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

Early 1990s St Petersburg was the city that made Putin a politician. Because he has stuffed the Russian government and the oligarchy with his friends and colleagues, it also defined the Putinist elite. The future ‘national leader’ returned home in 1990 from an undistinguished career in foreign intelligence in East Germany with neither the status nor the security he thought he had bought into with the KGB. The collapse of a dreamed of vocation as an agent abroad was harder for Putin than just losing a job when you’re a father of two little girls. It was like losing a father, losing his life’s whole goal.

He had lived the life of a second-rate spy – in Dresden where he drank too much and got fat. His first thirty-five years were lived with little success at all. He had trouble communicating and left a woman at the altar. Putin never rose to more than the rank of lieutenant colonel. Perhaps it’s not surprising how few of the stories Putin has told about his early life have any emotion in them at all. Apart from one, in Dresden in 1989, when an anti-communist mob is massing outside the offices the KGB worked from. It was at that moment he realized things were falling apart. Unsure how to react, but convinced something had to be done, immediately, Putin made frantic calls:

I was told: ‘We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.’ After a few hours our military people did finally get there. And the crowd dispersed. But the business of ‘Moscow is silent’ – I got the feeling that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared. It was clear that the Union was ailing. And that it had a terminal disease without a cure – a paralysis of power. 6

This shock, this feeling of being orphaned, crept up the spines of millions in Soviet state service during that vast and irreparable breakdown. For Putin and his generation, those who did not come from intellectual families, believed what they were told about the USSR’s superpower success; they did not question propaganda, or want what they did not have – that moment is their defining scar. Putin has spent a career trying to overcome that paralysis. But his horror that night in Dresden was not just philosophical. It was the realization that he was about to lose his livelihood in foreign intelligence, which had been his childhood dream, and with it his place in the world. The collapse was about to turn him from a privileged foreign agent into a personal failure, even a moral pariah, in the new Russia.

Putin is from a lost generation. Not every Russian was a dissident, a democrat or felt oppressed. Putin was one of millions who had never seriously questioned the system, never sought its dismantlement – and who lost their privileges and sense of self when it collapsed. Putin admits that he did not reflect on the repression carried out by the KGB when he entered the service and is proud that he even tried to ‘join’ as a child: ‘My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy novels. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.’ 7This was not abnormal, but perhaps a bit of a throwback. As early as 1961 only 25 per cent of Soviet youth listed ‘building communism’ as one of their life goals. 8

The consequence of such successful indoctrination being utterly exposed is that Putin and his generation have cynicism as their world-view. The system’s unravelling disproved every notion that the authorities had drilled into them. Putin, like millions of Russians who dedicated their lives to the Soviet state, found themselves irrelevant, mocked for having a ‘Soviet mentality’; those in the KGB were shunned and told they had been the ‘enemy of the people’ all along. From here stems a sense of betrayal, even viciousness, against idealism and moralizing democrats. Strangely enough, it was none other than the former dissident Andrei Sinyavsky, whose trial in the 1960s had initially rallied together the first Soviet human rights ‘defenders’, who expressed this lost generation’s utter disorientation:

What did Soviet power give the man in the street? Freedom, land, wealth and food? Nothing of the sort. All it gave was a sense of righteousness and a sense we lived in a properly run and logical world. We have now fallen out of that logical Soviet cosmos into chaos and have no idea what to believe in. The meaning of the lives of several generations has been lost. It looks as though they lived and suffered in vain. After all it is hard to believe in the dawn of capitalism, particularly such a criminal and wild capitalism, which smacks of criminal lawlessness. 9

Putin returned to St Petersburg to find the night crackling with gunshots as well-armed gang warfare was edging the city into anarchy. Calm and crumbling, if slightly creepy, during the late Soviet period – with then typically low crime rates and few sources of entertainment – the city experienced an avalanche of crime, discos, prostitutes, pole dancers, machine-gun killings and corruption after the fall. Contract-killings became commonplace, gangsters were elected to the town council and ‘privatization’ saw local oligarchs emerge, often by force, as power brokers. The 1990s saw the city dominated by mafia groups who quickly corrupted the city’s culture into one of sleazy nightclubs, misogyny and anti-intellectualism. Even the gravediggers were said to be part of an extortion racket. St Petersburg acquired a reputation as the ‘bandits’ capital’ after a string of high-profile murders: an oil executive was blown apart with a rocket-propelled grenade during rush hour, a city council member was indicted for running a ring of contract-killers and another was beheaded by a car bomb. This is the environment that made Putin believe that ‘Russia needs strong state power and must have it.’ 10

With such a stark and disappointing transition, men of Putin’s age were left obsessed by stability and burnt out. This was a decade of dizzying overload. The Soviet Union had frozen out modernity and got itself trapped in a dated 1930s heavy-industry fantasy with a police state. So, Russia was forced to go through all of the spasms of post-modernity – the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the consumer revolution of the 1970s, the ‘greed is good’ of the 1980s and the electronic takeover of the millennium – all at once in the 1990s. This is why Putin’s generation have been called ‘generation emptiness’. 11They are men shaped by a tsunami of shopping, PR and state collapse, their thinking warped by post-modern philosophy amid ideological bankruptcy. It is a generation for whom too many lost their ability see right from wrong, and with it went all their certainties apart from cynicism.

Perhaps no one lived 1990s St Petersburg quite like Arkady Kramarev, the city’s chief of police from 1991 to 1994. He knew Putin well: ‘We were neighbours, lived next door to each other, said “hello, how are things?” most mornings and because of what I did, worked closely together.’ His white, thinning hair still has hints of the gold shock it once was. His upper lip droops and his cheeks are worn and blotched. His blue eyes have hints of cataracts. Kramarev is an old man who never stops smoking. ‘The crime wave was like a hurricane,’ he remembers, vividly. The late 1980s were ‘calm years’, where only a hundred or so murder cases would drop on his desk a year. ‘The funny thing is that the first thing I felt when the Union collapsed was simple euphoria.’ But within eighteen months of the collapse, six hundred to eight hundred murder cases were piling up in his paper stacks: ‘At first we had no idea how to deal with this. We were Soviet policemen. We knew how to deal with organized crime only in theory.’

As the West cheered the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Berlin, Prague and Kabul, millions of its AK-47s turned up at car-boot sales across Russia. Killings soared but Kramarev’s police were in disarray. Inflation dissolved wages. The experienced officers left in droves. He still feels bitter that he was not allowed to deploy military or vigilante patrols: ‘There were no functioning courts to solve disputes between the new capitalists. So, in the conflicts that came the main judge was the Kalashnikov.’ Friends who went into business were murdered and, he laughs, ‘We used to say a bandit had a four-year lifespan.’ One day contract killers gunned down a businessman with machine guns and sped off. By the time the police found the car it was already riddled with bullets; the killers had already been killed. Every morning Kramarev would storm into the office feeling ‘furious, always looking… for a way out ’.