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

Regional politicians were now supposed to treat Moscow like the boss. Gleb Pavlovsky remembers orders starting to be given to them like they were bureaucrats, not elected officials in their own right. ‘The directives from the top were like this: “don’t elect that guy, elect this guy”, “use X percentage for X party”, and “carry it out with the means available to you on site”.’ 30

The governors had tried to politically pickpocket Yeltsin. Now that they were being treated like apparatchiks again, it meant one thing – the vertical was complete. Putin’s centralization and the rise of United Russia gutted these regional institutions of their meaning. Instead of a multi-nodal, autonomous and federal system able to react quickly in a high-speed post-modern world, the vertical had created a clunky imperial bureaucracy, incapable of acting on its own, utterly dependent on the Kremlin and essentially its patronage network.

They did not realize it at the time, but Putin and Surkov were building a device that would sap away their popularity. Erecting a clumsy, inefficient, vertical of power amidst rising corruption was not only creating a management nightmare for the future – it was laying claim and thus responsibility to all power and thus all problems in Russia. Boris Yeltsin had declined to join a party and used this ‘distance’ to dodge blame and deflect it onto governors, officials and even his own ministers from his perch as ‘the father of the nation’. In encouraging all officials, be they corrupt tax officials in Udmurtia to the governor of Krasnodar, to join United Russia – he was making himself in the eyes of anyone who lived in the regions, not only linked but also responsible for the sins of that tax official or the crimes of that governor.

Strengthening the state was not just about reinstalling the Soviet chain of command. It was about massive recruitment. The bureaucracy ballooned, growing by more than two-thirds between 2000 and 2010, hitting nearly 1.7 million employees. 31In particular, the agencies responsible for security, law and order expanded, the infamous ‘siloviks’. Spending on them rose from $2.8 billion in 2000 to $36.5 billion in 2010. 32

The FSB has not wielded great influence as an organization but has been rewarded for its loyalty. Yeltsin’s break-up of the KGB was partially reversed. The FSB saw the responsibility for foreign electronic counter-surveillance, oversight over potential mutinies in the army, control over the border guard force and its own foreign intelligence bureau restored to ‘the corporation’. FSB agents rose to prominence as the only trustworthy cadres who could coordinate the vertical of power being pulled together, as men from the ‘corporation’ were never suspected of any regional allegiances. Servicemen were now lauded by officials as nothing less than ‘our new nobility’. 33

Cuts were stopped with the FSB remaining a huge force. With over 350,000 employees, it is bigger than most Western European armies. It has been estimated that whilst in the USSR there was one KGB man for every 428 Soviets, the new regime had one FSB employee for every 297 Russians. 34The ratio for policemen to population is similarly high. Russia had 611 police per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 244 in the USA or 292 in Germany. 35Overall there are over 3 million employees of the dozen ‘silovik’ ministries charged with security, ranging from the FSB to the police. 36

Across Russia there was a low-key return to Soviet methods to tackle dissent. This took the form of closing down of papers, seizing ‘dangerous’ imported books, compounding print-runs, harassing dissenters, infiltrating opposition groups, threatening calls, detentions of unregistered protesters, violent break-ups of demonstrations, the sporadic use of mental asylums to imprison dissidents, and bogus charges of ‘bad parenting’ to scare them with the prospect of their children being put into care. In the North Caucasus there were extra-judicial executions.

The FSB started keeping a closer eye on the Russian population. By 2007 it had amassed over 70 million fingerprint dossiers for a country of only 142 million citizens. 37The regular murders of journalists (it was never clear by whom) created a culture of intimidation and self-censorship. Since Putin came to power, the Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that at least twenty-six journalists have been murdered for practising their trade, whilst another fourteen have been killed for ‘unconfirmed motives’. 38

The country suffered higher death rates from terror attacks than Israel or Pakistan, whilst abroad it was unable to either foresee or prevent the coloured revolutions. One could be forgiven for asking if the Russian taxpayer was getting value for money for all its ‘siloviks’. This underperformance was not lost on Surkov. ‘Generally speaking,’ he said, ‘Our problem is that the political leadership needs to motivate the bureaucrats more.’ 39

In 2007, Sergey Ivanov, then the defence minister, felt that new times were in need of slogans. He called for a new ideological triad for Russia: ‘sovereign democracy, strong economy and military might’. 40His nod to the tsarist ideological triad of ‘orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality’ under Nicholas I was unmistakable – inviting ridicule by polite Moscow society who began mocking Ivanov with competitions for the wriest triad such as ‘Oil, Censorship and Gas’, or ‘Putin, the Party and Petrol’.

The authorities were not deterred. Putinism had evolved far enough that by 2007 the Kremlin started to attempt to elaborate its own ideology. This was the inverse of the 1990s dreams of converging with the West. This new ‘thinking’ was first announced in a keynote speech by Surkov himself and called ‘The View From Utopia’. There was little that was utopian about his eloquent but empty words. Russia was not going to develop into a Western democracy, nor did the West have the right to judge its political system. Beyond that, sovereign democracy was thin. The ‘view from utopia’ turned out to be as little as announcing that Russian political culture had some unique characteristics: ‘Firstly, the desire for political integrity through the centralization of power. Secondly, the idealization of political struggle. Thirdly, the personification of political institutions.’ 41

In other words, continuity with tsarist-Soviet centralization, continuity with communist youth groups and propaganda, and the ‘personification of political institutions’ meaning the power of Putin himself. In ‘The View from Utopia’ the Kremlin had proclaimed it was like China setting its own ‘sovereign’ course. Just how far Moscow had swung away from hopes to build democratic Russia is captured in the memoir of one senior official, who published anonymously under a pseudonym. He recalled:

So once again empire is on the agenda. The imperial project has beaten its competitors from our own times. The nation-building programme, ‘the new Russia’, has crumbled and been removed from the table… in their hands power is going to try and build a new empire, presumably one of the new type. 42

The ideology Surkov had come up with was as insubstantial as it sounded. Putin’s enormous popularity still meant that the regime neither needed nor was really able to craft a strong identity for itself beyond him. Yet what seemed like strength at the time was actually a weakness. One study of United Russia election material spelt this out brutally. A full 70 per cent of their statements were simply rhetoric, e.g. ‘we want a modern economy’. 43No wonder that polls revealed only 3 per cent of its members had joined for ideological reasons. 44Little surprise, then, that in its own prospective members survey over 60 per cent said they had been motivated to join to solve their own material problems and half were motivated in order to make some money on the side. 45