Many in Russia and abroad picture Putin as a kind of contemporary tsar or party general secretary. He wields unmatched authority, an authority that has risen since his return to the presidency in 2012. The mechanisms of power remain firmly clasped in his hands. As Russian president he has extensive formal powers. He appoints and can dismiss the prime minister, the cabinet, the chairman of the Central Bank and the highest judges. He has the right to dissolve the State Duma and announce fresh elections. His annual address to the Federal Assembly lays down the guiding principles for Russian’s external and internal policies. His rulings settle disputes inside the government. He controls foreign policy and approves national military doctrine. He chairs both the Security Council and, since 2014, the State Commission for Military-Industrial Issues.1 He is the supreme commander-in-chief of the armed forces, a puissant monarch.
Yet there were always limits to the dominance that even Russia’s mightiest leaders – Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin – could exert in practice. Rulers had to build an effective team round them. Tsars plucked their ministers mainly from the high aristocracy until the nineteenth century, when they increasingly turned to other levels of society for talent. Under communism there was a reversion to an even older way of choosing an entourage whereby each general secretary promoted associates who had been with them for most of their career. Personal loyalty was the principal demand. This has been likened to a clan system – a comparison that makes a degree of sense except that communist ‘clans’ did not mainly involve ties of blood. Gorbachëv was unusual in being reluctant to elevate long-term friends and associates to prominence, while Yeltsin had a compulsive habit of firing his own appointees almost as soon as he had welcomed them to office. Putin has reverted to a more traditional style of Russian rulership, however, maintaining a stable team in the top tier of the Kremlin leadership. Authority and riches are showered on his favourites, from whom he requires unconditional allegiance in return.
This system already existed at lower levels of power before Putin first became president. Networks of patrons and clients were a feature of the Soviet system of rule even under Stalin, who strove in vain to break them up by means of his bloody purges.2 The persistence of administrative clanship was itself a reaction to the flow of arbitrary orders from on high. Officials needed a network of patronage for protection. When the USSR began to fall apart, the incentive to hold close to friends and acquaintances grew stronger and it was felt at every level of Russian society as the uncertainties of life increased in the 1990s. While state institutions weakened, people needed alternative ways of bringing security to their lives. Putin was known for his loyalty to both his bosses and his subordinates – this was one of the characteristics that attracted Yeltsin’s attention. He felt comfortable with such a system. Informal networks were often the only means of getting things done in an environment where bureaucratic formalities congested the administration. Putin, like other officials who had to cope with the chaos that preceded and followed the collapse of the USSR, had no intention of reforming this pattern of governance.
However, when Putin took over, he inherited a political system that was rife with factionalism. Prime ministers and their cabinets had appeared like passenger liners out of a sea fog, only to disappear when Yeltsin took against them. Putin’s aim was – and remains – to eliminate the chaos from Russian politics. Stability and order were and are his priorities. Yeltsin left him with a situation where there were ceaseless disputes between the upholders of state power and the proponents of democratic rights and liberal economics, and each side was itself divided.3 When leading opponents went up against each other, it was Putin alone who could arbitrate. He inevitably annoys the losers with his rulings, but he knows he cannot please everyone and is also aware that being thus above the fray consolidates his supremacy. Disputants do not express public discontent. Liberal economic voices have not entirely disappeared, but they are weak and becoming weaker. Even so, there is a degree of impatience with him among those security officials who have grumbled about Putin’s reluctance to complete the job and eject every liberal from all the ministries.4
At times, disputes between the various intelligence agencies have threatened to disrupt their effectiveness, at which point Putin generally steps in as moderator. But devolving authority to fellow leaders fosters a competitive and dynamic environment. Putin knows that so long as he can keep the pot simmering, he will remain master of the kitchen.
Though he has increasingly bestowed favour on the secret services, he does not display automatic beneficence towards his old KGB comrades. In 2013 when calling on Vladimir Yakunin to rescue the building work that was behind schedule for the Sochi Winter Olympics, he cautioned him to avoid ‘irrevocable mistakes’.5 This was a mild version of the tradition begun by Joseph Stalin, who set near-impossible targets while threatening dire punishments for failure to fulfil his five-year plans. Construction at Sochi was completed at a frantic tempo. Like Stalin, Putin also warned his subordinates not to try to fool him with false displays. He aimed to deter the ‘Potëmkin village’ syndrome, which was named after Prince Grigori Potëmkin, conqueror of Crimea in 1783, who allegedly tricked Catherine the Great into believing that he had already established prosperous Russian peasant colonies along the banks of the river Dnieper when she visited the region. The problem facing Yakunin was that asphalt supplies had run out in southern Russia. He knew that Putin would be angry if he discovered that inferior substitutes had been used in the construction of the new mountain highway. Like a communist functionary from the old USSR, Yakunin ranted and raved to lay hold of the asphalt and complete the project before the president arrived to inspect it.6 Up and down the ladder of command there are leaders who know how to intimidate – and Putin sits on the top rung and sets the authoritarian tone.
In quieter times, Putin has listened to a plurality of viewpoints. If big decisions are required on Russian economic development, he pulls in the main contending advocates and lets them argue their corner. Former Railways Minister Yakunin tells of a session where the respective merits of state subsidies and the free market were debated. He himself argued for higher railway tariffs while Finance Minister Anton Siluanov spoke up to protect his balanced budget. Yakunin shouted, ‘You are the Minister of Finances, so you should at least be familiar with all four rules of arithmetic, not just addition and subtraction!’ The outburst drew a reprimand from Putin for discourtesy.7
Putin restricts the discussion to a small informal group inside the ruling elite – and the talk can obviously become heated.8 His confidants are associates of long standing who accept that he alone will make the ultimate decision. Everybody knows that once a policy is settled, Putin will not countenance a review of the reasoning behind it. Like a military commander, he issues abrupt orders and demands instant action, his favourite saying being ‘Look into it and report’ or simply ‘Report!’ Behind the scenes no one except for a few trusted friends is allowed to contradict him.9 In public the discipline is total, and none of them dares to cut across him. When US Ambassador Michael McFaul attended meetings with Putin and other Russian leaders, it was as if Putin was the team manager and the rest were his players. Even Patrushev, who was his friend and superior in the KGB hierarchy before 1991, consistently deferred to the president.10
Through the expanding Presidential Administration Putin issues decrees on all manner of topics. Chief of Staff Anton Vaino, who has been in post since 2016, shoulders a gruelling work load. The government itself is topped by the Council of Ministers, headed since 2012 by Medvedev, who was given the post when he stepped aside for Putin to reoccupy the presidency. Putin has the right to dismiss the entire cabinet, but he knows he can rely on Medvedev to deal with the business of government within the framework of approved policies. Friction between the two men has stayed within manageable limits. Medvedev has accepted his defeat at Putin’s hands in the previous year and even when he was president, Medvedev only rarely spoke out against Putin’s policy preferences, and even then he did not name him.11 In subsequent years Medvedev has kept his lips sealed: he knows this is a requirement of survival and reappointment to the post.
Putin’s supremacy is consolidated by the fact that successive elections for over a decade have given United Russia, the political party he founded, a majority in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament. In 2016 Putin secured its compliance with his purposes by moving his Deputy Chief of Staff Vyacheslav Volodin across to the Duma, where he became its chairman. Many sensitive matters, moreover, are handled at the Security Council’s weekly sessions, with Putin as its chairman and Patrushev as its secretary.12 The secret services have a huge importance, as does the Ministry of Finances. Russia has a sprawling edifice of institutions held together by an understanding of the general line that has been laid down by Putin in consultation with the rest of the ruling cabal. It also coheres because all the team’s members understand that the potential consequences of disunity are dire. They did not come to power by a free and fair electoral process and are on permanent alert for signs of public discontent. The Kremlin elite has to present itself as a disciplined vanguard.
Like Brezhnev in the 1970s, Putin assigns the box seats of power to proven loyalists. A remarkable number of holders of high office are friends from his Leningrad youth or former colleagues in the city’s KGB or the mayor’s office. Inside the ruling group they are known as the Piterskie (for St Petersburg, the name the city reverted to in 1991).13
Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev was Putin’s legal adviser when he served as St Petersburg’s deputy mayor. Nikolai Patrushev is another old KGB hand. Sergei Ivanov, his Defence Minister between 2001 and 2007 and his Chief of Staff till August 2016, had known Putin since their time in the KGB. Igor Sechin, executive chairman of the oil company Rosneft, worked as Putin’s personal assistant in the St Petersburg mayor’s office after leaving the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the armed forces.14 Sechin was deputy chief of Putin’s Presidential Administration until 2008 and was heavily involved in the seizure of Khodorkovski’s assets in 2004. He was also deputy prime minister while Putin was premier. FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov began his career in the Leningrad KGB and rose to the top FSB job in 2008 when President Medvedev removed Patrushev on grounds of ill health and moved him across to become Security Council secretary, a post he continues to hold. Sergei Naryshkin, born and bred in Leningrad, trained as a radio engineer. Famously averse to publicity, he has declined to talk about his recruitment to the KGB and later to Anatoli Sobchak’s St Petersburg mayor’s office. He is unusual in the ruling elite for his gentle manner and intellectual demeanour. He likes to ‘advise’ rather than give noisy orders.15 From 2008 he was Medvedev’s Chief of Staff in the Presidential Administration. In Putin’s third presidential term he became chairman of the State Duma, a post he held until 2016, when Putin made him the Foreign Intelligence Service director.
Until 2000, officials who had had careers in the ‘power agencies’ made up half the list of the hundred most influential Russians, meaning that Putin had a corpus of useful supporters as soon as he became president. By December 2007, it is reckoned, about seventy of the top hundred public figures belonged to this category – and a career in the secret services continues to be an asset for entrance into public life.16
He regularly tests the people he appoints, and culls those who fail those tests. Although his St Petersburg former comrades are efficient administrators, few of them had the expertise to lay the brickwork of a market economy. Putin is committed to capitalism and knows that specialist knowledge is required to smooth the conditions that banks, factories, railways, communication networks and trade require. Alexei Kudrin, Finance Minister from 2000 through to 2011, is one of the few with a professional training in finance. When confronted by another of Putin’s confidants who objected to his line on economic policy, Kudrin rasped out, ‘Stop arguing with me, I’m a professor!’17 Kudrin was in ministerial office throughout the lengthy period of Russian economic expansion from 2000 – and he stood out against ministers, officials and advisers who wanted even greater state control than Putin permitted. Lobbyists for the armed forces and security services regarded Kudrin as public enemy number one.
But a world-class economy cannot be founded on one man, and in May 2001 Putin called upon a Yeltsin favourite, Mikhail Kasyanov, to work as his first prime minister. Like Kudrin, Kasyanov was committed to free-market ideas and the rule of law and wanted to eliminate bureaucratic interference in entrepreneurial activity. He later wrote that Putin also chose him because he had no personal ties to any of the ‘oligarchs’ in big business. As an ex-director of the FSB, Putin knew who was beholden to whom.18 In return, Kasyanov received the assurance of Putin’s support in pointing economic policy in the direction of reform.19 Kasyanov also recalled Putin’s plan for how they would work together:
‘On his side there was only one condition, which was never to trespass on his “turf”. The presidential turf covered the agencies of coercion and internal policy. Internal policy above all involved interaction with political parties and work with the regions.’ Putin promised that he would never dismiss the government without giving a public explanation or having a very serious reason.20
This account is a collector’s item. In the Gorbachëv and Yeltsin years, Russian politics were a leaking bucket. High-ranking individuals rushed to publish their recollections after leaving office, keen to explain why they resented the way they had been treated. Some, though, made a case for their ex-leader. While Putin has been in office, as both president and prime minister, reticence has become obligatory. It took a brave spirit such as Kasyanov, who was fired as prime minister in February 2004, to spill the beans.
When he took office, Kasyanov was initially satisfied with the demarcation of functions between president and prime minister. They cooperated productively even though Kasyanov was aware that Putin insisted on keeping the upper hand; Putin had the prerogative of choosing whichever ministers he wanted whereas Kasyanov could only appoint their deputies. At the start, Putin was restrained, leaving Kasyanov to manage the huge tasks of economic reform while he focused on Chechnya and his own electoral prospects. Kasyanov was able to liaise with Putin’s Chief of Staff, Alexander Voloshin, to ensure that there were no misunderstandings. He had ready access to Putin himself and was able to resist ministerial appointments that he did not like.21 Even when there were personnel changes at the Defence Ministry, a ‘coercive’ institution if ever there was one, Kasyanov felt free to recommend Lyubov Kudelina as Deputy Minister – and he recorded that Putin and Kudelina got on famously. For a while the relationship between president and prime minister seemed to be a harmonious collaboration that would advance the cause of reform, at least in the economy.22
But Putin was put out by Kasyanov’s habit of thinking for himself in discussions of policy. Kasyanov argued against the arrest of businessman Khodorkovski. He expressed annoyance with Putin’s decision to appoint an individual without economic qualifications, Alexei Miller, to head Gazprom. Kasyanov saw no reason to avoid consorting with opposition politicians including the liberal Boris Nemtsov – and he did this in full view of all those gathered at the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland.
Putin decided to remove him from the premiership by offering to make him Security Council Secretary instead. He was still willing to trust him with a big job outside the cabinet, even one that dealt with the FSB. Kasyanov rejected the proposition and turned Putin down on two occasions. Putin came back just once more, ‘Listen, I’ve never previously offered something to anyone three times.’ But Kasyanov dug his heels in, ‘Please don’t imagine I’m some strange creature of wonder. I’m not playing up or indulging in games. In my life I’ve climbed up all the rungs from simple economist to premier. There’s only one rung I’ve not climbed, just one official position, but that’s the one that you occupy.’23 Putin’s next idea was for Kasyanov to stand as mayor of Moscow in the next election. This time Kasyanov gave the offer some consideration until he had an encounter with Yuri Luzhkov, the incumbent mayor, who told him things about the job that definitively put him off – what they were, Kasyanov has never disclosed. Putin kept at it, suggesting that Kasyanov should take charge of the Inter-State Bank of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The answer yet again was no because Kasyanov believed that Russia’s priority should lie in constructing links with the European Union. At this point, Putin stopped making friendly gestures.24
In their final discussion Putin threatened to crush Kasyanov if he engaged in oppositional activity – and dredged up the rumours that Kasyanov had taken bribes when he was Minister of Finances in the 1990s. When Kasyanov retorted that Putin knew this was rubbish, Putin reminded him that there was no smoke without fire, and advised Kasyanov to bear this in mind.25 Kasyanov did the opposite and became one of the Opposition’s leading figures. But when he dared to challenge Putin’s protégé Medvedev in the 2008 presidential election, the Central Electoral Committee rejected his candidature. Pushed to the margins of political affairs, Kasyanov still caused trouble for Putin, and in April 2016 Russian television carried a grainy film of the married Kasyanov having sex with the much younger political activist Natalya Pelevina, which did lasting harm to his reputation.
Kasyanov was remarkable for leaving office and then formally joining the Opposition. More typical was Kudrin, who, after resigning from the Finance Ministry, accepted a post outside the cabinet as head of a research tank and as dean of studies back at St Petersburg State University. He and Putin were old Leningrad friends – it was Kudrin who had recommended his transfer to Moscow in 1996. Kudrin had long believed that ‘a liberal policy can only be a tough one’.26 He endorsed Putin’s moves against the ‘oligarchs’, including the arrest of Khodorkovski.27 But from 2004 Kudrin’s patience was strained by the growing expenditure on the armed forces. He also had personal ambitions. The final straw had been Putin’s decision to nominate Medvedev as the next prime minister when, as everyone expected, he himself won the 2012 presidential election. Until that moment Kudrin had hoped to get the job. In an angry reaction he criticized Medvedev’s policies at a New York conference and said he would not serve in a cabinet under him. Medvedev took his chance to dispatch a rival and, in a televised session of governmental business, demanded Kudrin’s resignation. Kudrin stepped down after consulting Putin, who evidently told him that he had only himself to blame.28
But Kudrin was no Kasyanov. Though he attended Opposition rallies to protest electoral fraud in late 2011, he got over his minirebellion and ceased to criticize the Kremlin leadership in personal terms. He and Putin remained in contact, and they have appeared in public together, politely exchanging opinions about where Russia is heading economically. In spring 2016 Putin commissioned Kudrin to write up his ideas. This was a clever move in that it effectively neutralized open criticism inside the ruling group past and present as well as putting limits on the victory of the enemies of economic liberalism. Putin barred Kudrin’s report from publication, but did not prevent him from circulating a redacted milder variant on the internet: economic liberalism is muffled but not silenced.29
Kudrin’s intellectual sparring partner in economic policy is Sergei Glazev, who has the least typical of backgrounds for a team member. One of Yeltsin’s early ministers, he resigned from the Russian government in September 1993 when Yeltsin peremptorily dissolved the Supreme Soviet. He then joined the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Very much the advocate for state intervention, Glazev is also a strident nationalist who believes that since the fall of communism Russia has been subjected to ‘colonization by Western capital’.30 In 2004 he even stood as an independent candidate against Putin in the presidential election. In those days he saw Putin as the champion of the liberal wing of Russian economic thought and called for a return to state subsidies, central governmental control and a loosening of monetary policy.31 But as Putin’s policies swung steadily towards state economic control, Glazev saw him in a different light. Old differences were forgotten, and the odd couple started to work together.
Glazev argued for Russia to follow the Chinese economic model and abandon any idea of copying American precedents.32 He pointed to the huge US national debt, a debt that is projected to grower ever more huge. He also stressed that the United States’ share of global output is falling. He assured everyone that the United States and the European Union are heading for chronic decline.
He was far from complacent about Russia’s future. He stressed that Russia was economically falling behind America. In his opinion, the Chinese would be the best strategic partners for the country’s regeneration. He urged the Kremlin to ensure that Russian business should seek links with China and the three other BRICS countries, Brazil, India and South Africa. Russia’s focus, he argued, should be on building up its own Eurasian Economic Union so that it might head a regional bloc made up of friendly countries of the former Soviet Union.33 Glazev maintains that China’s history shows the wisdom of avoiding excesses of privatization.34 Whether Chinese economic development would have succeeded without heavy reliance on private enterprise is a matter of doubt.35 For years he had proposed regenerating Russian manufacturing by making government credits more widely available over a sustained period. Putin signalled his assent in a decree on 7 May 2012 that committed the cabinet to a long-term objective of creating 25 million highly skilled jobs by 2020. A rise in productivity was the key priority. Ministers would help by trying to increase the share of investment to 27 per cent of gross domestic product by 2018.
This involved a scaling back of Kudrin’s sovereign wealth initiative. Whereas Kudrin had worked to build up funds against the day when hydrocarbon prices might plunge on world markets, Glazev argued against depositing revenues in profitable foreign funds and for advancing finance to Russian companies. Glazev and others have contributed ideas for a programme for state capitalism that supplied the groundwork for Putin’s current policies. Putin began to cite Glazev with enthusiasm. No doubt Glazev is also congenial to Putin because of their shared passion for the idea of a Eurasian Economic Union. Whereas Kudrin pushed for an improved linkage with the European Union, Glazev looks for opportunities in the ‘near abroad’ and recommends a strategic partnership with China.36
Putin has employed others who, like Glazev, have had no prior connection to him. He has shown enduring favour to fellow sports enthusiast Sergei Shoigu, who was Yeltsin’s Minister of Emergency Situations from 1991. Shoigu, half-Tuvan and half-Russian, became popular for his activity during episodes of natural disaster and terrorist outrage in Russia. In 2012 Putin made him Defence Minister. In the same way, Putin has stuck by Sergei Lavrov, who has been the Foreign Affairs Minister since 2004. Lavrov is an unusual member of the Putin team in so far as he was actually trained for the profession – diplomacy – in which he finds himself today. Another thing that marks him out from most ministers, the athletic Shoigu aside, is his love of sport. Lavrov is a Moscow Spartak fan who still plays football – quite a distinction for someone born in 1950. There is a touch of the old diplomatic world about him as he laments the fact that even he is not allowed to smoke a cigarette in his own ministry.37 Lavrov started as a Soviet diplomat in Sri Lanka and was then the Russian Federation’s ambassador at the United Nations. Both Shoigu and Lavrov know that adherence to Putin’s line of policy is an absolute prerequisite for survival in office.
The same rule holds for survival at the highest level of big business. The time has passed when tycoons were able to exercise a domineering public influence. Putin clawed back state control over large sectors of Russia’s natural resources. In some instances, direction came to be supplied by the officials-turned-businessmen whom Putin appointed to leading positions in Moscow television companies and the state-controlled energy and transport corporations. Not all such appointments met with acclaim. In 2016 a Bloomberg reporter asked Putin about the lengthy tenure of Alexei Miller at Gazprom. Why, he asked, did he remain in post after Gazprom had tumbled from being one of the world’s top ten biggest companies to a pitiful 198th place? Putin replied that Gazprom consistently satisfied the demands of Russia’s consumers.38
Yet the Kremlin’s ruling elite is not monolithic. German Gref, the executive chairman of Russia’s largest savings bank, Sberbank, is a former Deputy Minister of Finances. Known to be an economic liberal, he found work in the government uncomfortable. He has since been awarded a happy second career running one of the largest public funds. Arkadi Dvorkovich, the current head of Russian Railways, once served in the Presidential Administration. He was strongly associated with Medvedev. Dvorkovich’s proven competence and discretion were enough to keep him in post until after the 2018 presidential election. Putin demands loyalty above every other qualification. He also expects his appointees to work hard in their posts. No one is promoted to a sinecure, even though the material rewards of office can be huge and usually are. Everyone knows the score and Putin reciprocates by showing them loyalty. Both sides keep a watchful eye and stick to the informal rules. The Putin team has become ever more united in the image that they – and Russia – present to the world.
Putin, however, does not expect his team to be timid. Truculence is almost a requirement of membership, and Putin licenses his team to say what he thinks but cannot voice in public. He chooses people who like to play rough. He wants to make Russia feared as a dangerous, unpredictable force in international relations. This has left space for Security Council Secretary Patrushev to act as his attack dog. When serving as Duma Speaker, Naryshkin made several crude anti-Western remarks but he quietened down in 2016 when Putin appointed him as Foreign Intelligence Service director. Patrushev has never stopped barking. He blamed the United States for attempts to destroy the USSR and then the Russian Federation. He contended that a succession of American politicians starting with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the 1970s had deliberately worked to undermine the Soviet economy, and that President Reagan in the 1980s had arranged to reduce the world market price for oil so as to wreck the USSR’s budget. After destroying the Soviet Union, the Americans purportedly strong-armed the International Monetary Fund into imposing loan conditions that hobbled Russian economic development. According to Patrushev, Chechnya had fallen under the West’s control in the 1990s. The United States had also tried to annihilate South Ossetia and was behind the recent political turmoil in Ukraine.39
Patrushev expected Russo-American tensions to increase. American experts were predicting a crippling global shortage of energy, food and water – and Russia had vast resources that the Americans coveted.40 Having dismantled the Soviet Union, Patrushev argued, the Americans arrogantly expanded NATO to the Russian borders and gulled Ukrainians into trusting that life would improve if they accepted the Western embrace. He called on people to learn a rudimentary fact, ‘Without Russia, Ukraine simply won’t be able to develop successfully.’41
A Security Council secretary who sees American conspiracies everywhere illustrates the crudity of official thinking about foreign policy. Patrushev’s vision is an extreme variant of Putin’s world view, and Putin plainly does not feel the need to disavow him, far less to sack him. Paranoia about ‘enemies’ at home and abroad is a characteristic of most members of the Putin team. Not that all of them share it. Kudrin continues to hold a candle for a more ‘liberal’ policy of engagement with America and for a less state-centred programme for the economy. But Kudrin lost the factional struggle in the Kremlin and the security lobby triumphed. Almost all the members of the Putin team are shock troops who are drilled exclusively in the tactics of forward movement. They are attackers. The positions of those in the front rank have undergone much rearrangement since Putin first occupied the presidency, including his own, when he stepped down to become prime minister in 2008. He continues to reshuffle and renew his key personnel.
Kudrin was exceptional in holding on to the Ministry of Finances for as long as eleven years, but though everyone in the vanguard has moved at some time from one post to another, the changes have seldom been convulsive. The firing of Kasyanov was one of the exceptions. Putin sticks by his frontline commanders and fosters an atmosphere of solidarity.
In 2005 Vladislav Surkov, serving as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Presidential Administration, put this with gusto in a speech to leading businessmen: ‘We believe in the national elite. I emphasize the word “national”.’ He noted that Russian entrepreneurs travelled a lot abroad. He urged them to support Putin’s objectives by becoming more than just an offshore aristocracy. He called for the creation of ‘a new political class’. His desire was for politicians and businessmen to come together in ruling Russia for its own good. The geostrategic thinker Sergei Karaganov had put it in stark language in 2000: ‘The country is in an impasse: if the ruling class doesn’t find within itself the strength to carry society to a change in power and the model of development, Russia is doomed to decay and collapse.’42 In the winter break of 2013–14, as regional governors and leading officials of United Russia prepared to enjoy themselves, they received an unexpected gift. Vyacheslav Volodin, then head of the Presidential Administration, had sent them books to read. Among them were Berdyaev’s The Philosophy of Inequality and Ilin’s Our Tasks.43
If a new political class is to emerge, it must acquire a collective sense of purpose. Surkov had expressed a sense of urgency for unity in action without pressing works of the intellect on fellow politicians. Times were changing, as Volodin’s Christmas present showed. Fresh mortar had to be patched into the wall for Russia’s rulers to feel confident about its solidity. The job is only half done and complacency is not in order.44