Book of the Week: Putin: From Oligarch to Kleptocrat

The independent media was Putin’s first target. Newspapers, and TV and radio stations, often funded by wealthy oligarchs, were playing an increasingly important part in Russian politics by the late 1990s. One media organization in particular, NTV, had attracted Putin’s ire by airing a satirical puppet show ahead of the 2000 presidential election in which a Putin puppet played Little Zaches, an evil changeling from a fairy tale by E.T.A. Hoffman. In Hoffman’s story, the people of a village are so manipulated by Zaches that they mistake him for a gentleman and scholar, and award him the job of minister to the prince. Putin’s supporters reacted fiercely to the caricature; a letter was published in St. Petersburg’s Vedomosti newspaper signed by the rector of St. Petersburg State University, calling for charges to be brought against the producers of the show. [...]

By the end of his second term in office, in 2008, Putin had altered the criteria for judges serving on the Qualification Colleges that can dismiss judges from their posts, a move that enabled him to pack this oversight body with his appointees. He had also signed an edict extending his executive powers over all law enforcement and securities agencies, and made several watchdog bodies subordinate to the very ministries they were meant to monitor. Meanwhile, his political party, United Russia, had abolished elections for regional governors and replaced them with a system of presidential appointments—any of which could be rescinded by the president if he deemed a governor to be disloyal. Russian autocracy was back. [...]

A month ahead of the March 2012 presidential election, some 100,000 Russians demonstrated in -18° C temperatures in Moscow, calling for a rerun of the disputed December parliamentary elections—to no avail: Putin won his third term. But the day before his inauguration, violent clashes erupted between police and some 20,000 protesters in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. He responded by signing a law criminalizing public protests without a permit. Even so, on June 12, about 70,000 brave demonstrators marched in defiance. The war between Russian civil society and the Kremlin was on. Unfortunately, it received limited attention outside Russia, much less any credible coverage on traditional media inside Russia—which the government already controlled. [...]

Oligarchical capitalism destroys legitimate competition and eats away at the resources of a nation like a cancer. Any semblance of dynamic, healthy competition is strangled by fake competition based solely on firms’ relationships with people in power. When a shrinking private sector is entirely owned by the oligarchical elites, this precludes ordinary citizens from having a stake in the real economy and increasing their personal wealth over time. As the nation’s wealth becomes more concentrated in fewer hands, there is less incentive and fewer resources to resist the momentum of this disparity. The twenty or so oligarchs in Putin’s Russia do not get access to powerful people in government because of their wealth, as is the case, say, with many billionaire political donors in America, but rather the reverse: Russian oligarchs get access to obscene amounts of wealth because of their affinity with those most powerful in government. Men become oligarchs in Russia (there are no women oligarchs) because they are loyal to the only person in government who matters: Vladimir Putin.

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The New York Review of Books: The Literary Intrigues of Putin’s Puppet Master

What really triggered the sensation, though, over Okolonolya, or Almost Zero (subtitled gangsta fiction, in English, in the Russian edition), was the identity of its author, an unknown named Natan Dubovitsky. Dubovitsky was soon suspected, courtesy of an anonymous tip from the novel’s publisher to the St. Petersburg newspaper Vedomosti, of being a pseudonym for Vladislav Surkov, who was then the Russian presidential deputy chief of staff. At the time, this Kremlin ideologue was, arguably, the second- or third-most powerful man in the country. It was Surkov, variously called a “political technologist,” the “gray cardinal,” or a “puppet master,” who had created and orchestrated Putin’s so-called sovereign democracy—the stage-managed, sham-democratic Russia, the ruthlessly stabilized, still-rotten Russia that Almost Zero was savaging. Almost Zero is now available to English readers in a limited edition from an adventurous small publisher in Brooklyn, Inpatient Press. Inpatient takes the leap and credits Surkov as the author. (And, in the spirit of Almost Zero itself, it is publishing the novel without authorization.)

Plenty of politicos write novels; but not many write eviscerating self-satires. It was as though Karl Rove had taken the knife to his and George W. Bush’s America in, say, 2005. Surkov, however, wasn’t, and isn’t, simply a Rove. The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis calls him “a hero of our time” (in praise and opprobrium) for turning Russia’s political reality into “a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater.” For supplying an early model, if you will, for Donald Trump’s media-savvy tactics of chaos and confusion. And what a perversely fascinating, complex figure emerges from the details of Surkov’s biography: an arch-propagandist of power and an arty outsider, an authoritarian’s right hand and a bohemian aesthete whose education included studying theater at the Moscow Institute of Culture in the 1980s (he was expelled for fighting). As the USSR was collapsing, Surkov became the public-relations mastermind for oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s pioneering business, Menatep Bank, which was where Surkov met his wife, Natalya; soon, he was heading up Russia’s fledging association of ad men. Denied a partnership in business after Khodorkovsky’s ill-fated acquisition of the oil giant Yukos in the 1990s—Khodorkovsky ended up in prison during Putin’s taming of the oligarchs—Surkov left for a position with Alfa Bank (of Trump dossier notoriety, for alleged aid in Russian meddling in the 2016 election; the owners are suing for defamation). He then ran a major TV network, before devoting his image-making and lobbying talents, first, to then President Boris Yeltsin, and, subsequently, to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. [...]

So how is an English reader to approach Almost Zero? I asked some Russians for advice. The author and journalist Masha Gessen hadn’t read the book. “Should I?” she wondered. I told her I thought Surkov was fascinating, apparently very smart. “None of them are smart,” she said. Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina looked taken aback when I brought up Almost Zero during audience questions at her performance with the banned Belarus Free Theatre at New York’s La Mama. “I have no interest in reading it,” she replied. “I don’t think I will.” Understandably, perhaps, since Surkov was in charge of the government’s religious relations when Pussy Riot’s members were imprisoned for their punk song performance in Moscow’s Christ the Savior cathedral in 2012. I emailed the novelist Vladimir Sorokin, whose outrageous satires, like Pelevin’s, have been attacked by the nationalist youth groups supported by Surkov. “Yes,” he wrote back from Berlin, where he now lives, “people say that it’s Surkov’s book, maybe it’s true. I’ve read twenty pages and that was enough for me. It’s secondhand literature. There is no space there, no air. Only effort and the attempt to write a ‘contemporary postmodern novel.’ It’s boring.”

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