Find out about the Russian president's controversial
history and ideologies.
“Forget talking about the Trump Administration. The
question now is whether this will be a Trump Putin Administration or a Putin
Trump Administration.”
Former CBS News anchorman, Dan Rather, wrote that on
Facebook in December, in a post following the official CIA report confirming
Russia intervened in the election in an effort to help Donald Trump win. At
this point, it’s pretty much impossible to talk about our recent presidential
election without talking about Russia. And it’s pretty much impossible to talk
about Russia without talking about Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. We know
that President-elect Donald Trump is incredibly adulatory of Putin, and even
that Putin personally directed the Russian hacking operation.
Most recently, on
Friday, a U.S. intelligence report was released stating that "We assess
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at
the US presidential election, Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in
the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her
electability and potential presidency,”
The Daily Beast reports, and that
"we further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear
preference for President-elect Trump.”
But, what else is there to know about the controversial
leader, who we’re certain to hear more about in the coming weeks, months, and
years?
What’s
his history in Russia?
Putin began his career after law school as a spy with
the KGB, the main security agency of the Soviet Union, until its dissolution in
1991. He later rose through the ranks of the Russian government and was
appointed acting president in late 1999 when the sitting president, Boris
Yeltsin, resigned. A few months later, he was officially elected president.
But, while that election did technically abide by Russia's constitution, it
"did not occur on a level playing field," Michael McFaul, then-senior
associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a Senate
testimony the month after Putin was elected.
Rather, McFaul — who later became
the U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 — noted that, before stepping
down, Yeltsin strategically provoked a war against rebels in conflict-ridden
Chechnya to boost Putin's popularity shortly before the election, a theory
shared by other experts as well. Putin was elected for a second term in 2004,
though by that point the president had created barriers in the government that
made it difficult for other parties or candidates to rise up, noted Masha
Gessen, the author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,
in a 2012 op-ed for Slate. Constitutional term limits kept Putin from running
for a third consecutive term, so from 2008 to 2012, he served as prime minister
while his former chief of staff, Dmitry Medvedev, was president. In 2012, Putin
once again ran for president and won, though his win was marred by allegations
of fraud (like ballot stuffing) and a lack of competition (Putin's opponents
were only allowed on the ballot with his permission).
Throughout his time in power, Putin has been focused on
recapturing Russia’s influence it previously had on the Middle East and
regaining the country’s Soviet-era power. "I don't want to psychoanalyze
Mr. Putin," President Obama told a BuzzFeed reporter in a 2015 interview.
"I will say that he has a foot very much in the Soviet past. That's how he
came of age.”
What
are some of his most controversial views?
Some of Putin's ideologies and beliefs fly in the face
of human rights, and he runs a terrifyingly tight ship when it comes to certain
freedoms we in America have come to expect and hold dearly — some of which
we’ll be fighting to maintain under a Trump presidency. In 2013, Putin signed a
bill banning “gay propaganda,” which makes it illegal for citizens to share
information with minors “directed at forming nontraditional sexual setup,” that
"evokes interest" in "non-traditional sexual relations," or
that implies homosexuality and heterosexuality are equal; and in 2014, he made
it illegal for same-sex couples in Russia to adopt children.
Putin’s views on women’s rights aren’t any better. In
fact, his outlook on women appears to be frighteningly similar to Trump’s.
After Israel’s then president, Moshe Katsav, was charged with rape and sexual
harassment in 2006, Putin actually praised him. "He turned out to be a
strong man, raped 10 women," Putin was quoted as saying during a meeting
with Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert. "I never would have expected it
of him. He has surprised us all, we all envy him!" After the remarks went
public, a Kremlin spokesman told BBC that Putin meant them as a joke that
wasn't meant to be overheard. Locker room talk, perhaps?
And though in recent years Putin has been recruiting
women to political parties, the Washington Post reported that those women are
being brought on board to attract voters and make politicians seem less
corrupt.
Hillary Clinton herself was the subject of Putin's
sexist remarks in 2014, after she criticized Russia's actions in Crimea,
comparing it to Adolf Hitler's invasion of Europe. When asked about Clinton's
comments, Putin told Radio Europe 1, "It's better not to argue with women.
When people push boundaries too far, it's not because they are strong but
because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a
woman."
Why
are people calling him a dictator?
During the Democratic National Convention last July,
Vice President Joe Biden referred to Putin as a dictator while speaking against
Trump. And though, as CNN reported at the time, the White House said Biden’s
word choice wasn’t representative of an official administration stance,
spokesman Josh Earnest did reference a 2015 State Department report that states
Putin dominates Russia’s “highly centralized, authoritarian political system”
and note the similarities between “the word that Vice President Biden used” and
the language in the report.
But it’s not exactly black and white. When it comes to
dictatorships, the common threads tend to be centralizing power behind one
person, controlling the media and citizens' access to information, terrorizing
political opponents, unilateral aggression against other countries, and
nationalizing large parts of the economy. Putin doesn’t technically check all
of those boxes; Oberlin College professor of politics, Stephen Crowley, told
Mic that because Russia still has “contested elections, opposition parties, and
at least some degree of freedom of speech,” it’s not a dictatorship, like North
Korea under Kim Jong-Un or Syria under Bashar al-Assad.
Rather, Crowley said, he’d categorize Russia as a
“‘hybrid regime’ or ‘electoral authoritarianism’” — a blend of democracy and
dictatorship, that leans further toward the latter than the former. Indeed,
there are many aspects of Putin’s presidency that reflect authoritarian rule.
There’s the fact that, as Joshua First, a Russian and
Ukrainian history professor at the University of Mississippi, told Mic, those
“contested elections” aren’t exactly fair. “The process is greatly manipulated,
the most vocal opposition is suppressed, fraudulent votes are added in favor of
the pro-government party, and so on,” he said.
And throughout Putin’s tenure in the highest level of
Russia’s government, he’s systematically worked to concentrate control to the
president’s seat. In 2004, he signed a law giving the president the right to
appoint governors, rather than requiring citizens to elect those officials. And
during his four-year break from the presidency, Putin maintained significant
power from 2008 to 2012 as prime minister, while his former chief of staff,
Dmitry Medvedev, served as president. In fact, it was during that break that
Medvedev signed a law extending the presidential term from four to six years,
meaning Putin will now be in power until at least 2018, and possibly until
2024.
As Gessen noted in the New York Review of Books, Putin
has largely controlled Russia’s media since first becoming president, when he
took over the country’s broadcast television. And by dominating Russia’s media,
whether through state-owned outlets like the RT (formerly Russia Today) TV
station or through censorship of the few remaining independent outlets, Putin
is able to carefully control the messages his country’s citizens do and don’t
receive — which may, at least partially, explain the ruler’s seriously high
approval ratings.
Outside the media, Putin has passed a bill increasing
penalties for citizens participating in protests, even peaceful ones — despite
the fact that his own human rights adviser asked him to veto it.
When it comes to his interactions with foreign countries
with which Russia has tense relations, The Economist recently wrote that Putin
“finds new ways to scare the world” every week, by doing things like moving
“nuclear-capable missiles close to Poland and Lithuania” and threatening to
shoot down American planes that attack “the forces of Syria’s own dictator,
Bashar al-Assad. And in his quest to regain Russia’s Soviet-era power, Putin
has taken to making risky, aggressive, and internationally and domestically
criticized moves, like the annexation of the Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in 2014
(a militarized takeover of the region that was denounced by the United Nations
and resulted in sanctions from the U.S. government), or the destruction of tons
of banned Western food as a response to sanctions against Russia (which sparked
outrage in Russians who were angered by the waste of food that so many people
living below the poverty line could have eaten).
Putin and Trump also seem to have some similarities in
that both the Russian leader and soon-to-be American leader have histories of
playing it fast-and-loose with the truth; or that they both seem to view
control over a country as equal to leading it. "The man has very strong
control over a country," Trump said about Putin during NBC News and
MSNBC's Commander in Chief forum a couple months before the election. The
context was a positive one, in which Trump was commending Putin for being
"far more [of a leader]" than Obama.
Of course, as Gessen noted in her New York Review of
Books piece, for all the similarities Putin and Trump have, they also have many
differences when it comes to their "backgrounds, experience, and
demeanors." And, perhaps more importantly, even if Trump does share a
similar thirst for control as Putin, the American democracy has systems in
place, particularly our system of checks and balances among the branches of
government, that would prevent him from taking an authoritarian turn.
"Trump and Putin are heirs to vastly different historical and political
legacies, and the systems of governance in their countries are, indeed, far
apart," Gessen wrote. "Even Trump has acknowledged that Russia has a
'very different system, and I don't happen to like that system.' One cannot use
the parallels between them to predict what will happen to the United States and
its institutions."
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