Russians

10 Clan Rules

The law is like a cart—wherever you point it, that’s where it rolls.

—Old Russian saying

When Alexander Bulbov’s plane touched down in Moscow on a cold October night in 2007, the deputy head of Russia’s drug control agency was doing nothing more unusual than returning home from a law-enforcement conference abroad. So the masked commandos who stormed the plane and snatched him away as he was getting ready to leave caught him very much by surprise. Accused during the following days of abusing his office by authorizing illegal phone hacking on behalf of private companies, he appeared to be the newest casualty of the government’s latest anticorruption campaign. However, it soon became clear there was more to his case.

No ordinary antidrug official, Bulbov masterminded wiretapping operations for several high-profile criminal investigations into the activities of Federal Security Service officers accused of making millions of dollars through smuggling and tax evasion in connection with an expensive furniture store called Tri Kita. The veteran investigative journalist and member of parliament Yuri Shchekochikhin had been looking into the same allegations when he died, almost certainly from poisoning. He was one of more than a dozen reporters who have been killed—probably assassinated—since Putin came to power.

Far from a crusading liberal, however, Bulbov was directly plugged in to the political power structure as the right-hand man of the drug control agency’s chief, Victor Cherkessov. A former KGB officer, Cherkessov was a close Putin associate and reputed leader of a powerful Kremlin political “clan” of former security officers. How could the ally of such a loyal figure have been arrested? The answer would shed light on the mystery of what went on behind the Kremlin’s high walls.

Just as in Soviet days, the doings in the corridors of power remain a closely guarded secret. Analyzing Russian politics, which Winston Churchill compared to watching “dogs fighting under a carpet,” again requires Cold War–style Kremlinology. With competing conspiracy theories planted by rival groups among the weapons in the struggle, anything is possible, any rumor might be true.

It was significant that Bulbov’s arrest was made by a new agency called the Investigative Committee, which had been launched by Putin months earlier and was headed by Alexander Bastrykin, a former law school classmate of the president’s. Formally subordinate to the prosecutor general, Bastrykin had been repeatedly accused of overstepping his powers but never censured. When I met Bulbov’s lawyer Sergei Antonov soon after the arrest, he intimated that the charges against his client were fabricated to punish Bulbov’s boss, Cherkessov, for crossing a line by authorizing eavesdropping on people who weren’t meant to be subject to it, at least not by him. A large, genial man who spoke to me in his sprawling downtown office, Antonov said Bulbov’s phone taps had resulted in the arrests of FSB generals and contributed to the dismissal of the general prosecutor himself. All were connected to an even more powerful Putin ally—the president’s deputy chief of staff, Igor Sechin, the shadowy KGB veteran who also chaired Rosneft, the massive state oil company.

Antonov said Bulbov fell victim to a power struggle between Kremlin rivals who were operating competing intelligence agencies, both of which reported directly to Putin. Bulbov’s arrest, he added, was aimed at fueling fear. “Stalin used to arrest the wives of his top officials, even Molotov’s,” he explained. (Vyacheslav Molotov was Stalin’s foreign minister.) “They became hostages, to ensure people like Molotov didn’t act out of line. That’s happening again, not to family members but to deputies and allies.” A former KGB officer named Alexei Kondaurov, who knows more than most about secret intrigues, told me that Putin’s role as the ultimate arbiter between clans loyal to him inevitably provoked competition between them. “It’s obvious Cherkessov and Bulbov didn’t assign their own tasks,” he said. “Their orders came from the very top and carrying them out helped provoke the clan war.”

Rather than chaotic infighting, Bulbov’s arrest appeared to show the president carefully maintaining his power by playing rivals against each other. The struggle intensified after the arrest, when two officers from his drug control agency died mysteriously from radiation poisoning. Bulbov’s boss, Cherkessov, soon published an open letter warning that the standoff threatened to tear the country apart. “There can be no winners in this war,” he wrote.

Continuing its campaign nevertheless, the Investigative Committee proceeded to arrest a professorial deputy finance minister. But then a former detective named Dmitri Dovgi appeared to lift the lid on the group’s operations. His revelations came in a newspaper interview in which he claimed he had been ordered to open the investigations into Bulbov, the deputy finance minister and others he said were innocent of any wrongdoing. He, too, was promptly arrested, accused of accepting a million-dollar bribe to drop a probe into a businessman suspected of embezzlement.

Hoping to glean more details, I attended Dovgi’s trial, held in a small courtroom in northeast Moscow. The youthful, dark-haired defendant claimed the bribery charge was punishment for his exposure of the truth about his onetime employers but revealed nothing else about the committee’s activities. On the day of the jury’s deliberation, a juror who had shown signs of intending to vote for acquittal was delayed by a traffic policeman on her way to court.¹ Ignoring her special juror’s document, the officer kept her long enough for the judge to appoint an alternate juror. Found guilty, Dovgi was sentenced to nine years in jail. Bulbov, later released on bail, still faces trial. The Investigative Committee’s influence has continued to grow and grow.

The infighting cast a sinister pall over Moscow, adding to the uncertainty surrounding Putin’s expected exit from the presidency the following year. Unsurprisingly, the intrigue ebbed after the election of Putin’s protégé and four-year placeholder Medvedev. Few saw a coincidence: the clash had made crystal clear to the various Kremlin clans that they risked losing everything if any of them conspired to back a new leader. By enhancing his personal authority over men already loyal to him, Putin ensured he would remain Russia’s supreme leader even after stepping down from the country’s most powerful office.

Such clan politics explain a good deal about often seemingly inexplicable Russian behavior that ignores all manner of instructions, directives and regulations. Doors open to personal appeals, exceptions are made for friends, sweetheart deals violate supposedly ironclad prohibitions and the rule of law seems among the least admired of Western values. “Again and again through the centuries westerners who have been brought into contact with Russia have been shocked and baffled by the relative lawlessness of Russian life,” the legal scholar Harold Berman wrote in 1950. Although Berman believed the Russian system to have originally derived from the same Roman law that gave rise to Western codes, Russians “did not particularly want a western legal system.” Understanding what they did want requires looking at a side of Russian heritage that “has been obscure to westerners because of their very preoccupation with law and legality.”²

Refusal to go by the book, or even read it, is more than a reflection of the anarchy Russians are known to fear. It’s actually a manifestation of one of the most hidden aspects of their way of life. Official institutions—the kind Western countries depend on for governing—function so inefficiently in Russia because their actual role is largely to serve the workings of a different system, essentially the collection of informal networks of crony arrangements I mentioned at the start of this book. I believe they make up the real governing structure, whose beneficiaries carefully suppress the transparency and legality they perceive as threatening them. The supposedly mystical respect for authority and obsession about besporiadok—literally “without order”—Russians are believed to share is actually driven in part by interest in maintaining a system in which many hold a stake. Kirill Kabanov, a former security service officer who heads the nongovernmental National Anticorruption Committee, compares the scheme to feudalism. “A system of vassals headed by a group of high-ranking ‘untouchables,’ ” he explained. “Each group has its own network, a criminal structure in which loyalty is bought.”

Of course Russia displays a facade of quasi-democratic government. But just as ideas imported from the West have for centuries acted as a veil, those foreign institutions largely serve to conceal more enduring arrangements. Little as they contribute to an efficient economy, fair governance or other goals generally prized by Western societies, they are very effective for perpetuating the traditional Russian values of stability and aversion to risk, and they rely on a carefully constructed image of Putin as a wielder of great power.

Foreigners are unlikely to know that Russia has had more weak rulers than strong ones and that Ivan the Terrible and other ogres in popular Western images were actually far less potent than they seemed. The historical record is important because despite Russia’s reputation as a country ruled by iron-willed despots, it has more often been governed by a group of oligarchs whose ability to function under relatively flimsy tsarist authority became a lasting trait of national political life.

Besides the very important job of producing an heir, the tsar’s main role in medieval Muscovy was as a mediator or allocator of authority among leaders of the ruling clans, the most powerful usually being those closest to him. Relationships were based on kinship and power was obtained through engagements and marriages. “It was the brothers, uncles and fathers of the lucky brides who formed the innermost circle of power,” Edward Keenan explained.³

The dearth of Russian historical records, Keenan argued, partly explains the obscurity of those oligarchs’ roles and why virtually nothing is known about how a painful, debilitating bone disease called ankylosing spondylitis all but crippled Ivan the Terrible. Soviet forensic scientists who exhumed his remains in the 1960s discovered the condition, which rendered many of the stories we know about Ivan being terrible—his violent rages, kinky sex, throwing of cats from Kremlin towers—highly unlikely. Far from the mad despot official histories make him out to have been, Ivan was probably desperate to abdicate and vacated the Kremlin in favor of a palace outside Moscow, something many historians have been at pains to explain.⁴ That it often mattered less who the tsar was than that someone occupy the position probably accounts for why the ruling boyars—a rough equivalent of nobles—were willing to submit themselves to a series of false successors after the death of Ivan’s son Fyodor in 1598 brought about the end of the Riurik dynasty, soon to be followed by the more truly terrible Time of Troubles.

After the Troubles ended with the advent of the Romanov dynasty in 1613, Muscovy entered a period of expansion that required a growing bureaucracy to manage its acquisition of new lands. Originally recruited from foreigners, clergy’s sons and merchants, a group of leading clerks called diaki began to influence the behavior of the ruling clans, which increasingly depended on them. So when Peter the Great launched Russia’s imperial age at the close of the seventeenth century, his reforms were less a radical departure than a formalization of changes that had already taken place during the previous hundred years. Peter established ministries to govern the state, modernized the military and instituted compulsory education for the gentry. But rather than upend the political system by Westernizing Russia, as most believe, he rationalized it. For Peter—whose exile from the Kremlin as a child meant he wasn’t steeped in the court’s conservative culture—forcing the shaving of beards and other reforms were aimed at finally breaking the old kinship-based system in favor of the newer bureaucratic one, which displayed some characteristics of a meritocracy.

However, the deepest foundations of “Russianness,” as Keenan put it, didn’t radically change even amid the upheaval of modern times. Rather, “they have combined and reintegrated themselves in new forms, reaffirmed by political and social chaos and dizzying change.”⁵ Among the constants was an “authentic distrust of the unpredictable and risk-laden workings of electoral democracy,” which threatened to destabilize the going system. Notoriously corrupt, inefficient and cumbersome as it was by the end of the nineteenth century, Russia’s government nevertheless succeeded in maintaining social and political order in an enormous and poorly developed country. Far from being fated, the political culture was the product of a practical order that enabled the state to survive adverse conditions against great odds. In other words, it succeeded in accomplishing goals that happened to be different from Western ones.

The collapse of the Soviet system—which, revolution notwithstanding, developed into an extreme version of the traditional, risk-averse political structure—offered a chance to change that culture. If Western influence had previously affected mainly the elite and intelligentsia, now far more Russians had access to foreign ideas through books, magazines, television and travel abroad than ever before.

Several fundamental 1990s reforms gave hope for real political transformation in certain areas, including Moscow’s governance of the regions. After centuries of administrative coercion, for the first time in history the Kremlin began exercising control though fiscal policy—bargaining over taxes and the federal budget. Many criticized Yeltsin for enabling governors to act like corrupt princes: after telling them, famously, to take as much power as they could swallow, he allowed them to negotiate separate treaties. However, his decentralization actually represented an overall advance. It facilitated the rise of new elite groups and interests led by rival oligarchs and politicians who included various powerful regional leaders, the highly influential founders of Gazprom—including the longtime prime minister, Victor Chernomyrdin—and members of the dominant group: Yeltsin’s inner circle, called the Family.⁶ Although their rivalries set the pattern, those opponents also showed some signs they wanted to begin abiding by a set of common rules for their mutual benefit.

Those and other 1990s developments weren’t fated to fail; they were brought down by a coincidence of contingencies, including a severe economic crisis in 1998, outrage over NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia the following year and Yeltsin’s ill health. By weakening his ability and resolve to provide political protection for the government’s Westernizing technocrats, the convergence of crises unleashed a political struggle that Putin eventually won by exploiting mounting popular anger over a decade of upheaval, humiliation and nostalgia for the USSR’s superpower status. Lauded for ensuring stability, Putin used it to reinstate the old political culture—far from the first time that has happened in Russian history.

Aided by the boon of skyrocketing oil prices once he took power, the new leader restored the Kremlin’s administrative control. He immediately set about replacing elected governors with presidential appointments, instituting controls over the national media and removing his rivals from government—and he continues tinkering with electoral and other laws to maintain his control over the country and its officialdom. It’s worth repeating that his innovation wasn’t cleaning up Russia’s various Mafias but instilling a kind of order by making the Kremlin the main Mafia.

One hallmark of the current arrangement is that very few officials are fired, even for the most egregious behavior, as long as they remain loyal. Instead they are reshuffled into various parts of the vast state bureaucracy. When Putin’s sneering young ideologue Vladislav Surkov was relieved of his duties as deputy presidential chief of staff—apparently to placate street protesters in 2011, although the move in fact appeared to be a long-expected result of clan realignments—he was given the title of first deputy prime minister before being reinstalled as deputy prime minister and chief of government staff after Medvedev become prime minister in May 2012. He was finally removed a year later, only to be reinstated as Putin’s aide soon after. Stacked with the likes of Surkov and other Putin loyalists, Medvedev’s cabinet was engineered to enable Putin to continue controlling the government, which he also often criticized. Few of its officials’ job descriptions said much about their actual roles because administrative positions rarely reflect merit or real degrees of power.

That was especially evident under the Soviet Union, when Party bureaucrats were rotated through a variety of agencies and state enterprises with little or no regard for their knowledge and expertise, if they had any. Rather, they were appointed based on their informal relationships with other officials. Similarly, Dmitri Medvedev’s four years as a president who supposedly had vast formal powers belied his real role as one of Putin’s oligarchs, and not the strongest. During his tenure, Forbes magazine was astute enough to name a mere deputy prime minister the country’s real second-most-powerful person: the Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. He is a member of a small, shady group dominated by natives of Putin’s hometown, St. Petersburg, that controls the real levers of power—and profits from them. Although he no longer formally handles the government’s energy portfolio, Sechin continues to wield huge influence through Rosneft, whose $55 billion acquisition of BP’s Russian joint venture in 2013 made it the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, responsible for around 5 percent of global production. Sechin is also chairman of the state energy holding company, Rosneftegaz, which owns three-quarters of Rosneft and more than 10 percent of Gazprom. If there were any question about his role, his position as secretary under Putin of an energy commission conceived in 2012 effectively undermined the deputy prime minister officially in charge of energy, Medvedev’s close ally Arkady Dvorkivich.

Among Putin’s other cronies, several newly fabulously wealthy members of a St. Petersburg lakeside dacha cooperative, which the future president joined in the 1990s, are believed to ultimately disburse some of the riches from sales of Russia’s oil and gas. They include shareholders of the deeply obscure but hugely powerful Bank Rossiya, which has been accused of using secret offshore companies to channel state loans intended for the acquisition of a jaw-dropping collection of Gazprom assets. Former bank insiders have said shady privatizations of companies such as Gazprom’s Sogaz insurance firm enabled Bank Rossiya to suck billions of dollars’ worth of value from the parent company.⁷ Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist who is a keen observer of the hidden aspects of Russia’s economy, says the Putin circle’s “sheer asset-stripping” includes huge capital expenditures—$52 billion in 2011—on pipelines and other projects that cost far more than they would in other countries because much of the money is skimmed off.

Another firm, a Netherlands-based oil trading company headed by a former refinery manager named Gennady Timchenko, suddenly became the world’s third-largest oil trader thanks to contracts to export oil from Rosneft and Gazpromneft—Gazprom’s oil wing—in amounts equal to a third of Russia’s seaborne production. Now one of the world’s richest men, Timchenko was rumored to be operating on behalf of Putin, whom at least one well-connected observer has accused of amassing a secret forty-billion-dollar fortune.⁸ Putin, who claims an annual income of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, has denied the accusations.

When Timchenko lost his agreement with Rosneft in 2011, reportedly after balking at having to pay a premium, it was taken as a sign that Putin’s authority was crumbling as his cronies fought for spoils. Igor Yurgens, a wealthy businessman and leading Medvedev adviser who served as a mouthpiece for the liberal reforms he supposedly supported, used the occasion to issue his latest prediction of Putin’s demise. The new development reflected a “real crisis of management,” he said.⁹

In fact, the competition has been constant. “You shouldn’t assume there isn’t jockeying behind the scenes just because Putin’s in charge,” one midlevel official told me. “That’s the nature of the system.” Despite the rumors about his decline, Forbes put Timchenko’s worth in 2013 at more than fourteen billion dollars, a staggering rise from four hundred million dollars just four years earlier. He was only one of a new group of billionaires whose obscure but clearly very close connection to Putin has enabled them to displace some of the old oligarchs at the top of the ladder. Characterizing Putin’s ruling elite as “Politburo 2.0”—after the Communist Party’s governing body—a Russian think tank identified eight political and economic bosses who run the country under the president’s arbitration, Timchenko and Sechin among them.

As for Medvedev—another longtime associate from St. Petersburg who as president often mouthed tough Putin-style rhetoric and adopted a version of his patron’s swaggering walk—he never shook his much-ridiculed schoolboyish image. Unlike his surly mentor, President Medvedev grinned from ear to ear when he appeared next to the leaders of foreign countries, suggesting disbelief of his incredible luck. But his manner helped him succeed in his main role of deflecting domestic anger at corruption and mismanagement and misleading the West into believing he was serious about outlandish promises to end what he called Russia’s “legal nihilism” and modernize the country.

His least believable exhortations came in a sweeping online screed that passed for a political platform in 2009. Titled “Go Russia!” it denounced the country’s “primitive economy based on raw materials and endemic corruption.” The new political system will be “extremely open, flexible and internally complex,” he wrote. Admonishing his “brilliant and heroic” fellow Russians to drop their old “paternalistic attitudes,” he issued a detailed list of actions that would make the country a “leading” one. Its experts “will improve information technology and strongly influence the development of global public data networks, using supercomputers and other necessary equipment.” Moreover, “legislators will make all decisions to ensure comprehensive support for the spirit of innovation in all spheres of public life, creating a marketplace for ideas, inventions, discoveries and new technologies.”

Medvedev’s failure to enact a single significant initiative for achieving even one of his goals did little to quell four years of speculation about whether he was serious—a spectacular achievement. Political expert Stanislav Belkovsky, a former Kremlin insider who initiated the rumors about Putin’s personal forty-billion-dollar fortune, told me that any perceived differences between Medvedev and the Kremlin’s hard-liners were part of a deliberately constructed myth aimed at obscuring their real nature. “All those influence groups are actually business groups, and Dmitri Medvedev and Igor Sechin are part of it. They don’t differ from each other either in their philosophy, their ideology or their life purposes.”

After he stepped down to become prime minister, Medvedev was subjected to a series of public attacks and insults, including some delivered in a state television documentary that virtually accused him of treason for delaying Russia’s attack against Georgia in 2008. While Putin rolled back one after another of his symbolic initiatives, Medvedev gamely accepted his new role as public whipping boy—yet more bread and circuses, some believed, or a strategy to pave the way for his sacking, or both.

More than that of a pawn, however, Medvedev’s function has also been to act as a boss of the young, supposedly liberal officials who had close ties to some of the most powerful businessmen not plugged into Gazprom or otherwise directly tied to the Kremlin. The wife of Medvedev’s onetime chief economic adviser chaired the boards of two companies controlled by the billionaire oligarch Suleiman Kerimov—who is also close to the influential First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov.¹⁰ A lawyer with a say in economic regulatory policies, Shuvalov earned tens of millions of dollars, partly through investments in Gazprom made by one of Kerimov’s companies a year before the lifting of restrictions on foreign ownership of the stock sent the share price skyrocketing by 700 percent in three years.¹¹ Although Alexei Navalny and other opposition bloggers briefly put the Kremlin on its back foot by publicizing the news after it was exposed in the spring of 2012, Shuvalov was promoted to be Medvedev’s number two in government soon after. His wife was also the subject of media revelations—about her stakes in offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands after Putin had ordered officials to divest themselves of such foreign holdings. The interests of those supposed liberals surely lie less in reform than enabling the private business of their associates to boom, aided by massive loans from state-controlled banks.

Putin’s rise wasn’t simply the result of a fortuitous or disastrous alignment of contingencies, crucial as they were for helping enable it. The government has never successfully refuted signs of complicated political engineering, including circumstantial but convincing evidence of a pivotal plot to bomb residential buildings that killed more than three hundred people in 1999. Although the authorities blamed Chechen rebels, many Russians suspect the security services staged the explosions as part of a secret plan to bring Putin to power the following year.

Most of the residents of an apartment block in southeast Moscow were asleep when the first blast on the ground floor tore through the front of their building one night that September. It killed ninety-four people and injured almost two hundred fifty. Five days earlier, another bomb had killed sixty-four people in the southern city of Buinaksk. In the coming weeks, two more explosions would kill more than a hundred thirty in Moscow and Volgodonsk, another southern city.

The shock waves set off fear throughout a country gripped by a savage political struggle to succeed ailing President Yeltsin. Although no Chechen took credit for the bombings, Putin, still prime minister, used them as a pretext for launching a second war in Chechnya. Seething with expertly displayed anger, he vowed to kill Chechen militants wherever they were hiding. “If they’re in the airport, we’ll kill them there,” he said in a video clip that sealed his tough-guy image. “And excuse me, but if we find them in the toilet, we’ll exterminate them in their outhouses.”

That was the public’s first taste of his now infamous prison-inflected slang, which won huge approval in a society humiliated by losing its first war in the tiny region on its southern border. As an incisive political analyst named Vladimir Pribylovsky told me, the bombings “changed the situation” by enabling Putin to present himself as a decisive man of action. “Two things brought about his victory: the bombings and the phrase about wiping out terrorists in the outhouse.”

Serious questions surfaced from the start, including why bulldozers cleared most of the debris mere days after the bombings, far too soon to allow anything like proper investigations. Then a mysterious episode directed attention toward the FSB. It began late on a September night, when residents of an apartment block in the city of Ryazan, in central Russia, noticed a suspicious-looking car parked near a basement door. They informed the police, who discovered large bags of white powder connected to a detonator in the basement, its timer set to go off early the following morning.

The police said tests showed the powder was hexogen, a World War II–era explosive that had been used in the Moscow explosions. Although the local authorities announced they’d narrowly averted another blast, just as they were about to make arrests two days later, FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev appeared on national television to report that the sacks actually contained only sugar. Patrushev said they’d been used as part of a safety drill, and the FSB quickly cleared the basement of all remaining evidence.

When the authorities refused to investigate the bombings further, a band of liberal legislators formed their own independent committee. Twelve months later, in April 2003, its vice chairman, a prominent Kremlin critic named Sergei Yushenkov, was gunned down outside his Moscow apartment. Before his death, he told me the committee’s findings pointed toward the security services. “These special forces, which have giant opportunities and secrets, can manipulate public opinion and direct the course of events using all kinds of illegal methods at their discretion,” he said.

Mikhail Trepashkin, a lawyer representing two sisters whose mother died in one of the Moscow explosions, began his own probe. I had a long talk with Trepashkin shortly after his release from four years in prison—punishment, he said, for investigating the crime too closely. Gregarious and disheveled, the seasoned former KGB counterterrorism investigator displayed what seemed to be a photographic memory for names, dates and times as he described a complicated network of individuals and groups connecting politicians, police, security forces and criminals.

Trepashkin had been fired from the FSB in 1995 after helping catch high-ranking military officers in Moscow selling weapons to Chechen rebels, their ostensible enemies. (A rocket grenade fired at the US embassy during the bitter protests against NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was later traced to the cache.) Three years later, he took part in a now legendary news conference alleging that rogue FSB death squads had put him and Boris Berezovsky—who was still a Kremlin power broker and Putin patron—on a hit list. Among the security service officers also participating in the briefing was Alexander Litvinenko, who would be fatally poisoned in 2006 by a radioactive substance in London, where he was living in exile. Litvinenko’s supporters say he was killed because he, like Trepashkin, had accused the FSB of criminal activities, including responsibility for the apartment bombings. Roman Shleinov, then the head of investigative reporting at Novaya Gazeta, later told me he believed Litvinenko’s killing was ideologically motivated. “He would often call us from London with tips that never led anywhere,” he told me. “He had no worthwhile information. He just represented the tragedy of an ordinary person caught between opposing groups.”

Trepashkin said it was ironic that Putin is believed to have helped organize the news conference in 1998, when he was still an unknown presidential administration official. His goal was to assist in sidelining rivals who stood in the way of his promotion to FSB chief in July of that year. Litvinenko had recently appeared in an extraordinary videotape in which he claimed his FSB bosses ordered him to beat Trepashkin, who had sued the agency over his dismissal. “I was to plant weapons on him or even kill him because he knew something they were frightened he’d publicize,” he said. In the video, Litvinenko claimed his bosses were acting on their own, and that he was risking his life by speaking out against them. “If these people aren’t stopped now,” he warned, “this lawlessness will swallow the entire country.” Trepashkin said that after Litvinenko fled to London, he was approached with an offer to clear his own record by agreeing to spy on Litvinenko there.

Trepashkin also echoed widespread opinion that the official confusion over the Ryazan incident was evidence that the FSB indeed organized the operation—not as a counterterrorism exercise but to blow up the building. Many also believe that Putin, who headed the FSB until August 1999, surely knew about the plot.

Trepashkin claimed to have found ample evidence contradicting the official version of events but was prevented from presenting it in court after police stopped his car shortly before his case was to begin. “They searched it twice and found nothing,” he explained. “But as they were closing the door, they threw in a bag containing a pistol. I said it wasn’t mine, but there was nothing I could do.” Arrested on a charge of illegal possession of firearms, he says he was promised it would be dropped if he stopped investigating the apartment bombings. He was eventually sentenced to four years in prison. Tortured and held in filthy, cold Siberian cells—conditions he said seriously affected his health—Trepashkin called the judges who convicted him “bandits” for upholding clearly fabricated charges. They did so “only because, as I was told, the order came from up high.” It showed Putin’s regime “was based on a team that showed loyalty only to him, above the law.” Although six Muslims from southern Russia, none of them Chechens, were eventually sentenced in connection with the 1999 bombings, the case remains unsolved a decade and a half later.

The details that later emerged about the apartment bombings were unknown when Putin first took power. Nevertheless, the nature of his leadership was already crystal clear to those who cared to examine the record. His first weeks and months in office were a great personal disappointment to me because his every action seemed to reverse the gains of the 1990s and encourage society’s basest inclinations toward nationalism and lawbreaking. It was also frustrating that few foreigners saw his presidency that way until many years later.

My mother’s first conscious sense of the official deception that has played a key role in Russian history came when she was thirteen years old. Arriving at school one morning, she noticed a group of boys using more than their usual amount of determination to pelt each other with crumpled pieces of paper. Unfolding one, she was taken aback to see Stalin’s portrait. It was 1956, shortly after Khrushchev delivered a momentous unpublicized “secret speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress in which he denounced Stalin as a brutal murderer and blamed his cult of personality for crippling the Soviet Union with fear. The tyrant’s portraits were soon taken down around the country, propaganda was softened and those who were bold enough went so far as to begin criticizing some aspects of their lives under communism.

The thaw coincided with Tatyana’s growing rebelliousness. Responding to Serafima’s doting and caution by doing or trying to do whatever she was told not to, she also skipped class and sometimes paralyzed her mother with fear by disappearing from their little room for days without warning. Tatyana’s independence fed her contempt for Soviet strictures and deprivation. “She protested by the way she lived her life,” her cousin Gera Kiva recalled. When he swallowed his nervousness and decided to attend one of the international exhibitions that began appearing in late 1950s, he spotted her having her hair styled in a replica of a French hairdresser’s salon. She pretended not to see him, he said, because “she’d taken herself to the West.”

Blossoming at the age of sixteen, Tatyana, with her dark beauty, began attracting a flood of admirers, including, briefly, the Soviet hockey champion Stanislav Petukhov as well as my future father. Although she maintained contact with him after the American exhibition in 1959, their romance had cooled by the time he returned to Moscow for graduate study in 1961, and they drifted apart. Settling on studying foreign literature, she enrolled at the prestigious Moscow State Pedagogical Institute for Foreign Languages, housed in a sprawling neoclassical building across the river from Gorky Park.

Studying English emboldened her to frequent some of the city’s fanciest cafés, of which there were extremely few, such as those in the Art Nouveau–style Metropol and National hotels, off Red Square. Since meeting foreigners there was exciting but risky—or exciting because it was risky—she wore handmade clothes that weren’t easily identifiable as Soviet and made certain never to speak Russian. However, she forgot her cardinal rule one evening when talking to a classmate in the Metropol lobby. A large woman in a drab gray suit materialized and grabbed her arm. “Devushka!” (“Girl,” a standard form of address), she growled. “Come with me!”

After leading Tatyana along a corridor and into a dimly lit room containing a table and several chairs, she proceeded to grill her. “What are you doing here? Whom are you meeting?” Recovering from her shock, Tatyana felt queasy from a sinking feeling that the KGB would open a file on her, ending her carefree life. “Who do you think you are?!” the woman barked, clearly taking Tatyana for a prostitute, thanks to her unusual clothes and foreign boots, a gift from a well-connected suitor. She fixed her stare on Tatyana’s pillbox hat. “And where did you get that?!”

“It’s Soviet!” Tatyana protested, the only thing she could think of to say as the woman snatched it away. To her great good fortune, the hat was Soviet-made, which embarrassed the woman. “Khorosho” (“okay”), she said with a sigh. “Now, tell me what you’re doing here.” Tatyana’s luck extended to having remembered to carry her student identification. Many of her classmates who were studying to be interpreters were also being groomed to spy on foreigners, and her interrogator either took her for an agent or decided not to risk finding out because her manner suddenly transformed. “I’m sorry, my dear one!” she said in apology. “Let’s forget all about this.” Tatyana knew that getting off so lightly would have been impossible a few years earlier.

Immersion in literature soon began transforming her from an impetuous party girl into a resolute young woman with intellectual ambitions. After meeting a young painter named Yuri Kuperman in the National Hotel’s café, she fell in with a group of artists and other bohemian types. Most of the painters supported themselves illustrating books, but some—including Kuperman and his friend Ilya Kabakov, who would become Russia’s best-known conceptualist—were experimenting on their own, often starting by imitating pictures of Western art brought by visiting foreigners.

Although Tatyana rarely saw George—who eventually settled in London and made reporting trips from there to Moscow—they came to share mutual friends. Among them was Sergei Milovsky, the skillful Moscow lawyer whose unrivaled connections and sparkling charisma enabled him to live a highly atypical life as a kind of Soviet playboy. Not that one would have been able to tell by his appearance: there was nothing particularly distinctive about the middle-aged man with close-cropped graying hair. Milovsky’s epiphany had come during his service as a young conscript in the bitter Winter War with Finland in 1939–40, when Soviet forces attacking with three times as many men and a hundredfold more tanks were repelled by the far better equipped and trained Finns. Crack Finnish snipers picked off Soviet soldiers with frightening ease, often on open territory because the Red Army’s generals relied on their ability to sustain heavy losses as a favored tactic for overwhelming the enemy. Many who weren’t killed froze to death during that exceptionally frigid winter because they lacked tents.

Desperately cold and exhausted one especially freezing night in the open, Milovsky battled sleep for fear he would die and wondered why Soviet soldiers were kept in the dark about their every move. Envying the vilified enemy’s soldiers, glimpses of whom showed them to be far better dressed and equipped, he decided the war was a monstrous error that exposed the huge lie that life in the USSR was better.

Returning to civilian life, the natural charmer became expert in dispensing and soliciting favors and built a list of acquaintances that came to include privileged diplomats, journalists, actors and children of high-ranking Communist Party officials. Among them was a son of Anastas Mikoyan—a Party leader and close cohort of Stalin before becoming an important supporter of Khrushchev’s thaw—who brought Danish cheeses and salami to Milovsky’s legendary parties, which attracted legions of women bored by the monotony of their lives. Many came to him for help and advice, with which Milovsky was unstinting. It was thanks to him that Tatyana and George eventually reconnected and married a decade after their first meeting.

Milovsky was a shining example of someone who could work the system, an activity in which almost every Soviet engaged. Such schemes, in which unofficial networks are paramount, have required maintaining elaborate fictions, especially about the country’s leaders—a pattern set far before the seventy years of Soviet rule.

In medieval Muscovy, noble families whose wealth and power were sustained by the idea of a divinely appointed tsar wielding absolute power were disinclined to “leak” information to outsiders.¹² The old adage “Don’t carry garbage out of the hut” helps explain why foreigners, who often found Russians’ activities puzzling, tended to attribute their behavior to their uniqueness and inscrutability. The absence of genuine evidence about the inner workings of Russian politics also fueled speculation and propaganda.

Ivan IV’s reputation as “the Terrible” was enhanced by foreign visitors not privy to the clan struggles behind the facade of his absolute rule. One of the main sources of information was an English merchant named Jerome Horsey, who became Queen Elizabeth I’s envoy to Moscow. Describing Ivan’s sacking of the independent principality of Novgorod—secondhand information at best—Horsey wrote that his cruelty bred intense hatred and inspired many plots to kill him. Sniffing them out, Ivan proceeded to “ransacke and spoill and massacre the chieff nobillitie and richest officers, and other the best sortt of his merchants and subiects; his hands and hart, now so hardened and imbrued, did put many of them to most horrable and shamfull deaths and tortors.”¹³

Such accounts fed a myth that probably developed after the accession of the first Romanov, Mikhail I. Seeking to reinforce the legitimacy of a weak ruler whose family hadn’t been among the most powerful, its supporters encouraged an account of Ivan’s reign as divided into two stages. During the first, he built up the principality under the influence of a wise tsarina, Anastasia. According to the conventional wisdom, her early death sent him into a deep depression that led to madness and earned him the moniker grozny—which is actually best translated as “fierce,” not “terrible.” Anastasia, of course, was a Romanov.

The foreign stereotypes reinforced domestic fictions. Russians “imitated European historical reasoning for the same reason that they imitated wigs and portrait painting and ballet,” Edward Keenan argued. “Because their own was, or seemed to them to be, somehow deficient. In particular they acquired, and developed, an obsession with the juxtaposition of native and foreign culture that has distorted their perception of both.”¹⁴ In the nineteenth century, Keenan added, Russians developed “more complex forms of rejection of the European treatment of history,” including the idea of the Russian “soul,” which foreigners were deemed unable to understand. So it went and so it goes.

Despite the appearance of his great personal authority, however, Putin’s ability to govern in the Western sense—to institute structural economic reforms that would help wean Russia from its dependence on natural resources, establish a rule of law, rebuild infrastructures and generally act in the interests of the state and its people—is feeble at best. Outside Moscow, regional leaders govern their provinces largely as they see fit, acting with impunity as long as they remain loyal to the Kremlin. In that sense, the Russian state is weak because the center has little leverage beyond its administrative coercion and is rarely serious about doing more than that. However, as the gap between Putin’s promises and reality has widened, maintaining the central fiction of his all-powerful rule has become a growing challenge.

It was still relatively easy in 2007, when Putin’s United Russia Party won more than 70 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. (Some regions, such as Chechnya, gave the party the old Soviet-era 99 percent.) Although independent monitors reported systematic abuses—including harassment of opposition campaigners, stuffing of ballots and forced voting—very few voters seemed to care. Young Russians, including some I interviewed at a popular industrial-looking hangout for Moscow’s artsy young crowd, told me they weren’t concerned about the lack of democracy. “Russia is stable and on the right path,” a museum curator named Katya Kaytushina told me. “Anyway, I’m not really interested in politics.” A few tables away, an eighteen-year-old student named Alexei Aksandrov said he’d voted for United Russia. “I was a little concerned about the cult of personality being built around Putin,” he admitted. “But I like the president’s course. I mean, he looks good on television, and he’s respected. Maybe there is a dictatorship in Russia, but I’m not worried about it.”

The mood was very different at a roundtable discussion across town between some embattled Kremlin critics. Among the morose participants was the veteran corruption expert Georgy Satarov, who said he’d come to the conclusion that society was afraid to voice, or vote for, its own interests. “Russian public opinion no longer exists,” he declared. “People vote how they’re expected to. They say what they believe they’re expected to say.”

Medvedev’s nomination to succeed Putin hinted at how little the prime minister’s ascent would change the status quo. The president formally appointed the successor he had personally groomed after receiving the heads of four political parties, all essentially pro-Kremlin, in his office so they could unveil “their” unanimous choice. Saying that their pick of Medvedev represented the opinion of a wide variety of Russians wasn’t simple hypocrisy. The imitation of democracy was central to Putin’s maintaining power. Since no observer could have believed it was legitimate, the importance lay in the display. As he prepared to leave office in 2008, he took part in more of the publicity stunts for which he was widely ridiculed abroad: riding horseback shirtless, flying in fighter jets, shooting wild leopards with tranquilizers. They helped burnish the perception of his personal authority that would be crucial for maintaining power. When he stepped down, an astounding 80-plus percent of the population said he’d done a good job.

From the beginning, the cruder his persona became, the tighter was his connection to the conservative majority on whom he increasingly depended. During a 2002 news conference in Brussels, he responded to a reporter’s critical question about Chechnya by inviting him to come to Moscow to be circumcised. Later, he dismissed newspaper reports about him as gossip “picked out of someone’s nose and smeared onto little bits of paper.” Rude as such outbursts appeared to foreigners, and even to many Russians, they were popular. When I attended several annual Kremlin news conferences for more than a thousand reporters crammed into a Kremlin auditorium, Putin owned the room, keeping the increasingly weary journalists fixated for hours by alternating between threats, jokes and flirtation.

Natalia Muraviova, the rector of Moscow’s Academy of Communications and Information, sees such performances as coming from a highly talented actor. “He uses a lot of repetition that builds to a crescendo,” she told me. “And his widely reported aphorisms are like gems. They’re few and far between, and everyone remembers them.” Muraviova praised Putin’s speechwriters for enabling him to connect emotionally with his supporters by using images to support his statements. “He understands how language is used,” she said, “and does it very consciously.”

Putin’s skills have enabled him to play the part of political pundit in addition to his other roles. Inevitably, after corruption scandals and airline and other disasters that reflect very poorly on government oversight have come to light during his many years as leader, he has appeared on television dressing down one or another minister, or all of them, as if he himself had had nothing to do with the failures. Doing so has helped presumably outraged viewers to identify with him as well as place him within the traditional image of Russia’s rulers: “good tsar, bad boyars.” That is, the leader’s beneficent intentions are undone by the self-interested maneuverings of his crafty advisers.

In 2011, however, after more than three years as prime minister, Putin’s pumped-up persona began deflating. An archaeological diving excursion from which he emerged holding antique vases obviously planted earlier appeared ludicrous, as did later missteps. To make matters worse, his stern but relatively youthful visage, one of his biggest assets, seemed to be aging—paradoxically the result of Botox injections, many believed. Dorian Gray–like, his face took on an artificial-looking, impassive gloss reminiscent of a well-fed but declining dictator. When he appeared at a martial arts fighting match, an audience that would normally have been expected to support him booed. New accusations that he was out of touch, living in a bubble surrounded by sycophantic advisers, dented his authority.

Putin didn’t stand idly by. After opposition leaders scored a rare coup by rebranding United Russia with Navalny’s slogan—the party of “crooks and thieves”—he promptly launched a new vehicle called the Popular Front that all manner of organizations and celebrities were strong-armed into joining. The language of military mobilization extended to a newly manufactured social-networking group called Putin’s Army that juxtaposed the martial symbolism with sex by producing bizarre Internet videos of buxom young women preparing to rip open their tank tops and staged events with models in bikinis washing cars “for Putin.”

Their hero nevertheless continued compounding his public relations blunders by bungling the announcement that he would run for a third term as president. The widely expected announcement came during a televised United Russia conference, during which Medvedev humiliated himself by announcing he would step down. Then Putin declared that the two of them had agreed on the decision years earlier. It was a watershed moment. Its level of cynicism insulted ordinary Russians who had previously played along with the facade of democracy. Even though United Russia won 20 percent less of the vote in parliamentary elections that December than it did in 2007, tens of thousands of protesters who weren’t willing to ignore the blatant rigging this time around took to the streets holding white ribbons, mimicking the “color revolutions” that had recently overthrown old administrations in Georgia and Ukraine.

Nothing if not consistent, Putin responded by taking another page from his old playbook, insulting the protesters by saying he thought the white ribbons were condoms. Maintaining that only he could steer his country through the shoals of anarchy and stagnation, he dismissed opposition leaders’ wise decision to advocate clear steps toward gradual reform through fair elections and other measures that would reintroduce political competition, characterizing the call as an urge for revolution, a “constantly recurring problem in Russian history.”

He proceeded to use much of his political toolbox to try to discredit, disorient and undermine the opposition. President Medvedev, paying condescending lip service to the opposition’s demands, was trotted out to issue another call for easing restrictions against political parties. That served only to draw attention to his central dilemma: crack down and risk bigger demonstrations or ease up and undermine the carefully cultivated perception of authoritarian dominance. The discerning political columnist Yulia Latynina pointed out that Putin’s apparent belief that concessions to public opinion displayed weakness meant “you actually do show weakness when you compromise, something the public perceives just like a shark senses the blood of a wounded fish.”¹⁵ Putin nevertheless won reelection in March of 2012 with more than 60 percent of the vote amid a huge police presence on the streets. Protests continued but were greatly diminished.

Still, reaction to the two elections showed that civil society continued to display some vital signs after a decade of steady decline. It also showed fixing elections to be Putin’s main challenge. Almost thirty thousand people turned up at polling stations to observe the presidential vote. They were joined by formerly compliant politicians, television personalities, journalists and activists, who blogged and tweeted about many instances of fraud, especially schemes to bus factory workers and provincial residents from one voting station to another so they could cast multiple ballots. For once, a small grassroots opposition raised the prospect, however distant, of a struggle for the country’s future.

The Kremlin’s concessions were largely for show. One of Medvedev’s electoral reforms, the return of direct gubernatorial elections—which Putin abolished in 2005—allowed the president to hold “consultations” with candidates and regional lawmakers to ban independents from running, which virtually neutralized the measure. A new law effectively rescinded it altogether in 2013 by allowing each region to revert to Kremlin appointments. However, another change, which lowered the number of signatures required for new parties to qualify for registration (it used to be forty thousand; now it’s five hundred), gave hope by easing a rule previously used to sideline rival political groups. As opposition leaders scrambled to form new parties and alliances, jailed oligarch Khodorkovsky praised it as a “step forward, which could change something in Russia, but most important possibly become the main catalyst for a change of political generations.”¹⁶

The Kremlin undoubtedly hoped the reform would facilitate the rise of multiple new parties that would further fragment the already eviscerated opposition. However, the opposition hoped it would help institutionalize the nascent protest movement by allowing new groups to take part in regional elections in the fall. Among the promising developments was the merger of the liberal Republican Party—led by the dynamic young former legislator Vladimir Ryzhkov—with Boris Nemtsov’s Parnas movement, which took place after the government allowed the former to register for elections. In the end, the authorities made the next regional elections irrelevant by stepping up efforts to strong-arm, cajole and undermine opposition candidates back to the political margins. After pro-Kremlin candidates swept to victory in voting that opposition leaders said was rigged, Putin declared that the results confirmed he was pursuing the right course.

Faced with the need to transform his regime to ensure its long-term survival, he instead resorted to the old tactic of superficial reappointments and nominal changes. Soon after his election, he resigned his chairmanship of United Russia, a party he never formally joined—a clear symbol of his disdain for any institution that would constrain his power, even one whose real raison d’être was to support him. “The president is a consolidating figure for all political forces, for all citizens,” he explained. Medvedev—also not a party member at the time, despite having headed its voting list in parliamentary elections—took his place.

Dmitri Travin, a keen political commentator from St. Petersburg, stressed that United Russia wasn’t a real party. He compared it to the Soviet-era nomenklatura, which he said did nothing to try to preserve communism when it collapsed. “The nomenklatura used its privileges to privatize part of the state enterprises, and to make big money doing so, rather than save the USSR. In other words,” he wrote, “the nomenklatura lived well in Soviet times under a totalitarian system and exploited the crisis to make sure it was well set up in the new, market-economy Russia… United Russia is doing exactly the same.”¹⁷ Were Putin’s regime to collapse, Travin concluded, “these people wouldn’t lift a finger to preserve it: they would prefer to go into business (or even to go and live in the West) with the capital they are busy accumulating through corrupt practices.”

Putin has since continued tweaking electoral rules while setting about compensating for United Russia’s declining popularity by turning to his Popular Front, which developed into an official mass organization directly subordinate to him. The Kremlin fought back in other ways that reflect the dirty nature of politics in a state headed by a former KGB officer, including on the Internet. While the government backed friendly news sites, the notorious Kremlin youth group Nashi deployed online “trolls”—abusive comments—and bombarded Internet sites with distributed denial-of-service attacks that temporarily shut down critical media sites. As noted earlier, compromising videos appeared on the Internet along with transcripts of hacked telephone conversations and private e-mails from the accounts of Alexei Navalny and other opposition figures. Many of the transcripts appeared on the pro-Kremlin tabloid site Lifenews.ru.

The authorities’ attempts to discredit the opposition by manipulating Internet sites have often backfired, however. When bloggers noticed that a photo of Navalny had apparently been doctored by a newspaper to make it appear as though he were standing alongside the Kremlin’s archenemy Berezovsky, an outpouring of online ridicule compared the tactic to clumsy Soviet propaganda.

Some of the practices came to light in 2012, when hackers calling themselves the Russian wing of the Internet hacker group Anonymous posted their own trove of e-mails from accounts they said belonged to Nashi’s overseers. Many of the messages appeared to be from the head of the Federal Youth Agency, Vassily Yakemenko, and its spokeswoman. They were shown directing journalists and bloggers to extol Putin’s popularity and attack his critics. The e-mails describe price lists and payments and discuss schemes to file hundreds of comments on websites and create a video cartoon comparing Navalny to Hitler. Yakemenko stepped down soon afterward to found a new political party he promised would attract young “creative or middle-class” people because the old generation, “whose thinking remains weighed down with ideas from Soviet times, must be squeezed out of the ruling elite.”¹⁸ After that especially transparent attempt to co-opt opposition-party supporters failed, he opened a café.¹⁹

But even those who found Yakemenko laughable were deeply troubled by the Kremlin’s renewed crackdown on protesters. Putin took the oath of office in May, virtually snarling his words in a lavish coronation-like Kremlin ceremony after police emptied roads and swept the city center for protesters. Some, including Nemtsov, were beaten and arrested in a popular opposition hangout, a French café called Jean Jacques. Nemtsov said the empty streets exposed Putin’s fear of his own people. “This is not how you celebrate a holiday,” he scoffed. “This is how you celebrate seizing power.”²⁰

As the opposition settled into what has become a long-term struggle, demonstrators took to playing cat and mouse with police by staging impromptu rallies and “promenades” around the capital. Parliament, where a handful of critics displayed symbolic stirrings of dissent against the pro-Kremlin majority, proceeded to take action. Fines and other penalties for protesters accused of violating public order are now almost ten thousand dollars, or sixty times what they used to be. The following month, legislators passed a series of bills restricting civil society, free speech and launching what appeared to be an opening salvo against Internet freedom. NGOs that receive funding from abroad are now required to declare themselves “foreign agents,” a term clearly meant to associate them with espionage.

Soon afterward, Putin appeared to signal yet another campaign against NGOs in a speech that ordered the FSB to boost scrutiny of such groups—which he accused of “putting pressure on Russia.” Many had refused to register as foreign agents. Teams of officials from departments ranging from the tax police to fire inspectors soon began harassing human rights groups, charities and even the offices of foreign think tanks with raids and audits. Golos—which threatened the authorities as no other group did because it was the country’s only independent election monitoring agency—became the first to be charged under the new law and fined ten thousand dollars.

The Investigative Committee—the group set up by Putin and headed by his close former KGB crony Alexander Bastrykin—took the lead role in the crackdown. Russians had been shown a glimpse of Bastrykin’s character during his clash with a newspaper editor in 2012. Angered by an article in the crusading investigative paper Novaya Gazeta that called him and Putin “servants” of organized criminal groups, Bastrykin had the journalist driven to a forest outside Moscow. There he ordered his own bodyguards to leave, and—the newspaper later reported—threatened to cut off the journalist’s head and legs. Then he joked that he would investigate the murder himself. A public outcry forced Bastrykin to apologize, but no censure followed.

Soon afterward, on the day before a mass protest in June, Investigative Committee officers raided the homes of not only Navalny but also Ksenia Sobchak, a TV host turned protester and Russia’s chief “it girl,” as well as other opposition leaders and their families. “I never thought we’d return to such repression in this country,” Sobchak tweeted.

In October, the Investigative Committee placed another young opposition leader, the outspoken leftist Sergei Udaltsov, under house arrest on charges of plotting a violent uprising after investigators escorted by masked commandos searched his apartment for more than five hours. The authorities later charged him with the more serious indictment of “staging” riots. His trademark dark sunglasses, austere military-style jackets and many arrests for dogged protesting had burnished his reputation as a brave young radical. Now state television aired a documentary alleging he was plotting a violent uprising against the government with the help of an exiled banker and Chechen militants. The film included blurred footage, allegedly taken by a hidden camera, that recorded him plotting a coup in Russia with a Georgian member of parliament. Later, a member of his Left Front movement who criticized the authorities before trying to apply to the UN for political refugee status in Ukraine was kidnapped from a Kiev street by masked men and sent to jail in Siberia.

Another dissident whose work as a rocket engineer gave the FSB even more reason to suspect him hanged himself in a holding cell in the Netherlands after the authorities there rejected his asylum application. His death brought attention to a growing list of Kremlin critics, many of them minor, previously unheard-of figures, who have had difficulties seeking refuge abroad.

Navalny, however, refused to flee, even after it became clear he would be tried on the on-again, off-again embezzlement charges against him that were revived after he embarrassed the Investigative Committee’s Bastrykin by disclosing that he secretly owned property in the Czech Republic, then further angered the Kremlin by attending an unsanctioned rally in front of Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters. Accused of stealing around five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of timber from a state-controlled firm in 2009 while serving as an adviser to the governor of the Kirov region, northeast of Moscow, he went on trial in April 2013. Navalny dismissed the accusation against him—one of four, and the first to reach the trial stage—as an attempt to silence his criticism, and he declared he wanted to run for president.

His trial was a first of such a prominent opposition leader. The case against him was based largely on the testimony of one of his alleged conspirators, who worked with the prosecutors. During the trial, the man provided contradictory evidence, and the judge refused to allow Navalny’s lawyers to cross-examine him. The defense was also blocked from calling a dozen witnesses. The judge found Navalny—who spent most of the trial blogging and tweeting—guilty and sentenced him to five years in prison. However, he was unexpectedly released on bail after the verdict prompted angry protests in Moscow and other cities.

Navalny had already begun campaigning for Moscow’s first relatively free mayoral election in almost a decade. His release prompted speculation about whether it represented a small breath of democracy, a split within the ruling elite, or an attempt to bestow legitimacy on the vote. Although the unbeatable incumbent, the dour Putin ally Sergei Sobyanin, clearly wanted the legitimacy of a clean vote, the Kremlin’s main motives probably included the desire to keep outsiders confused about the extent of Putin’s authoritarianism: The speculation distracted from the inevitability of Sobyanin’s victory.

Navalny proceeded to cement his image as Putin’s main rival by mounting an energetic, Western-style grassroots campaign in which he addressed voters on stages and streets across the capital. After he won an astounding 27 percent of the vote—losing to Sobyanin’s 51 percent—a judge suspended his five-year sentence. More than to appear unpredictable, that decision also reflected Putin’s longtime strategy of backing off when his actions appear highly unpopular. In that case, the Kremlin probably saw more repression as less productive than freeing Navalny. His conviction bars him from running for office again, and the threat that the authorities can drag him back to jail at any time still hangs over his head.

Whether or not he remains free, the charges against him were so flimsy that they appeared to signify a return to Soviet-style justice against political opponents, demonstratively showing that the facts matter far less than the state’s determination to eliminate its critics. Still, the authorities had launched the proceedings only when few were inclined to object. By early 2013, much of the blog traffic and op-ed discussion about the protest movement concerned the disillusionment that had set in among opposition supporters and the moral crisis among its leaders. The hounding of a prominent economist cemented the sense of hoplessness. Sergei Guriev, the well-connected rector of the leading New Economic School and board member of Russia’s largest consumer bank, was a key supporter of some of then-President Medvedev’s highest-profile projects. After he annnouncd he’d donated money to Navalny, however, the Investigative Committee repeatedly interrogated him about his contribution to a report criticizing Khodorkovsky’s prosecution years earlier. After fleeing to Paris, where his family lived, he said he feared arrest.

The pro-Kremlin analyst Sergei Markov appeared to make the government’s case when he went so far as to allege that the New Economic School is a tool for “the Western political and economic elite to exert its influence on Russia’s ruling circles… Sergei Guriev was the intellectual center of that group that developed and implemented a project to replace Putin with a more easily controlled politician.”²¹ Like similar Soviet-era attacks, they hid deeper political motives: impugning Guriev was a way for hostile clans to assert themselves and weaken Medvedev.

Although such measures to stifle displays of public dissatisfaction blunted the movement, they have also added fuel to its fire, which will burn as long as Kremlin critics are prevented from expressing their views. What kind of country the new-old president ultimately bequeaths will partly depend on how far he is willing to go to cement his legacy. Even if he steps down at the end of his current term in 2018, no doubt he will seek to install a loyal successor to guarantee his security, as he did Yeltsin’s.

Rumors about possible replacements are a staple in Moscow. Among the top candidates, in theory, are Moscow Mayor Sobyanin—a former Putin chief of staff—and a nationalist deputy prime minister named Dmitri Rogozin. Both have been singled out as possible compromise figures who may appeal to enough political clans to assume the president’s role of arbiter. Insiders believe the engineering of Medvedev’s election in 2008—when the clan wars first emerged in public—will provide the model for the second succession.

No development can be ruled out, however. One observer who compares Putin’s system to Fascist regimes believes it shares their brittleness partly because leaders’ cults become unsustainable as they grow old and decrepit.²² Infighting between fragmented elites and a growing refusal among the educated, young and middle class to submit to unconditional authority and humiliation also contribute to the serious risk of breakdown, a possibility that will no doubt increasingly beset the authorities. Putin’s health became a concern when he skipped a number of scheduled events in late 2012 after having been photographed grimacing at a conference and clutching his chair. After denying anything was the matter, the Kremlin said he’d hurt his back practicing judo.

Putin soon returned and if he remains healthy, the critical question for Russia’s future will probably be whether his political system can consolidate by uniting the competing political clans following the transfer of his personal power when he finally steps down. Among those who have stacked government agencies with his protégés, Sergei Ivanov—a steely former KGB general who lost to Medvedev as Putin’s pick for president in 2008—has since regrouped and made inroads against his rivals. Meanwhile, some opposition leaders hope that emboldening disaffected voters to reject Putin will enable them to convince the rich and powerful that their positions would be more secure under a more moderate leader. A recent Levada Center poll showed a solid majority still supports Putin—who has said he hasn’t ruled out running for a fourth term in 2018. But it also showed a growing number of Russians believe he represents only the narrow interests of those in power.

Whatever happens, the real battle for the country’s future will require more than merely installing a new group in power. It will mean addressing the old behavior Putin did so much to reinforce in so many facets of life. Conventional wisdom long held that his great popularity rested on a tacit social contract: as long as booming oil prices buoyed living standards, most Russians were willing to close their eyes to authoritarianism. But the uncomfortable reality is that at least half of what is called the middle class, that great hope for Russia’s future, consists of government officials. More than that, even progressive-seeming professionals and entrepreneurs who admit to preferring life in the West nevertheless profit from the abuses of office that have crippled major institutions at home. They may not want real reform. “These people who dine, dress and holiday well want the quality in Russia’s political kitchen to correspond to that of [restaurateur Arkady] Novikov’s [fancy] restaurants,” Yulia Latynina wrote during the height of the protests in 2011. “Their problem with the authorities is aesthetic: they don’t want to go out for oysters then have to come home to last century’s spoiled gruel.”

One of the main prerequisites for genuine reform is overhauling the institutions Putin’s crony establishment has done much to undermine, not least of which is the legal system. In the early 1990s, when laws were in flux, White and Case’s John Erickson represented several Russian companies along with his Western clients. Among them, the Salyut Design Bureau, a former Soviet agency that oversaw satellite launches into space, sought Erickson out when a foreign investment bank attempted to overcharge it for advisory work. Such fairly common behavior, which reinforced the going view of capitalism as a predatory activity, appalled Erickson, who was therefore gratified to witness Western executives occasionally learning lessons about how business was conducted in Russia.

Describing a typical deal in those days, Erickson told me that important meetings with CEOs and their lawyers would often begin in the standard way, with negotiations about a list of open points. The two sides would settle each by compromise, usually until “about point number seven, when it would be clear from what the Russians were saying that they felt they really hadn’t agreed to anything on points one to six.”

Even signed contracts remained open to interpretation. “The Russians viewed them not as binding agreements,” Erickson said, “but simply guidelines about how they might act in the future. Maybe they’d comply, maybe they wouldn’t. Of course they didn’t have to care because you really couldn’t sue them effectively in the courts.” When Erickson drafted Western-style commercial regulations, versions often came back from government offices with roughly 10 percent of the text remaining. “It made me realize very quickly that Russia wasn’t America or Germany. It was a different country with its own system, its own way of doing things.”

Although the failure to properly overhaul the Soviet legal system has had disastrous consequences under Putin, some successes have been achieved. The introduction of a jury system in 2003 for the first time since the Revolution provided the best hope for fighting widespread corruption in the court system. Statistics show why. While judges presiding over non-jury trials find defendants guilty more than 98 percent of the time, juries have acquitted some 15 percent of defendants.

So when the directors of one of the country’s largest cigarette importers were accused of fraud soon after the reform passed, they opted for a jury trial. The lead juror, a soft-spoken deputy director of a small publishing house named Liudmilla Barabanova, told me the prosecutors presented reams of documents during the trial but not a shred of evidence to support their charges. Worse than that, each juror was offered a bribe of as much as five hundred dollars to find the defendants guilty. “We were all very tense,” she said. “But we didn’t dare complain to the judge because we knew it would be used as a pretext to dismiss us. We had to remain silent to see the trial to its end.”

Barabanova and the other jury members came to believe the accusations were false, cooked up by a rival to put the defendant company out of business, and that the prosecutors were playing along. But the jurors had no chance to acquit the defendants: they were sent home three days before they were due to reach a decision. “We were dismissed because we weren’t going to reach a guilty verdict,” Barabanova said.

The case went to a retrial. The new head juror, Yevgeny Danilov, told me it emerged that the plaintiff company was registered in the United States under a false name, something prosecutors assured the jurors was standard practice. “We understood something was wrong, that documents were being fabricated,” Danilov said. “We also realized we had to protect our own integrity, so no one could compromise us.” The jurors found themselves sneaking in and out of the courthouse to avoid being trapped into meetings with prosecutors who could later be accused of influencing them. This time the jury persevered in unanimously acquitting the defendants. Unlike American practice, however, Russian law allows acquittals to be appealed, and the prosecutors took their case straight to the Supreme Court, which overturned the not-guilty verdict and ordered another trial.

A young lawyer named Ekaterina Stavitskaya represented the defense during the third trial. Speaking in her small, plain office, she told me such trials were a way to get ahead in business. “Lawsuits have replaced the contract killings of the 1990s as a more humane way to get rid of competitors,” she said. In that case, it didn’t work: the third jury acquitted the defendants a second time. Later, however, the prosecutors again appealed to the Supreme Court.

After the first trial, its jury members tried to make sense of their experiences by meeting with the defense lawyers. They later realized they were spied on because photographs of them appeared in newspaper articles that accused them of obstructing justice. One paper called the jury members “secret terrorists.” The prosecutors appeared on television to denounce some of them as homeless, unemployed and mentally deficient. “I felt like my soul was being spat on,” juror Danilov told me.

Critics of the jury system complain that unlike Britain and the United States, Russia is a young, undeveloped democracy whose population can’t be expected to make important legal decisions. That was the opinion of the stolid justice minister, Yuri Chaika, who later became prosecutor general. “From the point of view of our society’s understanding of the legal system, of the level of our legal culture, it’s probably too early to have introduced juries to Russia,” he said.

Supporters of the jury system counter that jurors aren’t meant to be experts but peers who consider specific issues. A leading legal expert named Sergei Nanosov told me that judges routinely ignore egregious procedural violations to rule in prosecutors’ favor. They are kept in line by such a large array of institutional arrangements, including bonus pay doled out by regional officials, that “it’s fair to say our legal system is utterly dependent on the state.”

A rare Moscow city judge who refused to follow orders became a cause célèbre. Olga Kudeshkina was presiding over a trial against a customs official who had launched criminal proceedings against the owner of the infamous FSB-connected Tri Kita furniture shop, central to the 2007 Kremlin clan battle that prompted the arrest of the drug control agency’s Alexander Bulbov. The prosecutor general himself quashed an investigation into the smuggling of four hundred tons of furniture before going on to charge the customs official who initiated the probe with abuse of office. Kudeshkina was fired when she refused to convict him.

When I spoke to her later, the smiling, elaborately coiffed former judge explained that officials called chairmen of the courts, who assign judges to preside over trials, are expected to select loyal people for sensitive cases. A deputy chairwoman had selected her for the furniture trial “by mistake” because the chairman was on holiday.

The authorities essentially control the courts, Kudeshkina said, but “it’s much more difficult to do that with juries, so of course the authorities want to get rid of them by saying our citizens aren’t ready.” Judges’ dependence on politicians is so great, she concluded, that apart from cases involving political matters, Soviet practice had generally been fairer and less corrupt. Although Soviet judges were very occasionally fired for unjustified convictions, “that never happens today.”

Pro-Kremlin legislators have continued calling for the jury system to be limited to cases not involving national security or hate crimes, something legal experts believe is part of a strategy to chip away at the few surviving remnants of judicial independence.

In many other institutions, the informal patronage system behind the Kremlin’s ruling structure has seriously undermined the government’s oversight, including in the regions outside Moscow. Besides the Caucasus, perhaps nowhere has that been more visible than the crime-ridden port of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, where massive smuggling industries enrich officials who help criminal groups spirit illegally caught fish, timber, cars and many other goods in and out of Russia. No profitable business is exempt, a local law professor assured me. For most of Putin’s tenure, the region’s governor was a square-jawed former used car dealer named Sergei Darkin, who made his fortune selling the secondhand Japanese cars that sustain the local economy. Victor Cherepkov, a former Vladivostok mayor who waged an epic battle against corruption, told me Darkin also became part of a criminal group involved in prostitution, poaching and racketeering. He rose to power after the boss’s death, which was made to look like a scuba-diving accident. However, Darkin—who later cemented his position by marrying the millionairess wife of a rival named Igor “the Carp” Karpov after his death from a sniper’s bullet—assured me there were no improper connections between business and politics in his region.

Shoring up the Kremlin’s role as the ascendant Mafia-type group by appointing such men has also deepened Russia’s greatest security threat: instability in the North Caucasus, including Chechnya, which is led by Ramzan Kadyrov, another top tough who used to be a rebel fighter. What’s happening there may be an extreme illustration of Moscow’s relationship with the provinces, but is instructive because it mirrors the state of affairs across the country.

Russia launched the first military campaigns to conquer the mountainous region on the southern edge of its expanding empire in the mid-1700s. Organized largely by kinship clans, ethnic groups and language, the fragmented collection of Islamic societies that populated the North Caucasus offered fierce resistance to tsarist troops. By the nineteenth century, Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and other poets were romanticizing the dangerous region as a beautiful object of Russian manifest destiny.

Sporadic resistance continued well into the Soviet era, especially in Chechnya, where traditional kinship clans called teips helped keep society together under repression by Stalin, who in 1944 exiled all Chechens to Kazakhstan and elsewhere for allegedly collaborating with the Nazis. By the 1950s, however, popular Soviet comedy films depicted the Caucasus as an exotic tourist destination where communism was modernizing an amusingly backward people. Such patronizing attitudes seem almost quaint today.

Many Russians now associate the Caucasus primarily with horrific television news images of the aftermath of bombings—corpses strewn about Moscow’s airports, metro system and streets. The predominant view of the region as little more than a seat of terrorism and poverty is fueling deep suspicion and hatred. In 2012, protesters in the capital began rallying under a banner that read STOP FEEDING THE CAUCASUS, demanding that the government end the funding of a region they saw as irredeemably corrupt.

When I visited Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, in 2009 during one of many trips to the region, the city I first saw as a bomb-flattened wasteland four years earlier had been rebuilt with lightning speed. Expensive cars sped down Putin Prospect, a name some acquaintances could not bring themselves to say. Cafés bearing French and Italian names, a sushi restaurant and a branch of a Moscow luxury shopping mall lined the main thoroughfare. Giant posters of the thirty-three-year-old Kadyrov loomed everywhere, and everyone I spoke to on the street recited stock phrases about his greatness. Privately, residents complained bitterly of Kadyrov’s rule by fear, enforced by abductions, torture and killings. “We have to live like this, like it or not,” a friend named Heda Saratova explained. “We’re forced to say things we don’t believe.” A brave human rights activist, Heda is one of the few people who have continued documenting abuses after the grisly murder of her colleague Natalia Estemirova in 2009.

I’d traveled to Grozny with several fellow journalists on that occasion to interview Kadyrov. Summoned from our threadbare hotel to his heavily fortified compound in the dead of night, we passed a horse-racing track and a man-made pond outside its main entrance. Inside, lions prowled in cages, part of Kadyrov’s extensive zoo housing rare animals and birds, and there was a rumor that the complex also contained a prison where he tortured and killed with his own hands. Passing a sleek black Mercedes near the front door—a relatively modest example from Kadyrov’s fleet of luxury cars—we stepped into a massive, marble-floored palace lined with ornate columns and luxurious silk wallpaper.

Playing billiards with one of his men, the Chechen president was dressed in slippers and an Armani tracksuit. Although the squat bear of a man with a short beard and the jovial manner of a frat boy had been president for more than two years, he greeted us with a display of bashfulness, as if he were embarrassed by the opulence of his fantasy playground. By the time we sat down, it was 2:00 a.m.

Although Kadyrov shares apparently close personal ties to Putin, he began the first Chechen war as an anti-Moscow rebel and chief bodyguard for his father, Muslim imam Akhmad Kadyrov, a separatist leader who switched sides during Chechnya’s second war. The Kremlin later installed the senior Kadyrov as the Chechen leader before his assassination in a bomb blast. Today, the son praises Putin for “wise policies” that kept Chechnya a part of the Russian Federation. “If we would have been given independence, it would have been the end of our people. We would all have died,” he said in brusque, heavily accented Russian.

When I asked about Estemirova, whose death a leader of Memorial, the human rights organization that employed her, had blamed on him, Kadyrov accused her of having no honor or shame. Insisting his only concern was for the welfare of ordinary Chechens, he boasted, “I’d lay down my life for my people.” True or not, his fealty to Moscow obscures an irony not lost on most Russians: Kadyrov—who advocates strict Islamic codes, including polygamy—effectively governs his region independently of Moscow. His critics wryly note that the young leader has achieved the kind of de facto self-rule that had eluded Chechnya’s former separatist leaders by doing what he wants inside the region in exchange for maintaining outward loyalty to the Kremlin.

Kadyrov’s brutally enforced pacification of Chechnya has had the effect of spreading violence to neighboring regions. I traveled to the Caucasus again in 2011 to investigate the growing perception that a certain, perhaps managed, level of instability there suited one or more groups among the authorities in Moscow. That time my destination was the currently most volatile region, Dagestan, where I drove to the village of Gimry, a scattering of tin-roofed houses nestled between jagged peaks and accessible only by a narrow dirt road.

Fall arrives late in the green valleys, where the pervading smell of burning leaves is especially strong. You would think the subtropical region, with its abundant possibilities for growing fruit and other crops, along with the locals’ reputation for fine craftsmanship, should be booming economically. In fact it’s depressed, mired in corruption and seething under the Kremlin’s heavy boot. But although most of its population barely ekes out a living, Gimry’s deep isolation didn’t preclude the enrichment of some residents, including the owner of a large new house where I was invited to lunch. My hosts included the son of the village chief, who drove a fancy Volkswagen Touareg. When we sat in the courtyard over several courses, finishing with sweet grapes from vines hanging overhead, I couldn’t know they were half joking among themselves in the local Avar language about the benefits of kidnapping me for ransom. Later the local journalist who escorted me there earnestly told me not to take it personally. “That’s their business, you see.”

In a province so remote that children speak only Avar and residents use the word Russia to describe the country’s other regions, not their own, one could be forgiven for forgetting we were in Putin’s Russia. But despite its location on the southern fringes of the country’s vast landmass, the spread of violence from Chechnya has been a central symbol of rule under a president who has used the threat of terrorism as a main justification for his attack on his country’s democratic institutions. Far from the stability he’s claimed, however, his policies have encouraged traditional society to tear at the seams.

Gimry’s elders described how soldiers had recently sealed off the village during a so-called counterterrorism operation that lasted almost two years. An elderly man with a long white beard named Nabi Magomedov broke down as he described how it began with militants luring his son, a prominent member of the Dagestani parliament, out of his house with a request to talk. They proceeded to shoot him sixty-two times. Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov later took credit for ordering his death, accusing the younger Magomedov of betraying Islam by participating in politics. But if the ensuing police operation was meant to combat extremism by smoking out separatists among the villagers, it did the opposite. In addition to their daily searches of houses, soldiers had carte blanche to cut down apricot trees for fuel—“Otherwise they’d have frozen,” one farmer admitted—and to steal livestock and kill residents.

Villagers said they were protesting by refusing to observe Russian law and adopting Sharia instead—or at least their understanding of it, which included blood feuds and other centuries-old forms of remediation. Many became Salafists, conservative Muslims who denounced the Sufi Islam traditionally practiced in the Caucasus because it is supposedly under state control. On a small plateau above the village, workers were constructing a large madrasah said to be partly financed by “outside” money, perhaps from Saudi Arabia. Some hoped the new institution would replace the village’s state school.

Such opposition to rule from Moscow is an old story in Gimry, the birthplace of the Imam Shamil, one of the legendary leaders of resistance to the tsarist empire in the nineteenth century. But the religious radicalization is exacerbating new divisions in a region whose many ethnic groups previously coexisted more or less peacefully. When a budding relationship between a young resident of Gimry and a woman in the neighboring Sufi village of Insukul resulted in a shootout that killed seven people, the conflict was soon perceived as religious in nature. Both villages were girding for revenge when I visited.

In the months that followed, the violence rang alarm bells when gun and bomb attacks killed a number of moderate Sufi leaders, not only in Dagestan but also in other regions previously not known for such violence. The top Muslim official in the Tatarstan region, more than a thousand miles from the North Caucasus, was wounded in a car bomb attack and his deputy was shot dead on the same day. In August 2012, the country’s most senior Islamic cleric warned of a looming civil war in Dagestan, which lies several hundred miles from Sochi and the 2014 Winter Olympics. Putin’s response was to tell security forces to “outsmart and outmuscle” Islamist militants to ensure security during the games.

However, locals in Gimry also told me the mounting tensions were pointing toward a larger confrontation, which some ominously welcomed as a means of establishing formal independence. It would be led by young men who regularly leave their homes and go “into the forest” to join militant groups performing weekly bombings and shootings.

Outside a ramshackle brick mosque—where young men, some sporting dark beards and military fatigues, gathered for midday prayers—one worshipper named Abu Magomedov, who had served in Chechnya as an FSB officer, told me that killings such as the assassination of Dagestan’s interior minister in 2009 were justified as justice and retribution. “I was ordered to kill innocent Muslim boys ‘to control their numbers,’ ” he said of his time in Chechnya. “How am I supposed to take that?”

The anger is helping estrange increasingly radicalized young people from older generations that were made less devout by centuries of loose adherence to Islamic customs even before the suppression of religion under Soviet rule. The effects are sometimes felt beyond Russia’s borders, as Americans learned during the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, when two young Chechen-Avar brothers who had lived in Massachusetts for a decade set off bombs that killed three and wounded more than two hundred fifty people. Evidently grappling with the pressures of belonging to two cultures, the elder, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, began holding increasingly radical Islamist views to the dismay of his father, who separated from his wife and returned to live in Dagestan. Assimilating in the United States must have been especially hard for a family from a highly patriarchal culture of warriors. Although the brothers were almost certainly radicalized in the United States, where they learned about Islam from the Internet and had little if any known connection to militants in Russia, their search for identity was not unlike those of many young men in the Caucasus who express their alienation through violent acts.

Near Gimry, the village of Balakhani was home to a twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher named Mariam Sharipova, who came to national attention in 2010 as one of two suicide bombers who killed forty people in the Moscow metro. Inside the modest house clinging to a mountainside where Sharipova had lived with her parents, her father, a devout, bearded teacher named Rasul Magomedov, said he couldn’t explain why his daughter blew herself up. But he told me the Kremlin encourages such actions by using the threat of terrorism to consolidate its power. “Moscow pours all its blame for everything wrong into the Caucasus, to justify its actions and failures before average working people,” he explained.

It was difficult not to be moved by Magomedov’s stoic manner. Describing his daughter as a hard worker who had earned a degree in psychology and planned to study for a doctorate, he said the authorities should have heeded her act as a wake-up call. “Change your attitude toward us Dagestanis,” he concluded, predicting there will be more such attacks in the future. “Don’t think we’re stupid people,” he added. Magomedov disappeared without a trace a month later, the apparent victim of a kidnapping.

Three days before I spoke to him, twin explosions killed a police officer and injured sixty civilians outside a liquor shop in Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala, a hundred miles east on the shore of the Caspian Sea. In a hospital a short walk from the street’s mangled buildings, people wounded in the blast lay bandaged on cots in a hot, crowded room. Among them was a young man named Magomed Getinov, who told me he was leaving a friend’s apartment when the blast went off, sending shrapnel into his side. Although he called the bombers monsters, he blamed the region’s massive unemployment for prompting many young men with little to do to turn to violence. “They’re confused,” he told me. “They lose their morals, start turning into religious extremists and blow up innocent people because they believe they’re going to take over the world.”

Despite its poverty, Makhachkala’s society is cosmopolitan and open in comparison to much of the North Caucasus. At a dinner with the gregarious head of the official journalists’ union, a veteran political operator named Ali Kamalov, he raised his first shot of vodka to Allah. A typical representative of older generations, Kamalov had the benevolent manner of a patriarch from the North Caucasus—part tough guy, part Jewish mother—and insisted I not leave the table before stuffing myself with at least three servings of kebabs. He told me the root of the region’s problem was the pervasive corruption choking the economy. Huge funds for developing agriculture, infrastructure and social services were being pilfered by officials in Moscow and Makhachkala. Some of the money was spent on luxury cars and an expanding ring of suburban brick houses going up outside the capital. Distributing the Kremlin’s largesse enabled the powerful former Mayor Said Amirov—who is confined to a wheelchair after having survived more than a dozen assassination attempts—to build a patronage system so entrenched that when the Kremlin recently decided to oust him after fifteen years, it sent a team of special-forces commandos in armored personnel carriers to bundle him onto a helicopter bound for Moscow, where he faced murder charges. His fate, after having twice earned the title of best Russian mayor, is reminiscent of powerful Communist Party bosses such as Uzbekistan’s Rashid Rashidov, whom the Kremlin was able to unseat only by using satellites to photograph cotton fields, then estimating how much he was faking production figures.

Across town in an outlying, concrete-block neighborhood, Svetlana Isayeva runs the group Mothers of Dagestan for Human Rights from a tiny ground-floor office. She started the organization after her twenty-five-year-old son disappeared from the street outside her home in 2008. Stoic, dark-haired Isayeva told me many young men detained by security forces had been forced to confess to terrorism, after which some were killed. “Law enforcers burn them alive in their cars,” she said. “Then they’re accused of blowing themselves up by accident.” She said the abductions began taking place regularly when troops were moved to Dagestan from Chechnya in 2007, after the war there wound down. “All that equipment, all those soldiers. What was the military supposed to do?” she said. “They need conflict to continue surviving. That’s the only way I can explain it.”

Half a day’s drive west through Chechnya lies the region of Ingushetia, which is also crippled by corruption and bears the country’s highest official unemployment rate, a staggering 57 percent of the able-bodied population. During one of my trips there, in 2011, the threat of violence hung heavily over the dusty main town of Nazran, which was little more than a chaotic crossroads near a market and a bus station. Years of shootings and explosions by Islamist militants convinced most restaurants to close soon after dark, and it was nearly impossible to find alcohol served anywhere. Young people drank tea in a popular café near the market, one of the few such places where I saw women spending leisure time in public. Marina, a quick young medical student who declined to give her last name, told me that although she didn’t go out after nightfall, she’d grown inured to violence. “The first time a friend is killed, you grieve for maybe a year or more,” she said. “But after twenty times, you get used to death. We hear explosions one day and forget about them the next.”

Locals say although only some two hundred militants remain active in the region, the military stokes the conflict because soldiers get extra pay for combat and officers get promotions and special powers to control local life. Moscow-based Memorial still keeps extensive records about human rights abuses in Nazran. In its cramped, bare-bones office there, along a row of shops selling clothes, housing supplies and mobile phones, researcher Abubakar Sechayev told me that many young men disappear because the slightest suspicion of knowing a militant is enough to get them arrested or worse. “A person can be suspected today and easily killed tomorrow, and his house burned down,” Sechayev told me. “If the security services had any real proof, they’d go through the courts.”

Despite its obvious failure, the Kremlin’s Caucasus policy isn’t likely to change soon. A recent poll showed that most Russians believe the authorities should undertake harsher measures to fight militants there, such as reviving the death penalty and punishing militants’ relatives. During my latest visit, soldiers carrying out a counterterrorist operation in a town near Nazran arrested six suspected militants. The following day, an elderly woman and her daughter told me that “federals”—interior ministry troops—had broken through their front gate and searched their house. When the mother protested, the soldiers’ response summed up the Kremlin’s attitude. “Shut up, old woman: we do what we want here!”