The aim of this book is to analyze how Vladimir Putin exercised a subtle divide and rule against his hardline supporters between 2004 and 2011, to prevent them from constraining his accumulation of power. It is a case study that illustrates some key elements of the inner workings of his regime, and helps us to understand how it has lasted for 18 years. The book examines one of its understudied features: the origins, unfolding, climax, and fading of an important conflict between key groups of siloviki (security figures)1 in Putin’s entourage.
This conflict, fomented by Putin, should be seen as a special sub-set of the numerous conflicts over assets and power that are constantly raging between the many groups that make up Russia’s ruling class. These conflicts are typically, in varying proportions, both spontaneous and self-generated, and are then fomented by Putin or his associates, in a continuous process of divide-and-rule. What is special about the ‘siloviki war’ is that its key participants were close associates of Putin’s, came from one of his two power-bases, namely the security services,2 and wielded extensive power and influence over key agencies of his regime, such as the security police (Federal Security Service (FSS)), the Presidential Security Service, and the drug control service (State Committee for the Control of Narcotics (SCCN)). These agencies are heavily armed and could potentially have been used to support or carry out a coup, if sufficient discontent had developed with Putin’s leadership. Thus Putin benefited from the silovik war, at least in the short term, because he felt more secure, and also gained extra room for manipulating the ruling elites. On the other hand, Russia’s internal security system was severely damaged by the savage infighting.
The book also argues that when this first silovik war was in 2007 approaching its end, Putin fomented a new one. This suggests that he felt a continuing need to enjoy the space for political manoeuver that such conflicts generate. He sparked the new war by setting up an Investigations Committee of the Procuracy (ICP) that was effectively independent of the Procuracy-General, and then by having a political enemy of the procurator-general appointed as the head of the new ICP. The resulting war has now gone on for a decade—to the at least temporary advantage of Putin, but also to the serious detriment of Russia’s system of law-enforcement.
This whole argument, as described above, has not been seriously researched or documented before.3 This needs to be done, if we are to fully understand Putin’s method of rule.
The first silovik war originated in the 1990s, climaxed in 2004–2007, and faded between 2008 and 2010. The growing erraticness of Putin’s regime that it may have presaged has become marked since 2011. The context in which the war began was the St Petersburg of the early 1990s. Putin was then Mayor Anatoly Sobchak’s first deputy, supervising the privatization of hundreds of city enterprises. In the process, he developed close relations not only with newly emerging businessmen, including some from the region’s security services, but also with colleagues in the mayor’s office and the city’s police forces.
After moving to Moscow and rising in 1996–2000 to become FSS head (1998), then prime minister (1999) and then president (2000), Putin appointed a remarkable number of these friends, allies, and allies of allies to senior positions, mainly in the capital. Among them were most of the individuals who, before long, were to figure in the silovik war.
From 2000 to 2004 these people worked with Putin to consolidate a regime that they increasingly controlled. The aim was to achieve a smooth and gradual transition from President Boris Yeltsin’s appointees to President Putin’s. By 2004, after Putin had removed Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and his many supporters in the bureaucracy, the transition in personnel had gone as far as was necessary. The actual or potential Yeltsinite opponents of the newly empowered siloviki had been politically neutralized. Now Putin needed to focus on creating or maintaining a measure of personal autonomy from the main groups of siloviki and their non-silovik adherents. In this way he could hope to control them rather than be controlled by them. This task was never easy. At times, as indicated below, his often uncertain grip on the situation seems to have slipped.
This is the background to Putin’s apparently deliberate decision to exacerbate the existing rivalry between the two silovik factions discussed in this book. His actions were successful, enabling him to stay a little above these powerful groups and to have enough freedom of maneuver to maintain his personal authority within the regime as a whole. In this wider context he was able to play the ‘godfather’ role of distributing favors and mediating and balancing the many conflicting interests and rivalries within his far-flung, rather mafia-like clan.
However, this was achieved at a heavy cost to Russia’s wellbeing. Most obviously, Putin’s era has far surpassed Yeltsin’s in two broad senses. A growing proportion of the country’s national wealth has in one way or another been misappropriated by the ruling class, and a toxic mix of corruption, dysfunction, and stagnation has become more dominant in Russian institutions, permeating almost the entire polity and economy.
What this analysis of one particularly important elite conflict hopes to illustrate is how Putin’s complex clan of associates—seemingly similar in type to the regional clans of Yuri Luzhkov in Moscow and Eduard Rossel in Sverdlovsk region (both long disbanded)—is suffering today not only from the debilitating effects of this and other elite conflicts, but also from the fact that it has to go on ruling Russia. It cannot retreat from this role and simply live off the country’s wealth, as became increasingly enticing from the mid-2000s. This was when Russia’s oil revenues sky-rocketed and the Yukos case showed that seizing private assets was not so difficult. But the Putin clan differs from other mafia-type organizations in Italy, Mexico, and elsewhere. These organizations have not sought to rule their countries, but have concentrated on their ‘natural’ role as economic, social, and political parasites. By contrast, Putin’s clan at first put its main emphasis on taking power and ruling, and only then developed systematically its secondary instinct to become economic parasites or even moguls.
The task of the Putinites has been further complicated by the presence in the clan not just of silovik groups and their civilian adherents, but also of highly placed businessmen, lawyers and financial experts, mostly from St Petersburg. These are people with whom Putin developed close business or other ties in the 1990s, but who did not join siloviki groups. Examples are the tycoons Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Koval’chuk, Roman Abramovich and Anatoly Chubais, the financial expert Aleksei Kudrin, and perhaps the politician Dmitri Medvedev. Within Putin’s clan they have made up a loose, shadowy group, about which too little is known. However, on the basis of rather sketchy evidence they make two brief but critical appearances in this book, in June 2006 and late 2007, when they appear to have made a strong impact on events. This may have stemmed from their enormous wealth and their readiness to use it as an instrument to remind Putin of their interests, for example by financing Internet and other media critical of the Kremlin and of Putin. Even more important may have been their apparent possession of compromising information (kompromat) about the sources of Putin’s wealth. For example, Abramovich has been reliably reported as having given him a luxury yacht.
In the course of ruling, Putin’s factionalized clan—overly dependent on his personalistic rule—has faced some easily identified problems of institutional weakness. It has not had a powerful party and secret police to hold the country together, as the USSR did. It has not had the legitimizing base of a well-entrenched monarchy or republic. And it has not had a national ideology or respected constitution to promote popular unity, as more stable countries do. Thus, as its original public-relations trappings gradually faded, its arbitrarily authoritarian essence started to show. Putin deliberately reinforced this, especially from the mid-2010s, with a domestic and foreign nationalism that has deluded most Russians into believing—for now—that Russia is a great power once more.
Prior to the mid-2010s, the authoritarian essence was mostly hidden, although by digging hard much could be found, including in many of the sources cited in this book. Beneath a veneer of rhetoric about the rule of law, the essence that will emerge below derives from a complex clan built on the following elements:
- longstanding personal loyalties,
- general acknowledgment of the clan leader, Putin,
- a code of behavior (sometimes disturbingly brittle),
- a steady focus on material self-enrichment,
- manipulation of the political and economic system,
- intimidation or worse of outsiders who gain a measure of political or economic power,
- economic parasitism on the state and private business, and
- the use of violence when the clan’s will is determinedly thwarted.4
In trying to identify clan memberships in communist times, T.H. Rigby paid special attention to the ties that bound particular Soviet individuals to their sponsor or ally. These ties could be traced through personal appointments, a common institutional or home background, common themes propounded in speeches, and so on. As in Soviet times, today too, the exact nature of such ties is often difficult to pin down. Although a lot more information is now available, today’s system is much less rigid than the Soviet order, making relationship patterns more varied and changeable. Also, the fact that business, money and corruption are now dramatically more important factors than before does not necessarily make things easier: reliable information on the finances and corrupt activities of individuals is often difficult or impossible to obtain.
Finally, in this introduction, why is it hard to avoid comparisons with the mafia when describing the nature and structure of Putin’s regime? And why do so, even though the regime differs from other mafias by having an unusual, perhaps unique double focus—not just on being a parasite of traditional type on Russia’s economy and society, but also on ruling the country?
Logically, one should start by trying out comparisons with previous regimes in Russia. However, the results of doing this are not satisfactory. Unlike Putin’s regime, the Romanov dynasty functioned on the basis of a genetically determined principle of sovereign succession that was usually observed and that enjoyed popular support. Also, it operated a system of rule and patronage that was much less fluid and considerably less corrupt than Putin’s, and in which the accumulation of enormous personal wealth was not very common.
As for the communist regime, on the one hand it had succession procedures as dysfunctional as Putin’s. But, on the other, it was much less corrupt; featured a disciplined party with a monopoly of power and a secret police that, between them, held the whole structure together; possessed a legitimizing official ideology that for long generated considerable popular backing; and operated over almost four decades a personal dictatorship and a pitilessly effective system of mass terror. All these features distinguish it from the Putin regime.
By contrast, the latter eschews mass terror in favor of occasional brutality and the murder of individuals. Also, it operates on a fluid, personalistic basis that emasculates regular institutions and uses a system of informal understandings (ponyatiya) that can change unpredictably and that have to be sensed or guessed at by insiders. When a leader like Putin is at the height of his limited powers, he can sometimes manipulate these ponyatiya and mislead particular factions, e.g., the Sechin group in 2007 (see Chapter 9). But he can also be shocked on finding that a powerful elite group is able to impose on him its own understanding of what is needed in a particular situation, as the Abramovich group apparently did to him in 2006.
Many examples of the ways of the Putin regime will be found below, including those just cited. The reader will then be able to judge how valid or invalid the comparison with the mafia seems to be.
Footnotes
1
In this book the term siloviki is used roughly as it is in the Russian context. This is in two slightly different senses. Broadly speaking, it refers to employees of all the agencies that use any significant degree of armed force. More narrowly, as in ‘voina silovikov’ (siloviki war), the word refers to those close associates of Putin who made their careers in the KGB and also, in some cases, were running silovik organizations during the silovik war. I have tried both to find a non-clumsy way of translating siloviki into English, and also to think of any near-equivalent of the siloviki phenomenon in either Russian or non-Russian hi...