The pictures get to the heart of who Surkov is – and the insincerity at the heart of the Putin project. This is a man who is believed to have written a play under a pseudonym, the maiden name of his wife, which denounces the very system he had created and called it Around Zero. In the drama’s introduction he wrote: ‘this is the best book I have ever read’.2 ‘In Russia to be a gangster,’ cries out its central character, ‘is not to err but to conform.’3
The story of Vladislav Surkov, in his ten years as the ‘grey cardinal’ who managed democracy from this office, is not only the story of how the system was built – it is the story of how Russia is ruled.
The forces that had weakened Yeltsin’s Kremlin had been raucous TV and a raucous Duma. To tame these for Putin, the ‘grey cardinal’ brought politicians onside in hundreds of little meetings in this office. ‘He asked what I wanted from him materially in return for joining the party,’ remembers Vladimir Ryzhkov, at the time the deputy speaker of parliament, ‘When I told him that I wasn’t in need of anything, Surkov was genuinely surprised.’4
Surkov created his clients by corrupting them. This office was one of the operations centres of a racket that a US Embassy cable source (his name deleted) described with ‘officials going into the Kremlin with large suitcases and bodyguards’, which the source speculated ‘are full of money’, and ‘governors collect money based on bribes, almost resembling a tax system’.5
It was from this office that the Kremlin orchestrated the most important ‘no-alternative elections’. Any genuinely dangerous opposition candidates were allowed no coverage on the national TV stations it oversaw, let alone allowed to register to compete directly in any votes. This meant that unless you read one of the liberal newspapers with a tiny circulation, or a few blogs – out in the provinces the opposition simply did not exist.
That was, of course, if there were any left – as so extensively were potential enemies, even former foes, brought onside with plum but powerless positions in the establishment. The opposition leaders left officially competing for the Kremlin, the ones on Surkov’s speed dial, had been turned into Putin’s clowns. They include: the buffoonish half-Jewish anti-Semitic nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose ‘policies’ have included suggesting bringing polygamy into practice in Russia, reclaiming Alaska or a 2008 modest proposal to drop nuclear bombs in the Atlantic Ocean to flood Britain; also the perennial leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, who called for the ‘re-Stalinization of Russia’. They secured in the mind of the majority of badly informed Russians an impression that anyone opposing Putin is a fool.
All of this created a system rigged for only one force to win, United Russia – the party of power.
Send in the Bears
It was another idea of the accidental father of Putin’s Russia – Boris Berezovsky. It was 1999 and ‘Operation Successor’ was nearing conclusion, but the oligarch was not fit enough to celebrate. He had contracted hepatitis and with acute pains down his spine was lying in a hospital bed ‘in delirium’, tied up to a drip, fantasizing about a Kremlin party, a new party of power.6 ‘I had a temperature of 39ˆC, but at such moments the thinking process gets better. At first I began to think about the symbols of this movement… the Volga River came to me, then birch trees… but in the end I settled on a bear.’7
One of the men who came to visit Berezovsky was the new first deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov. This young man was the big thing in Moscow PR and had been brought into the family by Voloshin, the chief of staff. They knew they needed the best ‘political technologist’ going and looked no further than who was working for the oligarchs. It was the 1990s and Surkov had 1990s dreams – ‘I wanted to be like the hero in the movie Pretty Woman’, as he put it.8
The young Vladislav Surkov hadn’t always been called this. He was a natural at PR because he was used to half-truths. He was born as Aslambek Dudayev in the Chechen village of Duba-Yurt in 1964. His mother was a Russian schoolteacher, his father a Chechen who had gone off to military college and never came back. Once she realized they had been abandoned, his mother took him away from Chechnya, back to Ryazan in central Russia, where she changed his name to that of her own family – Surkov. He was then five years old.
They remember him as a brilliant young man, who was a hit with the girls. As Russia threw off communism, which he called ‘an enormous parasite’, he was experimenting with careers at a dizzying rate.9 First metallurgy, then two years in the army (they say it was military intelligence) in socialist Hungary, then back to Moscow and drama school, from which he was expelled for fighting. At the age of twenty-three he was recommended as a bodyguard to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who upgraded him almost immediately to the business team. ‘He was a real hipster,’ his colleagues remember, sometimes not pitching up to work before lunch.10 But he was so brilliant that he managed to put the first advert on Soviet TV for Khodorkovsky’s Bank Menatep. But he fell out with the young tycoon, who refused to make him a partner, winding up at the rival Alfa Group doing PR to further their bid for Russian domination. This is where the ‘family’ found him.
‘There are no limits to a man’s flexibility,’ Surkov shrugged when asked about the arrest of Khodorkovsky, his former friend.11 By then Surkov was famous in Moscow as an icon of post-modern cynicism, who smoked constantly, loved Allen Ginsberg and was always at the best gallery openings. Yet despite all this, he was the one who was building in the name of Putin the party that had been born in Berezovsky’s delirious mind – United Russia.
The half-real, half-imagined Yukos threat had taught the Kremlin that it needed to make sure that it had a rock-solid control of the Duma. The half-real, half-imagined Orange threat had taught the Kremlin it needed propaganda and a huge support base to block what had happened in Kiev from ever happening in Moscow. Surkov had proved his loyalty to Putin when he did not resign – like his old patron Voloshin – during the Khodorkovsky affair. The consequences of the Yukos threat and the ‘Orange menace’ was that Putin came to see that the propaganda and political party projects Surkov was running were not just important but vital. They were upgraded and so was he, to the level of presidential aide in 2004.
He was now running the campaign against the ‘Orange threat’ and building the party. ‘The bears’, as United Russia was known, was no longer what it had been in 1999. In its first election that year (then known as Unity) it had only got seventy-three seats, just over 23 per cent of the vote and come second to the Communist Party. Now halfway through Putin’s first presidency, Moscow was talking very differently. ‘The aim for this party,’ said the then leading United Russian deputy Sergey Markov, ‘is to create a party that could rule Russia for fifty years like the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan or the Christian Democrats in Italy.’ This was when Surkov’s career really took off. Though never promoted to have an official role in the party, perhaps because the revelation of his Chechen heritage excluded him from high elected office, Surkov was by mid-decade seen as the party’s official handler.
His project grew to gigantic proportions, with the Kremlin throwing all the energy into building up the membership base, the party infrastructure and the alliances it needed to ‘rule for fifty years’. His political technologists and cadres distributed the party card far and wide, amassing 300,000 members a year and topping the 2 million mark in 2008.12 The number of ‘bears’ kept on multiplying, as unofficially the authorities encouraged every official, policeman and ambitious businessman to sign on. The age when there was a ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ party membership had returned. ‘Bear bureaus’ were popping up everywhere – creating a vast network to campaign under slogans like ‘Into the Future with Putin’ or ‘Putin – Strength’. They opened no less than 2,597 district and 53,740 local offices from coast to coast.13