Will he draw the army card?
(Photo: Sputnik Photo Agency)
One simply has to “believe in Russia”, the Russian poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyuchev said back in the mid-19th century. But it is not only these days that the Kremlin is overdrawing its credit of confidence, which has been growing steadily for decades.
If it were only about the economy, the lending banks would have made the outstanding amount due long ago. But in politics other laws prevail – although Washington, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev and Brussels are now thinking, like bankers in a similarly desperate situation, how they can still ask a debtor who is now bankrupt in terms of trust to pay.
According to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Russia is “under no circumstances planning an attack” on Ukraine, its neighbor that it perceives as a breakaway. Should Ukraine really trust these words?
It would be naïve in view of the now more than 120,000 Russian soldiers who have wrapped themselves around Ukraine at the external borders like a sickle ready to cut from Moldovan Transnistria via the annexed Crimea, western Russia and north to Belarus.
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“Deliberate lies that one honestly believes in.” This is how George Orwell described such a world of ideas in one of the works that best illuminates the shoals and the human distortions produced by communist dictatorships – his post-war novella “1984”. But these days there are new books that look at today’s Russia, which has officially freed itself from the Eastern Bloc yoke, from very different perspectives.
Post-Communist Decadence
To the Russia in which abundance and luxury in Moscow’s posh department stores such as the “GUM” on Red Square or the “ZUM” on the Bolshoi Theater and the fashion temples around them display post-communist decadence par excellence for the winners of the change.
A country in which one can still encounter dark Dostoyevsky figures in run-down backyards on St. Petersburg’s canals, as if they were the descendants of the hired murderer Rodion Raskolnikov from “Crime and Punishment”.
A country in which an elite has developed that is now more powerful and even richer than the tsars with their legendary castles and the KP leadership, who took over the Kremlin as a stronghold against the West from the monarchs as the seat of their party dictatorship. And in which, three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people are again living with a mentality reminiscent of “Homo sovieticus”, the Soviet people.
Jens Siegert: Basically Russia.
Edition Körber
Hamburg 2021
232 pages
19 euros
Putin’s rule, as these excited days show again, has once again taken hostage the giant empire between Kaliningrad and Kamchatka. He has taken the confrontation with the West to the extreme, wants to revise the post-war order negotiated with his predecessors Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev: the reversal of NATO’s eastward expansion, a promise not to include Ukraine and Georgia in the western defense alliance and even the withdrawal of the American forces Nuclear warheads from Western Europe.
Only he himself knows whether Putin will draw the army card. Likewise, how far he would take a possible war if he didn’t give in and strive for a negotiated solution.
However, this is already being prepared in the media: Whoever sees the TV channels, which were once again turned into state propaganda mouthpieces under Putin, will repeatedly see reports that the hopelessly defeated Ukraine is allegedly planning an attack and that the USA wanted to wipe Russia off the map .
Joshua Yaffa’s book “The Survival Artists” explains the background for this targeted propaganda: “The rulers used the fear of war or encirclement by malicious enemies for a long time to unite the population and to assure themselves of their loyalty”, sums up the Moscow correspondent of the “New Yorker” and quotes the respected Moscow pollster Lev Gudkov: “Putin understands the complexes of the Soviet man very well and he uses them as a resource. They are the character traits of a person whose deviousness is based on dependency, envy, constriction and aggression.”
Joshua Yaffa: The Survivors.
Translation: Anselm Bühling
Econ publisher
Berlin 2021
560 pages
24.99 euros
Yaffa describes people who are internally torn as their homeland changes between liberal awakening and the increasingly frozen autocracy, which is paired with the cynicism and greed of the accomplices: directors such as the famous Kirill Serebrennikov, who has just returned from his house arrest and trial in Moscow Anton Chekhov’s “The Black Monk” is being staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, upright Russian-Orthodox priests, a doctor fighting for the homeless, and museum people with their mission of preserving Gulag memorials that were increasingly threatened under Putin.
Jens Siegert explains how the 145 million people are shaped by phenomena of the Soviet past to this day in his book “In Principle Russia”, which is as knowledgeable as it is entertaining.
The former radio journalist and former head of the Böll Foundation in Moscow, which is close to the Greens, shows how queuing, the Russian Orthodox Church, obtaining a “Propiska”, a residence permit in a big city, or life in “Kommunalkas”, so to speak Forced shared flats have deeply shaped people’s lives and continue to have an impact today.
And how the “first Russian affair with democracy” after more than 20 years with Putin is now more like a “sham marriage”. However, Siegert likes to reject the claims made by Western politicians who are accused of being “Putin-understanders” that “democracy is not for this very special country, and that the Russian people are not made for democracy”.
But Yaffa doubts whether democracy will prevail and whether Putin’s successor will be resolved: “It is more likely that Putin will be replaced by a coup d’état from above than by a revolution from below.”
Up to Western institutions
Putin and his “net”, as Catherine Belton calls it, have a lot to lose: the former KGB spy from Dresden and later deputy mayor, along with his helpers in the town hall on the Neva, had mafia godfathers and businessmen from St. Petersburg, as well as companions from the secret service “taken the pinnacle of power and then proceeded to enrich themselves with the new capitalism.”
The former office messenger Alexej Miller is now the head of the world’s largest gas company Gazprom. According to contemporary witnesses, he accepted money envelopes with bribes for Putin. Two other close associates at the time, German Gref and Igor Sechin, now run the largest bank in Eastern Europe, Sber, and Russia’s largest oil company, Rosneft.
In her book “Putin’s Network”, Belton documents the new system, which she calls KGB capitalism, with exactly how which companies were taken over and managed to rake in assets for more than 100 billion dollars. The former “Financial Times” correspondent for Moscow uses vivid examples to show how corruption is eating its way through Russia and how authorities, police and secret services are now competing with each other.
Catherine Belton: Putin’s Net.
Translation: Elisabeth Schmale, Johanna Wais
Publisher HarperCollins
Hamburg 2022
704 pages
26 euros
But Belton’s book goes even further: “The takeover of the economy – and the judiciary and the political system – by the KGB forces” not only brought them billions. They are “actively used to undermine Western institutions and democracy,” writes Belton.
The tentacles extended deep into Western institutions today, writes Belton. Also because many would have participated eagerly there: the Moscow rules would have found their way into London.
Because the stock exchange on the Thames, with its much more lax compliance rules, listed Russian companies much more easily than its big sister in New York. British lords and politicians – as well as American, German, Austrian, French and Italian – have been bought into the supervisory boards of Russian companies for a lot of money and are now active as Russia’s compliant lobbyists in the West.
Ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is perhaps the most prominent example. And an army of investment bankers, commercial lawyers and PR firms have also gotten rich with Russian money.
The extent to which the previously published English-language edition of her book had annoyed those addressed is shown by complaints by the owner of the London football club Chelsea FC, Roman Abramovich, who had the claim that the club was bought at Putin’s behest blocked. Bankers Pyotr Aven and Mikhail Fridman also pushed through some additions to the book. Sechin and his company tried this without success.
One figure shows that the Russian party in the West could go on for a while: according to official figures from the central bank, capital flight rose from $50.4 billion to $72 billion last year.
More: Dialogue instead of sanctions – The German political elite and those who understand Putin