This was in keeping with the Russian tradition of assuming that the Russian government is the hidden hand behind of everything that happens, and it is capable of practically any monstrosity, since in fact it has very often operated that way domestically.
To be sure, this Russian anti-Russian conspiracy theory was not quite as absurd as the American anti-American ones. The motives for this Putin conspiracy at least had a certain logic and seriousness to them. It was done, the Russian explained, so America would turn to Russia for support against the Taliban. The West would let up on Russia about Chechnya. We'd all join in a war on the common enemy Islamism instead. Russia's relations with the West would get better. America would do Russia's work for it and overthrow the Taliban, something Russia would bungle if it tried itself. Russia would regain some security on its southern flank. It would even regain some influence inside Afghanistan.
Obviously a lot of this did in fact happen. The West finally, after a lot of post 9-11 hesitation, dropped the idea of compromise with the Taliban. The U.S. military linked up with the Northern Alliance, a coalition largely of Tajiks and Uzbeks, headed by an anti-Soviet mujehhedin until his assassination just before 9-11, but encompassing some warlords who had fought on both sides in the 1980s. It toppled the Taliban. The Northern Alliance entered Kabul and played a significant role in creating the new government.
Warnings ensued in a fraction of the American press, among them some furious warnings from Central Asia and Caucasus Institute (CACI) people, that America was doing Russia's dirty work in Afghanistan, helping the horrible Northern Alliance, winning for Russia the position there that it had been unable to win for itself. But these dire warnings fell on increasingly deaf ears.
Even these occasional warnings were, to be sure, not conspiratorial but geopolitical in style; they never suggested that 9-11 was a conspiracy orchestrated by the Kremlin (to find that sort of thing in the West, one had to turn to weblists with an Islamic anti-Russian ethnic base, such as a Turkestan List, where one could indeed come across such comments as that, in matters of terrorism networks, "all roads" lead back to Moscow). CACI had earlier had some influence on keeping America from joining forces with Russia against the Taliban; in 1999 Clinton was accused of arming Russia against the Chechen rebels, and this helped scare Clinton off from the alliance he had briefly declared with Russia against terrorist extremism when Basayev made his incursion into Daghestan. This might be called an accusation of a behind-the-scenes action or conspiracy between the U.S. and Russia, but it was not the convoluted kind of conspiracy theory in which reality is presented as the opposite of appearance, due to a scheme of insidious invisible Powers that are trying to trick and cheat us all. Clinton's endorsement of Russia's territorial integrity and its fight against Basayev was quite public; he was only "accused" of being too serious about it. Svante Cornell, a deputy of Fred Starr at CACI, went further, in a pro-Taliban event at the Institute in this period. He acknowledged that it might sound nutty to say that Russia is behind all the problems in the Caucasus -- and I might interject that it is nutty, it doesn't just sound nutty; just consider the number of ethnic disputes in the region, each encompassing sizable ranks of ethnic and religious extremists and trigger happy actors -- but bravely went on to say that this was nevertheless the case. That did qualify as a conspiracy theory: behind every local evil, there was the hand of the central devil in Moscow. Perhaps even this could be passed off as a mild brand of conspiracy theory, since he was not attributing weirdly convoluted motives to Russia, just normal, or semi-normal, power politics motives. Anyway, after 9-11-2001, the Central Asia and Caucasus Institute took a more respectable tack, removing the pro-Taliban stuff from its website, although the basic orientation remained unchanged in the polemics against the Northern Alliance. There was a decent interval before Starr and Cornell went back to the business of blaming Russia for everything wrong in the Caucasus.
That pretty much gives us the lay of the land about conspiracy theories, in Russia and in America, about one another. The Russian ones far exceed the American ones. They exceed it in quality of nuttiness and viciousness, not just quantity. Meanwhile both do damage to the nation's ability to perceive things rightly, and to pursue its actual interests.
Each country, Russia and America, also has conspiracy theories about itself; these follow a slightly different pattern. Both countries are unduly prone to conspiracy theory about itself, and about the entire world for that matter, for their own very different reasons of national history. Both are always at some risk to their political sanity from this. In America, paranoia is rooted in the heritage of the conspiracy theory propounded in the Declaration of Independence, which became the foundation for the legitimacy of the independent American state; and in the imagined history in which the roots of the American regime are in turn credited to the schismatic Puritan sect in Massachusetts rather than to the colonial mainstream and to European history. In Russia, paranoia is rooted in the heritage of living under governments that operate inordinately often by conspiracy against their own society, and equally often project the blame, blaming disagreement as treason and conspiracy. The contents of the popular national conspiracy theories vary accordingly, Americans too often attributing conspiracy to their government, Russians too often attributing conspiracy to both sides, their government and its real and alleged opponents. The American anti-American conspiracy theories affect Russia indirectly, for example when the American government is accused of conspiring to be nice to un-American foreign dictatorships like Russia. The Russian anti-everyone conspiracy theories affect America more directly.
In America, more often than conspiracy theories about Russia, there are often gross journalistic simplifications that blame Moscow's side in every conflict, and blame that side alone, as if it were acting in a purely unprovoked malicious way while the other side was purely innocent. Sometimes this bleeds over into something close to conspiracy theory, in which Russia is always pursuing its most nefarious possible power politics interest behind the scenes and is the cause of all that goes wrong in its neighborhood. The journalists who purvey this kind of stuff no doubt think they're serving America's interest, even if their own government says nicer diplomatic things about Russia.
In Russia, there are often wild conspiracy theories that blame a convoluted American scheme for anything that goes wrong anywhere. These theories pervade much of the state controlled media. The journalists who purvey them no doubt think this serves Russia's state interest, even if the state formally says otherwise. The damage to America is real, but the greatest harm they do is to Russia's own interests, and to its very sanity.
And what of Putin?
There is the Putin of conspiracy theories. The Putin who blames the Kursk sinking on the independent media and proceeds to take it out on the Russian media. Who blames the Beslan terrorists on Western powers trying to break Russia into pieces, and takes it out on the West (and on Russia's own long-term interests) in Russian foreign policy. Who bundles together, into one vast occult power, the Democrats, the Media, the Terrorists, the West.
And then again, there is the Putin who spoke on 9-11-2009. He used a very different tone, one that recalled his better days: "I believe that this is yet another reminder that in the war against universal threats, we must put behind us all possible contradictions and arguments, and join forces."
It was an echo of the Putin of 2001. A wiser Putin. One who looked at the larger picture, at what was really being done by major entities in the world rather than at monsters emanating out of the imagination. And who had the common sense to discern the basic interests of Russia in this actual world situation.
It was a Putin that never was the whole Putin, but one that in some periods was able to prevail over the other Putin -- the Putin of cheap resentments and revenges. And one that evidently still exists somewhere inside the Putin of today.
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