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

In Moscow, the new Patriarch Kirill, escorted by bodyguards and the owner of a $30,000 gold Breguet wristwatch, drove around the capital in luxury cars with a blue-bucket alarm to break traffic. 55The fringe beards of perestroika were now national politicians. Yet for normal Russians, the flamboyance of restored power was not their daily experience of the Church. In every provincial city, from Abakan to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, locals puffed with pride at the new golden-domed church built as their post-Soviet landmark. In a country in disarray, sickened by the breakdown of the welfare state and the rule of law, a new army of priests and monks offered a compass, charity and a helping hand to those desperately needing someone to fight off the moral vacuum that underlay the epidemic of heroin, alcoholism, murder, corruption and prostitution. The Church set up drugs clinics, soup kitchens and orphanages – and the people in Siberia and the Urals felt that the Patriarch’s men were doing something for them.

The Moscow intelligentsia first mocked the Church as something medieval, then denounced it as something medieval: yet in contrast to the historic failure of Russian liberalism, it was running the most successful social project in the whole country. In a hundred small ways, the country was culturally being rewired. By the end of Putin’s first presidency, the vast majority of Russian homes had icons again, the majority of Russian cars had icons on the dashboard: tiny gold baptismal crosses, rare in the USSR, were now so common they no longer stood out, with regular church attendance (if still below 10 per cent of the population) higher than it had been in almost eighty years. 56

The infiltration of the Church into the political routine of the country had become so common that it was no longer noticed. Endless TV clips would show the Patriarch inviting Putin, or Medvedev, to attend a mass, with the President graciously accepting. Invented traditions, such as the President after his inauguration being blessed by the Patriarch in the Kremlin Cathedral of the Annunciation, in an act eerily reminiscent of the enthronement of the tsar, were shrugged off as the new normal. The triumph of the Church was visible in the size of the crowds it could draw. In 2011 – outdoing the numbers present at any of the protests surrounding contested elections – over 285,000 gathered to kiss a relic of the Virgin Mary’s belt as it was paraded through Moscow. 57In its journey across Russia, over 2 million had pushed their way to touch its holiness. 58

The rise of the Russian Orthodox Church both aided Putin and eventually subtly undermined him. It blew into society a sense that Russia needed to be Russian, not a ‘reproduction of the Western model’, to quote Patriarch Kirill. 59It reinforced in its sermons that Russia was the centre of an Orthodox-Slavic civilization that sooner or later would be not just the third Rome but the ‘second Brussels’ reuniting the lost lands. All of this was helpful to Surkov and ‘Sovereign Democracy’. Yet the Church was also injecting into the national bloodstream an overwhelming sense that all was not morally right, that Russia was disorientated, that Russia was sick, that it needed to cleanse itself, to be less corrupt and above all to be holy.

Putin undoubtedly thought that by allying himself to the Patriarch he was allying himself to a politician. This was true. But he was also giving free range to a cultural project that was raising questions he had no answer to: only ‘stability’ – is Russia for Russians? Why is the state not fighting drugs or helping orphans? How can Russia live without lies? The Church was preparing for a culture war against liberal Russia – meaning sooner or later that Putin would have to abandon consensus politics and take sides.

The government was not fretting about the growing number of consumers, bloggers, believers and migrants. In Putin’s 2007 state of the nation address he declared that, ‘Not only has Russia fully overcome a long period of production decline, but it now ranks among the top ten economies in the world.’ The same year he boasted to Europe:

Historians will be the judges of what my people and I achieved in eight years. We re-established Russia’s territorial integrity, strengthened the state, moved in the direction of a multi-party system and re-established the potential of our armed forces. 60

Boastful, self-deceptive propaganda from a corrupt regime? Or a heady but still broadly fair assessment of a Russian government that had achieved macro-economic stability for the first time in a generation? The truth is that it was both. Much of the work led by finance minister Alexey Kudrin was a success. Though macro-economic stabilization and the development of a consumer society is something, it did not add up to comprehensive modernization. The Putin regime’s success at financial stabilization reflected the fact that it was at its best when dealing with technical tasks that could be done from offices in the capital with the minimum of stakeholders, and thus conflicts with vested interests. They did well at stabilizing the ruble but not at guiding corporations to diversify the economy; success was found in reducing inflation and cutting red-tape but they fared poorly at weaning policemen out of organized crime, or pushing corporate boards to stop behaving like ‘politburos’, without any respect for minority shareholders. The narrower the task, such as paying off debts and building up reserves, the better the regime did.

Their success in tuning big macro-economic indicators was exactly because these tasks were not dependent on Russian specifics at all, but were the same all over the world. Putin and Kudrin could get the rates right in the central bank whilst failing to infringe on the fusion of property and power, the massive corruption in public procurement, chronic theft from road-building budgets, the poor organization of public services and the personalization of power itself around Putin. Not surprisingly given that the regime was corrupt, objectives that required a substantial change in political behaviour and people management failed, despite its success in macro-economic stabilization.

The biggest contradiction of all was that as Kudrin and Gref’s plans bore fruit, the projects steered by Surkov failed. ‘Sovereign democracy’ was never taken seriously as an ideology and neither United Russia nor Nashi ever developed into a factory for quality cadres. None of these initiatives supposed to improve Russia’s poor-quality governance achieved this. They merely added new sinecures and extended patronage networks that obstructed this goal. By creating institutions like these merely as Kremlin tools, without any autonomy, Putin and Surkov could not fill the holes left by the silencing of parliament, national TV and regional governors: they had put the Kremlin back in control but left it no better at governing.

This meant that the 2000s boom in the Russian economy covered up serious structural weaknesses that posed a long-term threat to the country’s development. But most politicians in the Kremlin did not see how vulnerable these deficiencies made them, as by the late 2000s they felt they were running the most successful Russian government since the 1961 Soviet triumph that had made Yuri Gagarin the first man in space. Polls concurred. This boom in living standards had become bound up in Russian minds with Putin. Gleb Pavlovsky reminisces how at the time:

It was significant that he was the insurer, the guarantor of slow but definitively rising living standards. Broadly in Putin’s system, precisely because it turned out to be more financial, than administrative or political (the administration here is pretty bad) – this insurance guarantee was crucial. 61