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

That the impasse required the involvement of Prime Minister Putin – the man ‘responsible for everything’ in Russia – illustrated the weakness of the federal system… none of the institutions designed to protect citizen interests functioned; labour unions, political parties, or even state institutions like the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service could not bring about a solution (even after President Medvedev reportedly told the Leningrad Oblast Governor Serdyukov to fix the problem in March). 26

Nor was Pikalyovo the only such incident. After a deadly explosion killed forty-six people at the Sayano-Shushenskaya mega-dam in Siberia, Putin again flew to the scene. His speech exhorting the oligarchs to invest more in infrastructure may come across as strongman behaviour at first look, but is actually that of a sign of weakness as he was forced to cajole them through telepopulism.

The need for ‘manual control’ and the absence of the vertical of power was because a corrupt system was neither capable, nor willing, to implement Kremlin orders. At the height of Putin’s power in 2006 one US Embassy cable reported, ‘It was rumoured within the presidential administration that as many as 60 per cent of his orders are not being followed.’ 27Half a decade later Putin conceded that as many as 80 per cent of Kremlin orders to the regions were routinely ignored or obstructed. 28Even Gleb Pavlovsky has written that within Putin’s state, ‘everyone has an interest in the current system and everyone is disloyal to it! Everyone works as provocateurs of conflicts which are settled by bonuses from other players.’ 29

Neither could Medvedev pull the levers of power to greater effect. He repeatedly called meetings to express his exasperation at orders going unfulfilled, achieving nothing or having to be reissued. In a revealing attempt to ease Medvedev’s concerns, one minister remarked in 2010 that in fact the amount of presidential orders completed on time had risen by 68 per cent, with now 20 per cent of orders implemented on schedule. 30During his time as president, Medvedev was forced to also practise ‘manual control’, as varied as inspecting train stations and airports personally to ensure anti-terror measures were in place. He was even reduced to angrily demanding ‘who owns this place?’ outside dilapidated provincial factories. He bemoaned:

What is not coordinated by the president is not coordinated by anyone. This is bad and it means that we have an absolutely out-dated, inadequate management system, which should be changed. Because when all signals come from the Kremlin, it shows that the system itself is not viable and must be adjusted. 31

‘Manual control’ has in fact forced Putin and Medvedev into a gruelling travelling schedule within Russia, significantly more intense than most European leaders. The practice is not restricted to the highest level. Senior officials are also forced to control their own departments, through ‘manual control’. Russia’s chief investigator regularly has to travel to the scene of any major incident, once leading to him being injured in a secondary blast after a terrorist attack. Amongst the many governance failures that have chipped away at the myth of the vertical of power, the most decisive in turning public opinion was the 2010 mass murder described in the introduction to this book, in Kushchevskaya. The murder trail revealed that a criminal gang had infiltrated the local authorities and repeatedly bribed officials to be able to operate. The gang leader, a local council member, had even boasted he was a guest at Medvedev’s inauguration. Putin himself admitted that in Kushchevskaya ‘all the organs of power have failed’. 32

Many in the Russian establishment shivered at the implications of Kushchevskaya. It was a case that clearly showed that despite Putin’s claims to have ended the ‘chaos of the 1990s’ there was as much continuity as change in much of the country. In sharp contradiction to Putin’s talk of the ‘dictatorship of law’, the chief justice of the constitutional court Valery Zorkin decided to speak out in a state newspaper. Zorkin argued that such cases had happened time and time again, with the intertwining of the mafia and the state now posing an existential threat to Russia. ‘One has to admit, honestly, that the disease of organized crime has too deeply infected our country,’ he wrote. 33‘Crime is undermining the fabric of our legal system… corroding the fabric of our still immature civil society.’ 34Zorkin asserted that a ‘fusion of authorities and criminals’ had already taken place in many parts of the country and it was growing impossible to distinguish between state and mafia operations. 35Implicitly arguing that the Putin regime had failed, Zorkin ended with a stark warning: ‘If the mafia isn’t pushed back it will raise the question of whether Russia can survive beyond the next ten years.’ 36

This awareness of the chronic weakness of the vertical was by now so strong that even the government officials charged with manual control barely bothered to disguise its weakness, including Grigory Rapota, the former deputy chief of foreign intelligence. He had done well under Putin. After a stint as a minister he had been appointed to be the presidential envoy first to the Volga region and then to the Southern region, containing the North Caucasus. He argued: ‘Everyone understands that manual control is not the way to run a country. But everyone also understands this is the only way to deal with our crisis.’ He then tried to shift the blame away from the state onto the Russian people themselves: ‘The Russian mentality is not only used to this kind of administration, but also used to the government regulation of all aspects of life. Not just bureaucrats, but the people, of whom bureaucrats are a part. Only, when we have a new generation – who are now about fifteen to twenty years old – in power will we be able to run Russia in a different way.’ Rapota may not have been watching the clock. By the time of our conversation, in 2012, any Russian of working age in the last year of the USSR would have to be aged thirty-nine or older.

Behind closed doors, the elite sounded very different. ‘We are an ocean of inefficiencies’, in the words of one government advisor, repeated around the most expensive tables of Moscow. The incompetence of the vertical was not just a matter of governors and officials lining their pockets and forgetting about Kremlin decrees, as forests burned outside. This feckless governance was translating into incalculable waste in the very public services the country needed to work properly if it was ever to modernize. A look out of any window, even in bijoux central Moscow, looked onto bits of backwardness – tangled webs of electrical wires are strung across the streets, in a way that had long vanished in most of the rest of Europe. Not to mention the smoke stacks belching steam next to the main government building.

The most shameful and important ‘ocean of inefficiency’ was public health care, constitutionally mandated to be free of charge in the Russian Federation, but so corrosively corrupt and clownishly run that 30–40 per cent of costs come out of people’s own pockets and 50–70 per cent forgo medical care as they cannot afford it. 37The ‘vertical of health’, the IMF calculated, was achieving results similar to countries that spent 30–40 per cent less on their health care systems. 38All this in a country with a health care system that was actually huge – Russia has twice as many doctors and three times as many hospital beds per capita than the United States, but because it cannot deploy them effectively it has infant mortality that is 40 per cent higher and African-level male life expectancies. 39All this in a country with 18 million veterans and 39 million pensioners, which somehow felt it more important to invest over $50 billion into the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics instead. ‘We are an ocean of inefficiency,’ as the elite like to say. 40