On New Year's Eve 1999, the Russian President Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as his successor. 'Take care of Russia', Yeltsin said to the obscure young bureaucrat. A quarter of a century later, on New Year's Eve 2024, the British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore reflects on Putin’s 25 years as dictator of Russia. RAAM publishes an article version of his essay, originally published on X.
A man walks past a large mural depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the side of a five-story residential building in Kashira, Moscow region, Russia, 12 January 2023. Photo: Yuri Kochetkov / ANP / EPA
‘I wasn’t just offering him a promotion,’ said President Boris Yeltsin on this day 25 years ago as he resigned tearfully in an unforgettable TV moment and astonished Russia by appointing an obscure young bureaucrat as his successor. ‘I wanted to hand him the Cap of Monomachos’ – the crown of the tsar - said the fuddled tsar wiping away a tear and growling: 'Take care of Russia.'
A not-so-accidental president
When he was appointed as premier and heir apparent by Boris Yeltsin, Putin was regarded as an accidental president, chosen as a puppet by manipulators – the oligarch Berezovsky and his understudy Abramovich, the presidential daughter Tatyana and son-in-law Yumashev - who felt they would control him. Funny how they never learn, for very few endowed with great power are controllable by those who made them; in fact they tend to destroy those first. Succession is always the test of any system; Yeltsin ironically handled his well and it will be the test of the Putinist state too. It was indeed a remarkable thing that at the end of the 20th century, a Russian ruler could simply appoint his successor on a caprice – and then fix his election.
Under the Romanovs, it had been the right of the tsar to choose successors until Paul I: Peter the Great insisted on that right. He crowned his wife – astonishingly a non-Russian, non-noble woman who had worked as a laundress and had been the lover of several officers before him – and she succeeded him as Empress Catherine I. Her rise was remarkable, the most meteoric since an actual beggar Zhu Yuanzhang founded the Ming dynasty. Peter possessed unique prestige as a political genius and military victor and first emperor and creator of a new state: Russia, a new manifestation of the grand principality of Moscow. After Peter, emperors chose some pretty whimsical options as their successors....
Succession is always the test of any system, and it will be the test of the Putinist state too
After Paul became emperor in 1796, he showed his disgust for his mother Catherine II's decadent but shrewd successful rule, a reign launched by her killing of her husband (Paul's father) and her own usurping of the throne (she was a minor German princess unrelated to the Romanov dynasty). Paul decreed the succession must be decided by a succession law to prevent more usurpations and more lascivious women of power until 1917. Under the Bolsheviks, the succession was decided by a tiny clique of potentates and of course the two greatest Soviet leaders, Lenin and Stalin, did not believe anyone was worthy to succeed them and tried to appoint ‘collective leaderships.’
After 1991 and the fall of the USSR, Russia enjoyed a period of chaotic and unstable, at best erratic and mismanaged, democracy: fitfully, lurchingly and lairily guided by a sclerotic, alcoholic but well-intentioned Yeltsin, swollen dazed yet always imperious and mysterious. By 1999, faced with economic failure, national humiliation, loss of empire, rampant gangsterism, American hegemony, medical disintegration, and military defeat by a tiny Caucasian nation, Yeltsin confronted a corruption investigation by his own procurator. Vladimir Putin, an obscure former KGB officer who had served in Dresden, East Germany, and an important official from Petersburg, recently arrived in the Kremlin administration. Fit, cadaverous, keen and inscrutable, he was appointed FSB Director just months after arriving. He immediately removed the threat of the investigation ruthlessly, coolly – the procurator was forced to resign as a video of him naked cavorting flabbily with a pair of prostitutes was aired on national TV – earning the gratitude and admiration of the Yeltsins. When Yeltsin offered him the crown, Putin said ‘I m not ready but it would be stupid to say, “I’d rather sell sunflower seeds.’’’ His appointment as acting PM and heir came just months later.
Retiring Russian President Boris Yeltsin (R) shakes hands with Prime Minister and acting President Vladimir Putin (L) as he leaves his office in the Kremlin 31 December 1999. Photo: ITAR-TASS / AFP / ANP
Absolute power, absolute insecurity
So the choice was not so accidental. He had shown some of the tawdry talents necessary to thrive in a bureaucratic bearpit and personal court of Russian power. No accidental leader could survive 25 years at the top of the Kremlin. It takes a certain skill of brutal cynical management and ruthless nerve that this mediocre powerbroker possesses. The challenge of absolute power in Russia is that while your power may have no limits, your position is also absolutely insecure. When Putin was first offered the power – in return for guaranteeing the Yeltsins would not be prosecuted, he understood the stakes of power when he blurted ‘how will I keep my wife and children safe?’ It was one of his few moments that show a lack of control and pride. The answer was simple but difficult: trust noone, payoff and playoff loyalty, stay in power forever. Ruling Russia is extremely hard; virtually every Romanov on hearing of their succession burst into tears – even the tough ones. ‘How can a single man rule and correct Russia’s abuses,’ asked Alexander I. ‘It would be impossible even for a man of ordinary abilities like me and even for a genius…’ Every Russian ruler – Peter the Great, Catherine, Stalin - has to approach their position in the same way: a hooded stance of perpetual ferocious vigilance. It is not paranoia – it’s a daily reality. Peter took part in torture of his enemies personally.
Most Russian leaders who fall are destroyed by those closest to them
As Stolypin said: 'nothing is more dangerous in Russia than the appearance of weakness.' If security is taken very seriously, it is very hard to overthrow a dictator just by popular protest. It has happened of course particularly in Ukraine and Georgia (where we may be seeing a slow revolution going pace now) but in control/security states like Russia, China and Iran, popular revolution is rare because the security organs are so big and so ruthless. Very few Russian rulers are overthrown by street revolutions – the usual example is Nicholas II but even he was really deposed by his generals. Most Russian leaders who fall are destroyed by those closest to them: from the Romanovs Peter III or Paul to the Soviets Beria and Khrushchev.
There is another misunderstood angle to this: the extraordinary experience of the ruler – the daily life of sycophancy, grandeur, solitude, distrust – in the Kremlin is so bizarre, so isolated, so dangerous that over the years, it moulds, remakes and distorts the ruler. Only those who came before can understand the perils, fears, pressures and daily vigilance: ‘Ivan the Terrible walked on these very stones,’ said Stalin as he strolled the Kremlin. Stalins and Putins existed before they possessed supreme power but Stalin said ‘young people are all the same. So why write about the young Stalin?’ Stalin’s young years were unusual and dramatic; Putin’s unremarkable. But once they wore the crown, its situation remade them.
Putin’s first term: ‘We learned quickly he was terrifying’
Those who knew Putin in his first term say he was different; he had to learn how to behave: the awkward clumsiness of his reaction to the loss of the Kursk submarine couldn’t be more different than the confident showman riding his steed through Siberian taiga or the masterful hucksterism of his annual press conference. He learned slowly. Stalin's courtiers said the same: Kaganovich said ‘I knew 5 or 6 Stalins’; Khrushchev called him a ‘man of faces.’ Putin easily learned how to exert fear (and I remember hearing from someone who knew him very well ‘we learned quickly he was terrifying’), how to play off his barons by distributing and withholding prizes but also the art of showmanship, the thespian part of statesmanship in a TV age. The bareback rider and tiger hunter; the cynosure of spectacular state rituals; the tsar reprimanding his foolish corrupt courtiers; the reasonable statesman meeting Bush or Trump…
The extraordinary experience in the Kremlin is so bizarre, so isolated, so dangerous that it moulds, remakes and distorts the ruler
As Pushkin wrote, 'heavy is the cap of Monomachos'; Russia is a very hard place to rule even if you are the tyrant. Stalin grumbled that no one paid attention to his orders – before the Terror. ‘Autocracy,’ said Catherine, ‘is not as easy as you think’ and ‘unlimited power’ is a chimera.
Putin’s background was ordinary and rough but he did have the grandfather Spiridon, who had been a cook at the Astoria Hotel – still a great hotel – where he had supposedly served Rasputin. But after 17, he joined the so-called GPU / NKVD Service staff of state dachas and cooked for Lenin and Stalin. (This makes Spiridon Putin the most world-historical chef since Carême!) Whether this story aroused Putin’s ambition, taught him a recipe for the secret alchemy of power, or whether it was only a detail of his family past that made him interesting, he promoted the story.
The link to the NKVD was important: by the end of the Soviet Union, the KGB was the only institution left that possessed intact prestige. From the KGB, Putin earned a sense of nationalistic service, gathered a cabal of trusted service nobility and learned its combination of remorseless pragmatism, Mafia brutality, venality and jargon, a culture of secrecy entitlement and vigilance, a cult of murderous macho muzhik swagger. Lenin and Stalin deliberately recruited the world of the brigand into their new secret police, the Cheka (which is why the story of Young Stalin's career as a bankrobber is interesting), now FSB/SVR. ‘There’s no such thing as an ex-Chekist’ Putin said. When he took power, he joked to a KGB gathering: ‘the government’s undercover FSB team has completed its first assignment.’ Like many leaders, he takes a special sinister glee in outer espionage exploits, clearly enjoying the details… especially the assassinations of traitors. ‘A dog's death for a dog,’ is his description of ‘a traitor's death.’ ‘A traitor has to be killed,’ he said.
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The path to one-man rule
How was it to get elected president? A century earlier a ruthless interior minister Plehve advised Nicholas II in 1904: ‘what you need is a short victorious war.’ Such things are hard to arrange – they often turn out to be long and catastrophic. Nicholas II lost his short victorious war but Putin had an easier option: Chechnya. Yeltsin had lost a war to the ferocious Chechen separatists, the Ichkerians under Dudayev/Maskadov; now Putin was told he was going to launch a Chechen war and win it. A series of mysterious apartment bombings eased the path. Soon after his appointment as PM, Putin launched his war. ‘We’ll follow the terrorists everywhere,’ he said, ‘If we find them on the crapper, yea we’ll kill them on the crapper.’ This was some of that KGB/Mafia jargon for you.
‘What you need is a short victorious war’
In the war, the Russians destroyed the entire city of Grozny in one of the most apocalyptic urban battlescapes of modern times, slaughtering and disappearing civilians if they got in the way. Civilian deaths: close to 80,000; the city shattered; Putin won the presidency… At home, he focused on restoring government power, breaking the oligarchs (whom he confronted at a meeting held in Stalin’s nearby dacha – supposedly), controlling the media. And creating a weird Truman Show Putinist counter-reality on TV of glory abroad, stability and majesty at home. Since this was Russia, this path led quickly to personal power – one-man rule, the default habit of Russian political personality, easy after the tainting of democracy. Personal power rested on victory in war. Modern Russian leadership after Peter the Great was based on command. Peter managed to be both politician and general though he saw himself as a soldier (When he had a son, he always celebrated ‘another little soldier’). He lost his first major battle at Narva so badly that he fled; but nine years later, he had learned how to command and win the battle of Poltava that made Russia a great power.
Russian President Vladimir Putin inspects the progress of mobilized servicemen's training at a training range of the Western Military District in the Ryazan region, Russia, 20 October 2022. Photo: Mikhael Klimentyev / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool / ANP / EPA
Ever since, every Russian leader aspires to command and none of them have been up to it. Even the lacklustre Nicholas II thought he could do it. Stalin fancied himself a military supreme commander – he told his son he 'was always a military man' yet he only survived his appalling blunders in 1941 because he had killed any other possible leader. Although after a year of unprecedented catastrophes that would have sunk any other tsar, he learned to allow talented generals like Zhukov to advise and organize: Stalingrad was the fruit of that partnership. He was lucky that at the same time, Hitler had become convinced of his own genius and was ignoring the professional advice of his own commanders.
The resort to war in Ukraine was not surprising or out of character, but the blithe careless ignorance of its real scale and costs
Putin won power on a military victory; he organized a short easy campaign against little Georgia in 2008; he seized Crimea with no losses at all in 2014; then he unleashed Russian airpower on Syria during the civil war there. That easy victory, killing vast numbers of civilians and saving Bashar Assad, delighted the Russian public with Putinist military prowess depicted on TV and surely played a key role in convincing him that he was a lucky if not gifted general and that victory was easy… It led to the miscalculation of Ukraine. So it was not the resort to war that was surprising or out of character but the blithe careless ignorance of its real scale and costs… If he emerges from the Ukraine war with the ability to claim victory, he will survive in power, possibly for a long time – he seems healthy, despite desperate Western wishful thinking that he suffers from fatal ailments. But if ultimately Russian elites feel that his dangerous gamble was not worth the costs in blood and treasure, he will fall. Somehow.
Russia has been ruthless with its falling commanders. Even Stalin, after totally misjudging Hitler’s intentions and being surprised by Barbarossa, expected to be arrested by his own comrades. The tsars who were killed – Peter III, Paul – were both victims of their own insults to their military. After Khrushchev’s reckless gamble in Cuba almost brought the world to nuclear war, he was quietly overthrown by his own courtiers led by Brezhnev: even the cowardly Brezhnev planned to have him assassinated. But in the end let him retire…
Putin’s lifelong mission
Ukraine is in part a result of Putin’s obsession: ‘how will history remember me?’ he asked academics and journalists. He was careful in his early years, winning over George W. Bush, aided by his offer of aid after 9/11, but even then his interests in Ukraine and empire were clear if you were watching. When Bush visited the Hermitage, they discussed Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin and then Peter the Great and their empire building for the entire visit. He admired Stalin but regarded his and Lenin's creation of faux republics like Ukraine as a fatal error. 'It is clear,' he said 'the fall of the USSR is the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’, its reassembly one of his lifelong missions and that he saw America with its flawed, undisciplined, hypocritical clamorous liberal democracy and its system of selfserving international rules as the chief enemy to be challenged and undermined at every opportunity, its power and grandeur a living insult to the greatness of the Russian World.
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Everything he has done has worked towards those ends. As for missing opportunities, in 2014, he annexed Crimea but did not invade the rest of Ukraine, hoping to undermine it through a Donbass dirty war but probably during his Covid isolation, he realized that in 2014, he could have conquered all of Ukraine – which was then unprepared militarily – and got away with it… Perhaps he felt he had to correct that mistake. In his latest big press conference, he said he should have invaded earlier, prepared better. In 2022, he (wrongly) sensed a felicitous conjunction of buffoonish EU leaders and an actual clown as a Ukrainian president – a clown who became the Churchill of our times.
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A Eurasian version of the Russian empire
History echoes, rebounds and ricochets but does not repeat. Putin exists in a new world of nuclear and thermobaric weaponry; high-tech sophistication and social media; he has not yet needed Stalinist mass liquidations though the war requires mass repressions; who knows where that will end. He is always aware of history; unlike Stalin he is no intellectual but he reads biographies of leaders. From the start he was obsessed with the history of the Russian conquest of Ukraine, studying Catherine and Prince Potemkin who had actually conquered Crimea and Ukraine, founding Sebastopol, Dnipro, Kherson, Odessa. (I had a minor role in this since he read my book Catherine the Great and Potemkin in 2000 and asked me to write an essay on how they conquered Ukraine, Crimea.) He thought of Russia as an empire state: both a modern high-tech superpower but also an empire in its various senses – from the Romanovs to the Soviet Union. Crimea was his great trophy for it represented both: Sebastopol – Potemkin’s naval base, twice almost destroyed by sieges by Western powers – is the closest thing to a Russian military-sacred city… After Covid, he talked about Catherinian history and when he wrote an essay about how Ukraine did not exist as a state, the writing was on the wall.
Foreign minister Lavrov recalled that Putin has ‘three advisors: Ivan the Terrible, Peter and Catherine!’
A little history is worth less than none at all, but foreign minister Lavrov recalled that Putin has ‘three advisors: Ivan the Terrible, Peter and Catherine!’ When his troops retreated from Kherson, he ordered Potemkin’s body to be stolen. The mistakes and gambles have been colossal as befits the scale and span of the Russian state. But rulers of China and Russia can afford and absorb vast mistakes. The Ukraine war was an unforced error but Putin, like so many Russian rulers, was prepared to sacrifice 550,000 men to win a historical victory both on the world stage – as China’s closest ally – and in the imperial/Soviet limitrophe where he hopes ultimately to regather Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia.
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The ability to submit to a military supremo and absorb vast losses is one difference between Russian and Ukrainian societies: even in the 21st century, Russia is still prepared to lose so many lives on a nationalistic imperial mission perhaps because many Russians still embrace the same idea as Putin: that Russia is more than just a republic or modern service state, it can only exist truly as an empire. (We also know too many loathe him and what he is doing). Catherine, Lenin and Stalin would agree. Ukraine, smaller and more fragile, cannot afford such losses either in terms of its population or morale… In surely his greatest crisis Putin had to absorb the failure to take Kyiv and liquidate Ukraine but his system is singularly well equipped to rewrite truth and recast real events into a victorious narrative of a struggle of timeless eternal Russia Eurasian power against corrupt decadent cynical America and its weak feckless allies. Like Stalin in June 1941, he had to absorb initial defeats on a huge scale but his sense of indispensable personal destiny and his fortified role as essential ruler combined to justify it all.
Putin’s system is singularly well equipped to rewrite truth
His micromanaging of the war was disastrous, his appointments of generals clumsy, and the war led him to mishandle his own court politics: the rise of Prigozhin was typical of Russian political culture. Tsars and general-secretaries who felt restrained by the slow obstinacy of bureaucracies often turned to trusted personal favourites to get things done, to break bottlenecks. Some of such favourites were brilliant: Potemkin was the greatest minister of the Romanov dynasty. Others were bizarre: Paul’s favourite was his Turkish barber. Stalin promoted an alcoholic semi-educated dwarf Yezhov to run his Terror and when he got out of control, he destroyed him but then he promoted Beria, probably his most sinister but also most capable henchman. Yeltsin overpromoted his bodyguard and then his oligarch Berezovsky. A caterer with a criminal past, Prigozhin was a typical imperial favourite who enabled a cheap quick deployment of social media against the west, then a cheap quick deployment of mercenaries to project Russian power in distant places, then to provide stormtroopers to hold the front at the moments of greatest stress in the Ukraine war. But Putin lost control of his system. Prigozhin was too much of an outsider to win over security organs or generals. By the remorseless logic of Putinist power he had to be liquidated.
The trap of succession
At his press conference before the Christmas holidays, Putin harked back to the brittle leaders pre-1914 who talked of the invigorating benefits of war for their waning empires and to ruthless revolutionaries like Mao who believed revolution would triumph because people are bored and crave the drama of righteous causes and the spectacle of terrible revolutions and bloodspattered reversals: ‘Peace is boring,’ said Mao. Putin agreed: ‘When everything is calm and measured and stable, it's boring. It's stagnation. We crave action, the moment the action starts everything whistles past your head, seconds fly by, bullets too, then we’re scared. It's terrifying but not horrifying.’ War is a ‘thrill ride.’
Power is always coarsening. These are the views of the coarsened hardened dictator who rolls what Bismarck called ‘the iron dice’ and plays with the fates of millions. And that is the problem with dictatorships. They can make dramatic decisions easily fast but when they go down, they take whole nations and cities of innocents with them to perdition.
Finally, Putin faces the challenge not just of war and peace but of succession. Many of his acts stem from a belief in his own destiny, disgust for those who threaten it: he watched the killing of ally Colonel Khadaffi – sodomized with a bayonet – and swore never to fall like that; it was one of the reasons he intervened to save another embattled ally Assad.
Succession is a trap. If Putin chooses a successor too early, that heir will threaten him and will have to be destroyed. If he does not choose a successor, his court will seek a safe successor to protect their system. If he does not groom an heir, his work will collapse. If he gets it wrong, his fall will be atrocious. He will one day soon be old and sclerotic. Dictators can rule everything – except time.
This essay was originally published by Simon Sebag Montefiore on X.
About the author
Simon Sebag Montefiore (1965) is a British novelist and historian. In the Netherlands, he is well known for his non-fiction books about the Romanovs and other global dynasties, Catherina the Great and Potemkin, Stalin and the city of Jerusalem. Translations of his works have been published by Spectrum and Nieuw Amsterdam.
