Putin

11 RUSSIA WITHOUT PUTIN, PUTIN WITHOUT RUSSIA

An eerie void formed when President Putin went missing for eleven days in March 2015, a void of both power and information. Not only was the leader nowhere to be seen, but his staff used cheesy, easily challengeable tricks like airing old video footage to make it appear that Putin was still diligently at work. In fact he had cancelled two quite important meetings—one with the president of Kazakhstan, the other with officials from the FSB, his power base and “alma mater.”

When it became clear that the government would not be forthcoming with information, rumors streamed into the void, little prompting ever needed for that. In operatic Russian style they ran the gamut from amour to murder—Putin was attending the birth of his love child with champion gymnast Alina Kabayeva, for whom he had left his wife of many years, or else he had been discreetly poisoned in the Kremlin.

It had to be something out of the ordinary. If it was the flu, his press secretary could just announce that fact and not becloud a situation already murky with the war in Ukraine, plunging oil prices, sanctions, and the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov one week before Putin’s seclusion. But Russian leaders don’t like their health discussed in public. It can only reduce their larger-than-life image. One Russian woman told me that Stalin’s spell had broken for her when during his final illness in 1953 she began reading reports about his urine in Pravda. “Gods don’t pass urine,” she said with a crooked grin.[396]

Contrary to some Western opinion, Putin cultivates his macho image not because he never outgrew an adolescent fascination with pecs, pistols, and espionage, but because in a Darwinian society strength is everything. In the entourage of every godfather, there’s always one man who thinks he can do a better job. Stalin, in his later years, was very aware of those in his retinue checking the spring in his step, his quickness of mind.

It is also possible that the reason behind Putin’s disappearance was not so primitive, but very much up-to-date. His media and image consultants may have advised him to change the Russian narrative from “Opposition leader murdered in front of Kremlin” to “Putin has disappeared.” In any case, his vanishing did precisely that. Domination through absence, domination through presence, but domination at all costs.

Since the void left by Putin drew rumors at a furious pace, this was also a way for Putin to gain certain valuable information about the country’s feelings for him. Of course, he knew that independent polling showed his popularity in the astronomical eighties, but he was also aware that this level was maintained because of the high price of oil, which created a boom. A decline in popularity in 2014–15 was offset by the elations of victory in Crimea and Ukraine. The problem with these polls is not that they’re rigged but that many respondents will, through an instinct bred in the bone, praise the leader rather than speak ill of him, especially if it costs you nothing.

Putin may also have been testing his immediate entourage to see how some might react to what could be a crisis in the continuity of leadership. Or the whole thing might have been as banal as a bad reaction to a Botox shot that puffed him so much he couldn’t show his face for a week.

Although Putin had disappeared from view a couple of times before, the March 2015 incident was the longest and therefore the most significant because it gave Russians a preview of Russia without Putin. In fact, “Russia without Putin” had already become the main slogan the opposition chanted in the streets along with “Putin is a thief.” Those street demonstrations grew particularly large and vociferous in late 2011 and reached their crescendo on May 6, 2012, the day before Putin’s inauguration for his third presidential term.

The mood at the anti-Putin march was both festive and sinister. People dressed as clowns seemed to be trying both to amuse and to provoke. Wearing storm trooper black, Fascists marched under their black, yellow, and white flag. The Communists held high their traditional red. But the majority of the people were part of the new middle class that had grown up and flourished under Putin. Young couples pushed strollers, followed by nerds sometimes called “office plankton” and “Internet hamsters,” old intellectuals with white goatees, stylish women in chic dresses and high heels. What united them was grievance at the way Putin and Medvedev simply swapped the positions of president and prime minister in 2008, an apparent homage to the Constitution that only made their “castling” the more insulting.

Once the demonstrators passed through the metal detectors splayed across the width of the street, they moved forward like a river whose banks were formed by three rows of police and SWAT teams (OMON) standing with their arms linked. Some of the young police, who had been placed in the front line to harden them, looked like they wanted to be anywhere but there. The OMON, on the other hand, were spoiling for violence. They wore segmented black body armor that gave them a sort of outer-space Samurai look. It was their demonstration too. A demonstration of their numbers, their power, their limited tolerance.

The violence was not long in coming. Given the length of the demonstration, those at the rear never knew what happened until they went home and turned on the television, which, being state-run, of course, minimized the number of demonstrators while exaggerating the number of police injured by stones and Molotov cocktails.

Putin was so unnerved by the scale and intensity of the demonstrations, he ordered that the streets leading to the Kremlin for his inauguration the next day be kept absolutely empty. So instead of waving in triumph to adoring crowds from his limousine, he drove through a ghost town. The look on his face was one of pale, cold fury.

The demonstrators had ruined his moment, and he would never forgive them. From that day on Putin has been implacable in crackdown.

Dmitri Oreshkin, an opposition analyst who heads Mercator, a Moscow-based research group, says of the people who call for a Russia without Putin: “What do they think is going to follow him? Some liberal politician? No, things would only get worse.”[397]

One way that things could get worse is for the Russian state to disintegrate, a possibility that has haunted Putin from the late 1980s as he watched the fall of the USSR. In the chaos of a post-Putin interregnum, Chechnya and the other Muslim-dominated areas could break away to form an emirate or even to swear allegiance to ISIS. Siberia could form its own political entity, vast, strong, and finally free from Moscow. Hungry for lebensraum and arable land, China could reassert control over territory long considered taken from them in “unequal treaties.” In short, this would be nothing less than the chaotic disintegration of a nuclear superpower. A more hazardous situation is difficult to imagine.

And so, to counter the formulation of “Russia without Putin,” Putin’s deputy chief of staff, Vyacheslav Volodin, has come up with an even more ominous version: “No Putin, no Russia.”[398]

The Russian Constitution provides that if the president resigns, is incapacitated, is impeached, or dies, his place will be taken by the prime minister. Elections have to be held within three months. There is no indication that Putin has groomed a successor. He would have considered that both premature and dangerous. It would mean both bringing someone too close to him while pushing others away and thereby turning them against him. Putin would of course have gathered or fabricated kompromat on all his potential successors. His main strength, however, has always been the loyalty he has demonstrated to others by keeping them in positions of power that bestow great wealth upon them. Still, among them all there is not one with whom Putin could strike the same power-for-immunity deal that Yeltsin struck with him. Putin needs his own Putin.

Whoever he is, Putin’s successor will have to possess a rare amalgam of qualities—he must be able to win the respect of the masses; to keep the oligarchs, the military, and the security forces in a dynamic balance; and to manage a complex foreign policy situation. He will also have to face the country’s two great unsolved problems—its dangerous dependency on gas and oil, and its failure to create a new sense of national purpose and identity.

It’s possible that Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose life has been marked by superlatives—Russia’s richest man, Russia’s most famous political prisoner—would return from his European exile in the event of Putin’s sudden removal or demise. More than once he has indicated that he would not be averse to running the country. He gained considerable moral authority by standing up to ten years of prison, which also focused and clarified his vision for Russia. Before his imprisonment Khodorkovsky had demonstrated that he was capable of transforming himself from a looter to a leader in business as well as transforming his company, Yukos, into a modern organization, transparent, efficient, highly profitable. At the same time he also displayed the ruthless streak that he would need to stay alive in the jungle of Russian politics. Adept at transformation, he may be just the man to transform Russia.

The other obvious candidate from the opposition side is lawyer and anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny. Born in 1976, he has enthusiastically indicated his willingness to run and is in the opinion of some prominent pundits the only electable member of the opposition. Navalny has Russian good looks, projects confidence, and has a gift for turning a phrase. He branded Putin’s United Russia Party “the party of crooks and thieves,” and it stuck.

He has several advantages over Khodorkovsky—he is young, he belongs to the generation that is absolutely at home on the Internet, but he also has a feel for the street. Not limited to the predictable positions of the human rights intelligentsia, he has a strong streak of anti-immigrant Russian nationalism and knows how to appeal to it in others, an increasingly valuable political skill in a global era of fast-moving rightward currents. A self-described nationalist democrat, he has, according to a New York Times story, “Rousing Russia with a Phrase,” “appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, ‘I recommend a pistol.’”[399] But the violent language is not reserved for non-Russians. To those who call him a network hamster, he replies: “I am a network hamster and I will slit the throats of these cattle!”[400] At the same time he is not above posing in various high-end brand-name clothes for the Russian GQ while giving the magazine a hard-hitting interview. This would win him points with other “network hamsters” but would alienate the sort of Russians who would see this, like his time at Yale as a World Fellow in 2010, as proof of his treacherous otherness.

Though disapproving of Putin’s methods, Navalny is already on record as saying that Crimea is now an inalienable part of Russia. Like Khodorkovsky, he too has been singled out for persecution, but, so far at least, it has been more serial harassment than the hard blow of prison. Currently, Navalny, who won 27 percent in the 2013 Moscow mayoral elections, is barred from politics by a felony conviction specifically imposed for that purpose. Under different conditions that conviction could of course be overturned. Also, unlike Khodorkovsky, he does not have the experience of running a vast and complex organization. Perhaps the two of them working together in a new party could prove a formidable force in the event of a suddenly Putin-free Russia.

The first post-Putin leader will, however, probably emerge from the inner circle of high government officials and military/security types. Dmitri Medvedev is one possibility, assuming that his years in power have made him tougher and wilier. The joke about Medvedev that began circulating as soon as he appeared on the political scene went like this: Putin and Medvedev go into a restaurant. The waiter asks Putin: “What will you have?” Putin says: “A steak.” And the waiter says: “And the vegetable?” Putin says: “The vegetable will have a steak too.”

Still, Medvedev ran Gazprom, a serious organization, before being chosen to replace Putin as president. Foreign leaders, especially Obama, felt comfortable with him as a twenty-first-century type, an aura Putin has never projected. Medvedev might be the right person to lead Russia out of its current political and economic impasse with the West, but most likely he would be a transitional figure, more figurehead than actual leader.

When Putin was deciding who would replace him as president while he served as prime minister to honor the letter of the Constitution, Medvedev’s main competition was Sergei Ivanov. Ivanov was, however, too much like Putin for Putin’s liking. Of the same generation, a fellow Leningrader and KGB officer, Ivanov, in his capacity as Putin’s chief of staff, could say that on many issues he and Putin “think more or less identically.”[401] They served together in the Leningrad KGB in the seventies, and Ivanov would later be Putin’s deputy when Putin took charge of the FSB. Rumor has it that Putin envied Ivanov’s height, fluency in English, and success in the KGB—Ivanov reached the rank of general as opposed to Putin’s lieutenant colonel—and for those reasons chose the pliable and stubby Medvedev as his replacement. Though Ivanov insists that when it comes to being Putin’s successor, “I have never regarded myself as such,”[402] others see that as a mere formal demurral. As political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky put it: “Ivanov wants the throne.”[403]

To speculation there is no end, but one thing at least is sure—short of grave illness or death, Putin would never surrender his post as Russia’s leader without a fight. And his own personal army, the 400,000-strong National Guard, which includes the OMON teams that attacked the anti-Putin marchers on the day before his inauguration, will stand him in good stead if that fight takes a literal turn. Apart from that unlikely though not impossible eventuality, the National Guard is always a part of the pressure Putin can bring to bear on any internal political situation.

What Condoleezza Rice said of him in a WikiLeaked cable—that Putin fears “law enforcement investigations”[404]—is no doubt true. He may well believe that he has to die in the Kremlin, in prison, or in sumptuous exile, perhaps living statelessly on the $35 million yacht the oligarch Roman Abramovich gave him as a present.

A new Russian leader almost always defines himself in stark opposition to his predecessor. Anyone replacing Putin would need to show that many of Putin’s actions were not only ill-considered, but criminal. Putin’s successor would look deeply into his affairs and no doubt find any number of crimes ranging from rank corruption to murder most foul.

Economic crimes are easier to trace than murder though their trail is often labyrinthine, shell company within shell company until half of Siberia disappears into a tiny Caribbean island.

The Panama Papers of early 2016 did not directly implicate Putin in any questionable dealings. However, they did reveal that symphony cellist Sergei Roldugin, the friend of his youth and later godfather to his daughter, controlled some $2 billion in offshore financial assets. Putin was pleased that no direct line could be traced between him and Roldugin, but he couldn’t have been happy that that particular cover was blown.

There is an almost Shakespearean profusion of corpses on the stage of Putin’s presidency—the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, gunned down just after entering her apartment building; former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko, wasting away from polonium poisoning in London; opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, shot dead in sight of the Kremlin. Still, there’s little chance of Putin ever being implicated in those crimes.

Putin doesn’t have to ask: Who will rid me of this meddlesome person? No direct orders from Putin are necessary for this, no winks, no nearly imperceptible nods (except, one assumes, for murders committed on foreign soil). Before himself being assassinated, former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko explained how such assassinations are conceived and carried out now under Putin as opposed to in Soviet times. Back then, the KGB was tightly controlled by the party’s Central Committee. Nothing as important as a killing was possible without direct party approval and control. Now it’s the opposite. There’s no party, no Central Committee to which the security services must kowtow and report. It’s all much more relaxed, informal, humdrum. As Litvinenko tells it, deals are made in the lunchroom: “I’m having a little soup and a guy from another section walks over and says: ‘Sasha, you got any criminal connections?’ ‘I do,’ I say. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘there’s this guy I’m sick of, get rid of him for me.’”[405]

In Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov the half-wit half brother Smerdyakov, sensing his brothers’ hostility and murderous intent, carries out their secret wish and kills their father. There is a sort of Smerdyakov effect at work in Putin’s Russia. Divining the leader’s unspoken desires, the little Smerdyakovs of the security services have no trouble finding criminal types to do the dirty work and, if necessary, take the fall.

Putin doesn’t order hits, because he doesn’t have to. It can all be settled by a couple of guys over a bowl of soup.

Putin is the richest man in Russia. Putin is the richest man in Europe. Putin is the richest man in the world. There are many estimates of Putin’s wealth but what they are actually based on is unclear to say the least. Apparently, Swedish economist Anders Aslund and the CIA working independently came up with the same figure, $40 billion, which has now become somewhat canonical. However, Bill Browder, who once ran the largest investment fund in Russia before he was swindled out of it and declared persona non grata, quintupled that canonical estimate to $200 billion in his 2015 book Red Notice. One more such quintupling leap and Putin will be the first trillionaire in history.

But all these various estimates overlook the most important thing, which is that if Mr. Putin is out of power, then he’s out of pocket as well. His control of portions of Russia’s largest companies would instantly evaporate with his loss of office.

If Putin was able to leave Russia, then the question would become—where would he live and on what? If his principal concern was extradition, there are any number of countries from Brazil to Dubai where he would be safe. Many countries have fast tracks to citizenship for those who buy property, deposit money in local banks, or otherwise invest. It’s possible that some deal for sanctuary could be, or has already been, worked out. The problem for Putin would not be finding a country that would accept him and not extradite him to Russia, which doesn’t extradite its own citizens either. A more pressing problem would be what would support the former president in something like the style to which he has grown accustomed. Putin may well have foreign accounts containing dollars or euros, but bank accounts can be frozen and access to safe-deposit boxes denied. For that reason leaders like Putin tend to favor tangible things and thus put their trust in gold and land.

In June 2011 Putin became the only Russian president ever to visit the nation’s main gold depository, located in central Moscow. A photo shows him holding up a twenty-pound ingot with one hand as his entourage looks on with smiling approval. Putin too seems to be enjoying the moment, the heft of the bar, the density of its concentrated wealth. In itself this of course proves nothing, but there are other, more significant indications of his interest in gold. Under Putin Russia became for a time the world’s top buyer of gold, acquiring over 600 tons in the decade between 2004 and 2014. Despite the economic problems caused by oil prices and sanctions, or perhaps because of them, Russia became the world’s number one gold purchaser in 2015 and in early 2016 was buying 500,000 ounces a month.

Russia also produces considerable gold—291 tons were mined in 2015, 208 of which were added to the nation’s central bank reserves. The gold produced within Russia is shipped by FeldSvyaz, a courier service that reports directly to Putin. How difficult would it be for Putin to arrange to have a certain percentage skimmed off the top and have it shipped abroad for safekeeping? Gold is not as cumbersome as might be imagined. A million dollars in gold bars is only three times heavier than its equivalent in U.S. hundreds and is virtually untraceable.

Where might that gold be? An early 2016 New Yorker article, “The Bouvier Affair” by Sam Knight, about the fleecing of a Russian oligarch, offers one clue:

Putin may also be funneling wealth out of the country to his children. In late 2015 there were reports that Putin’s daughter Ekaterina was buying a luxury property in Biarritz, the elegant resort on the Atlantic side of the South of France where Putin was living very modestly in the summer of 1999 when Boris Berezovsky came to convince him to accept the post of prime minister. That would make a nice full circle.

Putin has also maintained close ties with European leaders like former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who could have proved useful in assisting Putin in transferring wealth out of Russia.

But not all scenarios need end as ignominiously as those with Putin scampering away to Biarritz or some such place with bags of cash. A man extremely favored by fortune in his rise to power, he could yet prove favored again. The exploitation of the Arctic could stave off disaster for another generation.

Or a military intervention in Kazakhstan might provide the Kremlin with leverage over China, thereby completing the task of restoring Russia’s greatness by restoring Russia’s power.

Even if these unlikely glories are attained, they will, however, only temporarily obscure the failure at the core of Putin’s reign.

Putin was given a unique opportunity by history, a period of wealth and peace that he could have used to liberate his country from its dependence on oil and on authoritarian rule. He squandered that opportunity to unleash the source of Russia’s true greatness—the still untapped skills and spirit of its people. Was not his own career sufficient proof of how high an ordinary Russian could rise?

But Putin did not trust. He did not trust the world outside Russia, which in the end he could only see as the enemy at the gates. He did not trust the Russian people out of the fear that they would run rampant if given liberty. But it was a handful of well-educated men who looted the country, not ordinary Russians, who at worst filched a few boards or some cable, and proved themselves sober and canny in Russia’s first real elections. And in the end on some level he did not trust himself sufficiently to manage a freer people in a world that might be opposed at times to Russia but was hardly inimical to it.

He did succeed in restoring stability and a measure of self-respect to Russia after the bitter humiliations of the 1990s, no small achievement. At the beginning of his second term, with high oil prices buoying the economy and his popularity solid and high, Putin could have done something daring and transformative. Using his immense top-down power he could have in earnest begun the transformation of Russia from a petrostate to a twenty-first-century knowledge-based economy—not because a knowledge-based economy is “nicer” and “greener,” but because it is a more dependable producer of wealth over the long run and also because it involves larger numbers of people than the gas and oil industries, thereby making them stakeholders in society. In turn, that sense of belonging and connectedness could have served as the matrix for a new culture from which Russia’s new vision of identity would finally emerge.

The timing was good, the timing was bad. Good from the point of view of Russia’s wealth and Putin’s popularity, bad from the point of view of the world situation. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 might have been seen by Putin as only an internal question if NATO had not at the same time conferred membership on seven former Eastern Bloc countries, three of them former Soviet republics, moving the alliance right up to Russia’s western border. It was then that Putin began to suffer not from a too low sense of danger but from one that would quickly become much too high.

And as people often do in times of threat and jeopardy, Putin reverted to the tried and true, in his case “the power vertical.” His rule started out as authoritarianism lite but became less so with each challenge, culminating in the street demonstrations on the eve of his inauguration in May 2012. Economically, hewing to the tried and true meant sticking with gas and oil instead of transforming Russia into a knowledge-based economy that would have involved large numbers of people. Instead, the state and society ended up separate if not opposed, Russia’s perennial tragic conundrum.

And because it did not involve the people enough, the House of Putin will, like the House of the Tsars and the House of the Communists, sooner or later come crashing down. When and with how much suffering is anyone’s guess. All that is sure is that the Russian people, who outlasted Genghis Khan and Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler, will survive the fall of the House of Putin. Surviving is what Russians absolutely do best.