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

In Kirovsky – and a thousand other places – Putin was not really the problem. Here, at the end of the vertical of power, it was starkly obvious how weak his system really was. Rather than just being oppressive – incompetence, dysfunction and the absence of control meant that men right the way through the entire bureaucracy, all the way down, have become venal, extortionate and predatory. Out here the ‘werewolves in uniform’ were not working on Putin’s orders. Russia was not threatened by China, but by being driven insane by its own officials.

IF PUTIN in his palaces is haunted by any ghost – it is not the senile spectre of Leonid Brezhnev but the pained soul of Nicholas II. Would this most naive of tsars have dwelt after death on his catastrophe, on Russia’s screaming train-wreck off the rails of history, would he whisper to Putin as he sleeps, as the unlikeliest of successors sweats, that as the centenary of the revolution nears, they share a similar dilemma – that he must at all costs learn from his calamity? Yet, as we can safely assume is the case, and the Tsar remains as convinced in spirit as he was in the Winter Palace, he would creep closer, bent crooked, beseeching Putin to behave exactly as he did: to hold on, to relinquish nothing, never to abdicate in favour of the quibbling liberals who risk handing the inheritance to hysterics, to rule as he must, to rule alone, in the name of the stability that Russia needs at all costs.

The ‘national leader’ spends less and less time in Moscow. He has retreated to working as much as possible in his palace in the woods outside. He has also chosen to freeze traffic for his motorcade to the Kremlin only for strictly essential, diplomatic matters. The government seems frightened of Moscow. There are even plans to move it from the city. Theoretically, they are going ahead, and would see the entire bureaucracy and Kremlin staff moved to a new ‘administrative quarter’ to be built over a complex of drab housing estates near Vnukovo Airport. They say it is clogged traffic that inspired this plan. Muscovites says it is protests.

Putin behaves as if he cannot understand how, in 2008, he had the poll ratings of a movie star and was received like the greatest Russian hero since Yuri Gagarin in the capital, but today the most sophisticated of this city, the very people who have thrived during his reign, talk of him the way they once did about Berezovsky – as a thief who has stolen the state. Putin talks as if he is still loved by Russia, but walks with a paranoid shuffle and the aggression of the insecure. Courtiers say he feels hurt and unappreciated. He is cancelling foreign trips, no longer likes mingling ‘with the people’, preferring wild animals instead. As he once said: ‘I’m a superstitious person’. 1

Russia has fallen out of love with him and the Putin model he built has started to break down. This book has explored how after Yeltsin a regime was built in Russia that was both highly sophisticated and deeply backward at the same time. This managed democracy brought together clever technologies of power, giving the country the formal institutions of a democracy, but gutted them of any meaning. Machinations and corruption turned the Duma into a puppet show and elections into plebiscite contests fought with clowns. Russia became a videocracy that gave censored TV to the masses but allowed free newspapers and blogs for the intelligentsia. Russia saw its leader turn himself into a telepopulist superstar who exploited modern man’s seduction by images, his confusion between a great celebrity and a good politician.

This achieved a hegemony that was the envy of authoritarians, with minimal costs. Fewer journalists were imprisoned than in Turkey, fewer protests occurred than in China and the opposition was less of a threat than in Belarus. Putin looked both authoritarian and legitimate, Europe’s most successful post-modern politician who had subverted the very institutions Francis Fukuyama had believed would ‘end history’.

Yet behind this televised illusion, the regime was building a defunct and anachronistic power structure. It staged a gigantic transfer of assets, beginning with the robbery of Berezovsky and culminating with the robbery of Khodorkovsky, then consolidating with the creation of the Putin oligarchy. The Kremlin tried to build institutions that were outdated and inefficient even when they were young – a vertical of power restoring the Soviet chain of command, with United Russia as a de facto one-party state. These, they promised, would deliver ‘a dictatorship of law’.

These great plans inadvertently planted the seeds of corrosion into the Putin model. They were bad administrators and botched their state building. The vertical of power turned into a vertical of corruption, United Russia turned into a patronage network not a party and the ‘dictatorship of law’ turned out to be a dictatorship of predatory officials. They left Russia a fragmented and feudalized country in which all corrupt policemen, inspectors and governors had been signed up into Putin’s party.

Russia looked the other way. It was in love with its leader as a boom was under way that was nothing less than the greatest upswing in living standards in Russian economic history. A new middle class flourished. It was believed that the incompetence of the state could be overcome. After decades of penury, collapse and loss of status the winners rushed into consumerism and the losers breathed a sigh of relief that the free fall was over. Russia ignored politics.

The boom allowed Putin’s telepopulism to cement both a Putin consensus over the elite and a Putin majority over society. It was so successful, that by 2008 when he moved to the post of prime minister, Putin was on his own terms the greatest politician of his generation, not just in Russia but amongst his international peers. Bush, Blair, Berlusconi had all ended in failure; in China, India and Brazil, individual leaders never amassed as much power.

This is when Putinism began to undermine itself. By choosing Medvedev to play the role of president to circumvent a constitutional term limit, and allowing him to drum up support for a ‘modernization agenda’, the regime built up a narrative, infrastructure and constituency for reform that it bitterly disappointed. Medvedev’s great words and the battering of the financial crisis exposed Russia’s governance crisis. It became obvious that the vertical of power, United Russia and the ‘dictatorship of law’ had all failed. Below the surface a shift in values was under way, with Russians no longer wanting centralization or to hear Putin’s ‘commander’s voice’ that they had craved a decade earlier. 2

Putin returned, but to another Russia. His return culminated in the disintegration of the Putin consensus and the Putin majority that had begun under Medvedev. It came at exactly the moment that a quiet, giant change driven by the boom undermined the videocracy and his telepopulism. The new richer, globalized, online Russia was devastated by the news of Putin’s return to the presidency as it viewed this as the botched institutions he had built being cemented on to their future forever. This is when the winners of Putinism began to feel like losers.

He had triumphed as a politician, but Putin’s old model was bust, his old politics was bust, and this was exposed by the protest movement that erupted in Moscow over the winter of 2011–12 to denounce the rigged elections of managed democracy. The movement did not mark the end of the regime. It exposed the regime’s power for what it was – based on controlling gigantic assets, TV media and the security organs, not legitimacy and the acclaim of the elites.