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

The true courts of our imagination, those of Tudor England, only reached their theatrical pinnacle once the crown had subjugated all competing feudal sources of power and loyalty. By the reign of Elizabeth I the court had become the sine qua non of political advancement. Access was the currency of influence. The devolution towards a new form of court politics in Russia began with Yeltsin’s destruction of the party, the sidelining of the ‘organs’ and his 1993 neutering of parliament, and was in all senses complete by 2003 after the elimination of Khodorkovsky’s competing patronage system.

Russia’s neo-courtly politics has seen Western analysis lazily lapse into the techniques of Kremlinology devised during the Cold War to pick up ideological tremors within the Politburo. Typically, such neo-Kremlinology divides Putin’s entourage into ‘liberals’ and ‘siloviks’ with the embassies and think-tanks projecting onto their scuffles and appointments a half-imagined idealistic struggle over policy between conservative Chekists and economically liberal ‘reformers’. This is unhelpful. So unhelpful, that a conversation about ‘clans’ usually reflects merely the hopes and prejudices of the analyst. Those who are pessimistic have a tendency to see a stranglehold of a menacing ‘silovik’ clan headed by Igor Sechin, whilst optimists tend to see a ‘liberal’ grouping that the West needs to support, headed by, at times Dmitry Medvedev, Alexey Kudrin or lately Igor Shuvalov.

Kremlinology is unhelpful, as Putin’s Kremlin has more in common with the court of Elizabeth I than the Politburo during ‘stagnation’. In that Moscow, a catfight primarily between different ideological tendencies culminated in Gorbachev’s election as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Power and corrupt practices were part of a Politburo politician’s calculations, but their divisions were overwhelmingly on principle. Not so Putin’s Kremlin. At the court of Elizabeth I, politics was a constant jostling between ‘factions’ and favourites. These factions had some idealistic tints but cannot be compared to twentieth-century ‘believers’. Elizabethan factions were loose and informal groupings, friends and networks, competing above all for patronage and power for its own sake. Their tussles had ideological tints but were for the sake of spoils not causes. Putinist ‘liberals’ and ‘siloviks’ have more in common with renaissance factions than the ‘hardliners’ and ‘democrats’ of perestroika. They are not parties. ‘We are a team,’ smiled one Kremlin aide, ‘We stick together… But you should see how we fight!’

The best way to map the Russian elite is to look at the oligarchs on the Forbes rich list of Russia’s wealthiest, then superimpose a list of ministers, senior officials and directors of state corporations, then mind-map out a list of Putin’s personal friends, before visualizing a spider-diagram spreading off to include the family members and network of all of the above. Background does not neatly translate into clear-cut political camps.

For all Putin’s bravado about ‘liquidating’ the oligarchs, they are still powerful. Amongst them are several major species. On the one hand there are the 1990s oligarchs who do not owe him their wealth, and the new Putin oligarchs who became billionaires under and thanks to his rule. After the Khodorkovsky trial, the oligarchs positioned themselves around Putin – treating him as the arbiter and supreme adjudicator. Though they retreated from daily policy-making, they did not disappear. The number of Russian billionaires exploded from zero in 2000 to eighty-seven in 2008. 9

Amongst them distinct strategies emerged in trying to deal with Putin. The first was that deployed most successfully by Roman Abramovich – who did everything to help him, in order to protect himself. The second strategy is those of oligarchs who tried to stay out of Putin’s way, ingratiate themselves with him personally whilst consolidating their own empires, with their own clear opinions on where Putinism should develop. The leading practitioners of this group are the ALFA group oligarchs, such as Mikhail Friedman and Viktor Vekselberg. The final oligarch strategy was actually Putin’s own – the success of his friends.

Putin imposed a consensus on the oligarchs between when he turned on Berezovsky and destroyed Khodorkovsky. He then made himself indispensable to them. Putin became the arbiter, the dealmaker and the fixer. If you were on his right side, he was also the facilitator. This meant that these men actually came to want him. Most of them at first enjoyed this stability. Despite making millions and billions, the oligarchs had felt hunted throughout the 1990s. One whisper in Yeltsin’s ear, or one sharp power play could cancel out fortunes. There was something comforting to know that Vladimir Vladimirovich was always there. Some came to think, even in the 1990s, that they had always needed him. Knowing who was all-powerful, actually made them feel safe.

Under Putin the Russian ruling caste has become one of the richest in the world. Putin rewarded his ministers in the late 2000s with the right to serve as board members of state corporations. The Russian opposition claims Putin has ensnared their loyalty through a web of corruption. This wealth has become synonymous with a stretch of estates and exquisite mansions along the Rublevka highway heading west through woodlands from Moscow. This traffic-clogged road has a sense of history. Here, Ivan the Terrible would immerse himself in falconry and along its path tsars would make pilgrimages to a holy monastery, amongst them Peter and Catherine the Great. And it was here, far from the factories that pollute the rivers that run to the east of the city, that Stalin and his henchman lived in comfortable – but compared to what would ensue – quite plain dachas. Come the Cold War and the 1950s, the Rublevka was closed to the public, now the preserve of the general secretaries’ residences. Brezhnev and Andropov would live here. In 1989, at the juncture of history, Yeltsin would claim that an unknown gang tried to throw him off the Rublevka bridge. In reality, he was just drunk.

Under his reign and that of his successor the stretch has transformed into a Russian Beverly Hills. The gated communities first built for the Soviet upper castes are now the homes of the wealthiest; sealed communities of veritable palaces with armed guards and CCTV surveillance. On the Rublevka, where Putin and Medvedev live, the highway is closed to traffic twice a day as they commute to the Kremlin or the White House. The Rublevka is also a social world: of elite schools, where dynastic marriages such as those between the daughter of Igor Sechin to the son of current plenipotentiary envoy to the Southern Federal District are practised, a place where the reality of Moscow is half-removed.

Driven home by chauffeurs, the financially unlimited children of the elite ride home most nights in a drunken stupor, and have little clue what it is to live in creaking Soviet housing or wait in line for bread. ‘My real fear for Russia is the kids,’ the aide to one of the nation’s most powerful tycoons once confided. ‘Unlike their parents who are really sharp men who fought their way to the top, they are foolish, easily seduced by foreigners, drunken, drug-addled with more money than sense. Yet their parents want them to have an inheritance.’ Accordingly, Putin’s courtiers have rewarded their sons with well-paid jobs in state corporations. ‘If these children inherit it all then it will be a true disaster,’ said one of the oligarch’s men.

Rublevka is not just a place but a way of life. Courtiers are said to have a love for Italian Brioni suits and are rarely seen without their finery. Rublevka shines on their wrists. A few snapshots from 2009 caught the senior central banker Alexey Ulyukayev wearing a $78,000 watch, the then deputy head of the Kremlin administration Sergei Naryshkin a $29,500 watch, the then minister of finance Alexey Kudrin a $14,900 watch and the then first deputy mayor of Moscow Vladimir Resin a $1 million watch. 10Putin wears such watches, but is also generous with them. Twice that year he gave away watches worth $10,500 to a Siberian shepherd and a provincial Russian joiner. 11The next year, for good luck he tossed a $10,500 watch into the freshly laid cement foundations of a new hydroelectric plant. 12These were, of course, not Putin’s best watches. He was seen in 2009 wearing a gold watch worth $60,000, on other occasions craft-pieces worth a mere $20,000 and all together a sum of some $160,000. 13Nothing wrong with that, but then why was Putin’s official income declaration that year just shy of $170,000? 14