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

Everyone of a certain creative disposition claims to identify with these people, or for that matter John Lennon, whose framed portrait is also in his cabinet. What is unnerving are the frames by the windowsill, next to his catalogues on modern architecture. They show an alarming degree of insight into the nature of celebrity and its relationship to power in telepopulism. They are the framed portraits of Werner Heisenberg, the Nazi physicist who failed to build Hitler an atomic bomb but developed the ‘uncertainty principle’; the beaming Tupac Shakur in a hoodie, the 75 million record-selling hip-hop megastar of the 1990s; next to the quizzical stare of Barack Obama, pressing two fingers to his lips. Are we to presume that these are the inspiration for the ‘Alpha Male’?

It would sicken all of them, no doubt, to know their portraits were placed as symbols of mocking self-awareness in the office of the man who created United Russia as a hegemonic party, announced ‘Sovereign Democracy’ as an ideology and injected into the country constant doses of propaganda, paranoia and fraud, by a man who excelled at ruling through patronage and corruption, whose name became synonymous in Putin’s Russia with amorality and lies.

The pictures get to the heart of who Surkov is – and the insincerity at the heart of the Putin project. This is a man who is believed to have written a play under a pseudonym, the maiden name of his wife, which denounces the very system he had created and called it Around Zero . In the drama’s introduction he wrote: ‘this is the best book I have ever read’. 2‘In Russia to be a gangster,’ cries out its central character, ‘is not to err but to conform.’ 3

The story of Vladislav Surkov, in his ten years as the ‘grey cardinal’ who managed democracy from this office, is not only the story of how the system was built – it is the story of how Russia is ruled.

The forces that had weakened Yeltsin’s Kremlin had been raucous TV and a raucous Duma. To tame these for Putin, the ‘grey cardinal’ brought politicians onside in hundreds of little meetings in this office. ‘He asked what I wanted from him materially in return for joining the party,’ remembers Vladimir Ryzhkov, at the time the deputy speaker of parliament, ‘When I told him that I wasn’t in need of anything, Surkov was genuinely surprised.’ 4

Surkov created his clients by corrupting them. This office was one of the operations centres of a racket that a US Embassy cable source (his name deleted) described with ‘officials going into the Kremlin with large suitcases and bodyguards’, which the source speculated ‘are full of money’, and ‘governors collect money based on bribes, almost resembling a tax system’. 5

It was from this office that the Kremlin orchestrated the most important ‘no-alternative elections’. Any genuinely dangerous opposition candidates were allowed no coverage on the national TV stations it oversaw, let alone allowed to register to compete directly in any votes. This meant that unless you read one of the liberal newspapers with a tiny circulation, or a few blogs – out in the provinces the opposition simply did not exist.

That was, of course, if there were any left – as so extensively were potential enemies, even former foes, brought onside with plum but powerless positions in the establishment. The opposition leaders left officially competing for the Kremlin, the ones on Surkov’s speed dial, had been turned into Putin’s clowns. They include: the buffoonish half-Jewish anti-Semitic nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose ‘policies’ have included suggesting bringing polygamy into practice in Russia, reclaiming Alaska or a 2008 modest proposal to drop nuclear bombs in the Atlantic Ocean to flood Britain; also the perennial leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, who called for the ‘re-Stalinization of Russia’. They secured in the mind of the majority of badly informed Russians an impression that anyone opposing Putin is a fool.

All of this created a system rigged for only one force to win, United Russia – the party of power.

It was another idea of the accidental father of Putin’s Russia – Boris Berezovsky. It was 1999 and ‘Operation Successor’ was nearing conclusion, but the oligarch was not fit enough to celebrate. He had contracted hepatitis and with acute pains down his spine was lying in a hospital bed ‘in delirium’, tied up to a drip, fantasizing about a Kremlin party, a new party of power. 6‘I had a temperature of 39ˆC, but at such moments the thinking process gets better. At first I began to think about the symbols of this movement… the Volga River came to me, then birch trees… but in the end I settled on a bear.’ 7

One of the men who came to visit Berezovsky was the new first deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov. This young man was the big thing in Moscow PR and had been brought into the family by Voloshin, the chief of staff. They knew they needed the best ‘political technologist’ going and looked no further than who was working for the oligarchs. It was the 1990s and Surkov had 1990s dreams – ‘I wanted to be like the hero in the movie Pretty Woman ’, as he put it. 8

The young Vladislav Surkov hadn’t always been called this. He was a natural at PR because he was used to half-truths. He was born as Aslambek Dudayev in the Chechen village of Duba-Yurt in 1964. His mother was a Russian schoolteacher, his father a Chechen who had gone off to military college and never came back. Once she realized they had been abandoned, his mother took him away from Chechnya, back to Ryazan in central Russia, where she changed his name to that of her own family – Surkov. He was then five years old.

They remember him as a brilliant young man, who was a hit with the girls. As Russia threw off communism, which he called ‘an enormous parasite’, he was experimenting with careers at a dizzying rate. 9First metallurgy, then two years in the army (they say it was military intelligence) in socialist Hungary, then back to Moscow and drama school, from which he was expelled for fighting. At the age of twenty-three he was recommended as a bodyguard to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who upgraded him almost immediately to the business team. ‘He was a real hipster,’ his colleagues remember, sometimes not pitching up to work before lunch. 10But he was so brilliant that he managed to put the first advert on Soviet TV for Khodorkovsky’s Bank Menatep. But he fell out with the young tycoon, who refused to make him a partner, winding up at the rival Alfa Group doing PR to further their bid for Russian domination. This is where the ‘family’ found him.

‘There are no limits to a man’s flexibility,’ Surkov shrugged when asked about the arrest of Khodorkovsky, his former friend. 11By then Surkov was famous in Moscow as an icon of post-modern cynicism, who smoked constantly, loved Allen Ginsberg and was always at the best gallery openings. Yet despite all this, he was the one who was building in the name of Putin the party that had been born in Berezovsky’s delirious mind – United Russia.

The half-real, half-imagined Yukos threat had taught the Kremlin that it needed to make sure that it had a rock-solid control of the Duma. The half-real, half-imagined Orange threat had taught the Kremlin it needed propaganda and a huge support base to block what had happened in Kiev from ever happening in Moscow. Surkov had proved his loyalty to Putin when he did not resign – like his old patron Voloshin – during the Khodorkovsky affair. The consequences of the Yukos threat and the ‘Orange menace’ was that Putin came to see that the propaganda and political party projects Surkov was running were not just important but vital. They were upgraded and so was he, to the level of presidential aide in 2004.