Ksenia Sobchak was rightly called the ‘Russian Paris Hilton’. She had posed topless for Playboy, she had worn big pink bows and been the daily bread of the editors of the city’s celebrity press, but in a country whose superpowers include female looks, she was startlingly plain for an ‘It girl’. Through the 2000s, she was one of those pointless half-loathed characters, famous for being famous. And in a Russia where connections count for everything, she had one of the best sets of all. She was the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak – the first mayor of St Petersburg and former boss to Putin, thus former boss to a big chunk of the Putinist political elite. To see a video with Sobchak giggling was not a surprise, but to see one of her taking her camera phone towards the Nashi leader Vasily Yakemenko dining in a restaurant where champagne costs $46 a glass was. ‘I’m an “It girl”, but how can he afford that with a civil servant’s salary?’5 The Nashi commander squirms angrily. The video went viral. It meant only one thing – being vapid was no longer fashionable.
Like Sobchak, other celebrities and establishment figures began groaning at the sight of Putin after his announcement. The editorial line at the main financial daily Vedomosti (co-owned by the Financial Times) began to denounce ‘stagnation’; the former Medvedev-inclined economist Sergei Guriev started to bemoan the government in its op-ed pages; formerly pliant TV anchors started complaining about censorship; even gallery owners, whose fortunes were amassed doing ‘political technology’ for United Russia, turned to tweeting snide remarks about the creatures in the Kremlin. All of it was very self-consciously elitist, neither expecting nor really requesting an echo from beyond the ‘Garden’ ring road that splits the Moscow of Dolce Gabbana bags from the Moscow of endless Soviet housing estates, Azeris hawking watermelons on street corners in the summer, and alleys smelling of alcoholic urine.
Russians took to calling the Putin–Medvedev swap the ‘rokirovka’ – or castling – a defensive chess manoeuvre where the king is swapped with the rook. If anything it was the inverse, a move that instead of switching the king into a secure corner of the board left him as an exposed centrepiece, visibly the fulcrum of the game. The ‘castling’ laid bare Russia’s personalized power, its presidential tsarism. Putin’s decision to close down Medvedev’s ‘modernization’ candidacy without much explanation, or even why he had chosen to return to the Kremlin, stunned wealthier Muscovites. Lacking an explanation, the ‘castling’ seemed to be both gratuitous power-hunger, whilst also confirming the creeping chatter about stagnation or ‘Brezhnevization’ within the establishment and the emerging middle class. It demonstrated in one manoeuvre that politics, despite all the talk, despite the 1990s and the 2000s, was still a matter for a tiny power circle. By ‘castling’, Putin underlined that his KGB instructors had been prescient as well as accurate. The move revealed not only a lowered sense of danger, but a lowered sense of awareness of the extent to which the country had changed since Yeltsin asked him to ‘take care of Russia’.6
Putin – like a Soviet secretary general – seemed set to rule at least until his constitutional term expired in 2024. This would make the rule of this lieutenant colonel the longest since that of Stalin. ‘I’ll remember the day Putin announced his return for the rest of my life – 24 September 2011 – because all my friends and I calculated how old we would be in 2024,’ said Leonid Volkov, an ambitious city councillor in Ekaterinburg, capital of the Urals. He was not alone. Capturing the horror many felt at this prospect, already living in a reality where in political conversations ‘he’ often did not need to be named, for the listeners to cotton on who ‘he’ was, the poet Dmitry Bykov wrote a pastiche on Mayakovsky’s utopian ode ‘Here will be a Garden City’, in which the ubiquity of Putin, ‘a meek colonel from the swamps of St Petersburg’, is as oppressive as it is inescapable.
The same dim resentment, the same extremely weak but pervasive sense of dread could be felt in the outer tiers of the ruling elite. The day of the tandem announcement, I exchanged a few emails with a friend in the diplomatic service. He wrote back in one-liners – ‘Chaadaev was right’ – referencing the pessimistic cultural critic that had exchanged letters on Russian identity with Pushkin, coming to the terrible conclusion, ‘alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world’ and ‘that we exist only to teach the world some terrible lesson’. I emailed back, asking what he meant, but this time the reply was terser stilclass="underline" ‘1991’.
To some people this was no surprise. ‘It was never a secret, this was the plan from 2008,’ said Sergey Kolesnikov, Putin’s self-exiled former business partner in Tallinn. ‘In 2008, every day I was talking to Kovalchuk and Shamalov, and we discussed politics and this plan. And this is what was known behind closed doors. In some parts of the state this was always common knowledge.’
Though many claimed they had seen it coming, it was still a shock, however much anticipated. Previously pliant members of the tamed Kremlin parties, which, bereft of power and lost for content, had fallen into patronage systems, were likewise unenthused by Putin’s return. ‘It was when the castling happened that I realized I could no longer support the regime,’ says Ilya Ponomarev, the young MP with a complicated back-story and friends in very high places, holding court in a pastry-specializing grand cafe round the back of the Duma. Akademiya is the cafe of plotters, Nashi-deputies, stooges and opposition activists alike – because for the establishment, Moscow is a small place. ‘Make sure you take the Napoleon cake… this is their signature,’ says Ilya Ponomarev. This deputy should not be challenging the system – his mother works for Abramovich and is the senator for the territory of Chukotka on the Bering Straits. Whilst we take down the Napoleon cake he gets in a fluster as he has forgotten his credit card, but this turns out to have been in the pocket of his plush sky-jacket all along. ‘I’m often in London,’ he grins. As the chairman of the Duma subcommittee on Innovations and Venture Capital and involved in representing Medvedev’s science park Skolkovo abroad for lucrative business deals, he was nothing if not a winner. ‘But when it was announced that Putin was returning I realized that there was not going to be any reform, that there was going to be stagnation, which is potentially catastrophic for the country. Before the “castling” I had not thought this way. The move closed off the prospect of the system genuinely evolving.’
A Change in Pressure
This frustration within the establishment at first appears hard to understand. In the abstract it touched on a fear of social ossification, personified by Putin. ‘It’s not a frustration with economic stagnation, for now the economy is quite all right,’ explains the conservative thinker Boris Mezhuev: