I Was Able To Get A Sense Of His Soul

Now that it's 2014, and we've seen Pussy Riot and "gay propaganda" and imprisoned oligarchs and whatever else bizarre about Russia, you might think that Vladimir Putin's unraveling of whatever democratic reforms accomplished after 1991 happened slowly, almost imperceptibly, and only after many turbulent years. Which is why Masha Gessen's The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin is such an important book — because not only is there so much you forgot — especially in the haze of front sections packed with terrorism and whatever else was going on in the US — but she also reminds everyone how Putin's dismantling of the nascent Russian democracy happened like almost immediately upon his taking power in 2000.

In some ways I think people just wanted to ignore it. It just didn't jive with the heady 1990s when there was only one superpower, no wars and democratic expressions of freedom or whatnot exploding all over the world, or at least Eastern Europe. In other words, when Jesus Jones ruled the world, "watching the world wake up from history" or however that embarrassingly simplistic thought went. And as far as the west was concerned, the end of the Cold War worked for everyone: the cowboys heralded the victory of democracy over communism and the apologists got to feel vindicated that the Soviet "threat" was overblown. No one wanted to think that it could be resurrected any time soon, and something sinister like what Gessen describes just didn't fit whatever narrative had taken hold in the Clinton-Yeltsin years: International Space Stations, arms control treaties, G8 and whatever else.

If you read the newspaper during the Putin years you probably remember some of the chipping away at civil society. I remember specifically when Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 and thinking something along the lines of well, I'm sure something sketchy was probably happening, you know those Russian oligarchs or whatever. In reality it was just a bald power grab by Putin's government and, Jesus Fucking Christ, why didn't anyone say anything about it?

So I'm going back now and looking at some of the reports I'm sure I read in 2003, when Khodorkovsky was arrested. Here's one I'm pretty sure I remember, with a representative paragraph:

What brought him down is far from clear, whether political rivalries or criminal misdeeds, and his political aspirations remain unplayed. But his life as a businessman illustrates the changes and conflicts of a modern Russia that created a coterie of super rich.

Even a op-ed somewhat critical of Putin (that I don't remember reading) treats the whole arrest like it's a sort of growing pain in Russian democracy:

The Putin-Khodorkovsky showdown is a tough one to fathom. The contenders are both shining beacons of the New Russia — one a KGB operative transformed into a slick national leader with enormous popular support, the other a Young Communist who became a multibillionaire champion of corporate honesty. Both are darlings of the West — President Vladimir Putin is at home on President George W. Bush's ranch or in Queen Elizabeth's carriage; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the erstwhile head of the giant Yukos oil company, is embraced by Wall Street and hailed as a "visionary" by the Librarian of Congress. Yet these two are locked in a seamy struggle.

The key, of course, is that for all the progress it has made, Russia is still a long way from really fitting into any Western mold. The fabulously wealthy men we have taken to calling oligarchs, or "businessmen," are really the lucky beneficiaries of a shameless division of spoils from the collapse of the centralized Soviet economy. Putin, whom we like to call Russia's democratically elected president, was arbitrarily plucked from obscurity by Boris Yeltsin's threatened political "family" and plunked into the Kremlin. Neither man is really the product of either democracy or market economy: Theirs is the struggle of power and plunder.

This is not to say that Putin is in any way justified in hounding Khodorkovsky and throwing him into the notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison. The issue is not whether Khodorkovsky's wealth is ill-gotten — that's the only kind of wealth there is in Russia. But the arrest was so blatantly political — and so crudely theatrical, with masked gunmen and all — that Putin is not likely to have another barbecue anytime soon in Crawford, Texas.

The tone is condescending, and fits with what I remember Russia's standing was in the early 2000s (just before "Axis of Weasel" intransigence) — you know it whenever you hear a leader referred to as "a darling of [blank], for one. As for Khodorkovsky, the guy's an oligarch, and people don't feel sorry for oligarchs. Gessen's book reports something similar from the inside — there's a point where she writes that the dissidents shook their heads that they were eventually put into a position of having to defend oligarchs.

Gessen's reporting in The Man about this era is eye-opening. Gone is the bullshit ostensible reason for Khodorkovsky's imprisonment — tax evasion or whatnot; all the stuff that you gloss over when reading a Times piece about a faraway place. Instead she fixes it in the context of the rest of Putin's actions, and when you see it alongside the rest of the repression of the opposition, the contemporary silence becomes depressing. Most of the other oligarchs just left the country ("fled" seems like a misplaced word for rich guys), years later they started to go after gay people.

And then there's the terrorism, since that was one topic that I very clearly remember back in the early 2000s. After 9/11, the news from Russia about theater sieges, school hostages, apartment blasts and whatever else that seemed to happen with disturbing — frightening — regularity make you think that the world was about to end. Russia seemed, and was portrayed if I'm not misremembering, as one of the fault lines in the clash of civilizations, so all the worst-case scenario terrorism taking place — dead schoolchildren, theatergoers, people in the middle of nowhere — triggered something awful in a jittery post-9/11 culture.

And then it turns out that basically everything was bullshit — Gessen's recounting intimates that when it wasn't just tragically bungled the acts were actually perpetrated by the regime. In every case, the acts of terror were used to consolidate power in a way that seemed barely (or not at all) germane, which just makes you question it all even more. The machinations make the Patriot Act look like the Magna Carta. Again, it's not until you take it all in at one time that you start to see how efficient and ruthless the dialing back of democratic institutions was.

(I need to be clear: if you felt ill reading about Beslan or were on edge contemplating the fate of the Moscow theatergoers during that several day standoff or got depressed thinking about blown up apartments, you should read about the open questions about these events. It's not so much disturbing as it is disgusting.)

(Also, Face is useful in clearing the air about Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, who I unfortunately assumed to be just another Russian oligarch but who comes off as actually a pretty good guy; in this context, headlines like "Is Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov taking orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin?" are unfortunate and unfair.)

I don't know when opinion really shifted, but it was definitely after Obama — maybe around Syria, when Putin's intransigence was exposed for everyone who had wanted to "reset" the relationship? (Speaking of which, what exactly was being "reset"? These guys seemed like fuckers way before 2009.)

I suppose Pussy Riot was next, but the thing that really did it was the anti-gay legislation, which seems so backward and impossible that it's hard to fathom. And yet it's there, and it's depressing to think that there's a constituency in Russia that somehow supports it.

Also, Putin likes to steal shit. Like Robert Kraft's Super Bowl ring, which is another completely insane story. Or his $40 billion in wealth.

Oh, and then there are the assassinations and murders of political opponents, whistleblowers and various other obstacles to power.

In the end you wonder how Gessen herself is able to stay in the country. The book's afterword is instructive: it's a coda about the time Gessen finally meets Putin. It happened when she, in her day job as the editor of a popular science magazine that was essentially taken over by the state apparatus — how this happens is as strange as just about everything else you read about in The Man. The upshot of the arrangement was that the magazine was compelled to run one party feature in every issue. Gessen refused to participate in one of Putin's many staged puff pieces about Putin rescuing exotic animals or archaeological treasures, in this case Siberian cranes. She was fired by the publisher, and when the buzz in the media about it filtered up to Putin's office, she was summoned to Putin's office by Putin himself to talk about it. At the meeting he waved off her concerns about photo-ops being environmentally unfriendly and he wasn't interested about her concerns about the lack of press freedom in general. He also ordered the publisher to hire her back. After only a few minutes she realized that Putin really had no idea who she was, or that she had written anything about him on the side, especially something so damning and aimed toward a foreign audience.

It meant two things: one, that she could live and work under the radar, but that two, what kind of radar is Putin using in the first place? I don't know if the caricature of the out-of-touch autocrat is a cautionary tale for budding autocrats or whether it's a feature of a diseased system. Honestly, I'm not sure how it exactly plays out badly, except for the fact that all great fucked up autocrats in the end seem to be tagged as out-of-touch: you think people like Saddam, Kim Jong Il, etc. That and bad things seem to happen when autocrats become out of touch — the apparatus underneath has cover to do what it takes to make sure the boss is somehow pleased.

In the end end, meaning after I finished the book and Googled her to see if she had thoughts about what was happening in the Ukraine — this was after the Crimean annexation I think — I found this article, in which I learned that she actually left Russia because its anti-gay laws; she wasn't about to wait around to see if the legislature was going to follow through on its idea to take away the children of same-sex couples. There are times you take a stand, she explains in so many words, and then you have children, and then things change a little bit; ironic, seeing that the so called "gay propaganda" laws are supposedly about "protecting children," but in the end just depressing really.

Posted: March 29th, 2014 | Author: Scott | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: Book Club, When Jesus Jones Ruled The World

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