What Drives Putin and Xi (Part One)

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. And so understanding what drives these two men, how they view the world, what they want, is as important as any question in foreign policy and international affairs. To that end, I talked to two of the absolute best scholars who study these countries and their histories—the great Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin, and the great China scholar Orville Schell. This is part I of our conversation.

We’re recording this the day after Xi Jinping turns 70. But since Vladimir Putin has already wished his dear friend health and happiness, we can move past that occasion, and get right to the substance of the topic today. 

Steve [Kotkin] is the ultimate biographer of Stalin. You’re completing your third volume of a magnificent and transfixing biography of the man. And Orville [Schell] is the author of more books than I can rattle off here on China, past and present. But you’re also both among the most trenchant and eloquent observers of these two contemporary figures and their effect on the world. So we really could have no better pair to make sense of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. And there are commonalities and differences in that relationship and what it all means. 

But I want to start by tracing the arc of American and Western understanding of the two figures. When you go back and look at profiles and speeches and memos from officials on both of them from their early years in power, you see this kind of powerful impulse, among Americans especially, to view both Xi and Putin as moderate, as modernizers, as Western-oriented, certainly as leaders we could basically get along with and who would, by and large, move their societies in a direction that seems roughly aligned with our interests and our values. So Orville, let’s start with you. What was the early impression of Xi Jinping? What did it miss? And how did it start to change as you reflect over the last 10 years or so of our interactions with him?

ORVILLE SCHELL

When Xi Jinping came to power he was not somebody with whom we were tremendously familiar. We knew more about his father. And we rather blithely, and I think quite naively, assumed that because his father had undergone a lot of persecution and political travails, that this might have rubbed off on his son in a way that would have made him somewhat jaundiced about the old one-party Leninist state and the whole revolution. And I remember writing the book, concluding just as he was coming to office, and cautiously wondering if he might not turn into a reformer. 

Well, he did not. So now we’re left to try to figure out who exactly is he, and this is why I really welcome chatting with you, Steve, here, because I think any leader—there’s history, there’s ideology, and then there’s the man. And all of those ingredients have to be factored into any kind of understanding of what drives them. And I can’t think of a leader in Chinese history who is more opaque in this regard than Xi Jinping is, particularly the latter part, the psychological syndrome, out of which he operates. I think it’s really important but very, very difficult to divine.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Just to linger on Xi Jinping’s father for a second, say a bit more about who he was, and how we thought that might have shaped Xi Jinping and how we thought about China. 

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was somebody who, during the Cultural Revolution, had a very bitter experience, and like so many other people, was accused of being a counterrevolutionary, anti-party element. And it was in that climate of the Maoist—the most intense period of Mao’s revolution, the Cultural Revolution—that Xi Jinping came of age. And there is a scholar at American University, Joseph Torigion, who’s been writing about his father and actually discovering some very interesting stuff, but we still are left to sort of divine, you know, how did that impact his son. 

And I think the only thing that we can say is that when you’re a teenager, and your father is pilloried—and of course you yearn to love and respect your parents—that casts a tremendous shadow on your life. And he got sent away to the countryside, to Shaanxi province, which is where the father came from. And then finally, at one point, he came back to Beijing and tried to escape his exile, and his mother berated him and sent him back again. So we have here, at least insofar as we understand it, a tremendously complicated parental web of relations in which he grew up, having to, in a certain sense, despise his own father, because he was considered a counterrevolutionary element, while at the same time yearning to be part of what was going on—the Cultural Revolution there, Red Guard, to get into the little red pioneers. 

One telling fact is that he applied eight times to become a little red pioneer, which precedes party membership later on when you’re older. And of course, he was eschewed and turned down because of his black category of family background. Finally, a friend of the family presided over the decision, and he did get in. But you have to wonder, how did that influence him? This idea that you have to be a 200 percenter, more red than anyone else, in order to be accepted, and then you’re still not quite accepted? And to survive.     

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Before we focus on this idea of psychological syndrome, as you put it, Orville—Steve, let me turn to you. To go back over this course of Western understanding of Putin—this is an obviously slightly longer history, he’s been in power longer. But as you look at what we thought we knew of Putin and what we got wrong, and why, how do you understand that history of our own interpretation? 

STEPHEN KOTKIN

Orville mentioning the person who presided over Xi Jinping’s admission to the pathway towards eventual Communist Party membership reminds us, Dan, of contingency. We always have very substantial, deep, long-term structural understandings of how things work. And yet in our own lives, there’s been so much contingency, so much accident, randomness, intercession of people. And so we have to be careful to recuperate that contingency in our analyses. You know, having said that, let’s linger for a minute on the structural factors that the contingency eventually trips.

So with Xi Jinping, he doesn’t claw his way to power. This is not something where he has been fighting internally—battles and cleverness and Machiavellianism—and finally made his way to the top. He got tapped on the back of the shoulder—you know, the way people get tapped on the back of the shoulder at Yale to run the United States. We need to understand this. And there’s a parallel, Dan, with [Mikhail] Gorbachev, which is why I bring this up. 

So, Gorbachev is also this figure who is tapped by the KGB faction, by the powers that be, who are worried both about the corrosive corruption that’s become completely pervasive in the Soviet system, and they’re worried about the loss of dynamism in the Soviet economy and the Cold War competition. And so they send along a guy that they don’t know that well, but they do know that he’s not corrupt. They do know that he’s a sort of true believer in the system. And his mandate is to tackle the corruption and re-energize the system; same mandate as Xi Jinping, and a similar selection process—although hardly identical, and there’s sort of different interest groups and power relations and different time periods, so we want to be careful with the analogy. But the analogy works to a certain extent.

And so the big difference is that Gorbachev has happened, so that when Xi Jinping is tapped, the Gorbachev attempt to re-energize the system, to get back the dynamism, ends in liquidation—self-liquidation, an implosion. And so if Xi Jinping is going to do anything, he’s not going to do Gorbachev. That’s 100 percent clear—clear as day. Whatever lessons he learned from his dad, and whatever lessons he learned from his own experience in the Cultural Revolution, and whatever happened behind the scenes, we may never know that. But the key point here is that he comes in—Xi Jinping comes in—unlike Gorbachev, where Gorbachev already happened, and the lesson is profound and clear. And so the party is dedicated to a non-repeat of Gorbachev. 

So the whole story is, what is their analysis of the Soviet collapse? Not what is our analysis necessarily; not what we think happened or didn’t happen, but what does Xi Jinping think happened or didn’t happen? Let’s remember that Xi Jinping was also running the party school before he got the big job. And the two biggest topics at the party school were Soviet collapse and never to repeat in China; and then Western decadence, and et cetera, you know, the U.S. is in decline and all of that mythology that they are marinated in at the party school. But the number one topic, Dan, is no Gorbachev, no political opening, no political reform, no suicide of Communist Party rule. And so if you knew this, if you were aware of this, you saw that there were limits to the possibility of political opening and reform under Xi Jinping,

I wrote a book on the Soviet collapse, a short book in which I made the argument about how there’s no political reform, equilibrium in Communism. And once you begin to reform, you open up the party for liberalization. People want other parties, they don’t want the Communist Party. So the Communist Party is left with this problem that it can’t open up, it can’t politically liberalize and maintain its monopoly. It either has to crack down on political opening, or it has to go all the way in Gorbachev fashion and the thing unravels. And so for me, the history of the party, and Xi Jinping’s understanding of the history of the party, were absolutely central to what we needed to be thinking about.

ORVILLE SCHELL

And Steve, you know, China did have its sort of near-Gorbachev moment, didn’t it, in 1989, when reforms started unraveling the Leninist structure. And you will remember that one of the most embarrassing moments for the Chinese Communist Party in 1989 was that Gorbachev was supposed to come to Beijing, and they were going to bury the hatchet. And Gorbachev did actually come to Beijing—and he couldn’t go to Tiananmen Square to be received with proper pomp and circumstance, they had to meet him at the airport. And all the way into the city there were people holding such signs as, “Where is China’s Gorbachev?” So for a good Chinese Leninist, this was a wake up moment. And I think it’s very interesting; I’ve never seen anybody say anything about where Xi Jinping was during 1989, what his disposition was toward those demonstrations. But whatever he did, I think the message he ultimately took home was, we’re not going there.

STEPHEN KOTKIN

There’s the famous line, Orville, that you know, that Deng [Xiaoping] supposedly told one of his children that he thinks Gorbachev is an idiot.

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, I think if you’re a good Leninist, that’s not an illogical conclusion. 

STEPHEN KOTKIN

The irony, of course, is that Gorbachev was himself a Leninist and thought that there was a better Lenin, a more pluralistic non-Stalinist or pre-Stalinist Lenin—which was a fiction, which was an illusion. But it was his North Star. And he followed it, as a result of which communism died, more or less peacefully in the Soviet case. And then there was the non-fantasy version of Leninism that Deng Xiaoping had. And of course, Deng did purge the party of the fantasy Leninists, the ones who thought reform and opening was possible in a political sense, not an economic or a foreign policy sense. 

ORVILLE SCHELL

I do think, we don’t want to forget that during the halcyon decade of the 1980s, when we thought there was a fair wind blowing toward reform and opening, and China might slowly integrate into the world system and become more soluble, et cetera, et cetera. And it was a very exhilarating, exciting time, when many of us actually thought there was a prospect that this Communist Party might make some kind of a peaceful transition to something else. But we should remember that in 1981, just as the reforms were hitting the high tide in China, Deng Xiaoping came out with something that he called the four basic principles. And everybody just thought, oh, well, this is sort of communist rhetoric. But what were they all about? They were all about the party. And he wanted to remind people that whatever the hell was going on, we’re not getting rid of this one-party Leninist system. 

One thing I want to ask you about, Steve, is this: one element of both Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping—and I’m wondering about Putin—is this idea of a restoration of greatness, you know, rejuvenation, and in China’s case, the China dream. But I think Putin also has such a dream, maybe a bit more inchoate and less spelled out, but it seems to me this is one thing they do share in common.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me just add to that question, Steve. You trace this history of Xi, but it does seem like there are some commonalities with Putin. He was also kind of tapped, not exactly out of nowhere, but he was not the obvious heir apparent. He—at least in the mythology that most of us get—he was very much foreign by the experience of watching the Soviet Union fall, just as Xi Jinping presumably was. So in addition to that sense of lost greatness, how did that sense of humiliation, and shame of that period, shape him? 

STEPHEN KOTKIN

It’s a very good question. There are similarities besides age between the two, Xi Jinping and Putin. They’re both 70, they had hardscrabble youths—their growing up was not luxurious, to put it mildly. And yet they rose, somehow, to positions of authority, thanks to the circumstances and others who facilitated their career. And Putin was appointed, more or less, because he vowed to protect the Boris Yeltsin family, as it was called. The family in the kind of mafia sense of the state, that if Yeltsin stepped down, he wouldn’t go to prison. And at the same time, Putin would fix the chaos, the anarchy, of the Russian state. Because the Soviet collapse in Russia didn’t end in 1991, as I argued in my book, it continued all throughout the 90s. 

And so Putin’s mandate, as it were, was to protect the Yeltsin family, but also to arrest the continued decline, implosion, that Russia had inherited from the Soviet case. And so that life experience of the collapse is also very, very imminent for him, just as for Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping has a different experience in the Chinese countryside, and Orville has already alluded to this. Putin is in the second capital, St. Petersburg, but he’s in a communal apartment, a rough and tumble courtyard. There’s the experience of World War II, and the Nazi siege of Leningrad, where nearly a million people starve to death or die of disease resulting from their starvation. And so all of that is the crucible, as it were, in which Putin rises. 

And then he gets into the KGB, as we know, the same way that Xi Jinping got into the party track, which was to knock on the door. They tapped him, but ultimately, he was looking for it and looking for it, and that must have gotten around. He doesn’t have a distinguished career in the KGB, just like Xi Jinping doesn’t have an incredibly distinguished career as a provincial leader. 

And then Putin is in Germany, right there on the front line of the Cold War, when the wall implodes, and Moscow is absent, as he said, not giving instructions over the phone. And so he experiences that calamity, the end of the Soviet forward position in Eastern Europe firsthand. And that’s extremely formative for him. And so resurrection of the state, resurrection of the system in some fashion—not the communist system, because that’s gone and not recuperable—but resurrection of a Russian state and a great-power status, because the Soviet Union was not just a single-party monopoly communist state, it was also a great power. 

But here, we need to expand the purview a little bit. We have the Leninist picture: Leninism is a very specific form of organization. And we need to spend a little bit more time on what that is. We’ve got that picture partially introduced. But the other picture is the Eurasian land empire, for multiple millennia of history. 

And so what you’ve got here is an upstart version of power that’s very modern—and that’s the world we live in, which is the British Empire; a big navy; trade, especially trade with other advanced countries that have high tech and high-valued products; and a kind of open market economy based on trade and based on a navy; with limited government in some form, limits on executive power. And this model is unbelievably powerful, and it’s a kind of upstart.

You can see it with the Dutch, who have a version of it, but it’s really the British. And the British defeat the French in a more or less hundred-year war that culminates in the defeat of Napoleon. And then the British, from 1815, they refashion the world in their image, as a world where littoral states have an advantage and land-based empires are at a disadvantage—they’re autocratic, they have land armies, they don’t trade with other advanced countries, they’re often commodity exporters, where they don’t develop their own high tech and they don’t acquire the high tech the same way. They’re losing a game that for a long time they won. For a very long time, the land-based empires had the riches and had the system—until this British upstart. And then of course the Americans inherit that British power, and the Americans transform it. 

And so we have these two forms of power, one an upstart and one at least a millennium long, and the upstart one’s got the upper hand. And so we see these autocratic, ancient civilization land empires of Eurasia fighting back. And they fight back on the ground that they’re strongest—which is to say, history, which is to say, civilization. 

[Samuel P.] Huntington didn’t get it right when he said there would be a “clash of civilizations” that would arise naturally. What he did get right was the clash of civilizations ‘handbook’ would be available for these countries to try to realize a Huntington vision, to pitch themselves as civilizations, not just countries, and to try to talk about that golden age, and how that golden age is being stolen from them by Western imperialism—first the British or the Dutch, and now the Americans, and how no one has the right to rule them. And they’re sovereign, and they’re much greater, and they’re much older. And who put the Americans in charge of the world, when in fact the Americans barely exist when compared to Russian history or Chinese history? We could say the same for Persian history; we see a version of this in Turkey; we see a version of this in India. And so it’s very interesting to see this clash, and for them to object to the world as it’s configured in the last two centuries, but especially since 1945, and to try to reclaim their self-assigned place, their sense of being more ancient, more legitimate, more impressive. 

So for us, we need to think about how the Chinese Communist Party does not own Chinese civilization. Being able to separate the civilization from the regime, rather than to allow the conflation—that’s true in the Russian case. It’s true in the Iranian case; the Mullahs don’t represent Persian civilization through the centuries. Vladimir Putin does not equal Russian civilization and its achievements. And Xi Jinping and the Communist Party don’t as well. But once you put this Eurasian landmass—autocracy, land-based empire—and extortion, or expropriation, or repression, together as a package, you see that they’re fighting a losing game, which is one of the reasons we see them teaming up.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Orville, does Xi Jinping’s view of history align with that? When you talk about that sense of reclaimed greatness and how it relates to humiliation and his own life experience and his country’s, how does he trace that narrative?  

ORVILLE SCHELL

Here, I think there is something that Xi Jinping and Putin actually share. Leninism is all about how to build a strong, well-organized one-party structure and state. But there was another aspect of Lenin and that was his theories on imperialism: that in the developed world, in the higher stage of capitalism, you have to export all your excesses abroad and colonize and exploit lesser peoples to keep the whole capitalist edifice going. And of course, out of this—Leninism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, all of these kinds of things from the nineteenth and early twentieth century—came the whole culture of victimization.

This is something that, of course, China has taken to a very high stage. But it was also very deeply implicit in the way Russia looks at the world—that you’re disrespected, you’re occupied, you’re disesteemed—you have your victories, but still. This, I think, really is one place where Putin and Xi connect quite closely. They both feel shut out and marginalized. There’s an expression in Chinese—it makes me laugh every time I hear it, and the foreign ministry uses it a lot—it’s shānghài Zhōngguó rénmín de gǎnqíng. It means “you’ve hurt the feelings of the Chinese people,” as if the Chinese people were some throbbing mass of weakness that you’re constantly offending.

But I think that comes from Lenin, because he’s the guy who set up the “us” and “them,” the colonizers, the imperializers, and the victims, the people who are preyed upon and oppressed and exploited and marginalized—mistreated. And so this is a very deep thing that ties them together. And they want to be respected—and yet they don’t act respectable. So they’re in a terrible loop, and yet they’re constantly offended. And I think this drives them in a very powerful way together. And it just simply infuriates them because we are unable to say, “Fine, you’re a little autocracy—you’ve done a lot, you’ve pulled a lot of people out of misery, it’s all good, let’s just not criticize you.” Well, that’s not going to happen. So there’s that deep-rooted victim culture that came out of the Leninist narrative, which both have deeply imbibed. 

STEPHEN KOTKIN

And here we have the ultimate irony. Marxism, Leninism: it’s Western, it’s a Western import. Here, everything is anti-Western. Everything is about keeping out the pollution of the West, the decadence of the West, the amoralism of the West, and all the other things that they accuse the West of—but in the name of Western ideology. Marx was not Chinese, although certainly you could think that if you spent some time in a party school there.

On this point about anti-imperialism—imperialism happened. The Chinese were abused. The British were narco-traffickers; they did the Opium Wars, forcing opium into China. All of that happened. We know that history and we write about that history; we’re not in denial of that history. The part that China is in denial of are the depredations that Communist Party rule caused domestically. What the British did in China is inexcusable. But what the British did in China doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what Mao did in China. Mao put numbers up on the board that Hitler never put up on the board, let alone the British. So we’re talking about a very selective view of history—and the further point that they’re right, that Western imperialism was very nefarious for China; okay, we’ll talk about that. But let’s also talk about what your own communist system has done to your country. And if you want to talk about that, open up your archives. 

We may never see the Communist Party archives of China the way we have in the Soviet case. I’ve been very privileged to take advantage—China scholars don’t have that same privilege, that same fortune, where the regime has imploded and the archives became widely available. But I guarantee it, the secret of the Chinese Communist Party archives, if it’s ever revealed one day, is that they’re communists. That’s the secret of the Soviet archives. 

ORVILLE SCHELL

I remember vividly walking down the Avenue of Eternal Peace during—I guess it was National Day. And they’d have pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, giant painted portraits up, and you think, “Oh my Lord, where’s the anti-foreignism here?” And I might also say that, having spent decades living within this sort of victim culture of China that was elaborated out of Leninism—you go to Vietnam, or Holland, or even Burma or Cambodia or India, I mean, here’s some places that were really colonized. China was only partially colonized. And I don’t make any excuses for that, but the fact that they have managed to retain this idea of a century of humiliation, even when they are so demonstrably succeeding, is very striking. And you have to ask yourself, what is it that appeals to them about this idea of insisting, even when they are one of the great success stories of global history, on being victims?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Thank you for listening. Please stay tuned for July 13, when we’ll release the second part of my conversation with Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell.