Vladimir Putin sees himself as an exceptional human being, a man who moves history, the embodiment of Nietzsche’s will-to-power. He plainly wants the rest of us to see him in similar terms — hence the photographs where, bare-chested, he urges his steed across the vast steppes, a He-Man against the forces of darkness.
The truth is more prosaic. Putin was the eighth of Boris Yeltsin’s prime ministers, duller than most of his predecessors and seemingly destined to be as short-lived, but he happened to be in office when the bibulous Uralian suddenly quit. Under the constitution, this made him the acting head of state. Having assumed presidential power, he set about neutralizing rivals, initially with the support of the old nomenklatura, who hoped that the former KGB officer might be their own instrument. Before long, he learned to rule alone, and became, if reports are to be believed, the wealthiest man on the planet.
Now here is the scary thing. Putin’s rise did not require exceptional character, courage, or charisma. Almost anyone, finding himself at the head of the Russian state in the 1990s, might have established a dictatorship. Dictatorship comes easily, even naturally. The truly exceptional condition, the one that really does require men of character, courage, and charisma, is liberal democracy.
Look at the various leaders-for-life and fathers-of-the-nation who grabbed control of the successor republics when the USSR broke apart after 1991. What did they have in common? Were they unusually wise, disinterested, or patriotic? Had they earned the trust of their people by sharing their privations? Were they exceptional orators?
No. In almost every case, they were the apparatchiks who happened to be in the right place when the Soviet Union was dissolved. Finding themselves unexpectedly in charge of independent states, they seized the moment, ditching Marxism-Leninism, adopting nationalism, rigging the rules, and jailing their opponents.
Not everywhere. The three Baltic States managed to establish pluralist, multiparty systems. But they were exceptions. In most Soviet republics, colorless communist administrators reinvented themselves as grandiose emirs.
Nursultan Nazarbayev was a former steelworker whom the Politburo had picked as president of the Kazakh SSR. When the Soviet Union crumbled, he made himself supreme ruler, establishing a personality cult and naming the chief city after himself.
Heydar Aliyev was a KGB man who was running the exclave of Nakhchivan when the government of Azerbaijan collapsed in the wake of defeat by Armenia. He saw his opportunity and seized the presidency, holding it until his death in 2003, when he was succeeded by his son.
Alexander Lukashenko was the director of a Belarusian state farm who had made a splash by accusing senior officials of corruption when the first presidential election was held. He has held the post ever since, arresting or exiling every challenger.
Islam Karimov was first secretary of the Uzbek SSR when the USSR broke apart. He promptly established himself as a narcotics-funded dictator, persecuting and occasionally murdering opponents until his death in 2016.
Emomali Rahmon (“founder of peace and national unity”) was chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Tajik SSR. The republic voted by 97% to stay in the Soviet Union but, when the break happened, Rahmon became a nationalist, won four more “elections” with Saddam-like majorities, established a cult of personality, liquidated opponents, and is now grooming his son for the succession.
Most eccentric was Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s president-for-life, who banned, among other things, dogs, makeup on television, and lip-syncing. He went on to rename both bread and the month of April after his mother.
My point is not that these were Caligulan tyrants. It is that they were commonplace, quiet, small men whom circumstances cast into positions of power. That is what often happens when a political system is left to itself. Someone seizes control and rigs the rules so that he, his cronies, and their families can continue to loot the resources of the state while everyone else suffers a degree of oppression. Things have not changed much, in that sense, since the Bronze Age slave empires.
The founders feared what they called “Caesarism” — the idea that a popular general or brilliant demagogue might trample over their republican institutions. In most places, though, no special skills are needed. You don’t need to be a Caesar or a Napoleon. Fear and passivity are enough to keep even mediocrities in power.
This, incidentally, is what the tension in Ukraine is really about. Will that bloody and brutalized land follow the Baltic States into something approaching a law-based democracy, or will it go the way of the rest of the old USSR? We are about to find out.
