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

The trouble for Khodorkovsky was that outside the liberal intelligentsia in the capital, because of the crimes of the 1990s – as he now claimed to painfully see from his bunk in the penal colony – the country more or less agreed with Putin. In deepest Russia he was seen as little better than a better-dressed Berezovsky. The President’s popularity, on the other hand, only climbed.

The irony of the injustice – for all those in the factory towns who smiled at the news of an oligarch getting what in their minds he deserved – is that given the scale of corruption in the Putin court, these resources that had been nationalized were going to be used for private gain in much the same way they had been when they belonged to a private company.

The man who had an army of bodyguards, and his own former KGB generals on staff, ended up behind barbed wire in a penal colony in outer Siberia, attached to a uranium mine, not far from the Chinese border, in a camp that in Soviet times few returned back to Europe from alive. There he was made to sew gloves with the inmates, lost all parole for refusing to sew ever more of them, and one night his cellmate would stab him in the face with a cobbler’s knife. There, he wrote that he had realized what had jailed him: ‘the authoritarian project, a direct consequence of “Yeltsin-1996”’, which had been his project.

This is not a ‘morality play’. Ideas about ‘redemption’ in prison are not the way to judge the consequences of Khodorkovsky’s actions on Russia, only on himself. If we take this man at face value, if we believe that he did not want to be president, but wanted to rally democratic Russia, we need to judge him as a politician. So what were the results? In less than a year of his incarceration in Siberia: his company was lost to the state and with it went the main funder for the opposition. The liberal parties he backed failed to make it back in to the Duma in the 2004 elections and defeat left them in disarray, squabbling as their money ran out. The bottom line was that the huge Yukos supporter of a pro-American Russia had disappeared. Khodorkovsky had, in the end, helped neither Nemtsov nor Yavlinsky, or even Zyuganov, but only Sechin.

So let us ask: if a general fighting for a democratic Russia, who views his oil company as ‘ammunition’ for his forces, leads his men into a forest, refuses to ‘go on one knee’ (no matter if it would have been good tactics), gets surrounded then captured, has his ammunition stolen from him, his men scattered and is imprisoned in the Gulag – is this general a hero, or is he a failure?

As I sat reading Khodorkovsky’s letter from his faraway cell for the first time it was these words that struck me. They came from a man who considered himself both:

My impression of Russia has not particularly changed in jail. Actually, I did not have any illusions before either. It is a huge backward country with a very segmented, weak society and an atomised population, the majority of whom feel themselves not to be citizens, but serfs to various kinds of ‘bosses’.

Of the new things I now feel – only that of my own personal responsibility for what is happening, which weighs very heavily on me. The responsibility of a person who could and can change something, and this means I must at least try. The older I get the more frightening it becomes to face the Creator. I believe more and more: He gave us strength, and He will ask us to account for how we have thoughtlessly wasted it on secondary things. Someone who does not believe has it easier in this sense, perhaps.

Putin’s circle has never felt fully secure for long. Shocks have constantly left them on the defensive, cobbling the system together in an ad hoc, unplanned manner, as threats to power emerged. This is a government that spends vastly more of its time in crisis management mode than the White House.

Crisis makes the personality of a leader central. When a problem suddenly explodes and engulfs the agenda, what matters are not his beliefs or his programmes but gut instincts, the way he improvises. Politics under pressure is how you react on your feet, not how you implement a plan. Gorbachev’s instincts were ultimately democratic. Yeltsin’s were those of a megalomaniac. Putin’s instincts proved anti-democratic, paranoid and authoritarian. They could even be called Chekist – the Russian expression for a secret serviceman’s world-view.

Kasyanov’s tenure as prime minister saw the Putin government evolve from one that was considered liberal by the Russian elite into entrenched authoritarianism. He believes there was no plan – this was the product of cumulative reactions:

Putin’s authoritarianism was about eliminating risks to his power – free TV became a risk, it was eliminated, when elections became a risk, they were eliminated, when parliament became a risk, it was eliminated – this is all because Putin was frightened of genuine competition. It moved step by step, as each risk appeared he reacted forcefully to it. Putin was frightened of being exposed.

Kasyanov is right – Putin’s turning points came when he felt hunted. TV and Khodorkovsky, the two things that had threated to expose him, were destroyed. Yet why did a regime with virtually no effective opposition in the early 2000s fear criticism so intensely? Why did a hugely popular president – who had conquered Grozny and passed effective reforms – fear open competition?

The answer is that Khodorkovsky was right. Russia’s economic crisis was over but its governance crisis was not. And the reason Putin became so frightened of him is that he was exposing that in his speeches. The government was failing in basic tasks – behind the telepopulism there was no let up in corruption, terrorism and lawlessness. Khodorkovsky knew that had Putin’s real record been discussed on national TV it would not have shone. His popularity was not in sync with his performance. Contrary to what the public was being told during Putin’s first presidency, the country actually saw more murders, more terrorist attacks and greater corruption than under Yeltsin. This grim record is what made TV censorship and silent oligarchs so important for the Kremlin.

Despite the counter-terror bravado of ‘wasting them in their outhouses’, Russia’s rising numbers of victims stood out internationally. Between 2001 and 2007 the country lost 1,170 lives to terrorist attacks, making it the third most terrorist-prone country in the world after Afghanistan and Iraq. In those same years Israel lost ‘only’ 158 lives and Pakistan ‘just’ 222. 54

Every attack uncovered incapable officials, corruption and trails of collusion. The 2002 Dubrovka theatre siege in central Moscow shocked Russia, both because its crack troops proved cack-handed and because, despite all the military efforts in the Caucasus, some forty terrorists with large amounts of weapons could still be casually driving around the capital. In the Dubrovka theatre more than 1,000 theatregoers were held hostage by Chechen terrorists and 140 killed in a bungled assault. Unconscious bodies, knocked out by a mysterious gas used by Russian special forces, were left in piles outside the theatre, many choking on their own vomit. This horror could not be kept off TV. One expert estimated that it left 30 million people needing ‘psychological help’. 55

Nor was this the end of it. Attacks with the impact of London’s 7/7 bombing kept on coming. In 2004, two passenger jets exploded after leaving Moscow’s main airport. The dismal cause of the security breach was that both of the suicide bombers had bribed airport staff $140 to be let aboard.

Yet the most graphic illustration of Putin’s failure took place in a Christian town in the North Caucasus. Beslan is a synonym for carnage in Russian. Here the rain comes down from the mountains and the air is filled with the tension of a frozen conflict. Local North Ossetian security forces spit at neighbouring Chechens and Ingush. They are not seen as fellow people of the Russian federation, but enemy tribes. Moscow is not spoken of like a modern federal centre, but as the imperial centre – the armed pacifier, policeman and arbiter of the mountains. ‘When I was in Russia,’ is the way the locals talk; ‘over in Russia things are different’.