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

‘I know it is a rather paradoxical situation,’ grudgingly noted the young Nashi lawmaker Robert Shlegel, one of Surkov’s rising stars, ‘that we have a lot of members of parliament who are… not public people.’

All this was not lost on the ‘great puppet master’ himself. At their closed meetings, Surkov lambasted the ‘bears’ as failures and profiteers:

You cannot always be on life support! You need to be smart to survive… More importantly you need to enhance the thinking process. The intellectual life of this party is at zero. If only you could have come up with some interesting comments, like, ‘We hoped for the best but it turned out like always’… but nothing. However, if you sleep colleagues, nothing terrible will happen. We will consider you a trailer and we will be the engine. 25

Maybe Surkov was not so smart after all. A party built as a trailer cannot simultaneously be a car. He knew perfectly well why the party was incompetent, because he had not built it to be competent, but to be answerable to the Kremlin’s commands.

Amassing all this power was sold to the people like this. In the 1990s Russia had been in chaos. In the 2000s Putin was building what he called a ‘vertical of power’. The bureaucracy would have iron down its spine and it would be answerable to him. Russia would become rigid. This vertical, he promised, would deliver what Russians so desperately wanted – a modern state.

Surkov, of course, never believed that Putin’s vague vision of a vertical of power made much sense. He is far too clever for that. ‘Our average bureaucrat has an archaic understanding of the technologies of power,’ he commented in the safety of the German press in 2005, ‘He imagines it as a vertical line with a telephone on top… and that’s how the country is governed.’ 26

This is exactly what Putin wanted. His great ambition had not been to restore a party state. He had not been scarred by the loss of socialism, or even really the empire. What truly horrified Putin, when he first arrived in the Kremlin, was the near fiction of a Russian ‘Federation’. One of his first jobs for Yeltsin was being his senior official charged with regional affairs. Putin knew, better than anyone, how weak Moscow’s control over its own territories really was in 1999. It appeared to pain him. One opposition leader remembers coming to see the young hope to complain about the murder of one of his activists in the Buddhist republic of Kalmykia. In an outburst that seemed to be filled with anguish, even powerlessness, Putin snapped: ‘What do you expect? Everyone in Kalmykia is completely corrupt! What can I do? The system is completely corrupt!’ 27

Putin systematically dismantled Russian federalism. This is because the traumatic experience of working as Yeltsin’s eye on the regions never left him. This was a key part of his agenda from the start, unlike most of his political moves into authoritarianism, where he was reactively trying to crush any challenges that threatened to undermine him as they appeared.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of his approach, the problems he was trying to deal with were real. Not only the ‘siloviks’ but also the free-market types in government agreed with him. ‘Getting control over the governors again, who had been flirting with separatism and illegally funding themselves,’ remembers Kasyanov; ‘we always viewed this as one of our main tasks.’ The former prime minister recalls that Russia was in a governance crisis as bad as its fiscal crisis:

Then all these measures really seemed necessary, since after the 1998 crisis, there were big problems with the governors, who all ‘swallowed’ as much sovereignty as it was possible to digest, and in fact destroyed any common economic and legal space in Russia. The country was divided into fiefdoms, in which the governor was the king and god, who did not always obey the federal laws of the centre. The governors were delaying or preventing the exports from one region or the products of another, or conversely, prohibiting the import of agricultural products or alcohol themselves from other regions. 28

Putin shared this diagnosis. It was in this initial mess that the slogan ‘the vertical of power’ was coined to fend off accusations of chaos inside the administration. This opaque slogan became the Putinist synonym for recentralization.

The greatest source of infuriation at the start of Putin’s first term was that Moscow was making decrees and drafting laws, but they were not being enforced in the regions. This is why he created the Presidential ‘envoys’. Their job descriptions were vague, their task simple. The men were dispatched to cajole the governors and make sure the local branches of the FSB, the interior ministry, regional TV, the prosecutor’s office and the tax police knew who was boss.

The ‘envoys’ also surveyed whether regions were breaking federal law. This had become a chronic problem. Throughout the 1990s regional governments had been passing laws without so much as a fleeting thought for either Moscow or the constitution. This breakdown in the supremacy of central law reached such epic proportions that one 1997 government study showed that out of 44,000 laws passed by regional authorities, nearly half of them did not conform with federal law. 29Moves were taken to correct such laws and amend local constitutions that violated the federal one. Grigory Rapota, whose name was on Surkov’s speed dial, former envoy to both the Volga and the North Caucasus, explained the purpose of the vertical like this: ‘We absolutely felt we had to bring this legal confusion under one pole of influence.’

Back in the capital, the Kremlin financially undercut the governors. The most important measure cancelled Article 48 of the constitution, which gave governors access to 50 per cent of national tax revenue. A new tax code and a new VAT law centralized payments, cutting the regions out of the spoils. Already by 2002 the era of financial parity was over, with Moscow gathering 62 per cent of all taxes.

Much the poorer, governors were confined to their regions by the law passed in 2000 that ended the role of the upper chamber, the Federation Council, as their power base in the capital. The governors were from then on legally disbarred from doubling as senators, which gave them access to legal immunity, but had to send representatives to the upper chamber instead. After Putin’s decision in 2004 that from then on he would appoint governors, the transformation of the Federation Council into a rubber-stamping chamber and governors from Kremlin competitors to clients, was complete. None would now be elected and thus able to rally a mandate in his own right.

Finally, the Kremlin flushed out any remaining regional interests in the Duma by switching to a purely party lists system. The end of constituency MPs, coupled with a new 7 per cent threshold to enter the chamber, made it almost impossible for local leaders putting local concerns first to get elected, unless they were in the ‘national parties’, whose leaders were on Surkov’s speed dial.

The name United Russia indicates the obvious – it too was to play a vital role in building the vertical of power. For three generations, the elite of this vast country had been organized in the Communist Party. This meant that Moscow used the party as a tool to control and discipline all politicians across the imperium. After its implosion the lack of a successful ‘Kremlin party’ during the Yeltsin years meant that regional politicians came in all shapes and sizes, representing all kinds of interests – and there were few ways that Moscow could corral them.

United Russia was the main tool to ‘renationalize’ all these politicians into a single structure that the Kremlin could use to control and discipline them. It was supposed to end an era when Moscow could do nothing to influence whoever was in the regional parliament in Siberian Krasnoyarsk, or who was governor in Arctic Chukotka. At the time of writing, United Russia had a majority in 80 of the country’s 83 regional parliaments, controlling 2,840 of the seats out of a total of 3,787, with 74 out of all 83 regional governors being ‘bears’. Through conferences, manifestos and slogans – they were all reading Putin’s script.