The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  Putin reached into a bag of clichés to explain his vision of the Russian future, declaring in 2011: ‘We must not only preserve but must develop our national identity and soul. We must not lose ourselves as a nation: we must be and remain Russia.’17 He later defended his ‘conservative position’ as one that accorded with the ideas of Christian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. He upheld the importance of family and religious faith. At the same time he called for the state budget to be distributed more efficiently. He wanted people to assume greater responsibility for their personal health care; he criticised countries in the European Union where he claimed that welfare systems had created a culture of dependency. He wanted Russia to be different. He criticised Russian companies that registered their headquarters abroad.18 In foreign policy he condemned America’s penchant for armed intervention. He rebuked the Americans for continuing work on the anti-missile ‘shield’ in Poland and the Czech Republic – he described it as offensive in intent. He welcomed progress in laying the foundations for a Eurasian Economic Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan.19

  Barren of fresh ideas, he re-energised some of his older ones. With this in mind he consulted the academic Alexander Dugin, a veteran of the Eurasianist intellectual tendency and a hater of Western culture. Distrust of most things foreign was on the rise in the Kremlin.

  In March 2011, after the UN Security Council had endorsed military action in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship, the French and British led the enforcement of a no-fly zone. President Medvedev had cautiously accepted this, but Putin voiced a wish to be less accommodating and saw Gaddafi’s overthrow in October as yet another attempt by the West to dominate the Arab countries.20 On returning to the Presidency, he denounced America and its allies for siding with the rebels fighting President Bashar Al-Assad in the Syrian civil war. Putin rejected demands for sanctions against Assad’s government and continued to sell them armaments and air-defence equipment. Only when there was evidence of use of chemical weapons did he agree to help to compel Assad to desist. But otherwise he maintained Russian support for the Syrian President and warned Barack Obama that American interventions in Middle Eastern conflicts had failed to achieve the outcomes desired. Russia repeatedly clashed with America over foreign policy, strengthening friendly relations with Venezuela, a bête noire of Washington’s diplomacy, and mending ties to Cuba.

  In May 2013 Putin thumbed his nose at Obama by granting asylum to Edward Snowden, who was on the run from the American authorities for having disclosed the contents of millions of emails from the US National Security Agency. He depicted the US administration as the enemy of fairness and transparency of governance. He accused American web servers like Google of being part of a CIA project for global surveillance.21 He signed a law obliging such companies to store the data of their Russian users on the territory of the Russian Federation. There was widespread suspicion that his ulterior motive was to make it easier for the FSB to conduct surveillance of his own critics. Putin strengthened the restrictions on political rallies. In July 2012 the Duma with its United Russia majority passed a law requiring non-profit organizations that relied on funding from abroad to register as ‘foreign agents’. This was evidently an attempt, by pejorative language and bureaucratic control, to cast a shadow over their claims to altruism.

  Rulers savagely protected their interests. Sergei Magnitski, defence lawyer for an American hedge fund that had experienced predatory attacks on its interests in Russia, was arrested and murdered in prison in 2009. This led to a furore in America, culminating in sanctions against those deemed responsible for Magnitski’s death. Putin reacted with a series of measures, including even a ban on Americans from adopting Russian children. The judicial process continued against Magnitski and he was found guilty in a bizarre posthumous trial. Alexander Lebedev, an ex-KGB officer who became a wealthy businessman, suffered more lightly. His Novaya gazeta was the main oppositionist newspaper. (The murdered Politkovskaya had been one of its reporters.) Lebedev was tried for hooliganism in 2013 after punching a personal enemy on a TV chat show – and he was soon compelled to relinquish most of his remaining assets in Russia. The authorities also brought Alexei Navalny to court for fraud. Lebedev and Navalny both received light sentences. The authorities were making their point that no serious political challenge was going to be tolerated. Whenever they saw a growing threat, they turned to repressive measures.

  The ruling group had always been fluid in composition and a silent fractiousness bedevilled it. Gleb Pavlovski, a so-called ‘political technologist’ who had played a brilliant, devious game in manipulating public opinion, grew annoyed with the repressive measures of ministers. In April 2011, after he voiced his thoughts in public, he lost his entry pass to the Kremlin. Alexei Kudrin, Finance Minister since 2000, was an economic liberal who objected to the budgetary imbalance caused by the rise in military expenditure. He stepped down in September 2011. Vladislav Surkov, working in the Presidential administration, had refined the ideology of ‘sovereign democracy’ for use by Putin. Despite being appointed Deputy Prime Minister in 2011, he disliked the increasing crudity of Putin’s policies and resigned in May 2013. Putin seldom gave ground. He was adamant about demanding that ministers and officials showed loyalty to himself and to Russia – he banned them from holding their bank accounts abroad. He wanted people around him who wore their patriotism on their sleeves.

  He accentuated conservatism in social policy and denounced the idea of same-sex marriages. In June 2013 a law was enacted to prohibit the spreading of ideas endorsing ‘non-traditional sexual relationships’ among youngsters. Surveys indicated that a majority of Russians approved of his measures, and Putin ignored the complaints from abroad. The Russian Orthodox Church provided him with support. Its indifference to democracy and hostility to Western culture made it a convenient partner for a President who was known for his authoritarian and xenophobic style – and he secured the Patriarch’s favour by showering the Church with privileges. He was proud that Russia’s population had at last ceased to decline. (He turned a blind eye to the fact that Russia still had a shrinking number of adults available for employment and had to resort to recruiting labour from abroad.) Life expectancy, Putin emphasised, was solidly on the rise and the incidence of alcoholism was falling.

  He presided over a slight improvement in business methods as contract killings gave way to disputes at law; for he approved of due judicial process as long as it constituted no threat to him and his ministers and officials. At the highest level, this took the exotic form of exporting the biggest cases by mutual consent to the high court in London. Forty per cent of this court’s proceedings in 2010 consisted of wrangles originating in the former USSR. Some foreign legality was better than no legality at all.22 The climax came in autumn 2011 when Boris Berezovski sued his former business associate Roman Abramovich for strong-arming him into selling his Russian assets in 2000. Putin had for years sought Berezovski’s extradition from the United Kingdom. Now his own officials, including ex-chief of staff Alexander Voloshin, flew to London to testify in person against Berezovski.23 The trial ended in defeat for Berezovski, who died mysteriously in 2013 – and the coroner recorded an open verdict.

  The President admired Western techniques in manipulating public opinion, and in one of his early encounters with Prime Minister Blair he had asked what he could do to improve his image.24 He was slow to see that the country itself could benefit around the world from similar attention. On recognising his mistake, he established a network of cultural ‘outreach’ agencies known as Russki mir (‘Russian World’). The hope was to spread respect and understanding of Russia’s achievements in literature, film and intellectual progress on the model of the British Council and the Goethe-Institutes. Each office put on talks for the general public. What started with a fanfare soon got bogged down in over-bureaucratic oversight from Moscow. Other ventures in the deployment of ‘soft power’ were more successful. Russia successfully bid to hold the winter Olympics in 201
4 and the football World Cup in 2018. The outlay was sumptuous – and financial corruption proliferated. The Olympics were prepared at Sochi, in the Russian south on the Black Sea coast; and the Ministry of Culture heralded a festival of Russia’s Year of Culture in the world’s capital cities.

  The authorities, becoming mindful of international unease, granted early release to the Pussy Riot prisoners and to Mikhail Khodorkovski in the month before Putin opened the Sochi Olympics. Priority was given to encouraging positive attitudes to the new Russia.

  The opening ceremony was a potpourri of the kind of Russianness that he espoused. Stage management was perfect except when a giant snowflake failed to turn into one of the five Olympic rings. The scenes included a ballet with evocations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in a sanitised tableau of the Imperial past without tsars or peasants. There was a blandness even about the October Revolution scenario that followed. No Lenin, no Trotski. A gargantuan red locomotive hovered over the arena as the symbol of unstoppable progress. Nothing indicated that communists were involved. On to the period of Stalinist industrialization when the peasantry was forced into collective farms and reduced to starvation. The choreography involved a parade of gigantic red wheels. Stalin himself might have approved, for he too had a preference for symbolic euphemisms that disguised the reality of crushed bones and bloodshed. The Great Patriotic War against the Third Reich was depicted in soft tones. There was no display of military conflict that could have marred the atmosphere of an international ceremony. Instead there was a tableau of suffering masses in statuesque poses.

  Whereas tsarism was coloured blue and the Revolution red, the years of post-war reconstruction were rendered mostly in a dazzling white. Carefree teenagers wearing Pioneer ties danced to pop music. A handsome young couple drove a Soviet automobile across the set waving gaily to the spectators in the stadium. The word ‘love’ was displayed in capital letters to highlight the message that harmony had reigned in the USSR. Russians seemingly had plenty of food, fun and prosperity while submitting to discipline. Putin accentuated his favourite theme of Eternal Russia. He wanted to imbue everyone with the idea that that the great twentieth-century ruptures – the Revolution, the Great Terror and even De-Communization – matter less than the continuities.25 The spectacle came to its close without any attempt to depict Russian society since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Russian skiers and skaters won medals that seemed to confirm Putin’s professions of faith in the country. Before the Olympics, there had been speculation that foreign visitors might conduct public protests against recent Russian anti-homosexual legislation. In fact the Sochi athletes’ village and the competition venues witnessed little commotion, and Putin took obvious pleasure in the smooth organisation of the games.

  The gains for Russia’s international image vanished within days of the Olympics closing ceremony as conflict between the Russian and Ukrainian administrations deepened. Kiev had been locked in political crisis throughout the winter after President Yanukovych, under pressure from Moscow, suddenly changed his mind about signing an agreement of association with the European Union. Immediately there were demonstrations in the Ukrainian capital. When the central square – the Maidan of Independence – was occupied by protesters, the security forces used brutal force. Dozens of people were killed. This only served to strengthen the will of those who opposed Yanukovych, culminating on 22 February 2014 in his flight from Kiev and the assumption of power by the Ukrainian parliament. Yanukovych obtained asylum in southern Russia. Ukrainians celebrated national sovereignty, and the parliament issued a decree that gave precedence to the Ukrainian language. Talk spread in Kiev about the possibility of increasing military co-operation between Ukraine and NATO.

  The assertiveness of Ukraine’s insurgent authorities rang alarm bells in Moscow, and Putin was determined to impose Russia’s power on the situation. He issued an appeal to those Russian-speaking residents of eastern Ukraine and Crimea who disliked what was happening in Kiev. Russian media accused Ukrainian parliamentarians and Maidan militants of having Nazi sympathies.

  On 27 February, Russian armed forces occupied the Crimean peninsula and overthrew the local Ukrainian administration. Putin claimed that Crimea had always been part of Russia. It is true that Khrushchëv had transferred it from the RSFSR to Ukraine in 1954, but the Russian Empire had acquired the territory only in 1783 and the population was always a mixed one that included Tatars until Stalin deported them in 1944. Putin held a ceremony in Moscow for Crimea’s incorporation in the Russian Federation. His ratings in Russian popular opinion rocketed upwards, and he obtained permission from the Federation Council to send the army into eastern Ukraine if ever the need appeared to arise. All this evoked blistering criticism from abroad. When he had sent forces into Georgia, it was a punitive campaign without the goal of annexation. Now he was not merely creating Russian protectorates in the ‘near abroad’ but expanding Russia’s frontiers. With the NATO powers worrying and vacillating about the Syrian civil war, he aimed to drive a wedge between Germany and America. His trump card was the German dependency on supplies of Russian natural gas.

  Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, a former East German citizen, called his bluff; she feared that one grab of territory could lead to others. She signed up to a list of financial sanctions against Russia and several of its prominent politicians. Putin received a warning to keep out of eastern Ukraine. NATO rejected any idea of military action to stop him, and the Moscow establishment scoffed at Western limpness. But quietly the sanctions made their impact. The ruble plunged on world currency markets. There had already been a fall-off in industrial production in 2013 – even petrochemical output had declined. The Crimean conquest made things worse as Russian corporations found it hard to obtain credits from the outside world. Foreign investors who in recent years had thought twice about lodging their funds in Russia ceased to think even once. Putin toyed with ways to de-escalate the emergency. This pleased Ukraine’s President Poroshenko, elected in May 2014, who signed the very kind of agreement of association with the European Union that Yanukovych had rejected. Russian ministers reacted by repeating their charge that the Kiev authorities had Nazi sympathies.

  As tension between Russia and Ukraine continued, questions arose about Putin’s gamble in foreign policy. He had obtained a small expansion of Russian territory and a surge in personal popularity among Russians. He had succeeded in compelling the Ukrainian government to make concessions in self-administration to parts of eastern Ukraine where a majority of people were Russian. Having infuriated and alarmed the Western powers, he was luxuriating in a bath of national assertiveness.

  But he soon paid a price. The G8 summit, planned for Sochi in June 2014 with Putin as host, was cancelled. The other seven countries expelled Russia from their midst and met in Brussels by themselves – the G8 became the G7 again. Financial sanctions were applied against Russian banks and politicians. The loss in global status was dramatic. Putin’s adventure also disrupted progress with some of the administration’s own essential tasks. Russia needed direct investment by countries in the West. If it was to deal with competition from China, it had to strengthen its diplomatic bridges with America and the European Union. Russian businessmen continued to transfer funds abroad. Ex-Finance Minister Kudrin deplored the economic damage caused by ‘capital flight’ out of the country after the Crimean military operation. As investment dipped, gross economic output began to tail off. Putin had entirely failed to prevent President Poroshenko from signing an ‘association agreement’ with the European Union in June 2014. Georgia and Moldova did the same. The Russian objective of leading a buoyant Eurasian Economic Union looked further from attainment than ever.

  Putin had unleashed Russia’s dogs of nationalism. It was unclear whether he would be able to call them to heel once they had served his purposes. Bloody conflict continued in eastern Ukraine between Russia-backed rebels and the Ukrainian armed forces. In July, when a Malaysian passenger airliner was shot down ov
er the disputed territory, America and the EU strengthened the financial sanctions regime against Russia. Kiev’s army achieved successes until Moscow reinforced the rebels with men and equipment. Worldwide censure served only to elevate Putin’s standing in Russian public opinion, which held that Russia at last had a leader willing to challenge the Western powers. His popularity disguised the problem that the national budget remained acutely sensitive to vagaries on world petrochemical markets. Putin had failed to develop a strategy to diversify the structure of the economy in the times of financial plenty. Suddenly in the latter half of 2014, oil prices tumbled around the world. The Moscow stock market and banking system were badly shaken. Doubts increased about whether the government could either keep up its uncompromising foreign policy or sustain its welfare obligations to citizens.

  Not for the first time in Russian history, a pall of confusion descended over discussions about the future – even the rulers appeared perplexed about the situation. Russians found themselves yet again in a zone of uncertainty.

  Afterword

  Russia’s achievements since 1991 have not been unimpressive. Parliamentary and presidential elections have been held; and though they have been tainted by fraud the fact that they have happened at all sets a precedent which it will be hard for Russian rulers to repudiate. Competition among political parties has survived. Social groups have continued to give voice to their aspirations and grievances. A market economy has been established. The heavy hand of the state military-industrial establishment has grown weaker. Entrepreneurship has been fostered. The press has enjoyed much freedom. Police agencies invade the privacy of citizens to a lesser extent than at any time in earlier decades, and until the present century Russian armed forces rarely crossed the country’s international frontiers in anger. Economic recovery and development have got under way. Russia was a humbled vestige of its old self through to the end of the twentieth century. In the present millennium it is a great power again. Flattened Russia stands tall.