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

Russians took to calling the Putin–Medvedev swap the ‘rokirovka’ – or castling – a defensive chess manoeuvre where the king is swapped with the rook. If anything it was the inverse, a move that instead of switching the king into a secure corner of the board left him as an exposed centrepiece, visibly the fulcrum of the game. The ‘castling’ laid bare Russia’s personalized power, its presidential tsarism. Putin’s decision to close down Medvedev’s ‘modernization’ candidacy without much explanation, or even why he had chosen to return to the Kremlin, stunned wealthier Muscovites. Lacking an explanation, the ‘castling’ seemed to be both gratuitous power-hunger, whilst also confirming the creeping chatter about stagnation or ‘Brezhnevization’ within the establishment and the emerging middle class. It demonstrated in one manoeuvre that politics, despite all the talk, despite the 1990s and the 2000s, was still a matter for a tiny power circle. By ‘castling’, Putin underlined that his KGB instructors had been prescient as well as accurate. The move revealed not only a lowered sense of danger, but a lowered sense of awareness of the extent to which the country had changed since Yeltsin asked him to ‘take care of Russia’. 6

Putin – like a Soviet secretary general – seemed set to rule at least until his constitutional term expired in 2024. This would make the rule of this lieutenant colonel the longest since that of Stalin. ‘I’ll remember the day Putin announced his return for the rest of my life – 24 September 2011 – because all my friends and I calculated how old we would be in 2024,’ said Leonid Volkov, an ambitious city councillor in Ekaterinburg, capital of the Urals. He was not alone. Capturing the horror many felt at this prospect, already living in a reality where in political conversations ‘he’ often did not need to be named, for the listeners to cotton on who ‘he’ was, the poet Dmitry Bykov wrote a pastiche on Mayakovsky’s utopian ode ‘Here will be a Garden City’, in which the ubiquity of Putin, ‘a meek colonel from the swamps of St Petersburg’, is as oppressive as it is inescapable.

The same dim resentment, the same extremely weak but pervasive sense of dread could be felt in the outer tiers of the ruling elite. The day of the tandem announcement, I exchanged a few emails with a friend in the diplomatic service. He wrote back in one-liners – ‘Chaadaev was right’ – referencing the pessimistic cultural critic that had exchanged letters on Russian identity with Pushkin, coming to the terrible conclusion, ‘alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world’ and ‘that we exist only to teach the world some terrible lesson’. I emailed back, asking what he meant, but this time the reply was terser still: ‘1991’.

To some people this was no surprise. ‘It was never a secret, this was the plan from 2008,’ said Sergey Kolesnikov, Putin’s self-exiled former business partner in Tallinn. ‘In 2008, every day I was talking to Kovalchuk and Shamalov, and we discussed politics and this plan. And this is what was known behind closed doors. In some parts of the state this was always common knowledge.’

Though many claimed they had seen it coming, it was still a shock, however much anticipated. Previously pliant members of the tamed Kremlin parties, which, bereft of power and lost for content, had fallen into patronage systems, were likewise unenthused by Putin’s return. ‘It was when the castling happened that I realized I could no longer support the regime,’ says Ilya Ponomarev, the young MP with a complicated back-story and friends in very high places, holding court in a pastry-specializing grand cafe round the back of the Duma. Akademiya is the cafe of plotters, Nashi-deputies, stooges and opposition activists alike – because for the establishment, Moscow is a small place. ‘Make sure you take the Napoleon cake… this is their signature,’ says Ilya Ponomarev. This deputy should not be challenging the system – his mother works for Abramovich and is the senator for the territory of Chukotka on the Bering Straits. Whilst we take down the Napoleon cake he gets in a fluster as he has forgotten his credit card, but this turns out to have been in the pocket of his plush sky-jacket all along. ‘I’m often in London,’ he grins. As the chairman of the Duma subcommittee on Innovations and Venture Capital and involved in representing Medvedev’s science park Skolkovo abroad for lucrative business deals, he was nothing if not a winner. ‘But when it was announced that Putin was returning I realized that there was not going to be any reform, that there was going to be stagnation, which is potentially catastrophic for the country. Before the “castling” I had not thought this way. The move closed off the prospect of the system genuinely evolving.’

This frustration within the establishment at first appears hard to understand. In the abstract it touched on a fear of social ossification, personified by Putin. ‘It’s not a frustration with economic stagnation, for now the economy is quite all right,’ explains the conservative thinker Boris Mezhuev:

‘It’s a specific kind of social stagnation. It’s frustration with the sense that we live in a society where everything is treated as a resource – you become dean of philosophy just to exploit it for money, you become editor of a major newspaper just to exploit it for money – it’s a frustration with a society where the only thing that counts is connections and resources and has nothing to do with merit. It is a fear that Russia is turning into an anti-meritocracy: a place where elite oligarchic monopolization represses those that have the capacity to rise.’

For young politicians like Ilya Ponomarev, FSB officers and aspiring oligarchs, this fear was very real. Putin had surrounded himself with people of a similar age and background. Putin’s return meant that they would be staying in the same positions – perhaps until 2024. Those who knew them well said that in the security services this fear was particularly acute. Whether you were a young Duma deputy or a security officer, the ‘vertical of loyalty’ was whispered to mean you would remain middle-rank forever. A similar resentment at the very real gerontocracy of the Brezhnev era had pushed talented apparatchiks around Gorbachev.

In the weeks that dragged through a boring autumn leading into the campaign for the parliamentary elections, Russian journalists began twitching, as if smelling a gas that no one could see. Things had started to go amiss. It began with the mocking jokes – ‘the man referred to as President Medvedev’, or quips about Putin’s seemingly strangely adjusted features: ‘Mr Botox’. And then a flutter of seeming malfunctions in the social order: an audience stood up to clap at a foreign movie screening about jailed Khodorkovsky, cars had begun honking at the long motorcades blocking traffic in the most congested major city in the world as Russia’s leaders belted in black limousines back to their estates on the Rublevka; to the intense distress of a police officer, one man refused to move his car even though he was told ‘Putin is passing’. 8The glamour magazine Afisha was running increasingly political and biting front covers, while across town, United Russia posters were occasionally torn off the walls of housing estates.

Perhaps it was unsurprising as to why people were so disengaged. The party’s leafleting – showing space rockets, fighter jets in formation, combine harvesters and overproducing factories – looked both eerily and irksomely Soviet. The bland slogans on leaflets pushed through letterboxes in Moscow, ‘The Future For Us’, made such little attempt to persuade voters, they reminded elderly residents of Soviet ‘elections’ – where only one candidate had been on the ballot. The corrosive effects of a lack of narrative began to undermine Putinist telepopulism. The Kremlin’s main asset, the popularity of its front man, was no longer what it had been. Opinion polls began to tell a story of flagging enthusiasm. The number of people who trust Putin had fallen to 47 per cent in November 2011 from 69 per cent in 2009. 9His personal approval ratings had slumped from 83 per cent after the Georgian war in 2008, to 61 per cent in November 2011. 10They fell seven points after the announcement of his return that September. In a further poll breakdown only 26 per cent believed that Putin had adequately or successfully coped with Russia’s problems and 50 per cent disapproved of the Russian government. 11The discrepancy between ‘trust’ and ‘approval’ suggested that many were supporting Putin as they saw no alternative.