 Putin addresses the State Duma in January 2000 at the opening of its new session |
Putin's challenge to U.S. national security
Melvin A. Goodman, a Soviet analyst at the CIA from 1966 to 1990, is professor of international security at the National War College and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. He is a contributor to "National Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War" (Temple University Press, 2000).
(CNN) -- Vladimir Putin, acting president of the Russian Federation, is a virtual certainty to be elected on March 26, 2000, to a five-year term as president.
Putin's brutal war in Chechnya and his sober and steady manner have attracted a great deal of support in key urban areas and have convinced many likely opponents to avoid entering the presidential sweepstakes against him.
He moved quickly to pay overdue wages and pensions, and he benefited from a modest upturn in the Russian economy. So far, Putin appears to be a good choice for Russia.
But it not so clear that this former member of the KGB and former head of the KGB's successor organization, the Federal Security Service, is a choice that will serve the interests of the United States.
Putin's KGB career was ordinary
Putin's extremely ordinary KGB career offers few clues to his presidency of the Russian Federation.
He began in counter-intelligence in Leningrad and then went to East Germany, where he was stationed in Dresden for more than 10 years. Dresden is a backwater as far as the KGB is concerned. He returned to an unimportant assignment in Leningrad at the KGB academy, a move that suggests his career was going nowhere.
Putin saw the writing on the wall and resigned to join Leningrad's reform mayor, the late Anatoly Sobchak, first as an adviser for privatization and then as a deputy mayor.
He received very high marks for his work in privatizing small business. When Sobchak was defeated for re-election in 1996, Putin was brought to Moscow and quickly became a deputy on Yeltsin's Kremlin staff.
Bureaucrat to acting president
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Yeltsin made Putin the chief of domestic intelligence in 1998 and secretary of the National Security Council in 1999. Thus, Putin was in position to plan the second Chechen war in 1999 and the declaration of a new national security doctrine in January 2000, which appeared to lower the nuclear threshold somewhat.
The security doctrine dropped the idea of "no first use" of nuclear weapons and emphasized the right to use nuclear arms against aggressors "if other means of conflict resolution have been exhausted or deemed ineffective."
Some of his other actions in national security do not suggest that Putin is trying to win a popularity contest in the West. Since taking office on December 31, Putin has issued 12 presidential decrees, and half of them have dealt with military matters.
One edict reestablished mandatory training for reservists. Another one heavily censored information about the war in Chechnya. This latter decree reversed the open news policy of the first Chechen war from 1994 to 1996.
In late January, Putin's finance minister announced that defense spending will be increased by 50 percent, although it is uncertain whether such funding is readily available.
Security agencies beefed up
Putin has increased the powers of the security agencies, and former KGB agents and members of the current internal security services appear to have a lock on many appointments.
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Nearly half of Putin's Kremlin appointees either served in the KGB or work for the Federal Security Service; the former director of the FSS internal investigations unit has become head of Kremlin personnel.
Putin also approved a law that gives the security agencies real-time access to all e-mail and electronic commerce, and has closed several provincial papers that were conducting investigations of crime and corruption.
Nevertheless, it would be premature to write off Putin in terms of U.S. national security interests. For domestic political and economic reasons, Putin needs a predictable relationship with the United States. Therefore, he has made no gratuitously critical remarks about U.S. policy.
He has endorsed the ratification of START II and has hinted that, after the election, he will put pressure on the Communist delegation in the Duma to bring the strategic arms treaty to a vote. He also has endorsed START III talks and supports lowering the number of strategic warheads to 1,500.
Putin dreams of powerful Russia
Putin has no illusions about re-creating a Russian empire that would include some of the former republics of the Soviet Union.
He has stated that "anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart, but that anyone who wants it restored has no brains."
He is obsessed with ending the decline of Russian power and not with reestablishing Russia as a superpower competitor to the United States.
President Clinton should not have referred to Putin as a man the "United States can do business with" while the Russians were conducting the Chechen war. But Clinton -- over the near term -- may be right.
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