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

After the ceasefire I travelled over the front lines into South Ossetia on the back of a Russian military truck. There were burnt-out villages, ransacked post offices and shredded farmhouses. In the undergrowth there was a deep rot – the smell of death.

In the village cum capital, Tskhinvali, freshly pasted posters demanded: ‘Recognize the union with Russia’. Nothing had escaped the tears, chips and blast of this short, nasty war. Men in ill-fitting, unmatched camouflage outfits circled around in stolen cars from the southern villages. In the hills were roars and rumbles as the Russian Army cleared the last ordinance. Further back, shouts and the occasional crackle fired gleefully into the air. The militia pushed itself forward: ‘We gave it to them. They’ll never come again.’

Under the poplars, through the dusk on Stalin Street, militias drifted towards the megaphones; a ring of Russian tanks formed a semicircle around a Soviet town hall. It was a wreck, like everything else in Tskhinvali. Until a few weeks earlier this had been the government building of the unrecognized mini-state. Soon it would be the headquarters of a ‘government’ recognized by Moscow. This meant effective annexation. Behind the tanks, floodlights clacked on over the throng. Dignitaries in bad suits took their seats in front of the armour. ‘Is Putin coming?’ hissed the rumour. There was a rush to light the memorial candles spread over the steps of the ruined offices. Russian soldiers tied wrist ribbons – the Russian and Ossetia tricolour, as one. I climbed onto a tank to stand next to a young Russian trooper. ‘How do you feel?’ I asked. ‘Tired,’ he laughed.

I did not realize it at the time but I was watching the peak of Putinism. The camera crews of federal TV pushed and angled for the widest frame with the perfect pitch: a memorial concert that is also a victory concert. The marching, mournful chords of the Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony began to play under the conductor Valery Gergiev, then director of the London Philharmonic. A friend of the Kremlin with a private jet, he pulled the orchestra and the crowd into the message: Russia respects her dead. Russia is back. Russia has won. Troops quivered with emotion and exhaustion. The young man dressed in camouflage standing next to me on the tank turned to me and whispered; ‘I feel like my grandfather must have felt.’

A winner in a patriotic war. For the first time since General Alexander Gromov had crossed the bridge over the Amu-Daria river out of Afghanistan in February 1989, Russia was no longer in retreat. For weeks, news channels had been playing footage of tank columns threatening a European capital. In Russia and the West – there was political hysteria. Diplomats cabled from Moscow on Russian intentions in the Crimea. Newspapers published maps with troop numbers, once again in red and blue solider-shaped icons.

Over the phone, I rowed with Russian friends. ‘NATO is wrong.’ ‘Russia is right.’ ‘No, NATO is right.’ ‘Russia is wrong.’

For a few weeks the war seemed extremely meaningful to Russia’s development. Yet it was nothing of the sort. What seemed to be a sideshow in the 2000s – migrants and supermarkets, consumerism and tourism, tacky churches and hipsters – would all turn out to be hugely significant, the sociological remaking of Russia. The foreign-policy posturing of the late 2000s turned out to be incidental to the country’s eventual course.

As Western diplomats nervously debated whether Russian forces would next invade Crimea, alarm signals began to go off in world financial markets. In the offices of the Georgian National Security Council I watched as officials at first began to argue that the sudden collapse of the Russian stock market was ‘because they invaded us’, but by the time they realized that it was not just the Russian economy that was in free fall but the entire global financial system that was seizing up, it had become apparent that Western politicians had all but forgotten about them. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the crash was about to bring European, American and Russian hubris abruptly down to earth. At the moment of his greatest victory, forces that would tear apart the Putin consensus and expose the weakness of Russia’s claim to be rising with China were already at work.

PUTIN IS said to spend much of his time reading tomes on the lives of the tsars. Maybe he has let their shadows slip into the making of his choices. Many have an eerie echo of the past. When Russia was young, Ivan the Terrible, somewhat like Putin, chose to formally abdicate from the throne in 1574. He demanded that his boyars kneel before a converted Tatar noble called Simeon Bekbulatovich. Ivan insisted he was but a simple nobleman. Bekbulatovich was now their lord. After eleven months Ivan returned to the throne, proving for all to see that power was Ivan and there was no power without him even in the institution or robes of the tsar. When Putin ignored appeals from the elite to change the constitution and run for a third term in 2007, he anointed his most skilled courtier Dmitry Medvedev as his candidate, whom he would serve loyally as a mere prime minister. With this choice, the legend of servant Bekbulatovich began to haunt Moscow until Putin, like Ivan, returned to the Kremlin in 2012.

Soon known as ‘the tandem’, these two cooperated so smoothly in governing Russia, because they had already worked together for years. Like most leading Kremlin politicians they had got to know each other when Putin was in St Petersburg town hall. His young charge was the quintessential insider. He was the most junior member of the gang. Medvedev had proved his loyalty early – running Anatoly Sobchak’s election campaign to the Congress of People’s Deputies back in 1988. Nor had he ever flaked off into the anti-Sobchak opposition. Serving the ‘great democrat’ was his first real job after university, where he was taught by none other than Sobchak, who sent him to work for Putin straightaway, as a legal consultant for the city’s foreign relations committee. This is a man whose entire adult life has been spent working in one way or another for the St Petersburg family. Unlike older members of the Putin elite who before coming to work with Putin had lived Soviet lives – sometimes several, either in the KGB, the military, or even just managing furniture stores – Medvedev had no other politically meaningful professional experience. He could be trusted. After all since his early twenties in the early 1990s, he had been spending weekends with the Putins at their dacha in the Ozero cooperative.

‘Medvedev seems to enjoy working on our team, but I am not sure how we are going to use him yet,’ said Putin pensively in 2000 of the younger man he had brought with him to Moscow. 1A job was found for him, first as his 2000 election campaign manager, then as chairman of the Gazprom board of directors, before becoming the Kremlin chief of staff. These are all roles in which Medvedev excelled as a courtier – not a politician or administrator – earning him the sobriquet ‘the vizier’. He was as secretive as any other insider. Amongst his first acts on becoming chief of staff – a promotion after Alexander Voloshin, the previous office holder, resigned in protest at Khodorkovsky’s arrest – was to ban free contacts between Kremlin staff and the press. He made it clear that when push came to shove you were either with Putin or against him. After Andrei Illiaronov, the neoliberal economics advisor to Putin, made a show of attending Khodorkovsky’s trial he was told by Medvedev that he had crossed the line. He was informed, ‘You’ve made your choice about whom you are going to meet with.’ 2Four days later he was fired.