Putin Really Cares More about His Personal Wealth than about Russia’s Power, Nina Khrushcheva Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 30 – When the late Karen Dawisha argued in Putin’s Kleptocracy (2014) that Vladimir Putin is driven more by a desire to accumulate personal wealth than to restore Russia’s global influence, Nina Khrushcheva says she was skeptical to the point of dismissal.

            But now, the US-based scholar and Khrushchev’s granddaughter says, Putin’s recent actions have convinced her that Dawisha was right and that the Kremlin leader is not simply an authoritarian leader but a bandit who pursues personal wealth even more than national power (nv.ua/opinion/putin-dengi-pochemu-v-rossii-presleduyut-uchenyh-novosti-rossii-50056538.html).

                What changed her mind, Khrushcheva says, was the raid a month ago by the Russian special services on the Lebedev Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The security services wanted to question the institute’s director Nikolay Kolachevsky about the possible sale of an optical system to Germany, a supposed threat to national security.

            Some people have suggested that this raid simply shows that the security services are “out of control,” that they do things Putin doesn’t want. “Yes, that’s possible,” Khrushcheva says; “but it is improbable,” with “a more convincing explanation being that Putin is contradictory.”

            On the one hand, the Kremlin leader does want to maximize Russia’s power and status; but on the other, he is “not against maximizing his wealth. And as Davisha notes, “when he has to choose, money wins out.” According to Khrushcheva, that was the case with the raid on the Lebedev Physics Institute.

            That institute is in competition with the Innopraktika Institute which is connected with Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova and which conducts research for the FSB. If the Lebedev Institute is taken down a notch, hers goes up and with it her income and quite possibly that of her father.

            The interpenetration of scholarship and power/money in Russia is shown in the elections to the Academy of Sciences, the most recent of which took place last week. “After 2013,” Khrushcheva note, “when Kremlin-backed candidates lost, a three-year moratorium was imposed on elections of academicians.”

To ensure that didn’t happen again, all those nominated were supposed to gain election. But in 2017, when elections were held, the Kremlin tried to insert Mikhail Kolvalchuk, the brother of Putin’s “personal banker,” as president of the Academy. That effort failed because the alternative and Kremlin critic Aleksandr Sergeyev had too great an international reputation.

This year, she continues, academicians continued to resist the Kremlin’s agenda. A commission of the Academy identified 56 candidate members of the Academy as being guilty of plagiarism but only six were disqualified. Such resistance is “unacceptable” to the Kremlin, and the raid was intended to show who is in charge.

When she discussed the raid with one Moscow journalist, Khrushcheva says, he said that “in Putin’s Russia, physicists are becoming spies, chekists are writing history, and soldiers are defining geography,” a reference to the fact the head of the SVR is also head of the Russian Historian Society and the defense minister is head of the Russian Geographical Society.

“For the time being, science is resisting,” she says; “but the financial appetites of Putin and his entourage are insatiable.” As one Russian scholar now retired said, “Russia, despite all its pretense of being a great country, is ever more like a small former colony in which any general having gained power wants to call himself a doctor of science simply to boost his income.”