Fragile Empire by Ben Judah

Author:Ben Judah
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 9780300181210
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-06-18T07:00:00+00:00

Time to Switch to the Sports Channel

Supporters of a Medvedev policy agenda had by September 2011 started to become increasingly shrill. Members of the factions answering directly to Putin and Medvedev appeared to be clashing, as did those trying to curry their favours. ‘If stabilisation goes on forever, it will lead to stagnation,’ warned Igor Yurgens, the head of INSOR.51 However, it was becoming abundantly clear by the annual Yaroslavl conference, which Medvedev hosted in September 2011, that he was not going to fight for his job. In his headline speech at the event Medvedev gave the speech of a bureaucrat and not a campaigning politician. Humiliating him further, echoing Russia's poor state of repairs, a plane carrying Lokomotiv, one of the nation's premier league hockey teams, had crashed in the city's airport days before the conference, killing all but one of its forty-five passengers.

The ‘tandem announcement’ did not tarry. It came at the annual United Russia party conference on 24 September 2011. ‘There is nothing that can stop us … I have not lost my commander's voice,’ rang out the call of Vladimir Putin from a triangular podium before an electronically shimmering Russian flag, where minutes before a haggard Dmitry Medvedev had announced he was backing the once and future President for a mandate that could see him rule until 2024.52 The audience of United Russia delegates applauded like a Soviet Party Congress, rapturously. This moment will be remembered as the highest peak of Putin's power over the Russian establishment.

Minutes later, government advisor Arkady Dvorkovich let out two anguished tweets. ‘This is not a time for happiness.’ ‘Time to switch to the sports channel.’53

In St Petersburg somebody winced. ‘I feel towards him like a son,’ said his schoolteacher Irina Grigorovskaya, still so fond of him, not wanting to dwell on her feelings that afternoon. She watched him that day like so many million others, but unlike them she felt sorry for the child who had once drawn dinosaurs and loved chemistry experiments:

‘There have been some moments when I felt sorry for Dima … because he was being treated too roughly by Putin. I felt like this watching the United Russia congress when he had to announce that Putin would be the president after all … I was a bit disappointed, but I expected before the presidency that it would be just a rest for Putin … I know how hard this must have been, I feel sorry for Dima in an almost physical way.’

She was still preparing to vote for United Russia in the parliamentary elections and, of course, for Putin. ‘Who else is there to vote for?’ she sighed, looking at me like somebody very worried. It was a genuine question.

Putin had said that it had been ‘decided between us several years ago’ – as if letting slip that all the uncertainty of the tandem had been a lie.54 It was a mistake, insulting those taken in by it. Medvedev's presidency had built up the intellectual infrastructure, constituency and anticipation for change.

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