on how he views the world.

Putin was dubbed “the German in the Kremlin” by Alexander Rahr, one of his early, admiring biographers. 14Indeed, the German language was in many ways Putin’s ticket out of poverty and into the KGB. He had a hardscrabble childhood growing up in a postwar Leningrad kommunalka (communal apartment) with parents who had lost two sons, one of whom died in the nine-hundred-day Nazi siege of the city, during which one million civilians perished. An indifferent student who often got into brawls and into trouble, he eventually began to concentrate on his studies, focusing on German. His first German teacher, Vera Gurevich, was interviewed for the official biography that came out as he ascended to the presidency in 2000, and she praised his language skills and hard work: “He had a very good memory, a quick mind.” 15