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

In short, he suddenly catapulted all the major failings of Putinism previously only analysed by elite newspapers such as Kommersant , the think-tank INSOR or in the series of opposition pamphlets called ‘Putin: The Results’ into the heart of the national debate. ‘Forward Russia’ started a political campaign to build up a reformist pole in the elite. Medvedev continued to denounce ‘legal nihilism’, corruption and the ‘signs of stagnation’. As president he fostered new thinking in the establishment by patronizing INSOR and the Skolkovo research centre. The offices of INSOR or the ‘Centre for Contemporary Development’ are set in a small park inside a huge tsarist nobleman’s house in the chic and expensive Mayakovskaya district. As a statement it was not really a mere think-tank – the echoing entry hall is larger than the offices of any typical European research centre. The largesse of this establishment reflected that none other than Medvedev was chairman of the board.

Then head of INSOR, the economist Igor Yurgens, an elegant man, always in rimless glasses, his face distinguished by jet black eyebrows and snow white hair, explained how Medvedev got in touch: ‘He called us – he wanted our party of liberals to be part of something. But he never promised us we would be the only party feeding into his thinking. So we published thirty books on how liberalism can be put to good use. They used some parts of it, but not others.’

The centre served unofficially as Medvedev’s research department with its analysts writing private briefings, policy programmes and agendas for him, whilst presenting his point of view to Western diplomats. Meanwhile, at the Skolkovo science park his stated ambition was to create a Russian ‘Silicon Valley’. The minister responsible called it a ‘growth spot’ for the economy, pioneering a low-tax, high-tech future with foreign partners. Skolkovo stood for an alternative to the state capitalism of mega-corporations like Rosneft and Gazprom.

Medvedev also tried to endorse emerging Russian media trends. He opened a blog and started to tweet, even visiting the hip online TV station Dozhd; he denounced the beating of the famous journalist Oleg Kashin. He is believed to have given signs behind the scenes that the anticorruption activist Alexey Navalny, who would later emerge as the pre-eminent opposition leader, was not to be harmed. In fact Navalny’s later work exposing corruption by crowd-sourcing the investigation of government contracts would have been impossible without Medvedev. It was he who had ordered that all government contracts become publicly available. This reform immediately saw suspicious deals discussed in the press and enabled Navalny and his army of volunteers to start investigating suspicious orders and tenders for corruption – from orders for furs placed by the government of St Petersburg’s education department to requests for an antique bed from the ministry of interior.

Medvedev’s reformist campaign boomeranged and damaged the Putin consensus. Medvedev highlighted the structural problems of Putinism and built up a constituency wanting and expecting change. When he failed to deliver, he discredited the Kremlin’s abilities to pursue modernization. After Medvedev began his forward-looking speeches Moscow fizzed with talk of a Putinist ‘perestroika’ but this gave way to talk of ‘Brezhnevization’. The political buzzword soon became ‘stagnation’, in Russian a synonym for the Brezhnev era that preceded Soviet collapse.

This debate was not happening in a vacuum but in a tense period nationally. The economic crisis revealed Russia’s chronic governance crisis. The government had made good policy choices in the 2000s that had contributed to growth, but after a decade in power they had failed to improve Russia’s very weak institutions. By 2010 indicators showed that Russia was as corrupt as Papua New Guinea, with the property rights of Kenya, as competitive as Sri Lanka, with the police reliability of Mauretania. 21Fast growth and confidence meant this weakness was overlooked in the 2000s and seen as on its way out. By 2009 it looked as if it was here to stay.

What these abysmal rankings reflected at the street level was a society where everything has a price tag. The magazine Bolshoi Gorod playfully estimated that the bribes for being stopped by the police on street corners could cost $30 to have them drop the charges for ‘hooliganism’, or for drug use as much as $340; to ignore draft dodging could cost $680. The bribes in courtrooms could ruin a business: reclassifying a criminal case could cost $34,000; having an investigator reclassify or drop a criminal case between $3,000 and $1 million; getting various ‘services’ from the prosecutor could set you back from $5,000 to $5 million, whilst the cost of an appeal to the court of arbitration could set you back $20,000 or $25,000; and a favourable verdict could cost $100,000. 22Even the Ministry of the Interior admitted the average bribe had soared from the equivalent of $292 in 2008 to over $7,670 by 2011. 23

Intellectually, what the Russian debate in the media meant by the ‘new stagnation’ boiled down to three fears. The first was that power had become so personalized around Putin that the system could no longer change. It was frequently repeated that there was not pervasive corruption infecting the system, but rather that the system was corruption itself. This fear was best captured in a cartoon of Brezhnev’s face moulded to an ageing Putin in 2024, when, if elected as president in 2012, Putin would have to stand down. This fear also had an economic face. Like the Soviet Union, the Russian economy and national budget was again hooked to natural resources and dependent on a high price of oil. The concern began to circulate that Russia was under a ‘resource curse’, in which, thanks to huge oil profits, the elite had no incentive and interest in reforming. The third fear was that in terms of everyday life, nothing would ever change. Policemen would continue to demand bribes, the threat of ‘raiders’ or a tax inspection would still hang over businesses, the prospect of decent health care and roads, let alone courts, seemed to be becoming ever more distant.

The Putin consensus and the Putin majority had started to decay as its economic ‘winners’ had started to feel like losers. Without any of these things their gains were not substantive but sandcastles. In Moscow, the bourgeoisie found a new favourite topic – emigration. Polls showed that more people wanted to emigrate than had during the collapse of the USSR. Estimates put the soaring Russian population of London, a favourite destination, at over 50,000. 24But the fear of stagnation was only rammed home to me when I had a fight with a friend over her obsession with emigration and disinterest in the opposition. Not a provincial, but precisely the kind of well-educated, multilingual Muscovite upon whom modernization depends. ‘You just don’t get it,’ she shrieked. ‘You just don’t get it at all – what it really feels like to come from a country where everything, anything, can be stolen from you by a policeman with a smile on his face, with one knock on the door. Where everything has already been stolen and every single ceiling is made of glass. You just don’t get it.’ I think that afterwards, she cried.

For middle-aged Russians this fear of stagnation was becoming acute. This generation had all watched the humiliating archive footage of Brezhnev’s 1979 New Year’s address. Stagnation is personified in the infamous video, which shows the General Secretary hulked over a small desk in front of dark green curtains. He appears deeply confused, coarsely clears his throat and seems not to fully understand the instructions coming from the clearly pitched voice – the tone one uses to address somebody senile – of a younger aide. After changing two identical pairs of glasses Brezhnev mumbles, ‘that’s better now’, before trying to read a pre-recorded speech scrolling down the screen before him. He slurs, asking for help, losing his flow before groaning, ‘Where’s me boy?’ making the aide quickly return to the ailing leader festooned with medals, the incarnation of an ailing state. The popularity of this footage on YouTube rose throughout the crisis; the debates underneath it became increasingly about the present: ‘Just imagine Putin in ten years,’ snarled one of the commenters.