The country survived a full scale catastrophe in the early 1990s… some Chekists quickly fell away and parted from the professional community. Some became traitors. Some became sweepingly depraved. But a core of our professional community nevertheless stayed… Falling into the abyss post-Soviet society was saved on the Chekist hook… Yet this caste will be destroyed from within when warriors start to become businessmen.31
Cherkesov was retired in 2008. Yet whatever his internal motives for his denouncement, he is correct. The Chekists of the Putin court are more businessmen than anti-Western warriors. Whistle-blowers have come out of the establishment alleging that hostile takeovers of profitable enterprises have been undertaken under the supervision of Igor Sechin and the ‘siloviks’. Their business interests and contacts with foreign capital temper their anti-Westernism. Sechin, according to one US Embassy cable was considered by many of their sources to have come to realize the importance of working with Western funds and technology in the oil and gas industry. Nor are members of the ‘siloviks’ disdainful of Western lifestyles in the way that the original Chekists were or like the hardliners of Tehran. They are also believed to have vast assets spread across the EU – from bank accounts, properties, companies and a noted preference for educating their children in Swiss finishing schools and British universities.
Emblematic of this is the case of Yury Luzhkov, who as mayor of Moscow used to engage in nationalist tub-thumbing calling for Crimea to be returned to Russia and sponsored home building in contested South Ossetia. When forced from his job in 2010 he chose to spend most of his time in his palatial London residence on Hampstead Heath, one of the most expensive properties in Britain. This attitude does not make them less unnerving than the ideologues of varying sorts who ran Russia in the twentieth century. The twenty-first-century Kremlin seeks personal power for the sake of power, and money for the sake of money. Reflecting on Putin’s court, the influential analyst Vladislav Inozemtsev caustically wrote: ‘Russia is not under KGB rule. Russia would be so lucky!’32
In Tudor England, the Crown tended to adopt either a ‘distant’ or an ‘engaged’ approach to its courtiers. An engaged Crown would see a quick turnover of favourites and ministers, sharp U-turns and policy reflecting to a large extent the foibles of the monarch. Yeltsin had such a court. The strategy of Elizabeth I was a ‘distant crown’. This was marked by ministerial stability, long tenures and delicate management of factions, designed for all, feeling their turn could come and an isolated ruler without clear favourites or successors. This is Putin’s strategy. He has been forced to engage in faction management. Like Elizabeth I and unlike a twentieth-century dictator, he may have the power to destroy or humble a faction leader but can do little to remove the faction or tendency itself. Putin’s faction management is reflected in the way he tends to stay above the fray of political disputes. His point of view on policy tends to be heard only as the arbiter’s final voice. ‘The genius of Putin’, said one aide to the oligarchy, ‘is his faction management. He keeps perpetual uncertainty. No enemy is an enemy forever, no friend is a friend forever. Thus we have a sort of stability.’
As a result the Russian cabinet has been marked by an almost extreme continuity. There were virtually no changes in personnel of the two cabinets put together after 2004 within electoral cycles. His attempt to make factions feel they will eventually ‘get their turn’, can be reflected in his encouragement of both Medvedev and the ‘silovik’ defence minister Sergey Ivanov to think they could be his 2008 presidential candidates. Ivanov was so convinced he was Putin’s choice that he had a full wardrobe makeover in anticipation. Yet to distract attention from these intrigues, the Kremlin has drafted politicians with the charisma to distract preying eyes.
Like any court Putin’s has had its jesters, chief amongst them the cherub-cheeked Dmitry Rogozin, the ranting nationalist currently serving as minister for the military–industrial complex. He is what the English would call a ‘character’, prone to flamboyant outbursts. In person, he seems unable to miss a pun and smiles broadly at his own witticisms, as if surprised by them. Just like Putin, he slips into criminal slang when it suits him. His university classmates remember him not as a fool but as a clever ‘careerist’. Rogozin is the son of a prominent military historian – and like many of those steeped in the past, he has positioned himself as a nationalist. Rogozin is a proud handball master and a politician, whose party trick has been to throw out politically incorrect comments, pounding a point with passionate intensity and a populist touch. He made his name in right-wing nationalist circles, from his first attempt in 1992 to contest the legality of the Soviet dissolution to his demands that the ‘garbage’, by which he meant migrants, be cleaned up in Moscow. His willingness to chase the xenophobes’ vote eventually turned him into one of Russia’s most popular politicians.
This is when the Kremlin found a use for him. Keen to ensure such voters’ loyalty to the court, Rogozin was invited in and promptly sent to Brussels as ambassador to NATO, a great stage for regular TV interviews to fill the evening news, with even his pop-star wife providing news copy, serenading him in a YouTube video: ‘I know what you want and I know what you think, making love to me is like having a good drink.’33 Catapulted higher still to oversee one of the biggest financial flows of all – the military–industrial complex – in 2012 Rogozin’s nationalist quips and turns were seen as essential to have onside, to shore up government popularity. Like any jester, Rogozin’s job is to distract from and not determine politics. Seen as a populist project, his former classmates say Rogozin has been left an embittered cynic after years as Putin’s jester. Diplomats attest that the ‘great nationalist’ often travels on the private jet of a Caucasian billionaire.
Within the courtyards of the Kremlin, Putin cuts a lonely figure, ever alone. Unlike his courtiers who, like their Western counterparts, try to be seen as often as they can, smiling with their wives, Putin’s spouse is an absence, practically never seen. It is widely believed in political circles that he no longer enjoys the refuge of a warm family. This makes Putin’s life oddly closer to Elizabeth I than the loving father Nicholas II. Whilst Obama, Medvedev or Cameron regularly attend conferences, rallies or hospital openings holding their wives hands, using them as electoral assets and simple support, Putin works in solitude. At his rallies, he is alone. At summits, he is alone. At the banquets, too.
There have been increasingly rare sightings of Putin with his wife Lyudmila. These included them filling out the 2010 census form together. She fidgets uncomfortably throughout, as if distressed by his presence. Many in Moscow believe she has been sent to live in a monastery. Rumours circulate that she has suffered a nervous breakdown. Putin’s daughters are absent from Moscow and their whereabouts guarded like a state secret. Journalists are too frightened to ask him at press conferences. Once, whilst answering questions with Silvio Berlusconi, a reporter from Moskovsky Korrespondent dared ask Putin if he had really left his wife to marry a twenty-four-year-old gymnast. His pleasure was not pronounced and Berlusconi started to make a machine-gunning gesture with his hands.34 Moskovsky Korrespondent was quickly closed down by its publisher. There are those who claim that Putin’s alleged relationship with the gymnast has resulted in a baby boy. With the mention that Putin may have a son, a shudder comes to anyone who thinks of the future.