The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  During the Soviet Union, despite ownership being in the hands of the state, the local administration of factories remained deeply patrimonial.

  Sociologist Simon Clarke, for instance, described a Soviet enterprise as headed by an all-powerful director who answered straight to Moscow for implementing the production plan and making sure that the workers were cared for. “The ideal general director would be the subject of stories of legendary achievements and enjoyed the loyalty and even the affection of his employees, symbolizing the enterprise and the achievements of its labour collective.”54

  The very fabric of life proved to be so difficult that having a capable and just leader – one who could provide food, shelter, water, and benefits – under the given conditions was often a matter of life and death. But over centuries, this evolved into a disempowerment process that was often initiated by the workers themselves.

  “Workers attributed their relative good or bad fortune to the personality of the chief…,” Clarke writes. “There was therefore a high degree of collusion by the workers in their own exploitation….”55

  In a single industry town like Pikalevo, these archetypes are easily recognizable. The ideal plant director was Koren Badalyants, who managed alumina production with an iron fist from 1960 up through 1980. It was Badalyants who was credited with maintaining the highest salaries in the region, and, working within the Soviet allocation system, winning the choicest vacations for his workers. He built Pikalevo’s swimming pool – the pride of the town, which still bears a memorial to his name upon its entrance – and established some of the best kindergartens and schools.56

  Sergei Sofyin – who, like Badalyants, was a home-grown director and thus an exception to a string of managers sent in from Moscow – elicited a similar awe due to his strong authoritarian and paternalistic streak.

  An imposing man in his 60s with piercing eyes, Sofyin demonstrated a sincere connection with his plant that was valued by his workers. “Badalyants would say, the plant is my life,” he told us of his career at the plant, with tears welling up in his eyes. “I can’t add anything else to that.”57

  But he was also efficient in making sure workers’ needs were met, locals said, calling him “strict but fair.” Yelena Matuzova, who got a two-room apartment from Sofyin, said that he should be the mayor instead of Veber, but doubted that he would choose to run after being fired from the plant.

  Strong, popular local plant managers like Sofyin and Badalyants can serve as a key to understanding local attitudes towards supreme power in Russia. If they were seen as demigods, the awe and affection was also tempered with a fierce independence, and, most of all, an awareness of the leader’s “otherness.” For in the unwritten system of rules and rights that governed working relationships, the boss could enjoy the privileges provided by his caste as long as he never neglected to care for his workers.

  In this sense, an expletive-ridden characterization by Pikalevo factory driver Kirill Karpov58 spoke volumes about the ambivalence that workers felt both for Putin and for “good” managers like Badalyants and Sofyin.

  “They say all the right things. Seems to be a sensible guy. [Putin] can say [something so awful], then you see he’s not mad. Badalyants was like that. Could tell everyone to fuck off. He could lie to you and punish you [pertaining to both Badalyants and Putin]. But he was objective.”

  Karpov claimed that he wasn’t afraid of his boss. When Badalyants raised his voice at him, Karpov said he threw his keys on the table and refused to work. “He didn’t raise his voice at me again. He was an [excellent] psychologist.”

  And reverently, he said of Badalyants: “He was a boss.” As if there were no other real bosses in his experience.

  Those contradictory experiences of management reflected the way locals experienced power on all levels – as a force that had an unwritten, God-given right to exploit them in exchange for bringing order to their lives. That meant that Putin’s interference, regardless of whether what he said was actually true or not, was an act of order in itself.

  As Sofyin told us, “I think Putin’s visit was received as a manifestation of reason.”

  PART II

  THE OPRICHNIKI

  Chapter 5

  Men of the Sovereign

  It’s the Tsar on a horse, in a golden brocade,

  With a posse of butchers around him,

  Armed with axes and ready to hack and to hang,

  And to execute at the Tsar’s pleasure

  And in anger Potok reaches down for his sword,

  “Who’s this Khan come to Rus, who’s this tyrant?”

  And he hears the reply, “That’s a living god there,

  That’s our father, deigning to slay us!”

  - Count Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy,

  from “Potok Bogatyr”, 1873

  Everyone turned into a vassal. Because there were no new rules of the game, and to this day they don’t exist.

  - Kirill Kabanov, former FSB officer, 2010

  1.

  EVER SINCE HIS teens, when students had to decide on a career path and either leave for trade school or finish two more years and go to college, Kirill Kabanov wanted to be a KGB officer.

  For Kabanov, it wasn’t the movie allure of spies, as it was for Vladimir Putin, who came from the previous, post-war generation. Born in 1967 and growing up during the stagnation and lower-tier corruption of the Leonid Brezhnev era, Kabanov wasn’t interested in espionage or travelling abroad, he just wanted to fight crime, and fighting crime as an officer of the KGB was more interesting than being a cop.

  Now in his mid 40s, Captain Kabanov carries a gun to work every day. His office has a vintage Mauser hanging on the wall next to his desk, with its green glass lamp, KGB paraphernalia and a framed letter of gratitude from the Investigative Committee. On the wall above his chair hangs the obligatory picture of Vladimir Putin.

  Except that nothing is as it seems. The picture is a print-out of a photograph of Putin counting thousand-rouble bills. For some reason, it is surrounded by cartoon drawings of pigs and a vintage Soviet-era poster warning against taking bribes. And the gun he carries to work is for self-protection, just in case. Clearly, this is not the office of an FSB captain.

  It wasn’t that Kabanov never realized his aspirations – he did. In 1984, after completing school, he studied at the military academy. After a brief stint working for the Soviet Communist Party, he finally joined the KGB – now renamed the Federal Security Service, or FSB according to its Russian acronym – in 1994. He served in the Moscow economic crime task force of the FSB, investigating contraband cases. He rose to the rank of captain. But over the course of four years while he was in service, it became increasingly clear to him that the job of an FSB officer wasn’t to fight crime, it was to make money.

  Kabanov wanted to fight crime – if he had wanted to make a lot of money, he would have gone into business. But he felt that precisely because he wanted to fight crime rather than be a businessman, he was booted out of the FSB in 1998. Looking for another way to fight crime, he co-founded the National Anti-Corruption Committee, an NGO housed in a smoke-filled 18th century stone building on a quiet, central Moscow street.

  Burly, with a crew cut, he would look extremely intimidating were he an acting officer. As it is, he’s only a former officer, even though his work has taken him far: then-President Dmitry Medvedev, as part of his anti-corruption drive, had Kabanov join his presidential commission on civil society. Today, Kabanov frequently appears on state TV, offering brutal, expletive-ridden exposés of the world he left behind and which he continues to investigate.

  Kabanov insists that he’s no angel. But he also realizes that his experiences, coupled with his research after he left the force, were crucial in offering him a glimpse of a structure and way of life that he now understands is perfectly feudal.

  “I had a turning point right before I left [the FSB]. There were several turning points, in fact,” he recalls. “I didn’t understand why
our salary was the equivalent of £30 a month [circa 1995] when we handled goods worth millions of dollars. But back then the guiding principle was from the old days, to hold back, to drink cheap vodka, but not take [bribes]. We considered ourselves an elite force. ‘What are we, cops, to take bribes?’ we used to say.”

  For cops, he said, it was normal to “feed off the land” – an approximation of the ancient custom of kormleniye, or feeding, by which government officials in remote places got their salaries from the population they were in charge of protecting or keeping in line, rather than from the Tsar’s treasury. Rank and file bribe-taking among cops was common in the Soviet era, even though it exploded in the 1990s.

  But what started happening in the FSB during the 1990s was different, Kabanov said. It was coming from the top, not from the bottom.

  “First we started noticing that our generals were living beyond their means.” He described how they started showing up in swanky cars wearing luxurious clothes, and developed a taste for expensive imported alcohol. Details about their apartments and dachas trickled down to the lower ranks.

  When these same generals started closing contraband cases that Kabanov was investigating, he began to understand that it was no coincidence. “We thought they were behaving strangely, but it turned out that they were just running businesses.” It was a normal occurrence, for instance, for a shipment of cigarettes to wind up being presented as a gift to high-ranking officials of government agencies. And much of the illegal revenue his task force intercepted wasn’t returned to the state treasury where it belonged, but was pocketed by the generals and colonels who felt their salaries were too small to allow such riches to pass through their hands untouched.

  As much as he was revolted by what he saw, Kabanov understood that he had to make a choice. The pressure was increasing to go with the flow and become a businessman in uniform. To stay honest and fight the graft was impossible, because it was spreading too quickly.

  On several occasions, he found himself tempted. Once, senior colleagues offered him money to unpack a shipment he had confiscated. He refused, and went to his boss instead. “My boss called me an idiot.”

  Eventually, the system itself booted him out, after his repeated refusals to play by its rules.

  Officers in the Customs Service – an offshoot of the FSB – paid £175,000 to get him fired, he says. Other officers who had generously invited him to join their racket now accused him of extorting money and accepting a £60,000 bribe. His consultations with his brother, a former FSB officer who left the force to start his own private security agency, served as another pretext. Kirill Kabanov was discharged in 1998, let loose into the open.

  “When I was on the force I would brandish [the FSB identification card, or badge] if someone was rude to me. I came to understand that this badge gives you a feeling of power, a feeling of being protected from the chaotic, unlimited power of the government,” he explained. “And when it was taken away, I understood that I had become one of the cattle, the mindless masses. It was terrible. I felt unprotected.”

  It was a mere coincidence that the year Kabanov was kicked out of the FSB, Vladimir Putin became its director. Kabanov’s FSB career was over, but for many of his colleagues who opted to become businessmen in uniform, it was just the beginning.

  2.

  In his 1973 novel, Loyal Ruslan, Georgy Vladimov tells the harrowing story of a guard dog of the same name. Part of a canine regiment deployed to a labour camp in Stalin’s Gulag, the dog knew no other work and he was dedicated to his job.

  “About twenty dogs congregated on the platform near the end of the rails, walking along the fence and barking at passing trains in unison. The animals were beautiful and well-groomed; it was nice to marvel at them from afar, but no one dared to go up on the platform, for locals knew how hard it would be escape afterwards. The dogs awaited prisoners, but the prisoners never arrived that day, nor the following day, nor in a week, nor in two weeks.”59

  Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign was too humane to shoot the guard dogs after the camp was shut down, and they were left to their own devices, roaming the abandoned territory in search of food and someone to guard. A few years later, the dogs came upon a familiar picture: a procession of men with backpacks trudging towards them through the steppe. Mistaking a geological expedition for a new batch of prisoners, the dogs were overjoyed with the return of their old, habitual order of life, where there were people to patrol and herd about the territory. The fact that the geologists were not escaped prisoners simply did not fit into the dogs’ understanding of how the world functioned. With the dogs relentlessly attacking them as the escapees that they believed them to be, the men could do nothing but shoot them. And the last thing that the loyal Ruslan feels before his death is an utter betrayal by his own masters, by the people who taught him to patrol prisoners in the first place.

  If President Boris Yeltsin’s administration left hundreds of thousands of men to their own devices after the fall of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the holy ideology that these men had sworn to guard, then Vladimir Putin appears to have had more compassion for these wayward, leftover men. It is hard to say which approach did more damage.

  In a chaotic bid to diminish the influence of the organization, Yeltsin’s government began haphazardly hacking the KGB to pieces. It cut off core agencies – Kremlin security, foreign intelligence, border patrol, and electronic intelligence. It stifled funding for the new Russian Security Ministry, and, having done that, renamed it yet again in 1995, calling it the Federal Security Service. Between 1991 and 1995, the service was renamed six times. And the reshuffling would continue well into Putin’s term. By 2006, Putin signed a decree to transfer control of all detention centres – including prisons operated by the FSB – to the Justice Ministry, though de facto the FSB, in an ongoing struggle for finance and influence, retained control of its Lefortovo Prison.60

  A brief period of openness after 1991 – with some security officers taking part in a series of public discussions out of fear that they would lose even more funding and influence if they didn’t – was widely mistaken, particularly in the West, for a victory over the KGB.

  But the emerging evidence that former officers were increasingly occupying government posts in Vladimir Putin’s administration61 set alarm bells ringing, particularly in the light of changes that had begun long before Putin even rejoined the FSB as its director in 1998, changes that had already made the state security apparatus more powerful.

  As early as 1993, the last Soviet head of the KGB, Vadim Bakatin, warned that Russia’s security services had “never lost control” to begin with.62 And by 1995, the FSB was proclaimed to be “far more powerful than the now-defunct KGB.”63

  This suggests that for all the changes forced on the organization by the government – stripping it of funds and prestige, making it directly subordinate to the president, dividing its multitude of functions – the state was still dealing with an equally powerful behemoth, numbering the same body of officers.

  Hundreds of thousands of people who had sworn an oath to one country suddenly found themselves serving another, and yet a fundamental premise of its security apparatus – who they served and why – had never been addressed by the government.

  Former security officers like Kirill Kabanov, who served in the FSB’s counter-contraband department from 1993 through 1998, link Russia’s most formidable threat – rampant, crippling corruption – to this one unanswered question.

  “Ideologically, a majority of the people who came over from the KGB felt disadvantaged, felt a sense of betrayal. First their colleagues abroad were betrayed, then this humiliation of Lubyanka under siege – all this forms [inferiority] complexes,” he told me.

  The lack of a new value system had a disorienting effect on officers over the very identity of the government they were serving. Up until 1990, businessmen, speculators and dissidents were clear foes to be sought out and persecuted, at least in theory. S
uddenly after 1991, these former foes were in the government, and security officers found themselves serving the very people they had been supposed to persecute under the Soviet system.

  “Earning £30 a month, they were pushed into business. And they were provoked into certain hidden relations,” Kabanov explained. “OK, so I’ll be a security guard for hire. I will serve my boss, and whatever my boss tells me to do I will do it. But if there’s an additional service, like protection from criminals, then please be so kind as to add to my salary. And the business structure builds up this system.”

  Every former security officer that I have interviewed sooner or later came to this key problem of betrayal – not betrayal of the motherland, but betrayal by the government. Each of them complained of the lack of a higher purpose that was an integral part of the job. That higher purpose was identified in different ways: most described it as ideology, some spoke of patriotism, others of laws. In Russian, one of the words for treason and betrayal is izmena – a word that also connotes change. The idea that one could change masters or change a set of values that he had previously sworn an oath to is deeply unsettling and unforgiveable for any officer.

  And yet this was precisely what most officers were forced to do during the 1990s.

  Despite a slew of departments embroiled in a perpetual conflict between each other for resources, influence, and the favour of the sovereign, and despite Yeltsin’s attempts to separate intelligence from counterintelligence, officers from domestic as well as foreign departments pointed to a single problem – the lack of a system of coordinates and a unified raison d’etre.

  Yuri Gervis, a KGB officer who, like Kabanov, worked in the anti-contraband department, went on to serve another five years in the FSB, only to quit in 1996 to go into law practice. For him, the very “idea of government” had been a crucial stimulus without which he could not serve.