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

Medvedev’s presidency saw a large number of governors replaced. However, closer inspection of the anticorruption logic behind replacement of his biggest scalp – the long-standing Mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, does not show a diminishing of ‘local political technology’. The current mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, has shown little restraint from policies that look distinctly like that of his predecessor. Luzhkov was widely denounced as his wife had grown into Russia’s richest woman on the back of a Moscow-based construction company. Soon after Sobyanin’s odd choice to replace the capital’s asphalt pavements with slabs was taken, it was discovered his wife owned a factory producing pavement tiles. Regional governors have also displayed the same knack for finding their children good employment. In April 2010 the broadsheet Vedomosti published an investigation into the flourishing business activities of the children of the governors of Kaliningrad, Kalmykia, Voronezh and Sverdlovsk. The story was published under the satirical headline, ‘They are just plain lucky.’ 46

The paint peels on the walls of the Russian State University for the Humanities as Kremlin intellectuals pull up their chairs for a meeting of the John Locke Club, for thinkers supporting United Russia. Bored students and pale blondes, bathed in iPad glows, ignore the discussion. Yellow lighting. The smells of institutional Russia: wet clothes, wafts of canteen boiled meats and cheap cleaning fluids. The professors wait for their turn to speak, while texting under the table, then lecture lacklusterly on the theme of the day: ‘How to make United Russia a real political actor.’ Boris Mezhuev, a prominent conservative philosopher, takes the floor, though scant attention is paid: ‘But of course United Russia can’t be a real political actor. There is only one political actor in this country and we all know his name.’ A ripple of surprise, then nervous laughter turns to murmurs of quiet agreement.

‘The trouble with this regime – despite being here for so long – is they have not managed to institutionalize anything of their system,’ confides Mezhuev afterwards. ‘The parties are plastic. Politics has no meaning here anymore.’

The financial crisis, and the chronic governance issues it had revealed, had made such tiny gestures of dissent and contempt for the ruling clique commonplace in Moscow by the summer of 2010. It seems hard to imagine now – but that summer the increasing decline in the quality of Putin’s personal PR and the rising talk of stagnation was standing to benefit Medvedev. At a think-tank dinner, one popular radio host I like too much to embarrass announced: ‘He is in a great position. Either he can become president again or the first leader of the Russian opposition.’ The think-tankers nodded, knowingly.

He became neither. This merely reflected the fact the ‘tandem’ was the last propaganda coup of the Surkov years. Since 2008 it brilliantly deflected attention from the regime’s failings and avoided comparisons between them and the opposition by focusing all media eyes on Kremlinology. Would Medvedev assert himself? Was Medvedev incapable of fulfilling his rhetoric or being tied down? As 2011 wore on, the issue of the succession became so consuming that Russian journalists and Western diplomats would joke about ‘the question’.

‘A person who thinks he can stay in power indefinitely is a danger to society,’ warned Medvedev, observing that, ‘excessive concentration of power is a dangerous thing.’ 47His commitment to what appeared from his speeches to be an ambitious modernization agenda was cited by financial analysts as evidence of blocked reformism. As the volume rose on the debate around stagnation it simultaneously focused attention on the modernization agenda. INSOR released what was clearly an ambitious election manifesto and Medvedev was alleged to have lobbied for support from industrialists and the military–industrial complex. However, by summer 2011, the gap between rhetoric and fact had started to widen. Moscow chatter about Medvedev had turned from the cautiously optimistic to the concerned. From my notebook a few quotes:

• ‘Medvedev is strong enough to say what is wrong with Russia but not strong enough to change Russia.’

• ‘Medvedev means well but is being held back by Putin.’

• ‘Medvedev needs a second term to become Medvedev.’

• ‘Medvedev is weak, but a weak Khrushchev beat Beria.’

Though they will now deny it, a majority of observers and investors expected Medvedev to return to the presidency in 2012. Not just because one-term presidencies are euphemisms for failures, but because Medvedev controlled the political narrative. It went like this – the only response to stagnation was modernization, and in the Asian century what was needed was authoritarian modernization, not the chaos of democratization.

In authoritarian states, slight differences matter. Even the most marginal appointment in its upper hierarchy can eventually lead to political freeze or thaw. For the intelligentsia, Putin and Medvedev, almost by accident, had come to symbolize two possible futures. Medvedev: weak leadership with authoritarian modernization. Putin: strong leadership with authoritarian stagnation. But editors were still scared of Medvedev – the following poem was pulled from the online TV channel Dozhd. It was deemed too insulting, or close to the bone:

Putinist telepopulism that had seemed so effective in the 2000s had started to turn crass, as within the Kremlin a classic intrigue was taking place. Whilst Putin and Medvedev were not in conflict, their insecure factions started to compete. Pavlovsky was fired for publicly supporting a Medvedev return to the presidency and he claims that Surkov’s eventual demotion was because he also wanted this to happen. In sidelining them the Kremlin lost its finest ‘political technologists’. Online advertising was appearing, urging girls to ‘rip’ their shirts for Putin as half-naked female twentysomethings from ‘Putin’s Army’ scrubbed cars for the cameras. The leading Putin campaigner Sergey Markov tried to explain these stunts to me: ‘You see we are trying to combine a strong sexual message with a strong political message.’ This might have worked, but there was no clear Putin policy platform. Younger Russians had started to see right through this game. It became increasingly popular to trade satirical poems, this one a children’s poem from 1956. It needs no explanation, other than in Russia ‘Medved’ means bear and ‘Vova’ is a diminutive for Vladimir:

The regime was not just losing the narrative. It was making others lose their script. Medvedev’s mixed message – both seeming weak and encouraging others to take a stand for modernization – began to encourage unintended dissent. It had taken almost ten years for a public figure to denounce the strangling of TV in the presence of the powerful and not in the columns of a fringe opposition newspaper. Ironically, it took place where the Kremlin’s agents felt the safest – the podium of the 2010 Russian annual television award ceremony overlooking a dozen tables of black-tie executives, their female acolytes and the editors of state TV – the wealthy winners of Putinism, the rewarded, each with a multi-entry Schengen visa in his pocket and a Star-Alliance card in his wallet.