The bridge would be a demanding and technically complex project, however, and at first there were doubts about who would be willing to undertake it. Then, in January, 2015, the Russian government announced that Arkady Rotenberg, a sixty-three-year-old magnate with interests in construction, banking, transportation, and energy, would direct the project. In retrospect, the choice was obvious, almost inevitable. Rotenberg’s personal wealth is estimated at more than two and a half billion dollars, and the bulk of his income derives from state contracts, mostly to build thousands of miles of roads and natural-gas pipelines and other infrastructure projects. Last year, the Russian edition of Forbes dubbed Rotenberg “the king of state orders” for winning nine billion dollars’ worth of government contracts in 2015 alone, more than any other Russian businessman. But perhaps the most salient detail in Rotenberg’s biography dates from childhood: in 1963, at the age of twelve, he joined the same judo club as Putin. The two became sparring partners and friends, and have remained close ever since. [...]
When Gazprom built pipelines inside Russia during the next decade, they were two to three times more expensive than equivalent projects in Europe, even when they were in temperate, accessible areas in southern Russia. Perhaps the most striking example of inefficiency occurred in 2013, when Gazprom announced that the cost of a pipeline that Rotenberg was building in Krasnodar—a warm, flat region near the Black Sea—had risen by forty-five per cent. No explanation was given; wages were relatively stable, as was the price of steel. That stretch of pipeline was meant to feed into a larger pipeline going through Bulgaria. After the Russian government suspended construction on the Bulgarian pipeline, Rotenberg’s project miraculously went on for another year. Mikhail Korchemkin, the head of East European Gas Analysis, said that it became clear that Gazprom had “switched from a principle of maximizing shareholder profits to one of maximizing contractor profits.” The company’s projects, he said, presented a “way of minting new billionaires in Russia: overpay for services and make them rich.” [...]
A source close to the Kremlin insisted that the rise of Rotenberg and similar Putin-era nouveau oligarchs was not the result of a purposeful plan: “It wasn’t Putin’s strategy to create these people. That’s a fantasy. He may have agreed to help them, and at a certain point, once they became large and successful, he realized that they might be useful, that it’s not so bad to have a caste of very wealthy people who are obligated to you.” In effect, Putin’s oligarchs form a shadow cabinet. Evgeny Minchenko, a political scientist in Moscow, told me, “These are trusted people, who will stick with Putin until the end, to whom he can assign certain tasks, who won’t get frightened by external pressure.” They can take on projects the Kremlin doesn’t want to fund or manage, such as sports teams, media programs, and political initiatives. [...]
Blinkin told me that the bridge wasn’t strictly necessary; Crimea could accommodate travellers to and from the peninsula by simply increasing the number of ferries between the city of Kerch and the Russian mainland. He noted that far more passengers travel between Helsinki and Stockholm, for example, exclusively by ferry. But an expansion in ferry service is not as grand as a bridge, and doesn’t send a message about Russia’s status as a world power. “Is that worth such gigantic expense?” Blinkin asked. “In a strict economic sense, no. But, if you factor in the political component, then yes.”
