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

‘Are you ever worried they are going to kill you?’ I asked as we picked at a disappointing lunch deal at the Vietnamese cafe near his office.

‘Look… I really, really hate this regime,’ he replied, menacingly. The way he said it made me suddenly try to hold his gaze, but his eyes tipped slightly downwards, as if talking to someone other than just me.

‘They are leading this country into a catastrophe. It is not the opposition that will make the country collapse. Putin will make the country fall apart. But it’s not like they will kill me tomorrow. There is a risk of course… There is a risk they could do… but it’s completely ridiculous to compare me to those guys that were fighting apartheid. There is a constant routine… they raided my flat, they hack my account, there are people who follow me… you’re speaking English… so “you’re a spy”. But… here I am sitting in this cafe.’

Navalny’s wife Yulia was not quite so calm. After he had given a presentation to a crowd of adoring and, thanks to him, worked-up students at the New Economic School, one of them asked him that same question. And she burst into inconsolable tears. 50He was not going to stop:

‘By coming back Putin has decided to turn Russia into an authoritarian state like Belarus. He is pushing, a bit here, a bit there, to find out how far he can go. And there is only one thing that can stop him. A gigantic protest, or the West.’

THE KGB always thought Putin was flawed. Personnel training for Soviet foreign intelligence was onerous, pursued with a rigor and exactitude second only to that given to its cosmonauts. Agents were subjected to months of psychological tests, pulse measurements, head scans, role-plays and ‘Western’ life-simulations in its sealed academies, between bouts of form-filling and hours of language classes, broken up only by over-boiled institutional meals in its canteens, which sometimes were more or less the high point of the day. The agents would chatter about where they would all wind up – would it be London, Tokyo or West Berlin? Everyone wanted to be in a ‘real foreign country’ with blue-jeans and cassette-players, not in the empty-shelved Warsaw Pact or anywhere near ‘socialist’ consumer goods, which were of such pitiable quality during Putin’s education that over 2,000 Soviet colour TVs were self-combusting in Moscow every year. 1

But the agency, for now, just wanted to catalogue their weaknesses, because identifying flaws in others is the same as knowing exactly where you can make your incisions. Putin admits the KGB evaluated him as a stunted man. The instructors concluded he was at risk, but not in the slightest to succumbing to the temptations of women or drink, but due to a pervasive ‘lowered sense of danger’. 2He was also classified as a man unhelpfully unsocial, quite closed-off. This may explain why the KGB chose to place him in a second-tier East German city, not over the front line in the West, where a TV self-combusting was simply unheard of and a Soviet agent needed to be on his guard. A posting to Dresden can only have been a disappointment. Years later, Putin still only grudgingly half admits the agency’s character assessment. ‘I don’t think that I had a lowered sense of danger, but the psychologists came to this conclusion having followed my behaviour for a long time.’ 3

But they were right. This same stunted sense of danger saw Putin misjudge the public mood and hostility present in Russia to his 2012 return to the Kremlin. No sooner had the announcement been made but disgruntlement, with a shadow of defiance, seemed to have seeped through the capital, to hang in the smoke-trailed air of the bars that Moscow’s intelligentsia and moneyed elite had made their hang-outs. In these shallow places, where politics had been waved away during the boom years, snatches of political conversations began to be overheard, muffled by talk of emigration, London and frustration. For the denizens of Moscow’s trendiest haunts, like the fashionable fake French bistro Jan-Jak, a different kind of blog was becoming more popular – the easy materialism of Look At Me was out and Navalny’s page that said he was waging the ‘final battle between good and neutrality’ was in. 4

‘This repoliticization happened slowly, the way everyone used to wear Levis, but now everyone wants Diesel jeans. I think I was always talking about politics, but maybe even I wasn’t,’ pauses a friend and magazine editor in a Georgian restaurant with Dubai prices and a slick feel, such that even to call it a Georgian restaurant, the Russian equivalent of an Indian takeaway, seems somewhat misleading. ‘But then it started to get stronger. It started with the financial crisis, which shook us up. At first a few at the table wanted to talk politics. Then more did. And without really noticing we were all talking about politics again.’

Celebrities, for whom guessing the public mood was necessary to stay in the public eye, began to flirt with a shallow, smirking, anti-Putinism. At one end, the beaten journalist and former sailor Oleg Kashin found himself turning into a celebrity. With a terrible spittle lisp, f-ing his way through his analysis, Kashin’s line had once been as fringe as him. ‘Whenever you get the hell out of Moscow, you know what they tell you? They say: “We are just a bloody Moscow colony.” This whole place could just collapse in ten years or so,’ mouthed off Kashin, at the same table, in the same Georgian restaurant. ‘Russia could collapse all over again.’ But Kashin was now being invited to give speeches, more or less like this, at the nightclub Bright Night, belonging to the grumpy oligarch Mikhail Friedman. They hit a nerve. Kashin had once been a nobody, and a reporter for a pro-Putin newspaper. The sourer the political chatter got, the more famous he became. At the other end of the spectrum, celebrities who wanted to stay the centre of attention began to snigger publicly at the Putinists.

Ksenia Sobchak was rightly called the ‘Russian Paris Hilton’. She had posed topless for Playboy , she had worn big pink bows and been the daily bread of the editors of the city’s celebrity press, but in a country whose superpowers include female looks, she was startlingly plain for an ‘It girl’. Through the 2000s, she was one of those pointless half-loathed characters, famous for being famous. And in a Russia where connections count for everything, she had one of the best sets of all. She was the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak – the first mayor of St Petersburg and former boss to Putin, thus former boss to a big chunk of the Putinist political elite. To see a video with Sobchak giggling was not a surprise, but to see one of her taking her camera phone towards the Nashi leader Vasily Yakemenko dining in a restaurant where champagne costs $46 a glass was. ‘I’m an “It girl”, but how can he afford that with a civil servant’s salary?’ 5The Nashi commander squirms angrily. The video went viral. It meant only one thing – being vapid was no longer fashionable.

Like Sobchak, other celebrities and establishment figures began groaning at the sight of Putin after his announcement. The editorial line at the main financial daily Vedomosti (co-owned by the Financial Times ) began to denounce ‘stagnation’; the former Medvedev-inclined economist Sergei Guriev started to bemoan the government in its op-ed pages; formerly pliant TV anchors started complaining about censorship; even gallery owners, whose fortunes were amassed doing ‘political technology’ for United Russia, turned to tweeting snide remarks about the creatures in the Kremlin. All of it was very self-consciously elitist, neither expecting nor really requesting an echo from beyond the ‘Garden’ ring road that splits the Moscow of Dolce Gabbana bags from the Moscow of endless Soviet housing estates, Azeris hawking watermelons on street corners in the summer, and alleys smelling of alcoholic urine.