Putin undoubtedly thought that by allying himself to the Patriarch he was allying himself to a politician. This was true. But he was also giving free range to a cultural project that was raising questions he had no answer to: only ‘stability’ – is Russia for Russians? Why is the state not fighting drugs or helping orphans? How can Russia live without lies? The Church was preparing for a culture war against liberal Russia – meaning sooner or later that Putin would have to abandon consensus politics and take sides.
Kudrin Succeeds, Surkov Fails
The government was not fretting about the growing number of consumers, bloggers, believers and migrants. In Putin’s 2007 state of the nation address he declared that, ‘Not only has Russia fully overcome a long period of production decline, but it now ranks among the top ten economies in the world.’ The same year he boasted to Europe:
Historians will be the judges of what my people and I achieved in eight years. We re-established Russia’s territorial integrity, strengthened the state, moved in the direction of a multi-party system and re-established the potential of our armed forces.60
Boastful, self-deceptive propaganda from a corrupt regime? Or a heady but still broadly fair assessment of a Russian government that had achieved macro-economic stability for the first time in a generation? The truth is that it was both. Much of the work led by finance minister Alexey Kudrin was a success. Though macro-economic stabilization and the development of a consumer society is something, it did not add up to comprehensive modernization. The Putin regime’s success at financial stabilization reflected the fact that it was at its best when dealing with technical tasks that could be done from offices in the capital with the minimum of stakeholders, and thus conflicts with vested interests. They did well at stabilizing the ruble but not at guiding corporations to diversify the economy; success was found in reducing inflation and cutting red-tape but they fared poorly at weaning policemen out of organized crime, or pushing corporate boards to stop behaving like ‘politburos’, without any respect for minority shareholders. The narrower the task, such as paying off debts and building up reserves, the better the regime did.
Their success in tuning big macro-economic indicators was exactly because these tasks were not dependent on Russian specifics at all, but were the same all over the world. Putin and Kudrin could get the rates right in the central bank whilst failing to infringe on the fusion of property and power, the massive corruption in public procurement, chronic theft from road-building budgets, the poor organization of public services and the personalization of power itself around Putin. Not surprisingly given that the regime was corrupt, objectives that required a substantial change in political behaviour and people management failed, despite its success in macro-economic stabilization.
The biggest contradiction of all was that as Kudrin and Gref’s plans bore fruit, the projects steered by Surkov failed. ‘Sovereign democracy’ was never taken seriously as an ideology and neither United Russia nor Nashi ever developed into a factory for quality cadres. None of these initiatives supposed to improve Russia’s poor-quality governance achieved this. They merely added new sinecures and extended patronage networks that obstructed this goal. By creating institutions like these merely as Kremlin tools, without any autonomy, Putin and Surkov could not fill the holes left by the silencing of parliament, national TV and regional governors: they had put the Kremlin back in control but left it no better at governing.
This meant that the 2000s boom in the Russian economy covered up serious structural weaknesses that posed a long-term threat to the country’s development. But most politicians in the Kremlin did not see how vulnerable these deficiencies made them, as by the late 2000s they felt they were running the most successful Russian government since the 1961 Soviet triumph that had made Yuri Gagarin the first man in space. Polls concurred. This boom in living standards had become bound up in Russian minds with Putin. Gleb Pavlovsky reminisces how at the time:
It was significant that he was the insurer, the guarantor of slow but definitively rising living standards. Broadly in Putin’s system, precisely because it turned out to be more financial, than administrative or political (the administration here is pretty bad) – this insurance guarantee was crucial.61
However, the contradiction between the economic successes and bureaucratic failure – one side expressed in Kudrin and the other in Surkov – could not be postponed forever. The poverty and national disintegration of the 1990s had stopped, whilst the corruption and the monarchical presidency born in the 1990s had reached grotesque and exaggerated proportions. This made the Putin consensus and the Putin majority inherently vulnerable. Surkov had failed to create tools that could control the way society was evolving. It was now going its own way, driven by megatrends that Surkov could only try to steer – a growing consumerist middle class, the expanding Internet, uncontrolled mass migration and religious resurgence. Russia was being reshaped but not by the state.
However, the government was not so worried. As the economy boomed in the run-up to the 2008 crash, both the new middle class and the political elite were willing to look the other way. In Russia, as in China, consumerism had turned out to be far more complementary to authoritarianism than ration cards. In fact, Putin seemed so successful that at some moments during the decade there may have been more unrest in the hinterland of Beijing than in provincial Russia.62 ‘Putin – Stability’, as the posters he smiled from said.
Delirious Moscow
Tastes change. The most popular Russian novels of the decade were not ones about heroic masses, but dashing tsarist agents. Known as the Fadorin Series these were pulp detective thrillers set under Nicholas II. They sold over 20 million copies, because they indulged a country dreaming of a gilded age, without any of the pressures of the ‘collective’. The empire that the author Boris Akunin had chosen to set his adventures in was that of the 1880s, one that Russians could recognize, a place where power was both autocratic and fragile, the country both optimistic and paranoid. In the most popular book in the series, The State Counsellor, the hero-detective resigns from state service having saved the tsar, unable to put up with its dirty methods to ensnare terrorists. Akunin wanted to make a point out of this – think of yourself as an individual.
This reflected the ways in which the boom was changing Russian minds. The 2000s saw a rejection of the tradition of ‘togetherness’. Those in the new middle class were not saving Russia from communism, but putting themselves first. These new consumers were engaged in escapism and flight. Whilst showing minimal concern for their fellow countrymen, or interest in the state, Russian families were quietly renovating their apartments, buying modern cars and installing new televisions. For the young this was cool, not wasting time handing out pamphlets about political crimes at mass gatherings like their parents had done. Little wonder that these tsarist fantasies appealed.