They are not the ‘great ignorant’, nor are they apathetic. They are the silent Russian majority that polls show fear the police, do not feel protected by the law, think corruption is greater than in the 1990s, want a strong opposition and disapprove of this government. They are the majority who know and use the slogan ‘the party of crooks and thieves’. These are the seething people who, should Putin cut his promises in an oil tumble, would start to shriek with almost physical pain.
Travelling around Russia is like using a time machine. The botched vertical has left a country that once aimed for homogenous Soviet living standards as a patchwork quilt of regions. Each one is run as its own patronage network, some modernizing nicely, others in sociological collapse; some run by competent cadres who look to China, others by crooks in Gucci suits. It has left some cities with glass tower blocks, but others without airports; some with high-speed trains and 3D cinemas, others still single-industry rust heaps overrun by neo-fascists and gangs, where you can only have fun with a needle – a country where the capital has the human development of South Korea but many regions have life male expectancies below the Central African Republic.
Only in government propaganda is there a ‘real Russia’ and a ‘fake Moscow’. This is a fragmented country. Some say that the regions are defined by their demography, others say by geography. In Russia it is usually geology. The territories that thrive are cogs in the hydrocarbons mega-complex, giving them a cut in taxes. Oil and gas do not just create oligarchs, but regional gulfs as great as the social ones between Russia’s eighty-three regions – nine produce more than half of Russia’s GDP, but in 2010 over forty received more in federal aid than all the profits of their local enterprises.38 What this means is that gaseous Yamalo-Nenets, Tyumen and Khanty-Mansi regions technically have GDP per capita higher than the United States, but men in Pskov, Novgorod or Chita can expect to live barely beyond fifty-five years of age.39
In these geologically unlucky lands, the political variable is personality. ‘The governor decides everything,’ said one Kremlin aide. ‘They really have the power to make the difference in our system.’ Each United Russia chieftain determines to what degree his region will be managed or pillaged. Russia is a feudalized entity, a place where the governor is personally dependent on Putin, but without a ‘dictatorship of law’ it leaves every boss to build up his own regime, his own financial–political holding, the way he wants. It could turn out like Barnaul in Siberia, where no protest permits were handed out and the opposition left protest teddy bears and Lego in the snow, which were duly ‘arrested’ for their ‘illegal public event’; or like liberal Novosibirsk where thousands marched against Putin under colourful banners after United Russia scored just 27 per cent.40
Let’s take two regions with nothing in their subsoil, whose military-industrial roles in the Soviet plan were scrapped, one near St Petersburg and the other next to Moscow. Pskov, to the south of Putin’s home town, has a governor who was not even a member of infamous Yarva-Neva judo club of which the ‘national leader’ is the honorary president; he is the son of a member. His qualifications are scant and his record dismal. Pskov has lost one-third of its population since 1989 and has one-third of Russia’s dying villages.41 This kind of depopulation normally occurs only in times of war or plague. Despite sharing a border with the EU, no modern economy was built here to replace its socialist role, leaving the youth to be sucked into St Petersburg.
Kaluga near Moscow, however, is actually doing rather well. It makes such a difference who is in charge; there is even a modicum of decent administration here. The governor, Anatoly Artamonov, admires Lee Kuan Yew and jokes that he would like to erect a statue of him and one of Deng Xiaoping. He is seen as the most dynamic of Putin’s governors and the ‘national leader’ himself said of his work: ‘if we all go this way, the progress will be very significant.’42 He has a lot to be proud of. Regional GDP has grown 130 per cent in a few years and Kaluga had the country’s fastest growing industrial production of any region in 2011.43 The accountancy firm KPMG judged that Kaluga was ‘the only example where a business climate was created expressly for foreign investors.’44 The governor thinks he has pulled this off as he is a Kaluga native, not an implant. Yet even a man awarded by Putin with the ‘Order of Services to the Fatherland 3rd class’, is exasperated by his verticaclass="underline"
‘The vertical of power is not what it appears. Now I am certain that I have more authority than a European governor, thanks to Putin. I can go to China and sign contracts. I don’t have to ask him to do that. But I would be happy actually to feel extra control by Putin. I’m in need of that – more estimation, judgement – I’d really like to have that. I’m really free to the point that I’d like to have some constraints. So, I have to call Putin to ask to meet him and Putin always says: “What’s the problem?” So, I say: “There is no problem. I’m just coming to tell you what I am doing.” He then says: “There is no need. I am sure you are doing good work.”’
As we talked, Artamonov began to gesture ironically with his eyebrows:
‘This is as far as central control is concerned. So comparatively this works for me but not for everyone. I know there are other governors who are not governing and are only interested in pursuing… their hobbies. The centre should more forcefully control them. This is surprising for me – it’s Putin’s preference. If I was Putin I would be far more decisive and centralizing. Power should not make business. Twenty years ago the political system changed. And we still have not become a fully functioning, efficient, cooperative and clean state… the state is really still carrying a Soviet way of thinking inside it. We have a joke in Kaluga that makes me think of the Russian state. “The hedgehog is a proud bird. It will not fly unless you kick it.”’
This mess has left Russia in fragments. Moscow elites love making sweeping statements about ‘the state of the nation’. However, things are so different from town to town, that Russians live with very different problems, despite the same bad roads and corrupt officials. Authoritarian modernization is working in Kaluga under the United Russia franchise, but take a night train north of Moscow and in Yaroslavl the United Russia cadres have been chased out by the ballot box. Kaluga shows what might have been, had Putin been more competent; Yaroslavl hints at how he could lose control.
The chance conjunction of a catastrophe in the air, official callousness and the electoral cycle detonated the local ‘bears’. It was Medvedev’s sinking of the Kursk moment. Then ‘president’ he had wanted to make the city synonymous with his name, to be his Davos. To do this he sponsored the Yaroslavl Policy Forum, which billed itself as ‘a permanent international platform for ongoing intellectual discussions and practical definitions and development of the modern state and its role in ensuring stability and security in the modern world’. In reality, like most policy conferences, it was a banquet, this one in the honour of the visiting Italian prime minister, then Silvio Berlusconi, and his Japanese and Korean counterparts.
Yaroslavl is a sporty town, obsessed by hockey. And on the night before the policy forum opened the plane carrying its hockey team, Lokomotiv, crashed at the airport killing all of the players on board. It had been forced to use an inferior landing strip due to Berlusconi’s imminent arrival. Grief-struck, the city was soon convinced that ambulances had been blocked so Berlusconi could use reserved lanes to make his way to the conference. Blubbing masses rushed into the squares of this pretty tsarist city of onion domes and sugar-icing stucco, but felt they were treated callously by OMON guarding the forum. They wanted the ‘president’ to be with them, but Medvedev neither consoled them nor called off the banquet.