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News Analysis

The Poison Putin Spreads

BEIJING — He has stifled his political opponents and enriched friends and cronies. He annexed a chunk of Ukraine, threw moral and military support to Syria’s dictator in a brutal civil war and tried to tip the scales in an American presidential election. For the second time in barely a decade, he stands accused of orchestrating the exotic poisoning of an exiled former intelligence operative in Britain.

So what is it exactly that has made Vladimir V. Putin a hero for the world’s populists, strongmen and others occupying the fringes of global politics, both left and right?

The answer, probably, is all of the above.

For more than 18 years in power, Mr. Putin has managed to defy his critics at home and abroad by ignoring the norms and institutions of the global order that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Where once he seemed out of step with the liberalizing West, he now seems to be the vanguard of a new generation of leaders — in Turkey, Hungary, Italy and even America — who are challenging it.

He offers no coherent or comprehensive ideology, as Communism once did, but rather an amorphous model for protecting national sovereignty against international organizations, like the European Court of Human Rights, that were created to stifle ugly manifestations of ethno-nationalism.

“I do think these other leaders look at Putin and see not so much an inspiration but a type of permission,” Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and longstanding critic of Mr. Putin’s rule, wrote to me.

And he is not going away soon. On Sunday, Mr. Putin will be “re-elected” to a fourth term as president after a campaign as choreographed (and as dull) as those before.

Though many have pointed out Russia’s underlying weaknesses — a state-dominated economy eroded by corruption and mismanagement, along with voter malaise — the inevitable result will nonetheless underscore the resilience of the model he has created.

“The fact that he is a colossus on clay legs is irrelevant,” said Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York and a co-author of the forthcoming book, “In Putin’s Footsteps.” “Perception is more important than facts.”

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Traditional Russian wooden nesting dolls depicting President Vladimir Putin.Credit...Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Putin, she noted, has mastered the craft of shaping one’s image by imposing state control on the media — television, above all — while carefully corralling dissent on the streets and online. No one would have seen it coming in 1999, when Russia’s first president, Boris N. Yeltsin, plucked Mr. Putin, then his unassuming deputy, out of obscurity and made him president. But Mr. Putin has come to embody the post-ideology, post-fact age of reality television and “fake news” that all the world is experiencing.

Like Silvio Berlusconi, a former prime minister of Italy and, now, Donald Trump, he has shown an uncanny ability to harness the harsh glare of public attention to build a devoted following — to be all things to all people or, as Ms. Khrushcheva put it, to be “a collage of all movies, both villain and hero.”

Russia’s Constitution limits him to one more consecutive term, and far from entering it as a lame duck, Mr. Putin does so with his stature seemingly ascendant.

Except for an interregnum from 2008 to 2012 when he handed the office, but not actual power, to his loyal aide Dmitri S. Medvedev, Mr. Putin has been in charge since New Year’s Day in 2000.

He has already led the country longer than Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader best known for the country’s stagnation in the late 1970s and ’80s. With a new six-year term, he is set to remain in office at least until 2024.

Mr. Putin’s autocratic tendencies have become self-serving, reinforcing his control of the political and economic levers of power, but they have also evolved.

When he first emerged on Russia’s turbulent political scene, he appeared inclined to continue the embrace of the West that Mr. Yeltsin had pursued, however haphazardly. “By their mentality and culture, the people of Russia are Europeans,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in which I participated in 2003. He once said, perhaps a bit rashly, that Russia could even join the NATO alliance.

He soon soured on European institutions, including NATO and the European Union, which he came to see as irreconcilably opposed to Russian interests.

The West’s leaders, in his view, unfairly denounced Russia’s war against Islamic separatists in Chechnya; his crackdowns on the media and the opposition; Russia’s use of natural gas as political leverage; and the suspicious origins of cash flowing from Russia into Western banks and properties.

Ultimately, what Mr. Putin most hated was the post-Cold War dominance of the Soviet Union’s old foe: the United States. It began with President George W. Bush’s decision to withdraw from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and invasion of Iraq. His opposition to Mr. Bush’s decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was hardly unique; it put him in league with people across the political spectrum who distrusted America’s unbridled use of military power.

Mr. Putin’s grievance with the West reached full fury after popular uprisings in former Soviet republics, including Georgia and Ukraine, that he viewed as American-orchestrated affairs intended, as he told NBC News this month, “to halt Russia’s progress.”

The character of Mr. Putin’s nationalism, however, changed when he returned to the presidency in 2012 after Mr. Medvedev left office, and that is when he increasingly became a darling of the right.

Stunned by protests among disenchanted urbanites and the palpable disappointment among European leaders with his return to the presidency, Mr. Putin began to make explicit appeals to Russia’s cultural and religious history. He embraced what in the United States would be the familiar terrain of conservatives: “family values.” He crusaded against the moral decline of the West, which he once went so far as to describe as “infertile and genderless.”

Conservatives in the West began to write admiringly of him. In 2013, during rising tensions over the civil war in Syria, Matt Drudge, the conservative blogger, called Mr. Putin “the leader of the free world,” joining Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing commentators who seemed attracted to Mr. Putin’s willingness to oppose President Barack Obama’s plans to bomb Syria over its use of chemical weapons.

Mr. Putin’s strongman style and warnings against Western decadence attracted more and more conservative admirers in the United States and beyond. Foremost among them, of course, was Donald Trump.

Alina Polyakova, an expert on far-right populism in Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that Mr. Putin was offering to protect national identity against what are viewed as the threats of a liberalizing global world. These “threats” included, among others, same-sex marriage, immigration and the surrender of political agency to distant international institutions.

It is a romantic idealization, Ms. Polyakova said, since few in Europe actually want to live in the sort of corrupted political and economic system that Russia has become. It is nonetheless a powerful one.

“It gives people something solid to hold on to in a world that is becoming intangible,” she said. “He’s tangible. He’s real. He represents a sense of nationhood.”

Mr. Kasparov said the West itself shared the blame for Mr. Putin’s enduring appeal as a model of authoritarian leadership. Governments and corporations were too willing to look past his repressive actions against opponents (Mr. Kasparov among them) and the corruption that afflicted the bureaucracy and business. “The real Putin model of government is nonideological kleptocracy,” he said.

“When the free world decided 25 years ago that it was all right to repress your people at home while still enjoying the markets and acceptance of the free world, it was a deal with the devil,” he said. “Instead of liberalizing the dictatorships, the influence flowed the other way, spreading corruption and disdain for democratic ways.”

A correction was made on 
March 19, 2018

An earlier version of this article misidentified a political position once held by Silvio Berlusconi. He was the prime minister of Italy, not its president.

How we handle corrections

Steven Lee Myers, a New York Times correspondent in Beijing and a former Moscow bureau chief, is author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: The Autocrats’ Favorite Autocrat. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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