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

Putin’s failure has turned Russia into a country of gigantic contradictions. It has modernized as a society but degenerated as a state. It has grown wealthier, but more fragmented and feudalized. Russia has globalized and real incomes have soared by over 140 per cent, but institutions have slid into racketeering and fraud. This book investigates how people see politics in a country where Moscow has more billionaires than New York, whose economy grew faster than that of Brazil through the 2000s, which has the biggest online presence in Europe and one of the most engaged social media followings in the world; but where in 2010 indicators warned it was as corrupt as Papua New Guinea, with the property rights of Kenya, as easy to do business in as Uganda and as competitive as Sri Lanka.

This is an anguished, broken society and Putin is not shaping it. His initiatives to meld it such as the Nashi youth movement and ideologies such as ‘sovereign democracy’ have flopped. In spite of the state, this nation is going its own way – finding itself in new churches and supermarkets, as it crystallizes into a twisted civil society that venerates vigilantes and demonizes corrupt officials. This is a country pulling apart, in the grips of a culture war – where the Russian Patriarch calls the Putin era ‘a miracle of God’, but the heroes of the wild Moscow underground, the hippest scene in Europe, are the brightly coloured balaclavas of the Pussy Riot girl band who said a ‘punk prayer’ in the main cathedral. 4

It was not always like this. This book asks why Putin was once as popular as a true Russian hero like Yuri Gagarin, gathering an immense fortune in political capital, only to squander it. I show how Putin found a sophisticated way both to ‘manage democracy’ and censor the media – but also seduced millions of Russians by telling them what they desperately wanted, even needed him to say. This book illustrates how the Putin court was corrupt and dysfunctional from the very beginning, but explains why Russians supported him as he failed to build the modern, fully functioning state that they desperately wanted.

I saw the peak of Putinism. At the end of the 2008 war in Georgia I watched Russian troops mourn the dead and celebrate victory in South Ossetia as the approval rating of the ‘national leader’ hit 83 per cent. 5They believed Putin had restored Russia as a great power. Yet at the end of 2011 I watched huge rallies in Moscow as protestors called for him to dismantle this same system. They believed he had stolen the elections and even the state. On the streets, it looked as if Putin had lost control of events.

Between those two moments in Russian history the consequences of this regime have become clear and the changes that are now undermining it began. This book tells the story. It asks how Putin could squander that dizzying peak of popularity after his victory in 2008. It shows how he only entrenched his tsar-like power when demonstrators took to the streets in winter 2011–12 denouncing as illegitimate what they now called his ‘party of crooks and thieves’.

A new era is being born. The old Putin model is bust and Putinism by consent slowly coming to an end. To understand what is happening to Russia I have travelled from St Petersburg to Vladivostok to find the consequences of the Putin regime and the contours of this new era. I wanted to understand the opposition and their unnerving heroes. What promising and troubling things do they say about the Russian future? I try to explain how this movement has started to undermine the regime, but is not as powerful a force as one might expect them to be. Across the country discontent is enormous, but resistance still marginal. I wanted to find out why, although the regions can barely tolerate the status quo because they feel like Moscow colonies under the ‘vertical of power’, even in the most remote and suffering cities many people still feel there is no alternative to Putin. Regime legitimacy has collapsed, but nothing has yet replaced it in people’s hearts. The book ends with a look into Russia’s nightmares in the Far East – to ask if this ramshackle system is strong enough to resist the rise of China.

To write this book I travelled 30,000km over five years. I crossed Russia from the Baltic to the Pacific twice, interviewing hundreds of people in places where most Western journalists never go: catching rides in the trucks of wild gold miners on the ice road between Yakutsk and Magadan, travelling down Siberian rivers with Old Believers to find unelectrified villages, talking to the shamans and witches of Tuva. I even travelled on a Russian military truck over the ceasefire line into South Ossetia at the end of the Georgian war. I tried to spend as much time as possible with ordinary Russians in unglamorous places, from the grease-bars of Kaliningrad, to the roadside cafeterias of Nizhny Tagil and the minimarkets of Khabarovsk; it is their views and fears that have done more to shape my analysis than any other. From criminals to conscripts and cadres, I have tried to interview people from every walk of life about their country. When I talk about Russia, or the regions, I am referring to these thousands of interviews as a whole.

I criss-crossed Moscow hundreds of times on Stalin’s clattering underground, rushing to meet opposition leaders, analysts, politicians and officials. I found in Moscow a city that resembled Berlin and Chicago in the 1930s, with a seasoning of Paris in the 1960s – a place where my generation had defined itself against its elders, like nowhere else in Europe, with the same fizzing romantic resistance of the 1960s baby-boomers. They will inescapably assume power. I cannot remember the Cold War or the Soviet Union – I come from a new generation, the generation of the anti-Putin protesters on the street. I hope my new perspective mirrors theirs: not post-Soviet, but non-Soviet.

Inside the state, I had the chance to speak to ministers, governors, officers and even the Federal Security Service (FSB), who in detaining me and confiscating an early manuscript became by accident the first readers of this book. Picking up a draft, the FSB officer interrogating me asked if I realized how volatile and close to disintegration Russia really was (‘Russia can collapse again! Into a bloodbath of civil war without us to stop it…’). This book is about this apocalyptic fear, which shapes Russia – how it brought Putin to power, how he uses it to stay in power and how it is now being turned against him.

Only when something starts to fall apart, can we understand how it really worked. To answer the question ‘what is wrong with twenty-first-century Russia?’ we need to know why Russia fell in love with Putin, the man who now epitomizes the country’s ills, whose name is a synonym for the state. Why Putin? What was the Russia that made him? What had it come to for a man like him to be handed power? Who was this sullen lieutenant colonel from the swamps of St Petersburg?

PUTIN’S MOTHER is dead. So is his father. His wife Lyudmila is eerily absent. She is no longer by his side at the goose-step parades or the never-ending animal shoots. On the rare occasions that she appears in public, to show she is still alive, the woman is unsteady on her feet and seems to flinch at his touch. His daughters are a state secret. This television tsar seems lonely, exercising alone in echoing halls, as if terrified of physical decay.

But in St Petersburg, an elderly woman with concerned, maternal eyes still watches him strut on the evening news. Vera Gurevich, old but not frail, is the person who remembers his childhood best. Her voice wavers, suddenly on the edge of a cackle, then suddenly speeds up. Her eyes are bright blue, a pasty colour that you only seem to find among the very old. To everyone but her, he has become the state. In 2012, once the protests and jeers that shook the regime as he retuned himself the title of President abated, I felt I needed to speak to someone like this. I can imagine a day when there will be nobody who really knows Putin left.