When, as it appears, Vladimir Putin (pictured in Moscow on March 8) commissions a nerve agent attack on the streets of Salisbury, we become fixated by the notion of Russian power, writes Dominic Lawson
Russia is, by land mass, the biggest country in the world, so naturally it looms large in our minds.
And when, as it appears, the country’s leader — an ex-KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin — commissions a nerve agent attack on the streets of our most beautiful cathedral city, Salisbury, we become fixated by the notion of Russian power.
Such anxiety is natural. But we should put this incident in its proper context. Which is that it is a reckless act indicating not strength but weakness.
This Sunday, Russia goes to the polls to elect its President. And while the process has been rigged to exclude the only candidate who might have presented a threat to the existing order (the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny), Putin is worried that his inevitable victory will be on a derisory turnout.
It is not unduly cynical to see the ‘whacking’ of a Russian-turned-British intelligence officer previously denounced by Putin as ‘a traitor…who will kick the bucket’ as a grotesque election stunt.
After all, when he addressed the country’s Federal Assembly on March 1, Putin made the alleged might of the nation’s weaponry, and what it could do to its enemies, as his principal case for re-election.
He said almost nothing about the state of the Russian economy (the normal battleground for elections). This was for the simple reason that it is in a ruinous condition, and Putin has no coherent plan regarding what to do about it.
Miserable
Russia is an undeniably great nation and people. But its gross domestic product is no larger than that of Italy and far smaller than the UK’s.
Those outline figures do not do justice to the appalling inefficiency of Russia’s economy, mired in corruption which would disgrace any tin-pot sub-Saharan dictatorship.
The result, as one might expect, is extreme levels of inequality and poverty.
Such anxiety is natural. But we should put this incident in its proper context. Which is that it is a reckless act indicating not strength but weakness. Pictured: Military personnel in Salisbury on March 11
A rare British exposé of what life is like in the Russian heartland was provided by the Sunday Times reporter Matthew Campbell in January, when he travelled to the southern Urals:
‘I have only witnessed impoverishment like this before when reporting civil wars in West Africa and Latin America.
Here, the miserable conditions are intensified by industrial squalor and the brutal Russian winter. Even in the tumultuous years after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 I did not see poverty like this.’
Putin — with remarkable success, it has to be said — distracts and deflects public anger by blaming everything on the West’s sanctions, which were implemented after Moscow annexed Crimea and poured troops across the border into Ukraine.
But those military escapades were themselves designed by the Kremlin to shore up popular support at a time when the colossal corruption and inequalities stemming from it had led many thousands to demonstrate against the Putin regime.
Last month, there was an incident which combined both these elements. A 500-strong force of largely Russian mercenaries in Syria attempted to seize one of the country’s oilfields — and was all but obliterated by the U.S. Air Force.
The Kremlin attempted to cover up this debacle, but the mother of one of the slaughtered Russian mercenaries told the TV network Current Time that her only son, Ruslan, had joined the military campaign ‘because of poverty, because there are no jobs’.
Putin made much, in his main election address, of the modernisation of the country’s armed forces. But his claim that he had led it to a state of world leadership in technological capability, with the development of nuclear-powered cruise missiles, engendered mirth rather than admiration among military analysts.
Despair among the Russian population is most apparent in the country’s alcohol addiction. In December 2016, 78 people in the Siberian city of Irkutsk died from methanol poisoning. Pictured are some of the victims in hospital
Despite the flashy graphics that Putin showed the Russian Federal Assembly, not a single such missile has even been built by Moscow, let alone tested.
In fact, during the Cold War (which ended more than 25 years ago) the U.S. explored similar technology, but discovered that such a missile would emit radioactive waste from the moment it was fired and would almost certainly blow up long before it reached its target.
In other words, it would present an acute danger to the nation that it was supposed to protect. Meanwhile, in the real world, Russia’s solitary aircraft carrier, the Soviet-era Admiral Kuznetsov, is so unreliable that it never sets to sea without an ocean-going tug in case it breaks down and needs to be hauled back for yet more repairs.
We should not be too surprised about this. After all, how many products can Russia make of a quality that could sell internationally? None that I know of. For export revenues, it has been over-whelmingly reliant on oil and gas.
The collapse in prices of those commodities (less than half what they were six years ago) has exposed the rottenness at the heart of the Russian industrial economy, just as their explosive rise during the early years of Putin’s rule made him seem like a miracle-worker, rather than the accidental political beneficiary of geology.
Exodus
No organisation has produced a clearer and more comprehensive analysis of Russia’s deep crisis than the Carnegie Moscow Centre.
Its most recent (2017) report is devastating: ‘A substantial part of Russia’s production capacity — more than 40 per cent by some estimates — is both technologically and functionally obsolete and cannot produce competitive and marketable products.
‘For example Russia’s machine stock has shrunk by over half in the last ten years. Over the next few years we can expect a decline in investment . . . this downward spiral will eventually lead the country to economic collapse.’
This is one reason why capital has been flooding out of the country: the oligarch class want to take out as much of their money as possible, while they can.
And the exodus is human as well as financial. Russia is thought to have lost up to 4.5 million people through emigration since the start of the 1990s — many of the best and brightest among them.
They at least represent hope, rather than despair — a despair which is most obvious in the country’s alcohol addiction (admittedly a perennial problem, long pre-dating President Putin).
The most horrific illustration of this was the deaths, in December 2016, of 78 people in the Siberian city of Irkutsk from methanol poisoning. They had all drunk from bottles of bath lotion — increasingly favoured by Russians who now find even the cheapest vodka too pricey.
This image shows London apartments worth over £11m owned by the Russian first deputy Prime Minister, Igor Shuvalov. The front of the apartments are shown in red
In the past, this particular brand of bath lotion had contained drinkable ethanol, but the fatal batch had substituted that chemical with methanol — cheaper even than ethanol but poisonous to humans.
The 78 victims were by no means all deadbeats. The majority were described as having ‘steady if low-paying jobs’ and included a doctor, teachers and nurses.
Stench
It is a far cry from the Belgravia mansions and yachts of the Kremlin-favoured elite, such as Putin’s First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, who, according to Transparency International, is the owner of two vast London flats overlooking the Thames, worth more than £11 million.
Or Mrs Shuvalov, who according to the banned anti-corruption candidate Alexei Navalny, used a private jet to fly her corgis around Europe for competitions.
As for Putin’s own wealth, who knows? A whiff of it emerged through the so-called Panama Papers leak, which revealed an old musician friend incongruously linked to a number of offshore companies with cash flows of up to $2 billion.
This friend, a cellist called Sergei Roldugin, eventually denied he was a front for Putin’s hidden wealth and insisted these funds were charitable donations for the purchase of rare musical instruments — a slight improvement on his first statement: ‘I am not ready to give comments. These are delicate issues.’
Indeed they are. With this rich stench in the background, and the growth of extreme poverty becoming more evident daily, it does not seem quite so strange that President Putin, just ahead of the national ballot, might seek to impress and distract his people with a story of how traitors to the motherland meet justice.
But even if it impresses his own electorate, we should not be similarly awestruck. The Russian bear may be a physical colossus, but its teeth are rotten. It is much weaker than it appears.