As Moscow anxiously awaits May 9 — the arbitrarily chosen anniversary of the Soviet victory in the “Great Patriotic War,” as World War II is known in Russia — few will notice that May 7 is a more personal occasion for Vladimir Putin. He was inaugurated as President of the Russian Federation on May 7, 2000, served until May 7, 2008, and returned to the presidency on May 7, 2012. This year, May 7 marks the twenty-fifth year of his rule – the silver anniversary of his marriage to Russia. Of the eighteen tsars and seven general secretaries who ruled Russia, only four held power longer than Putin already has. Four rulers, each associated with transformative greatness or systemic terror, and usually both. But unlike those antiquities, Putin’s reign is far from over. Immortality research, now directed by his daughter, is among his personal preoccupations. And there is a theory that the man in the Kremlin is not Putin at all, but one of his henchmen – in Russia, this theory is taken seriously enough to require official denial. It articulates a fear, or a hope, that we will have Putin forever.
Putin’s seizure of power has never been based on repression alone. It relies, most fundamentally, on oil. Russia’s fossil fuel revenues have financed everything that Putinism requires: the overwhelming dominance of the security services, the patronage networks that connect the elite to the Kremlin, and the global flows of disinformation that are instrumental to Russia’s foreign policy. When European households paid their gas bills in the 2000s and 2010s, a portion of each payment found its way into operations designed to erode their democratic institutions. It was, in retrospect, political judo: the West financed his destabilization.
Russian disinformation is not a Cold War propaganda campaign – broadcasting an ideological alternative – but something more sophisticated, even postmodern: the production of doubt, the poisoning of intellectual wells. The employed “political technologists” did not need to convince the Western public of anything in particular. They couldn’t have done it even if they tried – conviction requires coherence, and coherence was never the goal. What they achieved instead was to ensure that the public could no longer agree on what was true. This is the strategic logic behind troll farms, botnets and strategic leaks. Russian funding of the extreme left and the extreme right greases the political horseshoe with oil money. The purpose of these innumerable operations was not persuasion, but paralysis.
Nowhere – not even in neighboring and much-affected Europe – has this operation met with more success than in the United States. The relationship between Putin and Trump remains murky although I am sure we will know the truth very soon. What is clear is the family resemblance of their projects. Both have built their politics around the same core elements: the humiliated nation betrayed by cosmopolitan elites, the strong leader who alone can restore its greatness, and hostility to any politics organized around the future – whether that future takes the form of climate commitments, social change or international law. Putin did not create Trumpism – Trump independently invented many of the same movements. But Putin got there first, and his office has had every reason to encourage and reinforce the American version. For some reason, Trump has shown no trace of influence anxiety, nor has Putin claimed his intellectual rights. This is, in fact, the only mystery that still remains to be solved.
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There is one detail from Putin’s KGB file that explains more about his politics than any political document. His superiors noted, as his only significant weakness, a “reduced sense of danger.” Perhaps it helped him survive a dangerous career in the security services. It probably explains why he launched a war that surprised his elite—people who shared his apocalyptic mood but never imagined he would pull the trigger. “Why do we need the world if it is a world without Russia,” Putin once said. “Death is beautiful if we die together,” he said on another occasion. These were not rhetorical flourishes. They were the expressions of a man for whom the calculus of danger does not work normally – a man who can threaten nuclear war because he does not fully believe in his own destruction and cares even less for others.
This is precisely what makes Trump’s version of the same policy less risk-averse but, in fact, more dangerous. Trump did not inherit Putin’s reduced sense of danger. Trump is exhibitionist, transactional and above all self-preservation. Where Putin can stare calmly into the abyss as he disappears from the screen at bad moments, Trump quivers, negotiates, retreats to Mar-a-Lago and raises another pusher. Which means that Trumpism, for all its destructiveness, is unlikely to end in the suicide in the bunker that Putin’s logic suggests. It will end, instead, with a deal – a routinely bad deal, celebrated as an unprecedented triumph.
There is a concept from ancient Greek tragedy that captures Putin’s predicament better than any political framework: Nemesis. Not revenge, which requires an outside agent, and not justice, which requires institutions—but the self-destruction of evil, the feedback loop in which every action produces the opposite of its intended effect. Putin feared NATO expansion — and brought it to the gates of St. Petersburg. He feared Ukrainian nationalism – and brought it to an existential force. He feared European unity – and forged it. He feared the disintegration of Russian power – and set in motion the military exhaustion, elite fragmentation and regional discontent that make disintegration all the more likely. In enmity, the villain creates exactly what he fears, only bigger and more terrifying than he could ever imagine.
Nowhere is this logic more evident than in the figure of Trump. For two decades, Russian state actors cultivated the American populist right as an instrument of Western destabilization. The investment seemed to pay off handsomely in 2016. What Putin failed to consider is that the forces he helped unleash are not controllable by Moscow — or anywhere. Trump is not a Russian asset, but something more ungovernable: an independent iteration of the Putinist model, operating on a much larger stage, with the resources of the world’s most powerful state and without Putin’s strategic patience. In Russian, the same word – curator – describes both the museum professional who organizes an exhibition and the intelligence officer who manages an agent. Putin combined both roles, as his language dictated, and he is failing in both: the curator has lost control of his exhibition and the curator has lost control of his assets.
And here Nemesis completes its circuit. Putin built his power on the assumption that Western democracy was decadent, divided and manipulable. Trump’s presidency has not produced the pliable, toothless America that Russian strategists envisioned. It has brought something truly worse: an aggressive and unpredictable America that abandons its allies not because of strategic calculation but because of chaos, and threatens the international order on which Russia’s own interests ultimately depend—in energy markets, in managing its imperial periphery. Putin wanted a weakened West. He went crazy.
On May 7, as Putin marks the silver anniversary of his marriage to Russia, the question is no longer whether Nemesis is on the job, but how long it will take to complete its circuit. Ukraine is bloody, but unbroken. Europe is rearming. The fossil fuel revenues that financed the entire enterprise are threatened not by the green promises that Putin spent years trying to thwart, but by Trump’s wars that eased the transition. And in Washington, the figure Putin helped create has become a monster that bears no resemblance to his master. History, as the Greeks who invented it desperately realized, has a way of settling scores.
(Further reading: Britain is still falling apart)
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