Sure, Russia’s in trouble. But predicting President Vladimir Putin’s playbook is a fool’s errand. Between Western sanctions over Ukraine, the plunging price of oil on which his economy heavily depends, and the pervasive perversion of the nation’s economy, the value of Russia’s ruble and thus the value of every Russian’s bank account has dropped. But Americans who predict that this will moderate Putin’s behavior — on Ukraine or anything else — might be the fools.
The first thing to remember is that Russia isn’t the United States. That means the kinds of public protest that lead to policy changes in our nation don’t — make that can’t — go far enough to force a revolution in Russia. By tightening up on the freedoms that Russian citizens briefly possessed after the fall of the Soviet Union — like disqualifying political parties he didn’t like and putting dissenting media out of business — Putin has crafted a political system that pretty much ensures his power for as long as he wants to wield it.
The second thing is, by all accounts, Putin’s popularity is still at sky-high levels that American politicians can only dream about. That’s because of something Russians have told me every time I’ve been there: He has given them pride again, pride that they lost almost a quarter-century ago when their status as a superpower vanished. By reminding his citizens that in the good old days, the world trembled when their leaders spoke (or in the case of Nikita Khrushchev in 1960 at the United Nations, pounded the table with a shoe), he never stops sending the message that Russia deserves a place again on the world stage. This strategy is called nationalism, and Putin plays the card constantly. It helps to explain why his foreign policy is basically built on flipping the bird to the United States.
The third thing to remember is that in Russia, when the going gets tough, the tough don’t get going; they just sit back and take it. This is a society where suffering is almost a part of their DNA. As George Friedman, author of “The Next 100 Years,” puts it, “They can endure things that would break other nations.”
My favorite metaphor for that is snow. In many parts of the United States, including the city of Denver, homeowners are required (once the snow stops falling) to clear the sidewalks in front of their homes. And even if it weren’t the law, many would do it anyway; that’s just who we are. In Russia? A few years ago, I spent some December days at the Yuri Gagarin Spaceflight Center outside of Moscow. This place is the heart of that nation’s proudest high-tech achievements: the first satellite in space, then the first human being in space. And it’s still on a roll; since the demise of the American space shuttle, every one of our astronauts heading for the International Space Station spends several months there training to launch in the Russian Soyuz capsule.
So what happens there when it snows? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which means, when you’re driving on the network of narrow roads coursing through the complex, your wheels slide into ruts half-a-foot deep. When you’re walking, the steps leading into every building are treacherous with clumps of ice. Unlike us, they don’t try to mitigate the inconvenience and discomfort of their weather; they simply adapt to it. It’s as if something as simple as snow actually defines the culture of the country.
Who knows? Maybe with the ruble tumbling into the toilet and people’s buying power plummeting with it, Putin will finally pay the price. Surely, Russia’s citizens have grown to like a higher level of prosperity and economic choice and won’t like what’s happening today. But half the population has lived with less and, like our own Greatest Generation that endured the Depression, they could do it again. And Putin might just let them.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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