So let us ask: if a general fighting for a democratic Russia, who views his oil company as ‘ammunition’ for his forces, leads his men into a forest, refuses to ‘go on one knee’ (no matter if it would have been good tactics), gets surrounded then captured, has his ammunition stolen from him, his men scattered and is imprisoned in the Gulag – is this general a hero, or is he a failure?
As I sat reading Khodorkovsky’s letter from his faraway cell for the first time it was these words that struck me. They came from a man who considered himself both:
My impression of Russia has not particularly changed in jail. Actually, I did not have any illusions before either. It is a huge backward country with a very segmented, weak society and an atomised population, the majority of whom feel themselves not to be citizens, but serfs to various kinds of ‘bosses’.
Of the new things I now feel – only that of my own personal responsibility for what is happening, which weighs very heavily on me. The responsibility of a person who could and can change something, and this means I must at least try. The older I get the more frightening it becomes to face the Creator. I believe more and more: He gave us strength, and He will ask us to account for how we have thoughtlessly wasted it on secondary things. Someone who does not believe has it easier in this sense, perhaps.
Authoritarianism is Weakness
Putin’s circle has never felt fully secure for long. Shocks have constantly left them on the defensive, cobbling the system together in an ad hoc, unplanned manner, as threats to power emerged. This is a government that spends vastly more of its time in crisis management mode than the White House.
Crisis makes the personality of a leader central. When a problem suddenly explodes and engulfs the agenda, what matters are not his beliefs or his programmes but gut instincts, the way he improvises. Politics under pressure is how you react on your feet, not how you implement a plan. Gorbachev’s instincts were ultimately democratic. Yeltsin’s were those of a megalomaniac. Putin’s instincts proved anti-democratic, paranoid and authoritarian. They could even be called Chekist – the Russian expression for a secret serviceman’s world-view.
Kasyanov’s tenure as prime minister saw the Putin government evolve from one that was considered liberal by the Russian elite into entrenched authoritarianism. He believes there was no plan – this was the product of cumulative reactions:
Putin’s authoritarianism was about eliminating risks to his power – free TV became a risk, it was eliminated, when elections became a risk, they were eliminated, when parliament became a risk, it was eliminated – this is all because Putin was frightened of genuine competition. It moved step by step, as each risk appeared he reacted forcefully to it. Putin was frightened of being exposed.
Kasyanov is right – Putin’s turning points came when he felt hunted. TV and Khodorkovsky, the two things that had threated to expose him, were destroyed. Yet why did a regime with virtually no effective opposition in the early 2000s fear criticism so intensely? Why did a hugely popular president – who had conquered Grozny and passed effective reforms – fear open competition?
The answer is that Khodorkovsky was right. Russia’s economic crisis was over but its governance crisis was not. And the reason Putin became so frightened of him is that he was exposing that in his speeches. The government was failing in basic tasks – behind the telepopulism there was no let up in corruption, terrorism and lawlessness. Khodorkovsky knew that had Putin’s real record been discussed on national TV it would not have shone. His popularity was not in sync with his performance. Contrary to what the public was being told during Putin’s first presidency, the country actually saw more murders, more terrorist attacks and greater corruption than under Yeltsin. This grim record is what made TV censorship and silent oligarchs so important for the Kremlin.
Despite the counter-terror bravado of ‘wasting them in their outhouses’, Russia’s rising numbers of victims stood out internationally. Between 2001 and 2007 the country lost 1,170 lives to terrorist attacks, making it the third most terrorist-prone country in the world after Afghanistan and Iraq. In those same years Israel lost ‘only’ 158 lives and Pakistan ‘just’ 222.54
Every attack uncovered incapable officials, corruption and trails of collusion. The 2002 Dubrovka theatre siege in central Moscow shocked Russia, both because its crack troops proved cack-handed and because, despite all the military efforts in the Caucasus, some forty terrorists with large amounts of weapons could still be casually driving around the capital. In the Dubrovka theatre more than 1,000 theatregoers were held hostage by Chechen terrorists and 140 killed in a bungled assault. Unconscious bodies, knocked out by a mysterious gas used by Russian special forces, were left in piles outside the theatre, many choking on their own vomit. This horror could not be kept off TV. One expert estimated that it left 30 million people needing ‘psychological help’.55
Nor was this the end of it. Attacks with the impact of London’s 7/7 bombing kept on coming. In 2004, two passenger jets exploded after leaving Moscow’s main airport. The dismal cause of the security breach was that both of the suicide bombers had bribed airport staff $140 to be let aboard.
Yet the most graphic illustration of Putin’s failure took place in a Christian town in the North Caucasus. Beslan is a synonym for carnage in Russian. Here the rain comes down from the mountains and the air is filled with the tension of a frozen conflict. Local North Ossetian security forces spit at neighbouring Chechens and Ingush. They are not seen as fellow people of the Russian federation, but enemy tribes. Moscow is not spoken of like a modern federal centre, but as the imperial centre – the armed pacifier, policeman and arbiter of the mountains. ‘When I was in Russia,’ is the way the locals talk; ‘over in Russia things are different’.
In their wide cemetery are the faces of hundreds of murdered children engraved on the stones. Toys, sodden teddy bears and rotting plastic playthings are left on the graves. And bottles of water, dozens of bottles of water. The cemetery is enormous for a sleepy town – it has to be, to bury an entire generation.
In September 2004, almost a year after Khodorkovsky was arrested, a Chechen and Ingush militia stormed the school of this poor ethnic Ossetian town, where posters shouting ‘Brotherhood and Unity for the people of the Russian Federation’ suggest that things are otherwise. The militia held the children hostage. When Russian forces assaulted it over 385 of them died. Beslan lost a generation in the cruellest of ways – for days they were given no water. That is why there are bottles of water on their graves. ‘They will not be thirsty in the afterlife,’ coughed an Ossetian official at the cemetery gates. The traces of flame-throwers used by Russian troopers inside the school smelled of incompetence as much as savagery.56
Five years after Putin had come to power, Beslan was proof that he was failing to keep Russians safe. The child massacre, with its subplots of official bungling, callous indifference and missed opportunities to negotiate, pushed Putin further into authoritarianism as a way of ‘limiting risk’ to his authority. After the slaughter, government rhetoric now began to sound dark and anti-Western, implying that foreign powers were behind the attacks. Speaking about foreign power in a way that had been little heard in Russia since the early 1980s Putin warned: