By the beginning of the 1990s Putin had developed almost all the ideas he espouses today. He’d only just started working in St Petersburg, but if we look at documentary recordings of the time, we see that he already had a whole series of attitudes concerning, for example, the idea that Russia’s system of administration should be a unitarian, centralized state, and also his condoning the chinovniki [bureaucrats] taking bribes. That surprised many people, but it’s undeniable that he took a positive view of this. He even shared—and repeated—the scandalous thesis of the then mayor of Moscow, Gavril Popov, that bureaucrats had the right to a commission on contracts.

There was also, of course, his fine contempt for the democrats of those years, who had received power for free, without a struggle, as if they had just found it in the street. So most of the ideas were already present in this period, including signs of Putin’s opportunism—his sense that there’s no need to go against the grain, that in fact you need to go with it. Why fight a trend and use up your resources? You have to take the resources of the trend and achieve what you want with them. That instinct was with Putin from the beginning. He had also taken from Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, the idea that Russia should be divided up into general-gubernatorstva—with a general-governor in charge of every region. Yeltsin also dreamed about such an arrangement, but wasn’t able to achieve it. It’s a very popular idea in Russia.

Putin belongs to a very extensive, but politically opaque, unrepresented, unseen layer of people, who after the end of the 1980s were looking for revanche in the context of the fall of the Soviet Union. I was also one of them. My friends and I were people who couldn’t accept what had happened: who said we can’t let it continue to happen. There were hundreds, thousands of people like that in the elite, who were not communists—I, for example, was never a member of the Communist Party. They were people who just didn’t like how things had been done in 1991. This group consisted of very disparate people, with very different ideas of freedom. Putin was one of those who were passively waiting for the moment for revanche up till the end of the 90s. By revanche, I mean the resurrection of the great state in which we had lived, and to which we had become accustomed. We didn’t want another totalitarian state, of course, but we did want one that could be respected. The state of the 1990s was impossible to respect. You could think well of Yeltsin, feel sorry for him. But for me, it was important to see Yeltsin in a different light: on the one hand, it was necessary to protect him from punishment; on the other, Yeltsin was important as the last hope for the state, because it was clear that if the governors came to power they would agree another Belovezhsky Accord, after which Russia would no longer exist.

Putin is a Soviet person who did not draw lessons from the collapse of Russia. That is to say, he did learn lessons, but very pragmatic ones. He understood the coming of capitalism in a Soviet way. We were all taught that capitalism is a kingdom of demagogues, behind whom stands big money, and behind that, a military machine which aspires to control the whole world. It’s a very clear, simple picture which I think Putin had in his head—not as an official ideology, but as a form of common sense. His thinking was that in the Soviet Union, we were idiots; we had tried to build a fair society when we should have been making money. If we had made more money than the western capitalists, we could have just bought them up, or we could have created a weapon which they didn’t have. That’s all there is to it. It was a game and we lost, because we didn’t do several simple things: we didn’t create our own class of capitalists, we didn’t give the capitalist predators on our side a chance to develop and devour the capitalist predators on theirs.

I don’t think Putin’s thinking has changed significantly since then. He sees them as common sense. That’s why he feels comfortable and assured in his position; he’s not afraid of arguing his corner. He thinks: look at those people in the West, here’s what they say, and here’s what they do in reality. There is a wonderful system with two parties, one passes power to the other, and behind them stands one and the same thing: capital. Now it’s one fraction of capital, now another. And with this money they’ve bought up all the intelligentsia and they organize whatever politics they need. Let’s do the same! Putin is a Soviet person who set himself the task of revanche, not in a stupid, military sense, but in a historical sense. He set it for himself in Soviet language, in the language of geopolitics, that of a harsh pragmatism that was close to cynicism, but was not ultimately cynical. Putin is not a cynic. He thinks that man is a sinful being, that it is pointless to try to improve him. He believes the Bolsheviks who tried to create fair, right-thinking people were simply idiots, and we should not have done that. We wasted a lot of money and energy on it, and at the same time tried to free other nations. Why do that? We don’t need to.

Putin’s model is completely different from that of Zyuganov, the head of the rump Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Putin’s idea is that we should be bigger and better capitalists than the capitalists, and be more consolidated as a state: there should be maximum oneness of state and business. A two-party system like in the us? Wonderful, we’ll have that too. Putin worked for many years to make that happen. Although he admits he has not been successful, I think that’s still what he wants, although he realizes it’s a much greater task than he imagined. But politics should be in parties. The current set-up is not a one-party system, there is no analogy with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The governing party, United Russia, is not the state. It’s just a sack full of people hanging on to the Kremlin—a telephone system, transmitting signals from the Kremlin to the bottom through the regional apparatus. It has absolutely no independence and cannot act on its own, in contrast to the old cpsu. It cannot fulfil political directives. It needs full instructions, one, two, three, four and five. If three and four are missing, it stops and waits to be told what to do. United Russia has nothing in common with the cpsu. It has been useful as a component of the system. This was one of the conclusions that Putin drew—that one needs a vote, one needs legitimacy from the people and not from the fact that in 1917 you seized the Winter Palace.

Putin doesn’t believe that there is real competition between the political parties in the West. He thinks of it as a game, like a round of golf in a private club: one player is slightly stronger, another is slightly weaker, but in fact there is no real competition. He imagines it as it was in the Federal Republic of Germany after the war, under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer. There are two parties, one of which has power, and the second waits, perhaps for a long time. The Social Democrats waited, I think, from 1945 to 1970. It’s a sort of one-and-a-half party system. Putin always said that at some point in the future the opposition will gain power, and we must be ready for that moment. By being ready, he meant that we must be both here and there, that is, controlling both parties. The second party hasn’t really worked out yet in Russia; but Putin wasn’t against the Communists turning into social democrats. The parties were all supposed to be controlled by the President, of course. The idea of a presidential power that stands higher than the other three powers is in our constitution. The President has a special kind of power which does not relate to executive power: executive power ends with the Prime Minister. The President is above them all, like a tsar. For Putin that is dogma. He thinks that in old societies and states there is a sense of order—people don’t aspire to destroy their opponent when they are victorious at the elections—and we don’t have that sense of order. He also thinks that all forms of power in Russia so far have been unperfected: he wants to build a strong, durable form of government.