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

He was now running the campaign against the ‘Orange threat’ and building the party. ‘The bears’, as United Russia was known, was no longer what it had been in 1999. In its first election that year (then known as Unity) it had only got seventy-three seats, just over 23 per cent of the vote and come second to the Communist Party. Now halfway through Putin’s first presidency, Moscow was talking very differently. ‘The aim for this party,’ said the then leading United Russian deputy Sergey Markov, ‘is to create a party that could rule Russia for fifty years like the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan or the Christian Democrats in Italy.’ This was when Surkov’s career really took off. Though never promoted to have an official role in the party, perhaps because the revelation of his Chechen heritage excluded him from high elected office, Surkov was by mid-decade seen as the party’s official handler.

His project grew to gigantic proportions, with the Kremlin throwing all the energy into building up the membership base, the party infrastructure and the alliances it needed to ‘rule for fifty years’. His political technologists and cadres distributed the party card far and wide, amassing 300,000 members a year and topping the 2 million mark in 2008. 12The number of ‘bears’ kept on multiplying, as unofficially the authorities encouraged every official, policeman and ambitious businessman to sign on. The age when there was a ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ party membership had returned. ‘Bear bureaus’ were popping up everywhere – creating a vast network to campaign under slogans like ‘Into the Future with Putin’ or ‘Putin – Strength’. They opened no less than 2,597 district and 53,740 local offices from coast to coast. 13

Anything popular, they wanted to brand United Russia. So agreements were inked with seventy organizations, of all colours and causes, bringing even the potentially troublesome ‘Association of Chechens’ and the ‘Union of Georgians in Russia’, into Surkov’s fold. 14The most important of all recruits were the trade unions. Deals were signed first with the Oil, Gas and Construction Workers Union and then with the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia. 15In fact all forty-eight all-Russian workers’ organizations and seventy-nine regional trade unions ended up branded and integrated into the United Russia network. 16

To make Russia more generous, but a place where that generosity was synonymous with the party, United Russia started pouring money into more than sixty social projects and national charities it ran itself – with the ‘bears’ out campaigning for the ‘Libraries of Russia’, supporting ‘Our Towns’ or ‘Our Parents’. 17Pretty much any popular cause was soon also a United Russia cause. In this spirit, companies were encouraged to make donations to the party: fifty-seven in 2009 obliged, giving anything from $15,000 to over $1 million. 18These donations were seen as a way of publicly declaring your loyalty, whilst also paying a political insurance premium in case they ever needed to ask officials – so many of them now ‘bears’ – for a favour.

This party construction effort sucked the elites into its orbit. By 2007, sixty-five of the eighty-three regional governments ruled under the party colours and, three years later, a whopping sixty of the Forbes top hundred powerful Russians were ‘bears’. 19But the party also had its eyes on the future. The youth groups that Surkov had sent Pavlovsky and Markov to found, Nashi and the party youth league, the Young Guard, were increasingly treated not as easily organized mobs but as a modernized Komsomol in which to groom the next generation. Several front men were ‘kicked-upstairs’ to the Duma to set a good example. Surkov wanted twentysomethings to have an orderly upbringing, not like his own, because: ‘We almost completely lost the youth of the nineties.’ 20

All these efforts were rewarded. In 2008, Medvedev referred to it as the ‘ruling party’ and Putin – who had until this point thinly pretended to be ‘above party politics’ – promptly became its leader. 21By the end of the decade ‘Edro’, as the party became known, was present in every corner of the federation. This slang name began as a joke, but slowly became more apt than funny – ‘Edro’ sounds like the word for atom, the building blocks for everything.

The party tried to pretend it had a greater purpose than just consolidating power for Putin – ‘Putin’s Plan’. When the party boss Boris Gryzlov, a grey and moustachioed gentleman from St Petersburg, was pressed by journalists in 2007 to explain exactly what this plan was, he snapped defensively: ‘Putin’s plan is simply the chosen course of the current president… Putin is the leader in charge of current strategy and this is why we have dubbed his ideas “Putin’s plan”.’ 22

In other words, the plan was whatever Putin wanted. Yet Mr Gryzlov was not hiding some shadowy agenda within the party, but the fact that ‘the bears’ were not really a party at all. The political technologist turned deputy, Sergei Markov, once admitted to me, in between hollering down the phone denouncing the opposition in a live radio interview: ‘United Russia is not a party, or not yet anyway, it’s just a mechanism for controlling people.’

He was telling the truth. The Kremlin had created United Russia as a tool. It was their appendage, not the other way round. The party had zero bureaucratic control over the Kremlin or Putin’s inner circles. The organization, in and of itself, had next to zero policy influence. This meant that United Russia looked like a party, was organized like a party and campaigned like one but was actually more of a bureaucratic patronage network dressed in mass-party clothes. The leadership was powerless, because power was in Surkov’s office. In other words, this was a recipe for corruption.

Once, I waited for Olga Krystanovskaya, an intellectual star within the party, in the lobby of Moscow’s Hotel National. It is a horrible, expensive place opposite the Duma, replete with thick, unattractive ochre carpets, miserable grey moustached bellboys and function rooms where oil companies announce big deals – but a place to be seen.

As the leader of the liberal faction of United Russia and a sociologist who has authored acclaimed studies on the composition of the political elite, I expected Krystanovskaya to give me a more subtle, even positive understanding of the party than Markov. After yapping at the waitress for the hotel restaurant to ‘cook it now’, she rolled her eyes at questions about United Russia’s internal debates.

‘You don’t understand, we are not a party like you have in the West, where the decision-making centre is inside the party. We have a decision-making centre outside the party, so when we get the order we move. When we have no orders we don’t.’

When even its most senior members spoke of United Russia like this, it was only a matter of time before videos would start to leak, showing what the Duma now looked like. Managed democracy had rendered the chamber so lifeless that deputies increasingly could not even be bothered to turn up. In 2003 it was estimated that as many as fifty-seven of them had not attended more than three times, a figure that rose to ninety-seven two years later. 23‘It is simply shameful to watch the empty seats’, publicly cursed Medvedev in 2010, ‘You must go to work!’ 24He had perhaps seen this infamous clip. In the near empty Duma, deputies could be seen clambering over empty chairs to press the ‘yes’ buzzers of those not present. Some of the few deputies there are sleeping through the vote, slumped like drunks asleep on the metro.

As the Kremlin built up United Russia as a patronage system and United Russia asphyxiated the Duma with its majority, the chamber quietly died as a meaningful institution. Most of its new members had little interest in being politicians at all, rarely giving interviews and spending as little time as possible in the debating chamber. The number of deputies that could be named even by keen observers seemed to decrease year after year, as less and less pretended to lead political lives. Even their own men were forced to admit that something was going awry.