Ben Judah - Fragile Empire - How Russia Fell in and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin

‘He looked brave. He was a good team player. He accepted the rules. He never played any political dirty tricks, nor did he play games with Yeltsin’s opponents like the previous prime minister, Sergei Stepashin, had been doing. He was young and many people wanted youth in power after years of old and frail Yeltsin. He did strictly as agreed. Putin looked like a normal, natural Russian.’

Berezovsky was by now aggressively trying to persuade Putin to be Yeltsin’s heir:

‘I said, “So what do you think?” We were at his dacha, and Putin said, “I don’t want to be President… I want to be Berezovsky.”’

‘Operation Successor’ was set to the music of the huge apocalyptic psychodrama playing out on Russian TV chat shows – the fear of collapse part two – as insurgent attacks multiplied in the Caucasus and the screeching guests called for Chechens to be ethnically cleansed and a Russian Pinochet to make sure Moscow was open for business, by means of the military police.

Putin inherited a monarchical presidency that was turning into a ‘managed democracy’ (the term is alleged to have been invented by Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin). He also inherited a country on the brink of war that he thought was about to dissolve into blood. The fighting in the Caucasus was escalating and Moscow’s control over the regions was unravelling in a hundred little acts of insubordination. Siberian Yakutia, mother of one-quarter of the world’s diamonds, had declared English an official language. 37There had even been an attempt to create a ‘Urals Republic’. The Siberian coal-mining province of Kemerovo was even building up its own hard currency and gold reserves. Regions were throwing up trade barriers between each other, the kind of which are usually seen between states. In Muslim Tatarstan on the Volga, not only had its President won the rights for special Russian passports with a separate Tatar identity page, but threatened loudly that if Russian volunteers were sent to fight in Kosovo in 1999 alongside Orthodox Serbs, his Tatars would volunteer to fight against them with Muslim Albanians. 38

The fact that default, disorder and depression had happened under the banner of democracy made the desire for reaction inevitable. This is why more than three-quarters of Russians now regretted the fall of the USSR and 70 per cent said they were ready to put order over democracy. 39Between 1991 and 2000 at least 150,000 people were murdered, the fourth highest rate in the world, whilst over 150,000 cars were stolen a year. 40Demographics tell the darkest story – soaring death rates and slumping birth rates saw the population collapse at a faster rate than it had even during the Russian Civil War. Male life expectancy plunged to fifty-seven years: a teenage boy had less chance of reaching sixty than had his great-grandfather born in 1900. 41

Russia’s biggest problem was not even in the cities falling to pieces but in the cold flatlands and bogs of western Siberia – its oil fields. The crisis of the state reflected the collapse of the Russian oil industry. In a cruel conjunction of geology, financial markets and bore-hole maintenance, everything had gone wrong in the industry that government revenues depended on. From its Soviet peak, oil production had collapsed almost 50 per cent, the oil price had fallen 60 per cent, and investment into the fields themselves had sunk 70 per cent. 42The pumps and drills of western Siberia, once the envy of the West, were now ramshackle piles and operated in line with defunct practices, degrading the fields themselves. Russia was not only producing much less oil, but the oil was worth far less and the industry itself urgently needed any profits to be reinvested, simply to keep it going. To make matters worse, the new oil tycoons were barely paying taxes, but hiding their revenues down ‘onshore offshore’ tax holes in Russian regions that Moscow was too weak to plug. Even the fields themselves seemed exhausted, as if geologically dying. The industry that Russia depended on looked ruined.

However, not everything was in implosion. The country was engulfed in a surreal explosion of consumerism, television and advertising as it was sociologically disfigured. The once forbidden West – in the form of Pepsi, Levis and Veuve Clicquot was pouring in. The number of telephones, apartments, refrigerators, cars, radios and trips abroad soared – along with the murder rate, drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution and violence. For all the social pain inflicted, the reformers did lay the technical–legal basis for a consumer society, within such a steep decline in overall living standards. The 1990s caught the small Russian middle class in a strange bind: they were accumulating more and more stuff, but the system to secure all their stuff was falling to bits. To protect their fridges and their holidays abroad, more and more were tempted by the idea of a Russian Pinochet.

Most Russians were impoverished. As many as 40 per cent had sunk below the official poverty line, which had been lowered from the Soviet version in order to hide the fact that, by old measurements, a majority were now impoverished. 43They were desperate for wages and pensions to be paid, and were terrified that public services were about to collapse completely. Their old discontent at the USSR’s breadlines and bureaucrats had been eclipsed by anger at Yeltsin. For them, the collapse of the Soviet Union was also the collapse of the welfare state.

The final delirious twist was that the intelligentsia, newspapers, magazines and ‘thick journals’ – Russian culture itself – was in free fall as commercial TV was exploding. The very class that had wanted the revolution had lost out from it, with violent entrepreneurs and oligarchs – the people they disdained – rising to the top. The circulation of all Russian titles had imploded from over 37 million in 1990 to fewer than 7.5 million the year of the default, and of these the USSR’s flagship semi-intellectual publication Argumenty i Fakty saw its readership shrunk from over 30 million in 1990 to just 3.5 million five years later. 44Mass TV news was making Yeltsin look more and more like a senile alcoholic, creating ever more demand for a Russian Ronald Reagan, who would be the first true actor-politician on screen who knew how to work the viewers. Meanwhile, the TV sets in almost every home left by the Soviet Union were retuned to a cacophony of over ten new channels broadcasting uncensored, licentious advertising. Dissident intellectuals gave way to TV hosts – and even Solzhenitsyn got himself a talk show.

The result was hysteria, a crashed Russia dangerously vulnerable to deviant messiahs and well-intentioned psychopaths. It should be no surprise, then, that Russia’s favourite film that decade was Brother . It is a bleak portrait of a criminal time. Danila, a demobbed conscript, arrives in St Petersburg to start a new life but finds the city lawless, dilapidated, a place where the strong crush the weak. Here, in Putin’s city of cracked paint, crumbling buildings and claustrophobic apartments, Danila goes into ‘business’ with his brother, a contract killer. He is the film’s hero. He forces North Caucasian fare dodgers to pay for their tickets on the buses. He hunts down gangster after gangster, killing ‘the Chechen’ and the other bandits who terrorize downtrodden ethnic Russians. He is no friend of the Jews. He is a bandit but, unlike the others, one who stands up for the weak. This 1997 film was a sensation. It was as if subconsciously the country wanted a man like Danila to mete out raw justice from Yeltsin’s chaos.

‘Elections, I just hate them,’ is what Yeltsin remembers Putin replied when he asked him to become his prime minister and successor. On 9 August 1999 the old man appointed somebody he liked and trusted, but who had the popularity of a statistical error: 1 per cent. 45National politicians dismissed Yeltsin as insane, ludicrous or bizarre. Inside the political castle, many of his top aides were aghast. It looked as if the man who had gone through three prime ministers in as many years had finally lost it completely. Even Putin’s dying father was astonished at his rise: ‘My son is like a tsar!’ 46