Authoritarianism Reborn: Putin Consolidates the “Vertical of Power”
This article covers Putin’s first presidential election and his consolidation of power through the interrelated taming of the oligarchs the the seizure of Russian television and Russia’s strategic natural resources. It is the ninth article in the series “Spy, Bureaucrat, Killer, Thief: The Many Faces of Vladimir Putin.” While it is not necessary to read earlier entries, it is recommended.
The first article provides a brief history of Russia’s intelligence services and a definition of “Disinformation” and “Active Measures.”
The second article describes Vladimir Putin’s early life and his experiences as a KGB Officer in Russia and East Germany.
The third article describes how elements of the KGB laundered billions of dollars of Communist Party money into the West as the USSR collapsed.
The fourth article describes the rise of the post-Soviet oligarchic system and the role Eurasian organized crime played in facilitating it.
The fifth article covers Putin’s tenure as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg and his enduring relationship with organized crime.
The sixth article covers the organized crime and intelligence service links to the Bank of New York money laundering scandal.
The seventh article covers Vladimir Putin’s rise to the Russian Presidency and the mysterious and controversial September 1999 Moscow Apartment Bombings.
The eighth article covers the mysterious series of political assassinations and terrorist attacks that convulsed Putin’s early reign.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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“Political Technologists” and the Election of Vladimir Putin
Yeltsin’s resignation on New Years Eve, 1999, thrust Putin into the glaring lights of international notoriety as the new President of Russia. According to the Russian constitution, he could only hold office on an interim basis until elections were held.
In order to keep “The Family” around Yeltsin safe from prosecution, it was also necessary to command a strong contingent of allies in the State Duma. To this end, Boris Berezovsky conceived of a new political party to rally around Putin called Unity.
To bring the party into existence, Berezovsky enlisted the help of two “political technologists,” Gleb Pavlovsky and Vladislav Surkov.
Political technologists practice a form of political manipulation developed in the states of the former USSR influenced by the Soviet model of top-down governance and tsarist practices of black propaganda and co-opting the political opposition.
By the 21st Century, the practice was influenced by developments in mass media, advertising and public relations.
“[P]olitical technologists,” states Professor Andrew Miller, “apply whatever ‘technology’ they can to the construction of politics as a whole. The manipulation of the media is central to their work, but by definition it extends beyond this — to the construction of parties, the destruction of others, the framing of general campaign dynamics and the manipulation of results. If Russia and other post-Soviet states are ‘directed democracies’, the job of the political technologist is to direct that version of democracy on their employers behalf.”
“We are talking about managed democracy,” Gleb Pavlovsky told The Guardian, “but I think that you in the West have forgotten that this concept was widespread in the 1950s in Europe in countries where there had been totalitarianism… In Germany, for example, there was the same idea: that German people have a tendency to totalitarianism and they must not be allowed near politics. So they must have the possibility to choose, (vote) freely, but the people who control real politics must be the same, they must not yield. So a prohibitory system must be created… Is it cynical from the point of view of the theory of democracy? Probably yes, but here it didn’t look like cynicism.”
Vladislav Surkov created Unity in a matter of months, winning a plurality of the vote in the Duma elections. He did so by using state and oligarch-owned media to launch attacks against Putin’s rivals, and manipulating smaller parties into alliances that benefited Unity.
Surkov, a master of postmodern propaganda with artistic pretensions, cut his teeth orchestrating PR and advertising campaigns for Bank Menatap, owned by one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. After working as the head of PR at Berezovsky’s ORT television station, Surkov became Deputy Chief of the Russian Presidential administration.
The campaign team assembled around Putin was led by his associate from St. Petersburg, Dmitri Medvedev.
Gleb Pavlovsky was responsible for creating an image of Putin to sell to the Russian people. Pavlovsky was helped by the stark contrast Putin struck from Yeltsin. In the chaos of late 1999, Putin’s image as a youthful strongman struck a deep chord in Russian society.
Putin also enjoyed the support of the security services, increasingly led by KGB allies of his from St. Petersburg, who came to be known as the siloviki.
“The Family,’’ the term for the inner circle around Yeltsin, placed the full support of state media behind Putin.
Putin stayed aloof of the Presidential campaign, refusing to engage any of his opponents in debates or participate in traditional campaign activities. Instead, Medvedev’s team used the massive state and friendly oligarch controlled media apparatus to provide daily images of Putin engaged in important state business to millions of Russians watching television around the country.
During this time, Putin had a much publicized outing with Tony Blair at the Mariinsky Theater.
The Kremlin used the resources of the state to coercively lean on regional governors to support Putin. Looming over this all was Putin’s execution of the war in Chechnya, which was indignantly demanded by Russians still reeling from terrorist atrocities.
Putin and the authorities around him made sure that the Russian public was kept in the dark as to what was really occurring in Chechnya. By the end of January, 2000, a combination of indiscriminate bombing and vicious street fighting had turned the Chechen capital of Grozny into a charnel house, leading to the death of over 1000 Russian soldiers.
While the state run media spun a Kremlin-friendly version of events entirely divorced from reality, the independent news media was leaned on and coerced by Russian authorities. In one particularly egregious case, a reporter for American-backed Radio Liberty Andrei Babitsky was detained by Russian soldiers and later traded to Chechen forces.
The Kremlin left nothing to chance and during the election there were widespread reports of ballot stuffing and irregularities in the regions outside of the main cities.
Putin won the election with 52.94% of the vote. Now that his Presidency was official, Putin set about consolidating his power.
Putin, the Oligarchs, Russian television, and the Consolidation of the “Vertical of Power”
In May, 2000, the Russian newspaper Kommersant received a leaked Kremlin document entitled Reform of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation.
The late scholar and highly-respected Putin biographer Karen Dawisha confirmed the authenticity of the document “from multiple Russian sources.”
The document, which was subsequently removed from the Kommersant website by Russian authorities, lays out in remarkable detail a strategy by which the Kremlin could centralize authority in the Presidential Administration of Vladimir Putin.
Here, quoted in translation directly from the document, is a nine-point plan to achieve this centralization of power:
- The formation of a controlled mass public platform for all politicians and public-political organizations of the Russian Federation, supporting the President of the R.F.
- The continuing removal from the Russian political arena of the State Duma of the R.F. as a “political platform” for the forces in opposition to the President of the R.F. and affixing with it an exclusively lawmaking activity.
- The establishment of an informational-political barrier between the President of the R.F. and the entire spectrum of oppositional forces in the Russian Federation.
- Introducing active agitation and propaganda throughout the entire territory of the Russian Federation in support of the President of the R.F., and Government of the R.F., and their policies.
- Introducing constant information-analytical and political work in all means of mass media.
- Introducing direct political counter-propaganda aimed at discrediting the opposition to the President, R.F.’s political leaders, and political public organizations.
- Holding public gatherings (pickets, rallies, conferences, marches, and etc.) in support of the President of the R.F.
- The organization and management of active political activity in all the regions of the Russian Federation in order to prevent attempts of governors, heads of krais, republics, and oblasts to conduct any activities aimed at dismembering Russia or weakening the powers of the center.
- The creation and maintenance of our own sources of mass media.
Four days after his inauguration, Putin issued an executive order that served as a basis for the establishment of a “vertical of power,” placing the 89 previously independent regional governors of the Russian Federation under the direct supervision of seven superfederal regions led by plenipotentiaries, many of them former KGB, who were appointed by, and answered to, Putin.
Instead of allying with liberal parties in the Duma, as many had expected, Unity allied with the Communists. Surkov oversaw the merging of Unity with its now toothless chief party adversary during the election, which led to the formation of the United Russia party.
“United Russia is a telephone system from the Kremlin to the bottom through the regional apparatus,” Gleb Pavlovsky told The Guardian. “A transmission of the signal. It has absolutely no independence and cannot act on its own, in contrast to the KPSS [Soviet Communist Party]. It cannot fulfil political directives. It needs full instructions, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. If 3 and 4 are missing it stops and waits for instructions.”
Putin placed his closest associates from St. Petersburg into positions of national power. Some of the highest positions were awarded to his colleagues from the FSB and other security services.
Former KGB associates of Putin placed into influential positions included Sergei Ivanov, head of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, head of the FSB and Viktor Cherkesov, who served as Putin’s representative to the Northwest region of Russia. The oligarchs worried that they were witnessing a power seizure by the feared siloviki.
Putin then seized control of independent media. A month after his inauguration, the Russian Prosecutor General’s office opened a criminal case against the oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky.
Gusinsky’s holding company Media Most owned the independent television station NTV, which had supported Putin’s opponents during the election. Putin saw this as a form of information warfare being waged against him.
NTV’s programming during the election marks a high point for freedom of expression and the press in Russian history that would soon be snuffed out. Putin was enraged by the way Kukli, a televised satirical puppet show, depicted him as Zaches the Dwarf from The Tales of Hoffman.
Even more unforgivable in the eyes of the new regime was airing of the program Independent Investigation two days before the election, which scrutinized the origins of the apartment bombings.
The show featured a segment that included a special town hall format in which residents of the building in Ryazan in which the FSB bombing “exercise” had taken place were given the opportunity to question a representative from the agency. The Q&A went disastrously and many who watched the program grew more convinced rather than less that the FSB was behind the attempted terrorist act.
On the morning of May 11th, masked gunman claiming to be tax police arrived at Media Most headquarters in Moscow and forced its employees into the cafeteria while they ransacked and searched the building.
Gusinsky, who had been in Israel at the time of the raid, immediately returned to Moscow and publicly denounced it. However, the raid was only the beginning of his problems.
“The myth of Putin as a President who advocated reforms, democracy, free speech, and so on, is history now,” Gusinsky defiantly told the press. “His real actions unmask him, revealing his true face, you know.”
Gusinksy was arrested and imprisoned in Moscow’s Butryka detention center. He was forced to sell NTV for a fraction of its value, effectively placing it under state control. In return, he was allowed to flee the country.
On July 28th, twenty-one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen were called to a meeting at the Kremlin organized by Duma member Boris Nemtsov, a reformer associated with the Yeltsin government. Tensions were high, Putin’s Kremlin had become increasingly assertive and even combative with the oligarchs.
A week earlier, Russia’s procurator general had accused Vladimir Potanin, the architect of the loans-for-shares program that privatized much of Russia’s most valuable state-owned industries, of underpaying the government during the privatization of Norilsk Nickel, one of the world’s largest precious metal extractors.
Vagit Alekperov, owner of the oil company LUKOIL and co-owner with Potanin of the publication Izvestia, had been charged with tax evasion.
Even Boris Berezovsky, who had been instrumental in Putin’s rise to power, was not immune to the crackdown. AvtoVAZ, a Russian automobile company owned by Berezovsky, had been accused of underpaying the government $600 million in taxes.
With the exception of Berezovsky, who ominously wasn’t invited, Russia’s top oligarchs sat around a large table in the middle of an ornate Kremlin hall.
When Putin arrived he delivered a crystal clear message: he would allow them to maintain control over the industries they had pilfered from the state during the privatizations of the 1990s, and in return they would all agree to play by his rules.
Chief among them: stay out of politics.
“What Putin and his administration did was a primitive two-step move,” Mikhail G. Delyagin, director of the Institute for Globalization Problems, told The Los Angeles Times. “First the authorities showed that they were sort of crazy and ready to rub out anyone. Then they backed off and said: ‘Well, maybe we overdid it a bit, but at least you have seen what we are capable of. So why don’t you guys start playing by our rules and pay as much in taxes as we tell you. Or else…’ ”
While most of the oligarchs were willing to bend the knee in return for being able to keep their loot, Boris Berezovsky had other ideas.
A PhD mathematician, Berezovsky had spent years seizing control of companies and spreading his influence in the corridors of power and believed he could still outmaneuver Putin. He thought his opportunity to do so arrived with the first major disaster of Putin’s term as President.
On August 12th, an accident caused the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk to sink in the Barents Sea, leading to the death of everyone on board.
Unaware of the severity of the disaster at first, Putin had declined to return to Moscow from a vacation in Sochi. Berezovsky took the opportunity to skewer Putin on his television station ORT.
Families of the crew members and ordinary Russians directed their fury toward Putin, and Putin in turn directed his toward Berezovsky. After being warned by Putin’s chief of staff that he should release control of ORT and flee the country, Berezovsky demanded a meeting with Putin himself.
Putin agreed and used the opportunity to excoriate Berezovsky, accusing him of hiring prostitutes to play the wives and sisters of the dead submariners for his television broadcasts. Putin then took out a file and began reading accusations of financial malfeasance at ORT. At risk of prosecution, Berezovsky fled to London.
In a matter of months, Putin had chased Russia’s two largest media moguls out of the country and had the rest of the country’s most powerful oligarchs either seeking favor or looking over their shoulders.
The next article will cover Putin’s consolidation over the ownership of Russia’s natural resource wealth, particularly in the energy sector.