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

It came from the supercelebrity Leonid Parfyonov, the most famous journalist in Moscow. He had been asked by the organizers to make a speech about the issue he considered to be the most urgent. Why be worried of Parfyonov? His TV show had been taken away from him in 2004 and he had moved quietly on to other things. As he mounted the podium, he gulped with a shaking hand in the glitz and the violet tint of the studio. The celebrity jerked his shoulders. He lifted his hand to his mouth and looked at the floor. He did not lift his eyes from the paper as he began to speak:

After the real and imagined sins of the 1990s national television broadcasting has been put under state control at the beginning of the new millennium. This happened in two steps, first the media oligarchs were removed and then media made to join the ranks of the war on terror. News and life in general was categorised as suitable or unsuitable subjects for TV broadcasting. One could get an idea of the authorities’ goals and objectives, their moods and attitudes, their friends and enemies, just by watching any significant TV programme. Legally speaking this isn’t news but rather government PR, or anti-PR… 49

After a few moments his pitch seemed to falter:

Federal channel reporters don’t see officials as newsmakers but rather as bosses of their boss. Legally speaking in this case a reporter is no longer a journalist, but rather a state employee that worships submission and service. Thus you can’t interview the boss of your boss: it’s like an attempt to uncover somebody who doesn’t want to be uncovered.… National broadcasters don’t dare throw critical, sceptical or ironic remarks to them.… Supreme power seems to be the dead of whom we never speak. 50

Supporters of a Medvedev policy agenda had by September 2011 started to become increasingly shrill. Members of the factions answering directly to Putin and Medvedev appeared to be clashing, as did those trying to curry their favours. ‘If stabilisation goes on forever, it will lead to stagnation,’ warned Igor Yurgens, the head of INSOR. 51However, it was becoming abundantly clear by the annual Yaroslavl conference, which Medvedev hosted in September 2011, that he was not going to fight for his job. In his headline speech at the event Medvedev gave the speech of a bureaucrat and not a campaigning politician. Humiliating him further, echoing Russia’s poor state of repairs, a plane carrying Lokomotiv, one of the nation’s premier league hockey teams, had crashed in the city’s airport days before the conference, killing all but one of its forty-five passengers.

The ‘tandem announcement’ did not tarry. It came at the annual United Russia party conference on 24 September 2011. ‘There is nothing that can stop us… I have not lost my commander’s voice,’ rang out the call of Vladimir Putin from a triangular podium before an electronically shimmering Russian flag, where minutes before a haggard Dmitry Medvedev had announced he was backing the once and future President for a mandate that could see him rule until 2024. 52The audience of United Russia delegates applauded like a Soviet Party Congress, rapturously. This moment will be remembered as the highest peak of Putin’s power over the Russian establishment.

Minutes later, government advisor Arkady Dvorkovich let out two anguished tweets. ‘This is not a time for happiness.’ ‘Time to switch to the sports channel.’ 53

In St Petersburg somebody winced. ‘I feel towards him like a son,’ said his schoolteacher Irina Grigorovskaya, still so fond of him, not wanting to dwell on her feelings that afternoon. She watched him that day like so many million others, but unlike them she felt sorry for the child who had once drawn dinosaurs and loved chemistry experiments:

‘There have been some moments when I felt sorry for Dima… because he was being treated too roughly by Putin. I felt like this watching the United Russia congress when he had to announce that Putin would be the president after all… I was a bit disappointed, but I expected before the presidency that it would be just a rest for Putin… I know how hard this must have been, I feel sorry for Dima in an almost physical way.’

She was still preparing to vote for United Russia in the parliamentary elections and, of course, for Putin. ‘Who else is there to vote for?’ she sighed, looking at me like somebody very worried. It was a genuine question.

Putin had said that it had been ‘decided between us several years ago’ – as if letting slip that all the uncertainty of the tandem had been a lie. 54It was a mistake, insulting those taken in by it. Medvedev’s presidency had built up the intellectual infrastructure, constituency and anticipation for change. Medvedev’s term had seen the political and economic claims of Putinism exposed as lacking and the ‘economic winners’ of Putinism come to fear stagnation. Putin would soon realize he had miscalculated the mood of the prosperous. By returning without a clear narrative, by sidelining Medvedev, the ‘modernization’ candidate, Putin entered the electoral cycle perceived as the ‘stagnation’ candidate.

Why Putin chose to return is both self-evident and yet unclear. He has hinted the financial crisis influenced his decision – yet for Russia the worst was over by late 2011. 55There are those who believe that the drift of segments of the elite over to Medvedev frightened him during the crisis, or that he was concerned that he might lose control of his assets or ability to protect his friends. An unshaven Pavlovsky told me as he stuffed his face full of pelmeni dumplings in a cheap self-service joint that in the summer of 2010 a ‘physiological deformation’ overcame Putin and his working relationship with Medvedev soured. ‘It was natural, like when you work with someone, to start to feel ill at ease with them.’ But he admitted he didn’t know. ‘It was something with Medvedev, I think, but it’s not clear. We’ll have to wait for his biography.’ It is likely that Putin grew suspicious of his courtier, who had made feeble last-minute attempts to gather support for a second term. But it is unlikely Putin was motivated by material interests: these would have been just as well protected in the position of prime minister.

One Kremlin aide claimed that his boss, a leading minister, had been informed the ‘agreement reached years before’ had been that whoever had the highest rating would run for president. This would explain why there were competing stunts, even cadres, but no actual struggle. Yet the same official admits that he and his boss only learnt the news at the United Russia conference as well. ‘I have no idea why Putin did this,’ he said, slowly, trying to find the right words, ‘but you have to realize he isn’t really a politician. He won’t let Russia go.’

As for Medvedev, he was despised from the minute he did not run, by the same liberal elites he had once charmed. That autumn I went to see Igor Yurgens. The establishment liberal sounded dark and paranoid:

‘I felt depressed. It was not a shock. We all knew how difficult it was behind the scenes. Like Kosygin’s change in the 1960s in the USSR that didn’t happen, Medvedev’s change – these are both historical mistakes – geopolitically characteristic of our Russian reality and part of our paradigm.’

As we talked, cloud cover had filled his office with gloom. He did not switch on the light: ‘The political system is not capable of fitting with post-modern forces already at work inside Russia. The political system is feudalizing whilst the productive forces, or at least the best part of them, are in the post-industrial epoch. We are awaiting a shock like something out of Hegel. This shock – it can be an event, it can be a person – it’s synonymous.