The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  He dodged the question the first time. But when the barrage kept coming he was forced to admit his talks, evading what exactly Surkov was getting at.

  “I have not discussed this situation with Surkov. I can say that yesterday Surkov invited me and simply asked to tell him about the preparations for the convention. Nothing was being approved with anyone. Yes, I had a meeting with Surkov, and I informed him about the convention.”

  When I pressed Prokhorov about the party’s closeness with the Presidential Administration, he continued to deny it.

  “It appeared that way to you, not to me. I’ve always said that I made decisions in this project myself, and I dealt with the party myself.”

  Asked about Putin and Medvedev, Prokhorov unwittingly revealed his key miscalculation in the whole affair: that the pressure coming from the Presidential Administration was merely the arrogance of bureaucrats, that having the backing of both members of the tandem, he just needed one meeting to explain to Putin and Medvedev what was happening, and his problems would go away.

  “Does Putin know?” someone asked.

  “I don’t know. I will try to inform all the political figures.”

  “What will you do if you learn that the initiative that you leave this post is coming from the country’s leadership?”

  “This is pretty easy to determine. And we will determine it tomorrow…. I just want to figure out what happened.”

  5.

  The next day – September 15 – everything spilled out into the open. Prokhorov quit the party and, seeing that he had nothing to lose in his dealings with the Presidential Administration, lashed out at Surkov in an attack not seen since Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s fateful criticism of Vladimir Putin in 2003. If Prokhorov could not save his party, then he could at least dismantle the façade that he seemed to have been fooled into keeping in place for so long.

  “I have felt with my own skin what a political monopoly is, when someone calls you every day and gives you all sorts of orders, tries to introduce his own people into the lists, pressures regional headquarters and takes party members arriving in Moscow straight to the Presidential Administration for talks,” Prokhorov told his supporters even while Kremlin loyalists were voting him out of office and approving their own party lists at a separate, breakaway convention.

  “There is a puppet master in this country who has privatized the political system. His name is Vladislav Surkov. As long as people like him control the process, politics is impossible. I will do everything to get Surkov sacked.”203

  It was an emotional outburst unprecedented for an oligarch who had less than twenty-four hours ago shown the utmost deference to that very puppet master. Something had occurred on the night of September 14 that changed Prokhorov’s tone.

  By most accounts, after the press conference Prokhorov met with Surkov once again for talks that lasted until two in the morning. There is no official account of what was discussed, but according to the most plausible version, Prokhorov told Surkov outright that he would take up the matter with Putin and Medvedev directly. Surkov, in his casual way, indicated that he might do as he liked. But what he apparently did not say was that it would be of no use.204

  Prokhorov tried to get an audience with Putin as early as Wednesday, September 14, but the audience was reportedly denied. After the decisive announcement on September 15, Prokhorov publicly stated that he would try to meet with Putin.

  Asked how exactly he would try to get Surkov sacked, Prokhorov mentioned “public political methods.” And right afterwards, he said, “I’ve already called the reception of the president and the prime minister and asked for a meeting. They have a busy schedule, I hope to meet within seven to ten days.” In another interview, he would accuse Surkov of “misinforming”205 Putin and Medvedev – a classic example of the idea of the Tsar being misinformed by his boyars.

  This was possibly the most revealing remark in the entire Prokhorov affair – for the fact that he tried to get through to Putin and Medvedev just hours after calling Surkov a puppet master indicated that however independent Prokhorov thought himself to be, he understood exactly where the real favour was coming from, and that without it politics would be closed for him – no matter how much money or popularity he could muster.

  “In the past, whenever I had the need to meet with the president or the prime minister, I would get in within seven or ten days. So I hope nothing has changed.”206

  But something evidently had. A week passed, then ten days, and Prokhorov still had not been given an audience. Medvedev never commented on the matter at all. On September 25, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, told media that Putin had no plans to meet with Prokhorov. There was no further evidence of any meetings with Putin or Medvedev. Russia’s youngest and most promising oligarch no longer seemed to be welcome at court.

  6.

  It was tempting that autumn to compare Prokhorov’s fate to that of Khodorkovsky – with the obvious result that where the latter utterly lost Putin’s favour, Prokhorov’s fall from grace was temporary. He was favoured and trusted enough eventually to be allowed to run for president – and he would retain the backing of Alexei Kudrin, the former finance minister who would remain a close ally of Putin even after his resignation in September 2011.

  Indeed, despite initial fears that Prokhorov would share the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, no signals that the oligarch was fair game were ever given. The reason may be that Prokhorov’s defiance went no further than calling Surkov a puppet master, and though he promised to stay in politics, he remained out of the limelight. For a while, he declined requests for an interview and was rarely seen speaking to the media.

  Prokhorov’s evident distance from the Kremlin certainly didn’t help his business. By late September, the Kremlin had him kicked out of the Presidential Commission on Innovation and Modernization, where Surkov was a prominent member. In October, bureaucratic red tape that delayed road construction for his “Yo-Mobile” factory in the Leningrad region was interpreted as a possible consequence of the Kremlin’s cold shoulder. Reports appeared that Prokhorov’s Onexim Group might sell its shares in the Yo-Mobile venture, but these were denied by his press service.

  Then, amid unprecedented public dissent that started gaining momentum after the December 4 parliamentary elections – elections where Prokhorov would have won a seat were he still head of Right Cause – he suddenly announced that he had taken “the most important decision of [his] life” and decided to run for president. Sources close to the Presidential Administration called this a Kremlin project intended to absorb disgruntled middle class voters, but Prokhorov countered cheekily that the Kremlin was a project of his instead.

  The oppositionist New Times magazine described witnessing a dramatic December 9 scene in which Prokhorov answered a call on his mobile, turned pale, and said it was Putin. “It’s OK, he asked me to run for president. I thought I had problems,” Prokhorov allegedly said.207 But Prokhorov denied that the incident ever happened, as he would staunchly deny any interaction with Putin that winter.208

  “Since the convention, I have not been able to get an audience,” Prokhorov told me when I asked him in late January. “When I understood that I would not get an audience, well, I started acting according to my own plans.”

  When pressed about the rumours, he conceded that there was a stereotype that everything that happened was orchestrated by state power – and that he was trying to break out of that stereotype.

  “What if we’re all a project of Putin? If the mass rallies were allowed, then were they a project of Putin?”

  “They were a concession,” I said.

  “Well, don’t you think that my appearance on the political scene was yet another concession?”

  His denials were logical – even if Putin had asked him to run, admitting as much would diminish the whole point of courting a middle class increasingly dissatisfied with Putin. Still, his campaign strategy too clearly shied away from direct criticism of Putin
– and when I asked his campaign manager, Anton Krasovsky, directly about Prokhorov’s talks with Alexei Kudrin, the self-described mediator between Putin and the opposition, he said there was nothing wrong with the connection. “I’m for continuity in state power,” he told me.209 Soon after, the Central Election Commission accepted his two million petition signatures – in an unspoken sign that Prokhorov’s candidacy had the blessing of the Kremlin.

  Given the approval of his presidential bid, there was clearly no retribution intended against Prokhorov. Even if there was, it did not approach the calibre of what was done to Khodorkovsky for his seeming “treason.” This is interesting if we want to understand what exactly a Russian oligarch has to do to lose his sovereign’s favour. For his attack on Surkov, Prokhorov was let loose, deprived of the privilege of “dropping by” to see Putin – and even that for just a short time. But Khodorkovsky was imprisoned in a Siberian jail, deprived of his multibillion-dollar oil empire, and hit with a string of impossibly arcane and mind-numbingly absurd economic charges that an international team of lawyers have been unsuccessfully fighting for a decade.

  The key difference is in the extent to which Prokhorov and Khodorkovsky broke the unspoken rules.

  Eight years after Khodorkovsky’s arrest, there is still little consensus, really, about what exactly sent him to jail. Out of the gargantuan efforts of Khodorkovsky’s defence team on the one hand and Kremlin propaganda on the other emerge two explanations, the first only slightly more accurate than the second: from the perspective of the West, Khodorkovsky went to jail because he criticized Putin, while from the Russian perspective, Khodorkovsky went to jail because he stole money from the government.

  Both explanations stem from the same fallacy: Khodorkovsky’s supporters focus on the illegal nature of the persecution, arguing that Putin “broke the law” to take revenge on his rival. The Kremlin, of course, argues that Khodorkovsky “broke the law” by stealing taxes.

  But there were no laws to break, there were unspoken rules, the ponyatiya. Take, for a moment, Khodorkovsky’s behaviour in 2003. Feeling he had atoned for the “incestuous” acquisition of his oil assets in 1995 by making his company more legally transparent and efficient than any other in Russia, he undertook to build a transnational oil empire. Inspired by the merger of the Russian oil company TNK with British Petroleum, in April 2003 he made an agreement with Roman Abramovich’s Sibneft for a merger that would create a $35 billion company that could pump more oil than a small Gulf state. The Kremlin initially backed the deal – until it became clear that Khodorkovsky was not about to defer to the government. That summer, Khodorkovsky started courting ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco for a mega-merger that would make him the head of a transnational corporation.

  And he seemed to assume that his luck in expanding his company by legal means gave him a mandate to reform the country just as he had reformed Yukos – forgetting that the country was not his to reform. Pyotr Aven, Putin’s close friend from his time in St. Petersburg and later the chief of Alfa Bank, told an American journalist that Khodorkovsky was “openly going around Moscow saying they would like to buy one third of the Duma to be able to block an institutional majority.”210

  It is widely believed that two factors – Khodorkovsky’s criticism of Putin for corruption during a meeting in February 2003, and his support of the Communist Party (believed, for a time, to be the only genuine oppositionist force to the Kremlin) – sealed his fate.

  But Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Putin’s prime minister at that time and then fell utterly out of favour for his staunch position on Khodorkovsky – and who would never see his opposition parties allowed anywhere near the election process – suggested that the problem was not one of “opposition” per se, but one of agreeability.

  Kasyanov told me in an earlier interview that he had asked Putin what Khodorkovsky was doing wrong, and the answer had surprised him.

  “It wasn’t a question of [him funding] liberal or not liberal parties. It could have been the other way around. The main problem [for Putin] – and this surprised me – was that besides the legal support that businesses could give political parties, the business had to obtain secret approval from the president for this activity. It didn’t matter what parties were approved or not. What was important was that this permission be obtained.”

  In other words, criticizing Putin on corruption or even funding the Communist Party alone might have been enough to make him unwelcome at court, but in itself it didn’t bring about the partition of Khodorkovsky’s oil empire and his imprisonment. Rather, these moves were part of a whole complex of actions taken by Khodorkovsky – actions that, interpreted in the context of an 18th century court, amounted to an open attempt to wrest power. Khodorkovsky seemed to be making clear that he refused to compromise with Putin, refused to negotiate, and refused to be loyal because he had a better vision for Russia than Putin, and he was bent on using his capital to put that vision into motion. It was this – and not funding a particular opposition party – that ultimately spent Putin’s patience. “I have eaten more dirt than I need to from that man,” Putin reportedly told BP chief John Browne in a private remark shortly before Khodorkovsky’s arrest.211

  Because neither democratic institutions nor laws could guard against these kinds of attempts to wrest power, the key governing factor to ensure against revolution in Russia was personal trust. Built up with staunch displays of loyalty and agreeability, personal trust determined the extent to which a businessman could continue to extract rent from his fiefdom. There was a certain archaic logic to this that Khodorkovsky and Kasyanov, both insistent on taking Russia’s constitution at face value, did not take into account: having obtained these assets from the state, the businessman was ever at the mercy of the state with regard to those assets, and given the personalized power that ruled in the absence of institutions, he was virtually at the personal whim of the ruler. Interpersonal relations and personal sympathy determined who got to own what.

  “Throughout 2003 our differences with President Vladimir Putin were increasing, especially with regard to pressure on business and on Mikhail Khodorkovsky [in particular],” Kasyanov said of his own diminishing relationship with Putin. “I knew what the results of my remarks could be, and that is why I began to criticize,” Kasyanov explained. Though it was more logical for a prime minister, who had to work for the president on a daily basis, to be favoured based on personal agreeability with the president, the same mechanism was also at play in the relationship with businessmen.

  In the case of Prokhorov, his eagerness to meet with Putin after the Right Cause debacle revealed the extent to which he had internalized this unspoken rule of agreeability. Unlike Khodorkovsky, he had made only a small miscalculation: that Surkov himself had been entrusted with managing the political realm for many years. He took pains to maintain his loyalty to Putin, and went after Surkov alone – who would be demoted from his post as deputy chief of staff amid the political unrest in December 2011.

  In Khodorkovsky’s case, his refusal to compromise cost him his business empire and his freedom. In Prokhorov’s case, it only cost him his party.

  Prokhorov, however, played his cards right, and remained in favour. He walked away from the scandal with his assets intact, and with the evident blessing to continue dabbling in politics. He would, of course, lose the presidential elections in March 2012. But he would go on to create the Civic Platform party – whose candidate, Yevgeny Roizman, would win an unprecedented mayoral election in his home city of Yekaterinburg in September 2013. With his party vocally critical of many government measures, and aiming for the federal parliamentary elections slated for 2015, it was a promising start.

  But the September 2011 debacle over Right Cause – by demonstrating just how cynically managed politics in Russia was, by shattering the illusion of political theatrics – served to contribute to the protests that would spill over that winter.

  Chapter 12

  The Regent


  1.

  ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2011, President Dmitry Medvedev was struggling to say something. He looked manically, feverishly happy – and not because Prime Minister Putin had just suggested that he head the United Russia party. It was as if he had finally overcome and disposed of an inner burden weighing on him.

  “Considering the offer to head the party list… and my readiness to get involved in the practical affairs of the government,” – a slight pause, for the president had made his decision and was about to speak, was about to say what so many had wanted him to say – “I believe it would be right for the convention to support the chairman of the party, Vladimir Putin, as candidate for president.”212

  There was a slight gasp among the journalists, although it would take at least a month to process and articulate the betrayal that many of them didn’t yet know they felt. But just one room away the huge sports arena filled with 11,000 United Russia deputies, delegates and functionaries, reverberated not with cheers, but with a wail of relief so passive and high-pitched that one couldn’t tell whether the sound issuing from these loyal members of the Duma was one of triumph or surrender.

  The announcement on September 24 came earlier than expected, although it was clear that party functionaries, ministers, officials and businessmen were struggling with the suspense. It surprised no one, although the idea of a soft-spoken, technocratic lawyer president, Dmitry Medvedev, handpicked by Putin to hold his place as president in 2007, had filled many people, particularly the kind who would go on to demonstrate against Putin, with hope: move over, pseudo-autocrat, we are not children or lackeys to be ruled by the cold terror of your eyes; we do not want the personal rule of an alpha dog, but the institutional governance of a president as an elected guarantor of the rule of law.