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

This made the ‘dictatorship of law’ sound like a bad joke. The predatory bureaucracy meant Russia remained a dangerous place for business. Surveys showed an increase in corruption on all levels of government. An anaemic rule of law meant businessmen could ‘rent’ courts to persecute their enemies. This is so pervasive that one study estimated one in six Russian businessmen had been prosecuted for ‘economic crimes’. Most of these cases have no plaintiffs and a zero rate of acquittal, which goes some way to explaining why as many as 30 per cent of adult males have a criminal record. 51This is not just continuity with the Yeltsin years, but a trickle down from the top. What the Kremlin did to its Khodorkovsky, countless bureaucrats did to their Khodorkovsky.

Putin had strengthened the FSB and bureaucracy. But corruption rose, as he had not answered one simple question. Who by the mid-2000s guarded the guardians? The answer in Russia was ‘Putin’, or nobody. As a result, the European Police Office (Europol) has estimated that 20 per cent of members of the Russian parliament, 40 per cent of decision makers in private enterprise, 50 per cent of bank directors, and 60 per cent of the directors and managers of state-owned companies had criminal ties. 52The ‘dictatorship of law’ was, in reality, the dictatorship of a venal officialdom.

There is always something diagnostic about a bestseller. In 2006 the novel San’kia started circulating online. After it was published, it consistently ranked in the top twenty lists for three years. There are rumours that Putin himself read it. This Russian book of the decade was written by an unlikely novelist, Zakhar Prilepin.

He had a shaved head and had been an OMON riot policeman who fought in both Chechen wars. When Putin came to power he was paid $26 a week and took extra shifts at checkpoints to make sure insurgents were not driving out of the Caucasus. ‘They never had proper transit documents,’ he recalled, ‘I let them pass and they gave me bananas, apples and sometimes fifty Ruble bills – I was not ashamed.’ 53

His San’kia is set in the ‘dictatorship of law’, the story of Sacha, a blundering punk-nationalist whose father has drunk himself to death. He begins to ‘run’ with a group of pathetic revolutionaries, baby-faced thugs who can barely tie their own shoelaces, let alone fight the police. Sacha falls into their company not out of choice but because he is completely disorientated: a cipher for a fatherless generation. An avuncular professor, concerned by his brawls, invites him for a quick word. He knows full well how punks smash their heads open banging on the bars of the state. The professor raises his voice:

You have nothing in common with the motherland. The same way the motherland has nothing in common with you. There is no more motherland. It’s vanished, gone. There’s no point playing these games – smashing windows, breaking necks and God knows what else. Do you really think that this people, half of whom are alcoholics and half of whom are pensioners need a purpose? 54

As angry as he is ignorant, Sacha snorts back: ‘What then – live here? In this country that will be dead in thirty years, over-run by Chechens and Chinese?’ 55

Surkov and Putin knew full well that there was already widespread anger at the bottom of society towards corruption, particularly acute amongst the young. It was not yet directed at Putin. This is why Surkov was keen to get them onside to avoid a repeat of the ‘Orange scenario’ in Russia, where a new generation exhausted by corruption had en masse deserted the Kremlin candidate. This is why to cover up the incompetence of the system, the government pushed ever harder to get the young to join Nashi, to give them a purpose in Putinism.

The people who read San’kia are the same people who joined Nashi. They are from what was then called ‘Generation Elusive’, those born between the last years of Brezhnev and the beginning of perestroika. 56Those of this age in Russia, around twenty-five to thirty-five, are much too young to have ever had any illusions to shatter (communist, democratic) and end up in Putin and Surkov’s ‘Generation Emptiness’. They are a brutalized generation that entered the job market, right into the wreckage, where they found the cynical moral wasteland of the 1990s.

Their Russia has never known dreams; in the industrial cities they have taken to vicious, hooliganish behaviour. This generation thinks of itself as fatherless, without anyone to look up to – the death of the totalitarian state, which knocked the life out of the welfare state, emasculated tens of millions of fathers waiting for unpaid wages, sending them into alcoholism – all this left the young with only old burnt-out cynics, ‘Soviets’ or drunks to give them guidance.

As a result, a rainbow spectrum of cultish gangs, which promised blood brotherhood to the lost, flourished – from football fanatic attacks to neo-Nazis, even anti-Putin psychedelic punk fascism or art groups that stage public political orgies. Nobody in the Kremlin knew what ‘Generation Elusive’ believed in, other than that they felt cut off from power. None of this was surprising. The Soviet structures that reared both Khodorkovsky and Putin, the vilified KGB and Komsomol, bred loyalty despite all their brainwashing and oppression. This is because they really were real social lifts. The party turned Gorbachev and Yeltsin from peasants into masters of Moscow. But had they been born in post-Soviet Russia, they would have remained peasants, as the power elite itself was evolving into a removed aristocracy.

Surkov and Pavlovsky were convinced that at all costs they needed enough young out there celebrating the birthday of the ‘national leader’, young people who could get to Moscow overnight to camp out on Red Square and prevent this palpable resentment ever coalescing into an ‘Orange Revolution’. Their secret ingredient to this ‘purpose’ was for Nashi to have all the camping, sex and rock stars of a romantic revolutionary movement.

In the mid-2000s I enjoyed watching the ambivalent, dismissive reaction of my friends at the elite MGIMO University to this paid-for ‘mobilization’ – people in exactly the age group Surkov was targeting. As one of Moscow’s most prestigious institutes, a favourite dumping ground for the children of the minor oligarchy whose English wasn’t up to scratch for abroad, its academic quality was corroding in proportion to the rise in chauffeured cars outside. Those studying here were not the grandchildren of the party elite but the sons and daughters of Khanty-Mansiysk oil bandits, FSB officers turned ‘tax inspectors’ or aluminium gangsters turned respectable United Russia MPs – a cross section of a coarse ruling class that had replaced the Soviet nomenklatura. Ashamed of such gruff parents, they loved nothing better than to pose as ‘more European than thou’, citing Jean Luc Godard movies or name-dropping Berlin galleries, knowing full well that their fathers (but not if they were girls) had plans for them in ‘business’. But the idea of joining Nashi repulsed them. ‘It’s a Komsomol for churls and careerists from the darkest depths,’ sniffed one daughter of a general turned entrepreneur. She was right – that was exactly what it was.

The crushing majority of young Russians, anyone not lucky enough to have fathers who struck oil in the 1990s, who could now bribe a place at MGIMO, or with well-dressed parents in the 10–20 per cent so proud (relieved) to be in ‘the new bourgeoisie’, are all what we would call in the West, the ‘social excluded’. In the mid-2000s some 70 per cent of people were not middle class, living in a state where all the social elevators of the Soviet Union had rotted or snapped. Access to ‘opportunity’, to big sums and big resources, be they financial or political, was available only to a tiny, cobbled together Moscow power circle. If you went to school over the Urals in post-Soviet Russia, the idea of studying hard and becoming what you wanted was as laughable, as inaccessible as it is in the worst black American ghetto. Like there, the cult of ‘gangster’ thrived, likewise perceived as the only ways to riches and respect.