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

The last time Berezovsky met Putin it was in the offices of his chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin. Putin accused him of putting up prostitutes in front of the cameras as the wives and girlfriends of the sailors. He then told Berezovsky: ‘I want to control ORT. I will manage it.’

The oligarch recalled that once Putin left the room he turned to the bearded and bald Voloshin and said, ‘I think we have made a mistake… We have let the black colonels in.’ Berezovsky claimed that Voloshin blew off his comparison of ex-KGB colonel Putin to the South American and Greek ‘colonel’ regimes that had seized power during the Cold War. Yet it was men like Voloshin who had once craved ‘a Russian Pinochet’.

Regardless of the right historical analogy, Putin had no intention of being exposed. Picking them off, one after the other, he managed to force both Gusinsky and Berezovsky into exile. The key to his success was how utterly unexpected his power grab was. No one had prepared for it. That day in the Kremlin, the last thing Putin said to Berezovsky was this: ‘You were one of those that asked me to become President. So how can you complain?’

No one had expected anything like this from the lieutenant colonel. The next episode in the hostile takeover of the media was the end of the NTV affair. In September 2000 Gazprom sued Media-Most for the non-repayment of its 1996 ‘bribe’. By April 2001, after lengthy legal manoeuvring, the exiled Gusinsky’s TV channel was finally brought under full Gazprom control by means of its outstanding debts. Its home in the Ostankino TV tower, a Moscow icon taller than New York’s Empire State Building, was entered by force. The new ‘editorial’ team then ousted all its popular government critics.

The ease with which Putin seized the main television stations reflected the weakness of society, of journalism and the oligarchs. The 1990s had produced few strong non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or civic movements, as the economic depression had ravaged the civil society that had sprung up during the perestroika years. Moscow’s journalists were far from a community, but a fragmented, inexperienced demi-monde full of hired columnists, hysterical TV hosts and paid-for agitators. Oligarchs such as Berezovsky were themselves despised by the public, to the extent that even when they started telling the truth about creeping authoritarianism they were doubted. There was little for resistance to form around.

In November 2000 Berezovsky had fled first to France, then to Britain. It was there that he received the news that the man that he had done so much to help was issuing an international arrest warrant against him. ‘I felt when I first heard the news – how small is Putin to behave like this? I thought he was above using the instruments of pressure and oppression. I thought he was not so weak. I thought he could use the power of persuasion, of explanation, not those of oppression.’ Nevertheless, in what Berezovsky did not say, and in the regret of what he did, I could tell that he felt he had been a fool. Months before his death, he left an emotional post on Facebook: ‘I repent and ask forgiveness for what led to the power of Vladimir Putin.’

The man who Berezovsky had thought was the ‘family’ bodyguard had robbed him. He had been destroyed as a Russian politician. Putin had asserted his independence in the boldest way. He had devoured his patron. Criminal investigations were opened against Berezovsky who, under pressure, sold his share of ORT to Roman Abramovich, who promptly handed it over to the state. By taking over ORT and NTV Putin had achieved exactly what he wanted – he had become Berezovsky. It was the beginning of a massive redistribution of assets. By 2008, some 90 per cent of all Russian media was directly or indirectly under Putin’s control. 29

Putin called this asset grab the ‘war on the oligarchs’. With the creation of two oligarch-exiles all federal TV stations were easily brought under Kremlin supervision. News coverage or satire that could undermine the regime would disappear from the screens. But it was something more than pulling puppet shows that lampooned Putin – it installed a modernized form of authoritarianism in Russia.

Putin had created a ‘videocracy’. This is an ascendancy where hegemony over national broadcasting underwrites political dominance, a style of power that eschews relying on mass parties or arresting men for telling anti-regime jokes or distributing leaflets. This was not unique to Russia, but in step with the changes new technology had brought to power in Europe as a whole. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi dominated Rome as he controlled the country’s most powerful media holding, whilst in London Tony Blair governed as much through spin as through a grip on the House of Commons. Like Blair and Berlusconi, Putin realized that power now sprung from an ability to dominate 24-hour news. The difference was that in this regime TV editors would get calls from ‘up top’ setting the agenda; the secret services would call reporters to tell them they had gone too far, and journalists were frequently murdered.

In the early 2000s the new men in the Kremlin had every reason to feel pleased with themselves. To their satisfaction, the public appeared to agree, with 50 per cent of those polled believing that the TV channels belonging to the exiled oligarchs were attacking Putin, due to their owners’ financial interests. 30Without much fuss or the need for any of the clumsy censorship of the Soviet Union, they had their message coming out of the airwaves. Their position looked sophisticated, almost unassailable. In March 2000, as many as 83 per cent of Russians had learnt about the election campaign through TV compared to just 19 per cent in the national press. 31With less than 2 per cent of the country having either access to satellite TV or the Internet the Kremlin seemed to have done the impossible: it had provided censorship for the masses and media freedom for the intelligentsia. This meant it never needed to lock up many people. 32Putin has never imprisoned as many journalists as his contemporary Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Technology, however, never stands still.

The Kremlin seized the airwaves by creating a TV tsar, through telepopulism. Putin was not ‘born’ but ‘made’. As the doyen of Russian journalism, Leonid Parfyonov puts it:

Putin is really a collective product of the key spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky, the deputy Kremlin chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, the press team, editors of national TV, which insulate him from the world – the defining image of which is Putin under HD cameras directing a minister to get into action – it’s a complete creation.

It was not always so slick. In some of his earliest television appearances with Yeltsin, Putin seemed nauseous and mousey. It was his lack of charisma, his ‘greyness’ that meant the PR ‘political technologists’ had to go into overdrive to create an action figure image out of him. After some initial fluffs, it was wildly successful. Parfyonov thinks the hidden ingredient was Putin’s endlessly changing costumes:

The success of Putin was that he never repeated the mistake of Brezhnev who was there ageing on TV, the same static image capturing the decay of the state. He understood that he had to be multiple Putins – Putin diving into the sea to rescue amphorae, Putin driving a yellow car through Siberia, Putin racing a sports car. It was about not being Brezhnev, not being Yeltsin. Not having the image stuck.

The infamous Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky himself recalled: ‘Putin, of course spoiled us. Rather, we used Putin to spoil ourselves. The Presidency was so quickly filled with the gas of absolute charisma that the answer to any question quickly became – like Putin.’ 33What Pavlovsky means by spoiled , is the increasingly extravagant acts of media-blitz that he invented, infecting almost all aspects of Russian TV. Moments that gradually made Putin seem almost absurd, just like this: Putin saunters onstage. His smile is insincere. Wearing a blue zip-up jumper over a beige turtleneck, Pavlovsky’s agents have made it look like he has come straight from the gym. The tune from MC Hammer’s ‘U Can’t Touch This’ announces him; a crowd of teenagers clap and scream as he makes his entrance on the country’s most popular hip-hop show, The Battle for Respect . Standing in front of a giant screen, Putin extols the martial values of rap. For viewers across Russia’s nine time zones, the sight is as striking as seeing Margaret Thatcher on Top of the Pops . There are cries of ‘Respect, Vladimir Vladimirovich, Respect!’ The shaven-headed winner of the rap challenge bellows: ‘This man is a legend… he is our icon… let’s make some noise so everyone can hear!’ 34And the viewers at home, mostly young people in factory towns far from Moscow, are left feeling that Putin is ‘with it’.