The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (28 page)

A massive billboard campaign followed on Moscow’s streets, picturing a pensive Prokhorov over the slogan “Right is might” and emboldening hopes that a new, viable party was in the works.

Right Cause’s PR strategy seemed both to flaunt its Kremlin blessing (as the only factor that would ensure its entry into Parliament) and deny it – for acknowledging it outright meant admitting that any politics that occurred in Russia did so at the bidding of the Kremlin. Thus, Prokhorov reportedly assured his supporters that he had agreed to lead the party on four conditions: unlimited access to federal television channels, guaranteed immunity for himself and his business, guaranteed immunity for everyone that he brought into the party and even the post of prime minister if Right Cause were to garner enough votes in the parliamentary elections.
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It took less than two months to test whether a puppet party could turn into the real thing. It couldn’t.

In August, Boris Nemtsov, who had gone on to co-chair the unregistered Parnas democratic party along with former Prime
Minister Mikhail Kasyanov after leaving Right Cause, warned Prokhorov that he was clearly underestimating Vladislav Surkov.

“I’ve known Prokhorov for a long time, we have good relations, and I think that he made a big mistake by agreeing to head a puppet party,” Nemtsov said in public comments. He added that the party was being “handled” by Surkov – a fact that Prokhorov surely could not have ignored when he announced his conditions for heading the party, for his constant communication with Surkov about the party was later publicly confirmed.
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But tensions came to a head when Prokhorov apparently started interpreting the third clause of his conditions – immunity for those he brought into Right Cause – a bit too literally. One of his most controversial moves and arguably the decision that cost him his party was introducing Yevgeny Roizman, a former Duma deputy and an anti-drug crusader, as a candidate for parliament from the Right Cause party. It was a candidacy that did not have approval from the Presidential Administration, and it was easy to see why.

Roizman founded the City Without Drugs foundation in his home town of Yekaterinburg in 1999. The foundation was notorious for the brutal rehabilitation regimens used to treat drug addicts – but also for reducing deaths from overdoses in the city by 90 percent.
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A rugged, streetwise poet, he managed to muster 40 percent of the votes to represent his region as an independent parliamentarian in the federal State Duma in 2003. As a deputy, he served on the State Duma Security Committee and advised the government on its anti-drug programme. But his image as a non-conformist earned him easy enemies, and his methods made him difficult to get along with. Prosecutors even tried to have his parliamentarian immunity revoked in 2007 over a fist fight with an opponent during a live debate.
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For Prokhorov, who was grooming Roizman for anti-drug minister in his “shadow government,” the crusader was a man of action who could draw votes. But for the Kremlin, he was clearly a liability – a man with that kind of record could not easily be managed, and a free radical in a party that had the Kremlin’s blessing to be in the Duma did not mesh with the very premise of “managed democracy.” Though Gozman and others inside Right Cause would tell me that Prokhorov made a number of unpopular personnel decisions and undermined his authority with a diluted ideological
platform, Prokhorov’s insistence on keeping Roizman on the ticket ultimately led to his standoff with the Presidential Administration.

Roizman himself attributed it to the Kremlin’s concern about his popularity. “I think that with our joining, [the party] started getting more [potential votes] than they expected,” he told me. “Prokhorov started surrounding himself with independent people. It is impossible to pressure him. They started fearing that it would get out of control.”

By early September, rumours were circulating that Prokhorov would leave the party.

And so it was no surprise that on the first day of the party’s convention on September 14, party functionaries widely seen as loyal to the Presidential Administration barred Prokhorov loyalists from the convention. A mysterious group of 25 “dead souls” that no one among Prokhorov’s supporters had heard of appeared on the party tickets and were to be voted on that very day. In a desperate bid to salvage his position at the party Prokhorov called a snap press conference to remove the upstarts, insisting that he was not going anywhere despite rumours and reports that he had already been expelled.

If Prokhorov was aware that day of where the disfavour was coming from, he did not show it. As if he still hoped to strike a deal with Surkov, he blamed the takeover on a single administration official by the name of Radi Khabirov – ignoring the administrative chain of command in Russian political structures that made such bold initiative unlikely for such a low-placed official. Asked repeatedly about his negotiations with Surkov, he was forced to admit that they were taking place, but pretended to see nothing out of the ordinary about having to discuss the plans of a purportedly independent political party with the first deputy chief of staff officially responsible for managing Russia’s domestic political scene.

He dodged the question the first time. But when the barrage kept coming he was forced to admit his talks, evading what exactly Surkov was getting at.

“I have not discussed this situation with Surkov. I can say that yesterday Surkov invited me and simply asked to tell him about the preparations for the convention. Nothing was being approved with anyone. Yes, I had a meeting with Surkov, and I informed him about the convention.”

When I pressed Prokhorov about the party’s closeness with the Presidential Administration, he continued to deny it.

“It appeared that way to you, not to me. I’ve always said that I made decisions in this project myself, and I dealt with the party myself.”

Asked about Putin and Medvedev, Prokhorov unwittingly revealed his key miscalculation in the whole affair: that the pressure coming from the Presidential Administration was merely the arrogance of bureaucrats, that having the backing of both members of the tandem, he just needed one meeting to explain to Putin and Medvedev what was happening, and his problems would go away.

“Does Putin know?” someone asked.

“I don’t know. I will try to inform all the political figures.”

“What will you do if you learn that the initiative that you leave this post is coming from the country’s leadership?”

“This is pretty easy to determine. And we will determine it tomorrow…. I just want to figure out what happened.”

The next day – September 15 – everything spilled out into the open. Prokhorov quit the party and, seeing that he had nothing to lose in his dealings with the Presidential Administration, lashed out at Surkov in an attack not seen since Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s fateful criticism of Vladimir Putin in 2003. If Prokhorov could not save his party, then he could at least dismantle the façade that he seemed to have been fooled into keeping in place for so long.

“I have felt with my own skin what a political monopoly is, when someone calls you every day and gives you all sorts of orders, tries to introduce his own people into the lists, pressures regional headquarters and takes party members arriving in Moscow straight to the Presidential Administration for talks,” Prokhorov told his supporters even while Kremlin loyalists were voting him out of office and approving their own party lists at a separate, breakaway convention.

“There is a puppet master in this country who has privatized the political system. His name is Vladislav Surkov. As long as people like him control the process, politics is impossible. I will do
everything to get Surkov sacked.”
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It was an emotional outburst unprecedented for an oligarch who had less than twenty-four hours ago shown the utmost deference to that very puppet master. Something had occurred on the night of September 14 that changed Prokhorov’s tone.

By most accounts, after the press conference Prokhorov met with Surkov once again for talks that lasted until two in the morning. There is no official account of what was discussed, but according to the most plausible version, Prokhorov told Surkov outright that he would take up the matter with Putin and Medvedev directly. Surkov, in his casual way, indicated that he might do as he liked. But what he apparently did not say was that it would be of no use.
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Prokhorov tried to get an audience with Putin as early as Wednesday, September 14, but the audience was reportedly denied. After the decisive announcement on September 15, Prokhorov publicly stated that he would try to meet with Putin.

Asked how exactly he would try to get Surkov sacked, Prokhorov mentioned “public political methods.” And right afterwards, he said, “I’ve already called the reception of the president and the prime minister and asked for a meeting. They have a busy schedule, I hope to meet within seven to ten days.” In another interview, he would accuse Surkov of “misinforming”
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Putin and Medvedev – a classic example of the idea of the Tsar being misinformed by his boyars.

This was possibly the most revealing remark in the entire Prokhorov affair – for the fact that he tried to get through to Putin and Medvedev just hours after calling Surkov a puppet master indicated that however independent Prokhorov thought himself to be, he understood exactly where the real favour was coming from, and that without it politics would be closed for him – no matter how much money or popularity he could muster.

“In the past, whenever I had the need to meet with the president or the prime minister, I would get in within seven or ten days. So I hope nothing has changed.”
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But something evidently had. A week passed, then ten days, and Prokhorov still had not been given an audience. Medvedev never commented on the matter at all. On September 25, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, told media that Putin had no plans to meet with Prokhorov. There was no further evidence of any meetings with
Putin or Medvedev. Russia’s youngest and most promising oligarch no longer seemed to be welcome at court.

It was tempting that autumn to compare Prokhorov’s fate to that of Khodorkovsky – with the obvious result that where the latter utterly lost Putin’s favour, Prokhorov’s fall from grace was temporary. He was favoured and trusted enough eventually to be allowed to run for president – and he would retain the backing of Alexei Kudrin, the former finance minister who would remain a close ally of Putin even after his resignation in September 2011.

Indeed, despite initial fears that Prokhorov would share the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, no signals that the oligarch was fair game were ever given. The reason may be that Prokhorov’s defiance went no further than calling Surkov a puppet master, and though he promised to stay in politics, he remained out of the limelight. For a while, he declined requests for an interview and was rarely seen speaking to the media.

Prokhorov’s evident distance from the Kremlin certainly didn’t help his business. By late September, the Kremlin had him kicked out of the Presidential Commission on Innovation and Modernization, where Surkov was a prominent member. In October, bureaucratic red tape that delayed road construction for his “Yo-Mobile” factory in the Leningrad region was interpreted as a possible consequence of the Kremlin’s cold shoulder. Reports appeared that Prokhorov’s Onexim Group might sell its shares in the Yo-Mobile venture, but these were denied by his press service.

Then, amid unprecedented public dissent that started gaining momentum after the December 4 parliamentary elections – elections where Prokhorov would have won a seat were he still head of Right Cause – he suddenly announced that he had taken “the most important decision of [his] life” and decided to run for president. Sources close to the Presidential Administration called this a Kremlin project intended to absorb disgruntled middle class voters, but Prokhorov countered cheekily that the Kremlin was a project of his instead.

The oppositionist
New Times
magazine described witnessing a dramatic December 9 scene in which Prokhorov answered a
call on his mobile, turned pale, and said it was Putin. “It’s OK, he asked me to run for president. I thought I had problems,” Prokhorov allegedly said.
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But Prokhorov denied that the incident ever happened, as he would staunchly deny any interaction with Putin that winter.
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“Since the convention, I have not been able to get an audience,” Prokhorov told me when I asked him in late January. “When I understood that I would not get an audience, well, I started acting according to my own plans.”

When pressed about the rumours, he conceded that there was a stereotype that everything that happened was orchestrated by state power – and that he was trying to break out of that stereotype.

“What if we’re all a project of Putin? If the mass rallies were allowed, then were they a project of Putin?”

“They were a concession,” I said.

“Well, don’t you think that my appearance on the political scene was yet another concession?”

His denials were logical – even if Putin had asked him to run, admitting as much would diminish the whole point of courting a middle class increasingly dissatisfied with Putin. Still, his campaign strategy too clearly shied away from direct criticism of Putin – and when I asked his campaign manager, Anton Krasovsky, directly about Prokhorov’s talks with Alexei Kudrin, the self-described mediator between Putin and the opposition, he said there was nothing wrong with the connection. “I’m for continuity in state power,” he told me.
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Soon after, the Central Election Commission accepted his two million petition signatures – in an unspoken sign that Prokhorov’s candidacy had the blessing of the Kremlin.

Given the approval of his presidential bid, there was clearly no retribution intended against Prokhorov. Even if there was, it did not approach the calibre of what was done to Khodorkovsky for his seeming “treason.” This is interesting if we want to understand what exactly a Russian oligarch has to do to lose his sovereign’s favour. For his attack on Surkov, Prokhorov was let loose, deprived of the privilege of “dropping by” to see Putin – and even that for just a short time. But Khodorkovsky was imprisoned in a Siberian jail, deprived of his multibillion-dollar oil empire, and hit with a string of impossibly arcane and mind-numbingly absurd economic charges
that an international team of lawyers have been unsuccessfully fighting for a decade.