We Need to Talk About Putin: Why the West Gets Him Wrong полностью

Putin’s particular venom is directed towards those he considers traitors, those who were once insiders but who changed sides. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for instance, had become vastly wealthy within the system and was offered the chance to retain his position, but chose to challenge the Kremlin. The Chechens were Russian citizens who were trying to break free, so they had to be crushed. The Ukrainians are, to Putin, essentially Russian subjects, so cannot be allowed to turn their backs on Moscow. This may even explain the attempted assassination of Skripal: it is not simply that he was a Chekist who betrayed the Motherland – and for money, at that – but that he had been pardoned, as part of a spy swap in 2010. As far as the Russians are concerned, the unspoken agreement is that if you are pardoned, your slate is wiped clean, but in return, you’re out of the spying game. You will, of course, be debriefed, and you may give the odd lecture about how things were in your day, but that’s it. As it has become clear that Skripal was rather more active than that, travelling around Europe to advise security services and maybe even identifying former colleagues for surveillance or recruitment, to Putin he was breaking the rules. Although he has denied any Russian role in the assassination attempt, Putin has not shown any regret, describing Skripal as ‘simply a scumbag’ and a ‘traitor to the Motherland’.

And as we know, Putin feels a traitor must be destroyed, crushed. Or, as he put it in 2010, ‘Traitors will kick the bucket. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers-in-arms. Whatever they get in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.’

Most enemies are not traitors, though. Putin doesn’t want to be a tyrant if he can avoid it, and as we have already seen, there is a surprising amount of room in his Russia for a sort of limited freedom. Television, with the exception of the plucky Dozhd Internet channel, is either state-controlled or state-dominated, but there is a great deal of intelligent questioning and even genuinely investigative journalism in the print and online media. Russia is a dangerous place to be in the media – being a local journalist there is as risky as being a war correspondent elsewhere – but still people are willing to poke into the dark corners and shine a light on them. When the real identities of the two GRU assassins who went after Skripal were announced, although much of the international attention was on Bellingcat, the Western investigative website which outed them, they couldn’t have followed the clues without the involvement of Russian investigative journalists.

Just as there is still real journalism, there is a lot of real politics – so long as you don’t call it politics. When non-governmental organisations start to pose a challenge to the state, they face pressure or outright closure, but on a local level Russia is full of parents’ and residents’ associations, pressure groups, environmental lobbies and other expressions of grassroots civil society. Sometimes they are ignored, sometimes they are squashed, but they often bring about real change. The secret seems to be to focus on specific outcomes and always, always use every opportunity to make it clear that they are not political or complaining about the government as such, whether local or national, just this one issue here or that one problem there.

Again, it’s all about the ponyatiye, the unspoken understandings. If you follow the unspoken rules, you should be OK. It’s when you cross them that you become not an enemy, but a traitor. Putin is a merciful autocrat. He doesn’t want to kill you – unless you force him to.

In late 2015 and early 2016, I lived for a while in Kotelniki, an outer suburb of south-east Moscow, at the very end of the metro system. It was still being built all around me – the metro station had only opened a few months earlier, and there wasn’t even yet an asphalt path to it – and almost everyone else there seemed to be couples in their late twenties with young children. Typically, they were not well-heeled yuppies, but rather shop and office workers who had needed more space when their first baby came along, yet weren’t able to afford anywhere more central during the time of rocketing property prices. Having bought themselves a slice of high-rise commuter-belt suburbia, they found themselves after 2014 squeezed between their mortgages (many of which had been negotiated in euros, rather than rubles, when the exchange rate was favourable) and falling real wages. They were hurting: hunting for bargains, postponing making repairs to their flats, moonlighting as Uber drivers.