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

Few expected Medvedev to be the choice. His technocratic manners, fluency in English and management consultancy jargon, sprinkled with the Davos patois of the super-elite stood out in the Kremlin. His working life had not been spent in Soviet Russia. Putin’s choice was greeted with enthusiasm by government economic liberals, embassies and many oligarchs. It seemed a victory for a certain tone – smiling and relaxed after stern KGB stares, at ease with video blogging where Putin does not even use the Internet, and more importantly not post-Soviet in personality but almost, tantalizingly, un-Soviet.

Medvedev was the first Russian leader since Nicholas II not to have been a member of the Communist Party or a KGB agent. He did not come from a peasant family persecuted by Stalinism, like Yeltsin or Gorbachev, or a rat-infested post-war komunalka like Putin, but one of the drab but decent blocks of flats and scientific families that the USSR was producing in the last decades of its existence. He was an only child. He had a very happy childhood. In a photo that Medvedev likes to place prominently on his website, it would be hard to imagine a baby with a broader smile. He had grown up in a different era in St Petersburg from Putin. Nobody wanted to watch spy thrillers. People wanted to listen to rock music. And Medvedev wanted to listen too: he loved Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. But he studied hard. The story he tells of himself is very different from that of the working-class brawling of little Putin. It’s that of a diligent, hard-working, not particularly creative but intelligent young man from a good family, with a slightly clunky way of thinking and speaking, with none of the Putin or Khodorkovsky mystique. This is how he remembers falling in love:

In the second and the third grade I was very interested in dinosaurs. We studied them, drew them, discussed them. I learned all the periods of the earth’s development, starting with the Archaean and ending with the Cenozoic era… In the fourth and fifth grades, I was taken by chemistry… I did experiments. Then it was sports. We would practice three or four times a week. And then all of that ended in a single moment. A new life began. 3

He met Svetlana when he was seven years old. He began dating her at high school, and this he claims, was the only year his grades suffered. They married when he was twenty-four.

Today in the drab but functional school where Medvedev had studied and met Svetlana, at the edge of St Petersburg, where the suburbs of Soviet grey blocks make it indistinguishable from anywhere else in Russia, his old maths teacher Irina Grigorovskaya thinks about him every day. ‘Svetlana was a very popular girl and she liked many boys. We could all see how this made Dima nervous, even dismal, at times,’ she told me, in a quivering tone of defensiveness towards ‘Dima’, as I asked if he had ever seemed weak as a boy. ‘He seems so soft, but there is something hard inside him.’ On the far wall behind her, a framed picture of Putin and Medvedev in tandem stares past her. ‘There used to be a lovely picture of Dima and his wife there,’ she remarked, as if piqued, as it drew my attention. She continued, timidly:

‘He was moving a lot and was very lively. But it was enough to only give him one glance, or even one word, and he would stop it and do what he had to do… but he was very goal driven. He would always think what his plans were and how to achieve them. He wasn’t the smartest boy in the class… There was one who was even brighter, but he was lazy and amounted to nothing.’

She chooses her words carefully. ‘Yes… Dima did always do as he was told. But he always had his own ideas. He was reliable.’

It is easy to imagine this lovely young man having taken one different turn and not having wound up immediately after university in St Petersburg town hall. He would have been an exemplary lawyer, maybe working for an American law firm. In another life he might have been a man like Sergei Magnitsky, the attorney at a Western law firm, who died in jail, having been tortured and denied medical care, a victim of the Hermitage Capital affair. He wasn’t, because from the age of twenty-three he was working for Sobchak, then directly with Putin. He was a part-time consultant for the city Foreign Relations Committee, run by Putin. He dropped by every week, sometimes more than once, to do one-on-one legal work with Putin. Ever since he was twenty-four Medvedev has always worked with Putin, with only one short interruption after 1996 as Putin made his transition to Moscow. When the ‘Tsar’ decided he wanted Medvedev in the Kremlin, it was none other than the ‘silovik’ Igor Sechin who made the call telling him to start packing. Perhaps the essential thing you need to understand about this man is not that he could have been a very normal person, this is obvious – but that Medvedev was raised by wolves.

After Putin announced Medvedev would run for president in 2008, the muzzled parts of the Russian media spent an inordinate amount of time reporting on his cat – Dorofei, a Neva Masquerade. In a pathetic premonition of his owner’s career, Dorofei overestimated his strength and was savaged by a cat belonging to Mikhail Gorbachev, their neighbour at the time. He recovered from his injuries on a course of antibiotics but in the end had to be castrated.

Medvedev himself was introduced to the people on billboards, walking side by side with Putin. Younger Russians groaned at the clumsy imagery recalling the ‘great friendship’ of Lenin and Stalin. The image was simple: power was not being handed over but split. It was instantly dubbed ‘the tandem’.

From the beginning Medvedev was never viewed as fully independent or fully in power. Once Putin was no longer president, this is when he truly became the leader – the one upon whom everything depends. ‘There is personal chemistry, I trust him, I just trust him,’ said Putin, ‘we are people of the same blood.’ 4Medvedev came across as the perfect son-in-law; the kind of clever and unthreatening man who possessive mothers suggest their daughters should marry. This was a man, after all, with an aquarium in his office. And he even cared for the fish himself. He was a hit with the West’s men in Moscow. Unlike Putin, diplomats cooed that he was always polite at dinner.

Putin and Medvedev were more similar in policy content than presentation. Medvedev picked up the same themes of modernization and improvement, but more earnestly discussed government lapses and mistakes. He stressed technology, legal reform and anticorruption where Putin spoke more of power, enemies and state strengthening. Many, including one source in military intelligence, saw Medvedev as more a de facto vice-president, spokesman or foreign minister: ‘Putin knows that he [Putin] is personally unacceptable in the West. This is why he created Medvedev. He says the things Putin cannot himself say convincingly.’ The Putin consensus had seen the boss deliver mostly cocksure presentations on the state of Russia. In his final state of the nation speech he boasted of Russia’s return to the top ten global economies, whilst in Medvedev’s inauguration speech he lamented ‘legal nihilism’. 5Medvedev encouraged and excited chunks of the intelligentsia. He spoke like a political liberal, if a rather rhetorically inept one: ‘freedom is better than un-freedom. This principle should be set at the core of our politics. I mean freedom in all its manifestations, personal freedom and economic freedom and finally, freedom of expression.’ 6

The pessimists argued that the regime, in spite of being corrupt – or rather because it was so corrupt – was striving for the appearance of legality. Many analysts saw in Medvedev, the man who denounced how ‘no other European country can boast of such a level of disregard for the law’, a ridiculous tribune for the elite’s insecurities, overcompensating with words for what was being stolen by the barrel. 7The pessimists said it felt satisfying for the elite to wave the anticorruption flag, lest it fall into others’ hands, and that to feel legitimate it would say almost anything. This was a policy charade, they said, uttered by the president of charades – who took his orders from Putin in the prime minister’s office.