31 May 2020

How the Coronavirus Revealed the Hollowness of Putin’s “Vertical of Power”

By Joshua Yaffa

From the moment Vladimir Putin first took office, more than twenty years ago, he has returned time and again to the idea of the “vertical of power,” or a top-down apparatus of state authority that has become a trademark of his rule. This “vertical” was pitched as an antidote to the supposed disarray and fecklessness of the Russian state in the nineties; by contrast, Putin’s Russia would be run as a coherent, hierarchical machine, with him at the very top, and his will and decisions flowing downward from there, implemented by everyone from the country’s governors to its businesspeople, school principals, and spies.

The truth is that Putin’s supposed vertical has always been overhyped and riddled with inefficiencies—the Times Moscow correspondent Andrew Higgins skillfully documented its many “shockingly ramshackle” qualities last year—but, in the coronavirus pandemic, it has confronted an even starker challenge, one that can’t be overcome with bluster, oil wealth, or propaganda. Gleb Pavlovsky, a former adviser to Putin who fell out with him and left the Kremlin in 2011, told me that, for matters of both domestic and foreign consumption, the vertical was designed to make Putin look the man of decisive action, the “commander-in-chief who is always ahead and manages to outplay everyone.” But, as Pavlovsky added, “The virus played a different game.”

As of May 26th, Russia has three hundred and sixty-two thousand registered cases of covid-19, placing it behind only the United States and Brazil in over-all numbers. Thirty-eight hundred people have died, but that seems to be a vast underestimate: relying on data from Moscow health officials, the Times reported that Moscow alone recorded more than seventeen hundred excess deaths in April, far more than the official covid-19 count of six hundred and forty-two deaths for the city. (The Russian Foreign Ministry accused the Times and the Financial Times, which published similar reporting, of reporting “disinformation.”) So far, Russia has managed to avoid an acute, localized catastrophe of the kind seen in Lombardy or New York City, even as Moscow hospitals were pushed to their capacity in April and May. But the response of the Russian federal government has clearly been spotty and piecemeal, with individual regions, hospitals, and doctors left to figure out how to deal with the pandemic on their own.

Putin’s much heralded vertical of power has proved flat-footed, even absent. Putin himself periodically appeared on television to announce a series of rolling “non-working holidays,” leaving it up to individual regions to opt for lockdowns—or not—and declining to offer much in terms of economic relief. His video-conference meetings with governors were broadcast on federal airwaves, but ended up portraying him as bored and disengaged. Rather than coming off as the all-powerful strongman, Putin “looks like an old, sick wolf,” the political scientist Alexander Kynev told the Moscow Times. Earlier this month, the independent polling agency Levada Center found that Putin had an approval rating of fifty-nine per cent, a historic low.

One of Putin’s signal pronouncements—that doctors and other medical personnel treating covid-19 patients would receive bonuses from the state—has been marred by sporadic and delayed implementation, with scores of doctors all over the country complaining that they have nothing at all. In multiple statements and meetings with officials, Putin expressed his displeasure at the problem, but still hundreds of medical workers treating patients from Siberia to the Caucasus continue to publicly complain about not receiving the promised money.

In early and mid-March, when the spectre of the pandemic was bearing down on Russia, Putin focussed on a different matter entirely: a constitutional referendum, initially planned for April 22nd, that was designed to reset the clock on his Presidential terms, allowing him to run again in 2024 (and potentially even in 2030). “He was preparing for the final act of perestroika of the entire political system, and the virus only got in the way,” Pavlovsky told me.

When it became obvious that the referendum would have to be delayed, and that the coronavirus would instead become the central challenge to the state, neither Putin himself nor his vertical seemed interested in taking charge, or capable of doing so. Putin let others, like Sergey Sobyanin, Moscow’s mayor, serve as the public faces of enforced quarantine and other restrictive measures, and left coördination among regions to Mikhail Mishustin, the Prime Minister. (In a sign of the virus’s reach, Mishustin himself came down with covid-19 last month but recovered.) Was Putin’s disinclination to seize a prominent role for himself a sign of aloof disinterest, a wariness of being associated with a story that could end badly, or simply an acknowledgment of political reality?

“The vertical of power is a kind of theatrical façade,” Pavlovsky told me. “It is good at producing the appearance of authority, but it doesn’t actually have managerial abilities or the ability to quickly mobilize resources.” The myth of the vertical has served Putin well over the years, as he has been seen by various constituencies—from warring security and intelligence chiefs to rival businesspeople and oligarchs—as the singular arbiter capable of keeping the over-all system buoyant and profitable. But that doesn’t help you in a crisis that is driven by scientific cause and effect, rather than by political or emotional factors.

The point is not that Russia’s response to the pandemic has been horrible; even with its high number of cases and dubious official death count, the country’s health-care system has avoided total collapse and a death toll so high that it would be impossible to hide. Instead, regional officials and medical workers have responded to the spread of the virus largely on their own. It turns out that the vertical is better at fostering a kind of psychic or virtual power than wielding real power in a time of genuine crisis.

In an article for Republic, a news and politics Web site, Ivan Davydov, a political columnist in Moscow, described how the “champions of geopolitical e-sports suddenly felt completely useless in the real world—confused and scared.” Davydov added, “Over the course of this virtual game, its players completely lost the skill of talking with the real Russia. Suddenly, when the people need a state, it turns out the state was not built for this purpose.”

This is partly the inevitable result of the Putin system’s longevity; after twenty years in power, Putin thinks of himself less as a politician and more as a “messianic” or “historic” hero, as Tatiana Stanovaya, the head of the analysis firm R.Politik, put it. This period crystallized in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fuelled a would-be separatist insurgency in Ukraine. Sanctions, opprobrium, and attempts at isolation followed—but Russia was again an undeniable force on the world stage.

“If, in earlier times, Putin stood before the people and in some way was responsible to them, he now sees himself as standing before history,” Stanovaya told me. He is consumed with the idea of restoring Russia’s great-power status, and so the tasks that interest him are commensurate with this sweeping mission: navigating an oil-price war with Saudi Arabia and the United States; dispatching Russian forces and paramilitaries around the Middle East to take advantage of the vacuum left by the U.S.; and courting foreign leaders, whether Donald Trump or China’s Xi Jinping. Stanovaya said that Putin sees “social problems,” of which covid-19 is one, as “too small compared to his great mission. They’re simply not interesting to him; they don’t rise to his level.” (Putin, though, relishes high-profile events like the military parade commemorating victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War, normally held on May 9th. In April, Putin delayed it indefinitely, citing the pandemic; on Tuesday, he announced that it would go ahead after all, on June 24th.)

As Stanovaya explained, the vertical, to the extent that it exists as more than a political myth, insures the loyalty of the political élite on issues central to Putin’s survival. “A governor would never question the Crimea annexation, for example, or the need to ban opposition parties and keep them off the ballot,” she said. But the vertical does not touch issues of day-to-day governance—the sort of administrative measures that are central to pandemic response. In March and April, a number of governors did just that, restricting entry to their regions or quarantining travellers arriving from elsewhere in the country, even as the Kremlin insisted that such measures were its prerogative alone.

On one level, the Kremlin has become a victim of its own dominance. Over the years, it has managed to remove genuine opposition from the political system and has largely denuded independent media—which has left it with singular political control, but also more responsibility and oversight functions than the vertical can actually manage. Stanovaya cited the example of the unpaid bonuses to doctors. “Putin said to issue payments to everyone who treats covid patients, but in actual fact defined this group rather narrowly and didn’t allocate a sufficient amount of money,” Stanovaya said. “Regional officials, cut off from federal help, were left having to interpret Putin’s words in the most narrow way, so as to exclude the maximum of possible medical employees.” Some regions denied payments to any doctor or nurse who does not work in a hospital specially designated for covid patients; others took to counting hours or even minutes spent in the “red zone” with patients in order to lower the amount of bonus payments. In some cases, bonuses were withheld from doctors who treated patients with obvious clinical symptoms of covid but who tested negative. “The hospitals are the ones on the ground, trying to survive however they can,” Stanovaya said. “They don’t care about the vertical or what the Kremlin thinks.”

With the limitations, or even hollowness, of the vertical exposed by the pandemic, one lasting impact may be a process of “involuntary federalization,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a noted political scientist in Moscow, told me. Regional leaders mobilized to deal with covid-19 in their territories, and, as a result, their popularity has risen while trust in Putin has fallen. Previously, Putin could blame regional officials for any shortcomings while emerging unscathed himself. But now, as Schulmann put it, “The perennial idea of ‘good tsar, bad boyars’ has stopped working.”

This is not to say that Putin’s hold on power is fragile or risking collapse. Quarantine makes it nearly impossible to organize any large-scale protest movements; the Kremlin’s five hundred billion dollars in cash reserves are among the world’s largest. What’s more likely is that the pandemic will further embed political and social trend lines that emerged long ago. Putin’s approval rating has fallen since his last reëlection, in 2018. During the same period, Schulmann pointed out, local pride and anti-Moscow sentiment had also been growing in the regions.

“Coronavirus doesn’t so much introduce anything new as much as it strengthens what’s already been happening,” Schulmann said. The same is true for Putin’s vertical of power. “To a large extent, the image of a vertical stretching from the sky to the earth was always a propagandistic picture,” she said. Schulmann pointed out that Putin’s administration stopped publishing data on the implementation of Presidential orders back in 2013, when eighty-five per cent were carried out. The pandemic has exposed the fallibility of the vertical—or even its fundamental powerlessness—ever more sharply. “The virus is a genuine threat, not a fantasy one—and it doesn’t listen to bureaucratic orders.”

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