Overreach by Owen Matthews

Author:Owen Matthews
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-10-08T16:47:43+00:00

The Tsar and His Court

The Security Council meeting of 21 February was remarkable in many ways. The setting of the Kremlin’s St Catherine Hall was unique in its formality and grandeur – a clear signal that something momentous and historic was afoot. The vast, garishly restored ceremonial halls of the Kremlin were familiar to Russian TV viewers from various spectacles of adulation by the collected members of Russia’s political and cultural elite as they listened to and applauded Putin’s annual state of the union addresses. This time, the Kremlin hall was not packed but empty save for the president himself, seated at a vast white table, and the members of the Council seated at a bizarre distance from him. And as the meeting progressed, the content of the broadcast, too, became more and more extraordinary. The spectacle of humble ministers dutifully reporting to Putin was a staple of Russian television. So was the occasional ritual humiliation by Putin of oligarchs and senior officials. But for the first time the Russian public saw the chilling spectacle of the entire security establishment of their country assembled for a ritual, public obeisance to – and abuse by – their supreme leader.

In the Soviet era, the only public display that could hint at the changing power relations inside the inner Politburo was the order in which the USSR’s gerontocratic rulers would file onto the roof of Lenin’s Mausoleum for the annual May Day parade. Putin’s regime offered something far more interesting – an hour-long spectacle of Russia’s new Politburo offering their ‘opinion’ of a possible recognition of the independence of the Donbas republics, followed by a personal response by Putin himself. The spectacle was certainly carefully orchestrated. But it was also very revealing – including in ways that the Kremlin spin doctors did not intend.

It began with a mind game. As Peskov confided to the source with whom he lunched on 28 February, all the members of the Security Council had been told – falsely – that the meeting would be broadcast live.65 That was a lie. As sharp-eyed reporters noticed, the times on the watches of the participants showed that the meeting took place hours before it was actually shown on TV. It continued with a ritual that Professor Mark Galeotti described as ‘King Lear meets James Bond’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld’.66 One by one, the members of the Council stood not to speak their mind on whether the republics of the Donbas should be recognised as independent states so much as to count the ways in which they agreed with Putin.

The ultra-hawks Nikolai Patrushev and Aleksandr Bortnikov were the most obviously assured in their delivery and extreme in their lies and eschatological fantasies. FSB Director Bortnikov ran through an extraordinary list of alleged Ukrainian provocations – including ‘genocidal’ attacks on the civilians of Donbas. Security Council Secretary Patrushev claimed that the conflict was being driven by the machinations of Western powers whose ‘goal is the destruction of Russia’. Defence Minister Shoigu – who,

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