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

This was derided by the controlled media as ‘dem-shiza’ or democratic schizophrenia. Prior to the outbreak of financial turmoil in 2008, it seemed like the Kremlin propagandists were wasting their time. The ‘free cafes’ were vacuous places, where talking about either Putin or Khodorkovsky was looked down on as ‘not cool’. This attitude was more useful to the Kremlin than any censor. Even one of their most fashionable and politically minded frequenters, the celebrity journalist Leonid Parfyonov, was saying things like, ‘I am a professional journalist, not a professional revolutionary. My job is to report and not climb the barricades.’ 64It was a sign of how far Muscovite culture was to change that both Parfyonov and the writer Boris Akunin became powerful orators of the December 2011 protest movement.

The keenest observers of society were getting agitated. Gleb Pavlovsky began to show signs of this, telling me, ‘The hipsters are very interesting… there is a new “youth” way of behaving… I think Moscow is changing.’ But those in universities, such as Vyacheslav Glazychev, who had written widely on the ‘unshakable nature’ of the ‘Putin majority’, felt a change under way in the world of the ‘golden youth’ that ran so close to the world of power in Moscow. But he wasn’t sure what it was. In his ‘den’ of weird objects under a picture of Dubrovnik he sighed:

‘The generation that became adults under Gorbachev and Yeltsin are burnt out completely. Nobody knows what’s coming with the new generation, for the moment, they are just babes in the wood. But it will be very different. It always is.’

He was right. It was in the ‘free bars’ of Moscow that the first seeds of a new opposition began to germinate but had not yet sprung to life. One evening I sat on a cracked balcony with a friend, smoking cigarettes with the names of Soviet space missions. ‘I’m fed up of Moscow,’ she complained, flicking our Apollo-Soyuz butts off the dusty ledge, ‘I can’t stand this social scene anymore. It’s all glamour and no substance. It’ll never amount to anything.’ And for the remains of the decade, she was right.

As Moscow changed socially, it changed politically. By the late 2000s feelings of vulnerability had evaporated. A hubristic mood had settled over the barons of the city – stability had been secured. Now Russia was resurgent. Fired up by surging oil prices, a booming middle class and high growth rates, the elite felt that Russia was rising with China. Taking at face value the 2001 Goldman Sachs pamphlet that classed Russia together with Brazil, India and China as the world’s four largest emerging economies – the BRICs – the establishment came to believe that the country would continue to grow rapidly until it had caught up with the West. 65The highbrow magazine Ekspert even predicted that the ruble would join the US dollar and the euro as a global reserve currency, whilst Putin predicted that Russia would ‘overtake Britain and France’ in GDP terms in 2009. 66

Russian intellectuals and politicians felt they were fireproof, with think-tankers devoting panels to the idea that Russia’s commodity-driven economy had ‘decoupled’ from the West. This optimism in global growth prospects was not uniquely Russian. Prior to the crash in 2008, most analysts had a rosy view of future GDP potential. Western analysts shared this enthusiasm for the Russian market – from the creators of the BRIC brand at Goldman Sachs to the director of Deutsche Bank in Moscow, who believed Russia had made ‘a macro-economic breakthrough’. 67

The intensity of this mood was understandable. It was not at all unique, but fostered by a fast connecting new global superclass for whom Davos had replaced the United Nations General Assembly as the true gathering of power-brokers. In Brussels, elites felt sure of themselves as an emerging ‘normative superpower’, and in Washington the ‘project for a new American century’ seemed realistic. There was a widespread belief propounded by the US economist Ben Bernanke that the global economy had entered a ‘great moderation’, and some analysts argued that economist Milton Friedman had been right to argue it was ‘depression proof’. 68

What marked out Moscow was that this was the first time since the late 1970s that the Russian elite had tasted success, rising influence and an economic boom. In this pre-crash world that treated GDP as a synonym for power, and saw Western banks as the pinnacle of efficiency and good forecasting, the delirious excitement of the Kremlin courtiers could be forgiven. They were presented with data that suggested that by growing at merely 3.9 per cent a year, in nominal GDP terms Russia would overtake Italy in 2018, France in 2024, Britain in 2027 and Germany in 2028. 69

Economic self-confidence dovetailed with a change in self-perception as a foreign policy actor. Moscow identified with the BRIC countries and began to see itself as a rising power. In Europe it became increasingly revisionist. The foreign policy debate in Moscow started to dwell on a supposed long-term decline of the West, and how to restore Russian influence in former Soviet states. Russian diplomats like to talk about how they felt like poor cousins or unwanted guests with Western counterparts under Yeltsin or during Putin’s first few years. Their behaviour changed markedly during his second term.

Russia was no longer intent on ‘joining the West on its own terms’, but striking out as an ‘independent’, ‘sovereign’ player in international affairs. The establishment spoke increasingly about the coming end of the American ‘unipolar’ world. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, began to let slip that he felt the West had seen its day. In 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin felt strong enough to start openly challenging it. He accused the US of having ‘overstepped its national borders in every way’. 70Dry and confident, Putin’s demeanour unnerved American officials. After the ‘Munich speech’, the normally sanguine Defense Secretary Robert Gates exclaimed, ‘One Cold War was quite enough.’ 71

As Putin’s reputation rose domestically he ceased to be treated like a conventional politician. Influential players called on him to ‘follow Roosevelt’ and alter the constitution to run for a third term, whilst commentators discussed whether he should be considered a great man of history. 72Behind the Kremlin walls, the idea began to circulate that he might rule forever. Even Moscow’s democratic aristocrats such as Mikhail Gorbachev publicly credited Putin with having ‘pulled Russia out of chaos and earned a place in history’, which had enabled Russia to enjoy ‘a resurgence’. 73

Inevitably, Putin began to change. His Western guests first picked up on this shift. Jonathan Powell, the chief of staff to Tony Blair, recalls how both he and the prime minister were touched on their first visit to Russia when Putin pointed out the shabby block of flats he had grown up in as a child, whilst driving away from a state function at a tsarist palace in St Petersburg. As Powell wrote in his memoirs:

Each time Tony visited him in his dacha he had acquired more grooms for his horse and lived in greater luxury. Angela Merkel described a joint German–Russian cabinet meeting in Siberia in 2006. She said that she had found it difficult to convince Putin that cabinet ministers should be treated with respect rather than contempt. For Putin hubris resulted partly from the trappings of office and partly from the price of oil. 74

Power loves to build, because rulers die but architecture remains. Putin’s Moscow began the biggest construction project since Brezhnev’s 1980 Olympic games – Moscow City. These gigantic skyscrapers, the tallest in Europe, with names such as ‘Imperia’, ‘City of Capitals’, ‘Federation’, ‘Russia’ or ‘Eurasia’ were launched in quick succession between 2003 and 2007 with the intention of creating a ‘global financial centre’ for over 200,000 people to work in or visit at any one time. These sub-utopian glass fragments of a BRIC dream were seductive to Muscovites. They call them the teeth, or the claws, pushing up like fangs at the city’s edge. To the drunken financiers in rooftop bars, they smiled like a Cheshire Cat over the Kremlin. Yet the new mood did not calm everyone. A popular political joke in Moscow in 2007 had Putin discussing with Medvedev the issues of the day.