The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (20 page)

There are several possible reasons why they did this.

The most obvious was revenge – still smarting over their failed extortion attempt in 2006, they came across a
bona fide
kidnapping case that presented an excellent opportunity as an airtight extortion
weapon. But there was another potential motive. During that time, Chichvarkin was embroiled in a bitter debt dispute with MTS, one of the big three cellular providers in Russia, which was making overtures to buy out Yevroset on the cheap. Some media commentators have pointed to a connection between the kidnapping charges and a takeover attempt by MTS,
¹²⁰
but there is no proof of this.

Whatever their motives, in order to make a more damning case against Yevroset, Department K officials worked through the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s Office to try to prove not only that Vlaskin was kidnapped, but that the original case against him, for stealing phones, had been fabricated. And that the police department that fabricated the case was none other than Yevsyukov’s.

In January 2009, investigators started confiscating criminal cases from the Southern District Police Department. Many of the cases had been instigated but never pursued – and among them was Vlaskin’s. On February 2, 2009, investigators arrived at the department for another batch of documents, only to find that the hundreds of folders they were looking for were dumped in the rubbish bins behind the building. When the investigators tried to take the folders, they themselves were removed – practically by force – from the premises.
¹²¹

After the rubbish incident, investigators called in the head of the department – Viktor Ageyev – for interrogation. Most of Yevsyukov’s colleagues were interrogated over the Vlaskin case as well during that period, and it seemed that Yevsyukov might be next.

Indeed, Yevsyukov was eventually questioned in connection with the Vlaskin case – but only after his arrest for the shooting spree, in July 2009.
¹²²
Yevsyukov’s lawyer, Tatyana Bushuyeva, told me she knew of this questioning. She also said that Yevsyukov was held in a cell with someone she said was the “former head of security of Yevroset” – apparently part of a common practice where acquaintances were placed in the same cell to get them to talk about each other’s case.

But lawyer Mikhail Vokin, asked about the reports that Yevsyukov had been questioned, denied them, saying he was under oath to keep the investigation secret.

“In March, two FSB agents were attached to investigators conducting a probe of the Southern Police District department,”
Gervis told me. “There was pressure, and there were demands to hand [over] their superiors.”

On April 22, Viktor Ageyev filed his resignation papers, apparently in connection with the investigations at his department. Four days later, on the evening of April 26, his subordinate, Denis Yevsyukov, by that time the head of the Tsaritsino Precinct, snapped and shot nine people in a supermarket.

At the end of the day, it is immaterial whether or not the chain of events described above went to Yevsyukov’s head and caused him to snap – it cannot be proven either way.

Instead, it demonstrates something more interesting – an environment where there are no good guys among the players. A whole network of warring power factions, who, from top to bottom, from police generals to FSB colonels to investigators of the prosecutor’s office, down to the rookies in the local police precincts getting their
obrok
in watermelons, are all functioning according to the same pattern: the protection racket. Instead of protecting confusing, constantly changing laws, they are protecting the interests of their patrons.

Who are those patrons?

That is the biggest question. In a classical, absolutist monarchy, their chief patron would have been the sovereign, their king and country – which would have been the same thing. But Putin’s Russia, which has many of the trappings of an absolutist monarchy, refuses to see itself as such. The scholar Lilia Shevtsova has underlined the contradictions that this presents: Putin has preserved personified and undivided power, she writes. However, describing Yeltsin’s rule as “elected monarchy” she applies the same metaphor to Putin’s rule, “accenting the contradictions between personified power and the elective method of legitimizing it.”
¹²³

A maddening dissonance ensues: Putin had a theoretical option of “building a responsible system of governance based not on the irrational and mystic power embodied in the leader but on the rule of law.”
¹²⁴

But he either could not, or would not do so.

Those words were written in 2004; by 2013 that dissonance has only grown, amid contradictory laws that fail to work and Putin’s constant calls to fight corruption. Why, despite yearly orders from Putin – his personal orders, harsh, determined and ominous – does corruption only grow?

Given the messy framework of laws, the instructions given to the
siloviki
must be interpreted on a completely different level. What, from their perspective, is corrupt, and what is untouchable? Studying people’s attitudes towards bribery in post-Soviet Russia, sociologists Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath came across that same idea of sacredness that Russian political scholars are all too aware of: “The Soviet State… had a quasi-sacred character of invincibility and unquestionability, underpinned by harsh, numerous and well-organized internal security services.”
¹²⁵

What follows from this is a rationalization of corruption not as the violation of rule of law (which doesn’t exist), but as the whole sphere of private commerce in itself. Private commerce becomes corruption by definition. Given the concept of the government as “the all-encompassing domain of power and control, and the generator of legitimacy… any activities beyond the purview of the state [are] slotted into an opposed and subversive category of the spontaneous, uncontrolled, self-interested and morally dubious.”
¹²⁶

But state power in Putin’s Russia was only sacred when it wanted to see itself as such – in all other cases, it was a “democracy” with “rule of law.” And amid that dissonance, feudal relationships dictated to what extent commercial activities were balanced with their service to the state: the vassal of your vassal is not your vassal.

Order, in this case, pertains to the interests of state power – all else, whether it’s a businessman or a rival agency taking more bribes than they’re worth, is fair game.

The “all-encompassing” aspect of the Russian government isn’t just a mystical concept. It is primarily an economic one – especially if we remember that oil, gas and customs duties, not individual income taxes, constitute the bulk of federal revenue.

Seeing themselves as part of that all-encompassing economic entity, the milch cow for an enormous, chaotic and poverty-stricken country, security officers cannot help but see businessmen like Chichvarkin as sources of their own private income.

And this brings us once again to that unverified incident in 2006 when Putin called in Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and Economics Minister German Gref and told them to sort out the Department K racket.

There is no documented proof of this incident – and it may well never have happened, since we only have unnamed Yevroset sources speaking about it. But we know of similarly undocumented meetings which bore all the marks of behind the door instructions to clean up one of an endless multitude of extrajudicial messes. If this meeting indeed happened, then by its chaotic result we can only surmise that the initial instructions were utterly distorted on their way from Putin to Rashid Nurgaliyev, from Rashid Nurgaliyev to his deputies, and from those deputies to the head of Department K, Boris Miroshnichenko.

Whatever instructions were issued, corruption was fought selectively – and only against those that were fair game, outside the protective sphere of the government.

For that is what happens when, as Humphrey and Sneath put it, a “sacred” state “crumbles from the centre, when its leaders become mere fallible humans, and its parts are left largely to fend for themselves.”
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Given these ongoing transformations, it is no wonder that corruption becomes a security threat, and that security officers themselves begin to recoil from it – and it is wrong to believe that Putin has always had the loyal support of his security officers. The
siloviki
understand that Putin is a mere mortal, but something in their behaviour, in the structure of the relationships that they build with one another in the service of the state, automatically assumes that he is not.

They recognize this contradiction and they direct at Putin all their love and all their hatred: a love that is patrimonial and therefore purely economical (for he is their ultimate protector), and a hatred that is mystical – they cannot forgive him for being a fallible human, for extolling commerce as the chief ideology, and disgracing the very idea of state power.

“If anyone is behind Dymovsky, it’s God Himself.”
-
Alexei
, a retired police colonel and an associate of Dymovsky

“We are told, ‘don’t be afraid, nothing will happen to you, the System won’t betray you.’ This started in 2000, and it came from a person we all know, a man who will not betray his own kind. Vladimir Putin. Ever heard of him?”
-
Marat Rumyantsev
, reserve officer

FRESH OUT OF prison, with a police tail following him everywhere he went, Major Alexei Dymovsky poured me a glass of cheap wine at a provincial café and became apocalyptic.

“I know the structure of the police, I know how it works from the inside,” he said after I asked him what brought him to town. “Right now, someone is artificially creating tensions between the people and the police. Once the first shot is fired, it will all sweep over Russia. People will die. A civil war will begin.”

It was spring 2010, and Dymovksy was a media personality. Six months earlier, he had recorded a video address to Vladimir Putin complaining of rampant corruption that went viral. Within weeks of the video, he was jailed on charges of fraud. Once he was
released from jail in January, he began giving press conferences in Moscow and was eager to join a cause, whether it was standing up for whistleblowers or for the working man.

He’d just arrived in the Siberian mining town of Mezhdurechensk on the back of a mine blast that was sparking region-wide unrest.

“There will be blood here tomorrow,” he said as his eyes filled with tears, looking away from me with an expression of genuine fear and dismay.

There was no blood the next day, for the tensions had petered out after Prime Minister Putin raised base salaries and ordered the firing of a scapegoat. But even on his own, Dymovsky, this fumbling, sentimental cop who believed in conspiracy theories, for a moment emerged as an uncanny oppositionist force from the one place no one expected: the police. And while he would fade into obscurity by the time protests gripped the Moscow capital for real in 2011, he exposed a growing dissatisfaction not among the middle class oppositionists, but among officers serving the state.

The brutality, corruption, and depravity of the police force had become something of a backdrop by 2009, an environment that many no longer even noticed. Bribery was seen by political critics of Putin’s regime as the result of the very mindset of “these people” and their low salaries, as though it was hard for them to imagine that these wielders of force, the beneficiaries of what had
de facto
become a protection racket extending into all spheres of commerce, would ever rebel against a system that was seen as deliberately working in their favour to keep them loyal to the regime.

But that November, seven months after Major Denis Yevsyukov shot nine people in a Moscow supermarket, Alexei Dymovsky, another police major, from the southern Russian port town of Novorossiysk, shocked the whole country with a mere YouTube video.

Part of the shock element resulted from the exploding of a persistent Moscow stereotype, that of an enlightened elite of internet users versus the backwards masses who only watched television. The police force, for the most part, was seen as falling into the latter category, so the fact that a precinct officer from a provincial town would use the internet instead of his gun to try to prove a point
turned prevailing views on the relationship between the regime and its executioners upside down.

On November 5, 2009, Dymovsky, on the suggestion of a friend, created a personal website and posted two videos – one addressed to fellow officers,
¹²⁸
and one directly to the man he perceived as the boss of his bosses – Vladimir Putin. (Technically, the Interior Ministry answered directly to the president, but Dymovsky admitted to me that he had so little interest or knowledge of politics at the time that he “hardly knew what Medvedev’s name was.”) He was so nervous about the video address that he drank a glass of vodka before recording.

The videos showed a chubby, depressed-looking man in uniform baldly describing his grievances – stumbling over every other word. And the key complaints directed to Putin primarily focused on his working conditions – Dymovsky’s bosses were refusing to extend his sick leave and threatening to fire him.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich, I’m appealing to you as an officer of the police. Dymovsky, Alexei Alexandrovich. I’m currently not working, but I’m a senior operative. I’m appealing to you with the following request. Maybe you don’t know, maybe you’re not being told, but I want you to know how we live. Simple officers, simple police officers who solve cases, detain suspects, write up complaints, who work. I appeal to you. I live on 14,000 roubles (about £270) a month. I work 30 days out of 31 days in a month. I get no overtime. On Saturdays at 2 p.m., we’re told that since we don’t have any cases solved, we have to work until 8 p.m. I asked, ‘are we being paid for this?’ And I was told ‘no, this is the personal wish of the head of police.’ Recently I applied to a clinic because my arm was going numb. And I was told that I have to leave the clinic because they had an order from the head of police not to treat any officer.”