The ‘grey cardinal’ failed to mention that it was during the first ten Putin years that Russia, the world’s largest oil producer, had seen its budget dependence on hydrocarbons remain firmly closer to the profile of the world’s second largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, than that of the diversified economy of the then third, the United States. In 2001 oil accounted for only 34 per cent of export revenue, but it had grown to 52 per cent by 2011.24 In the same ten years, oil and gas exploded from just 20 per cent of government revenue to 49 per cent.25
This was not entirely the fault of Putin’s economic planners. This is the pattern they inherited – and is as it has always been. The cycles of Russian history turn in accordance with commodity prices. Under the tsars, the government lurched from repression to reform in line with the price of its lifeline export – grain. In 1929 it was the collapse of the grain price that shattered the precarious balance of Lenin’s New Economic Policy and pushed Stalin towards collectivization, terror and totalitarianism. The Soviet superpower invaded Afghanistan when the price of oil was at historic highs in 1979–80 and collapsed as it tumbled, creating first a fiscal crisis, then a balance of payment crisis, then a food crisis as the state was forced to beg the West for credits to feed its cities. Such is the fate of a state that raises its revenues as a raw material exporter.
As always at the head of these historical cycles, the regime grew hubristic. The change that had taken shape could be seen in the capital’s skyline. The buildings thrown up in Moscow in the 1990s were glassy, forward looking and derivative in their design. They were built like they did not belong in this city – like the first forward units of a Western reconstruction army. Yet without anybody taking much notice at first, throughout the 2000s the style morphed. Russian petro-rubles began to throw up a fashion all of its own. Bullying towers sprouted round the ring roads, with gothic turrets over dark-tinted glass fronts, topped by sinister spires, their curves and points mimicking the Stalinist skyscrapers of the centre in their domineering presence, and their utter disregard for the old Moscow they overshadowed of crooked lanes, white churches and flecked pale paint.
The boom was not just dramatically changing Moscow but Russia. It was driving four megatrends below the surface. The boom was building up a middle class, bringing millions online and sucking in millions of mostly Muslim migrants. The surprise cultural winner of the boom years was not one of Putin’s projects – but a resurgent Orthodox Church. It also changed the way in which the Moscow political class behaved. As the price of oil soared, it was growing ever more ambitious, but its foreign-travelling children shunned Nashi and were in love with glamour magazines, blogging and being hipsters.
The Rise of the Middle Class
They were neither ‘new Russians’ nor ‘old Soviets’. These were people who dismissed as sad throwbacks both the old men that still pinned ‘hero of labor’ to their lapels and the leather-jacketed bandits they crossed in the streets. They read the Russian version of Elle, bought their furniture from IKEA, wanted iPhones and went on holiday in Turkey. This was the kind of Russian which flourished under Putin – those in a new rapidly growing, educated and globalized consumer class whose emergence is the best thing to have ever happened to this country.
The biggest myth that the Moscow elite and Western analysts held in the 2000s about Russia was that this ‘new middle class’ was a thin crust sitting on top of a huge retrograde mass of drunken urban peasants who would vote for Putin, Zhirinovsky and probably even Hitler if given half a chance. This elitist point of view – which was implicitly Putin’s and the purpose of managed democracy – did not recognize how deep, fast and thick social changes had taken place. The emerging middle class ballooned during this period, expanding to at least a quarter of the population, one-third of the adult population and became a majority in Russia’s major cities.26 Yet at first it confused people – meaning a dispute about what to call this class raged through the late 2000s. Was it really a middle class when it was a minority? Or should it be called the ‘independent class’ or ‘people who can live by themselves?’ Or the ‘creative classes’ as its more artistically inclined members insisted? No two analysts agreed, other than on that a vague, but tangible new way of being Russian was right in front of them.
The blogger Dmitry Drobnitsky spent the 2000s arguing with his friend Boris Mezhuev, a senior lecturer in philosophy at Moscow State University, about the new middle, creative or independent class. He insisted that it existed and that there was also a new ‘identity’ that it encompassed, that was much bigger and more important than the ‘middle class’ in terms of an income bracket. Working in management, in packaging and graphic production, Drobnitsky spent his days coming into contact with these people. His friend didn’t. Both op-ed columnists in the fiercely pro-government newspaper Izvestia, owned by Gazprom, a Putin ally, their confusion mirrored a broader confusion in Putinism. They met in Kofe Khaus, the smoke-filled knock-off Russian Starbucks, where they would hash out this dispute. One afternoon I dropped in on them and listened to Drobnitsky outline to Mezhuev his new not-quite-post-Soviet everywoman.
‘Who is this person? Who is the new middle class? Imagine her like this? She is thirty-eight and she came to Moscow from a provincial city with her friend. They lived together at first and things were pretty difficult. Her friend didn’t make it and went back to the sticks. They don’t talk so much anymore. She is working as an accountant in one small private firm, she works hard, rents her apartment, and does some freelance accounting on the side for another firm.
‘The thing that’s rather difficult for her is that she has a son, but she’s single. This means there’s a lot of stress. She uses social networks in the evening to relax. But there are some things to look forward to in her life. Last year she went to Turkey with her friend from the office. Next year, she plans to go Israel. There was a Jew from her school, who emigrated in the 1990s, and she says life is good there with little crime. Now there are no visas she’d like to see for herself.
‘Then one last thing about her – when things started to get better in the early 2000s she made a lot of big plans for her son and what they would do when Russia finally “made it”. She’s become a little tense recently that it won’t. Another thing has changed too… She used to always pay bribes to policemen. But she thinks that’s not ‘cute’ anymore and stopped doing it. Oh, and she looks immaculate. Being neat and not scruffy and Soviet is very important to her.
‘No, she’s not interested in politics. But she likes VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. Her friends post links there and she likes them, usually as a “cute” way of saying “Hi”. Well… occasionally, she does stumbles across funny pictures that mock the police… and occasionally Putin.’
Towns like the once sleepy Moscow satellite of Khimki – exactly the kind of place where we can imagine this Russian everywoman renting her apartment, in a new ‘evro-remont’ (‘euro-refit’ apartment) – were transformed. Dozens of giant steely complexes were thrown up, selling everything from imported cheese in chilled cabinets to soft furniture. Those who lived there were able to buy high-quality Western clothes, imported technology and Western medicine in abundance. A Russia of post-industrial consumer cities like Khimki had emerged, encompassing over one-fifth of the population.27 For those lucky enough to live in them, the Putin years were the years that their lives were finally modernized.