Vladimir Putin inspires many thoughts (“He is an evil man,” thinks John McCain in his memoirs; “Will he become my new best friend?” thinks Trump in a tweet), but none so common as two competing ideas of the Russian president’s power, each ruminated upon by his adversaries but each seeming to oppose the other: “Putin is weak,” think some; or, think others, “Putin is strong.”
In fact Putin is both weak and strong. The relationship between each quality is more dynamic than mere coexistence, and his frailty reinforces his menace and his menace reinforces his frailty, as Russia-watchers have observed. The more insecure Putin becomes, the more frightened he becomes; the more frightened he becomes, the more aggressive he becomes; the more aggressive he becomes, the more reckless he becomes; the more reckless he becomes, the more insecure he becomes—and so on and so forth as Crimea is annexed, American elections are meddled with, Syria is sacrificed.
And Putin has perhaps never been more insecure than he is at this moment; naturally, he has just made a grab for lifelong power. As his popularity has declined, he has held a referendum to extend presidential term limits that could allow him to rule into his 80s. It is out of weakness that he has attempted to ensure he can rule as a strongman for life.
The “Putin is weak, not strong” belief is compelling: under him, Russia is suffering from grave and obvious problems. There are the economic problems: oil prices are down; the ruble is very down; sanctions are up; sanctions are staying up; young people are leaving. Old people, his political base, have threatened to leave him, particularly over an abortive proposal to raise the retirement age. The country is spending too much money supporting separatists outside its borders, and within its borders not enough money keeping people above the poverty line; people living below the poverty line—one in every four families with children—watch angrily as the president’s allies and the president’s son-in-law and the president himself become multi-billionaires. Some of those allies have been targeted by sanctions.
In addition to the economic problems, there are the health problems—rather, there is the health problem, made worse by all the economic problems and making the economic problems altogether worse in turn. Russia—in which half of all medical facilities have no hot water and half of all hospital beds were cut between 2000 and 2015, according to the Wall Street Journal—has the third-largest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world: over 650,000. Though it is not known precisely how many Russian people have died from the virus, Putin could have certainly done more to curb its spread, which might have curbed the decline in Russia’s GDP.
Although the Russian president’s weaknesses may go unreported due to the Russian media’s weaknesses, Russian people cannot help noticing that under the present system they suffer manifold intolerable weaknesses of their own. In the past few years, some of Putin’s own allies have spoken out against his policy failures; some of Putin’s own party members have run as independents. Putin’s approval rating is lower than it has been in three decades.
So, yes, Putin is weak—indeed, the only argument as persuasive as the “Putin is weak, not strong” argument is the “Putin is strong, not weak” argument.
Within its borders, Russian media is largely under Putin’s thumb, Russian institutions are largely dwarfed by Putin’s control, Putin is Russia’s longest-ruling leader since Stalin, and though his popularity is low compared to his past self, it is high compared to many past and present Western leaders.
Beyond Russia, the country can appear even stronger. Russia has invaded Georgia. It has invaded Ukraine. Nordic countries are afraid it will invade them. It has quite possibly swayed a civil war in the Middle East in favour of a dictator who has murdered, tortured and displaced millions of his own people, swayed an American presidential election in favour of a serial sexual assailant whose businesses have had to declare bankruptcy several times, and swayed a British referendum in favour of ruining that country.
These are not the actions of a weak man but a strong one—at least, they would be were he not so weak. Putin’s adventures abroad are meant to appeal to his own people, who have good reason to feel disempowered in their country and might wish not to feel disempowered in the world.
The danger Putin poses amplifies and obscures the state of endangerment in which he lives. And now, when Putin’s power is threatened—by pandemic, by economics, by the disillusionment of Russian people—it is shored up in a move animated by a spirit of fragile fortitude that Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe once described as “classically Putin, and classically Russian: using daring aggression to mask weakness, to avenge deep resentments and, at all costs, to survive.”
This article appears in print in the August 2020 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “The weak strongman.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.
A stone monument warns of deadly tsunamis of centuries past, on the Pacific coast in Japan (Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images)
In Japan, there are stone markers that can be found around the island, on high ground, near the shore. They are inscribed with variations of the same warning: Do not build below this point.
These monuments were erected by survivors of long-forgotten tsunamis. The stones marked the point where the waves crested. They were meant to warn future generations to stay safe by avoiding the coastal lowlands at this particular point.
Some are ancient, others were placed as recently as 1896, only a century ago—but long enough for people to forget the two tsunamis that struck that year, killing over 22,000 people.
In some cases, these ancient warnings were heeded and the nearby towns stuck to the safety of the high ground. In other places, the warnings were forgotten or ignored, successfully for the most part—until 2011. That year a magnitude-9.0 earthquake sent waves as high as 30 feet crashing against the shore, drowning 12,000 people. The villages that had heeded the warnings of the tsunami stones survived far better than most.
Japanese academics who study disaster preparedness believe it takes about three generations to forget hard lessons of survival. We tell our children what happened, and our grandchildren, and then memory fades.
The last great global pandemic was just over 100 years ago. My grandfather told me that his father had just returned by boat from overseas, where he’d been gassed in the trenches. He had travelled overland to their farmstead in northern Saskatchewan, to be reunited with his family. He brought influenza with him, and his wife died mere days after he came home.
My family remembers the broad strokes of that tragedy, but not the details. I can’t tell you what they tried to stay safe, or what they wished they had done differently. As I worry about keeping my own family safe with the arrival of another global pandemic, I wonder what my great-grandfather would have to say. But those memories are gone.
There will be other plagues. Our children or grandchildren will almost certainly be faced with the same dilemmas we face now and our great-grandparents faced in 1918. If we could erect our own tsunami stones, what would they say?
I am not an epidemiologist. But, like all of us, I have been consuming the advice and warnings of those who have spent a lifetime studying pandemics. And, what has become painfully obvious is that no one really knows what to do. Some experts advised shutting the borders immediately. Others claimed the ensuing panic to come home flooded our airports and only accelerated the spread of the virus.
For weeks we were told not to use face masks. And then we were told that we must. A professor with a long string of academic titles wrote that we must sterilize our groceries. I then read another who assured us this wasn’t needed. Some governments are testing and tracing everyone—others don’t think this is a priority at all.
With all the confusing and contradictory guidance, I don’t know how to best protect my own family. Can they walk in the park with their friends? Should I be wiping down the vegetables? And when do we wear masks?
The high ground is hard to find.
Unfortunately, these days I have limited faith in the ability of our political classes to set aside their partisan interests in favour of the collective good. Ass-covering and point-scoring is now so instinctive most politicians aren’t even aware they’re doing it. But, I would like to think that when this tide begins to ebb, our leaders will make a sincere effort to take stock and understand what worked, what failed, and why.
And, once we have done this, I hope we also give some thought to how we can erect our own tsunami stones, warnings that will abide, outlive us, and point our grandchildren toward safe ground, so they can do better than we have done.
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