Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
We are talking about Putin’s Russia – a subject on which you’ve written your own book.
Yes, and these are all books I read while writing my own book, along with many others. These books are all very relevant to Putin’s Russia, though some extend back slightly into Yeltsin’s Russia. When I first visited Russia I was involved in left wing politics, social groups and trade unions. I went there first to report on the miners’ movement at the end of the Soviet period, and that was very much my interest. In fact, the book I spent the most energy on was called The Russian Revolution in Retreat, which is about the social history of the early 1920s, because that’s what socialists and radicals argue about – where did it all go wrong after the revolution? I then worked as a financial journalist, so I was writing about Russian companies and the economy, and about natural gas, which is obviously central to the economy. So my second book, Change in Putin’s Russia, is a kind of overview that embraces things that people like me are especially interested in – the labour movement, the social movement, Chechnya and that kind of thing. Also, it has a strong element of looking at the economy, which I think you have to do in order to understand the other things that are going on.
Your first choice is Godfather of the Kremlin.
Yes, I chose it because it takes on a fiendishly difficult subject – [the businessman and oligarch] Boris Berezovsky and his role in creating Putin. I think anybody who has come to be interested in Russia during the Putin period thinks of Berezovsky as someone who has fallen out with Putin, is in exile in London, showing his skill at manipulating the media. He does that very well. This book is a marvellous reminder of the fact that Berezovsky was an extremely powerful man, perhaps the most powerful man in Russia towards the end of Yeltsin’s term, and actually helped to create Putin the president and to put Putin where he is. That’s a story that Putin doesn’t want to remind the world of, because of course he did not – as his telling would have it – come from a security services background to centralise and rescue the nation, and deal with the oligarchs who had been running riot since the 1990s. He came out of the family circle that surrounded Yeltsin. Those people and the security services camp worked together to find a suitable candidate, a successor. This is an antidote to the popular image promoted by Putin, and shows the connection between the regimes. It’s also by a journalist who took his job very seriously and was killed for doing his job – he was stabbed on the street in Moscow. As usual in these cases, the instigators have never been found. Anna Politkovskaya’s name is internationally known, but Klebnikov’s should be too.
Berezovsky was screwed over quite badly by Putin, though. And I suppose Putin can claim that he did deal with the oligarchs to get back on track, once he’d done what he had to in order to gain power.
It’s true that once Putin decided to change his way of doing things – once he decided to centralise and to curtail the power of the oligarchs – the second oligarch he dealt with was Berezovsky, after [Vladimir] Gusinsky. Yes, he dealt with him very firmly.
Do you personally see Berezovsky and the oligarchs as robber barons or as capitalist martyrs?
Of course they were robber barons. The collapse of the Soviet Union was such that robber barons were bound to come to the top and, if we’re talking about the development of capitalism, very dynamic they were too. [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky, of course, was the most dynamic. What I think happened under the Yeltsin government, however, was that you had a type of capitalism which was unsustainable in capitalism’s own terms. You just cannot run a large capitalist country if you’re going to collect as few taxes as the government was collecting towards the end of the Yeltsin period. For those who think we need capitalism and we need a state to run it – and I don’t count myself among that number – that was an unsustainable model that clearly had to be corrected. Then Putin comes in with colleagues from the security services. It’s about centralisation, it’s about the state having stronger control, and the savagery that was unleashed on Chechnya within weeks of Putin taking over as prime minister. It’s about restoring the strength of the state and having a different balance between the state and private capital. That balance has shifted.
Simon Pirani is senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. He is the author of Change in Putin’s Russia: Power, Money and People
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