Deception (8 page)

2

The Pirate State

The story of Sergei Magnitsky should be a wake-up call to the outside world, revealing the true nature of the regime in Russia. But outsiders have systematically (and in some cases wilfully) misread events since
1999
, when the chaotic but pluralist era of Boris Yeltsin gave way to the corrupt and authoritarian rule of the ex-KGB hard men – the
Siloviki
. Telling the real story of these men's doings is hard and even dangerous. For Russia's self-censoring mainstream media, no-go areas include Mr Putin's private wealth, his sexual preferences, and the mysterious ‘terrorist' bombings of autumn
1999
that stoked public anxiety, making the unknown stopgap prime minister a shoo-in for the presidency. It is often forgotten that Mr Putin arrived on the national stage as a political cipher: a quiet, grey, timid-looking man, blinking nervously in the unaccustomed limelight. He was the fifth prime minister in the space of twelve months: many at the time thought, wrongly, that his stint in office would be equally brief (as we will see later in the book, the outward appearance of mediocrity can be dangerously deceptive). Now the media admiringly portray Mr Putin and his colleagues as chaste, brave (and in his case virile) guardians of the national interest, not brutes or swindlers. Privately, few Russians believe these political arrangements are fair or efficient. But they see no way of changing them.

That reflects the contradiction at the heart of Russian public life. The twelve years of the ex-KGB regime has brought not the promised transformation to order and modernity, but only a sleazy stability. Corruption and incompetence mean that public services are still dire, despite the billions squandered on them. The result is demoralising and tiresome. Many of the brightest and best Russians yearn to live and work abroad. But at home, few see any alternative to Mr Putin and his colleagues. Whatever their shortcomings, in the view of many Russians, they are the least bad option – certainly better than the uncertainties and humiliations of the
1990
s.

The harshest fate awaits those who try active opposition. Demonstrators for causes that displease the Kremlin risk arrest. A stark example of this is the protestors who gather on the
31
st of the month (when it happens) to defend Article
31
of the Russian constitution, which guarantees freedom of assembly. Apparently oblivious to the irony, police haul them away: punishing those demonstrating for the right to demonstrate. The FSB and other organs of state power have closed down independent public life in Russia. They have intimidated journalists (and even bloggers); they bully trade unionists; they infiltrate and disrupt opposition parties. The threat of Soviet-style coercive psychiatric treatment is in the background (and sometimes even the foreground) during interrogations. All critics of the regime count as potential ‘extremists', and ‘extremism' is a criminal offence, punishable in some cases by the death penalty. In July
2010
the FSB gained new rights to issue warnings to individuals, organisations, and media outlets to stop activities it considers actually or potentially extremist.

A full account of the misrule that results would take a whole book, with full chapters, rather than just fleeting mentions, for subjects such as the mistreatment of the country's millions of migrant workers.
^q
Most of the worst abuses happen in the republics of the North Caucasus, such as Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan, where the authorities are struggling to maintain control amid a growing insurgency from Islamist groups and others infuriated by their corrupt and incompetent rulers. But the noxious cocktail there poisons public life in Moscow too. A signal example of this came with the murder in January
2009
of Stanislav Markelov, a leading human rights lawyer who had represented many victims of abuse in Chechnya. The men who gunned him down in the middle of Moscow in broad daylight also killed a young journalist, Anastasia Baburova. So hardened is international public opinion to the regime's habitual use of violence against its opponents that other cases barely attract attention. In March
2009
Lev Ponamarov, a leading human-rights activist, was severely beaten. This appears to have been a snub to a visiting European human-rights representative, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, whom he had just met. In July, Albert Pchelintsev, an anti-corruption activist, was shot with a stun gun, by attackers who told him that it was to ‘shut him up'. Natalya Estemirova, the leading campaigner and researcher in Chechnya for Memorial, the oldest and best-known Russian human-rights organisation, was abducted and murdered in July
2009
. The Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov said callously that he would not have bothered to murder a woman ‘devoid of honour, merit and conscience'. Oleg Orlov, chairman of Memorial, accused Mr Kadyrov of ‘political responsibility' for the killing and was then prosecuted for criminal slander (he was acquitted in June
2011
).
¹
The investigative journalist Oleg Kashin received a crippling beating in November
2010
.

These killings, assaults and other forms of intimidation often bear the FSB's fingerprints. It makes no difference when other Russian authorities condemn the lawlessness. Mr Medvedev, for example, repeatedly denounced corruption and what he memorably termed ‘legal nihilism'. Yet for the most part, the Russian president was part of the problem, not of the solution. It was he, for example, who in August
2010
signed into law the FSB's new powers to issue intimidatory warnings. Human Rights Watch states in its most recent report that the climate remains ‘deeply negative', with only rhetorical commitments to human rights and the rule of law.
²

Those who seek the secrets of the regime are at even greater danger. Russian journalists who turn over such stones risk violent attacks or death. Foreign journalistic inquiry too has become far harder over the past ten years as the regime and its business cronies have discovered England's tough and far-reaching libel law. Finding source material is tricky. The paper trail often goes cold in places such as the British Virgin Islands, which blocks outsiders from finding the ultimate beneficial ownership of the companies registered there. But the greed and cynicism of supposedly more reputable countries in dealing with dubious but tempting customers is if anything worse.
³

Even in America, Britain and Continental European countries that claim to shun crime and corruption, officials are unwilling to speak out publicly about the sea of dirty Russian money that swills through property markets, banking systems, financial exchanges and (increasingly) politics. In the course of an important investigation I appealed to a well-placed Western official to help me see some crucial documents. He responded: ‘We would love to help you, but however discreetly we do it, the Russians will find out. And they will take it as a declaration of war.' A Finnish official, faced with a specific request that could have cast a damning light on a senior Russian figure's behaviour, answered: ‘Good luck. But we can't help you. That's why we're still here'. Such coyness stems only partly from prudence. Some officials have personal financial reasons for going easy on Russia: a lucrative directorship may be awaiting them when they leave government service. Others fear more generally that moral grandstanding will be bad for business; some feel that criticism of Russia is selective and even hypocritical, given the corruption and misrule in other countries, not least in the West.

These perceptions are changing, albeit slowly. Russia's reputation as a promising emerging market looks increasingly hollow, as other competitors for foreign trade and investment do better. Russia's place in the BRIC group – Brazil, Russia, India and China – is now largely nominal, as the other three countries forge ahead. Closer to home, the smaller but more advanced states of Central Europe have outstripped Russia in importance. The Czech Republic, with a population of only
10
m people, buys more German exports than Russia with
140
m people. Even including oil and gas, Poland is now a substantially bigger trading partner for Germany than Russia.
⁴

Yet declining importance does not mean irrelevance, and few European leaders are willing to contemplate a real confrontation. They argue that many places are worse run than Russia, which does not look like a rogue state, or even a particularly threatening one. They also note that Russia, for its part, does not want a confrontation either. Having indulged in Soviet symbolism and nostalgia at the start of his time in power (when he described the USSR's collapse as the ‘geopolitical catastrophe' of the last century, and reinstated the tune of the Soviet national anthem) Mr Putin switched tack. Russia has mended fences with neighbours such as Poland, expressing sympathy for the victims of Soviet-era crimes such as the Hitler–Stalin Pact and the wartime Katy
ń
massacre of captured Polish officers, and in some cases explicitly repudiating the lies surrounding those crimes, which had only lately been making a revolting comeback.

Russia has also in large part signed up to the rules of the international game (though it may not always obey them). It has negotiated with seeming sincerity to join outfits such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (a rich-world think-tank in Paris) and the World Trade Organisation, which regulates global trade. Many leading members of Russia's government, especially those dealing with financial and economic policy, look no worse and in some ways rather better than their counterparts in other ex-communist countries. As Daniel Treisman, an American academic, argues, Russia is no more messily ruled than other middle-income countries such as Mexico or Turkey.
⁵
Rigged elections, manipulated media, high-level corruption and abuse of state power are unpleasant phenomena, but sadly not rare ones. Russia's legal system sometimes works – especially in cases that, unlike Mr Magnitsky's, do not involve the interests of the rich and powerful. Charities and pressure groups can function with only mild difficulties so long as they stay away from taboo areas such as Chechnya. Elections in the provinces sometimes yield surprising results that annoy the country's leaders. It has a degree of media freedom (chiefly on the internet and in small-circulation publications). Emigration provides an important safety valve: unlike in the Soviet era, if you don't like it, you can leave. The state expects little of its citizens, and vice versa.

Given that Russia emerged from communist dictatorship only twenty-one years ago, the right response, its advocates argue, is to be impressed that the country is so normal, rather than depressed that it is not better. Such special pleading makes it easy for foreigners to conclude that Russia, once you get used to it, is just another roughly hewn emerging market, more a source of opportunity than danger. In any case, Russia does not take much notice of outside strictures, so the best thing is to shut up. Critics of Russia's domestic and foreign policy certainly need to be careful not to exaggerate their case. Some aspects of politics may be reminiscent of fascism, such as the personality cult of Mr Putin, the overlap between business and politics, and thuggish youth movements (as I note later, one of these now boasts Ms Chapman as a senior figure). But Russia is not a totalitarian country, or even a fully autocratic one. Vladislav Inozemtsev, an economics professor highly critical of the regime, concedes:

 

Contemporary Russia is not a candidate to become a Soviet Union
2
.
0
. It is a country in which citizens have unrestricted access to information, own property, leave and return to the country freely, and develop private businesses of all kinds.
⁶

 

After an era where Russia resembled Weimar Germany in some respects, nothing like the Nazi Party or Hitlerian ideology is in sight.

The temptation among many Westerners, therefore, is to accept the superficial image of normality and cooperation, without digging too deeply into the violent, thieving and distorted mind-set and personalities behind it, or their pervasive incompetence and penchant for risky short cuts. A glimpse behind this veil of official timidity and self-interest came with the WikiLeaks revelations that started in November
2010
. They exposed the almost panicky concern of American diplomats about the level of corruption in Russia, about the fusion between crime, business and government, and about its spillover into the West. America's then Secretary of Defence Robert Gates observed in a secret cable that Russia was ‘an oligarchy run by the security services'.
⁷
Britain's Michael Davenport, a seasoned Russia-watcher in the Foreign Office, termed it a ‘corrupt autocracy' when talking to his American colleagues.
⁸
But that was mild by the standards of a more extensive analysis compiled in mid November
2009
by the American embassy in Moscow. Classified ‘secret' (but now available at the click of a mouse on the WikiLeaks website), it was to prepare the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, for a two-day visit to Moscow. It highlighted the real nature of his
Siloviki
interlocutors, the FSB director Aleksandr Bortnikov, the SVR director Mikhail Fradkov, and the Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev. It described them as: