Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy

AKAKY AKAKIEVICH PUTIN II

I have wondered a great deal about why I am so intolerant of Putin. What is it that makes me dislike him so much as to feel moved to write a book about him? I am not one of his political opponents or rivals, just a woman living in Russia. Quite simply, I am a forty-five-year-old Muscovite who observed the Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the 1970s and 1980s. I really don’t want to find myself back there again.

I am making a point of finishing the writing of this book on May 6, 2004. There has been no miraculous challenging of the results of the March 14 presidential election. The opposition has acquiesced. Accordingly, tomorrow sees the start of Putin II, the president reelected by an unbelievable majority of more than 70 percent. Even if we knock off 20 percent as window dressing (i.e., ballot rigging), he still received enough votes to secure the presidency.

In a few hours Putin, a typical lieutenant colonel of the Soviet KGB, a soul brother of Akaky Akakievich, downtrodden hero of Gogol’s story “The Greatcoat,” will ascend to the throne of Russia once again. His outlook is the narrow, provincial one his rank would suggest; he has the unprepossessing personality of a lieutenant colonel who never made it to colonel, the manner of a Soviet secret policeman who habitually snoops on his colleagues. And he is vindictive: not a single political opponent has been invited to the inauguration ceremony, nor a single political party that is in any way out of step.

Leonid Brezhnev was a distasteful figure; Yury Andropov was bloody, although at least he had a democratic veneer. Konstantin Chernenko was dumb, and Russians disliked Mikhail Gorbachev. At times, Boris Yeltsin had us crossing ourselves at the thought of where his doings might be leading us.

Here is their apotheosis. Tomorrow their bodyguard from Unit 25—the man in the security cordon when VIP motorcades drove by—Akaky Akakievich Putin will strut down the red carpet of the Kremlin throne room as if he really were the boss there. Around him the polished czarist gold will gleam, the servants will smile submissively, his comrades in arms, a choice selection from the lower ranks of the KGB who could have risen to important posts only under Putin, will swell with self-importance.

One can imagine Lenin strutting around like a nabob when he arrived in the vanquished Kremlin in 1918 after the revolution. The official Communist histories—we have no others—assure us that, in fact, his strutting was modest, but his modesty, you can just bet, was insolent. Look at humble little me! You thought I was a nobody, but now I’ve made it. I’ve broken Russia just as I intended to. I’ve forced her to vow allegiance to me.

Tomorrow a KGB snoop, who even in that capacity did not make much of an impression, will strut through the Kremlin just as Lenin did. He will have had his revenge.

Let us, however, run the reel backward a little.

Putin’s victory had been widely predicted both in Russia and throughout the world, especially after the humiliation of such democratic, liberal opposition parties as the country possessed in the parliamentary elections of December 7, 2003. Accordingly, the March 14 result surprised few. We had international observers in, but everything was low key. Voting day itself was a contemporary remake of the authoritarian, bureaucratic, Soviet-style pantomime of “the people expressing its will,” which many still remember only too well, myself included. In those days the procedure was that you went to the polling station and dropped your slip in the ballot box without caring whose names were on it because the result was a foregone conclusion.

How did people react this time? Did the Soviet parallel rouse anybody from inertia on March 14, 2004? No. Voters went obediently to the polling stations, dropped their papers into the ballot boxes, and shrugged: “What can we do about it?” Everyone is convinced that the Soviet Union has returned, and that it no longer matters what we think.

On March 14, I stood outside the polling station on my own Dolgoruky Street in Moscow. With the advent of Yeltsin, its name had been changed from Kalyaev Street. Kalyaev, a terrorist in czarist times, was later regarded as a revolutionary. It became Dolgoruky Street in honor of the prince who had his estate there in Kalyaev’s time, before the Bolsheviks came.

I talked to people going in to vote and coming quickly out again after participating in the charade. They were apathetic, indifferent to the process of electing Putin for a second term. “It’s what ‘they’ want us to do? Well, then. Big deal.” That was the majority sentiment. A minority joked, “Perhaps now they’ll name it Kalyaev Street again.”

The return of the Soviet system with the consolidation of Putin’s power is obvious.

It has to be said that this outcome has been made possible not only by our negligence, apathy, and weariness after too much revolutionary change. It has happened to choruses of encouragement from the West, primarily from Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian leader, who appears to have fallen in love with Putin. He is Putin’s main European champion, but Putin also enjoys the support of Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and Jacques Chirac, and receives no discouragement from the junior Bush across the Atlantic.

So nothing stood in the way of our KGB man’s return to the Kremlin, neither the West nor any serious opposition within Russia. Throughout the so-called election campaign, from December 7, 2003, until March 14, 2004, Putin openly derided the electorate.

The main feature of his contempt was his refusal to debate anything with anyone. He declined to expand on a single point of his own policies in the last four years. His contempt extended not only to representatives of the opposition parties but to the very concept of an opposition. He made no promises about future policy and disdained campaigning of any kind. Instead, as under the Soviet regime, he was shown on television every day, receiving top-ranking officials in his Kremlin office and dispensing his highly competent advice on how to conduct whichever ministry or department they came from.

There was, of course, a certain amount of tittering among members of the public: he was behaving just like Stalin. Putin, too, was simultaneously “the friend of all children” and “the nation’s first pig farmer,” “the best miner,” the “comrade of all athletes,” and the “leading filmmaker.”

None of it went further than tittering, however. Any real emotion drained away into the sand. There was no serious protest over the rejection of debates.

Meeting no resistance, Putin naturally became bolder. It is a mistake to suppose he takes no notice of anything, never reacts and only, as we’re encouraged to believe, forges ahead in pursuit of power.

He pays a lot of attention and takes account of what he sees. He keeps a close eye on us, this nation he controls.

In this way he is behaving exactly like a member of Lenin’s Cheka, or secret police. The approach is entirely that of a KGB officer. First there is the trial balloon of information released through a narrow circle of individuals. In today’s Russia, that is the political elite of the capital. The aim is to probe likely reaction to policies. If there is none, or if it has the dynamism of a jellyfish, all is well. Putin can push his policy forward, spread his ideas or act as he sees fit without having to look over his shoulder.

A brief digression is in order here, less about Putin than about us, the Russian public. Putin has backers and helpers, people with a vested interest in his second ascent of the throne, people now concentrated in the president’s office. This is the institution that today rules the country, not the government that implements the president’s decisions, not the parliament that rubber-stamps whichever laws he wants passed. His people follow society’s responses very attentively. It is wrong to imagine they aren’t bothered. It is we who are responsible for Putin’s policies, we first and foremost, not Putin. The fact that our reactions to him and his cynical manipulation of Russia have been confined to gossiping in the kitchen has enabled him to do all the things he had done in the past four years. Society has shown limitless apathy, and this is what has given Putin the indulgence he requires. We have responded to his actions and speeches not just lethargically but fearfully. As the Chekists have become entrenched in power, we have let them see our fear, and thereby have only intensified their urge to treat us like cattle. The KGB respects only the strong. The weak it devours. We of all people ought to know that.

Let us now go back to late February 2004. At some moment the Kremlin techniques for sounding out opinion warned that the public was beginning to tire of Putin’s insolent refusal either to debate or to campaign and of the absence of any recognizable preelection campaign.

To reinvigorate the languishing electorate, the Kremlin announced that Putin had decided to take firm measures. These proved to be a Cabinet reshuffle three weeks before election day.

At first, everyone was taken aback by what appeared to be an act of lunacy. In accordance with the constitution, the entire Cabinet does, in any case, resign after an election. The newly elected president announces his choice of prime minister, who, in turn, proposes ministers for the president to confirm. What sense could it possibly make to appoint all the Cabinet members now, only to have to reappoint them after the inauguration? What was the point of a senseless activity that could only further paralyze the functioning of a government riddled with corruption, which already spent a good proportion of its working days taking care of personal, commercial interests?

However, although replacing the Cabinet a month before the constitution required was entirely daft, it did indeed serve to reinvigorate the election process. The political elite was stirred, the guessing game about whom Putin would appoint occupied the television channels, the political pundits were provided with news to pontificate about, and the press finally got something it could cover during the election campaign.

But this reinvigoration of politics lasted one week at best. Putin’s spin doctors daily intoned on television that the president had made the appointments because he wanted to be “absolutely honest with you”; he did not want to “enter the election with a pig in a poke” (by which evidently was meant following the constitutional procedure for replacing the Cabinet). He wanted to present his future course before March 14.

It has to be said, alas, that people believed him: probably just over half the electorate. The half that fell for and hailed this dishonest, absurd line of argument has an important distinguishing feature. They are people who love and trust Putin without reservation, irrationally, uncritically; fanatically. They believe in Putin. End of story.

In the week preceding the appointment of a new prime minister, the media images were all of the now-familiar love for Putin. Those with faith in the genuineness of his proclaimed reasons for changing the Cabinet ignored the obvious non sequiturs.

You really do have to believe unreservedly, as if you have fallen in love for the first time, if you are not immediately to be struck by the obvious question: Why didn’t Putin choose a less dramatic way of presenting his future course than firing the entire government? He had plenty of other ways to provide a glimpse of his second term. He could, for example, have taken part in televised debates. But no. The week after the dismissal of the Cabinet saw unprecedented levels of cynicism. The people of Russia watching their televisions were told that actually it didn’t matter what happened on March 14. Everything had been decided. Putin would be czar. The spin doctors were all but saying, “He wants to show you his course in advance because it’s the only choice you’ve got.”

The day when the name of the new prime minister was to be announced was arranged with all the ceremony traditionally preceding the emergence of the hero of an opera to sing his first aria. The president will tell us tomorrow morning. In two hours’ time. In one hour’s time. Ten minutes to go. Moreover, the one whose name would be revealed might, we were assured over the air waves, possibly be the president’s successor in 2008.

In Russia it is important not to look ridiculous. People make up jokes, and you turn into a Brezhnev. When Putin announced his new government, even his die-hard supporters fell to laughing. No one could fail to see that the Kremlin had been staging a bad farce. It was no more than a petty settling of scores—subjected, of course, to endless spin and veiled behind all manner of claptrap and rhetorical flourishes that invoked the greatness of Russia.

But the mountains truly had brought forth a mouse. Virtually all the old ministers stayed where they had been. Only the prime minister, Mikhail Kasianov, was let go. He had been getting up Putin’s nose for many months in a big way, and in many small ways, too. He was a legacy of the Yeltsin era. When raising the second president to the throne, the first president of Russia had asked Putin not to remove Kasianov.

Prime Minister Kasianov, alone among the main actors in Russian politics, categorically opposed the arrest of the liberal oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the gradual destruction of his Yukos oil company. Yukos was the most transparent company in our corrupt country, the first to function in accordance with internationally accepted financial practice. It operated “in the white,” as people say in Russia, and, what is more, it donated over 5 percent of its gross annual profit to financing a large university, children’s homes, and an extensive program of charitable work.

But Kasianov was speaking out in defense of a man whom Putin had, for some time, counted among his personal enemies, on the grounds that Khodorkovsky was making major financial contributions to the country’s democratic opposition, primarily to the Yabloko Party and the Union of Right Forces.

In Putin’s understanding of political life, Khodorkovsky’s donations represented a grave personal insult. The president has publicly shown, on many occasions, that he is incapable of grasping the concept of discussion, especially in politics. There should be no backtalk from someone Putin considers his inferior, and an underling who allows himself to demonstrate any independence is an enemy. Putin does not choose to behave this way. He is not a born tyrant and despot; rather, he has been accustomed to think along the lines inculcated in him by the KGB, an organization he considers a model, as he has stated more than once. Thus, as soon as anyone disagrees with him, Putin demands that the “hysterics” be dropped. This is the reason behind his refusal to take part in preelection debates. Debate is not his element. He doesn’t know how to conduct a dialogue. His genre is the military-style monologue. While you are a subordinate, you keep your mouth shut. When you become the chief, you talk in monologues, and it is the duty of your inferiors to pretend they agree that the choreography is a political version of the misrule of officers in the army that occasionally, as with Khodorkovsky, leads to all-out war.

But to return to the government reshuffle. Kasianov was out. The ministers returned to their original portfolios and Putin ceremoniously parachuted in Mikhail Fradkov as the new prime minister. In recent times, Fradkov had been quietly enjoying a place in our bureaucratic hierarchy as the Russian Federation’s representative to the European institutions in Brussels. He is a nondescript, amiable, forgettable gentleman with narrow shoulders and a big bum. Most Russians learned that our country had a federal minister named Fradkov only when his appointment as prime minister was announced, which, in accordance with Russian lore, tells us that Fradkov is a low-profile representative of that same service to which Putin has dedicated the greater part of his working life.

The nation laughed out loud when it heard of Fradkov’s elevation, but Putin insisted, and even started explaining his “principled” choice to the effect that he wanted to be open with the electorate and to enter the election with people knowing whom he would be working with in his fight against Russia’s main evils, corruption and poverty.

The Russian people, both the half that supports Putin and the half that doesn’t, didn’t stop laughing. The Kremlin farce continued. If the country as a whole did not know Fradkov, the business community remembered him only too well. He is a typical member of the Soviet nomenklatura who, throughout his career, from the Communist period onward, has been shifted hither and thither to miscellaneous bureaucratic posts, independent of his professional background and expertise. He is a typical boss for whom it is not too important what he is driving, just as long as he is in the driver’s seat. While he was director of the Federal Tax Inspectorate Service, it had a reputation as the most corrupt ministry in the Russian civil service. Its bureaucrats took bribes for just about everything—for every form they issued and every consultation. The service was consequently shut down, and Fradkov, in line with the undying traditions of the Soviet nomenklatura, was “looked after.” He was transferred once again, this time to Brussels.

Prime Minister Fradkov hastily flew back to Moscow from Brussels, only to provoke further merriment. At the airport, in his first interview in his new capacity, he confessed he didn’t actually know how to be a prime minister. No, he had no plans; it had all come like a bolt from the blue. He was waiting to see what arrangements had been made and what his instructions would be.

Russia is a country where much goes on behind the scenes and most people have short memories. Despite his ignorance of the arrangements and the lack of instructions from Putin, which never have been made public, the Duma confirmed Fradkov’s appointment by a convincing majority, making reference to its duty to “fulfill the will of our electors who trust President Putin in all matters.” This Duma, its composition the result of the elections of December 7, 2003, contains practically no opposition to Putin and is firmly under the control of the Kremlin.

March 14 arrived. Everything went off as the Kremlin had intended. Life went on as before. The bureaucrats returned to their tireless thieving. Mass murder continued in Chechnya, having quieted down briefly during the elections, to give hope to those who for five years had been hoping for peace. The second Chechen war had begun in mid-1999, in the run-up to Putin’s first presidential election. In accordance with Asian traditions, just before his second presidential election, two Chechen field commanders laid down their weapons at the feet of the great ruler. Their relatives had been seized and were held in captivity until the commanders stated that they now supported Putin and had given up all thought of independence. Oligarch Khodorkovsky took to writing penitential letters to Putin from prison. Yukos was rapidly becoming poorer. Berlusconi came to visit us, and his first question to his pal Vladimir was how he, too, could get 70 percent of the vote in an election. Putin gave no clear advice, and indeed his friend Silvio would not have understood if he had. Berlusconi is, after all, a European.

The two world leaders went off on a trip to provincial Lipetsk, where they opened a production line for washing machines and watched a military air show. Putin continued to give dressing-downs to high-level bureaucrats on television. That is usually how we see him, either receiving reports from officials in his Kremlin office or tearing one of these bureaucrats apart in monologues. The filming is methodically thought through in PR terms. There is no ad-libbing; nothing is left to chance.

Instead of the risen Christ, it was Putin who was revealed to the people at Easter. A service was held at the Church of Christ the Redeemer, Moscow’s cathedral re-erected in concrete on the site of an open-air Soviet-era swimming pool. Almost a month had passed since his second election. At the beginning of the Great Matins service there stood, shoulder to shoulder with Putin as if at a military parade, Prime Minister Fradkov and Dmitry Medvedev, the Kremlin’s new eminence grise, head of the president’s office, a man of diminutive stature with a large head. The three men clumsily and clownishly crossed themselves, Medvedev making his crosses by touching his hands to his forehead and then to his genitals. It was risible. Medvedev followed Putin in shaking the patriarch’s hand as if he were one of their comrades, rather than kissing it as prescribed by church ritual. The patriarch overlooked the error. The spin doctors in the Kremlin are effective but, of course, pretty illiterate in these matters and had not told the politicians what to do. Alongside Putin there stood the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, who had been behind the rebuilding of the cathedral and who alone knew how to invoke the protection of the Cross in a competent manner. The patriarch addressed Putin as “Your Most High Excellency,” which made even those not directly involved wince. Given the numerous ex-KGB officers occupying top government positions, the Easter Vigil has now taken over from the May Day parade as the major obligatory national ritual.

The beginning of the Great Matins service was even more comical than the handshakes with the patriarch. Both state television channels did a live broadcast of the procession around the cathedral that precedes the service. The patriarch participated in this, despite being ill. The television commentator, who was a believer and theologically knowledgeable, explained to viewers that in the Orthodox tradition, the doors of the church should be shut before midnight because they symbolize the entrance to the cave where Christ’s body was placed. After midnight the Orthodox faithful taking part in the procession await the opening of the church doors. The patriarch stands on the steps at their head and is the first to enter the empty temple where the Resurrection of Christ has already occurred.

When the patriarch had recited the first prayer after midnight at the doors of the temple, they were thrown open to reveal Putin, our modest president, shoulder to shoulder with Fradkov, Medvedev, and Luzhkov.

You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. An evening of comic entertainment on Holy Night. What is there to like about this individual? He profanes everything he touches.

At about this time, on April 8, nine-month-old twin girls were declared shaheeds—martyrs for the faith—in Chechnya. They came from the tiny Chechen farmstead of Rigakh and were killed before they had learned to walk. It was the usual story. After the March 14 election, relentless military operations were resumed in Chechnya. The army, in the form of the Regional Operational Staff Headquarters for Coordinating the Counterterrorist Operation, announced that it was attempting to catch Basaev: “A large-scale military operation is under way to destroy the participants of armed formations.” They failed to catch Basaev, but on April 8 at around two in the afternoon, as part of the military operation, the Rigakh farmstead was subjected to a missile bombardment. It killed everyone there: a mother and her five children. The scene that confronted Imar-Ali Damaev, the father of the family, would have turned the most hardheaded militant into a pacifist for life, or into a suicide bomber. His twenty-nine-year-old wife, Maidat, lay dead, holding close four-year-old Djanati, three-year-old Jara-dat, two-year-old Umar-Haji, and the tiny nine-month-old Zara. Their mother’s embrace saved none of them. To one side lay the little body of Zura, Zara’s twin sister. Maidat had had no room and evidently no time to think of a way of covering her fifth child with her own body, and Zura herself had had no time to crawl the two meters. Imar-Ali gathered up the antipersonnel fragments and established the number of the killer missile: 350 F 8-90. It was not difficult; the number was easy to read. Family members and friends started burying the bodies, and the mullah, a Muslim scholar from the neighboring village, declared all those who had been slain to be martyrs. They were interred the same evening, their bodies unwashed, without burial clothes, in what they were wearing when death claimed them.

WHY DO I SO dislike Putin? Because the years are passing. The second Chechen war, instigated in 1999, shows no sign of ending. In 1999 the babies who were to be declared shaheeds were yet unborn, but all the murders of children since that time, in bombardments and purges, remain unsolved, uninvestigated by the institutions of law and order. The infanticides have never had to stand where they belong, in the dock; Putin, that great friend of all children, has never demanded that they should. The army continues to rampage in Chechnya as it was allowed to at the beginning of the war, as if its operations were being conducted on a training ground empty of people.

This massacre of the innocents did not raise a storm in Russia. Not one television station broadcast images of the five little Chechens who had been slaughtered. The minister of defense did not resign. He is a personal friend of Putin and is even seen as a possible successor in 2008. Nor was the head of the air force fired. The commander in chief himself made no speech of condolence. Around us, indeed, it was business as usual in the rest of the world. Hostages were killed in Iraq. Nations and peoples demanded that their governments and international organizations withdraw troops, to save the lives of people carrying out their duties. But in Russia all was quiet.

Why do I so dislike Putin? This is precisely why. I dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on throughout his first term as president.

This is how I see it. Others have different views. The killing of children has not deterred people from trying to have Putin’s term in office extended to ten years. This project is being conducted through the creation of pro-Putin youth movements on instructions from the Kremlin. The deputy head of Putin’s office is a certain Vladislav Surkov, the acknowledged doyen of PR in Russia. He spins webs consisting of pure deceit, lies in place of reality, words instead of deeds. There is a great fashion at the present for bogus political movements created by directive from the Kremlin. We don’t want the West suspecting that we have a one-party system, that we lack pluralism and are relapsing into authoritarianism. Suddenly there appear groups called Marching Together, Singing Together, For Stability, or some other latter-day version of the Soviet Union’s Pioneer movement. A distinctive feature of these pro-Putin quasi-political movements is the amazing speed with which, without any of the usual bureaucratic prevarication, they are legally registered by the Ministry of Justice, which is usually chary of attempts to create anything remotely political. As its first public act, the new movement usually announces that it will attempt to ensure the extension of the term of office of our beloved president. Putin was given just such a present for his inauguration on May 7. At the end of April, the members of For Stability set in motion procedures for prolonging his term. The group’s underlying concept is that Putin is the guarantor of stability. At the same time, the members of this pocket-size movement demanded an inquiry into the results of privatization, a move that revealed them to be against Khodorkovsky, hence friends of Putin. The Moscow City Electoral Commission hastened to accept the application of the young members of For Stability for a national referendum on the president’s term.

Such was the state of play on inauguration day, May 7, 2004. Putin has, by chance, gotten hold of enormous power and has used it to catastrophic effect. I dislike him because he does not like people. He despises us. He sees us as a means to his ends, a means for the achievement and retention of personal power, no more than that. Accordingly, he believes he can do anything he likes with us, play with us as he sees fit, destroy us if he wishes. We are nobody, while he whom chance has enabled to clamber to the top is today czar and God.

In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.