Anything popular, they wanted to brand United Russia. So agreements were inked with seventy organizations, of all colours and causes, bringing even the potentially troublesome ‘Association of Chechens’ and the ‘Union of Georgians in Russia’, into Surkov’s fold.14 The most important of all recruits were the trade unions. Deals were signed first with the Oil, Gas and Construction Workers Union and then with the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia.15 In fact all forty-eight all-Russian workers’ organizations and seventy-nine regional trade unions ended up branded and integrated into the United Russia network.16
To make Russia more generous, but a place where that generosity was synonymous with the party, United Russia started pouring money into more than sixty social projects and national charities it ran itself – with the ‘bears’ out campaigning for the ‘Libraries of Russia’, supporting ‘Our Towns’ or ‘Our Parents’.17 Pretty much any popular cause was soon also a United Russia cause. In this spirit, companies were encouraged to make donations to the party: fifty-seven in 2009 obliged, giving anything from $15,000 to over $1 million.18 These donations were seen as a way of publicly declaring your loyalty, whilst also paying a political insurance premium in case they ever needed to ask officials – so many of them now ‘bears’ – for a favour.
This party construction effort sucked the elites into its orbit. By 2007, sixty-five of the eighty-three regional governments ruled under the party colours and, three years later, a whopping sixty of the Forbes top hundred powerful Russians were ‘bears’.19 But the party also had its eyes on the future. The youth groups that Surkov had sent Pavlovsky and Markov to found, Nashi and the party youth league, the Young Guard, were increasingly treated not as easily organized mobs but as a modernized Komsomol in which to groom the next generation. Several front men were ‘kicked-upstairs’ to the Duma to set a good example. Surkov wanted twentysomethings to have an orderly upbringing, not like his own, because: ‘We almost completely lost the youth of the nineties.’20
All these efforts were rewarded. In 2008, Medvedev referred to it as the ‘ruling party’ and Putin – who had until this point thinly pretended to be ‘above party politics’ – promptly became its leader.21 By the end of the decade ‘Edro’, as the party became known, was present in every corner of the federation. This slang name began as a joke, but slowly became more apt than funny – ‘Edro’ sounds like the word for atom, the building blocks for everything.
The party tried to pretend it had a greater purpose than just consolidating power for Putin – ‘Putin’s Plan’. When the party boss Boris Gryzlov, a grey and moustachioed gentleman from St Petersburg, was pressed by journalists in 2007 to explain exactly what this plan was, he snapped defensively: ‘Putin’s plan is simply the chosen course of the current president… Putin is the leader in charge of current strategy and this is why we have dubbed his ideas “Putin’s plan”.’22
In other words, the plan was whatever Putin wanted. Yet Mr Gryzlov was not hiding some shadowy agenda within the party, but the fact that ‘the bears’ were not really a party at all. The political technologist turned deputy, Sergei Markov, once admitted to me, in between hollering down the phone denouncing the opposition in a live radio interview: ‘United Russia is not a party, or not yet anyway, it’s just a mechanism for controlling people.’
He was telling the truth. The Kremlin had created United Russia as a tool. It was their appendage, not the other way round. The party had zero bureaucratic control over the Kremlin or Putin’s inner circles. The organization, in and of itself, had next to zero policy influence. This meant that United Russia looked like a party, was organized like a party and campaigned like one but was actually more of a bureaucratic patronage network dressed in mass-party clothes. The leadership was powerless, because power was in Surkov’s office. In other words, this was a recipe for corruption.
Once, I waited for Olga Krystanovskaya, an intellectual star within the party, in the lobby of Moscow’s Hotel National. It is a horrible, expensive place opposite the Duma, replete with thick, unattractive ochre carpets, miserable grey moustached bellboys and function rooms where oil companies announce big deals – but a place to be seen.
As the leader of the liberal faction of United Russia and a sociologist who has authored acclaimed studies on the composition of the political elite, I expected Krystanovskaya to give me a more subtle, even positive understanding of the party than Markov. After yapping at the waitress for the hotel restaurant to ‘cook it now’, she rolled her eyes at questions about United Russia’s internal debates.
‘You don’t understand, we are not a party like you have in the West, where the decision-making centre is inside the party. We have a decision-making centre outside the party, so when we get the order we move. When we have no orders we don’t.’
When even its most senior members spoke of United Russia like this, it was only a matter of time before videos would start to leak, showing what the Duma now looked like. Managed democracy had rendered the chamber so lifeless that deputies increasingly could not even be bothered to turn up. In 2003 it was estimated that as many as fifty-seven of them had not attended more than three times, a figure that rose to ninety-seven two years later.23 ‘It is simply shameful to watch the empty seats’, publicly cursed Medvedev in 2010, ‘You must go to work!’24 He had perhaps seen this infamous clip. In the near empty Duma, deputies could be seen clambering over empty chairs to press the ‘yes’ buzzers of those not present. Some of the few deputies there are sleeping through the vote, slumped like drunks asleep on the metro.
As the Kremlin built up United Russia as a patronage system and United Russia asphyxiated the Duma with its majority, the chamber quietly died as a meaningful institution. Most of its new members had little interest in being politicians at all, rarely giving interviews and spending as little time as possible in the debating chamber. The number of deputies that could be named even by keen observers seemed to decrease year after year, as less and less pretended to lead political lives. Even their own men were forced to admit that something was going awry.
‘I know it is a rather paradoxical situation,’ grudgingly noted the young Nashi lawmaker Robert Shlegel, one of Surkov’s rising stars, ‘that we have a lot of members of parliament who are… not public people.’
All this was not lost on the ‘great puppet master’ himself. At their closed meetings, Surkov lambasted the ‘bears’ as failures and profiteers:
You cannot always be on life support! You need to be smart to survive… More importantly you need to enhance the thinking process. The intellectual life of this party is at zero. If only you could have come up with some interesting comments, like, ‘We hoped for the best but it turned out like always’… but nothing. However, if you sleep colleagues, nothing terrible will happen. We will consider you a trailer and we will be the engine.25