Here is a question I keep returning to, because I cannot make it stop being strange. How does a man who rules a country responsible for roughly one and a half percent of the world’s economy keep bending to his will a coalition of states that outweigh him, militarily and economically, by dozens of times? Right now we are watching it happen again. A war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court refuses an ultimatum, sends a delegation of clerks to a meeting designed to talk peace to death, and somehow it is the rest of the world — Europe, the United States, even the country he is bombing — that ends up rearranging itself around his calendar. You can call this many things. Strategy is not one of them. The honest word, the word that has followed this man across three decades, is luck.
I am aware of how unsatisfying that sounds. I do not believe in fate, in providence, in any supernatural hand arranging the world’s affairs. Luck is not a scientific concept, and I would never pretend otherwise. But it is a real pattern — a long chain of fortunate accidents, each of which could have broken the other way and did not — and once you trace that chain from the beginning, the legend of the master statesman collapses into something far more ordinary and far more humiliating: a man who kept happening to be in the right room when the door opened.
A chain of rescues
Start at the bottom, in 1990, with a middle-ranking intelligence officer pushed into the reserve. People forget what that meant. After 1991 the old security apparatus was no longer the spine of the elite; it was a mark of disgrace. When the monument to the founder of the secret police was hauled down, the men inside that infamous building did not dare show their faces. Officers who had once belonged to the chosen caste scattered like cockroaches, hunting for security jobs and complaining about how hard life had become. Our future president was one of them — a man whose comfortable foreign posting had evaporated, headed, by any reasonable forecast, toward personal oblivion.
Then luck arrived, and it arrived with a name. First it was the reform-minded city boss who, against all probability, plucked this nobody from obscurity and made him a deputy and effectively the manager of a great city. When that patron lost his election in 1996, the luck seemed to run out; our man was unemployed and, in his own self-pitying telling, supposedly without means to live, which was a lie. But the wheel turned again. A powerful Kremlin property manager, on someone else’s recommendation, brought him to Moscow and handed him a serious post. And from there, close to the center, the name of his luck changed once more — to the ailing president and the family circle around him, the courtiers and relatives who, casting about for a successor, looked at this grey, pliable functionary and decided he would do. None of this was earned. Not one rung of that ladder was climbed by talent. Each was a door someone else opened, for reasons of their own, at the precise moment he stood in front of it.
I dwell on this because the official mythology insists on the opposite. It tells us about a magnetic leader who drew the nation to him. This is nonsense, and it was always nonsense. By the classical meaning of the word — that personal magnetism which makes others want to follow you — this man has never had an ounce of charisma, has none now, and never will. He did not fight his way to power through public politics, because he has never practiced public politics; he would have lost any genuine election. He was installed, through an operation engineered to manufacture a successor. The “charisma” came afterward, applied like cosmetic surgery, a PR prosthesis fitted over an empty space. And here is the mechanism people miss: power itself is the magnet. The moment a man holds it, others are drawn to him like moths, and then they write songs about wanting a man just like him. Mistake the gravity of the office for the gravity of the person and you have swallowed the whole illusion. The real ambition was never even to rule. It was to steal — he would have been perfectly content running the country’s richest energy company. He took the presidency the way a man takes a wallet he found on the ground, and only later discovered he could keep the whole country.
The windfall that bought a reputation
But the single largest stroke of luck — the one that underwrites every favorable thing anyone has ever said about this rule — came when he was already in the chair. The oil price.
I want to be very careful here, because this is where honesty costs something. There is a constant comparison made in Russia, almost a reflex: things are better now than in the chaotic nineties. And the uncomfortable truth, which I will not dodge to score a cheap point, is that the comparison has real substance. From roughly 2000 to 2008, before the crash, the economy did not merely grow; it surged. Gross domestic product expanded by something like seven percent a year on average — in one year it touched ten — a pace bettered at the time only by China, outrunning every country in Europe and the United States. The share of the population living below the poverty line fell from around thirty percent to thirteen. Incomes climbed, people bought apartments, real estate appreciated. Never before, by almost any material measure, going back through the Soviet decades to the old tsardom, had ordinary Russians lived as comfortably as they did in that decade. That is not propaganda. There are numbers. I lived through it. To deny it would be to lie, and a lie is the favorite weapon of propaganda, not of analysis.
So let me say both halves of the sentence at once, because the whole point lies in holding them together: the man under whose portrait this happened is a fascist and a criminal who belongs in a prison cell — and the prosperity of those years was real. The trick the regime plays, and the trick its apologists fall for, is to let you believe the second fact proves something about the first. It does not. Because the boom had nothing whatsoever to do with him.
From the spring of 2002, oil prices began a long climb, driven by forces entirely outside any Kremlin office: a war in Iraq, falling production elsewhere in the world, rising global consumption, the steady exhaustion of the easy reserves. By early 2008 a barrel of Brent crude crossed one hundred dollars for the first time; by that summer it neared one hundred and forty-four. A river of petrodollars poured into the country. Most of it, naturally, was captured by the inner circle — billions stolen while others stayed poor — but the flow was so enormous that even the portion left over for the population was enough to lift the average. That surplus is the entire material basis of the regime’s good name. Strip it away and there is no economic miracle, no benevolent stability, nothing but a security man who got rich while the weather over the oil markets happened to be fair.
I once heard the objection that the price rise was predictable — that students in the petrochemical faculties were told in the late nineties to expect an era of expensive oil. Fine. But predictability is beside the point, and it actually sharpens mine. Luck is undeserved success, victory that comes not from your own merit but from the circumstances around you. Not one of those professors forecasting expensive oil ever claimed the rise would be produced by the actions of this particular man. It would have happened with anyone in the chair. He simply occupied the chair when the windfall blew through the window. That is the textbook definition of luck.
The lookout
Which brings us back to the present, and to the latest accident to fall in his favor. His current good fortune also has a name, and the name is the American president.
Watch the choreography of these recent days. An ultimatum is issued: thirty days of ceasefire, or sanctions and weapons. The refusal comes overnight. And then, instead of the promised consequences, the American president pivots without warning, calls it a great day, and urges the victim to rush to a meeting on terms the aggressor has already gutted. One day a threat, the next day its opposite, a man visibly contradicting himself in public — and that incoherence is not a flaw in the cover; it is the cover. Chaos is exactly the smoke a killer needs. While one man manufactures confusion with his statements, the other manufactures corpses behind the screen. They are a near-perfect pairing: the one who creates the distraction and the one who exploits it. Looked at coldly, what the world is dealing with resembles a small, well-functioning criminal enterprise of two — one waging the war, the other standing lookout.
So the answer to my opening question is finally in view. How does a dictator commanding a sliver of global output dictate terms to a coalition holding roughly half of it, with overwhelming military superiority on the other side? Not through strength. Through a sequence of fortunate accidents that has held, improbably, for a quarter of a century — a rescue here, an anointment there, a tidal wave of oil money, and now a useful chaos in Washington.
Twenty-five years, fully counted
There is one last correction I want to make, and it concerns how we weigh the whole period. For years the regime invited us to judge it by the fat decade alone — to let the memory of rising incomes stand in for the entire era. That accounting is now obsolete, and we are free to compare again. Because the same rule that brought the prosperous 2000s has brought us here: to a war in the heart of Europe, to a country set against the civilized world, to the dismantling of every institution that might have outlived one man. The twenty-five years are a single thing. You do not get to keep the windfall on the ledger and leave off the catastrophe. Count honestly, and the verdict is not a balance sheet with a respectable surplus; it is a country driven toward collapse by a man who was lucky for a long time and is now spending the bill.
And luck, whatever else it is, is not infinite. History leaves room for coincidences, but coincidences run out. I cannot tell you the hour the streak ends — I do not know, and anyone who claims to is selling something. What I am certain of is the shape of it. This rule was never built on merit, so there is no reservoir of genuine achievement to fall back on once the accidents stop arriving. It can be answered, in the end, only where every false legend is finally tested — on the ground, by people who have nowhere left to retreat and who are, in the one domain that now decides wars, the technology, winning. When the luck finally fails, and it will, it will not fail alone. It will take the whole story of this regime down with it.