He is likely to remain in Russia, but here we come to the issue about Putin and money: while he enjoys the good life that wealth allows, it has been power that he has really craved and collected. Even in this day of electronic finance, money is a thing. It can be hidden, sent abroad, willed to your children. Power is active, ephemeral, it must constantly be refreshed and reasserted. Back in the Soviet era, one reason why so many leaders died in office was because they knew that they would become vulnerable as soon as they retired. Everything they had – the cars, the mansions, the summer dachas – could be taken away from them by their successor. The tragedy of modern Russia is that the same is still true: Putin may never feel secure enough to put his future in anyone else’s hands.
Putin made his political career as a loyal bagman. He got his hands dirty for Mayor Sobchak in St Petersburg, and when police investigators were closing in on his boss on embezzlement charges, he arranged for the private plane that took him out of the country. When he worked at the Presidential Property Management Directorate, one of the more infamously corrupt agencies, even by Moscow’s standards, he kept his new boss out of the crosshairs, even while corruption investigations sprung up all around him. As director of the FSB and then prime minister, he looked after Yeltsin’s interests – literally the first thing he did as president was sign a decree guaranteeing his predecessor lifelong immunity from prosecution. So can Putin find himself a Putin of his own?
This makes it all the more important to consider a third key question: just how far is Putin really in charge? I don’t mean that there are sinister string-pullers behind him, as much as that he has to work, find out about the world and issue his orders through others. The amount of power the machine has over its purported operator should not be underestimated. Mikhail Zygar, who always has a nose for a great story, tells of how Putin was persuaded to bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics. The oligarch Vladimir Potanin, a keen skier, had become involved with a project to develop a resort near his dacha at Krasnaya Polyana in Sochi. He was keen to make it part of an Olympic bid in order that the government would foot the bill, but Putin was dismissive when the idea was broached in 2005. At that time, he had not yet warmed to the idea of major sporting events as both national PR and great ways to make the elite compete for your favour (and the lucrative contracts to build facilities and infrastructure you can then dispense). So Potanin turned to Dmitry Peskov, then the deputy press secretary, who explained how to change the boss’s mind. Billboards went up advertising the Sochi bid, but only along roads that the presidential motorcade would be taking. Radio adverts were bought, but only on the stations and at times when Putin might be listening. Peskov arranged for someone in a ‘Direct Line’ to ask Putin when Russia would finally host an Olympics. The idea was to make him believe that the country was crying out for it, and that he could profit from that mood. He was duly convinced, and the whole effort of the state then went into trying to win the bid to stage a Winter Olympics in, of all places, a subtropical region, a city with no airport and minimal infrastructure, which had to be rebuilt pretty much from scratch, making it the most expensive Games to date. And all because Peskov was able to tell Potanin how to manage the boss.
It’s also a negative process. At the end of 2015, for example, when military intelligence chief General Igor Sergun died of a heart attack, it became clear that Putin wanted to appoint one of his ex-bodyguard favourites, Alexei Dyumin, as a replacement. The GRU wasn’t keen on the idea – as far as they were concerned, Dyumin was a heavy rather than a spymaster. Defence minister Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov concurred. But the problem was that even Shoigu can’t just say no to the boss, or at least not without taking quite a chance. So they played for time, while also leaking stories to the press that Dyumin wasn’t up to the job. Even the FSB, usually if anything a rival of the GRU, didn’t want to see a precedent established that a totally unqualified favourite could be parachuted into running a security service, so they also started muttering against the idea. Eventually, Sergun’s deputy Igor Korobov was appointed, and Dyumin got the consolation prize of the governorship of Tula instead. It is not that, had Putin flatly demanded it, Dyumin would not have been given the job, but there seems to have been a point at which he decided it was not worth the political cost of asserting his authority. Even tsars need to keep their boyars on side.
