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

The movement electrified and frightened Russia, tarring United Russia as ‘the party of crooks and thieves’. It wounded Putin politically for the first time. It marked the beginning of the end of Putinism by consent. The Kremlin has tried to cobble together a new model, but it is highly precarious. The Putin consensus has been replaced by a culture war and the Putin majority has been replaced by class war. Having lost the support of the most advanced part of society, Putin was forced to find it amongst the most backward. This new model turned the old Putin budget on its head. It ended the economics of restricted spending, a budget surplus and low debt not overly dependent on a high price of oil. This occurred just as serious production and investment problems were mounting in Russia’s hydrocarbons industry. Putin embarked on a huge spending spree, his accounting menaced by an unreformed pension system that could send debt skyrocketing, a vanishing budget and trade surplus and the danger he could have to cut dramatically should the price of oil fall from present highs. Economic stability has been replaced by volatility to ensure the survival of the regime.

To stay in power Putin knows he must divide the nation, to keep the Moscow opposition from linking up with the discontent in the rest of the country. It is a myth that in deep Russia he is popular. There is an anguished country out there, furious at corrupt officials, resenting the vertical and appalled at the absence of a ‘dictatorship of law’. They crave a modern state – but do not yet see the opposition as being able to deliver that. The anti-Putin movement has so far failed to overcome the broken links between regions, generations and classes that fragment the nation, or cut through the hidden links of corruption and dependence on state corporations that tie the people to Putin. These explain why for the moment, discontent is vast, but resistance tiny. This precarious status quo could easily be pushed into unrest if Putin loses control of his balance sheets and cuts back on his handouts to the working class and poor in the regions. They can barely tolerate the system as it is. This is because in a thousands towns like Kushchevskaya in the west or Kirovsky in the east, Putin’s botched state building has turned officials into ‘werewolves in uniforms’ that prey on the people. This makes people hate the state and makes everything fragile.

For centuries, the state has shaped Russian society, marshalling it out of serfdom, then experimenting on it with communism or capitalism. The civil society that sprang up under perestroika was buried in the rubble of the USSR and broken during the depression of the 1990s. It was so easy for Putin to consolidate his power, as atomized, without strong NGOs, newspapers or moral leaders, there was almost no such thing as Russian society at the turn of the century. Yet Putin has failed to come up with any projects or ideologies – be they Nashi, United Russia or Sovereign Democracy – that could shape society. Now, society is going its own way, driven by megatrends that the Kremlin can only try to steer. The protests began the politicization of the new middle class. People want to make inputs. All across Russia, in every town or stretch of territory, activists, bloggers and citizen initiatives are crystallizing into a civil society. How this evolves will decide everything. Will it emerge obsessed about vigilante policing and beating the weak, such as the City Without Drugs in the Urals? Or liberal and green like the Khimki forest defenders near Moscow? We will know soon enough just how far these hundreds of small deeds share Putin’s aggression and paranoia – or reject it.

Russia is one of history’s great failures. At the beginning of the last century there was the chance that, had the empire been successfully governed, it could have come to play a role like the United States. In the middle of the last century there was no reason why – had a transition to capitalism begun early enough and been managed effectively – the empire couldn’t have come to be something like China is today. At the turn of this century, Russia was faced with a situation similar to post-war France. It had lost its colonies, been humiliated and pushed into anarchic politics – but thanks to De Gaulle and his generation the country became a powerful, independent, even wealthy post-imperial player. Russia can aspire to this.

Putin’s return throws this in doubt. Rather than saving Russia, he has come to hold her back, imprisoned in defunct institutions. Like a jealous and abusive lover, he is clasping Russia, telling her she cannot live without him. The old pillars of managed democracy are crumbling. Resistance is rising. There is growing resentment. This is not the stability Putin thinks he has fought so hard to achieve. And this means that to stay in power the regime must either reform or repress. The country can only reach the next stage of its development with proper institutions; it needs to restore the very ones Putin destroyed to consolidate his power, and jettison those he built. Otherwise, at best there will be political stagnation, and Russia will sink yet further down the echelon of states, perhaps even to the irrelevance of post-Ottoman Turkey.

Russia is not at risk of state collapse. It has problems but they are not Soviet. The regime may be unpopular and its finances precarious, but this is not necessarily a death sentence. The Putin clan still controls all the assets that matter. The oligarchy, though they grumbled, still seem to want him there as their arbiter. Russia is still a cautious country that does not want a revolution and is terrified of anarchy. Yet the mood, the op-eds, the way people think is jittery and hysterical.

Putinism is apocalyptic. The power to control the Russian nightmare of total collapse brought him to power and has kept him in power. He will only be driven from office when somebody can steal it from him. The West cannot decide Russia’s fate, though it needs to think through how it will respond to Putin’s. It is deeply uncertain. He and his clan could rule for decades to come if the price of oil stays in their favour. If they do, Brussels and Washington need to ask themselves how they relate to a more repressive and rigid Russia, with a rising opposition. Putin has imprisoned his opponents before.

The West needs contingency plans. There is no real risk of an implosion. Yet if mass unrest and civil disobedience spiral out of control at some point over the years to come, then the ‘party of crooks and thieves’ may sacrifice their ‘tsar’. Today there are almost incalculable sums riding on Putin continuing in power. But the best interests of money can easily flip. In December 1991 the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine gathered in the Belovezhskaya forest to cut Gorbachev out of the picture – and retain their political machines. It is not inconceivable that one day the masters of Rosneft, Gazprom and Transneft could do the same. This is where the danger is – that Putin may come to feel he is only safe inside the Kremlin. We do not know this side of Putin. We do not know what he will do when he has his back to the wall. What happened to Khodorkovsky, and in Georgia, gives us little confidence.

The West needs to start thinking about this eventuality. It should ask itself if it would offer him exile to avert blood. We do not know how things will turn out. We know that only 6 per cent of Russians say they can imagine what the country will be like in five years’ time. 3What is certain is that for the moment, Putin cannot be defeated politically, only economically – but the rise of Navalny shows Moscow hungers for a new leader. We also know lackeys toppled both Thatcher and Khrushchev.

In the Kremlin they have nightmares about Nicholas II. He survived the internal threat in the 1905 revolution only to see his system disintegrate under the pressure of war. Putin is in a similar position – any blows from the outside, that today move on the markets not in uniform, might push him from a fragile throne. Though it would be wrong to think of regime change as anything inevitable. In the West we are tempted to think authoritarian regimes’ decay in a metaphor similar to climatology, that simply by growing a middle class or the Internet by such and such a date, the Kremlin will simply melt. In Russia, people do not think like that. They think in the metaphor of plate tectonics. The regime is fragile and has cracks running through its foundation – it will be damaged by an earthquake, but nobody knows when, how strong or even if that will come.