Strongman (21 page)

The backlash

Few people can say they know very much about Vladislav Surkov, even though for more than a decade he has been one of the most influential people in the Kremlin. Hiding behind
the innocuous title of deputy chief of staff to the president, he is in fact the architect of Russia’s political system – changing chameleon-like at his master’s command, thinking
up ever new structures and ideologies to justify whatever twist or turn Vladimir Putin required. His most notorious coinage – the notion of ‘sovereign democracy’ –
essentially meant that Russia would decide for itself, as a sovereign state, what kind of democracy it needed. If today it meant that parties needed 7 per cent of the vote, not 5, to get into
parliament, Surkov was on hand to explain why. If a few years later, it was decided that 5 per cent was, after all, better, Surkov would justify that too. If governors should no longer be elected,
Surkov would explain why appointing them was also democratic.

He was born in 1964, and for a long time concealed the fact that his father was Chechen (his name was originally Dudayev). He studied at a metals institute, did his compulsory military service
in military intelligence, and then turned to the arts, training to become a theatre director before studying economics and going into business. He composed lyrics for rock bands, and still writes
novels. This post-Soviet renaissance man worked with Mikhail Khodorkovsky as head of PR, before moving briefly to central television and then into Putin’s office as what the Soviets would
have called ‘ideology secretary’.

Following the ‘catastrophe’ of the Orange Revolution, it fell to Surkov to devise strategies to prevent the contagion spreading to Russia (as the entire ruling elite believed it
would). In doing so he was guided by the assessments of those who had been on the ground in Ukraine during those tumultuous events.

Gleb Pavlovsky, having safely escaped in his orange disguise, wrote in the press: ‘Kiev is a serious wake-up call for Russia. I believe that our political system is not ready for the new
revolutionary technologies of the age of globalisation. The combination of the internal weakening of the political system and external pressures and provocations could lead to a new revolution, and
a global revolution in Russia would not be a small thing. We avoided bloodshed in 1991, almost by a miracle. We avoided bloodshed in Russia in 1996 and 1999 everywhere except in Chechnya. But that
doesn’t mean that another miracle is coming.’
¹²

He told the BBC, looking back in February 2008: ‘This catastrophe was very useful for us. We learned a lot of valuable lessons. Putin started to take much more seriously the threats he
faced. It very quickly became clear that they would try to export this to us. We needed quickly to prepare, to strengthen our political system and make it ready for a blow from the outside –
a blow in a “velvet glove”, but a blow that would topple us nonetheless. Putin in 2005 very quickly prepared, consolidated the elite, the political system, the cooperation, so there
could be no orange revolution in Russia. Within a year we had turned back the wave of coloured revolutions.’

Surkov and his comrades targeted two lurking dangers – the ‘unguided’ energies of young people, and foreign-funded NGOs. To tackle the first problem, it was decided to set up a
mass youth organisation that would be totally loyal to Putin and the current regime. It was called Nashi – meaning ‘Our Own People’. The word has a strongly nationalistic or
chauvinistic connotation, implying that all those who are not ‘nashi’ are ‘against us’, even traitors.

Sergei Markov describes himself as one of the ideological team, under Surkov, that begat this monster, which smacked so strongly of the Soviet communist youth movement, the Komsomol. In an
interview, Markov stated without embarrassment: ‘The main aim of Nashi was to prevent an orange revolution in Russia. So the first guys who joined were super patriotic. And the first rule was
geography. They had to live within ten hours’ drive of Moscow so that they could take the night bus and be in Moscow in the morning and occupy Red Square to protect the sovereignty of the
state.’

Nashi quickly had its own website (www.nashi.su, using the still valid domain of the Soviet Union rather than Russia). Over the coming years they would hold patriotic summer camps at Lake
Seliger, north of Moscow, dedicated to a healthy lifestyle, political education and paramilitary exercises; they would turn out regularly in their red T-shirts not just for their own demonstrations
but to swamp opposition protests; and they mounted campaigns against any institution or individual they didn’t like – including Western ambassadors, critical newspapers and even a kebab
shop unluckily named ‘Anti-Soviet’. Nashi describes itself as a ‘democratic anti-fascist youth movement’. Its membership soon grew to well over 100,000.

The Surkov team felt their mission was already accomplished on 15 May 2005 when Nashi mobilised its first large rally. Some 60,000 activists, mostly transported into Moscow overnight on
thousands of buses, brought Leninsky Prospekt to a standstill. According to Markov, ‘after that the talk about orange revolution stopped’.

Mission accomplished, but role far from over. Nashi became the self-appointed voice of public outrage, a potent political force that purported to be independent but in fact enjoyed the absolute
protection of the state, however lawless or thuggish their behaviour became. Their activities had little to do with preventing a coloured revolution in Russia. The British ambassador, Tony Brenton,
would find himself in their sights after he attended a conference held by The Other Russia, a coalition of opposition groups, in July 2006. Brenton recalls the incident in the self-deprecating
manner of a British diplomat: ‘I went along to this Other Russia conference to express our support for Russian civil society, which I did in a deeply dull speech. I wasn’t the only
ambassador there, but for some reason the Russians picked me out. And this youth group, Nashi, which is a ruling-party youth group, so in effect works for the Kremlin, demanded an apology for Tony
Brenton’s interference in Russian politics. Now there was no way I was going to apologise, so then they said, well we are going to hassle Tony Brenton until he does apologise. It was my job
to put up with it, which I did.’
¹³

What he and his family had to endure, however, bordered on the criminal. Hooligans from Nashi camped outside his house, waving banners, followed him around town and shouted abuse at the back of
public meetings he addressed. When his wife drove out to go shopping, they hammered with their fists on the roof of her car. Brenton complained about this intimidation, which clearly violated the
Vienna Convention on the status of diplomats (not to mention laws against harassment), but it took half a year before the foreign ministry took action to force Nashi to back off.

Nashi undertook similar actions against the Estonian ambassador to express the ‘outrage of the Russian people’ against her country’s decision to remove a memorial to Soviet
‘liberators’ of Estonia (considered occupiers by most Estonians) from the centre of the capital, Tallinn.

Whenever complaints were made, Kremlin spokesmen would shrug their shoulders, claiming it was nothing to do with them, almost laughing it off as a bit of harmless fun. But the link with the
Kremlin is explicit. The Nashi website is full of articles by Surkov, Putin and Medvedev, all of whom also attend their conferences and summer camps. Putin’s party, United Russia, also has
its own official youth wing, Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard – another Soviet-era term), which is rather more disciplined than Nashi.

Surkov’s second line of attack, to ward off the orange ‘contagion’, was aimed against non-governmental organisations, particularly those which received funding or support from
abroad. These had been identified by the paranoiacs in the Kremlin not just as factors in the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine (and a third grass-roots revolt in the former Soviet republic of
Kyrgyzstan in February 2005) but as the means by which the United States was allegedly plotting the downfall of the Putin regime.

Civil society had burgeoned in Russia ever since Gorbachev’s
glasnost
policies had allowed the first ‘informal organisations’ to be registered. Now there were hundreds
of thousands of them, and about 2,000 dealt with human rights and democracy issues. Organisations such as the Carnegie Centre provided independent expert analysis of Russian politics; Memorial
chronicled the crimes of the past and kept alive the memory of the victims of communism; the Helsinki Group monitored human rights abuses. And some of them received grants or subsidies from Western
governments or from parent NGOs abroad.

Less than a year after the Ukraine revolution the State Duma introduced legislation to rein them in. The law, which would severely hamper the activities of foreign-supported NGOs operating in
Russia, caused an outcry in the West, and President Bush, among others, successfully lobbied for some of its terms to be softened. Nonetheless, the version signed into law by President Putin on 10
January 2006 required all Russian NGOs to disclose their finances and sources of funding, and ensure that their activities complied with Russian ‘national interests’ or risk closure. It
became considerably more difficult for foreign groups to fund and support their partners in Russia. (By October, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Danish Refugee Council and two
branches of Doctors Without Borders had been forced to halt their work temporarily for allegedly failing to comply with registration requirements.)
¹⁴

Aware of the bad publicity surrounding the new law, the Kremlin resorted to Soviet-style propaganda to make the public aware of how heinous NGOs could be.

A fortnight after the law was signed, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a 78-year-old human rights activist and chairperson of the Moscow Helsinki Group, was at home in Moscow when a friend called and told
her to switch her television on, quickly. ‘I switched on the TV,’ she told me, ‘and saw some strange silhouettes. The presenter, in a dramatic voice, was saying that some English
diplomats had made some kind of transmitter, inside a rock, in some square, stuffed with top-notch technology.’
¹⁵
State television had been given
an extraordinary scoop: clandestine footage of British spies in action. The pictures showed named British diplomats, including one Marc Doe, a ‘second secretary’ (often a euphemism for
an MI6 agent), retrieving data from a fake rock, in reality a transmitter, planted in a park. The report showed the rock being opened up, to reveal a James Bond-style gadget inside.

The story was bizarre, but it was not untrue. Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, admits: ‘The spy rock was embarrassing. I mean, they had us bang to rights. The rock was
there for all to see, on television. Clearly they had known about it for some time and had been saving it up for a political purpose.’
¹⁶

The political purpose became clearer as Lyudmila Alexeyeva continued to watch. ‘Suddenly they are talking about this diplomat at the British embassy, Doe, or something like that, who
“managed” our human rights organisations. And then they show some piece of paper with the words “Moscow Helsinki Group”.’ In fact, the document, signed by Doe,
appeared to be authorisation for the transfer of £23,000 to the Moscow Helsinki Group.

The Russians did not expel any of the British spies they had caught red-handed. The story had a different purpose: to demonstrate that NGOs like the Helsinki Group were in the pay not just of
the West but of the British secret service. Alexeyeva says she had never met Marc Doe, and the Helsinki Group had only received one grant from the Foreign Office’s Global Opportunities Fund,
which was merely processed by the embassy. The Foreign Office says that all its payments to Russian NGOs are openly published on its website. But by using a spy to handle some of those payments, it
had played straight into the Russians’ hands.

Two days after the ‘spy rock’ exposé, President Putin justified the controversial NGO law by making an explicit link between espionage and NGO activities: ‘We have seen
that attempts are made to use secret services to work with NGOs and that they are financed through the channels of the secret services. No one can say that this money doesn’t stink. I assume
that many people will now understand why Russia has passed a law regulating the activities of non-governmental organisations in this country. The law is intended to block the interference by other
states in the internal affairs of the Russian Federation.’

Triumph of the strongmen

In his annual presidential address in April 2005, Putin uttered a sentence that has often been quoted as proof of his nostalgia for communism. ‘The collapse of the Soviet
Union,’ he said, ‘was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.’ In fact, he was not talking about the communist system as such. What he regretted was the passing of a
mighty, unified, multi-ethnic state, whose collapse – as he went on to say in that speech – left ‘tens of millions of our fellow citizens and compatriots outside Russian
territory’. This was, as he put it, ‘a genuine drama’ for the Russian nation – and it is hard to dispute that.

It was an unfortunate choice of words, however, since so many of his actions at the beginning of his second term really did look as if he was trying to restore the Soviet Union, communism and
all. In response to the Beslan siege he had removed many of the most democratic elements of the electoral system, tightening his personal grip on power. In response to the popular revolutions in
Georgia and Ukraine he had squashed human rights groups and set up an ugly chauvinistic youth organisation. All the while, his stranglehold on the media was tightening.

There was little reason now for genuine liberals to remain in Putin’s team. As early as February 2004 Putin had lost his prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, who was sacked after a series of
disagreements – the final straw being Putin’s decision to appoint his friend Igor Sechin to the chairmanship of the state oil giant Rosneft. Sechin was just one of Putin’s cronies
(others included ex-KGB man Viktor Ivanov, ideology chief Vladislav Surkov and deputy chief of staff Dmitry Medvedev) who ended up running massive state companies, in addition to their
administration jobs. Kasyanov saw this as proof that ‘Putin was drifting away from liberal approaches, towards a command economy’.
¹⁷
Out of
government, Kasyanov went on to become a leading opposition figure, and one with much credibility, having worked side-by-side with Putin for three years – and having considered him initially
a reformer.