PUTIN’S KLEPTOCRACY
Who Owns Russia?
Karen Dawisha
Simon & Schuster
445 pages; $30
Now in his third (non-consecutive) presidential term, Vladimir Putin presents himself as the strong and virtuous leader who rescued Russia from the chaos, corruption, penury and weakness of the 1990s.
State-controlled news media and Kremlin spin doctors disseminate this message diligently — and to good effect, judging from Mr Putin’s 80 per cent approval rating. But with Putin’s Kleptocracy, Karen Dawisha, a respected scholar of Soviet and Russian politics at Miami University in Ohio, seeks to shred this carefully constructed narrative.
Her verdict is not merely that Mr Putin’s boast of having built a potent, efficient state that fights for the little guy and against the venality of the powerful is bunk. Her bedrock claims are that the essential character of Mr Putin’s system is colossal corruption and that he is a prime beneficiary. The thievery, she says, has made him fabulously rich, along with a coterie of trusted friends dating back to his days as a KGB officer in Communist East Germany, then as first deputy mayor in 1990s
St Petersburg, then as head of the Federal Security Service.
In explaining the system’s workings, Ms Dawisha enumerates the standard shenanigans of crooked regimes: bribe-taking from domestic and foreign companies seeking business permits; kickbacks from inflated no-bid contracts for state projects; privatisation deals rigged to enrich cronies who will later be cash cows for the Kremlin; illicit exports of raw materials purchased at state-subsidised prices and sold for a killing; “donations” from oligarchs eager to keep feeding at the government’s trough; real estate scams yielding mega-profits and palatial homes; money laundering; election-fixing; labyrinthine offshore accounts; lucrative partnerships with the mob; and the intimidation, even elimination, of would-be whistle-blowers.
To prosper, Russia’s super-rich must demonstrate absolute loyalty to the president. As Mikhail Khodorkovsky and other tycoons have discovered, the punishment for defiance is severe.
Ms Dawisha won’t disappoint readers seeking examples of industrial-size sleaze. She reckons Mr Putin’s private wealth at $40 billion and lists among his prized possessions yachts, planes and palaces — along with a $700,000 wristwatch collection for good measure. As for the Friends of Vladimir, Ms Dawisha writes that “more than half of the $50 billion spent on the Sochi Olympics simply disappeared into the pockets of Putin’s cronies”. The Rotenberg brothers, Mr Putin’s childhood chums, alone garnered $2.5 billion of the outlay for the games.
Russia’s roster of 110 billionaires remains remarkably static, even as the wealthy in other countries rise and fall. What these plutocrats share are long-standing, close connections to Mr Putin. And not a few are former KGB operatives themselves.
Ms Dawisha’s charges are not entirely new: her copiously researched account relies on books, news reports, official documents, memoirs, WikiLeaks and witness testimonies collected by Russian and foreign journalists. The torrent of detail, some of it well known and peripheral to her kleptocracy theme, can drown readers who are untutored in Soviet and Russian politics. Still, Putin’s Kleptocracy is the most persuasive account we have of corruption in contemporary Russia. Ms Dawisha won’t be getting a Russian visa anytime soon. Her indictment – even if it wouldn’t stand up in a court of law – hits Mr Putin where it really hurts.
He may cop to being an authoritarian (he boasts of building a strong state), a nationalist (he wears a cross, preaches patriotism and praises the Orthodox Church) and an empire builder (he brags about retaking Crimea and is unapologetic about seeking a sphere of influence). But the accusation that he’s a common crook, or even an uncommon one, is different — and a charge he doesn’t treat lightly. That’s why Russian reporters avoid it, especially as political controls have tightened, and why Ms Dawisha’s original publisher, Cambridge University Press, declined to print the book on the advice of its lawyers worried about the possibility of legal action.
The true tragedy is that corruption, state-sponsored, energy-driven and totalling hundreds of billions annually, has mortgaged Russia’s future. Freedom has withered. Money for the investments urgently needed to make Russia innovative and prosperous has been diverted to enrich a few.
Alas, that’s what kleptocracies do.
©The New York Times News Service 2014
