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Dysfunctions Last Updated: Apr 21, 2014 - 7:44:37 AM


Putin and the Exile (Sergei Guriev)
By David Remnick, New Yorker April 28, 2014
Apr 21, 2014 - 7:43:35 AM

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In 1987, Joseph Brodsky, the singular Russian poet of his generation, delivered a lecture in Vienna entitled "The Condition We Call 'Exile.' " He began with a gesture of humility. Brodsky had been forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1972, but it was his good fortune to reside in the Russian language no less than he did in his apartment on Morton Street. Working for the dictionary, he called it. He got academic jobs, won prizes, made new friends. Cruel fate, soft berth. So when he began his talk in Vienna it was with an overture to the "uncountable" exiles: the Turks in Germany, the Mexicans in Southern California, and the Pakistanis in Saudi Arabia searching for menial work; the Vietnamese boat people, "bobbing on high seas or already settled somewhere in the Australian outback."

A week ago, as agents of Vladimir Putin's regime made every crude effort to provoke civil war in eastern Ukraine, Sergei Guriev, a leading Russian economist, who had felt compelled to flee Moscow for Paris last year, made a similarly humble gesture. He was in a privileged exile of his own-April in Paris-stirring a café crème at Les Deux Magots, the pleasant redoubt of intellectual ghosts and museum-weary tourists, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He has secured a tenured position at the esteemed Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris--the Sciences Po-and taken an apartment in town. His wife, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, who is also an economist, and his two young kids are thriving. Before fleeing, he wrote to a friend, "Better Paris than Krasnokamensk," the site of a notorious Russian prison. "If you are going to be an exile," he said at Les Deux Magots, "this is a very pleasant place to do it."

Guriev left Russia after being subjected to a series of interrogations, search warrants, and dark warnings concerning his person. Before that, he led one of the most prestigious academic institutes in Moscow, served on numerous corporate boards, and gave frequent counsel to the Russian leadership, including Putin. He was a member of the credentialled, globalized Moscow élite. But he put it all at risk by giving his support to leaders of the anti-Kremlin marches of 2011 and 2012; by speaking up for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch who spent a decade in prison; and by praising the anti-corruption crusades of Alexei Navalny, who is now under house arrest in Moscow.

Vladimir Putin listened to the counsel of Sergei Guriev until that counsel, inflected with notes of disapproval and an urge for profound reform, became intolerable. So now, in Paris, Guriev, a slight, handsome man in his early forties, sat in the sun and provided a convincing assessment of the ominous transformation that has led to masked thugs in the streets of Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Lugansk; xenophobic propaganda on the Russian airwaves; a wholesale rejection of the West and an increasingly close alliance in the United Nations with the likes of Assad's Syria and Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

Putin came to office in 2000. Russia was at its nadir: an economy in ruins; a political system with no authority; fourteen per cent unemployment. His timing was uncanny. Energy prices rose. G.D.P. growth shot up to as high as nine per cent. Unemployment dropped by more than half. A financial sector developed, which brought greater investment and productivity. By 2008, average citizens-far from all Russians, but tens of millions of them--were living better than they had lived at any time in the nation's history. Russian billionaires, like the sheikhs of yesteryear, bought up the prime real estate of Mayfair, Fifth Avenue, and the Côte d'Azur. And with that new wealth and welcome stability came enormous popularity for Vladimir Putin. His compact with the Russian people, however, was stark: Stay out of politics and thrive. Interfere, presume, overstep, and you will meet a harsh fate.

But now, as the economy sputters, the compact has become much more severe. Inflation is high. Foreign investment, the stock market, and the ruble have declined--and this is all before the pain of Western sanctions and the costs of the Ukrainian adventure have fully registered. Capital flight has reached as much as seventy billion dollars this year. Growth is now at about one per cent and, according to Guriev, "heading toward zero." Corruption, cronyism, re-nationalization, and opacity are enemies of progress, advisers like Guriev have long insisted, but Putin has not wanted to hear it. He has come to insist on public pledges of loyalty; a figure like Guriev can no longer remain an adviser to the regime.

The occupation of Crimea, the maneuvers in eastern Ukraine--it is all part of a short-term, and highly successful, political diversion to maintain Putin's domestic rating. It is also a road to nowhere. Never mind the interests of the Ukrainian people, who have suffered one kleptomaniacal leader after another. Putin will hardly rescue them. The tentative cooling-off agreement that Russia and Ukraine struck late last week might curtail further violence, and yet on the same day Putin chose to emphasize his right to send troops into the country and used the centuries-old, highly nationalist term Novorossiya--New Russia--to describe southeastern Ukraine.

Putin's current tactics for social control are cunning and effective. His popularity rating--a vexed statistic in an authoritarian country--is at eighty per cent. "For less sophisticated people, he relies on brainwashing," Guriev said. "For more sophisticated but less honest people, he needs to bribe them. For honest, sophisticated people, he uses repression." The President doesn't much care if he has pushed an independent mind like Guriev out of the country. He knows that his real cronies--the men from the K.G.B., from his judo club, from Ozero, his dacha co-op near St. Petersburg--have nowhere to go. They will either suffer the Western sanctions, which could cut into their billions, or make the highly dangerous move of plotting against their patron.

As Guriev was discussing all this, his phone rang. It was his wife. Eighty boxes had arrived that day from Moscow-"our worldly possessions"--and he had to go and help out. But, before leaving, he noted that there were limits to how long Putin could sustain his diversion, much less his power. "When people see that Putin can't deliver, there will be trouble," he said, adding that he did not know how bad things would get before they begin to change, but, for his part, he was counting on another turn. Not soon, necessarily, but one day. Guriev had not sold his apartment in Moscow. "We're only renting here," he said. "I plan on going home."


Source:Ocnus.net 2014

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