Introduction: Putin's New Russia: Fragile State or Revisionist Power?

Much of the content in this collection of articles in the South Central Review were presented by scholars and journalists at a September 2015 conference and subsequent talks between 2016–2017 on Putin's New Russia at the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University. These articles help to fill a gap in the western understanding of Putin's Russia by examining the structure of its political and economic systems, the motivation of its ruling elite, the threat it poses to its neighbors, and its profound dysfunctions. The authors answer the question: How does Russia's external demonstrations of strength relate to growing evidence of its internal weaknesses? To respond to this question, we must review Russia's foreign and defense policies to understand how they are related to the country's internal challenges.

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When Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin Acting President in December 1999, many in the western capitals hurriedly attempted to determine who he was and how he rose in three years from being an obscure municipal official to Acting President of Russia. In his earlier career, Putin served 16 years in the KGB, the Soviet Secret Police, as a Lt. Colonel assigned to East Germany. After retiring from the KGB, he went to work in St. Petersburg city government in several posts, including Deputy Mayor. The Yeltsin government then brought him to Moscow where he held several positions before being appointed as the director of the Federal Security Service, the new Russian name for the domestic KGB. He then became Prime Minister and Acting President, and then was elected in his own right in March 26, 2000. Some believe Putin's meteoric rise was a function of his reputation for absolute loyalty to his superiors above all other considerations and his ruthlessness in executing orders. In the most comprehensive research into corruption in the Russian government to date, Dr. Karen Dawisha argues in her book, Putin's Kleptocracy, that a small group of former KBG agents from St. Petersburg hatched a plan to take over the Russian economy and political system, a plan they had effectively accomplished by the mid-2000's. She argues that Putin pursued successively higher offices in part to protect himself from an ongoing investigation of his corruption while serving in St. Petersburg city government.

Much of the initial Western perception of Vladimir Putin was based on his early years as President, when he was thought to be an economic reformer who sought to bring Russia into the liberal international economic order. For the first six years of Putin's Presidency, Russia was treated as a great power and was one of the select countries included in G-8 meetings. Beginning in the mid-2000's, Putin abandoned his economic reform agenda and shifted the direction of his government, ending Russia's integration into the world economy, crushing civil society, gaining virtual control of the Russian electronic news media, and seizing the territory of neighboring states such as Georgia and Ukraine, while aggressively rearming. Russia began its withdrawal from global economic integration well before the invasion of Ukraine, for reasons which remain debated among Russia observers. After the invasion of Ukraine, Russia was expelled from the G-8 and has been isolated in international bodies. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of this isolation is the vote on resolution 68/262 in the U.N. General Assembly on March 27, 2014. Resolution 68/262 condemned Russian aggression in annexing Crimea, which had been part of Ukraine: 100 nations voted yes, 11 voted no, and 58 nations abstained.

European and U.S. policymakers were slow to acknowledge and react to the reality of Putin's Russia, its revisionist policies, and the threat it posed to western democracies and its other neighbors.¹ European paralysis in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine was in part a result of multiple, simultaneous other crises distracting it from Putin's military adventures. Since the end of the Cold War, many European countries had virtually unilaterally disarmed by neglecting its military. The financial crisis in Southern Europe caused serious...