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

Across the country their $17 million budget was being spent building a new Komsomol that would feed recruits and rally the youth around the party of power. On the surface, a network of regional commissars were thrown up, teams of local agitators chucked together in all major cities, lecture tours and conferences kick-started with the old ‘pioneer camps’ being reborn as an annual ‘Seliger’ festival, named after the lake where it was held. In the shadows a ‘battle-wing’ was coming together to smash the ‘Orange threat’. At first, these toughs had to live no further than a night bus away from the Kremlin, to be there by morning to lock arms around it. For all the fancy seminars, which looked at first glance like ambitious projects for a ‘Putin Youth’, the Nashi were on closer inspection a primitive financial dog-whistle there to get paid thugs into Moscow, hatched by men who clearly suspected they were not legitimate enough to rely on the army and the police if the ‘Orange hour’ ever struck. The campaign against the enemy within had begun.

Russia had changed, darkened by Khodorkovsky, Beslan and Kiev. The Kasyanov government had been replaced by one of pliant cadres. Reform had slowed. Yet the former prime minister was holding out hopes to become Putin’s choice for mayor of Moscow. As these dreams began to wither, he grew increasingly embittered at having been cut out of Russian politics – especially, he thought, since so much reform had been pushed through on his watch. Kasyanov began visiting his old mentor, the ageing and ill Yeltsin, in his retirement dacha. It was a ‘golden cage’, which Yeltsin was certain was bugged:

‘He had a very high quality of life in the official state dacha, with official state cars. But he had bound himself not to criticize Putin. He was within a year extremely disappointed in him. He was completely against all the moves he was doing against the freedom of the press, to the parliament, to the governors, violating the constitution but pretending it had remained. This truly pained Yeltsin. He was extremely torn, morally and psychologically, by what Putin had become. And this inner torment I believe was one of the reasons that contributed to his death.’

It was not only clear to Yeltsin but much of the Moscow establishment that the regime was not quite the triumph it sold itself as on TV. In one way or another most agreed with the Khodorkovsky diagnosis – the state was inefficient. So why did Russia’s elite continue to support Putin so passionately in his early years – despite the fact that the many shortcomings over terrorism, the rule of law and corruption were in plain sight? Khodorkovsky’s sentence frightened the oligarchs, but it does not explain why there was a consensus, even passion, amongst the intelligentsia, the rank and file members of United Russia or the ‘deep state’ that had no fear of arrest.

Putinism is apocalyptic. The project is presented as nothing less than Russia’s last chance to survive as a state: ‘Russia will be a great power or she will not be at all.’ The fear that should he fail, the country would fall into anarchy, pulled the establishment together. There was still widespread fear that Russia could collapse again. In private, many expressed their fears that Russia could within a few decades cease to exist. Demographics, China, Muslims, oil price crashes… there were many demons.

Nor was such an apocalyptic way of talking about Russia – an inevitable product of the fall of the Soviet Union and the 1990s collapse – restricted to Russians. The Western establishment used very similar language. The US National Intelligence Estimate ‘World in 2015’ and ‘World in 2025’ coolly predicted that Russia was at risk of dissolution, demographic imbalances and strategic irrelevance. As the pro-Kremlin intellectual Vyacheslav Glazychev once said of the Putin majority: ‘Horror vacui – the fear of empty space – is most probably the important underlying reason for the unshakeable nature of this belief.’ 65

In the Kremlin itself they speak in the same apocalyptic tones about Putin, to the extent that you worry they believe it. ‘You have to understand that Putin cannot let Russia go. Russia is his project. He has to hold on to it,’ barked one wide-eyed government aide, leaning forward and touching my arm to stress his point: ‘For the first time in a hundred years the country is developing like it should. For eighty years we were under a Marxist experiment and then ten years of total chaos. He brought order and stability. He saved us… Putin saved us… And only in twenty years will he be appreciated. Can you even imagine what Russia would have been without him?’

THIS IS the view from his Kremlin office.

Under the pristine white of the Ivan bell tower is the world’s largest bell, which was cracked and never rung. Under the golden domes of the Cathedral of the Dormition is the world’s largest cannon, which was botched in the making so could never be fired. Behind the slender turrets of the palace of the Patriarch are the concrete pillars of the palace of the Soviets. Over the red walls are the peaks of Stalin’s towers, but the eye seems to drift back to the five golden cupolas of the Dormition. There is a legend in Moscow that when the German armies reached its outskirts, during the blizzards of 1941, their forward units closer to these walls than Sheremetyevo Airport is today, these exhausted men from Munich and Dusseldorf swore they could see its gold-tipped towers, that in this cathedral Stalin ordered a secret service to be held. And the priests begged God to save the Soviet Union, which according to legend – they called ‘Rossiya’.

This is the view from the office of the man known as the ‘grey cardinal’, the first deputy chief of staff in the Kremlin (1999–2011), the man charged with managing (‘manipulating’) domestic politics on Putin’s behalf. His name is synonymous with the Putin system: Vladislav Surkov. For ten years this room was the nerve centre of Russia’s managed democracy. Or, to be more precise, his secure-line telephones were. These six beige machines seem of a Soviet vintage and are a sign of apparatchik status. In January 2011 the speed-dial buttons on the largest phone bore several surnames in block capitals. Some, given their roles at the time, are of no surprise: RAPOTA – SVR, plenipotentiary to the Volga Federal District; KUDRIN – finance minister; ZORKIN – chair of the Constitutional Court; SHUVALOV – first deputy prime minister.

Others are to be expected, but depressing to see nonetheless, for a country that pretends to be a democracy with opposition parties in the Duma: MIRONOV – leader of ‘Fair Russia’; ZYUGANOV – leader of the ‘Communist Party of the Russian Federation’; ZHIRINOVSKY – leader of the ‘Liberal Democratic Party of Russia’.

This is not the strangest thing about Surkov’s office, but what everyone always suspected. It was always well known that the Kremlin had a special department to deal with the ‘tamed opposition’ in the Duma. The unnerving oddities are the photographs that Surkov has chosen to frame. It is not his portrait of Putin in a knitted jumper, with a fatherly smile, nor is it surprising that there are portraits of Che Guevara, Jorge Luis Borges and Joseph Brodsky in the cabinet, beside a sign in Chinese characters that says ‘Sovereign Democracy’. That a man who harangued politicians to vote the way he asked them to, dictated news broadcasts, created fake parties, instigated Nashi, oversaw ballot stuffing, directed election campaigns in contests without alternatives, was the boss of Gleb Pavlovsky and all Putin’s political technologists: that he should consider himself a kindred spirit with a revolutionary, a writer and a poet tried in a Soviet kangaroo court – that he should consider himself an artist – is no surprise. 1