11. First Years of the Putin Kremlin

PUTIN WAS NOT A POLITICIAN: He was unknown. So who put him in the seat of power and why? It had to be the oligarchs, those who ran everything, and needed some figurehead.

We aim at managing dissent rather than crushing it. This ensures that every opposition political persuasion had a voice provided by a Kremlin-backed political party or movement. Liberals, nationalists, statists, environmentalists, rightists, leftists – all were represented (infiltrated) by a series of doppelgangers, (clones), stooges and pastiches in a Kremlin-financed simulation of politics which lasted for over a decade. ‘It will go into the textbooks as one of the most colossally successful social swindles of a historic magnitude.’ (2,000 words)

LIKE Wall Street bankers financed Occupy Wall Street. They kept their finger on the pulse of the opposition. The Democratic Party financed the Black-Lives-Matter street-demonstrations. (Or their political donors financed it), and then gave the party their new “talking points”.

If there are people on the internet fighting against the regime, then there must be those who are for the regime. If there is an opposition demonstration, there must be a pro-regime demonstration. If the opposition has crazy people who do anything and break the law, then the regime has to have them too. Cold-hearted, ready to do anything, stamp on the portraits of their enemies.

Since Putin had come to power the accent had been on nationalism and patriotic symbols, in an effort to consolidate support around a tough, authoritarian Kremlin. Support for nationalism was growing every year along with a deep nostalgia for the vanished greatness of the USSR. The economic dislocation of the 1990s was partly to blame, but it was also a consequence of political technology and opportunism in the Kremlin, which saw nationalism as a ready-made program for political mobilization that simultaneously justified, in a vaguely emotional way, the strong state and authoritarian rule that Putin sought to implement.

[Later these nationalist “street-gangs” got out of hand, and formed an opposition. The Kremlin lost control over this portion of their strategy. I may write about it; but it makes for a lot of detail, maybe not so relevant to Russia Today.]

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Putin and his circle had learned one thing from the experience of his two predecessors, Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Both had enjoyed immense popularity at the start of their rule, but soon lost it – with catastrophic consequences. Gorbachev lost control of the state that he had been entrusted with; and Yeltsin nearly did too. The lesson was, in order to keep power, one had to win and preserve overwhelming popularity. And the failures of Gorbachev and Yeltsin taught the Kremlin (team) that popularity above all depends on studious focus on the national mood.

Polling, focus groups and spin-doctoring became a Kremlin obsession, as ‘political technology’ became the new religion of power – denoting the adoption of Western-style political messaging techniques, but with an authoritarian twist: the experience of Putin’s predecessors also taught “his team” that staying in power meant not tolerating any alternatives. An ‘election’, for instance, might involve massive fraud and disqualification of anyone deemed a threat to the ruling party; but it might also feature a huge number of surveys designed to register public preferences and to gather information on which themes resonate with the people, what they care most about and how to appeal to them.

Russians became consumers of politics, in the same way that they were consumers of cosmetics or electronic goods, with their opinions registered through tireless market research and sales data which filtered through opinion polls and focus groups to the Kremlin’s department of domestic politics and to Putin’s staff; who planned speeches, public appearances and other symbolic paraphernalia of the regime accordingly. But aside from influencing the decorative exterior of the Kremlin’s machine – there was very little left for Russia’s ordinary citizens to pronounce upon. Opinion polls had largely replaced any formal way of influencing the process.

Meanwhile, slowly but surely, any competition was removed. Oligarchs were cowed after the forced expulsion in 2000 of Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, the owners of the two main private federal TV stations (which were summarily nationalized), and the arrest and prosecution in 2003 of Mikhail Khodorkovsky on charges of tax evasion. Independent political parties such as the Communists, along with smaller liberal parties – the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko (Navalny)– were either subdued (in the former case) or excluded from parliament after the 2003 elections (in the latter two cases). The State Duma became ‘a machine for passing the necessary laws’, according to Pavlovsky.

Russians appeared willing to sacrifice their freedoms in exchange for rising living standards and law and order. The Yeltsin-era public commitment to democracy and press freedom was replaced with patriotic rhetoric, and nationalist symbols of great power. Putin’s Kremlin was a curious hybrid regime: deeply solicitous of the popular will, but hermetically sealed from the public all the same.

Putin started his presidency as something of a blank slate, with a gift for appearing to every potential interest group as nash (a Kremlin backed youth movement), or ‘one of ours’. Despite his hardliner image, for example; ✓liberals liked his free-market economics, such as land reform and tax reform, believing his nationalism was a bluff – symbolism and nothing more. ✓Conservatives, meanwhile, saw his overtures to the liberals as tactical, while they believed his real sympathies lay with them. It all presented a confusing picture for observers. Putin was like a Rorschach test: ✓he could appear to be anything an observer wanted to see. Nationalists and hardline statists – but also liberals who longed for a strong modernizer to cut through the entrenched political interests and introduce reforms – all warily embraced a man who represented an enigma.

Helped by large oil surpluses and the devaluation of the ruble in 1998, Russia’s economy began to boom. The elusive middle class that Western reformers hoped would be a bulwark of democracy and civil society, was instead fashioned by an authoritarian, paternalistic system. Rising incomes were supposed to lead to greater acceptance of liberal values. But the opposite was happening. The new middle class thought they owed their better fortune to Putin and to the social compact they believed they had made with him – giving away their freedoms in exchange for rising incomes. Products of the 1990s, they associated democracy with social anarchy and impoverishment.

Thus, affluence and optimism coincided with deepening nationalism. Following the first year of economic growth since the end of the Soviet Union, a study of publicly available opinion research by the Center for Political Technology in 2001 showed fresh optimism, combined with (for the first time in a decade) a near-majority of Russians (46 per cent) believing that the coming year would be better than the previous. But simultaneously, according to one study, ‘A mood which was formerly concentrated in the Soviet Communist subculture and limited to those with poor education, low income, and non-urban groups, has started to penetrate the layers of society which until recently acted as the agents of modernization’. Some 79 per cent of Russians, for example, felt the end of the USSR to have been a mistake, compared with 69 per cent in 1992; 56 per cent saw NATO as a ‘bloc of aggression’ rather than a defensive alliance, an 18 percentage point rise since 1997. One of the largest subcategories to subscribe to this view included those with higher education (68 per cent). Increasingly, nationalism was becoming the center of gravity in Russia’s domestic politics, and the Kremlin struggled to keep pace with this mood.

The Kremlin’s efforts to centralize power were mirrored in the centralization of the production of images and symbols. Pavlovsky was the public face of the Kremlin’s efforts at political technology, and during Putin’s first term he and his Kremlin handlers oversaw a shift in politics and the media away from the liberal parties and voices of the Yeltsin era, and towards a preponderance of more conservative and nationalist figures, to which they recruited Alexandr Dugin and his Eurasianists.

Dugin was given a small role on Russia’s First Channel TV, the great beacon of state propaganda, alongside the station’s deputy director Marat Guelman. Guelman was Pavlovsky’s partner in the Foundation for Effective Politics, a gallery owner with an almost endless supply of aerodynamic-looking designer spectacles which framed his chubby, cherubic face and permanent scraggly beard. His background as an art critic and collector gave him credibility when pronouncing enigmatically on the post-modernistic playground of Russian political theater.

Guelman had got to know Dugin in the 1990s as a Moscow art dealer who held weekly soirees at his gallery. The two men were very much part of the bohemian world of Moscow intelligentsia: Dugin was co-leader of the coolest fascist group in the city; Guelman was a liberal hipster who exhibited plainly subversive artwork – such as orthodox icons chopped up with an axe. Neither held against the other the fact that they came from opposite sides of the political spectrum: ‘We came from the same tusovka’, Guelman said of Dugin, using the Russian word for ‘clique’.

As deputy director of First Channel, Guelman was responsible for overseeing a shift in the way the channel covered news to suit the Kremlin’s needs. ‘Official censorship is direct prohibition. All the rest is just editorial policy’, he breezily told a journalist in 2005, in an interview which seems to have combined the unburdening of a guilty conscience with the pride of a maestro who could not resist an admiring glance back at his own work. Later in life, having left the channel and his political consulting business in 2004, Guelman looked back on the system he had helped to create with some misgivings. ‘In 1996, we beat the Communists, but in so doing, we gave the regime a tool for staying in power until the end of time’, he told me.

The changing landscape of journalism was mirrored in the changing political spectrum, partly engineered by the Kremlin and partly brought about by a growing conservative mood in the country. No liberal parties made it into the Duma in the December 2003 elections, largely thanks to another exercise in political technology called the United Russia Party, formed that year as a merger of Putin’s Unity Party (largely the creation of Pavlovsky) and the opposition Fatherland Party (headed by Putin’s former opponents Yury Luzhkov and Evgeny Primakov). Oil industry magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was an important bankroller of liberal political parties, was jailed the same year, in an unmistakable warning to other businessmen to stay out of politics.

The 2003 elections showed that politics in Russia had become almost entirely virtual – a combination of manipulation and populism that would characterize the ‘managed democracy’ of the first Putin era. The stars of the new era were not the politicians (who, aside from Putin, were viewed as unthinking marionettes acting out their lines), but rather the unseen puppet masters behind the scenes, the political technologists such as Pavlovsky and (before he left) Guelman. They had demonstrated their skills by getting Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. Then they had taken an unknown, relatively mid-ranking officer from the KGB – perhaps the least popular profession in the country – and made him president. As Guelman says:

“We took a guy [Putin] whose rating was on the same level as a statistical error in September, and by January he is the electoral leader. Three months later, he wins the presidency. Very impressive. But then how to keep it there? That has been the puzzle at the center of Russian politics ever since.”

Thanks to the efforts of the technologists, Putin’s approval ratings steadily rose throughout much of the decade, hitting highs of 60 and 70 per cent – unheard of for any politician. ‘He had the popularity scores of a celebrity, a football star or singer’, was how Pavlovsky put it. ‘He ceased to be regarded as a mere politician.’ Putin, he said, was viewed as a traditional tsar, who in the public imagination could do no wrong. In this centuries-old model of rule, Russians blamed the errors and injustices of the state on the bad ‘boyars’, or nobles surrounding the tsar, and blissfully assumed that the omnipotent tsar simply must not be aware of them.

The task of maintaining these ratings fell largely to the Kremlin’s Svengali-like chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, and his deputy Vladislav Surkov, head of the Kremlin’s department of domestic politics. These two men were important exceptions to the general rule that Yeltsin-era officials were excluded from the new Putin team. They retained their influence, according to Guelman, mainly because none of the ex-KGB men around Putin really understood how the ‘political technology’ worked: ‘They [the Putin’s team] didn’t understand how these ratings stayed so high and they were reluctant to risk any drastic changes to the machinery.’ After Voloshin’s departure in 2004, amid the fallout from the jailing of Khodorkovsky, the informal title of Kremlin grey cardinal passed to his deputy Surkov, who became something of a cult figure in Kremlin circles.

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