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

First they had to make Putin sound like his voters – the only social class really present in Russia in the early 2000s, a formless lower middle class – earning a living from payday to payday, dipping in and out of poverty. The tone, gesture and vernacular that made Putin seem as down to earth as possible was systematically prioritized. Putin even occasionally slips into the slang language known as ‘fenya’ – thieves’ slang. This resonated in a brutalized Russian society. According to research by Vladimir Radchenko, the former deputy chairman of the Supreme Court, between 1992 and 2007 over 15 million Russians received a criminal record – over 30 per cent of all adult males – and, in a country of only 142 million citizens, over 5 million have spent at least some time in custody or the prison system, leaving Russia with the second largest prisoner population per capita in the world. 41

Watching Putin in the moment that clinched his popularity, threatening to chase Chechen insurgents and ‘waste them in their outhouses’, sends a chill down the spines of those who have read the Gulag Archipelago . There, Solzhenitsyn had warned that the day Gulag slang was heard in Moscow State University would be the day the camps had infected all Russia. Putin’s coarse bar-humour would unsettle Moscow’s diplomatic corps. He once remarked when informed that the former Israeli president, Moshe Katsav, was facing trial for sexual assault: ‘He raped ten women. We never knew he had it in him. We all envy him.’ 42

Being a real man of the people, even an orator, was essential but not enough. Yeltsin was always, even in his trembling later years, more of a ‘muzhik’ – a peasant, ‘son of the earth’, than his successor – and at his best was always more charismatic than Putin has ever been. So how did the poles of Putin’s big tent hold together for over a decade?

It was not only posturing. Yeltsin had told Russians what he wanted them to hear – that the Soviet Union had been a catastrophe and the lives they had led under it had been a deceit. Putin reversed this. He started telling Russians what the majority of normal people desperately wanted, even needed him to say. 43They had not lived decades of their lives in vain. The sacrifices and cults of the Soviet dream had been cruel, hopelessly flawed, but it had not all been a stupid mistake that could now be mocked. Soviet heroes and Soviet triumphs were still glorious even if the Union was gone. This is why Putin said, ‘Those who do not regret the fall of the USSR have no heart. Those who want to restore it have no brain.’ 44

The Kremlin was also at last providing them with the payslips they needed most. The Putin majority were simply grateful that their wages and state benefits were paid on time due to the economic upswing and stabilization of government finances. This was something that radically improved the lives of Russians – in a country where over 53 per cent are ‘budgetniki’, or reliant on state salaries, pensions or benefits. 45Within two to three years of Putin taking office, protests against withheld salaries and benefits had dried up. The most critical ‘stability’ Russians needed was provided for. The impact this had for normal people cannot be overestimated – the last time state paychecks and benefits had been stable and secure was in the first few years of Gorbachev.

TV never let them forget it. ‘Generous Putin’ was a propaganda staple. Campaigning for the Putin majority saw the regime consistently resort to high-PR spending campaigns. Here the regime defined itself against the perceived ‘heartlessness’ of Yeltsin. These included consistent efforts to redirect taxes from the energy sector into increased spending. These policies were sold to normal Russians as defending lower-middle-class interests. Starting in the early 2000s there were consistent salary raises for bureaucrats and state employees, pension increases, and rising investment in healthcare and education.

As the videocracy took shape, the teams around the deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, and the spin doctor Pavlovsky created Putin as a symbol very different from Vladimir Vladimirovich, the grey man from St Petersburg. The idealization of the leader as the nation’s father, friend, fighter and pride echoed disturbingly with the past. The opposition screamed that Russia was returning to a Stalinist leader cult. But they were creating an embodiment of the state, as much as glorifying a man, for exactly the same reasons as the 1930s developers of ‘agitprop’. By glorifying the state as a leader they covered up its shortcomings. There were also unnerving echoes to the cult of personality in the 1930s. As the historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore recounts:

His adopted son Artyom Sergeev remembers Stalin shouting at his son Vasily for exploiting his father’s name. ‘But I’m Stalin too’, said Vasily. ‘No, you’re not’, said Stalin. ‘You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me. 46

Looking back at what Pavlovsky and Surkov had done, Boris Mezhuev, the pale and piercing-eyed conservative philosopher from Moscow State University, only sighed. A decade later, with a cheap whisky in his hand in a grubby chain cafe frequented by his students in a rundown mall above the metro station, Mezhuev tried to half sum up and half excuse what had happened to them: ‘You see for a man of my generation, the 1990s left us with only two routes – one, to the border to Europe, the other to become a character out of Generation P.’

Generation P – which in Russian alludes to both ‘Generation Lost’, or ‘Generation Fucked’, is the book by the reclusive writer Victor Pelevin. It comes up again and again when normal Russians try to explain what the post-Soviet period was like to live through. It is seen in Russia as a self-portrait of the generation that went from perestroika idealists dreaming of democracy to Putinist cynics thinking everything is only PR. For them, the new regime was the end point of their failure and loss of faith. These were the same people that had gathered in their hundreds of thousands on Red Square against communism. Now they barely stood up for independent TV as disorientated, exhausted and disappointed by their dreams – they had lost the will to fight. What for?

Generation P is about an everyman called Babylen Tatarsky, who fell in love with Pasternak poems one summer in the countryside and enrolled in a Moscow literary institute, but whom the collapse has turned not into a poet but an impoverished shop assistant. Chance throws him into his true calling – tuning Western advertising to fit Soviet tastes. Grilled by his first boss to come up with a way to promote a cigarette brand called ‘Parliament’ he suddenly realizes that his whole diploma on Russian parliamentarianism was just a prelude for the chaos of post-communist consumerism:

Tatarsky had realized quite clearly that the entire history of parliamentarianism in Russia amounted to one simple fact – the only thing the word was good for was advertising Parliament cigarettes, and even there you actually could get by quite well without any parliamentarianism at all. 47

He is a cipher for the burnt-out Moscow media men that began as Berezovsky’s hacks and ended up putting the make-up on Putin. But certainly, what Mezhuev meant was not that he and Pavlovsky had turned into drug-fuelled wrecks, gorging on vodka and cocaine like Pelevin’s Tatarsky, who discovers that all Russian politicians are just 3D holograms made by advertising executives who kill each other for contracts. Neither of them tried to have a conversation with Che Guevara on a Ouija board or (to our knowledge) stumbled around on LSD coming up with branding strategies to make more money. What Mezhuev meant, what made Putin’s TV coup so easy, was that the 1990s left men his age living by the book’s morality, by these two phrases: