Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  Significantly, the country’s biggest state-controlled company, Gazprom – with its web of political, business and media connections – turned out to be exempt from the new requirement for government ministers to leave their directorships (just as it survived the reformers’ attempts to demonopolise it a decade earlier). It was revealed at the end of August that first deputy prime minister Viktor Zubkov would remain chairman of Gazprom (though he had given up all his other directorships). Zubkov was Putin’s former financial crime-buster, and also a St Petersburg friend and trustee of his judo club. Dvorkovich explained that Gazprom directors had access to a great deal of ‘secret information’, which made the appointment of independent directors ‘complicated’.4 The news seemed to confirm Gazprom’s untouchable status at the very hub of the Putin system, used to control the media, to exert pressure on foreign states and to fill the pockets of a network of cronies.

  Putin responded to Medvedev’s ‘manifesto speech’ in Magnitogorsk with his own long speech to the Duma on 20 April, in which he warned against ‘jerks or rash experiments based on liberalism’ in the economy. It was beginning to look as if Putin no longer entirely trusted his protégé to stick to the right path.

  For a while in the spring it looked as if Putin – and possibly Medvedev – were casting around for alternative political solutions. An official attempt was made to boost, and apparently co-opt, a small centre-right party called Right Cause, perhaps as an approved liberal ‘opposition’. The first deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov and the finance minister Alexei Kudrin were initially courted as potential leaders of the party, but after a week or so of intrigue both turned the offer down. Then one of the country’s richest men, the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, became leader. But he pledged to turn the party into a real alternative to United Russia, and began fiercely criticising the Kremlin. This was not at all the ‘loyal’ opposition that was intended, and at a farcical party conference in September Prokhorov was ousted. He accused the Kremlin’s ‘puppeteer’, Vladislav Surkov, of ‘privatising the political system’.

  Finally, on 6 May, came an announcement so redolent of the Soviet past that it seemed that all pretence at democracy had at last been dropped. Without any public consultation or prior discussion, Putin announced, during a speech in Volgograd, that he was setting up a new organisation, the All-Russia People’s Front. At its heart would be his United Russia Party, but ‘non-party supporters’ – organisations and individuals – were welcome to join. By the very next day the People’s Front already had a ‘Coordination Council’, which met at Putin’s dacha to plan its election campaign. Over the next weeks, thousands of individuals and organisations were recruited. Whole streets joined, as did factories and offices, youth groups and war veterans, associations of music producers and reindeer herders. Trade unions signed up – often without even consulting their members. Some refused to be corralled in this way. The Union of Architects later voted to overturn the decision taken on its behalf. Individual members of the Composers’ Union protested loudly, insisting they would not help Putin to stage ‘sham elections’.5

  Ostensibly the People’s Front was formed to help United Russia fight the coming Duma election in December. The party’s poll ratings were collapsing so dramatically that this might be the only way to ensure victory. But Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, revealed its true purpose. The Front would ‘operate above the party, it’s not based on the party,’ he told reporters. ‘It would more likely be based around Putin, who came up with the idea.’

  Putin’s initiative seemed to make a mockery of Russia’s already emasculated party system. Instead of having normal political parties, representing different sectors of the political spectrum, Putin now envisaged United Russia as an amorphous mass organisation, representing all groups. It is worth recalling that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union also did not ‘fight’ elections alone but as part of ‘the indestructible bloc of communists and non-party people’ – claiming, in other words, to represent everybody.

  Here is how Putin introduced his idea in his speech to United Russia members in Volgograd:

  I have some suggestions. I will explain them now to you. I want to note that selections to the State Duma candidate pool must be completed before August. We then need to discuss the candidates, so that the electoral list can be finalised in September at the party congress. The selection procedure should not only involve party members, but non-affiliated United Russia supporters, trade union members, members of women’s and youth organisations, public associations, citizens who take the initiative, who are actively engaged. In short, all those willing to have a direct influence on government policy through United Russia in the State Duma.

  What am I suggesting and how do I propose we do this? Essentially, I propose creating what in political practice is called a broad popular front.

  [Applause]

  Thank you very much for that reaction, for your support.

  This approach to consolidating the efforts of a broad range of political forces ahead of major political events has been taken in the past and is still practised in various countries at various points by a variety of political forces: by those on the left, and by what we know here as right-wing liberal, nationalist and patriotic forces.

  How it is called is not the issue. The issue is how we conceptualise it and what we want to achieve. This is a tool for bringing together like-minded political forces.

  And I would very much like United Russia and other political parties, trade unions, women’s organisations, youth organisations, for example, veterans’ organisations, including World War II veterans and Afghan war veterans – everyone who is united in their common desire to strengthen our country, united by the idea of finding optimal solutions to the challenges before us – to benefit from this single platform, let’s call it, say, the ‘All-Russia Popular Front’, because ahead of May 9 and at Stalingrad, this kind of rhetoric is in the air, and the name ‘All-Russian Popular Front’ seems quite apt ...

  [Applause]

  Thank you.

  I suspect that this was the event that Peskov predicted to me would cause ‘hysteria’, because it appeared to be so obviously aimed at further side-lining President Medvedev and positioning Putin as ‘national leader’ – head not just of a declining party but of a ubiquitous People’s Front. The coming Duma elections would be dominated by People’s Front posters and Putin’s image.

  Medvedev at first reacted coolly – describing the idea merely as ‘legitimate’ – and then hostilely: a week after the prime minister’s announcement, he told a group of ‘young parliamentarians’ from various parties: ‘Attempts to tailor the political system to one specific individual are dangerous ... Excessive concentration of power is definitely a dangerous thing that has happened repeatedly in our country ... As a general rule, it led to stagnation or civil war.’

  By the summer, Medvedev was beginning to sound defeatist. In an interview with the Financial Times he admitted for the first time that he did want to stand for re-election: ‘I think that any leader who occupies such a post as president, simply must want to run. Another question is whether he is going to take that decision for himself or not. The decision is somewhat different from his desire to run.’6 It was a humiliating admission that no president fully in charge of his country would ever make: I want to stand for re-election but it’s not my decision, or not mine alone.

  Medvedev still ‘campaigned’. At a huge Putin-like press conference he showed his liberal side: Khodorkovsky, if released from jail, would be ‘absolutely no danger to society at all’, he said. In an interview to mark the third anniversary of the war against Georgia he showed he was just as tough as Putin, insisting that he alone took the decision to invade Georgia. At the St Petersburg Economic Forum he declared that Putin’s reforms, though necessary, had run their course: ‘Yes, we had a stage of development that is associated with an increased state role in the economy. It was important to stabilise the situation after the chaos of
the 1990s. But now the potential of this path has been exhausted ... Such an economic model is dangerous for the country’s future.’ At a closed meeting with business leaders he reportedly appealed to them to support his economic policies, rather than his predecessor’s. And he told leaders of political parties that he wanted to roll back several of Putin’s political reforms: lowering the threshold to enter the Duma from 7 to 5 per cent, ‘decentralising’ power, and promising other, unspecified changes.

  Some commentators suggested that Medvedev and Putin were in fact still working in tandem: one out front pushing for reform, the other calling for caution to stop the process from spinning out of control.7 But that ignored the one indisputable fact: that an election was approaching and only one of them would be the ruling elite’s candidate. Neither man was indifferent as to who that candidate would be.

  It seemed that Medvedev was approaching an ignominious moment, when he would – in the words of the veteran Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky – ‘tiptoe out of the Kremlin’, confirming to the entire world that he had only ever been a stand-in for Putin. His four years as president would look like a farce, designed to keep the constitution formally intact while actually entrenching Putin’s autocratic rule.

  In August, Putin went scuba-diving in the Black Sea, over an ancient archaeological site, and emerged from the water clutching two Grecian urns that were conveniently lying on the sea bed, having escaped the attentions of thousands of other divers over the centuries. There seemed to be no end to his wizardry. Returning to the presidency would surely be no harder for him.

  The announcement at a United Russia congress on 24 September that Putin would indeed run for president, and that Medvedev could become his prime minister, was therefore no real surprise – yet still, because of its implications, it came as a thudding shock. After all Medvedev’s talk of political and economic stagnation, and the need for reforms, Russia faced the possibility of another 12 years of Putin. The dreams of Medvedev’s ‘Go, Russia!’ article had vanished. The smile stretched across Medvedev’s face could not hide his humiliation. Most cynically, the two men revealed that all the talk for the past year of ‘taking a decision when the time was right’ was a charade: the job-switch had in fact been discussed years ago, when Putin handed over to Medvedev.

  With television and the electoral process controlled by the Kremlin, there was little doubt that Putin would be re-elected as president in March 2012. Russia’s future had been decided by two men, behind closed doors.

  CONCLUSION

  The picture of Russia that has emerged from these pages is not the one I would have wished to paint, or that I imagined painting 20 years ago, when the country emerged from the destruction and humiliation of communism.1

  After a hopeful start, when he wooed the West and took steps to stimulate the economy, Vladimir Putin presided over the smothering of media freedoms and democracy, and developed a personality cult that exploited all the modern means of communication. The economy remains almost entirely dependent on exports of raw materials, with no modern manufacturing base to speak of. Corruption is by the government’s own admission overwhelming and growing – the glue that holds together a mafia-like state, dominated by a clique of Putin’s friends and colleagues, from the KGB, St Petersburg and even his dacha cooperative. If Dmitry Medvedev truly wanted to reform all of that, he failed abysmally. Putin’s pledge to crack down on the oligarchs applied only to those who opposed him politically, while the country’s wealth was amassed in the hands of fabulously rich tycoons and state bureaucrats. A land of limitless human and natural resources, freed two decades ago from the grip of totalitarianism, failed to burst into bloom. Some 40 per cent of young people, according to a poll, would rather live somewhere else.2

  It is not misplaced, therefore, to ask: why is Putin so popular? In fact, his ratings have been steadily falling. According to the Levada Centre, only 39 per cent of respondents in August 2011 said they would definitely vote for Putin, compared to a high point of 58 per cent three years earlier, during the war with Georgia. His ‘approval rating’ dropped over the same period from 83 per cent to 68 per cent. (Approval of Medvedev fell from 73 to 63 per cent, and only 20 per cent said they would ‘definitely’ vote for him.) It is also worth remembering that the atmosphere of autocratic rule (and the residual fears of a KGB state) mean that many Russians give answers to pollsters (even independent ones) that they think the government wants to hear.

  Putin remains, though, the most popular politician in Russia, despite his failings and failures. For part of the answer to this conundrum, read again his favourite song, which I translated at the end of Chapter 11. It may sound maudlin and cheesy to Westerners, and it might be scorned by the sophisticated and cynical Russian intellectuals who loathe Putin and everything he stands for. But you could go into millions of Russian homes and find people going watery-eyed over Sovietera classics. It doesn’t mean they are all old communists! The chord that Putin strikes among millions of Russians is one of nostalgia – for simpler days, for ‘equality’, for comradeship, unity, the wartime spirit that lasted so much longer in Russia than anywhere else. These things are real. Alien perhaps to most Westerners, but real.

  The mass of the Russian public is not generally the same as ‘average’ Westerners. In a television contest in 2008 to find ‘the greatest Russian’, Stalin came in third place – and, it is thought, would have come first if the authorities had not rigged the result to avoid complete embarrassment.

  In Chapter 1 I pointed to the mistaken Western (especially American) belief that Russia was just a Western country waiting to be freed. Putin plays to that part of the Russian mind that rebels, instinctively, against that. He speaks for those who want to have a Western economy and enjoy all the benefits of it, but who want to find their own path towards that future, and recoil from some of the West’s failings. He speaks for those who want Russia to be respected in the world – and, sadly, for those millions who mistakenly confuse respect with fear. And he speaks for those who simply love Russia and savour its uniqueness – those who infuriate Westerners like myself who genuinely endeavour to ‘understand’ it, by smirking at us, saying: ‘You’ll never understand the Russian soul.’

  If only Putin had combined his intuition with an instinct for democracy, and trust in the people’s choice, he would have been a great leader.

  But Putin does not really understand democracy. As we have seen, he believes that American presidents can have pesky newscasters removed from their jobs. He falls for conspiracy theories (the Georgia war was started to help Senator McCain) and believes nonsense served to him by his intelligence service (America has separate poultry factories producing substandard chickens to sell to Russia). He has created a system where (he believes) nothing will happen properly if he does not personally supervise it: after the outbreak of wildfires in the summer of 2010 he even had CCTV monitors installed in damaged villages so that he could monitor the progress of reconstruction work from his own office.

  His style of leadership includes publicly berating officials on television, sometimes forcing them to change their policies on the spot, because the cameras are whirring. An example:

  Vladimir Putin: I want to understand how many Russian airplanes Aeroflot is going to buy. Otherwise the situation is that you want to dominate the domestic market, but don’t want to buy domestic equipment. That’s no good.

  Vitaly Savelyev (Director General of Aeroflot): But we are buying Russian-built planes ...

  Vladimir Putin: Not enough of them.

  Vitaly Savelyev: All right, we will draw up plans. I will report back.

  Vladimir Putin: Good.

  Putin instituted a tradition (continued by Medvedev) of having the opening of every cabinet meeting recorded and shown on television news, apparently in the belief that this demonstrates openness and democracy. In fact, it means that government sessions turn into shows. Instead of a natural and perhaps difficult discussion in the privacy of the cabinet room, the
re is a speech by Putin and, at best, a stilted dialogue with ministers. No Western government televises its cabinet sessions, and no one would expect this to happen, because difficult decisions can only be taken in private. Putin has thus taken a superficially ‘democratic’ idea – televising the decision-makers – and turned it into an instrument of dictatorship.

  Putin revealed his flawed understanding of media freedom when he visited the studios of Channel One in February 2011. He told journalists: ‘I think representatives of all authorities and ministries not only can but must appear on federal television, explaining what goes on in their departments, explaining the processes that happen there, so that people hear from the horse’s mouth about the intentions of officials, about their plans.’ At first sight it sounds liberal. But what Russian television lacks is not ‘explanation’ of the government’s ‘intentions’ and ‘plans’ that have already been made, but free and informed debate of policies before they become government plans.

  For all the iniquities of the Putin system, however, it is not ‘like the Soviet Union’, as is so often glibly stated. I was struck by ex-President Bill Clinton’s sarcastic comment to Putin after the latter’s homily about how to reform the capitalist economy in Davos in January 2009: ‘I’m glad to hear Prime Minister Putin come out for free enterprise. I hope it works for him.’ The Baltimore Sun ran an article in 2011 about the Russians’ love of fast food restaurants under the headline: ‘We’re lovin’ it, comrade.’ Comrade! It’s 20 years since Russians were comrades – but it seems they are still lumbered with the stigma of communism.