The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  There is no documented proof of this incident – and it may well never have happened, since we only have unnamed Yevroset sources speaking about it. But we know of similarly undocumented meetings which bore all the marks of behind the door instructions to clean up one of an endless multitude of extrajudicial messes. If this meeting indeed happened, then by its chaotic result we can only surmise that the initial instructions were utterly distorted on their way from Putin to Rashid Nurgaliyev, from Rashid Nurgaliyev to his deputies, and from those deputies to the head of Department K, Boris Miroshnichenko.

  Whatever instructions were issued, corruption was fought selectively – and only against those that were fair game, outside the protective sphere of the government.

  For that is what happens when, as Humphrey and Sneath put it, a “sacred” state “crumbles from the centre, when its leaders become mere fallible humans, and its parts are left largely to fend for themselves.”127

  Given these ongoing transformations, it is no wonder that corruption becomes a security threat, and that security officers themselves begin to recoil from it – and it is wrong to believe that Putin has always had the loyal support of his security officers. The siloviki understand that Putin is a mere mortal, but something in their behaviour, in the structure of the relationships that they build with one another in the service of the state, automatically assumes that he is not.

  They recognize this contradiction and they direct at Putin all their love and all their hatred: a love that is patrimonial and therefore purely economical (for he is their ultimate protector), and a hatred that is mystical – they cannot forgive him for being a fallible human, for extolling commerce as the chief ideology, and disgracing the very idea of state power.

  Chapter 8

  The Police Major

  “If anyone is behind Dymovsky, it’s God Himself.” - Alexei, a retired police colonel and an associate of Dymovsky

  “We are told, ‘don’t be afraid, nothing will happen to you, the System won’t betray you.’ This started in 2000, and it came from a person we all know, a man who will not betray his own kind. Vladimir Putin. Ever heard of him?” - Marat Rumyantsev, reserve officer

  1.

  FRESH OUT OF prison, with a police tail following him everywhere he went, Major Alexei Dymovsky poured me a glass of cheap wine at a provincial café and became apocalyptic.

  “I know the structure of the police, I know how it works from the inside,” he said after I asked him what brought him to town. “Right now, someone is artificially creating tensions between the people and the police. Once the first shot is fired, it will all sweep over Russia. People will die. A civil war will begin.”

  It was spring 2010, and Dymovksy was a media personality. Six months earlier, he had recorded a video address to Vladimir Putin complaining of rampant corruption that went viral. Within weeks of the video, he was jailed on charges of fraud. Once he was released from jail in January, he began giving press conferences in Moscow and was eager to join a cause, whether it was standing up for whistleblowers or for the working man.

  He’d just arrived in the Siberian mining town of Mezhdurechensk on the back of a mine blast that was sparking region-wide unrest.

  “There will be blood here tomorrow,” he said as his eyes filled with tears, looking away from me with an expression of genuine fear and dismay.

  There was no blood the next day, for the tensions had petered out after Prime Minister Putin raised base salaries and ordered the firing of a scapegoat. But even on his own, Dymovsky, this fumbling, sentimental cop who believed in conspiracy theories, for a moment emerged as an uncanny oppositionist force from the one place no one expected: the police. And while he would fade into obscurity by the time protests gripped the Moscow capital for real in 2011, he exposed a growing dissatisfaction not among the middle class oppositionists, but among officers serving the state.

  The brutality, corruption, and depravity of the police force had become something of a backdrop by 2009, an environment that many no longer even noticed. Bribery was seen by political critics of Putin’s regime as the result of the very mindset of “these people” and their low salaries, as though it was hard for them to imagine that these wielders of force, the beneficiaries of what had de facto become a protection racket extending into all spheres of commerce, would ever rebel against a system that was seen as deliberately working in their favour to keep them loyal to the regime.

  But that November, seven months after Major Denis Yevsyukov shot nine people in a Moscow supermarket, Alexei Dymovsky, another police major, from the southern Russian port town of Novorossiysk, shocked the whole country with a mere YouTube video.

  Part of the shock element resulted from the exploding of a persistent Moscow stereotype, that of an enlightened elite of internet users versus the backwards masses who only watched television. The police force, for the most part, was seen as falling into the latter category, so the fact that a precinct officer from a provincial town would use the internet instead of his gun to try to prove a point turned prevailing views on the relationship between the regime and its executioners upside down.

  On November 5, 2009, Dymovsky, on the suggestion of a friend, created a personal website and posted two videos – one addressed to fellow officers,128 and one directly to the man he perceived as the boss of his bosses – Vladimir Putin. (Technically, the Interior Ministry answered directly to the president, but Dymovsky admitted to me that he had so little interest or knowledge of politics at the time that he “hardly knew what Medvedev’s name was.”) He was so nervous about the video address that he drank a glass of vodka before recording.

  The videos showed a chubby, depressed-looking man in uniform baldly describing his grievances – stumbling over every other word. And the key complaints directed to Putin primarily focused on his working conditions – Dymovsky’s bosses were refusing to extend his sick leave and threatening to fire him.

  “Vladimir Vladimirovich, I’m appealing to you as an officer of the police. Dymovsky, Alexei Alexandrovich. I’m currently not working, but I’m a senior operative. I’m appealing to you with the following request. Maybe you don’t know, maybe you’re not being told, but I want you to know how we live. Simple officers, simple police officers who solve cases, detain suspects, write up complaints, who work. I appeal to you. I live on 14,000 roubles (about £270) a month. I work 30 days out of 31 days in a month. I get no overtime. On Saturdays at 2 p.m., we’re told that since we don’t have any cases solved, we have to work until 8 p.m. I asked, ‘are we being paid for this?’ And I was told ‘no, this is the personal wish of the head of police.’ Recently I applied to a clinic because my arm was going numb. And I was told that I have to leave the clinic because they had an order from the head of police not to treat any officer.”

  He went on to detail routine violations at his department – including orders to falsify evidence against suspects to boost statistics, and jailings of innocent homeless people outright.

  To fellow officers, he said:

  “I ask you to join us. There are a lot of us who want to work honestly. I ask the pensioners to join us. You’ve already worked, you have nothing to fear. Look at the young people who join the police! They say they are not daunted by salaries of 12,000 roubles because they can rely on a generous kalym.” (Dymovsky seems to have confused kalym – which is a bride price in some ethnic republics in Russia – with obrok, or a tribute paid by a peasant to his lord.)

  Not a single word of what he said was news to anyone, but the monotonous, jargon-ridden voice of a cop, the lowest cog in the Interior Ministry, detailing those petty abuses punctured the uneasy tolerance of police corruption for the second time that year.

  Despite Dymovsky’s request to meet with Putin “eye to eye,” the prime minister responded to the video address and to the ensuing scandal with an icy silence. His press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said that while the prime minister was informed of the address, he had not bothered to watch it.129 Putin would never
utter the word “Dymovsky,” and never bring up the issue of his complaint. For apart from complaining about low salaries and general corruption, Dymovsky broke every unspoken rule in the book: addressing the Tsar, he named his boss, Novorossiysk police chief Vladimir Chernositov, and accused him of giving orders to imprison an innocent person in exchange for being given the rank of major.

  “Dymovsky did not say anything new. It’s all happened before,” Mikhail Pashkin, chairman of the Moscow Police Union and an avid critic of Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, told me. “We’ve been talking about this kind of stuff for the last ten years. It’s just that he found a new medium, video.”130

  Police whistleblowers frequently faced retribution. Grigory Chekalin, a former deputy prosecutor of the Chita region, fought criminal allegations after he refused to fabricate charges against two people he believed were innocent. He fled to Moscow, virtually exiled from his home city. In Moscow, officers who complain might just lose their jobs.

  “If an officer wants to live by the law, they try to get rid of him,” said Pashkin. “Or if an Interior Ministry officer is facing someone who has more money than he does – then he will get prosecuted for bribe-taking. They jailed a [certain] officer for eleven years over $400 that they found in the corridor. He spent six years in prison. The problem was, he [started investigating] a store that was [protected] by a different structure. He’s a lawyer now, and a member of our union. We tried to defend him.”

  Dymovsky became an instant celebrity; whisked to Moscow, he gave a press conference where he laid out vague plans to organize efforts to fight corruption in the bottom rungs of power. And as Dymovsky had promised, heartened by his example, more cops followed, recounting the medieval hell of police departments across the country in their monotonous voices.

  The dozens of new video revelations posted on his site, Dymovskiy.name, bore a single common pattern: these cops had already complained to their superiors about being given orders to break the law, and their complaints earned them nothing but ostracism. Desperate, they tried to channel the wave of public indignation to get their cases across to the government, seeking protection to practice what they saw as honest police work. But most of these attempts went nowhere; and Dymovsky’s, in the end, would be no exception – exiled from the force, they were lucky if they were not in jail.

  President Dmitry Medvedev’s epic overhaul of the Interior Ministry – beginning with a plan to cut 20 percent of the work force and raise salaries, going through a series of high profile purges, and culminating in renaming the militsia into the ‘politsia’ for a more Western-sounding corps – did nothing to reinstate these dozens of police officers, who, like Major Dymovsky, blew the whistle on the dirty work they were being forced to do.

  2.

  The Russian language doesn’t have a term for whistleblowing, but it does have a word for a snitch. And like any military organization structure, the Interior Ministry did not tolerate subordinates ratting publicly on their bosses. Despite feeble gestures from the Kremlin to fire a few police commanders in the Krasnodar Region where Dymovsky’s home town of Novorossiysk was located, local structures came down hard on the hapless police major – using every means in their arsenal to discredit his name.

  Almost the day after the video address was picked up by the media, the Krasnodar region Interior Ministry head Sergei Kucheruk fired Dymovsky for slander, while his bosses, Valery Medvedev and Vladimir Chernositov, filed a slander suit against him. But that was only the beginning.

  The Interior Ministry immediately unleashed a powerful campaign against Dymovsky. Sources leaked quotes to the press that orders had been given to “bury” the whistleblower.131 Spokesmen for the ministry publicly called him insane; an ex-wife posted a video statement accusing him of being a dirty cop.

  Under the unspoken laws that enforced loyalty in power structures that had no viable written code to adhere to, the punishment for accusing one’s superiors of a crime was to be discredited and slapped with one’s own crimes. In a system where everyone broke the rules, these crimes did not have to be fabricated.

  Even as the Interior Ministry’s security department began checking the validity of his claims, local police also started digging for dirt against Dymovsky. All that investigators could actually find were allegations of embezzling about £500 in the course of eighteen months. Given the scope of police racketeering that Dymovsky and other officers described to me, this was a laughable sum.

  Within a month, Dymovsky was presented with charges of fraud and abuse of office. In January 2010, he was taken into custody and locked up in a pretrial detention centre.

  What was interesting was that investigators made little effort to deny that the persecution was a direct retaliation for snitching to Putin. Inna Biryukova, a spokeswoman for the Krasnodar regional Investigative Committee, said the fraud checks were not connected to his video. But when I asked her when exactly those checks were initiated – before or after the video was posted – she said, “After.”

  But the Kremlin’s anti-corruption drive, which started gaining momentum soon after the outcry sparked by the videos, acted in Dymovsky’s favour. In December 2009, Medvedev decreed that the Interior Ministry should be reformed by 2012; in February, he sacked sixteen interior ministry officials – one of them Boris Martynov, head of the Krasnodar Regional Police, which had Dymovsky’s department in its jurisdiction.

  In that context, the media attention given to Dymovsky’s imprisonment only vindicated his claims and his own status as a new type of dissident. Politically, a police whistleblower in prison threatened to make a laughing stock of President Dmitry Medvedev’s reform campaign. In that light, Dymovsky’s release from prison six weeks later on March 7, 2010, made perfect sense. And the prosecutors who approved the decision gave a perfectly Soviet explanation. “The decision to release him was made because the necessity to keep him in custody has passed,” Inna Biryukova told me when I asked whether the media attention reflected on the decision to release him on bail.132

  The investigation into fraud allegations against Dymovsky never went to court and seemed to be filed away as a potential weapon for further use. As for the slander case, a court ordered Dymovsky to pay 50,000 roubles each to Chernositov and Medvedev for spreading false rumours against them.

  Instead, the regional Interior Ministry took on a more localised approach and started waging a “softer” war: officials connected Dymovsky’s Belaya Lenta movement, which staged a series of protests in Novorossiysk during his imprisonment, to the US Agency for International Development in a bid to portray the Dymovsky scandal as a Western intervention attempt. One of Belaya Lenta’s leaders, Vadim Karastelyov, was arrested once while handing out flyers; on another occasion he was severely beaten by unidentified attackers.

  Karastelyov told me that Valery Medvedev – who was behind the slander suit – detained him personally in Novorossiysk as he was handing out flyers.133 The behaviour of Dymovsky’s bosses, if not backed by Interior Ministry officials in Moscow, was clearly tolerated because Dymovsky had violated the unspoken rules of the game.

  Less easy to understand is the reaction of the federal government. In the context of its police reform campaign, simply ignoring Dymovsky was certainly an option, and on the surface this appeared to be precisely what both Medvedev’s Kremlin and Putin’s White House were doing. But the noticeable silence with which it was treating the case raised even more questions. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, could go on at great lengths about human rights activists and oppositionists; but on Dymovsky everyone was silent.

  When reports appeared in the media that winter asking “Who is behind Dymovsky?” and when I got to know Dymovsky and his friends better, I started to understand part of the reason for the silence.

  3.

  Dymovsky’s video address sparked more than a wave of solidarity from lower-rank cops across the country. It brought a general neurosis to the fore: calls for the entire Interior Ministry to be refor
med played into a collective horror that some powerful force was out to destroy the Ministry in an attempt to undermine the government. Even Moscow’s gypsy cabbies – the ones who boasted of friends and relatives in the “power structures” – suddenly started claiming there was a “vast plot” to take down Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev.

  The very fact that an inarticulate police major like Dymovsky was on the evening news was so unheard of that it started fuelling rumours that someone was out to transform and destroy the entire Ministry. Because transformation and destruction never benefitted the average subject, all camps agreed that someone was out to shake things up to gain power. The only question that they differed on was who.

  Following the beating to death of a student by three policemen, a senior United Russia deputy, Andrei Makarov, weighed in with his own apocalyptic vision. The Interior Ministry, he said at a November press conference, “is impossible to reform, therefore it must be liquidated.”134 It was corrupt, depraved, and, to boot, was struggling to “discredit” a bill to decriminalize tax violations – a bill that was supported from up on high by Vladimir Putin himself. One did not have to be a lawyer to understand why the Interior Ministry spoke out against the decriminalization: charges of tax violations were the most common mechanism used to apply pressure on businessmen to shake them down.

  Depending on one’s position and source of income, the increasing changes that were gaining momentum in the second year of Medvedev’s term were interpreted as either legitimate reforms, spearheaded by the president, or a shadowy bid by a hardliner group to destroy the Interior Ministry, gain hold of its financial positions and use it to fortify their power.

  And Dymovsky – or whoever was behind him – was automatically categorized as part of a shadowy plot.