LRB, Vol. 43 No. 4 · 18 February 2021
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/the-paper/v43/n04>
SHORT CUTS
Putin’s Palace
Tony Wood
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/contributors/tony-wood>
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Alexei Navalny’s arrival in Russia on 17 January was both a homecoming
and a high-stakes opening gambit. His decision to return, made after
several months convalescing in Germany from near fatal poisoning with a
nerve agent in Siberia last August, was a provocation confronting
Vladimir Putin with a choice: he could either arrest his most prominent
opponent, drawing greater attention to Navalny’s anti-corruption
campaign, or allow him to operate freely on Russian soil. The Kremlin
took no chances and arrested him immediately. This was the spark for the
protests that took place across Russia on 23 and 31 January, which drew
thousands onto the streets in more than a hundred cities and towns
despite sub-zero temperatures.
These were the most serious demonstrations of discontent in Russia for a
decade, and they brought a serious crackdown. On 23 January almost 4000
people were arrested nationwide – more than double the previous record
for a post-Soviet protest – and the following Sunday a new record was
set, with another 5700 detained. In Moscow the authorities closed off
the entire city centre, forcing the protesters to switch from their
planned route and instead march to Sailor’s Silence, the prison where
Navalny is currently being held. In St Petersburg protesters were
prevented from marching down Nevskii Prospekt, and some were reportedly
tased when they reached Sennaya Square. Similarly harsh treatment was
meted out in Vladivostok, where protesters avoided police for a while by
forming a large circle out on the frozen surface of the Amur Bay.
Detainees reported being beaten by police in Kostroma, Ryazan and
Chelyabinsk. As many as eighty journalists were among those detained.
The geographical breadth of the protests was striking. Protests of
varying sizes took place in every region of Russia, from Yakutsk in the
Far East to Murmansk near the Norwegian border. Several thousand marched
in Ekaterinburg in the Urals and in the Siberian industrial hub of
Novosibirsk, and there were smaller crowds in dozens of other places. A
list of arrests by location maintained byOVD-Info, a Russian human
rights monitoring organisation, suggests there are at least stirrings of
opposition across Russia’s socioeconomic landscape as well as its map,
from decaying industrial centres to more prosperous enclaves of oil wealth.
The immediate goal of the protests was to pressure the Kremlin into
releasing Navalny – nominally detained for violating the terms of a
five-year suspended sentence he received in 2017 for ‘financial crimes’.
But sympathy for Navalny isn’t the main driver of discontent: his case
has served as the focal point for a wider frustration with the status
quo. Signs of unrest have been growing in recent years. In 2018, there
were protests against the increase in the pension age, and in the summer
of 2019 demonstrations took place in Moscow against the rigging of
elections to the city assembly. But while public displays of dissent
have become an increasingly normal part of Russian political life,
nationwide, co-ordinated upsurges like this January’s are still rare.
Their emergence testifies to Navalny’s ability to galvanise Russia’s
opposition movements. He has been able to do so in large part because he
has turned his anti-corruption message into a powerful political weapon.
His activism began more than a decade ago, with a demand for
transparency from state oil and gas companies, but in recent years he
has undergone something of a political evolution, discarding both his
ethnonationalist rhetoric and his full-bore endorsement of the free
market, and taking what could be called a ‘social turn’. The platform he
developed for his abortive 2018 presidential campaign – he was barred
from running thanks to his 2017 fraud conviction – emphasised the
state’s role in promoting social welfare and called for greater spending
on healthcare and infrastructure, as well as opposing any increase in
the pension age. What have remained consistent, though, are the
anti-corruption theme and Navalny’s highly effective use of social media
and the internet. He has been able not only to reach millions of
Russians but to spur many of them to action.
Two days after his arrest, Navalny released his latest documentary on
YouTube./Putin’s Palace: The Story of the Biggest Bribe/is just under
two hours long and lays out in detail the networks of graft involved in
the construction of a personal residence for Putin by the Black Sea.
Much of the basic information isn’t new: the existence of the palace was
first revealed in 2010 by the businessman Sergei Kolesnikov, who had
been involved in the scheme but became disillusioned by the scale of the
greed involved. (He fled Russia after blowing the whistle.) But
Navalny’s team has built on Kolesnikov’s revelations and presents them
in a way that combines serious investigative work with irreverent humour.
What began in 2005 as a project for a luxury dacha on a wooded cape near
the resort of Gelendzhik turned into a gargantuan undertaking, which has
now cost an estimated £1 billion of Russian taxpayers’ money. Calling it
a ‘palace’ is an understatement: it’s more like a vast lordly estate,
encompassing not only a 68-hectare complex of buildings around the
palace, but also neighbouring tracts of land totalling another 7000
hectares. As Navalny points out, Putin’s private domain is more than
thirty times the size of Monaco. But unlike Monaco, it is protected by a
no-fly zone and a naval security order requiring ships to stay two
kilometres from the shore. Navalny’s team nevertheless managed to float
nearby in a dinghy and launch a drone over the estate. The sweeping
aerial views make clear not only the scale of the project but the
pointless extravagance: it has two helipads, an underground ice hockey
rink, an orangery, an amphitheatre, an Orthodox church, a tunnel to the
beach, and two vineyards complete with state of the art wineries.
The palace itself is a three-storey neoclassical edifice arranged around
a colonnaded central courtyard, with a total floor space of 17,691
square metres. Based on leaked floor plans and photographs taken by
construction workers, Navalny’s team has put together sleek digital
renderings of the palace’s interiors and furnishings. The architectural
style is self-aggrandisingly imperial, from the marble floors to the
baroque frescoes adorning the ceilings. Film buffs will enjoy the moment
when Navalny recognises the double-headed eagle atop the entrance gates
from the storming of the Winter Palace in Sergei Eisenstein’s/October/.
But the dominant motif is not so much grandeur as excess. The ground
floor alone boasts a cinema, a solarium, a hairdresser’s, a doctor’s
office, a spa, a Turkish bath, a ‘cocktail hall’, a wine-tasting room.
Outside there is a swimming pool and an ‘aquadiscotheque’, whatever that
is. (The word was quickly taken up as a mocking chant: in Moscow’s
Komsomolskaya Square on 31 January, protesters jumped up and down
shouting ‘akvadiskoteka!’ at a phalanx of riot police.) Upstairs are a
personal gym, a reading room, a music room, a private theatre, a
billiard room, a casino and a hookah lounge. This last room also
contains a platform with a pole on top; Navalny wonders aloud what the
pole could possibly be for – a Christmas tree, perhaps, or a giant
shawarma? The top floor is more modest, with a mere ten bedrooms in
addition to the presidential suite. To judge by the plans and
photographic evidence, the palace is being furnished at colossal
expense; after perusing Italian luxury furniture catalogues, Navalny’s
team established the cost of many individual items, the choicest being a
gold-plated toilet brush that apparently costs €700.
This is the latest in a series of documentaries from Navalny. In 2015 he
took aim at Yuri Chaika, then Russia’s prosecutor general. Two years
later he brought out/Don’t Call Him ‘Dimon’/, detailing the then prime
minister Dmitri Medvedev’s illicitly acquired assets – country estates,
villas, vineyards, yachts – and a private fortune worth some £630
million. While/Putin’s Palace/shares the investigative approach and
caustic tone of those films, it is bolder still in its ad hominem attack
on the president, accusing him of pathological greed. As well as laying
out the corrupt networks through which Putin and his associates channel
their wealth today, it offers a historical account of how they built
those networks in the first place.
The story of Putin’s rise has been told many times: his stint with
theKGBin Dresden in the 1980s, several years spent working for the
mayoralty of St Petersburg in the early 1990s, then the move to Moscow
in 1996 and rapid rise to become Yeltsin’s anointed successor in 1999.
Most versions of this told in the West tend to emphasise the formative
influence on Putin of the Soviet period, in particular his connection to
the security services./Putin’s Palace/instead sees the 1990s as the
foundational period for the contemporary Russian elite. It was then that
Putin and his circle learned the corrupt methods they continue to use
today: extracting bribes, skimming from government contracts, setting up
shell companies, using charitable foundations to disguise flows of
money, designating nominal owners in order to shelter their assets.
It was also in the 1990s that many of the people who now rule and own
Russia became friends and colleagues. The personnel in Putin’s networks
have barely changed since then: they’re just operating on a grander
scale now. While running the foreign trade committee of the St
Petersburg mayor’s office in the 1990s, Navalny recounts, Putin would
write a number on a piece of paper indicating the size of the kickback
required from visiting businessmen – usually $10,000 or $20,000. They
would then hand over the cash to his assistant Alexei Miller. Since
2001, Miller has been theCEOof Gazprom, the giant gas company
majority-owned by the state; in a strange coincidence, Putin’s cousin
Mikhail Shelomov owns 39 million Gazprom shares, currently worth around
£80 million. Shelomov is one of several people believed to be holding
vast assets on Putin’s behalf. Another is the cellist Sergei Roldugin,
who in 2016 shrugged off revelations in the Panama Papers of his vast
fortune by saying: ‘I am rich with the talent of Russia.’ On 30 January
yet another of Putin’s close friends (and former judo partners), Arkady
Rotenberg, came forward to announce that the Black Sea palace in fact
belonged to him.
By the end of January,/Putin’s Palace/had had more than a hundred
million views on YouTube. At least one of them was from Putin himself,
who on 25 January said he had seen bits of the film and found it
‘boring’. Two days later, Putin gave a virtual speech to the World
Economic Forum at Davos in which he decried the worldwide growth of
inequality: ‘Millions of people, even in rich countries, no longer see
the prospect of increasing their incomes.’ The Davos gathering, of
course, is a festival of elite insincerity, but even by those standards,
and still more so in the wake of Navalny’s accusations, this was a real
piece of chutzpah. But it was also an indirect acknowledgment of the
resonance that Navalny’s anti-corruption agenda has had.
How far that agenda can take the protest movement, and whether the
protests can be sustained in the face of formidable repression, remain
to be seen. On 2 February, a Moscow court ringed by riot police
sentenced Navalny to two years and eight months in a penal colony. Two
days later, Navalny’s aide Leonid Volkov announced a pause in protests
until the spring. As and when they resume, the Kremlin is probably
betting that it can beat them into submission. But street protests are
only one part of a strategy. As Volkov put it, ‘Alexei has asked us to
concentrate on this autumn.’ Elections to the Russian parliament are due
in September, and Navalny will aim once again to deploy his ‘smart
voting’ tactic, designed to channel votes towards the candidates best
placed to beat incumbents from Putin’s party, United Russia. It’s not
clear exactly how effective this tactic is. Advocates claim it helped
several opposition candidates to victory in local elections in 2019, and
that it was crucial in depriving United Russia of its majority on the
city councils of Tomsk and Novosibirsk last September. Detractors argue
that these upsets were mainly driven by other factors, including
slow-burning discontent with United Russia. But it adds an element of
unpredictability to the electoral process, something the Kremlin thought
it had successfully eliminated.
A year ago, Putin surprised the country by introducing constitutional
amendments, later approved in a July 2020 referendum, that would enable
him to remain in power beyond the end of his current term in 2024,
conceivably until 2036. It seems that he doesn’t intend to retire to his
palace any time soon. But playing the long game may not be the best
strategy: a sizeable proportion of the protesters have been in their
twenties or teens – people born and raised entirely under Putin’s rule,
for whom the spectre of chaos the Kremlin so often invokes is less
fearsome than a future of stagnation and endless corruption.
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