The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  Putin’s strategy of squeezing troublemakers out of the country seemed to work pretty well.

  “This tactic is smart, and it is efficient,” Mikhail Khodorkovsky said.12 We were sitting with the former prisoner in his large, semiempty wood-paneled office in London. He looked calm, as always, but during our conversation, he was constantly crumpling an empty can of Coca-Cola. “It lets off steam. When a person is fed up, he faces a choice: either he leaves the country, and loses his social status, or he stays, and he gets all kinds of problems, and he can find himself in prison. When you look at it, the loss of a social status is considered a minor evil.”

  He laughed sadly, holding the crumpled Coca-Cola can in his hand. “There will never be a critical mass built outside the country. Because there is no tool from outside which would work better than something inside the country. We are a mainland country. We provide 80 percent of our needs ourselves. This country is invulnerable.”

  CHAPTER 30

  WHEN THE PARTY’S OVER

  It was a great success. The large two-story Manhattan penthouse on the fourteenth floor in a brand-new Sky Garage building in Chelsea was overcrowded that night in October 2010. Artists, executives, and journalists filled the penthouse apartment that was rumored to belong to Nicole Kidman. There was plenty of champagne, absinthe, and high-cheekboned models. Most of the guests spoke Russian. In the crowd, the billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, at six feet eight inches tall, stood a head above everyone else.

  He was pleased with himself in New York. “It’s perhaps the only city in the world where the energy reminds me of Moscow,” he said to Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker. “In all other major cities, I generally fall asleep.”1

  The crowd had gathered to celebrate the launch of the American edition of Snob magazine, which Prokhorov funded both in Moscow and now in New York. Masha Gessen, the magazine’s deputy editor, had the mic. “In Russia a lot of the process of securing one’s place in society involves building fences, both literal and figurative, to create a private space and live as you want to,” said Gessen. “What the project aims to do is allow them to kick over the fence and enable people to talk to others outside their professional and social circles and engage with a larger group.”2

  Thin and angular as a teenager, Masha was dressed in a white shirt and black tuxedo for the occasion. She smiled broadly. A Russian American journalist, she had emigrated to the United States with her parents when she was fourteen years old in the early 1980s and returned to Moscow ten years later. Masha was as well known in Russia as she was in the United States, where she wrote for Vanity Fair. No one was better positioned than she to introduce the “Global Russians,” the driving idea behind Snob magazine, to New York.

  Beginning in the early 2000s, a new generation of smart and successful Russians had emerged—or, as the Snob manifesto put it, those successful, educated cosmopolites who might live in different countries and speak different tongues but who think in Russian.3 Moving between international corporations or building their own companies, they lived in whatever country or city provided them with the best options for pursuing their careers, and when they weren’t in Russia, they felt themselves to be neither exiles nor emigrants.

  A group of journalists spotted them first and saw a promising market with money to spend and ambitious social aspirations. The journalists secured backing from a billionaire, Prokhorov, and launched the magazine they called, fittingly, Snob—born to sell elitism to people eagerly pursuing exactly that. The journalists also coined a name for the international Russian professionals they were targeting—Global Russians. It was 2008, Putin had stepped down as president, and people thought a new era was dawning.

  The journalistic bet on this community turned out to be a very successful one. Two years later, the crowd in the penthouse in New York was so impressive that the party was reported in both the New York Times and New Yorker.4

  Gessen believed that the Russian idea of emigration—of leaving the country forever—that had existed from before the revolution to the end of the Soviet Union was finally dead. “Global Russians” was a new, optimistic name for people who moved not out of fear but because they saw a good opportunity elsewhere, and neither they nor the authorities shut the door behind them.

  That was how the Russian middle class also saw things in 2010. The virtual club of Global Russians identified by and with Snob suddenly became very prestigious. Hundreds joined in, people as different as Olga Romanova, still fighting for her husband; Peter Holodny, the financier-priest who helped reunite the two Russian Orthodox churches; and Russian American investor Boris Jordan.

  For the first time in their history, Russians enjoyed total freedom to travel and to live life split between two or even more countries.

  But it didn’t last for long. The club members didn’t know it yet, but they had only three years left.

  In May 2013 approximately two and a half of those three years had expired, and the atmosphere in Moscow had changed beyond recognition.

  For more than a year, Putin had been attacking Russian society with arrests and repressive legislation, introducing internet censorship along the way.5

  Few doubted that the turning point had been the Moscow protests in 2011. Putin had watched the crowds of angry Muscovites and suspected American interference, but he also saw that some of his country’s business elites had turned against him. That included Mikhail Prokhorov.

  An essential Russian oligarch and towering figure in Russian high society, Prokhorov had built his enormous fortune by participating in the “loans for shares” scheme back in the nineties, in which powerful banks lent money to the Russian government in exchange for shares of some of the country’s most valuable assets. Prokhorov along with his partner picked up Norilsk Nickel, the world’s leading smelter of palladium and nickel, built in Stalin’s time by prisoners of the gulag two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.

  Now Prokhorov wanted more civilized rules for business, and he wanted to become acceptable in the West, which is why he funded Snob and cultivated the new Global Russians. In summer 2011, before the election and Putin’s reascension to the presidency, Prokhorov launched his own political party, and a sizable contingent of Moscow elites was fairly supportive. But Prokhorov had not sought Putin’s sanction first, and that was a mistake. He lost his own party (it expelled him under instigation by the Kremlin) a few days before Putin announced his return to the Kremlin. That was why, in December 2011, Prokhorov was standing in the crowds on Sakharova Prospect listening to Kasparov and Nemtsov. The all-powerful oligarch felt he’d been played like a gullible child.

  A year later, with his fortune then estimated by Forbes at $13 billion, Prokhorov stepped down from his businesses and left his partners to manage his assets.6 He hadn’t given up his political ambitions, but he understood that his politics could place his companies at risk. Putin was by then firmly set on a confrontational path, and he wasn’t just fighting a big sector of Russian society. Relations between Russia and the United States had slipped to their lowest point in decades. At the end of 2012, Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, lobbied for by Browder, Nemtsov, and Kara-Murza, which imposed US sanctions on Russian officials involved in human rights violations. The list of sanctioned officials started with eighteen people implicated in the jailing and death of Magnitsky and gradually expanded. Within five years it would include Alexander Bastrykin, chief of the Russian Investigative Committee—the Russian equivalent of the FBI.7 Putin, furious, responded with an asymmetric strategy: the Russian parliament banned foreigners, namely Americans, from adopting Russian children.

  On May 6, 2013, Muscovites once again gathered in the center of the city for a protest rally. This time they were not in a cheerful mood. They didn’t hope for any political change. They came to the streets to protest the imprisonment of their fellow protesters, in a desperate act of self-defense.

  Two weeks later, in London, the local public was invited to a debate on the subject of Vladimir Putin.
The well-chosen setting was Lowther Lodge, a dark redbrick Victorian building crowned with chimneys in affluent South Kensington, overlooking Kensington Gardens. The mansion had housed the Royal Geographical Society since the early twentieth century. On that May evening, it was hosting a high-profile debate on the motion that “Putin has been good for Russia.”

  The debate took place in Lowther Lodge’s largest conference hall, which held up to eight hundred guests, and it was full. The organizers had chosen the speakers carefully. The first to be invited was Boris Jordan. It took some effort to explain why an American investor would be qualified to talk about Putin, and the organizers decided to introduce Jordan as the author of a 2007 op-ed on Putin in the Washington Post, titled, “He Delivers. That’s Why They Like Him.”

  Participating in the debate was the second step in Jordan’s new public campaign. Before that, he had invited himself onto a panel on Russian-American relations at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University. He had invited himself because he could: after all, he had funded the center and it was named after him. In New York, Jordan argued that Putin’s personal expectations for Russian-American relations had not been met during his first two terms as president. He also attacked the Magnitsky Act, saying he didn’t understand why the United States “interfered in Russia’s internal affairs.”8 Now he was coming to London.

  To oppose Jordan, the organizers approached Masha Gessen. Since 2010, Gessen had abandoned Snob and had worked for several publications in Russia. (She left one publication because she didn’t want to send a reporter to cover Putin’s flight with endangered Siberian cranes when he led them in a motorized hang glider, supposedly showing them a new route to use to fly south in the winter—an obvious publicity stunt.9) She briefly headed the Moscow office of Radio Liberty.10 Gessen had published a biography critical of Putin called The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, and she agreed to come to London.

  The debate was supposed to be two-on-two, so the organizers added two Brits. A former British diplomat would speak for the motion alongside Jordan; in support of Gessen was the Guardian’s Luke Harding, the first Western journalist kicked out of Moscow since the Cold War.11

  The organizers seated Masha Gessen, dressed all in black, and Boris Jordan, now a stout man with receding silver hair and a white trimmed beard, to the right and left of the chairman at the table. The two had much in common: they were both Russian Americans and both forty-six years old. Gessen and Jordan were also two members of the Global Russians club. But now they were on opposite sides.

  Masha started speaking, and she looked uneasy. She didn’t feel safe in Russia anymore. The ban on adopting Russian children, a retaliation to the Magnitsky Act, affected her directly: Gessen, although living in Russia, was an American citizen and an LGBT activist with three kids, among them a boy she had adopted from a Russian orphanage. In March, a Russian ultraorthodox antigay politician and member of parliament had set about promoting the adoption ban by attacking Gessen. “The Americans want to adopt Russian children and bring them up in perverted families like Masha Gessen’s,” he said.12 It was a threat worth taking seriously, and Masha consulted with a lawyer. His only advice was that she should tell her son, “if you are approached by a stranger, a government official or a policeman—run.” This was not very reassuring. She was thinking seriously of leaving Russia, again.13

  Gessen spoke softly, consistently debunking the apologists’ arguments, starting with the premise that Putin was bringing prosperity to the country. “We are seeing the economy entirely dependent on oil and gas reserves.… Look at the social sector. If you need to get a medical test at a clinic in Moscow, you have to bring your own syringe.” But she didn’t think she was going to win over the audience. Putin was to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and the entire world was looking forward to the games.

  Then Boris Jordan took the pulpit: “Masha moved to Russia in 1994, and I moved in 1992 having only learned about Russia through books, imagining myself riding through the snow in the Russian field on a troika, Russian bells ringing, and beautiful churches. And when I got off the plane it was anything but that. It was very gray, very different. I want to put you in 1998–1999—and Russia was, unlike what Masha said, a very dark place.”

  He repeated the Kremlin narrative: that Putin had saved the country from the criminal chaos of the 1990s. Jordan was insisting how great Putin was doing economically, bringing prosperity to the middle class of the country, but he didn’t stop there. He thrashed the independent media of the 1990s, including the television channel (NTV) he used to run: “They were anything but independent! The oligarchs controlled them.” Using theatrical pauses, raising his voice, gesticulating, Jordan looked like a very good salesman, selling Putin to the audience.

  An angry exchange of remarks followed, and the Guardian journalist Luke Harding, visibly exasperated, exclaimed, “There are some people we didn’t mention today.” He then listed the Russian journalists and human rights activists killed in the 2000s. He looked at the audience. “The list goes on and on,” he said, “and you know, brave reporters, Russian human rights workers, journalists, campaigners, often not in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, but in the provinces—these are the people who have been good for Russia, not the kleptocrats”—he pointed to his right, where Jordan was seated—“not the people who’ve made money from Russia, large amounts of money.”14

  Less than a year later, in spring 2014, Putin sent troops to Ukraine and, breaking all international laws, annexed Crimea. Before long, he started a guerrilla war in the east of Ukraine, sending troops, tanks, and Russian mercenaries disguised as civilians. It was clearly a new era in Russia.

  Putin’s illegal aggression didn’t sway Boris Jordan. Three weeks after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, Jordan, in an interview with a Russian magazine, was still waging the public relations campaign he had launched a year before in New York, talking about how to improve the world’s unfair and inaccurate image of Russia. “Recently, I participated in a debate in London about what Putin has done for Russia,” he said. “In the hall there were a thousand people. All criticized Putin. The only person who found anything positive in Putin’s activities was me.”15

  But Jordan was not campaigning by himself. Putin’s plan had worked: in his hour of need, the huge network of organizations coordinated through the Kremlin’s Congresses of Compatriots came to his aid and supported the annexation. It fit their understanding of geopolitics, an understanding formed in the late nineteenth century, when Russia had last successfully expanded its empire.

  Meanwhile, the community of Global Russians was dying.16 Masha Gessen had moved her family to New York.

  Putin made the death of the Global Russians’ idea official in June 2014 when he signed a law requesting all Russian citizens with dual residence or a second passport to register with the Russian state. Failure to register was made a criminal offense. He wanted to keep his people on a short leash.

  In late 2018, Boris Jordan was still sticking to his story. In an interview for this book, he admonished us, “You don’t drag me into criticizing Putin!” He was almost shouting about how useful he was in the effort to fix Putin’s image problems.

  CHAPTER 31

  ELIMINATING THE PROBLEM

  A repressive regime has a number of options available to eliminate its critics and opponents. They can be sent to jail or expelled from the country, shot or beaten to death. All of these methods produce two desired effects: one immediate, in removing the troublemaker, and the other educational, in spreading fear in the society.

  The most effective methods extend the consequences of that political choice to relatives and friends. The KGB refined this strategy to perfection. When they came after a dissident, the KGB could have the dissident’s spouse lose his or her job, children expelled from university, or relatives banned from traveling abroad.

  One method has been always distinctive. Poison, deadly and
effective, is unique in that its victim does not die alone. Their relatives and friends share the horrific experience of the loved one’s dying. In a way, this is the essence of the message.

  The use of poison is even more devastating in our modern world because its effects communicate the message through global media and across porous borders, from Moscow to Washington, DC.

  It was a few minutes before midnight on February 27, 2015, when Moscow lawyer Vadim Prokhorov (no relation to the oligarch) learned that his friend and client Nemtsov had been killed. A short and energetic forty-three-year-old, lawyer Prokhorov had represented Boris Nemtsov and the Russian opposition at large since the early 2000s.1 The two had spoken just three hours earlier about an upcoming Russian television documentary that was going to depict Nemtsov as an American puppet. He knew that Nemtsov had to go to the Echo Moskvy radio station for an hour-long conversation about the protest rally scheduled for the next day and then planned to have dinner with his girlfriend. It was after that dinner, when Nemtsov was walking home with his girlfriend over the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge—a stone’s throw from the Kremlin wall—that a man appeared behind them and fired six shots. Four of them hit Nemtsov in the back. He died instantly.2

  Vadim Prokhorov was sitting at a desk in the editorial offices of the independent magazine New Times, checking the galleys as he usually did on Friday nights to help the magazine avoid defamation lawsuits, when someone shouted, “Nemtsov was killed! I heard the news on radio.” Then his phone rang—it was a friend of Nemtsov’s who was first to come to the bridge, and he confirmed the news.