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

As a result the Russian cabinet has been marked by an almost extreme continuity. There were virtually no changes in personnel of the two cabinets put together after 2004 within electoral cycles. His attempt to make factions feel they will eventually ‘get their turn’, can be reflected in his encouragement of both Medvedev and the ‘silovik’ defence minister Sergey Ivanov to think they could be his 2008 presidential candidates. Ivanov was so convinced he was Putin’s choice that he had a full wardrobe makeover in anticipation. Yet to distract attention from these intrigues, the Kremlin has drafted politicians with the charisma to distract preying eyes.

Like any court Putin’s has had its jesters, chief amongst them the cherub-cheeked Dmitry Rogozin, the ranting nationalist currently serving as minister for the military–industrial complex. He is what the English would call a ‘character’, prone to flamboyant outbursts. In person, he seems unable to miss a pun and smiles broadly at his own witticisms, as if surprised by them. Just like Putin, he slips into criminal slang when it suits him. His university classmates remember him not as a fool but as a clever ‘careerist’. Rogozin is the son of a prominent military historian – and like many of those steeped in the past, he has positioned himself as a nationalist. Rogozin is a proud handball master and a politician, whose party trick has been to throw out politically incorrect comments, pounding a point with passionate intensity and a populist touch. He made his name in right-wing nationalist circles, from his first attempt in 1992 to contest the legality of the Soviet dissolution to his demands that the ‘garbage’, by which he meant migrants, be cleaned up in Moscow. His willingness to chase the xenophobes’ vote eventually turned him into one of Russia’s most popular politicians.

This is when the Kremlin found a use for him. Keen to ensure such voters’ loyalty to the court, Rogozin was invited in and promptly sent to Brussels as ambassador to NATO, a great stage for regular TV interviews to fill the evening news, with even his pop-star wife providing news copy, serenading him in a YouTube video: ‘I know what you want and I know what you think, making love to me is like having a good drink.’ 33Catapulted higher still to oversee one of the biggest financial flows of all – the military–industrial complex – in 2012 Rogozin’s nationalist quips and turns were seen as essential to have onside, to shore up government popularity. Like any jester, Rogozin’s job is to distract from and not determine politics. Seen as a populist project, his former classmates say Rogozin has been left an embittered cynic after years as Putin’s jester. Diplomats attest that the ‘great nationalist’ often travels on the private jet of a Caucasian billionaire.

Within the courtyards of the Kremlin, Putin cuts a lonely figure, ever alone. Unlike his courtiers who, like their Western counterparts, try to be seen as often as they can, smiling with their wives, Putin’s spouse is an absence, practically never seen. It is widely believed in political circles that he no longer enjoys the refuge of a warm family. This makes Putin’s life oddly closer to Elizabeth I than the loving father Nicholas II. Whilst Obama, Medvedev or Cameron regularly attend conferences, rallies or hospital openings holding their wives hands, using them as electoral assets and simple support, Putin works in solitude. At his rallies, he is alone. At summits, he is alone. At the banquets, too.

There have been increasingly rare sightings of Putin with his wife Lyudmila. These included them filling out the 2010 census form together. She fidgets uncomfortably throughout, as if distressed by his presence. Many in Moscow believe she has been sent to live in a monastery. Rumours circulate that she has suffered a nervous breakdown. Putin’s daughters are absent from Moscow and their whereabouts guarded like a state secret. Journalists are too frightened to ask him at press conferences. Once, whilst answering questions with Silvio Berlusconi, a reporter from Moskovsky Korrespondent dared ask Putin if he had really left his wife to marry a twenty-four-year-old gymnast. His pleasure was not pronounced and Berlusconi started to make a machine-gunning gesture with his hands. 34 Moskovsky Korrespondent was quickly closed down by its publisher. There are those who claim that Putin’s alleged relationship with the gymnast has resulted in a baby boy. With the mention that Putin may have a son, a shudder comes to anyone who thinks of the future.

The face of Putinism that stares out of mass corruption is neither one of liberal or state-capitalist authoritarian modernization. The allegations that the Russian elite could consider it acceptable to divert funds for medical equipment in order to build a palace – in a country with a health care catastrophe where, on average, male life expectancy is at the same level as impoverished Papua New Guinea or Pakistan – is truly outstanding. They show that though the Putin regime may have ideological tendencies, and stated ambitions towards modernization and state strengthening, its politics is dampened by its avarice.

The face of the regime seen in the mirror of such allegations is one that is neither wholeheartedly interested in building an authoritarian ‘China’ nor modernizing into ‘Europe’, as its political ambitions are knotted into financial interests. It is a regime whose insiders would never truly confront the West, for risk of losing their assets, nor which would appear capable of improving the state to Western standards, for risk of undermining their hold on them. Worse still, having directed such a massive transfer of assets, Putin is vulnerable that should he leave power they could be redistributed again.

‘Let the dead bury their dead and mourn them,’ wrote the young Marx, ‘for our fate will be to become the first living people to enter the new life.’ 35This was the spirit of Yeltsin’s court and Putin’s Moscow, the stage for Surkov’s ‘puppet shows’. This was the capital of a country where the oligarchs and the power brokers – with the most unlikely of CVs – had not inherited, but seized huge pieces of the Soviet raw materials complex. They felt they had won out where everyone else had lost; they felt they had understood how to live in a country where everyone else was drowning – because they were geniuses. The Putin court, those that had survived, those that triumphed, felt not only incredible self-worth, but also the right to incredible privilege. To quote Surkov:

We must all agree with the following proposition, genius is always in the minority, but their doings make the majority richer. And the majority must understand, that there are privileges, which we give to talented people… 36

BY 2006 RUSSIAN fiction had taken a darker turn. The writer Vladimir Sorokin was so appalled by what he saw as the political drift towards a dictatorship that he wrote Day of the Oprichnik . The year is 2028 and the monarchy has at last been restored. The nation has burnt its passports on Red Square. Russia is walled off behind a great wall and the Oprichniks – as the dedicated servants of the sovereign are known – roam Moscow raping the wives of their enemies, constantly taking bribes and guzzling imported narcotics, before repenting fervently before the Lord. But proud, imperial, holy Russia is just an illusion. The entire country is economically dependent on China. Asiatic settlers are everywhere in Siberia and dominate commerce even in Moscow. The ruler’s own children are brought up speaking Mandarin. On instructions from the Kremlin, one Oprichnik is ordered to take banned classics to be burnt by a Siberian witch. He begs her for a sight of the future, as she tosses Anna Karenina into the fire, but she just snarls, ‘The country will be alright.’ 1This is a thin satire on Putin’s state. Yet the idea of a country dominated by an arrogant, at times criminal, elite was not just a flight of fancy. Sorokin had been harassed and sued by the Kremlin’s youth groups for ‘pornography’ and his works had been thrown into a giant papier-mâché toilet before being dynamited. But outside the cramped and dimly lit offices of a tiny, ageing and ignored circle of human rights activists – nobody seemed to care. Why?