Dozens more such family connections between government and the business world could be added to these. The daughter and son-in-law of Aleksandr Khloponin, the former Norilsk Nickel chairman who was federal envoy to the North Caucasus from 2010 to 2014, led companies dedicated to promoting business in that region; the son of FSB director Aleksandr Bortnikov was a senior vice president at VTB bank; Sergei Ivanov, son of the Putin ally of the same name, was president of the diamond company Alrosa; and so on.{45} The phenomenon extended from the national down to the local leveclass="underline" often, the children and spouses of regional leaders would be placed in charge of the leading firms in the area, in some cases turning both political power and economic activity into a single family concern.
Though nepotism was far from unknown under Soviet rule, its scale never came close to that reached in the Putin era, when familial ties became a mechanism for inheriting social rank, much as they had been in tsarist times. The steady stream of revelations about the riches of government figures and their families fuelled a quietly mounting popular anger, directed above all at the ruling United Russia party. At first this took the form of dark humour. In April 2011, the newspaper Vedomosti ran a story about the wealth and power accumulated by the children of United Russia officials under the sarcastic headline ‘They Were Just Very Lucky’. Around the same time, Navalnyi famously described United Russia as ‘the Party of Crooks and Thieves’, prompting some creative reinter-pretations of the party’s logo. In one, the iconic Russian bear was making off with a bagful of cash; in another, the beast had its hand in a giant honeypot. But soon the party’s well-known corruption prompted more active opposition, and became a central focus for the protests that erupted in December 2011 – as much as, or in some cases more than, Putin himself.
Corruption continued to be a prominent theme after Putin returned to power in 2012, and was the subject of a string of investigations made public by Navalnyi’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) – in retaliation for which Navalnyi himself was prosecuted several times. In March 2017 and again in June, corruption was once more the spur for rallies in dozens of Russian cities; although the main target this time was the riches accumulated by Dmitri Medvedev, many of the protesters aimed their rhetorical fire at Putin. In this, the protesters were far from alone: according to a March 2017 survey by the Levada Centre, a quarter of those polled thought Putin was ‘fully responsible for the scale of corruption’, and two-fifths found him responsible for it ‘to a significant degree’.{46}
There can be little doubt that a small number of people profited immensely from their access to power, and that a coterie of individuals around Putin did especially well. As the Russian analyst Dmitri Trenin pointed out in 2007, ‘It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Russia is run and largely owned by the same people.’{47} In addition to figures such as the Rotenberg brothers and Gennady Timchenko, there were the members of the ‘Ozero’ dacha co-operative, founded in 1996 by Putin and seven others, including Yuri Kovalchuk and Nikolai Shamalov, who were also on the US and EU sanctions lists. In 2016, the cellist Sergei Roldugin, a close friend of Putin’s, was revealed to be nominally in charge of $100 million worth of assets, according to information leaked in the ‘Panama Papers’; denying allegations that he was safeguarding the money for Putin, Roldugin breezily affirmed that he was ‘rich with the talent of Russia’.{48}
Yet the corruption, nepotism and ‘raiding’ so characteristic of the Putin era are not the malignant fruit of his rule alone, nor are they solely attributable to the vices of a few individuals. The ‘kleptocracy’ targeted by Western sanctions is merely the flesh-and-blood manifestation of a systemic feature: the blurring of the boundary between the state and the private sector. This in turn is the result of the particular form taken by capitalism under Russian conditions. The idea that Putin and his circle are somehow unusually crooked requires us to overlook the extent to which the entire Russian elite – from billionaire oligarchs to local kingpins – is driven by the same motives, and skilled in the use of the same predatory techniques. More importantly, it asks us to ignore the wider realities of profit-making in Russia, which are rooted in the system that was imposed in the 1990s, and which Putin consolidated after 2000. That system will not be affected by the sanctions regime, nor will it be altered in the unlikely event of Putin being removed from power before his term is up.
There is a memorable scene in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film Leviathan, set in a small town in the far northern Kola Peninsula, in which the town’s thuggish mayor pays a night-time visit to Nikolai, whom he has ordered to be evicted from his home. Red-faced and drunk, the mayor stumbles out of his chauffeur-driven car and says to Nikolai, ‘You should be able to recognize power’ (‘Vlast’ nado znat’ v litso – literally, ‘You should know power’s face’). Dmitri, the Moscow lawyer whom Nikolai has invited to help him, tells the mayor he has no right to be on private property, to which the mayor responds by shouting at Nikolai, ‘You never had any rights, and never will!’
One of the leviathans referred to by the title of Zvyagintsev’s film is the state apparatus, embodied in the swaying petty tyrant and his disregard for Nikolai’s rights. But in the film as in Russian reality, when isolated individuals try to oppose a crooked mayor or resist a ‘raid’, they are also up against a far larger machinery, in which state and business, profit and power, are interwoven, each sustaining and defending the other. It is all the more formidable an adversary because it is both elusive and all-pervading, abstract and yet substantial. It is both versions of the biblical monster that haunt the screen at different moments in Leviathan: a black whale that surfaces forebodingly from the sea, and a bleached skeleton embedded in the sand.
CHAPTER 3
Red Bequests
WITHIN THE WELTER of commentary on Putin’s Russia there is an overwhelming consensus that many, if not most, of the country’s problems hinge on the persistence of the Soviet past. These holdovers can take many forms, from the physical to the psychological. They include the rusting remnants of Soviet industry – Russia has hundreds of ‘monocities’, towns dependent on the survival of a single factory – as well as the authoritarian instincts of the country’s present-day rulers, which are widely held to be a continuation of dark precedents set by the Communist Party. More diffuse than either of these, but more insidiously powerful, is the idea that a Soviet mindset still lingers within society as a whole, a set of assumptions and habits forged by decades of submission to power that supposedly keeps Russians mired in passivity to this day.