The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (29 page)

The key difference is in the extent to which Prokhorov and Khodorkovsky broke the unspoken rules.

Eight years after Khodorkovsky’s arrest, there is still little consensus, really, about what exactly sent him to jail. Out of the gargantuan efforts of Khodorkovsky’s defence team on the one hand and Kremlin propaganda on the other emerge two explanations, the first only slightly more accurate than the second: from the perspective of the West, Khodorkovsky went to jail because he criticized Putin, while from the Russian perspective, Khodorkovsky went to jail because he stole money from the government.

Both explanations stem from the same fallacy: Khodorkovsky’s supporters focus on the illegal nature of the persecution, arguing that Putin “broke the law” to take revenge on his rival. The Kremlin, of course, argues that Khodorkovsky “broke the law” by stealing taxes.

But there were no laws to break, there were unspoken rules, the
ponyatiya
. Take, for a moment, Khodorkovsky’s behaviour in 2003. Feeling he had atoned for the “incestuous” acquisition of his oil assets in 1995 by making his company more legally transparent and efficient than any other in Russia, he undertook to build a transnational oil empire. Inspired by the merger of the Russian oil company TNK with British Petroleum, in April 2003 he made an agreement with Roman Abramovich’s Sibneft for a merger that would create a $35 billion company that could pump more oil than a small Gulf state. The Kremlin initially backed the deal – until it became clear that Khodorkovsky was not about to defer to the government. That summer, Khodorkovsky started courting ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco for a mega-merger that would make him the head of a transnational corporation.

And he seemed to assume that his luck in expanding his company by legal means gave him a mandate to reform the country just as he had reformed Yukos – forgetting that the country was not his to reform. Pyotr Aven, Putin’s close friend from his time in St. Petersburg and later the chief of Alfa Bank, told an American journalist that Khodorkovsky was “openly going around Moscow saying they would like to buy one third of the Duma to be able to block an institutional majority.”
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It is widely believed that two factors – Khodorkovsky’s criticism of Putin for corruption during a meeting in February 2003, and his support of the Communist Party (believed, for a time, to be the only genuine oppositionist force to the Kremlin) – sealed his fate.

But Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Putin’s prime minister at that time and then fell utterly out of favour for his staunch position on Khodorkovsky – and who would never see his opposition parties allowed anywhere near the election process – suggested that the problem was not one of “opposition”
per se
, but one of agreeability.

Kasyanov told me in an earlier interview that he had asked Putin what Khodorkovsky was doing wrong, and the answer had surprised him.

“It wasn’t a question of [him funding] liberal or not liberal parties. It could have been the other way around. The main problem [for Putin] – and this surprised me – was that besides the legal support that businesses could give political parties, the business had to obtain secret approval from the president for this activity. It didn’t matter what parties were approved or not. What was important was that this permission be obtained.”

In other words, criticizing Putin on corruption or even funding the Communist Party alone might have been enough to make him unwelcome at court, but in itself it didn’t bring about the partition of Khodorkovsky’s oil empire and his imprisonment. Rather, these moves were part of a whole complex of actions taken by Khodorkovsky – actions that, interpreted in the context of an 18th century court, amounted to an open attempt to wrest power. Khodorkovsky seemed to be making clear that he refused to compromise with Putin, refused to negotiate, and refused to be loyal because he had a better vision for Russia than Putin, and he was bent on using his capital to put that vision into motion. It was this – and not funding a particular opposition party – that ultimately spent Putin’s patience. “I have eaten more dirt than I need to from that man,” Putin reportedly told BP chief John Browne in a private remark shortly before Khodorkovsky’s arrest.
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Because neither democratic institutions nor laws could guard against these kinds of attempts to wrest power, the key governing factor to ensure against revolution in Russia was personal trust. Built up with staunch displays of loyalty and agreeability, personal
trust determined the extent to which a businessman could continue to extract rent from his fiefdom. There was a certain archaic logic to this that Khodorkovsky and Kasyanov, both insistent on taking Russia’s constitution at face value, did not take into account: having obtained these assets from the state, the businessman was ever at the mercy of the state with regard to those assets, and given the personalized power that ruled in the absence of institutions, he was virtually at the personal whim of the ruler. Interpersonal relations and personal sympathy determined who got to own what.

“Throughout 2003 our differences with President Vladimir Putin were increasing, especially with regard to pressure on business and on Mikhail Khodorkovsky [in particular],” Kasyanov said of his own diminishing relationship with Putin. “I knew what the results of my remarks could be, and that is why I began to criticize,” Kasyanov explained. Though it was more logical for a prime minister, who had to work for the president on a daily basis, to be favoured based on personal agreeability with the president, the same mechanism was also at play in the relationship with businessmen.

In the case of Prokhorov, his eagerness to meet with Putin after the Right Cause debacle revealed the extent to which he had internalized this unspoken rule of agreeability. Unlike Khodorkovsky, he had made only a small miscalculation: that Surkov himself had been entrusted with managing the political realm for many years. He took pains to maintain his loyalty to Putin, and went after Surkov alone – who would be demoted from his post as deputy chief of staff amid the political unrest in December 2011.

In Khodorkovsky’s case, his refusal to compromise cost him his business empire and his freedom. In Prokhorov’s case, it only cost him his party.

Prokhorov, however, played his cards right, and remained in favour. He walked away from the scandal with his assets intact, and with the evident blessing to continue dabbling in politics. He would, of course, lose the presidential elections in March 2012. But he would go on to create the Civic Platform party – whose candidate, Yevgeny Roizman, would win an unprecedented mayoral election in his home city of Yekaterinburg in September 2013. With his party vocally critical of many government measures, and aiming for the federal parliamentary elections slated for 2015, it was a promising start.

But the September 2011 debacle over Right Cause – by demonstrating just how cynically managed politics in Russia was, by shattering the illusion of political theatrics – served to contribute to the protests that would spill over that winter.

ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2011, President Dmitry Medvedev was struggling to say something. He looked manically, feverishly happy – and not because Prime Minister Putin had just suggested that he head the United Russia party. It was as if he had finally overcome and disposed of an inner burden weighing on him.

“Considering the offer to head the party list… and my readiness to get involved in the practical affairs of the government,” – a slight pause, for the president had made his decision and was about to speak, was about to say what so many had wanted him to say – “I believe it would be right for the convention to support the chairman of the party, Vladimir Putin, as candidate for president.”
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There was a slight gasp among the journalists, although it would take at least a month to process and articulate the betrayal that many of them didn’t yet know they felt. But just one room away the huge sports arena filled with 11,000 United Russia deputies, delegates and functionaries, reverberated not with cheers, but with a wail of relief so passive and high-pitched that one couldn’t tell whether the sound issuing from these loyal members of the Duma was one of triumph or surrender.

The announcement on September 24 came earlier than expected, although it was clear that party functionaries, ministers, officials and businessmen were struggling with the suspense.
It surprised no one, although the idea of a soft-spoken, technocratic lawyer president, Dmitry Medvedev, handpicked by Putin to hold his place as president in 2007, had filled many people, particularly the kind who would go on to demonstrate against Putin, with hope: move over, pseudo-autocrat, we are not children or lackeys to be ruled by the cold terror of your eyes; we do not want the personal rule of an alpha dog, but the institutional governance of a president as an elected guarantor of the rule of law.

That too had a 16th century precedent: soon after Ivan the Terrible separated Muscovy into the lands of the sovereign (the
oprichnina
) and the lands of the Aristocracy (the
zemschina
), Ivan “abdicated” again in 1575 and appointed a Tartar prince, Simeon Bekbulatovich, to rule in his stead. For eleven months, Ivan the Terrible kept up the appearances of a loyal subject of Simeon even as he clearly continued to wield power. The causes of this masquerade remain a mystery to this day, but historians suggest that a vicious power struggle – between hardliners who wanted a return to the
oprichnina
and more progressive boyars in the Godunov family – pushed the increasingly paranoid Ivan to temporarily distance himself from the throne.
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Putin’s anointment of Medvedev in 2007 was motivated only in part by a desire to install a reliable placeholder for the presidency, which Putin could not assume for a third consecutive term without changing the Constitution. The idea of a placeholder was too risky if Putin was bent only on returning to the Kremlin – it would have been much easier to hold a referendum in 2007, changing the Constitution. That suggests that the entire Medvedev project may have been partially a response to a similar, under-the-carpet struggle – albeit one that did not involve bloodshed. With Medvedev, Putin was placating the budding business and middle class, giving them a leader he thought they could identify with, and delegating the task of upholding the legal-rational state to a lawyer that he could trust.

Putin was also separating out his own
oprichnina
– establishing a realm of nominal rule of law (Medvedev) while maintaining traditional forms of rule through personalized power, shock and awe (Putin).

By doing this, he was confusing the constituents of both realms – the cosmopolitan, educated members of the elite, the
people who lived and functioned without relying on the state, remained sceptical. And the rest – particularly those millions whose government posts represented their very livelihood – were growing tired of constantly having to figure out who the boss was, and what game he was playing.

On September 24, when Putin took the stage for a second time, his party eagerly took up his speech for their campaign programme without as much as a discussion, joking that it would save time on having to devise their own. Their leader had delivered his most supreme instructions and order had returned to their lives.

Speaking to journalists after the announcement, the United Russia functionaries didn’t show a hint of self-consciousness concerning what they said about their leader: it occurred to no one but the journalists just how Soviet their words sounded, how reminiscent of the Communist Party.

But this wasn’t mere obeisance to their leader, it really did sound like genuine relief over the key decision in their careers and their jobs having been made for them.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich’s programme gives us an opportunity to go calmly into the regions, it gives us a plan, a strategy to solve people’s problems,” Andrei Vorobyev, head of United Russia’s executive committee who would go on to become governor of the Moscow region, told journalists.

When I asked him separately about the decision, he made it clear that party functionaries – the ones who by law were supposed to nominate leaders and candidates for president – had little to do with it. Like a thunderstorm after a drought, it had come from above.

“That was the decision that was made,” he said with a smile. “That’s life. The demand was there, this was the news [we] wanted.”
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Delegate Alexander Nikitin, chairman of the Tambov regional parliament, didn’t even try to mask his outright flattery. “Vladimir Putin is our leader. He is our guide. We orient ourselves around him. So what happened today is absolutely logical and obvious. We are happy to be his contemporaries.”

I asked him if the party would have accepted the decision if it had been the other way around – with Putin as prime minister and Medvedev running for a second term. But the question seemed to stump him. “The decibels of applause were equally directed at the
prime minister and the president. The party would support…” he paused, and corrected himself – “has supported the decision that was made.”
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Just the previous day, I had probed one of the more astute United Russia members to share what her colleagues were talking about. Fresh from a meeting with Putin, she was beaming – she couldn’t find the words for a moment, but then it all came out: in spite of herself, she was “amazed” by the extent of his knowledge, the “precision” of his reaction. This experienced, insightful political expert, who had criticized Putin in the past, was in awe of what she had found at the pinnacle of power – and it was hard to imagine that the awe did not colour her perceptiveness.

“People in the party have a firm position on this. That Putin is the leader. He is ours. With Medvedev it’s different. We respect this person, but he’s not the leader,” she explained, asking not to be quoted by name. “It’s not that a decision [where Putin doesn’t run for president] is unacceptable. It’s just something they wouldn’t understand. Everyone is waiting for Putin. They want him.”