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

There are nightmares too, amongst the intelligentsia. Listening to their debates, the commentator Maxim Trudolyubov, the opinion-page editor of Russian’s leading broadsheet Vedomosti , laments: ‘There is this feeling in the air that Russia is somehow cursed…. Cursed to an endless cycle of revolution, stagnation and collapse, to be repeated forever.’

There is paranoia everywhere and a presence in Putin’s office, one whose shadow is so huge it encompasses everything, to the point it cannot be seen. The ghost of Boris Yeltsin. All Putin’s career has been about not being Yeltsin. To not be Yeltsin, he had to become Berezovsky, then to become Khodorkovsky. To not be Yeltsin, he had to build the vertical of power. To not be Yeltsin, he exercises, plays hockey and for the cameras even flies with storks. To not be Yeltsin, he controls TV. But he has made a mistake. In consolidating power, his gigantic transfer of assets means he cannot step down. He has become Boris Yeltsin. Putin cannot leave power for fear of arrest. History is inescapably repeating itself. He will inevitably need a protector, either in 2018 or 2024, because any real transfer of power will be a transfer of assets. His return to the Kremlin, demoting Medvedev to prime minister, hints that he has no confidence anyone in Russia can do that for him.

Russia is not yet unstable, but its future has become uncertain. Something medieval hangs over Moscow, even when you try to hide from it with Wi-Fi or the restaurants that serve imported Italian food, cooked for you by imported Italian chefs. In one of these places I drank beer with the commentator Kirill Rogov, a liberal and a researcher. At first we talked about polling data, but as we picked at a calamari ciabatta that went badly with the drink, the numbers gave way to fears from the past. It was gloomy, and some trashed oil men brayed and ordered more wine at another table:

It has happened many times here before. That the nation comes to believe, hysterically and all of a sudden, that the tsar in the Kremlin is not the true tsar, that he is a fraud, a fake tsar… and that the true tsar is elsewhere. And the people then chase him from the castle. This is what Putin is afraid of. The moment when everyone turns on him as an imposter and he is all alone. This is what terrifies him. And you know this has some basis in statistics? In polling it is far easier to go suddenly from eight out of ten believing something, to two out of ten, in a flash, than going slowly down from eight, to seven, to six, to five, to four…’

Unless otherwise stated all quotes are from interviews with the author. As the purpose of these notes is to make my sources accessible to the widest possible audience, I have used an English language source over a Russian one whenever it is available.

1. ‘The State of Russia: Frost at the Core’, The Economist , 9 December 2010.

2. ‘Putin Situatziya V Kushchevskoi I Gus Khrustalnom – Proval Pravokhranitelnoi Sistemi’, available at http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=414405&tid=85093.

3. Valery Zorkin, ‘Konstitutsiya Protiv Kriminala’, Rossiskaya Gazeta , 10 December 2010.

4. Gleb Bryanski, ‘Russian Patriarch Calls Putin Era Miracle of God’, Reuters , February 2012.

5. William Maudlin, ‘Russia’s Rulers Popularity Declines as Elections Loom’, The Wall Street Journal , 25 August 2011.

1. Allen Lynch, Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft (Washington DC, 2011), p. 9.

2. Available at http://md-prokhorov.com/vybory/178-vladimir-putineto-zhestkaya-ruka-nachnet-nas-ochen-skoro-dushit.html.

3. Anders Aslund and Andrew Kuchins, The Russia Balance Sheet (Washington DC, 2009), p. 39.

4. Jonathan Daniel Weiler, Human Rights in Russia: The Dark Side of Reform (Boulder, CO, 2004), p. 36; Branco Milanovic, Income, Inequality and Poverty during the Transformation from Planned to Market Economy ( Washington, DC, 1998), p. 186.

5. Stepan Opalev, ‘Karta Myasoedov Rossii: V Srednem 63 Kilogramma Za God’, Slon , 12 October 2011, available at http://slon.ru/economics/myasnaya_karta_rossii_v_srednem_63_kilogramma_za_god-687903.xhtml.

6. Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President (London, 2000), p. 79.

7. Ibid., p. 42.

8. Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (London, 1998) p. 56.

9. Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1997), p. 17.

10. Brian D. Taylor, State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (Cambridge, 2011), p. 1.

11. Sergey Polotovsky and Roman Kozak, Pelevin I Pokolenie Pustoti (Moscow, 2012).

12. ‘Anatoly Sobchak’, The Economist , 24 February 2000, available at http://www.economist.com/node/286742.

13. Allen Lynch, Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft (Washington DC, 2011), p. 40.

14. The ghost of Pyotr Stolypin has hung over post-Soviet intellectual debates. He was Nicholas II’s most effective minister, under whose watch the economy boomed, but dissent was repressed. His commitment to authoritarian modernization in the run-up to the First World War earned him a reputation for savage effectiveness.

15. Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1997), p. 30.

16. Anders Aslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution (Washington DC, 2007), p. 72; Tony Wood, ‘Collapse as Crucible’, New Left Review , March-April 2012, available at http://newleftreview.org/II/74/tony-wood-collapse-as-crucible#_edn35.

17. Ibid.

18. Daniel Treisman, The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev (New York, 2011), p. 279.

19. Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1997), p. 58.

20. Olga Khrystanovskaya and Stephen White, ‘Putin’s Millitocracy’, Post-Soviet Affairs , vol. 19, no. 4, available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/19406036/Putins-Militocracy-Olga-Kryshtanovskaya-and-Stephen-White.

21. In Russian hierarchies the title of deputy mayor or prime minister simply designates a leading role on a policy portfolio. The title of first deputy mayor or first deputy prime minister is the equivalent of deputy mayor or deputy prime minister.

22. Footage available at http://www.twitube.org/show.php?v=Or17Un5Go0k.

23. Interview with Yury Vdovin, June 2012.

24. Putin, First Person , p. 44.

25. Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia , p. 29.

26. Putin, First Person , p. 99.

27. Stephen Kotkin, ‘Stealing the State: The Soviet Collapse and the Russian Collapse’, The New Republic , no. 15 (1998).

28. It has been calculated that the ‘seven bankers’ controlled no more than 15 per cent of Russian GDP: see Daniel Tresiman, ‘Loans For Shares Revisited’, NBER Working Paper 15819, March 2010.

29. Lynch, Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft , p. 41.

30. The Kremlin strongly denies this was said at the off-record meeting with opposition leaders, to the forceful denial of those present: see http://www.newsru.com/russia/22feb2012/baburikremlin.html.

31. The ‘Democratic-Choice of Russia – United Democrats’ faction headed by Yegor Gaidar only received 3.86 per cent of the vote in the 1995 legislative elections and failed to make it into parliament.

32. Lynch, Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft , p. 42.

33. ‘84 per cent Inflation’, The New York Times , 1 January 1999.