The Russia Conundrum

I would define the West as those countries in Europe and the Americas where human rights are protected, where democratic values ensure that people have a choice in who governs them and where – despite the well-publicised challenges of recent years – civic institutions, checks and balances enshrine the right of the people to oversee and control those they have elected.

I live in a city and country where powerful Russians, exiled from their homeland, have been targeted and murdered by the agents of the Kremlin. The United Kingdom is a democracy, but Putin’s powers know no borders. I know that the same fate could befall me at any moment – the polonium slipped into my tea, the Novichok on my doorhandle – but I have learned to live with it. What I have not learned to live with is the thought that my country is in the hands of men who strive only to increase their own wealth and power. Living in the West, I have seen how politicians here have mistaken and misinterpreted Putin’s Russia, trying to accommodate him and the threat he poses; how they fell into the traps that Putin set for them.

Like many people in the public eye, I often feel that my identity has been taken from me and moulded into a shape that I do not recognise. Politics has become an acutely personalised business. When someone is involved in a public conflict, their image is appropriated and conflated with the values and prejudices of those who use it for their own ends. I was involved in one of the fiercest political controversies of modern Russia, and for me that made the process all the more extreme. For my supporters, I was a passionate champion of democracy, battling to save the nation’s soul; for my detractors, I was a greedy oligarch who stole the people’s inheritance. Neither version is the whole truth, but both have become ingrained in the polarised way I am now viewed.

Kierkegaard wisely pointed out that life can only be understood backwards, even though we are condemned to live it forwards. As well as looking to the future, I will look back at how today’s crisis developed over the past three decades, to consider why things in Russia have gone so wrong. It is 37 years since the then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev advocated the establishment of a Common European Home uniting East and West in a cooperative endeavour, and nearly 30 years since Boris Yeltsin proposed that Russia should join NATO. Why was that moment of mutual respect and conciliation squandered? What condemned Russia to return to anti-Western autocracy? Why were the hopes of the Russian people, with their long-standing admiration for Western democracy and desire to share in its benefits, left dashed and disappointed?

Russia succumbed to the weight of its thousand-year history, to the seductive paradigm of an autocratic leader who sometimes makes the trains run on time but always takes away freedom, prosperity and dignity. Until the beginning of the 2000s we were building a democratic state, with all its initial-stage shortcomings, similar to what happened in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. From 2001 on – and especially after the Yukos affair, the battle over property rights and political values, in which the very public clash between Vladimir Putin and myself brought into focus the choice between the two contrasting futures available to the nation – the analogy is closer to early fascist Spain and Latin America: ‘To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law.’ The fork in the road and the unfortunate path that Russia followed are obvious. Under Putin, Russia is in thrall to a brand of authoritarian state capitalism based around one leader. Society and the state apparatus are controlled through corruption, blackmail, intimidation and the arbitrary enforcement of the law, while the substance of independent civic institutions has been systematically undermined. This is no way to build a modern country.

Riot police clash with demonstrators during a protest against Alexei Navalny’s jailing in January 2021