The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (3 page)

Across the globe, I walked the unmarked battlefields of the struggle
that is being waged to determine the balance of power between dictatorships and democracies: the coffee shops where activists conspire, the forests where campaigns are hatched, the slums where anger slowly burns, the streets where youth begin to fight, the prisons where a dictator’s enemies languish. This conflict has fractured in a thousand directions, with rapidly modernizing regimes squaring off against an unlikely collection of individuals and organizations who are moving up their own learning curve. In more than two hundred interviews, I listened to both sides as they laid out their strategies for survival and success.

Even as I reported, the newest chapter in this battle was being written in the Middle East. Until 2011, it had been the only region in the world that lacked a single democracy, with the exception of Israel. The average Arab leader ruled for more than sixteen years. The Middle East lagged behind the rest of the world in almost every measure of what makes a people free. But as in Portugal in 1974, the revolution began in the least likely of places, Tunisia, a country that had long been considered to have one of the sturdiest regimes in the region. On December 17, 2010, local police harassed Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid. Ashamed, angry, and pushed beyond what he could accept, Bouazizi took his own life in a public act of self-immolation. The world watched as the popular rebellion inspired by a single man’s death spread from one country to the next. After Tunisia fell, the revolution jumped to Egypt, the political and cultural epicenter of the Middle East. Massive protests sprang up in Bahrain and Yemen, just as Libya descended into carnage and then outright civil war. The shocks were soon felt in Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan as protests and rallies of varying size came to life. Even after the brutal forty-two-year reign of Gaddafi came to its violent end, the fires continued to burn in Syria as Assad struggled to combat a widening campaign to topple the regime his father had built. A fruit vendor takes his own life, and the Middle East is turned upside down. Is it the beginning of a new democratic wave?

The truth is it is too soon to say. It took nearly fifteen years for Samuel Huntington to confidently identify his democratic wave, and the task of building a democracy is harder than razing a dictatorship, as Egypt learned all too well. The pace of progress will be uneven.
Autocrats who clung on may soon find their grips loosening again. But regardless of how quickly deeper change comes, the first casualty of these revolutions is the idea that some corners of the world are somehow immune to democratic demands. What the Arab Spring revealed is something that young people, hardened activists, and outspoken critics of these regimes had long known: that in repressive countries around the world there is a battle being waged between the ruler and the ruled, a struggle between warring camps as the future of democracy and dictatorship hangs in the balance.

A
s a KGB officer, Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin had one foreign assignment. In 1985, at the age of thirty-two,
Putin was stationed in Dresden, East Germany. He moved there with his wife and his one-year-old daughter, Masha; soon after they arrived, his second daughter, Katya, was born. The Putins lived in a drab apartment building. Most of their neighbors were members of the Stasi, the East German intelligence agency. But the location was convenient, putting Putin a short five-minute walk from the KGB’s headquarters at 4 Angelikastrasse. As a case officer, the young Putin recruited sources, ran agents, gathered the latest scuttlebutt on East German leaders, and cabled his analysis back to Moscow. For a Soviet spy, it was fairly unremarkable stuff. What was more remarkable were the years that he lived there. Putin remained in Dresden, on the edge of the Soviet Empire, from 1985 until January 1990. He was, in other words, a witness to the collapse of a dictatorship, and of the Soviet system that followed soon thereafter.

The German Democratic Republic was a postcard of a twentieth-century totalitarian state. The Stasi had infiltrated all parts of life.
It kept secret files on more than six million East Germans; in Dresden alone, the files the secret police compiled would
stretch almost seven miles.
According to the regime’s own records, the East German government employed 97,000 people and had another 173,000 working as informants. Nearly one in every 60 citizens was somehow tied to the state’s security apparatus. Even as a KGB officer,
Putin was
shocked at how “totally invasive” the government’s surveillance was of its own citizens. He later described his time in East Germany as “a real eye-opener for me.” “I thought I was going to an Eastern European country, to the center of Europe,” he told a Russian interviewer. But it wasn’t that. “It was a harshly totalitarian country, similar to the Soviet Union, only 30 years earlier.”

As a Soviet intelligence officer working in a client state, Putin very likely saw signs of East Germany’s rot before others. He likely would have read the Stasi reports—many of which were sent unfiltered to Moscow—that painted an increasingly dark picture.
These reports documented the rising demands of the people and described the regime’s own economic record keeping as fraudulent. He would have seen the signs of a moribund economy, as government subsidies had long outstripped state revenue. In 1989, near the end, the signs of collapse were on his doorstep.
There was a run on Dresden banks. At the Dresden train station,
crowds tried to fight their way onto trains bound for the West. On October 4, ten thousand East Germans gathered, and the police used truncheons and tear gas to keep them from overrunning the station to board the cars. The crowds tripled in size over the next several days.

The confusion of watching a Soviet outpost collapse around him was quickly followed by fear. The ties that bound the Stasi and the KGB were plain to anyone. The East German officers referred to their Soviet counterparts as “the friends.” Indeed, the KGB station where Putin worked was across the street from the Stasi’s offices. After the Berlin Wall was breached, Putin and his colleagues set about covering their tracks. “We destroyed everything—all our communications, our lists of contacts, and our agents’ networks. I personally burned a huge amount of material,” Putin later recalled. “We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.” On December 6, when crowds of East Germans stormed the Stasi’s building, Putin worried that they would direct their anger across the street at him and his colleagues. And they almost did. As angry East Germans began to assemble, Putin went outside to address the crowd. Claiming he was no more than a translator, he told them it was a Soviet military organization and they should move on. Worried about the crowd’s aggressive mood, Putin called the detachment of local Soviet military officers to protect them. And he
remembers being told, “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.” His fear turned to alienation. “That business of ‘Moscow is silent’—I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared.”

It is hard to imagine that those years did not leave a mark on the psyche of the young intelligence officer. Putin saw firsthand the costs and inefficiencies of the East German police state. He watched as the country’s centrally planned economy fell further behind and East German officials worked furiously to hide these failings with subsidies they could never recover. And the experience brought home the weaknesses of the Soviet system that he served as well. “Actually, I thought the whole thing was inevitable,” Putin later said, referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I only regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls and dividers cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away.”

Putin saw Moscow’s failure to recognize its weaknesses and then adapt as a catastrophe. Having been its foot soldier, left practically alone to defend its interests from an angry mob, he longed for the strong, sovereign Russian state that had once been. He felt frustration that the center had never listened to the periphery. “Didn’t we warn them about what was coming? Didn’t we provide them with recommendations on how to act?” recalled Putin.

Nearly ten years later to the day, that young KGB agent would become Russia’s second president, unexpectedly replacing Boris Yeltsin as his health and personal popularity failed him. Putin’s experience from those years may explain what he meant when, later as president, he said, “
He who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart; he who wants to revive it in its previous form has no head.”

On January 1, 2000, Putin made a pledge to the Russian people. Few people he addressed that day were happy with what Russia had become. The decade that had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union
had been marked by economic hardship, crisis, and unpredictability. The country’s early experiment in democracy had seemingly spawned little more than feuding politicians and fractious political parties that everyone assumed (probably rightly) were on the take. Cynicism rose as Russians came to believe that they had traded the sins of communism for the false promises of a corrupt democratic system. Worse yet, they felt as though they had been duped: they had followed the democratic model set by the West and had only been repaid with suffering, as a few profited at the expense of everyone else. And as if to add insult to injury, their country had been reduced from a superpower to something far more middling.

The moment, therefore, was ripe for what Putin promised on the first day of the new century. Beyond the pledges of growth and renewal, Putin offered the thing that everyday Russians missed most: “
stability, certainty, and the possibility of planning for the future—their own and that of their children—not one month at a time, but for years and decades.” They were welcome words to those yearning for safety and security after a decade that left Russians feeling vulnerable and forced to fend for themselves. Putin’s vision was of a strong, resilient Russia that would return to its natural place as a great power. Moscow would no longer be silent.

Although he did not spell out how this stability would be achieved, Putin’s plan gradually revealed itself. If there is one defining characteristic of Putin’s brand of authoritarianism, it is the centralization of power. If Russian politics had become too noisy, divisive, and tumultuous, Putin set out to tame it. Russia would become more stable and predictable because it would, in essence, be directed by one man and the small circle of people around him. It was, as Putin and others would sometimes describe it, a “power vertical.” Among Russia’s political and economic institutions, the Kremlin would not settle for being first among equals; everything would be subordinate to it.

Putin began with the oligarchs. These Russian tycoons, many of whom had been awarded sweetheart deals for major centers of industry like gas, minerals, and steel, had become fabulously wealthy during the years of cowboy capitalism that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. Within two months of Putin’s inauguration, the Kremlin warned these billionaire businessmen that they would be either loyal
or out of business. Those who challenged this advice quickly found themselves in exile or prison. None learned this lesson harder than the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested when SWAT teams stormed his corporate jet in 2003 and placed him under arrest. His prosecution was clearly politically motivated, and the trial was widely criticized for gross irregularities. Nevertheless, he remains in prison to this day, an object lesson for anyone who fails to heed Putin’s warning.

The country’s regional governors followed. In a land the size of Russia, these governors had been able to run their corners of the country as personal fiefdoms. Under Yeltsin, Kremlin edicts had been treated as suggestions, more easily ignored than enforced. This, too, would eventually come to an abrupt end. In 2005, Putin did away with the direct election of Russia’s governors, opting instead to give himself the power to appoint them. In addition, their finances would now be supervised by Kremlin loyalists, whose ranks were drawn from Putin’s friends in the KGB.

Perhaps most remarkable was the way in which
Putin brought the media to heel. At the beginning of Putin’s presidency, only one of the top three television networks was state owned. Three years later, the Kremlin controlled all three. (The oligarchs who owned two of the main television networks—ORT and NTV—were forced to sell their shares or face imprisonment. Both sold and fled the country.) Kremlin cronies also began to buy up the largest-circulation newspapers and magazines. Today the Russian government controls
roughly 93 percent of all media outlets. Some print publications and radio stations are still able to operate with a measure of independence; the radio station Ekho Moskvy, for example, is one of the most critical remaining voices. But more incredible than the takeover of many Russian media companies is the degree to which the Kremlin is willing to manipulate the news—especially the news you see on TV.