The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (42 page)

More importantly, it would play into a general drive towards democracy-building supported by many of those close to Putin, and, contrary to appearances, by Putin himself. As we have seen in
previous chapters, Putin’s government is not averse to democracy, in fact it has spent considerable resources building up democratic institutions – as long as those institutions function on the Kremlin’s own terms.

When Navalny announced he would run for mayor, it was not clear whether this decision was the result of negotiations with Sobyanin’s administration, or simply a desperate bid to make it more difficult for the authorities to jail him. But as the situation developed, it became evident that Sobyanin had an interest in keeping Navalny in the race. In an unprecedented move, the incumbent mayor publicly called on municipal deputies to endorse Navalny, helping him get the necessary 110 municipal signatures so that he could be registered as mayoral candidate.
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Neither Navalny nor his campaign manager Leonid Volkov were keen on drawing attention to it, but it was a fact that Navalny would not have been able to gather the necessary number of signatures on his own. Not because of political pressure, but because most municipal deputies, mostly members of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, couldn’t consider endorsing anyone but the man in power.

These overtures from Sobyanin bolstered Navalny’s popularity. But it would take another move from the government to really set his campaign in motion. That move came on July 18, when Navalny, against the hopes and expectations of many, was sentenced to five years in jail and taken into custody. Although a conviction barred him from public office, technically he would remain eligible until the conviction and the sentence took effect, pending appeals.

Navalny’s arrest brought thousands of people to the streets to demonstrate just outside the Kremlin for his release. Whether it was due to the rally or, as some speculation had it, to Sobyanin’s lobbying, or both, another spectacular thing occurred: Navalny was released the following day after prosecutors suddenly changed their minds about taking him into custody.

This evident indecisiveness on the part of the government galvanized Navalny’s supporters. His campaign staff began organizing aggressive meetings with Muscovites around the city. His volunteers were all but campaigning door-to-door, in the best Western traditions.

But even among his more moderate supporters, murmurings began that questioned what, exactly, made Navalny so different from
Putin. Always a fierce debater, Navalny had mostly resorted to figures and facts when fighting his opponents as he battled corruption. But suddenly, he had taken on an overly aggressive flair. At one point, when confronted about his nationalist views, he was borderline rude, retorting to a journalist’s question with a sarcastic “Hello?!!”
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The political analyst Nikolai Zlobin was rudely rebuked by Navalny’s campaign manager Leonid Volkov for questioning Navalny’s programme. In response, Zlobin likened Navalny’s style to Putin’s.
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When leaked evidence was published that Navalny had registered a company in Montenegro in 2007, Navalny lashed out at those who dug up the report as being hired detractors – but didn’t address the evidence, and brushed off the incident itself by vaguely saying he had only planned to register a firm, but never did so.
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There was nothing illegal, of course, about registering such a firm, but given Navalny’s crusade against government officials with property abroad, it was a circumstance that a more experienced, Western politician might have addressed with better skill and less animosity.

Some journalists, meanwhile, began noticing that Navalny would only grant interviews to friendly outlets. His mobile number, once accessible, would now only answer to the select few – so that it became easier to reach Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, than Putin’s foe, Alexei Navalny. It seemed that the “love” he spoke about from the stage would be bestowed not necessarily on those who shared his views, but on those who were loyal to him personally.

More prominently, his popularity was increasingly becoming compared to a personality cult, with a number of fellow oppositionists likening his speech on September 9 to that of a Führer. Referring to Navalny as a “messianic” leader was becoming increasingly commonplace.
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What accounted for this kind of behaviour from a leader whose entire programme was built on opposing what he called a corrupt, authoritarian, and self-serving regime?

That answer, just as with the answer to many questions about Vladimir Putin, lies with the myriad uncertainties faced by Russian society as a whole. As I write this in October 2013, no one knows what will happen to Navalny. Putin, who was elected president for a third term in March 2012, will be up for re-election in 2018 – a
re-election that he has not ruled out. If Navalny wants to run for president in 2018 – something he has admitted – he would not only have to maintain and increase his following, but fight the courts to get his conviction overturned. Given the dependency of the courts on the Presidential Administration, that would take careful back-door negotiations and the support of patrons close to Putin.

Nor is Putin’s own future fully certain. For six years, the government had funnelled a good share of its resources – both monetary and ideological – towards the Sochi Winter Olympics in February 2014. Rife with corruption and scandal, a lot of effort went into maintaining the kind of stability necessary to pull off such an ambitious project. There was talk, even, that political decisions, from a parliamentary reshuffle to decisions involving the volatile North Caucasus region nearby – in particular, Ramzan Kadyrov’s Chechnya – were put on hold until after the Olympics in order to avoid destabilization. Many predicted a new wave of corruption scandals and sackings.
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Such tension leading up to one single sporting event – no matter how big – creates inevitable uncertainty after the fact. Would the Olympics prove to have been a force holding things together? Would the absence of an ambitious, consolidating project, amid a stagnating economy, exacerbate political and economic instability and the centrifugal forces that have perennially plagued such a large country as Russia?

Whatever happens to Navalny, he himself is not a major part of the equation. Whether in jail or free, he may fail to garner the kind of political support that will be necessary to eventually propel him into any kind of office, and be forgotten. Or he may become the client of powerful patrons within the government and the oligarchy who may, through a number of government posts, eventually groom him into potential presidential material. The transfer of power to a person like Navalny can come quietly, from within the government, or it can come through revolution violent or bloodless, for Russia has seen both varieties.

But that a leader
like
Navalny emerged in 2012 and went on to take part in a mayoral race in 2013 gives us two important clues about the kind of person who could eventually come to replace Putin: his rise will be propelled by the Kremlin itself, and, if he wants to succeed, he would do well to don the kind of unaccountable,
transcendent haughtiness that Navalny is increasingly flirting with. Power, in the Russian tradition, legitimizes itself – not because the people want it this way, but because there is usually little alternative.

Why is this the case? Why can’t a society just elect a leader who will rule in accordance with the law, in accordance with democratic procedure? Because first there must be laws a society has agreed upon.

I have evaded this question throughout the book, primarily because such a question presumes we are dealing with a problem that needs to be fixed, whereas I believe we are instead dealing with a problem that first needs to be understood.

The dominant assumption about Russia – held for over a hundred years by both Russian philosophers and outside observers – is that Russians tend to forge an intrinsically collectivist society, where the interests of the group predominate over those of the individual. The idea, which pitted Russian society against a presumably individualistic West, is so dominant that communists used it to justify their ideology, arguing that communism was a natural destiny for collectivist Russia, while capitalist reformers during the 1990s tried to “cure” Russians of collectivism by imposing an individualistic doctrine. It is telling that both attempts proved, to various degrees, disastrous. Perhaps the collectivism that the communists tried to exploit, and the market capitalists tried to cure, was actually lacking?

If we look back at the kind of relationships described between people in this book, we will notice a startling pattern: many of the stories that have been told are about the inability of various people to agree on a common interest and achieve it.

Sergei Kvitko’s appeal to Putin to gasify his home was made after all attempts to solve the problem together with his neighbours and local government officials had failed. The residents of Pikalevo blocked a highway when negotiations between workers and managers, managers and owners, owners and the local administration, had broken down.

Law enforcement officers described in
Part II
used their positions of power to solve personal, individual goals of enrichment, and conflicts inevitably arose among officers in their pursuit of enrichment because the only governing mechanism was one’s closeness to power.

The young activists who joined pro-Kremlin groups did so because, given a staggering lack of community in their own towns, the government was their only venue for activism. The protesting creative class failed to find a common language with many of those who eagerly joined the Kremlin’s campaign for traditional values.

Those who visit Russia and travel beyond the confines of Moscow are often struck by the vast expanses. But among those expanses, they also see newly-built houses surrounded by high, impenetrable walls, as if their whole objective is to isolate themselves from their neighbours and from outsiders.

The roads, meanwhile, and the poorer homes, will often be dilapidated, broken and desolate. Inside the walls of the rich, the lawns will be groomed and gardens will be planted, but outside, just a few metres away, one will often find a sprawling heap of rubbish.

When one looks for a Russian national identity, one will find more factors dividing society than unifying it. When an August 2013 survey asked 1600 Russians what group they identified themselves with the most, 32 percent said they were “their own person and didn’t identify with any group.” The next category – 11 percent – identified themselves not as Russians, but as the middle class. Just four percent identified themselves as ethnic Russians.
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Interpersonal trust among Russians, while not at the bottom of the list, is still considerably lower than in other countries. According to the Levada Centre, only 27 percent of Russian respondents said that they believed other people should be trusted. That figure was 69 percent in Sweden, 42 percent in the United States, and an average of 45 percent among 29 countries.
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More striking still were statistics on how likely Russians were to get involved in voluntary work to help strangers in their community. According to two studies in 2011 and 2012, between 1 and 3 percent of Russians said they had volunteered through NGOs in the past year. When informal voluntary work was factored in, a 2011 Gallup poll found that less than 15 percent of the Russian population volunteered. That was far below third world neighbours like Turkmenistan (58 percent) and Uzbekistan (46 percent).
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Far from collectivist, these figures – and the view from any rural window – paint a society that is atomized and even individualistic. Lack of communication – which leads to lack of community –
emerges as a central problem.

Soviet attempts at collectivization tried to remedy this problem. Note that the very word “collectivization” presumes the
lack
of a collective, implying one that needs to be imposed by force. Collectivization attempts during the end of Stalin’s rule – in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when a majority of the population lived in the countryside – faced a crucial hurdle: the lack of roads connecting communities. In autumn and spring, dirt roads were impassable; even today, this is the case for some federal highways, which become impossible to navigate during the autumn rains and the spring thaw. Lack of roads has been both a cause and an effect of lack of community. (As one study suggests, some farms took advantage of the lack of roads to remain out of the government’s reach and expand their holdings.
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There are also the centrifugal forces resulting from twenty-one internal, non-Russian ethnic republics, some of whose residents do not speak Russian. The various ethnic, economic and social interests, sprawled out over one sixth of the world’s landmass, led Russia scholar Natalia Zubarevich to conclude that we are dealing not with one Russia, but with four.
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Putin’s state has particularly struggled to find a unifying factor: forging a national identity, and preparing for the 2014 Winter Olympics as a goal that everyone, from construction companies to schoolboys playing hockey, could strive for. But that left a big question of what would unify the country after the Olympic Games – not that the preparation efforts, riddled with corruption and embezzlement, have had much success. The recent official resurgence of Orthodox Christianity is the latest development in a perennial quest to keep the country together.

If we are dealing with an atomized society, divided by space, ethnicity, climate and economics, if we are dealing with broken communication between individuals and small groups, then what does that say about the relationship with supreme power?

Very often, Russian authoritarianism has been explained as an extension of Russia’s intrinsic collectivism. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, meanwhile, identified “the primary concern of all tyrannical governments” as an attempt to bring about isolation, writing that tyrannies strive to sever political contacts between
men.
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But perhaps authoritarianism, and the patrimonial state in particular, is merely what arises in the absence of political bonds between people?