New book by journalist
who spent years interviewing dozens of sources reveals a regime where
disloyalty is the biggest crime
Strongman Putin, but what was the rationale behind this topless shoot? Photograph: RIA Novosti / Reuters/Reuters
For many people in the west, Russian politics has become synonymous with
the country’s secretive president, Vladimir Putin, who has been known to disappear for weeks without explanation.
But Putin does not work alone. As with
most world leaders, he has a network of powerful allies around him – allies who
both support and deceive him, according to a new book by the Russian journalist
and opposition activist Mikhail Zygar.
The journalist founded the independent
news network Dozhd (Rain), which was shut down by the government in 2014. He
has spent years interviewing dozens of sources inside the Kremlin, and his
book, All the Kremlin’s Men, paints a convincing portrait of the inside world
of Russian politics, a place shrouded in conspiracy where “the biggest crime is
being disloyal”.
Disputes over military action in Syria; events in Ukraine and nuclear
posturing in the Baltics have left international tensions between Russia and
the west at a post–cold war high, but at home Putin’s approval ratings remain strong and he is preparing to run for president again in early 2018.
So how did he get there? And what drives
him forward? The Guardian asked Zygar to talk through his key findings from
inside the seat of Russia’s power.
According to one of Zygar’s sources inside the Kremlin, Putin was
initially reluctant to support the multibillion-dollar bid to host the Winter
Olympics in Sochi in 2014.
To persuade him, his press secretary,
Dmitry Peskov, is said to have arranged for a pro-Olympics advertising campaign
on billboards along the motorway Putin uses to travel into Moscow.
Zygar claims radio ads were also
produced, timed for when they knew Putin would be listening to the radio in his
car. When Zygar asked Peskov to confirm his part in the ad campaign, the
secretary didn’t deny it but said: “Sometimes we have to use tricky methods.”
House of Cards = western politics
Zygar’s book lists several sources inside the government who say that Putin
was so convinced that the backstabbing and politicking of the hit Netflix
series House of Cards accurately mirrored western politics that he
instructed his colleagues to watch it.
Zygar claims that for Putin, the
scheming protagonist Frank Underwood “represents the typical American
politician” – which is why he prefers to support figures such as Italy’s former
prime minister Silvio Berlusconi or Donald Trump, who are more “practical” and
“cynical”, says Zygar.
Crimea came ‘out of the blue’
Russia’s decision to illegally annex Crimea, formerly part of Ukraine, was not part of a
long-term strategy to “reclaim” the peninsula but was rushed through in three
months, the book claims.
“No one was ready for it, nobody
expected it, so it was a surprise for the Russian public who previously had no
public desire for Crimea ‘coming back home’,” says Zygar.
This is in stark contrast to the short
war with Georgia in 2008 over the contested republic of
South Ossetia, which
was preceded by months of TV programmes warning about Georgia’s aggression, he
adds.
Putin’s web of paranoia
Putin and the men behind him, including the security council head
Nikolai Patrushev and intelligence officer Boris Ratnikov, fully believe their own propaganda: that the US is
hellbent on destroying Russia, says Zygar.
Zygar points to the time when Patrushev,
one of the president’s top advisers, gave an interview to a prominent state
newspaper claiming that the US was “jealous of Russia’s great natural
resources”. His source? A KGB psychic who claims to have read the former US
secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s mind in a trance.
Ukraine will be left ‘frozen’
The current goal of foreign policy in Ukraine is to leave everything as it is, according to a source
close to Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s main adviser on the country.
Based on the information Zygar
collected, he predicts that the east of the country – caught in a tussle
between the national army and pro-Russia separatists – will be left in “some
sort of frozen conflict” rather than transform or develop economically.
This helps Russia’s cause because “it’s
leverage that can be used against Ukraine … It cannot develop its economy. It’s
always affected by civil unrest,” Zygar says.
The secret behind that Siberian lake photo
Third time lucky, claims Zygar. Photograph: RIA Novosti/Reuters
Putin has built a personality cult around his hardman stunts over the
past 15 years, the most infamous being him riding a horse topless in Siberia’s Tuva region in 2009 and doing the
butterfly in a cold Siberian lake.
Zygar says the idea was to show the
Russian public that Putin is “young, energetic and active ... a real man”. What
they may not know is that Putin had to swim across the lake three times before
the killer shot was nailed, or so the book claims.
How Medvedev was persuaded to step aside
Another reason for Putin’s hardman photoshoot, taken when he was prime
minister, was to show that he was different, better and stronger than Dmitry Medvedev, who was president between 2008 and 2012.
According to Zygar’s sources inside the
Kremlin, Putin wanted to be president again and convinced Medvedev to step
aside in the 2011 elections by warning him that Russia could be a target of a new conspiracy organised by the
US.
Putin is quoted in the book as telling
Medvedev that the “the situation is hard and we could end up losing the country
if leadership isn’t strong enough”. He went on to win the election in 2011 and
was inaugurated in May 2012, when Medvedev became prime minister.
The winter of 2011-12
The most important event shaping modern political life in Russia was the
staging of opposition protests in winter 2011-12, when thousands of Muscovites
took to the streets to protest against the government.
According to Zygar, this left Putin with
one conclusion: that his support base was no longer the middle-class
intellectual elite living in the capital, but the working-class heartlands
across the country, who were “more conservative, more religious, distrustful of
reformers and feel more nostalgia for the Soviet period” – a legacy evident in
many of Putin’s subsequent policies.
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