Putin’s St. Petersburg Experiences in 1990s Far More Fateful for Russia than His KGB Background, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 7 – Many have argued that Vladimir Putin’s role as a KGB officer played the key role in his approach to governance, but in fact, Vladimir Pastukhov says, the current Kremlin ruler’s experiences in St. Petersburg in the 1990s where the criminal world and government power came together has been far more significant.

            “Rephrasing Tolstoy,” the London-based Russian analyst says, “all happy democracies

are like one another but all unhappy autocracies are unhappy in their own way.” Each has a very specific origin which must be understood if one is to follow its present and future (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=6367EA5246461).

            The Putin regime bears “the indelible imprint” of the current ruler’s experiences in St. Petersburg in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the weakening of the center led not only to the increase in the power of regions for a time but to the fuse of power and criminality in them.

            This fusion was common in many places, but it took the most complete shape in the Northern capital where Putin was at the time and where he became part of it. Pastukhov observes that “when Peter broke his window into Europe, he hardly supposed that this would be a window for the transfer of opium.” But that is how things have worked out.

            In St. Petersburg at that time the center of official power, the mayor’s office, “became “at the same time the center of unofficial power of the criminal underground, a kind of arbiter in relations” among the various groups of the local elite – “the criminal, the siloviki, the bureaucracy, the entrepreneurs and the intelligentsia.

            This fusion of formal and informal power “in one set of hands” had “a unique synergistic effect, the power of which was very quickly felt by Russia as a whole” after Putin was selected to be Yeltsin’s successor and as he brought his St. Petersburg team and its approach to rule with him to the Kremlin.

            This St. Petersburg experience was far more influential in Putin’s approach to power than his background in the FSB, Pastukhov says, because while his origins in the security services were a problem, they were “not the main one” as KGB work was so varied and Putin was involved in only part of it and for a relatively short time.

            That is why one is entirely justified in speaking of Putin’s approach to rule as that of “’bandit Petersburg,’” something that is important to understand not only in trying to make sense of what he does but also what may very well happen to Russia after he leaves the scene and Russia suffers through another fateful transition.

            On the one hand, “the genesis has defined the nature of the regime, and the nature of the regime imposes sharp limitations on how it will react to challenges in critical situations. When one considers scenarios of future catastrophes, one must keep this genesis and this nature in mind as the most important factor.”

            And on the other, Pastukhov concludes, “with a high degree of probability after the achievement of ‘the bottom,’ Russia again will acquire that landscape out of which arose the Petersburg ‘System’ as there is a high degree of probability that the malignant criminal thriller will be repeated as a sequel.”

            “To prevent that from happening,” the analyst concludes, “one must remember how the first in this series ended.”