Much like the enduring Slavophile-Westernizer debate, Russia’s ongoing, sometimes tortured search for its place in the world will continue to be influenced by Church leaders, advocates of a Russian-led “Eurasian Union” and others who make various claims for the country’s exceptionalism. Their views will keep feeding Russians’ ideas about themselves and their country, which also remain affected by its difficult climate and geography.
Hundreds of deaths from cold each winter help reinforce a sense that life is cheaper in Russia than in the West together with the very old corollary that individuals aren’t suited for making it on their own. And although Siberians exhibit fierce pride in their region, Siberia and the far north still loom large in the collective imagination as places of involuntary exile, where the cold is additional punishment.
The notion of individual weakness has helped buttress Russia’s age-old fatalism. In the summer of 1939, just after the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, when the Gulag system was approaching its full size, Zhora wrote Serafima that something was “hanging over the camp’s atmosphere” in Ivdellag: “People are suffering from evil so much they’re trying to convince themselves it’s for the better.”
Ivdel, July 22, 1939
Let the end come quickly. Some kind of end, freedom or death, to the happiness of healthy human life or to the bloody wall of murder—forward to humanism or backward straight to Robespierre’s slaughterhouse. Let mine be a lonely, unnamed grave under the Urals cliffs or the parquet floor of a jolly dance hall. I don’t care. To the end, to the end!
Ivdel, August 23, 1939
Dearest one,
I’m writing my last letter to you. This morning we received a telephonogram [message dictated by telephone] about sending me from Ivdellag together with an engineer… No one knows anything about where I’m being sent or why. It just said there was an order that I be sent away immediately. Others disappeared in such cases. They promised to write, but not a single person has.
I’m probably being sent to another camp. Oh, how I don’t want to go, how difficult it is to travel to a strange new place! Nothing good comes of winters in unfamiliar places. The battle is not over survival but death. You’re put in the worst situations doing the hardest work. All your friends are left behind in the old place. Indeed, I have a privileged position here, and who knows what awaits me there. Maybe I’m being sent where I’ll have no contact with the world. Whatever happens to me, remember that I love you and will be with you. Even if I disappear without a trace for years, I’ll immediately find you the moment I free myself…
I embrace you and Mother. Love and remember me.
My mother in Moscow, 1963.
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 faci
litated 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.
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