I live in a city and country where powerful Russians, exiled from their homeland, have been targeted and murdered by the agents of the Kremlin. The United Kingdom is a democracy, but Putin’s powers know no borders. I know that the same fate could befall me at any moment – the polonium slipped into my tea, the Novichok on my doorhandle – but I have learned to live with it. What I have not learned to live with is the thought that my country is in the hands of men who strive only to increase their own wealth and power. Living in the West, I have seen how politicians here have mistaken and misinterpreted Putin’s Russia, trying to accommodate him and the threat he poses; how they fell into the traps that Putin set for them.
Like many people in the public eye, I often feel that my identity has been taken from me and moulded into a shape that I do not recognise. Politics has become an acutely personalised business. When someone is involved in a public conflict, their image is appropriated and conflated with the values and prejudices of those who use it for their own ends. I was involved in one of the fiercest political controversies of modern Russia, and for me that made the process all the more extreme. For my supporters, I was a passionate champion of democracy, battling to save the nation’s soul; for my detractors, I was a greedy oligarch who stole the people’s inheritance. Neither version is the whole truth, but both have become ingrained in the polarised way I am now viewed.
Kierkegaard wisely pointed out that life can only be understood backwards, even though we are condemned to live it forwards. As well as looking to the future, I will look back at how today’s crisis developed over the past three decades, to consider why things in Russia have gone so wrong. It is 37 years since the then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev advocated the establishment of a Common European Home uniting East and West in a cooperative endeavour, and nearly 30 years since Boris Yeltsin proposed that Russia should join NATO. Why was that moment of mutual respect and conciliation squandered? What condemned Russia to return to anti-Western autocracy? Why were the hopes of the Russian people, with their long-standing admiration for Western democracy and desire to share in its benefits, left dashed and disappointed?
Russia succumbed to the weight of its thousand-year history, to the seductive paradigm of an autocratic leader who sometimes makes the trains run on time but always takes away freedom, prosperity and dignity. Until the beginning of the 2000s we were building a democratic state, with all its initial-stage shortcomings, similar to what happened in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. From 2001 on – and especially after the Yukos affair, the battle over property rights and political values, in which the very public clash between Vladimir Putin and myself brought into focus the choice between the two contrasting futures available to the nation – the analogy is closer to early fascist Spain and Latin America: ‘To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law.’ The fork in the road and the unfortunate path that Russia followed are obvious. Under Putin, Russia is in thrall to a brand of authoritarian state capitalism based around one leader. Society and the state apparatus are controlled through corruption, blackmail, intimidation and the arbitrary enforcement of the law, while the substance of independent civic institutions has been systematically undermined. This is no way to build a modern country.
Riot police clash with demonstrators during a protest against Alexei Navalny’s jailing in January 2021
But the West, which continues to inflict unnecessary damage on itself, is also to blame. The Kremlin has benefited enormously from democracy’s crisis globally, and from the realisation that Western liberal democracies have turned out to be more vulnerable to political corruption than many thought they were. When Vladimir Putin is criticised for political corruption and intolerance, he now simply points to the West. You may think there are imperfections here at home, he says to the Russian people, but just look how much worse things are in the countries of so-called Western democracy. It is an old tactic: I remember very well how, when Soviet leaders were attacked for their human rights abuses, they would retort that Black people in America or Catholics in Northern Ireland were being treated much worse. Such arguments have become an existential crutch for the Putin regime.
At times, it seems that both sides recognise the need for fundamental change, but neither seems capable of securing it. What should matter to all of us are the shared origins of our common European-Atlantic civilisation. Russians should not be strangers in the Western world. We are Europeans; we have helped to build and grow this civilisation, and I believe we will be an important part of it once again.
The 2020s have the potential to be a turning point for Russia. The invasion of Ukraine has thrown the future of the Putin regime into uncertainty and given ammunition to Russia’s democratic opposition. Putin’s decision to jail Alexei Navalny in 2021 made the popular lawyer and anti-corruption activist into a political prisoner, in the same way that I was in the 2000s. Navalny’s ‘crime’ was the same as mine: to have pointed out the corruption and self-enrichment of the president. He took the same decision that I did: to continue the fight, even if it means going to prison. It gave both of us status in the struggle for freedom and democracy. Modern technology now makes that struggle very public. Navalny’s exposé of Putin’s theft of public funds to build his extravagant palace on the Black Sea was viewed over 100 million times on the internet. Social media helped coordinate demonstrations against Navalny’s imprisonment all over Russia, not just in Moscow and St Petersburg; and hundreds of thousands of those who took part said they were motivated to protest against the Kremlin for the first time in their lives. They are mainly young people and their protest is not just about Navalny, but about the injustices that run through Putin’s Russia.
Discontent with the Putin regime has reached new heights. We are at a historic moment of opportunity that offers the chance of a better future. If it were to be spurned, the issues that divide East and West will become entrenched beyond redress. The security not only of Russia but also of the Atlantic alliance will suffer and global peace be put at risk. Men and women of goodwill on both sides must come together now to ensure this is not allowed to happen. What follows is my attempt to reveal how this can be done.
PART ONE
A GREAT EXPERIMENT
Early years: an image from school
CHAPTER 1
HOPES AND ASPIRATIONS
I grew up on Cosmonaut Street in north-east Moscow, where gangs of youths and petty criminals ruled the roost. There were street fights and at times it could be scary. I decided early on that I didn’t want to live my life in fear; I didn’t want the unending stress of living with outside forces that can bully you. For the hooligans, the answer was simple: I trained in martial arts, beefed up my muscles and refused to give in to their threats. But there were other forces in Soviet society that were also aimed at making people cower, and they were harder to confront.
As a child in the 1960s and 1970s, like most Soviet people I believed in the Party. Communism was our universe; it was here to stay and we never even thought there could be other ways of doing things. That’s pretty much how children are: parents, friends, teachers – what they say is a fact; most of the time you accept it without questioning. Sure, we had a little snigger when our leader Leonid Brezhnev used to come on TV mumbling and stumbling or awarding himself yet another medal. That was funny. But maybe it was like that everywhere? I didn’t see a connection between our system and empty shelves in the shops. I didn’t even know that shops could be full.