Ten years that shook the world: How the west discounted then overvalued Vladimir Putin
This was a decade of fake news, the Pussy Riot trial, attempted murder in Salisbury, Russian soldiers ‘on holiday in the Donbas’ – and a multitude of lies designed to deflect Russian blame in the downing of the MH17 passenger jet. Oliver Carroll reflects
The past decade in Russia has seen politics move a lot faster than technology.
Rewind to 2010, and it was all smiles, open shirts and blue jeans as the White House brought Russia’s president to the west coast to demonstrate a “reset” in relations. Dmitry Medvedev – remember him? – joined American officials in a tour of Silicon Valley tech giants. He wrote his first Tweet (“Hello everyone! I’m on Twitter and this is my first message!”). He visited Google and Cisco. He stopped by for a chat with Steve Jobs.
After handing the thrilled Medvedev a new iPhone 4, Jobs suggested the Russian president take “inspiration” from the Apple way. Medvedev, who liked to think of himself as reformer, no doubt dreamt of such things. But history rendered such liberal hopes obsolete. When asked, Medvedev stepped aside for a returning Vladimir Putin, and the Kremlin rejected any idea of evolutionary product updates.
Instead, it stopped still, reversed and emerged a truly revolutionary player.
By the time of Medvedev’s June 2010 visit, the seeds of Russia’s volatile decade were already well sown. For one, Putin’s intention to return the top job was almost certainly settled by this point. But for two, the Americans were also hiding something.
Little known to the Russian guests of honour, the FBI had closed in on a massive Russian spy ring across the United States. The scale of the operation – 11 men and women – was unprecedented for post-Soviet times. The deep-cover agents, who would become the inspiration for the TV series "The Americans," had been caught sending encrypted communications and messages written in invisible ink. One even tried to get a job at a Washington think tank.
According to Michael McFaul, Barack Obama’s Russia adviser and future Moscow ambassador, the revelations spooked the White House. They found out late, and only thanks to a mole in the Russian security services; the operation could have caused “real damage”, McFaul wrote in his memoirs.
But rather than risk a major scandal and the reset, Obama waited for three days before sanctioning an arrest operation. He then agreed to a face-saving swap of four individuals being held by Russia on spy charges. The deal was done, Cold War-style, on neutral tarmac in Vienna airport.
Vladimir Putin greeted his spies as national heroes when they touched down in Moscow. In televised comments, the Russian leader fantasised about the four men he was sending back. Traitors have a tendency to die terrible deaths, he noted, “choking on the dime” that fed them. One of the men on board the plane to Austria was a former military intelligence officer, jailed after shopping the names of more than 100 Russian agents to MI6. His name was Sergei Skripal.
The arc from Medvedev’s iPhone to the Salisbury park bench where the Russian double agent was found frothing at the mouth in 2018 could hardly have been a more dramatic one. The use of a military nerve agent in a Nato country – moreover against a cashed-in spy – raised the stakes. It also shocked many of those within the system. “They were idiots if they really did what they are accused of,” a high-level Kremlin insider said. (The source insisted on anonymity in conversations with The Independent.)
But according to Gennady Gudkov, a retired KGB colonel turned opposition politician, the assassination operation was reflective of a change in strategy that could not have happened without Putin’s approval. “When I was in spy academy in the 1980s, we were told terror abroad was no longer an approved method,” he says. “There had been several bad operations in the 1970s and the political bosses considered it wasn’t good for the Soviet reputation. But now it’s certainly back, and it’s obviously on Putin’s orders.”
The increased role of the military and secret services over the 2010s has mirrored a wider Brezhenvite turn across most areas of Russian life.
In April 2019, a man was fined £365 for calling the president a ‘fantastical f***wit’ in the first outing of a new law banning the ‘disrespect of government symbols online’. Unfortunately for the Kremlin, the phrase became a widely shared meme
The state has stepped up its control of industry: now 70 per cent is, one way or another, in the Kremlin’s hands. Control over the media has been increased: extending dominance from TV and the tabloids to almost all influential outlets. The scope for dissent and protest has been restricted, with vaguely worded laws that could criminalise everything and nothing. The Internet now looks to be next in line.
Occasionally, the total crackdown reached comical proportions. In April 2019, a man was fined £365 for calling the president a “fantastical f***wit,” in the first outing of a new law banning the “disrespect of government symbols online.” Unfortunately for the Kremlin, the publicity meant the phrase became a widely shared internet meme.
“Every year under Putin has turned out to be more absurd than the last one,” says Gudkov. “Elections, courts, arrests, assassinations. And here we are in 2019, with a kind of Diet Stalinism. there’s no reason to believe we aren’t headed for a full-fat version.”
There are several ways of explaining why Russia’s disruptive decade developed as it did. For opposition politicians like Gennady Gudkov, the authoritarian turn was due entirely to Putin’s personality – and what they describe as his paranoia and desire to hold on to power for life. Hopes for a democratic future were thwarted by Medvedev’s “dependence” and “cowardice,” Gudkov says. The Americans who pushed for the failed reset tend to agree with this point of view. Everything was going well while Medvedev was the official vis-a-vis, Ambassador McFaul wrote in his memoirs. There was “great rapport” at the presidential level, progress on arms control and more besides. It was the return of Putin to the presidency that changed everything: “On good days, Putin saw the United States as a competitor. On bad days, the United States was his enemy.”
But another way of looking at things would see Putin’s evolution as disrupter-in-chief as a reaction to the world around him. This is certainly the viewpoint of those closest to the Kremlin. The insider interviewed for this piece, for example, listed an array of complaints about western “double standards” that had contributed to the boss's intransigence. At the start of his time in power, Putin thought he was a “partner” in the war on terror, but later became convinced the west was never interested, the source said. In his very first meeting with Bill Clinton, the Russian leader even proposed that Russia join Nato. Then, after 9/11, he agreed to Washington establishing air bases in Kyrgyzstan for the Afghanistan operation.
Russia got “nothing in return" for such overtures, “only criticism about Chechnya and support for our enemies there”. There was little pleasure when President Obama later began to describe Moscow as a frustrated “regional power”.
The insider continued: “We thought we were living according to the rules, but we found out there were no rules. In time, we understood that good relations with the west implied giving in and becoming a satellite. So now we have a fight without rules. But don’t for a minute forget it wasn’t us who destroyed the rules.”
A third factor at play was domestic politics. By the time of Putin’s return to the political frontline in 2011, Moscow’s newly confident middle class was beginning to assert itself. They reacted fiercely against the switch between Medvedev and Putin badly. A November 2011 poll showed only 34 per cent of likely voters intended to vote for Putin in March’s upcoming presidential elections. Obvious falsifications in parliamentary elections in December caused tens of thousands to take to the streets in protest over late 2011 and 2012. The mass rallies, which were essentially a reaction against the naked cynicism of authorities, in turn, triggered two things: a crackdown on protesters that extended to most areas of Russian life; and a doubling down on the cynicism of the regime itself.
Cynicism – where ideas and idealism are replaced by tricksterism and self-interest – has been a feature Russian politics since the 1980s. According to the cultural historian Mark Lipovetsky, it took its roots in the "ubiquitous cynicism" of the late Soviet period and the “anything goes” culture of Russia’s Wild West capitalism immediately afterwards. Its most obvious early proponent, the nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, went on to inform other world politicians and is considered with some justification to be a prototype of Donald Trump.
But it's important to understand that Zhirinovsky remained on Russia's political fringe until very recently. Indeed, throughout the 2000s, the Kremlin was intent on keeping up appearances on an increasingly authoritarian system. Vladislav Surkov, the regime’s main ideologue, promoted concepts of “managed” then “sovereign” democracy as a way to paper over the cracks.
With the changes of the 2010s, however, the freak show went centre-stage and cynical manipulation was the new mainstream. If before, the Kremlin tried to massage the greys, now black was simply relabelled white. This was the decade of fake news; the Pussy Riot trial; Russia Today; “green men” in Crimea; Russian soldiers “on holiday in the Donbas”; and a multitude of lies designed to deflect Russian blame in the downing of the MH17 passenger jet.
“It became all about lying with a smile,” says Mark Lipovetsky. “No, these soldiers in Crimea are not the Russian military. No, they made their own uniforms. No, they bought them in an army and navy store. But then, yes, the president says six months later, it was actually me all along.”
Earlier this year, the now largely sidelined Surkov summed up the new reality for an article in Nesavisimaya Gazeta. Putin’s state might be a police state but it is a superior type of order, the Kremlin aide wrote. It was not a deep state like the United States. Instead, the penetration of the security services was “transparent”, honest and there for all to see. What Russia had was a “deep nation”. It was the political equivalent of the Pompidou Centre: the pipes you see on the outside are what you actually get.
Such cynicism is the blood that now runs through the veins of Russia’s government, says Konstantin Kalachev, an occasional Kremlin adviser and former board member of the ruling United Russia party.
“The Kremlin culture is all about projecting, and not actually believing what you are saying,” he says. “Lying is totally fine if it means hitting the target. So the country has been turned into a Disneyland for benefit of one man alone – the president.”
In just over four years, Vladimir Putin’s fourth term is up and, according to the constitution, he is due to leave his post. At this stage, there seems little prospect of his giving up power. At his December end-of-year press conference, he seemed to suggest he was mulling over a shake-up of Russian power structures to give the parliament more authority. But most likely he hasn’t decided what his next move will be; those that know him say he has a tendency to leave key decisions until the last minute. The same people suggested another de-facto switch with Medvedev remains the most likely scenario for him staying on.
In an illusionary world full of deception and suspicion, Medvedev is, they say, Putin’s one constant; the colleague who never let him down. “There is still anxiety given the forces the switch unleashed last time, but it remains the simplest solution,” says Kalachev.
Putin’s cynical, value-less system, on the other hand, seems much less prepared for the transition. Already, there are several warning signs. Pro-Kremlin candidates are being rejected at the polling booths. For the first time since Perestroika, opinion polls show a desire for change over stability. The country’s metropolitan youth is restless.
This summer’s protests in Moscow, which erupted after gerrymandering in local elections, seemed to show the limits of the Kremlin’s manipulative technologies. The hardline response only served to create idealistic new leaders who appealed for self-sacrifice and offered a rebuke of the Kremlin’s value-less world view.
“Cynicism is a self-limiting system,” says Lipovetsky. “On the one hand, it produces more cynicism. But on the other hand, as we see here, it produces idealism.”
As Russia heads into the next decade, there is little prospect of a fluffy bunny, pro-western president appearing in Putin’s place. But the way the system he built deals with the next generation, and their demands for a different type of politics, will determine whether it has any chance of surviving into the long term.
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