The two Dmitris: A lesson for the West

Winston Churchill famously said that Russia was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That observation may have been correct at the height of Stalinism in 1939, when Churchill uttered these words, but it’s far less appropriate today, at the height of Putinism. Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin, occasionally may be unpredictable, but a close reading of his statements shows that he consistently has pursued an increasingly anti-democratic, authoritarian, and fascist agenda at home and an increasingly imperial, hegemonic agenda abroad. Putin has changed, but in a predictably repressive and violent direction.

Sadly, the Russians evidently also have changed, from a people who welcomed glasnost and perestroika in the Mikhail Gorbachev years to a people who tolerate, perhaps even welcome, war and genocide in the most recent Putin years. Russian elites have followed in Putin’s and the people’s footsteps. One of the most glaring such examples among policymakers is Dmitri Medvedev, Russia’s former president and prime minister, a man who used to be known as a political moderate and now appears to be a saber-rattling extremist. An equally distressing example of a scholar who has undergone a similar sea change is another Dmitri: Dmitri Trenin.

Trenin once was the darling of European and American conferences. With his perfect English, impressive knowledge and genial smile, he charmed those who met him. “Dima,” as he was known, appeared to be a scholar and a gentleman. He also appeared to be someone who could speak evenhandedly, as well as critically, about Russia — and, of course, the West. Many people saw him as someone you could trust.

That he was always openly identified by conference organizers as a former colonel of the GRU, the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, bothered no one. Some raised their eyebrows, but post-Soviet Russia seemed to be becoming a transparent country — and, besides, Dima was a former colonel, wasn’t he?

In the mid-1990s, he joined the Carnegie Moscow Center, a think tank affiliated with the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Washington. In 2008, he became the director of the center. (The affiliation ended in early 2022.) Carnegie wasn’t the only feather in Dima’s cap. He served as senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome. He became a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Royal Swedish Academy of Military Science, and the European Leadership Network. He even participated in a Carnegie Corporation-funded project I directed on reengaging Russia.

And then came Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Push came to shove, and Dima chose to leave the Center and ally with Putin and his genocidal war. His Putinophilia evidently became so extreme that, on Nov. 30, 2022, as the war was obviously going badly for Russia, Dima out-Putined Putin by arguing that Russia should “place all of eastern, southern, and central Ukraine under its control.” Shades of Medvedev’s rhetoric!

What happened to the two Dmitris? Medvedev’s turnabout is easy to explain: A protégé of Putin, he had to march in lockstep with his master to curry favor. But how could a mild-mannered scholar like Trenin turn into someone who comes across as a rabid imperialist?

It’s perfectly possible that Dima fell for Putin’s ideological blandishments and, having suddenly seen the error of his Westernizing ways, decided to side with the Kremlin. It’s also possible that he experienced a progressive disillusionment with the “degenerate” West and then, confronted with war, opted for Mother Russia.

But there’s another, less comforting possibility: Had Trenin remained a colonel of the GRU all along? “One hundred percent,” is how a Ukrainian colleague responded when I asked him what he thought the likelihood of this would be. In other words, once in the GRU, always in the GRU?

This brings us back to Churchill’s quip. Yes, Russia can be mysterious, but it looks especially so if we view it through rose-tinted glasses. In that sense, Dima’s story isn’t about him and his possible duplicity. It’s about us — the West — and our naivete. If indeed the premise is true, we should have known better than to accept uncritically the possibility that a former colonel of the GRU could ever leave its ranks.

And that, in turn, raises a discomfiting question: Just how many liberally minded Russians might be working for Russian intelligence?

Unfortunately, although this question must be asked, asking it is corrosive, because it casts doubt on the sincerity of Russian liberals in general. On the one hand, they deserve Western support in their struggle against Putin’s dictatorship. On the other hand, thanks partly to the two Dmitris, they may always be under suspicion. There is, alas, no solution to this conundrum — which may be just what Russian intelligence wants.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”