Kremlin leaders have trampled the rule of law in Russia, protecting their dominance with a regime of fear. But they are not the sole culprits. Lower down the ladder of power stand elected officials and businessmen who have fought to ensure the retention of ill-gotten gains. It was a state of affairs predating Putin’s first presidential term, but by introducing greater order to the national patchwork of malpractice he has made a bad situation worse.
The national and regional rulers would not so easily have imposed their kleptocracy had popular attitudes offered a stronger defence. For centuries there was widespread distrust of those in authority among Russian people: from tsarism through to the communist period it was the norm for families to assume that the government in the capital was a parasite on society, and that the courts were skewed in favour of the powerful and well-off. The response was for Russians to put their confidence mainly in relatives and proven friends. When officials of the tsars came looking for taxes and conscripts, it was understandable for peasants to conceal everything they could – and when the landed gentry demanded excessive payment from their peasantry, misrepresentation of the size of the harvest was widespread. Such evasion and downright illegality were only reinforced during the communist dictatorship. When communism collapsed and a wild capitalist economy was introduced to Russia in the 1990s, the natural reaction was for citizens to concentrate trust once more in families and friends rather than a government that had spawned the growth of the so-called oligarchs. Discontent and despair grew as people struggled to cope with the financial depression that subsequently afflicted the economy.1
Little about all this was inevitable and less still intentional. Rulers in the last decade of the twentieth century were plotting a route out of darkness and carrying few reliable searchlights. But they quickly took advantage of a situation that enabled them to pursue policies in their own self-interest, which surprised only those who had overestimated the chances of installing a healthy democracy and the rule of law. Russia in the last decade of the twentieth century had been a society fed up with political rhetoric, distrustful of politicians and sunk in the tasks of putting food on the table and staying employed. Demonstrations grew fewer. Riots were a rarity.
The rulers knew how important it was to monitor both the public mood and developments in high political and business circles. They understood what could happen when public opinion turned sour. Through the late 1980s Gorbachëv was without rival, but in 1990 pollsters reported a sudden dip in his popularity: it turned out to be irreversible. Yeltsin crested a wave of admiration in 1990–91, only to experience a deepening loss of esteem throughout the rest of the decade. Gorbachëv and Yeltsin had drunk from the chalice of acclaim, and choked on its unpalatable dregs. Both oversaw a crisis that unexpectedly became insurmountable, and both had to step down from power. Those on whom Putin and his team have bestowed favours in the form of ministries, corporations or national projects are quite capable of turning against their benefactors. The media that currently adulates can in a trice switch to attack mode.
When both elite disgruntlement and popular discontent arise simultaneously, as they did for Gorbachëv and Yeltsin (and for Nicholas II in 1917), then the ruler is under severe pressure to depart. No effort is spared in the Kremlin to track the movement of potentially dangerous opinion. In the Soviet era this was done by the KGB and the intelligence services that preceded it. But since the secret police had an interest in exaggerating the dangers to political stability, the communist leadership could never feel entirely confident in the reliability of its reports.
Open polling of citizens was fitful until 1987, when Gorbachëv permitted the establishment of the All-Union Centre for the Study of Public Opinion by the noted sociologists Tatyana Zaslavskaya and Boris Grushin. Rebranded the Russian Public Opinion Research Center in 1992, and known by its Russian-language acronym VTsIOM, day-to-day activity was directed by Yuri Levada, who set high standards in incorporating techniques of investigation and analysis from the rest of the world, with the result that politicians sometimes had to read uncongenial news of what people thought about them. VTsIOM was left undisturbed until 2003, when the government changed its funding basis. A frustrated Levada, believing ministers had objected to unsettling reports on attitudes to the fighting in Chechnya, walked out and formed his own Levada Centre. He died in 2006. The Levada Centre maintained its independence, but got into trouble because a small portion of its funding was from outside Russia, making it liable to be put on the list of ‘foreign agents’. Opting to do without finance from abroad still failed to protect it from the ill-will of the Justice Ministry: in 2016, shortly before the Duma election, it was categorized as performing ‘the functions of a foreign agent’, testimony to the Kremlin’s continuing sensitivity of opinion polls.
Putin has described his annual ‘Direct Line’ TV phone-in as a barometer of public opinion, grandly dubbing it ‘the most powerful sociological poll’,2 and he and his team arrange for his public appearances to pass off with the minimum of unpleasantness. And much as they sometimes object to the Levada Centre’s investigations, they depend on the information competent pollsters provide. This does not mean that such surveys produce entirely satisfactory findings: Russia is no longer a country where everyone feels free to express a critical opinion about the leadership. Individuals who receive a call from a polling organization have to think carefully when asked whether they can depend on Putin. Memories are long enough to stretch back to the time when any Soviet citizen who voiced disapproval of the authorities got into deep trouble. Though current conditions are not so dire, many could still be chary about saying things that could result in damaging consequences in employment or housing. Even so, it is hard to believe that survey results are more than marginally inaccurate.3
The Levada Centre, despite the rough handling it has received from the authorities, continues to provide a useful insight into the way Russian opinion has been developing. In January 2018 it asked what issues most agitated people. The answers were evidence of a steady concern with basic material conditions. The greatest worry, registered by 68 per cent of respondents, were price increases. Next were the widespread poverty (47 per cent) and the rise in unemployment (40 per cent). Such results, if an accurate reflection of reality, tend to show people complaining about the conditions that most directly affect them and their families. The factors they might regard as having caused the situation come lower down: bribery and corruption, for example, were raised by only 38 per cent of respondents. The narrowing access to health care and education came lower still.4
Putin’s own culpability is a moot point. Two-thirds of people hold him personally responsible for the persistence of corruption, and there is widespread scepticism about the likelihood of eradicating it. But only 6 per cent accuse him of dishonesty. Overall he emerges with his reputation intact: others supposedly are corrupt, but not him. Why? Over half of respondents believed he was simply unaware of it, and that his advisers were keeping him in the dark.5
Putin’s poll ratings and personal electoral successes over the years have never shielded him from the danger of a severe backlash. His popularity tumbled severely in 2011 after he announced his intention of standing again for presidential office and handing the premiership back to Medvedev. Returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin found his popularity flatlining, and it dipped to 62 per cent in January 2013, as he paid the price for his wheeling and dealing over the presidency as well as the troubled state of the Russian economy after the global recession of 2007–8. As employment conditions worsened, the leadership incurred disapproval, but even the extreme gap in Russia between the super-rich and the very poor attracted criticism from only a third of respondents.6
This had been why in 2012 he issued his May Decrees, all eleven of them, on the very day he returned for his third presidential term. He had stormed to victory even though the Opposition had been effective in organizing protests in Moscow and many large cities, leading to a widespread assumption that his position was now impregnable, but that was not how Putin saw it. His decrees were aimed at showing that his administration would look after people’s interests while it was creating a modern economy and society. It was noticeable that he promised to raise the salaries of teachers and doctors – he knew professional employees were prominent among the protesters. He also committed himself to increasing grants for students. Although he repeated his dedication to improving the combat readiness of the armed forces, the main thrust of his announcements fell on health, housing, administrative fairness and schooling.7 To forestall greater unrest, Putin had been scared into issuing a more compassionate agenda for his presidency.
But he knew few would read beyond the headlines. If implemented, these decrees would utterly transform the living conditions for all Russians, yet no one who examined the detail could fail to see them as unrealistic, even utopian. A year later there was already disquiet in ruling circles. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov reminded the cabinet that revenues from oil and gas imports were failing to keep up with official promises to increase expenditure. Minister of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukaev concurred by reporting on the difficulties bedevilling the government’s welfare programmes.8
It was not the May Decrees but the Crimean annexation that did most to restore Putin’s popularity, which in June 2015 reached a peak of 89 per cent.9 Shortly before the 2018 presidential election it was still at a comfortable 71 per cent.10 There had been much greater dips in his ratings in the past: in August 2000 it tumbled to 65 per cent, after the Kursk submarine disaster, and at a time of growing public unease about the war in Chechnya, when many Russians remembered the earlier war in 1994 and feared the Russian army would run into trouble again and thousands of soldiers would lose their lives. Other falls occurred in later years, notably at the time of the Beslan school siege in 2004.
But the personal firmness he showed in dealing with terrorism was widely recognized, and his rating before the end of his second term climbed back to over 80 per cent. These figures were remarkable, but Putin still made sure that no crowd protests could be staged at any of his public appearances. Whenever possible, he wanted the guarantee of a friendly reception.
The government never matched the president’s appeal. During Putin’s first two terms it usually scored 20 per cent lower and the gap remained when Medvedev took over the presidency and Putin became prime minister – not even Putin proved capable of raising the ratings for the cabinet. Even though he was easily the country’s most favoured politician, there were limits to his popularity.
Most Russians were also convinced that economic sanctions were part of the West’s ceaseless project to weaken and humiliate Russia. In autumn 2014, seven out of ten Russians were of this opinion and the ratio was constant in subsequent years. Western complaints about Russian military activity were dismissed as unjustified by six out of ten of those who were surveyed.11
By the beginning of 2015, according to a VTsIOM survey, the fear of a possible nuclear war had risen since the Crimean annexation, but the mood was hardly pervasive: only 17 per cent reckoned such a war was likely.12 The Levada Centre confirmed this finding: its poll in June 2017 indicated two-thirds of Russians wanted to see Putin stay as president and three-quarters desired the same tough line, or an even tougher one, to continue in both Russia’s foreign and domestic politics. Less than 13 per cent of respondents asked for a more liberal framework in internal politics and for a movement away from confrontation with the West. Putin’s foreign policy had acquired the imprimatur of popular endorsement. As he advanced towards the finale of the presidential contest, his ratings held steadily at over 80 per cent. It appeared that none of the disquiet about the general conditions in society could lessen his appeal. After the election, the smooth running of the FIFA World Cup and the boost to Russia’s standing abroad appeared to put him in an impregnable position.
That this was an illusion was exposed in June 2018, when a policy announcement was made about state pensions by Prime Minister Medvedev. It was done on the first day of the FIFA World Cup – quite deliberately: the leadership wanted to bury bad news.
The plan, Medvedev explained, was to fill the hole in the pension fund by requiring people to stay longer at work, something ex-Finance Minister Kudrin had been recommending for years.13 The current system was for men to retire at sixty and women at fifty-five: Medvedev wished to raise the age to sixty-five for males and sixty-three for females. Putin kept out of it, wanting Medvedev to suffer any opprobrium that arose. Public disapproval grew fiercer, and no amount of success for the Russian footballers was enough to deflect it: pensions, low though they are, can make the difference between poverty and starvation. People living below the official subsistence level had fallen to one in nine in 2012, but the number has risen in each successive year. Poverty has become a growing plague.14 Getting and keeping a job, or perhaps two, was essential: unemployment relief is miserable at only 15 per cent of the average national wage.15 With male mortality averaging at sixty-seven in Russia, the government’s proposal would have meant that most men would hardly live long enough to benefit at all from the financial contributions they had made. Women on average lived to seventy-seven, but the peremptory addition of an extra eight years to their working lives did not amuse them. And the devious way that Medvedev sneaked out the announcement on a day of sporting celebration made it doubly annoying. Streets filled with protesters in Moscow and other cities. The impact on public opinion was deep and dramatic.
Labour Minister Maxim Topilin gave interviews repeating the government’s case that there were too few people in employment to pay for the rising number of pensioners, and stressed that men in their sixties were easily able to keep on working,16 but every statement by him or Medvedev only added fuel to the flames. According to the Levada Centre, in the days immediately after the announcement trust in Putin fell to 48 per cent: the first time it had fallen below the midpoint since the Crimean annexation.17 By late August 2018, Putin’s trustworthiness rating had plummeted to 36 per cent in a VTsIOM poll. Medvedev’s was even lower at barely 7 per cent.18 But questions about public trust and public approval produced different results: three-fifths of Russians continued to approve of Putin. Were a presidential election to be called he remained easily the most favoured candidate.19
Despite this bizarre contradiction, however, there was an unmistakable growth in negative sentiment. Over a quarter of the Russian people said they disapproved of Putin. Moreover, 33 per cent objected to the State Duma and 55 per cent to Medvedev.20 Only a third said they would vote for United Russia in an election.21 By October 2018 the Levada Centre found that 61 per cent held Putin responsible for the country’s problems.22 Signs mounted of discontent with his pension reform at home and with a foreign policy that added to international tensions.23 The media had built up his cult as a dominant leader, and now he was held to account both in people’s homes and on the streets.
Unnerved by the surging hostility, Putin went on television to explain why pensions had to undergo change. He blamed it on the demographic lulls in the Russian birth rate in the Second World War and the 1990s – omitting any reference to the effects on the budget of his assertive foreign policy. In a measured performance, he stressed that the government simply lacked the money to maintain the pension fund on its existing basis. But to demonstrate a willingness to listen and to compromise he trimmed the details of the reform. Women, he announced, would be allowed to retire at sixty; those who had three or more children, even earlier. He also planned to make it illegal for companies to fire employees over the age of fifty, who could find it difficult to obtain another job. Unemployment relief would be doubled. Putin ended with an appeal: ‘I ask you to approach this with understanding.’24
Those who thought authoritarian rule meant the Russian leadership could always flout public opinion were taken by surprise. The poll data that showed consistent support from most Russians for a ‘strong hand’ in government meant they wanted a firm, decisive ruler who could secure for them the improvements they sought in living conditions, not a dictator. Any ruler, however strong, who fails them in such matters, is likely to breed discontent.25 In this respect nothing had changed in Russia. It was only the latest clash between public expectations and official policy. Putin and Medvedev would have to tread more carefully in future. And there was another paradox. Whereas trust in Putin had collapsed, active distrust – which in early August 2018 fell to 5 per cent – remained low.26
Even so, there were signs that millions of Russians had lost much of their innocence about Putin, if indeed they ever had it. In July 2018 the approval rating for certain institutions was much higher than Putin’s: 85 per cent of a large sample poll for the Russian army, 66 per cent for the Russian Orthodox Church.27 Once upon a time Putin had been able to match these figures. He was paying the price for taking his people for granted – or, more likely, he had known he would meet with trouble but had hoped the political costs would be bearable.
The authorities tried to restore his standing by means of media manipulation. The Rossiya-1 channel broadcast an unscheduled series titled Moscow. Kremlin. Putin. The first show set the pattern, the commentary justifying pension reform. Putin was filmed on his summer 2018 vacation. It was already the standard procedure to broadcast videos of him taking breaks around the Russian Federation: Putin picking and eating wild berries; Putin watching mountain goats through binoculars; Putin taking a strenuous hike. The accompanying interviewees included his spokesperson Dmitri Peskov. ‘Putin doesn’t only love children,’ he stressed: ‘he loves people in general. He’s a very human person.’ Peskov praised Putin for his physical fitness and fearless character: ‘You can imagine, bears aren’t idiots, if they see Putin, they’ll behave properly!’ His syrupy words reflected a growing panic in the Kremlin to try to persuade the Russian people to value the caring, all-action president they had elected. And to appreciate the conscientious approach he took to his decision making. It was unclear whether they would be enough.