The ghost in the Kremlin’s corridors: Yevgeny Primakov’s lasting power

How a cautious Arabist turned prime minister sketched a doctrine of multipolarity in the 1990s; and why his fingerprints still mark Russia’s diplomacy today.

You may not know of Yevgeny Primakov. But he really should be a household name: because his shadow still tilts across the table whenever the Kremlin weighs its hand. To make sense of the way Russia now speaks, you have to look back to the man who first inscribed those habits into the bones of its statecraft during the devastating 1990s.

The current talks with the United States won't lead to Obama-era resets or Reagan-esque grand bargains. What Moscow wants is simpler and it's a style of diplomacy Primakov would have recognised instantly.

Back in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was raising toasts in Washington and ending his address to the US Congress with “God bless America,” Primakov kept his distance. A trained Arabist and intelligence man who rose to become foreign minister and then prime minister, he had spent too long in Cairo and Damascus to buy into the mood music of “partnership.”

He grasped, far quicker than most of his peers, what the so-called post-Cold War order really had in store for Russia. Essentially it boiled down to servitude with a smile: a junior chair at the grand table and a signature scrawled on whatever demands the West thought fit to slide across. His answer was to repurpose Karl Deutsch and J. David Singer's 1960s concept of multipolarity: better to court many princes than bend the knee to one.

At the heart of his politics lay a set of instincts honed by hard experience: never get boxed into someone else’s binaries and guard sovereignty the way a poor man guards his last coin. You should reach out, yes, and build ties with any power that offers the chance, but don’t ever shackle yourself. And as for ideology; use it if you must, but never repeat the Soviet mistake of letting it dictate everything. For Primakov, the only philosophy worth carrying was the blunt survival of the national interest.

His name reached Western headlines in March 1999. On his way to Washington as prime minister, he learned that NATO had begun bombing Serbia and responded by ordering his plane to turn around mid-Atlantic and fly back to Moscow. The gesture announced that the gig was up and Russia wouldn't be nodding along politely as the West dismantled Yugoslavia. For many Russians, it was the first sign in a decade of collapse that at least one of their leaders still had a spine. However, in a host of Western capitals, it was the moment Primakov was marked as a spoiler.

That same year, he was briefly spoken of as Yeltsin’s possible successor. Many in a Russia battered by economic collapse and humiliated abroad seemed to yearn for his steadiness and dignity. Yet his political star dimmed quickly, outmanoeuvred by the oligarchic Kremlin clan that would ultimately place the much younger Vladimir Putin in power.

Primakov never wore the crown of the presidency, but his way of seeing the world seeped into the bloodstream of the man who did. Putin came out of the shadows at the millennium with the instincts of a security official rather than a statesman. It was Primakov’s frame that gave those instincts shape and turned watchman’s reflexes into a doctrine of state.

Of course, the critics keep their ledger handy. They point to his handling of the wreckage of the 1998 financial crash, and say he was no wizard of economics. They recall his unbending hand in Chechnya. Both fair charges, maybe. But whenever the talk turns to foreign policy, the tone completely changes. Here the clarity still lingers because he saw with cruel precision that Russia could never be folded into a Western-centred order without shrinking itself to fit. As a result, he sketched an alternative.

You can still trace his hand in Moscow’s conduct. Talks with Washington are stripped of both the begging bowl and the sabre-rattle. What you find instead is a patience that borders on the obstinate; we can call it strategic waiting. The bet is simple: unpopular governments in Paris and Berlin (just look at current polls) will fall with the seasons, but Putin's Russia will outlast them. In the meantime it probes at the seams of Western unity, leaving a door ajar for any thaw that might drift in with a change of weather.

Even the scaffolding of BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation shows Primakov's imprint. These aren’t anti-Western clubs so much as post-Western stages; built to shrink the US-led bloc from lead actor to one among many in a larger cast.

This sets him apart from other Russian visionaries. Vladislav Surkov’s notion of a “Great North,” uniting Russia with Western Europe, collapsed almost as soon as it was uttered. Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Common European Home” dissolved into smoke. Primakov had seen the futility long before. He never believed Russia could be integrated into Western structures on anything other than subservient terms.

So the moves you see out of Moscow today are part of a strategy long-aged, like spirits resting in a dark barrel and waiting for the moment to be poured. In essence, Russia won’t barter away its red lines in Eastern Europe for a scrap of sanctions relief. Nor will it march dutifully in the slipstream of a US–China collision. Instead, it will manoeuvre always under its own steam.

Primakov was born in Kiev in 1929, grew up in Tbilisi, and was educated in Moscow. He worked as a reporter and analyst of the Arab world before becoming a trusted envoy, then rose to head the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. Yeltsin made him chief diplomat in 1996 and prime minister in 1998. He died in 2015 at the age of 85, honoured with a state funeral. Both Putin and Dmitry Medvedev paid tribute to him as a man who had kept Russia’s dignity intact in its hardest modern decade.

In the end, his fate was not to rule, but to leave his doctrine behind; to shape Russia’s course long after his physical life had come to an end. That, ultimately, is Primakov’s bequest: it's why the men in Washington no longer face the pliant Russia of the 1990s, but a state seasoned by the humiliation of those years. Once burned, it now carries the scars. And this time, whatever else happens, it will not come cap in hand.