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

Tatarsky, of course, hated most of the manifestations of Soviet power, but he still couldn’t understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland. But then, Tatarsky had never been a great moral thinker, so he was less concerned with the analysis of events (what was actually going on) than with the problem of surviving them. 48

RUSSIAN HISTORY beats to the years in which the leader makes a great turn. Stalin overhauled his agenda in 1929 and set the party on a road to super-industrialization and terror. Gorbachev came out as a radical in 1988 when he announced ‘glasnost’ – the openness the system could not survive. Yeltsin the ‘impeccable democrat’ turned in 1993, when he ordered the Alfa commando force to storm the same parliament he had barricaded himself within – in the name of ‘democracy’ – from these same commandoes in 1991.

The year that Putin made his great turn was 2003. It closed the era where he ruled like Yeltsin’s heir. It was the moment when Russia lurched decisively into an authoritarian regime. This was the year that those who had gone along with ‘the Russian Pinochet’ first got a taste of what that meant, the year when those who trusted in Yeltsin’s judgement first sat up in shock. Even Boris Nemtsov was stunned. ‘At first I thought because he was a Yeltsin man – he was a man like me! I had no idea what he would turn into.’

Putin is not an intellectual and not a romantic. He does not, like many Russian politicians, come from the ranks of the intelligentsia. His family home in a Leningrad komunalka was not a home to books, hushed conversations about repression or whispers of doubt. His mother was a janitor. Once describing his childhood, he mentioned an orthodox Jew who would read the Talmud in the communal apartment, but said, ‘I am not interested in such things.’ 1His eldest brother died in infancy, and his second older brother died of diphtheria in the war. His father survived the conflagration but with extensive wounds. Putin brawled in the streets; summing up his childhood, he recalls, ‘I was a real thug.’ 2

Putin has a harsh, uncompromising view of the world. Those close to the German intelligence agency, which watched his time in Dresden, claim that he beat his wife. 3From time to time, his disdain for the doctrinaire thinking of Soviet communists or Russian liberals seeps out, neither of whom he sees as genuine problem-solvers but blames for the double disaster. Putin thinks he is a practical man.

He is obsessed by history and considers himself a Russian conservative. He is fond of recalling the words of the reformist authoritarian minister between 1906 and 1911, Pyotr Stolypin: ‘Give the government twenty years of stability and you will no longer recognize Russia.’ Stolypin brooked no dissent and in the slang of the day the hangman’s noose was known as ‘Stolypin’s tie’. Putin has built a statue to him in Moscow. After a century of passionate commissars and dissidents, cosmonauts and novelists, his hero is an unemotional bureaucrat whose mission in life was to keep Russia’s ideological, animal spirits down, so that it could get on with its development. In a reversion to tsarist conservatism, rejecting the revolutionary spirit of 1917 and 1991, stability is sacred.

Putin’s tone is close to that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the inheritor of the Russian conservative tradition beloved of the West. Towards the end of the writer’s life, a stroke left his right hand paralyzed and his hand gnarled, but he had found a ruler he could praise. He had spent the 1990s with a biweekly talk show with a lot of screaming – ‘it’s a nightmare!’, ‘this is terrible!’, ‘outrageous!’. This enemy of the Soviets, with a low opinion of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the West, admired Putin despite his KGB past. For Solzhenitsyn, under his leadership Russia was ‘re-discovering what it meant to be Russian’. 4He had returned to the motherland in 1994 from his Soviet-imposed exile in the United States, embarking on a journey, or perhaps a pilgrimage, from the Pacific to Europe. Meeting with anxious families and the hungry he found a ‘poor and demoralized country,’ which he did not consider suited to Western democracy. 5Like Putin, he came to believe that only a long-term, distinctively Russian form of liberal authoritarianism, where Church and state are partners, could restore the nation. ‘Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country,’ said Solzhenitsyn, ‘and he started to do with it what was possible – a slow and gradual restoration.’ 6

He accepted from Putin the highest honours of state, which he had refused from the hands of Yeltsin. There in the Kremlin, Solzhenitsyn spoke his mind – ‘Of course Russia is not a democracy yet and it’s only just starting to build a democracy so it’s all too easy to take it to task with a long list of omissions, violations and mistakes.’ His vision of reconstruction was uncannily similar to Putin’s frequent invocation of the nineteenth-century tsarist foreign minister Alexander Gorchakov’s line, ‘Russia is calm, Russia is concentrating’, as the empire built up its forces after humiliation in the Crimean War.

Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn considered the development of a party system ‘irrelevant’ for Russia and believed ‘human duties’ were as important as human rights. 7After traversing the country in 1994, Solzhenitsyn published a pamphlet, republished in millions of copies, titled ‘How to Rebuild Russia’. He argued that Russia needed to rebuild itself around a Slavic-Orthodox core of Ukraine, Belarus and northern Kazakhstan – ‘for we do not have the strength for the periphery’. 8It is a pamphlet that every politician of his generation claims to have read. Trying to integrate with these countries, whilst ignoring the Muslim ex-SSRs yet refusing to let them fall out of a Russian sphere of influence, has dominated Putin’s foreign policy. Like Solzhenitsyn, Putin has a world-view that is old fashioned for his country. He claims to not use the Internet as he thinks, ‘50 per cent is porn material’, believes Russia needs a ‘strong hand’ and that he is beloved by an abstract ‘real Russia’ in the heartland. 9Putin is distrustful of international organizations and liberal Muscovites alike. Solzhenitsyn, of course, due to his post-Soviet politics, is not universally revered in Russia, but mocked for his faux-tsarist diction and as an anti-Semitic sham-sage.

At a dinner in Paris, Putin was asked who his heroes were. He said that in his office he had the portraits of two tsarist legends, Peter the Great and Alexander Pushkin, and a European one – General Charles de Gaulle. 10This point is both flattery and something more. Like de Gaulle, who sought to bridge France’s schizophrenic traditions of revolutionary republicanism and monarchism, Putin sees himself as bringing together both tsarist and Soviet traditions. This is how Putin imagines himself.

Putin’s economic thinking is also an attempt to bridge Soviet and free-market techniques. This is clear from his only piece of book-length political writing. Putin did not in fact write this, his ‘dissertation’. It was partly plagiarized and almost certainly ghost written. The text comes from his unemployed interlude between St Petersburg and Moscow, when Putin was anxious to burnish his credentials and find a new job. After Sobchak’s 1996 election defeat he turned to the St Petersburg Mining Institute. He had engaged in discussions at the institute on the post-Soviet economy with associates throughout the 1990s. He had friends there. So, Putin used his contacts to obtain a ‘candidate’s dissertation’, the equivalent of a PhD.