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

Putinism is so dysfunctional that in Russia’s most western province, Kaliningrad, those who live there are quietly trying to Europeanize themselves. They are proud that they have bicycle lanes – and Asiatic Moscow does not. They are proud that 60 per cent of them have Schengen multi-entry visas, in a country where 80 per cent have never travelled abroad. 1The best thing money can buy is a European passport. Local experts predict that at current growth rates half its population will by hook or by crook have become EU citizens by 2040. 2This rejection of Russia even applies to the name – almost a quarter want to rename Kaliningrad as Konigsberg, as it was known before the city was conquered and annexed out of German East Prussia in 1945. 3

Knowing how they are tied into Europe, the Russian elite has become paranoid about its eastern territory. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis, white men all over the world have become hysterical about China. The 2008 market crash pricked the Brussels delusion-bubble that Europe would be a normative superpower and the Washington fantasy ‘Project for a new American century’. 4In their disorientation, the Western political class became obsessed about Chinese GDP figures, which they read as a synonym for power, and saw in the glass-tower cities that sprang up overnight in the Pearl Delta shimmering reflections of the eclipse of the West. When China Rules the World became a best-seller. 5In Russia, the policy wonks were also worried, especially Sergey Karaganov, a bald authority, consulted by both Yeltsin and Putin. He warned: ‘If the current economic trends persist, it is very likely that Russia east of the Urals and later the whole country will turn into an appendage of China – first as a warehouse of resources, and then economically and politically. This will happen without any ‘aggressive’ or unfriendly efforts by China, it will happen by default.’ 6

The entire hysteria about whether Putinist stagnation or opposition-induced anarchy would lead the country to disaster was not just about the West – but Siberia. The entire conversation in Moscow took place in hysterics. Claims of migrant invasions and Chinese gobbling up of resources filled the newspapers. There was an insecure tinge in the jokes Russians were telling.

‘Optimists learn English, pessimists learn Chinese and realists learn how to operate a Kalashnikov.’

‘The good news in 2050 is that the Ukrainian Euro and the Russian Yuan are trading one to one.’

The ‘yellow peril’ was in the air. Yet none of the political class seemed to have been to the eastern provinces. Nobody could give you a firm answer if this ramshackle Russia could live in the shadow of a rising China. It was impossible to work out from Moscow if talk of migrant invasions, resource robberies and losing Siberia reflected the anguished uncertainty that Putin’s return and mass protests created – or an emerging reality the vertical would be unable to prevent.

The Trans-Siberian from Irkutsk, where men die in their early fifties, to impoverished Birobidzhan on the Chinese border, was claustrophobic with Russian fears. For three nights, through the incessant rocking and screeching of the rails, I chatted with the workers, state employees and military men travelling home on this most remote and least inhabited stretch of the railway. In the restaurant-wagon some young conscripts returning home were drinking. The first lashed out: ‘Navalny… he’s only in it for himself. He never came to the city of Chita. He never talked about Chita! He does not care about Chita! He only cares about Moscow.’ The second groaned: ‘The opposition is all men like… Boris Nemtsov…! The former deputy prime minister. They just want to be Europeans not Russians. They just want to drink oil again.’ Yet neither of them had voted. ‘Putin is just a billionaire and all politicians are just crooks.’

In the smoking area I befriended a nervous military epidemiologist. For hours he had incessantly walked up and down the carriage looking over his shoulder, taking on and off his glasses. This is how he spent his life, travelling between Irkutsk and Khabarovsk to inspect sites in the Taiga for disease. He said that in his small unit everyone had been too frightened not to vote for Putin: ‘They could have sacked us. And I do not know how to be a private sector epidemiologist!’ As the train pulled past the Siberian forests, so huge and uninterrupted that it seemed to come from a different geological era of time, he went on: ‘There is the big eye. They would have found out if I’d not voted for him.’ The military epidemiologist lit up again. ‘Life has got better under Putin. But the state has not got better. The schools have not got better. The police have not got better.’ At dusk the train passed a tumbledown village. ‘China is so much more modernized. I like it. Lots of big glass buildings.’

At night the express pulls into stations where its departure is called out by primitive loudspeakers, making me think of history. It booms metallically: ‘Mosvka – Khabarovsk, Mosvka – Khabarovsk’, before the clattering and lurching of the carriage begins again, for hours and hours. The loudspeakers, which once called out Stalinist slogans, remind you that for decades this railway shunted cattle-trucks full of humans being deported to the Gulag camps.

Over a day from Irkutsk the train reaches Chita and the villages become fewer and fewer. From here it is over 1,400km to the next major town. They come every hour, then every two hours, then up to every three. They are squalid little wooden wrecks without paved roads, with carved roofs and weak foundations half sunk into the earth. They are dying. You can easily make out that many of them are abandoned. Tangled electric wires bent by the wind tie them into the Russian grid. In the third-class carriages, a long dormitory, all the men lounge shirtless and unwashed, playing cards and drinking beer in the morning. Their tiny gold baptismal crosses glint as the sun comes through the trees. Somewhere near is the camp where they sent Khodorkovsky.

The train passes a whole day without any major settlement. It is so remote, that like ghosts on the rails Yukos is still branded on passing oil wagons. But this is not the edge of the earth… it is a mere several hundred kilometres from heavily populated and industrialized northern China, the empire of mass production. The poverty and emptiness of the landscape in the Russian Far East is the geopolitical weakness of the state.

In Siberia it is all too evident that Russia is no longer ‘sovereign’ economically. As the country produces so little and depends for its livelihood on exporting raw materials, it is now in the trading spheres of influence of other powers. The lives of middle-class Russians in Europe are lived out culturally in the shadow of America and Britain, economically in that of Germany and the rest of the Eurozone. Russians in Asia live in the shadow of China, Japan and South Korea. Instead of taking holidays to Turkey, they go to the visa-free island of Hainan in China. Instead of driving second-hand German cars, they drive second-hand Japanese ones.

From Krasnoyarsk onwards you begin to feel the shadow of China and your distance from Europe. In Krasnoyarsk is the first of the Chinese markets of Siberia, selling everything from electricals to crockery. In Irkutsk you start to see signs in Chinese. In official taxis a welcome sign with a picture of the lightly bearded mayor greets visitors for ‘business or rest’ in Russian, English and Mandarin.

If you begin to look closely you can see Chinese characters on household appliances, plastic bags, packets of frozen food and countless trucks. This economic aura is exactly the same thousands of miles beyond China in every direction into the continent: into Central Asia, South East Asia and Russian Asia – the areas you can reach by truck and make a profit selling the cheapest stuff with the simplest operation. By Irkutsk you have left the European economic sphere of influence and entered that of East Asia. The further east, the cars are more likely to be right-hand drives. They are second-hand cars from Japan that drives on the left – colonizing Russian roads on which you drive on the right. These ‘foreigners’ make up as much as one-third of all cars in the country. 7