POLITICS Sticking power

ladimir Putin announced to the Rus- STEPHEN KOTKIN senior military officers, equivalent to lovsky argues that Russia, obviously no sian people in September 2011 that Putin's KGB types, to civilian posts, democracy, is also not sovereign. Rather, Vhe had decided to he their presidenl Gleb Pavlovsky whence they enriched themselves in the its system depends entirely on the global again, for a third term. Insulted by his pre- name of sovereignty and state security? Is economy, a variable Russia cannot control. sumption, as well as the now openly admitted GENIAL'NAYA VLAST' ! SLOVAR' not today's Georgia under Mikheil Saakiish- True, Pavlovsky deems Alexei Kudrin, until spuriousness of Dmitry Medvedev's four- ABSTRAKTSII KREMLYA vili essentially a one-man regime under last year the long-serving Finance Minister, year presidential interlude, much of educated 118pp. Moscow: Evropa. Paperback. which a tiny clique of associates holds sway the "Economic Surkov" for having pre- Russia seethed. In elections to the Duma on 978 5 9739 0207 0 over the executive, parliament and main empted economic risks to the system with December 4, United Russia, the regime's dis- Masha Gessen national television channels, with a constitu- the oil-money stabilization fund. Pavlovsky tributor of spoils, dropped seventy-seven tion altered by fiat and an opposition chased adds, in a further twist of the knife, that in seats, from 315 to 238 (out of 450), despite THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE from the streets with truncheons? We would contrast to the administrative "vertical" of recourse to brazen fraud. The latter, readily The unlikely rise of Vladimir Putin do well to understand that such regimes are Surkov "the budgetary-financial vertical of captured by smartphones, spurred public 314pp. Granta Books. £20. often feeble, even before they reveal them- Kudrin has been built and is functioning". protests on December 10, followed by further 9781 847081490 selves to be so, and yet they are not so easily Many other sobering arguments are voiced: US: Riverhead. $29.95. marches on December 24 and on February 4 dislodged. They wield numerous instru- that the system throws up "simulated dan- 978 1 59448 842 9 of this year, as Russians, despite bitter frosts, ments - tax police, courts, buy-offs - that gers - revolution, putsches, civil war. The turned out across the country in ever-larger Angus Roxburgh are useful only for certain tasks, like holding simulators are tolerated and sometimes numbers, exceeding 100,000 in Moscow. In on to power. Stalin excepted, the more paid"; and that "everyone has an interest in fact, demonstrations, strikes and railway THE STRONGMAN leaders in Russia have pushed for a "strong the current system - and everyone is dis- Vladimir Putin and the struggle for Russia blockades in Russia have been far more prev- state", the more they end up producing weak loyal to it! Everyone works as provocateurs 352pp. I. B. Tauris. £20 (US $28). personal rule and institutional mush. In the alent than generally appreciated, as Graeme 978 178076 016 2 of conflicts, which are settled with bonuses B. Robertson demonstrated in The Politics end, whether the current Russian regime from the pockets of other players". This, we of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing dis- Sean P. Roberts falls or survives, the colossal moderni/alion are told, is called "stability". sent in post-communist Russia (2010), using challenge will persist. Pavlovsky draws a telling contrast with PUTIN'S UNITED RUSSIA PARTY daily briefings dispatched by security offi- Russia's inventive electoral machinations Karl Rove's efforts under George W. Bush 240pp. Routlcdge. £90 (US $ 155). cials to the central interior ministry. Better 9780415669023 were immortalized in Andrew Wilson's Vir- to create a permanent Republican Party known is the circumstance that Russia has tual Politics: Faking democracy in the post- majority, which failed. The "Putin major- some 50 million internet users, and numerous Allen C. Lynch Soviet world (2005), still one of the best ity", he explains, encompasses people on the sites have long taken aim at Putin, corruption books in the field. Now, one of Wilson's col- state budget (such as pensioners), the work- VLADIMIR PUTIN AND RUSSIAN and misrule. ourful subjects, Gleb Pavlovsky, an adviser ing class, state functionaries and the security STATECRAFT whom the Kremlin recently threw under the Still, the Moscow eruptions shocked not 184pp. Potomac. £19.50 (US $24). services, and women. In other words, those just the complacent regime but also the pro- 978 1 59797 298 7 political bus, has written a biting assessment who bore the burdens of the Yeltsin testers, who began to carry banners such as of the regime he long served. Genial'naya "reforms", the losers of the 1990s, became "Mubarak, Gaddafi, Putin". A Mubarak scen- vlast'! Slovar' abstraktsii Kremlya (The the winners of the 2000s. The majority ario (a leader's forced resignation) differs stood out as utterly singular in writings on Genius of Power! A dictionary of the Krem- holds, provided the state budget can con- from a Gaddafi one (civil war and state col- Russia. Throw in Putin's KGB background lin's abstractions) takes the form of a mock tinue to find the largesse for its outlays, and lapse), of course, and neither prospect appears and all the lingering emotions and politics of imitation of regime insider-thinking, with the people continue to stay out of politics. in the offing. What i,s certain is that Russia is the Cold War, and Russia's ostensible singu- stentorian nonsense followed by © in the But now? If the election of 2000 institution- at an impasse, and has been since 2007, when larity becomes magnified. But the world text. Pavlovsky aims to settle scores with the alized the Putin majority, Pavlovsky con- Putin himself began hectoring the country knows myriad examples of personal rule, still more recently demoted arch-manipula- cludes, the election of 2012 will institutional- about the imperative to modernize. caudillos, juntas, in countries small and tor Vladislav Surkov, whose most famous ize the "permanent insulted minority". Boris Yeltsin, too, was once wildly popu- large. Did not Indonesia's Suharto appoint coinage is "sovereign democracy". Pav- Masha Gessen, in The Man Without a lar. But as early as 1993, the reported "yes" Face: The unlikely rise of Vladimir Putin, vote for his ham-handed "presidential" con- follows a different tack in exposing the nasti- stitution was inflated by Yeltsin's own pen, ness of the regime and those who greased its according to his former press secretary. path, yet should have known better (she Yeltsin's re-election campaign in 1996 omits Pavlovsky). Born in the Soviet Union, mobilized state coffers, a near-monopoly of Gessen moved with her family to the United television, and scare tactics about a possible States in 1981, returned to Russia in 1991, at return to Communism, while concealing the age of twenty-four, and became a fine from voters a heart attack the candidate magazine writer and author. Here, too, she suffered while campaigning. (Yeltsin spent employs a chatty, New Yorker-\ike style. "I much of his second term in hospital, woke up because someone was shaking me", referred to as his "dacha".) Putin's own she begins, setting the theme. Gessen, who experience in 1990s St Petersburg had discloses she has two children and lives shown him how Russian elections were won with another woman, counts herself a prime (or lost, as in his patron's case): with smear beneficiary of the Soviet collapse, which campaigns drawing on the slate budget and afforded her freedom and the good life of media, fake supporters to discredit candi- shopping for bathroom fixtures. During the dates, and other toxic tricks. By 1998, colos- 1990s, she was also robbed, however, and sal property theft, mass impoverishment, some of her friends were shot dead, which regional flouting of the federal constitution, spurs her to controlled anger and the search contract murders, separatism, terrorism, for someone to blame. Relying on her own self-serving oligarchs controlling the air- reportage, Oleg Blotsky's Russian-language waves, and foreign diktat had culminated biography of Putin (2001), and interviews in financial and psychological default. with people she tracked down who knew him Yeltsin had the decency to apologize when before he became a national figure - as well he stepped down early on New Year's Eve, as with the talented Paris-based journalist 1999, and named the little-known Putin as Natalya Gevorkyan (once tipped to record his successor. In effect, Putin will also Putin's autobiography), and the avuncular succeed in naming his heir - the same per- London exile Boris Berezovsky - Gessen son Yeltsin picked. denigrates Putin's Soviet-era KGB service. This one-man capture of the State has Vladimir Putin at Novosibirsk Academic Town Technology Park, February 17,2012 She taunts him for having been assigned to a

TLS MARCH 2 2012 POLITICS

"backwater of a backwater", then has Putin dent . . . realized that he now bore responsi- Westerners for assuming "Russia was just a years ago, hardly constituted the machine and his KGB pals secretly instituting a bility for the entire crumbling edifice of a Western country waiting to be freed". Then that supporters and enemies alike imagined. gangster regime already in 1990s St Peters- former superpower". Once, she acknow- he indulges his own disappointment, admit- This is the point, however, at which we could burg, which they subsequently manage to ledges that a governance "problem Putin ting he did not foresee post-Soviet Russia have used some political science to elucidate impose on all of Russia. How, one might was trying to address . . . was real". would turn out this way in the space of the gulf between power and authority. There object, could Putin be such a nonentity and twenty years. He concludes that Russians cannot be a genuinely strong slate with a yet take over an entire country? Well, he far cry from the conspiracy have not yet had a leader who provides both deliberately demobilized, weak society. fooled Berezovsky, the supposed kingmaker theories of The Man Without a stabilily and democracy, as if those things Putin's regime has the power to rip off and who installed him. Just ask Berezovsky. Face is The Strongman: Vladimir came primarily from a leader. coerce individuals, but it cannot ensure lhal Gessen shreds the credentials of the APutin and the struggle for Russia, Journalists over-emphasize immediacy its programmes are implemented and its laws former Mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly a mostly chronological retelling of the past and personality; political scientists usually obeyed. Sobchak, whom Putin served as deputy, twelve years by Angus Roxburgh, an old the reverse. But Putin's United Russia Party, This brings us to Vladimir Putin and Rus- impugning Sobchak for being a megalo- Russia hand. He takes us behind the curtain by Sean P. Roberts, draws on eighty-five sian Statecraft, the pick of the batch, by the maniac and demagogue who played the at the Kremlin press section, which he interviews in Moscow in 2007, thirty-three of American academic Allen C. Lynch. Lynch democrat while engaging with old elites. formally advised, and shows it pitifully them wilh "experts, including several journal- offers an economical and incisive, if at times (Russia's 50,000 self-styled liberals were incapable of grasping its image-making ists". The unironic author is at pains to dis- credulous, synopsis of Putin's efforts to evidently supposed to pull the chain and challenges. He is at his best in a chapter on guise the fact that his book is not a work of come to grips with Russia's place in the flush away the million-strong inherited fraught Georgian-Russian relations, captur- science but of local ethnography, and focuses world, drawing on the many excellent works Soviet nomenklatura.) In 1990s St Peters- ing the culpability on all sides. Often, how- on a fixed point in time. His fieldwork, how- on Putin in Russian and especially German. burg, Gessen writes, the authorities bugged ever. The Strongman - a tie-in to a television ever, yields choice quotes from Russian ana- Lynch argues that his occupancy of a series and beat journalists. They cut deals and series - devolves into analysis by access. lysts. Sergey Markov succinctly observes of of key posts - among them, head of the presi- pocketed the money without delivering the For example, Roxburgh narrates the Orange United Russia, "It's not a party. How to make dential administration in charge of investi- goods. They threw sulphuric acid in oppo- Revolution in Kiev in 2004, but he appears real parties, nobody knows". Georgy Satarov gating corruption, and head of the decayed nents' faces. And then they came to Moscow innocent of Chris Chivers's breakthrough tells him, "I don't think the power vertical is successor to the KGB - taught Putin that the - where, presumably, none of this was hap- reporlage, in real time, on the refusal to very effective and it's getting less and less Russian state under Yeltsin was a fiction. pening. Russia had democracy everywhere crack down by the SBU (successor in effective" - a statement, to repeat, of 2007. Pulin also learned the full details of the oli- Putin was not. Ukraine to the KGB). Instead, we get Accumulating these remarks, while making garchs' run of the house. Lynch observes There is more. When the voluble Sobchak Leonid Kuchma's self-serving post-facto passing allusions to other systems, Roberts that a genuine election in 2000 might have inconveniently recalled Putin's role differ- mendacities - because Roxburgh inter- indicates that United Russia is not a well-in- produced a far less loyal successor who ently from the emerging official line, he viewed him. Another example: in 2009, the stitutionalised one-party system such as could have exposed, and prosecuted, the was, Gessen implies, murdered by poison- newly installed President Medvedev Mexico's former PRI. United Russia tire- criminal self-dealing and incompetence of ing. She piles up the suspicious corpses, received the Editor of one of Russia's few lessly collects money from criminal busi- Yeltsin's democracy. During his first term recounting the death by polonium radiation real newspapers, owned by Mikhail Gorb- nesses, which pay for state intervention on as President, Putin defended Russian state of Alexander Lilvinenko in London and the achev and Alexander Lebedev, after another their behalf. Roberts also shows, however, interests and often made Solomonic deci- murders of the investigative journalists Yuri of its correspondents was executed. 'To feel that United Russia does some good. One inter- sions: outrageous corruption and malfea- Shchekochikhin and Anna Politkovskaya, the significance of this, you would have to viewee describes an association of parents sance were curbed without Utopian efforts to among others. Gessen's friends feur she may hear - as I have done - members of Putin's with disabled children whose 600 families eliminate either. Putin did eliminate the be next. She is right that the regime shrinks team fulminating against the newspaper", conceived worthy programme ideas but were humiliating Bill and Boris "summits" and from no act or method, but proving mailers Roxburgh writes. "I have heard (he prime too poor to realize them, until United Russia the era of IMF missions parachuting into is not simple. In her telling, the deadly terror- minister's men use obscene language uboul showed up to fund them. "All we needed to Moscow to dictate Russian personnel ist siege of a Moscow theatre turns out to it, and they told me Putin feels the same do in return", a woman explains, "was just to appointments. But if Putin helped restore the have been a convoluted set-up; and the fatal way." Actually, we "felt the significance" say it was United Russia's project." On bal- Russian state, Lynch observes, it came at a storming of a school held hostage in Beslan even without being privy to the swearing. ance, Roberts makes us appreciate that the high price. two years later was unnecessary (Putin Like many Westerners, Roxburgh scolds Russian political system, as observed five After twelve years at the pinnacle of power, could have acceded to the terrorists' with twelve more in prospecl, Putin remains demands). Tarring Putin, rather than just his at a loss as lo how to move Russia to the next associates, with corruption, she recounts the level, towards a version of the modernity he story of his supposed $1 billion dacha com- For Ruthie Rogers in Venice rightly says the country needs. As for the plex on the Black Sea, invoking the notion man-boy Medvedev, even now he continues of pleonexia (an "insatiable desire to have his enervating verbiage. "The old model, what rightfully belongs to others"). Con- (Bo Rogers died in November 2011, aged twenty-seven) which faithfully and truly served our state in versely, she tells us that Mikhail Khodorko- recent years, and did not serve it badly, and vsky, the jailed tycoon, "invested money Shoulders to cry on, which we all defended - it has exhausted and energy in constructing a new political these mooring posts, itself, he remarked on December 17. Why system". She offers a similarly one-sided trios leaning together, have these endless calls for modernization not account of the destruction of Vladimir Gusin- supporting each other: been answered? Masha Gessen has the sim- sky's empire ("The day the media died"), in grief and inconsolable. plest response: it was mostly a ruse. Angus where she used to work. Repeatedly, she Roxburgh's explanation comes via a Russian scolds the New York Times for its allegedly Mooring posts tapering to blunt black businessman, who tells him that corruption naive response to these events. Above all, like a lost child's lost crayons. "is the entire system - the political system, she frog-marches Putin's facilitators before the business establishment, the police, the her interviewer's court. Berezovsky, we The endless wash judiciary, the government, from top to hear, rues the day he ever helped him. of salt water. bottom, all intertwined and inseparable". Andrei Illarionov, who worked as Putin's See-through, threadbare, worn, Allen Lynch, too, singles out structural imped- top economic adviser, rues the day. William iments, as well as accumulated Soviet rot and Browder, who applauded Khodorkovsky's these great fogs like ghosts geopolitical constraint, some self-imposed. arrest before his own investment fund in slow flight from some slaughter. Russia wants to deal with the West and China was evacuated under duress, rues the day. from a position of equality, but it cannot; Gessen derides her peers for being taken The hoarse cries of fog-horns, Russia wants to be a global power centre in its in by Medvedev's talk of modernization lost in their loss, own right, the hub of a Eurasian Union, but it ("The intelligentsia ate it up"), then lets on with no way back, is not. Pavlovsky suggests another piece of that her recent boss, the ultra-rich Mikhail the answer, on top of the exigencies of the Prokhorov, a permitted presidential candi- and the world gone white global economy: Putin has exposed himself date, "just might topple the system". in a single night. as ever more cocky and vindictive, and bereft Briefly, Gessen's book slips out of its of the political agility of his first term, refus- trance. When Russia's giant Kursk sub- ing all concessions and unable to revive a marine blew itself up and sank, she writes, CRAIG RAINE sense of a future. Russia deserves better, but Putin, "a hundred days after becoming presi- is in line for more of the same.

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