Kremlin leaders instinctively surround their regime with the fog of authoritarianism. They should not be surprised if one day complaints about cronyism, corruption and mismanagement undermine the throne. Today it drives Russian money out of the country and allows this foreign money into the country only where, in the natural resources sector, the rewards are tangible and reasonably safe.
By posing as the biggest bully on the block, Russia, instead of developing the CIS into a meaningful Commonwealth united by common concerns, division of labour and complementary interests, or building a stable, energy-based relationship with Europe, falls victim to a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, when the US Secretary of Defense gave a reply to Putin’s outburst, that Robert Gates remarked, jokingly: ‘From one ex-spook to another ex-spook, I have gone through re-education.’ The trouble is that most Russian ex-spooks still have to graduate in the real world.
5
Russian breakdown
‘What is Russia? Russia is the country where one can do the greatest things for the most insignificant results.’
Sometimes the remains of empires past can be awe-inspiring and an inspiration to later generations. This is certainly true of the Romans from the Jordan river to the pillars of Hercules and from the wastelands of northern Africa to Hadrian’s wall on the British Isles. The British Empire left not only the sombre architecture of its military cemeteries all over Europe, Africa and Asia but also had a lasting imprint on institutions and the layout of capital cities from Toronto to New Delhi. Even the Russian Empire left its military citadels, monasteries and Orthodox churches across the wide stretches of Eurasia, from the white snows of the north to the shores of the Black Sea. The Soviet Empire, by contrast, will not be remembered for the beauty of its buildings or the fascination of its institutions. The promise of the workers’ and peasants’ paradise, mobilizing a dead-tired population at the end of the First World War and subsequently fascinating its intellectual fellow travellers and artistic admirers all around the globe, ended, inevitably, in misery and poverty, frustration and bitterness. Even today’s rulers of Russia draw little inspiration from a failed empire once believed – and feared – to inherit the earth.
Vestiges of empire
What Muscovites call the Northern River Port is a case in point. A wide-berthed canal links the capital with the Volga river to the north. The many hundreds of miles of waterway were dug under Stalin in the years from 1933 to 1937. No fewer than half a million human beings, men and women alike, are said to have been worked to death, and the earth walls on both sides of the canal are haunted cemeteries – unless a capitalist suburbia for Russia’s nouveaux riches takes possession, bringing with it clubs, marinas and golf courses. In recent times, just opposite the landing bridges, a nuclear submarine, black and menacing, is rusting away at some time in the future it is supposed to house a museum for Soviet naval ambitions during the Cold War. On the side of the Leningradskoye Chaussee white luxury liners of generous proportions are moored. The passengers seem to be elderly American Rotary members, husbands and wives, who have booked a package tour to see not only what is left of the evil empire of the past but also to get a taste of post-Soviet capitalism’s rough and tumble. Perhaps, as in my case, they are also participants in a conference which helps today’s Russia to present itself to the outside world in a way compatible with the self-respect of an imperial power that has lost its empire and is searching for new meaning, direction and equilibrium.
The long landing quay is separated from the adjacent parklands by a building with huge arches that could have been transplanted from the Crimean peninsula to these northern shores were it not for the brutal foundation walls of a huge spire which still carries the conquering Soviet star adorned with hammer and sickle. More than 130 metres into the sky, under Stalin and his successors it celebrated the glory and the threat of Soviet power. Today it is a shabby reminder of a past which Russia’s modern rulers have by and large chosen to relegate to the archives. No one can tell for how long the hands of the big clock, halfway up the spire, have remained frozen at twenty past five. The building is by now, no doubt, a hazard to everybody walking through it or shopping at some of the stores selling tickets or guidebooks to the city. Everywhere decay is conspicuous, but without the charm of Rome and the Roman Campagna so attractive to northern visitors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here no grand tour is on offer but only the melancholy of a suffering past and endeavour wasted. The people who go about their business, young couples flirting or busy mothers pushing prams seem to be completely unaware of the deeper meaning of those ruins. Or they find it useless to ask for sense and direction in a past that they refuse to own. Moreover, almost two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, they have grown used to the less horrific expressions of Stalin’s horrors; Stalin is no closer to them than Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. If they find anything meaningful in the remains of the revolution and its bloody aftermath it is a recognition that life can be, as Thomas Hobbes once put it, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and that you had better enjoy the good post-Soviet days while they last. Who can tell for how long? Today, it is the order of Putin, of the oligarchs and the FSB – heir to the KGB and the Cheka and the Tsar’s Okhrana – reigning over the 13 million inhabitants of Moscow and throughout the far-flung Russian domains.
The charms of the Leviathan
The new order justifies itself by being, after a century of turmoil and upheaval, a sort of order. This legitimacy will hold as long as it can deliver the goods. Over the best part of a decade and probably well into the future, rising oil and gas prices are buoying the government of President Putin and his successor. Moreover, the government has successfully suggested to the people that it is not the world market, globalization and the demand from the industrial world outside that drives Russian growth but the wisdom of the people running the Kremlin, Gazprom and internal intelligence. Muscovites, except in the poorer neighbourhoods beyond the inner city, look better fed and better clad than ever in living memory. They no longer look like the characters populating Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita or Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, haunted, hungry and nervous.
The long queues in front of the shabby shops of the past, selling standard staples, are no more. Instead, middle-class cars crowd the streets twenty-four hours a day, causing gridlock and aggression, with many a Porsche and black BMW, not to mention the huge Mercedes limousines preferred by high government officials or, in the even more expensive armoured version, by oligarchs, caught in the middle of never-ending traffic jams. Kremlin cars, invariably black limousines driving in convoy, force their way, blue and red lights flashing, through the lanes respectfully opened by motorists who are not normally lacking in punch and aggressiveness.