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

As we talked, Artamonov began to gesture ironically with his eyebrows:

‘This is as far as central control is concerned. So comparatively this works for me but not for everyone. I know there are other governors who are not governing and are only interested in pursuing… their hobbies . The centre should more forcefully control them. This is surprising for me – it’s Putin’s preference. If I was Putin I would be far more decisive and centralizing. Power should not make business . Twenty years ago the political system changed. And we still have not become a fully functioning, efficient, cooperative and clean state… the state is really still carrying a Soviet way of thinking inside it. We have a joke in Kaluga that makes me think of the Russian state. “The hedgehog is a proud bird. It will not fly unless you kick it.”’

This mess has left Russia in fragments. Moscow elites love making sweeping statements about ‘the state of the nation’. However, things are so different from town to town, that Russians live with very different problems, despite the same bad roads and corrupt officials. Authoritarian modernization is working in Kaluga under the United Russia franchise, but take a night train north of Moscow and in Yaroslavl the United Russia cadres have been chased out by the ballot box. Kaluga shows what might have been, had Putin been more competent; Yaroslavl hints at how he could lose control.

The chance conjunction of a catastrophe in the air, official callousness and the electoral cycle detonated the local ‘bears’. It was Medvedev’s sinking of the Kursk moment. Then ‘president’ he had wanted to make the city synonymous with his name, to be his Davos. To do this he sponsored the Yaroslavl Policy Forum, which billed itself as ‘a permanent international platform for ongoing intellectual discussions and practical definitions and development of the modern state and its role in ensuring stability and security in the modern world’. In reality, like most policy conferences, it was a banquet, this one in the honour of the visiting Italian prime minister, then Silvio Berlusconi, and his Japanese and Korean counterparts.

Yaroslavl is a sporty town, obsessed by hockey. And on the night before the policy forum opened the plane carrying its hockey team, Lokomotiv, crashed at the airport killing all of the players on board. It had been forced to use an inferior landing strip due to Berlusconi’s imminent arrival. Grief-struck, the city was soon convinced that ambulances had been blocked so Berlusconi could use reserved lanes to make his way to the conference. Blubbing masses rushed into the squares of this pretty tsarist city of onion domes and sugar-icing stucco, but felt they were treated callously by OMON guarding the forum. They wanted the ‘president’ to be with them, but Medvedev neither consoled them nor called off the banquet.

This is ‘deep Russia’ not hipster-land – but this cack-handed performance pulled the plug on Putin’s legitimacy. The ‘national leader’ saw his rating plunge to less than 30 per cent and in the parliamentary elections the party scored just 29 per cent. 45When unrest broke out in Moscow in December 2011, local Facebook protests flared. ‘We had seen the real face of United Russia,’ said the e-organizers. Luck gave them the hook-up that never happened in the capital, sealing the fate of the Yaroslavl ‘bears’. Evgeny Urlashov, a local defector from the establishment, joined the Facebook protests and was tweeted to victory in mayoral elections. This was not an isolated ballot, but the tenth out of fifteen mayoral votes that the Kremlin lost that season.

This scenario on a national level is not unthinkable, though only mayoral elections can be lost so easily as an ‘escape valve’ for discontent. However, the new stubbly mayor, smoking a shisha pipe like the mad hatter in a hockey-themed bar, is as frustrated with the Moscow opposition as some governors are with the Moscow government:

‘The opposition is quite simply scaring people. I think that if the opposition in Russia is trying to pursue some kind of “revolution” then I am against it. I am positive that us Russians are united on one thing. We don’t want to have a revolution. We don’t want war, we don’t want bloodshed, we don’t want slaughter.’

This is a huge problem as he is convinced that the vertical is unworkable:

‘Before, when I was a party member, United Russia wouldn’t let me do anything without orders from Moscow. I wouldn’t do a single thing without waiting for Moscow to say so. I ended up doing nothing at all. Now I can do all kinds of things with power. Look, I can build a kindergarten. But the party of power would do nothing at all without the most explicit directions even for the tiniest of things. The huge problem with this vertical of power is that it has become a vertical of corruption. The vertical prizes loyalty not effectiveness.’

The mayor suddenly had urgency in his voice:

‘Putin needs to be stronger! Putin needs to battle the corrupt thieves. If Putin wants to be the good tsar, to be the great tsar, which I know is his intention… He needs to change the vertical of power. He needs to do battle with the thieves, with free courts, fair elections and with tough rough methods against the corrupt bureaucrats inside the system.’

United Russia is exceptional in Kaluga because it gets things done; United Russia is exceptional in Yaroslavl because it has lost control. Most cities sit somewhere with the ‘bears’ in the middle – incompetent, but in charge. Yet it would be a mistake to think only outliers talk scathingly about the vertical of power. So do the middling conformists. I found the same resentment when I met with the head of a rigging machine that returns over 70 per cent for Putin and his party. 46The blue-eyed Rustem Khatimov, the president of Bashkortostan, an oil-rich and Islamic republic of Russia, claimed he could not think of a single thing about the balding action hero in the Kremlin that displeased him. He spoke about the man as a ‘genius’, and how he was ready to vote for him in 2018. This did not stop him sniping at the system. Read between the lines:

‘I lived in Moscow for a long time and I know sadly, with many Moscow businessmen they begin the conversation with one question – how big is the bribe? We need more responsibility as a region – in terms of the budget, in terms of the control of our natural resources and in controlling the big building projects.’

The vertical that exasperates him has grown stronger in his capital of Ufa. This concrete place is really two towns, a Bashkir-Tatar city of minarets and hard round flatbread, beside a Russian-Soviet town of beer tents and dilapidation. This is a wealthy territory. It calls itself ‘the Muslim capital of Russia’, but it is clean and quiet like authoritarian Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Even this republic was long run like a family business by the president’s predecessor, Murtaza Rakhimov. His son was the biggest Bashkir oil magnate and he stuffed the apparatus with Bashkirs only. He tried to resist the vertical. Those in charge had ‘never commanded as much as three chickens’, Rakhimov snarled, before growling:

‘Right now, everything is decided from above. The level of centralization is worse than it was in Soviet times. With respect to local people, they carry out a policy of distrust and disrespect.’ 47

Rakhimov’s political career was over. Yet the vertical has not grown more legitimate in his old concrete headquarters. Officials’ whisper, when the president is out of sight, that his going means non-Bashkirs have only just started to be employed again and the ‘local censor’ is softer. In private, though, government advisors are frank about the future: ‘We cannot be independent, so we want to be autonomous, really autonomous, because Moscow is taking all the oil money for itself.’