In Moscow's Shadows 173: Personalistic Power under Putin
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Three very different books, and yet which together, I think, say something quite interesting about Russia today. Hello, I'm Mark Gagliotti, and welcome to my view of Russia in Moscow's shadows. This podcast of varying length, frequency and format, yet always reassuringly low production values, is supported by generous and perspicacious patrons like you, and also by the crisis exercise software company Conductor.

Now, originally I was planning on including a book review section at the end of this particular episode, but the more I looked at the three books I planned to cover, the more I felt that they actually offered a very useful opportunity to consider again that whole vexed question of power and personality in modern Russia. Before I dive in though, two quick notes. First of all, my next book, Forged in War, a military history of Russia from its beginnings to today.

out with Osprey Bloomsbury. It comes out on the 7th of November in the UK, and, well, it clearly was worth actually breaking away from the mother country, in the United States, the 5th of November. So, it should be out very, very shortly, and, well, of course, I commend it to you, and I'll be talking more about it in a future podcast.

The second thing is just a quick note for patrons. Again, I know sometimes there are problems with messages getting through from the system, but I have sent out messages about a couple of patrons-only question and answer sessions that I'll be recording this month. So if you haven't received a notification, then you might want to check your spam filter or go on to the Patreon site.

So the first book I want to talk about is The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano Daimpoli, who has been everything from an advisor to former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to a professor at Ciospo Paris, and it's published by Pushkin Press in a, as we said, nice translation by Willard Wood. Translators are, after all, the all-too-often unsung heroes of international publishing and really can make or break a book. In a

I'd say call it cutely retro-gothic framing. The book is the story of one Vadim Baranov, a stylised version of the impresario of the political theatre of early Putinism, Vladislav Surkov, told by the man himself, now retired, over the course of one night. Now let's be clear, this is fiction derived from reality, not a fictionalised telling of reality.

This may sound a rather fine distinction, but it is important. Daimpoli quite rightly plunders recent history for his materials, but with those materials doesn't always build an exact replica of the reality. Nonetheless, Baranov-Surkov is a wonderful guide, I think, to the zeitgeist of both the 1990s and indeed early Putinism,

and the strange mix of cynicism, sentimentalism and ruthless pragmatism at the heart of the new elite. Despite coming from this stock, Baranov soon loses any faith in that much maligned figure, the Russian intelligent. He says, I was now revolted by the mortal sadness of the man of letters, his inability to generate joy, his general unfitness for reality.

Now, it's interesting, actually, that this parallels at the moment a growing backlash against the émigré dissidents, which is actually best characterized in a scathing but not necessarily entirely unfair piece by the Russian economist, academician, Vladislav Inozemtsev, who, ironically enough, must really count as one of them. Anyway, this article concludes that.

Change in Russia will come not from those assembling in nice hotel conference rooms in Berlin or Washington, but from Russians who become angered by corrupt officials, police brutality or economic hardships. These people will organise themselves much better than the emigrant activists can, and will have a much sharper vision of the future than the current opposition may possess.

And therefore, if the West is interested in cracking down on Putin's regime, which, after all, does not seem evident, it should look inside Russia, for both elite figures who are not happy with current developments, and for local problems that might become signals for the protests. Now, I think this is actually very perceptive, which is, of course, a

a way of saying this is actually what I believe as well but anyway I very much encourage you to read his short but pithy broadside on of all places the Middle East Media Research Institute website and I'll leave a link to it in the program notes but anyway back to Baranov/Sudkov as I say he starts as another child of Soviet collapse and intelligentsia dreams as he puts it

We were convinced that it was now our turn to remake society from the ground up, captives of the Russian notion that art is more than just culture, that it's prophecy, truth and social construction. Now he soon learns though that with a country to be reshaped it'll take rather less utopian notions and what he does is he attaches himself to a series of

what you might think of as rather harder, in some ways colder men, from the voluble Boris Berezovsky, of whom more in a moment, to Putin himself. Even as he turns to political technology, he is still approaching it with the soul of an artist, a choreographer, a producer.

So look, this is in some ways a very familiar story, leveled with just the right amounts of dramatic license and full of very nicely observed moments, such as his description of Putin's first time as prime minister in 1999 in the rebuilt White House building. That's the Moscow one, not the Washington one. His team scrambling to actually get something done while around them functionaries maintain their habitual indolence.

I'd subsequently learned that it was always this way in a ministry. A small group of people works frenetically in one room, and everyone else slacks off. Interaction between the two groups is limited. An occasional respectful glance tinged with irony, as the long-timers wait for the umpteenth invasion to move through like the rest, in the full knowledge that the grass will grow again where it's now being trampled.

This, I think, is really spot on as a summary of the challenges faced by any who would actually do something, and not, frankly, just in Russia. And speaking of encapsulations, consider this from Putin at the time when he was deciding on moving against Khodorkovsky and his Yukos oil company. And this comes after the lead character had just advised him that, well, the markets wouldn't like going after Yukos.

Putin shuddered. And for the first time since I'd known him, I felt a glimmer of hatred directed at me. Get this one thing straight, Vadya. Traders have never been in charge of Russia. Do you know why? Because they can't provide the two things that Russians require from the state. Internal order and external power. Only twice for two brief periods have merchants governed our country. Once for a few months after the Russian Revolution in 1917, before the Bolsheviks stepped in.

and once for a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall during Yeltsin's time. And what happened? Chaos. An explosion of violence, the law of the jungle, wolves coming out of the forests and roaming our cities to devour the defenseless population. And a couple of pages later, Baranov Surkov says, At the time, I still accepted what the Tsar told me literally. I had no inkling of the deep desire for revenge hiding behind his words.

nor the impossibility of filling the great emptiness they masked. And I think that's a real point, because that emptiness still to this day cannot be filled. So, overall, this is an excellent book, wonderfully written and framed, well worth reading. But, in my impeccably anal compulsive shelving, it's going to be going in the fiction, not the Putin-era politics section.

So that was very much a personalised view of Russia's trajectory. And this approach, while perfectly understandable in fiction, is a bit less so in analysis. And on that note, let me turn to Amy Knight's The Kremlin's Noose.

Putin's bitter feud with the oligarch who made him ruler of Russia from Icon Books and Cornell University Press. And if that sounds like a rather lukewarm lead-in, I mean, actually, let me quote from my own endorsement on the cover. This is a deeply researched book, undeniably the best and the most detailed examination by far. Although they cut off at that point, as I'm actually talking not just about everything, but specifically about Boris Berezovsky's rise and fall.

It is, I would say, the best analysis of this quintessentially 1990s oligarch figure who met his end one way or the other, whether it's suicide or murder, still an open topic. I'm perhaps more inclined to accept the official line that it was suicide. That's an official British line, I should add. But anyway, very much a quintessential figure of the 1990s and certainly a key figure in the shaping of the politics of Yeltsin era into early Putinism.

So it is the best analysis of this, but it's not a perfect one, in my opinion anyway. Amy Knight is a long-time Russia watcher, best known for some wonderfully detailed examinations of the Soviet and then Russian security agencies, and also, for my money, the absolute best biography of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's last and at once most capable and, against, it has to be said, strong competition, most repulsive political police chief.

Now, using a personal story as a way of making wider points about a country and a system can be an effective approach. It's certainly what Anna Arutunyan and I set out to do in our book on Prigozhin, Downfall. However, there is always the danger that it makes everything about personal interactions. And even in a personalistic authoritarianism like Putin's, that's not all that there is.

There are institutions, socio-economic classes, schools of thought and of course the impersonal forces from economics to climate all of which shape, constrain, drive, frame and overrule the personal. You'd often be forgiven frankly for forgetting this reading the Kremlin's noose. Now don't get me wrong, as ever, Knight has done her homework, absolutely.

and marshals an impressive amount of information here. However, I did feel that her evident and understandable distaste for Putin and all his works does mean that

As Berezovsky moves from being his patron to his foe, she inevitably finds herself rooting for a man who, let's be honest, was undoubtedly a lot more charismatic than Putin. A voluble and passionate figure that was wonderfully brought to light by Tom Hollander in Peter Morgan's superb play Patriots.

Now again, just as a sideline, I reviewed that play for the Times, and again I'll provide a link in the program notes. And I wrote at the time, The greyness of Putin and the kaleidoscopic variety of Russia prove equally frictionless, hard to grasp. As a result, both end up represented in cliché. Indeed, of late, portrayals of Russia are often not really about Russia.

Lucy Preble's A Very Expensive Poison, on the assassination of the defector Alexander Litvinenko, features Putin as participant and narrator, deliberately scrambling the story to conceal the truth. The play's real outrage is reserved for a cynical Britain for neither protecting nor avenging Litvinenko.

The BBC's The Salts Repoisonings focused on the ordinary citizens caught up in the 2018 Novichok attack to the extent that critics actually lamented the lack of Russians. And more generally, moving from quotation to just me talking, we do see this tendency quite widely, certainly not just in this book, to use Russia or Putin really as a means to talk about other things time and time again.

First example, the way that every political process that goes awry in the West's eyes can end up being blamed on Russia. Such as, for example, the renewed talk of Russian interference in the US electoral process. Obviously coming up very close. Now, are the Russians trying to bolster Trump and generally stir up trouble, dissent and disorder? Yes, of course they are, absolutely. However...

Is it the national alibi, the excuse for a political process that frankly has become pretty toxic and pretty unmanageable? I would suggest not. Again, this is the danger. We use Putin as an alibi for anything that goes wrong. As a corollary, the risk is that we end up denying countries their own agency in the same terms. For example, consider the turmoil in Georgia, where the ruling Georgian Dream Party's power grab through a

fairly clearly rigged election, is being framed as a Russian plot rather than, frankly, an expression of cynical and conspiratorial local ambition. Likewise, in Africa, we find every time that, you know, whether it's Wagner or its successor, the Africa Corps being hired somewhere or some other move that doesn't play to the West's interests,

This is framed as, again, a Russian plot rather than Africans making decisions. Let me quote, actually, from the end of John Lechner's forthcoming and thoroughly excellent new book on Wagner, Death is Our Business, coming out next year. Now, this quote may be slightly inaccurate in the sense that it comes from a proof copy rather than a final print version.

But anyway, right at the end of the book, he is talking about what happened in Niger. The threat of Wagner was useful to Washington until it overplayed its card. In an interview with the Washington Post after American troop withdrawal, Niger's Prime Minister stated that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Molly Fee, urged him during the March visit to refrain from engaging with Iran and Russia in ways objectionable to Washington.

When she finished, I said, "Madam, I am going to summarise in two points what you have said. First, you have come here to threaten us in our country. That is unacceptable. And you have come here to tell us with whom we can have relationships, which is also unacceptable. And you have done it all with a condescending tone and a lack of respect." Lechner continues after a paragraph, "The Russians had no plans to enter Niger.

Yet the West's fear of their arrival made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. And indeed, they ended up there. And this is the point. I mean, actually, the West managed at once to look past Russia's actual role and also past African interests. It was so convinced that what went wrong for it was because of the Russians that it actually managed to push Niger into the hands of the Russians. So again...

This is not really about Russians, but about a kind of a mythic sense of Russian-ness as a kind of grand conspiracy against the West. And finally, the way that we use Putin or Putinism as some kind of broad classifier. Viktor Orban, "Hungary's Putin" or, well actually it was a line from The Guardian at one point,

Putinism is breeding in the heart of the American Republican Party and so forth. It's like fascism, a term which has also become all too freely used in connection with Putin and his regime. Putin and Putinism have just become a fashionable term, meaning something we dislike, which can be applied to almost everything, and thus risks meaning almost nothing. So again, this is the problem that in fact sometimes we end up

not actually talking about Russia itself when we are ostensibly talking about Russia. Indeed, it's interesting that so many of the reviews of the Kremlin's noose aren't really about the book itself. For example, Luke Harding of The Guardian himself, who's been used in the book as a source, used the, frankly, the excuse of a book review to provide his own sort of potted history of Putinism and, of course, again, recount the tale of his own falling foul of the intelligence services.

Generally, people seem disinclined to engage with the actual meat of this book. Now, in part, this may be about the very detail that in some ways could intimidate people from actually really trying to sort of dig in and pull it apart. But also because, frankly, a very nice story has emerged of a far from perfect, but nonetheless engaging rogue, Berezovsky, who misunderstood who Putin really was.

and thus played a key role in elevating him to the prime ministership thinking that he would actually be a useful figure not just for his own interest but for Russia and therefore sought redemption in exile by trying to challenge the Putin regime but in the process

While trying to take down the man whose rise to power he'd engineered, he ended up having to pay for it. First, with much of his fortune, losing, for example, a £3 billion court case to Abramovich in London, where the idea is that naive judges fail to understand the twisty ways of Russian business. And then with his life, his apparent suicide in 2013, of course, being murder at the hands of Putin's goons.

So that's the story. Of course, it has to be said that the murderers were clearly vastly more capable and discreet ones than those who left a radioactive trail through London when they murdered Litvinenko, or a bottle full of Novichok behind after failing to kill Skrypa. The trouble is, this is very much the story that Berezovsky himself spun, and storytelling was absolutely one of his strengths.

He clearly was not just the victim of a lot of dark stuff in the 1990s, for example. Knight notes that Berezovsky acquired a kriša, a roof, protection, because of the threats from organised crime in those years, but skirts around a whole range of, frankly, pretty, let's say, plausible allegations that this was more than just about protecting himself personally.

Likewise, the description of the voucher privatisation as a process whereby, quote, the ownership of Russia's valuable property ended up in the hands of shrewd businessmen, is frankly a little bit like describing pickpocketing as the reward for great manual dexterity. Likewise, Berezovsky lost that court case in London, or not because the judge was some kind of unworldly, naïve,

but because, not least, he was, shall we say, less than honest or convincing while giving evidence. The point is that we have to be careful, first of all, about the notion of the individual as being so crucial, but secondly, about the degree to which different individuals will clearly try to spin their own narratives. Ironically, Knight concludes at the very end of the book...

Berezovsky's death allowed his enemies to rewrite his history, thus giving Putin a final victory against the oligarch who had helped him to become the most powerful and longest-lasting Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin. Well, yes, up to a point, though. I do think we always have to be careful about invoking Stalin as a comparator. For example, I have no idea if this is true or not, but if someone said...

Olaf Scholz is the least internationally respected German leader since Adolf Hitler. Now that might, might be technically accurate, but as soon as you invoke the shade of Adolf Hitler, you're bringing, I think it's fair to say, all sorts of much more

unsavoury connotations to the table. So likewise, I do think we should be a lot more cautious about bringing the Stalin comparison into any discussion. More to the point, though, is it really just Berezovsky's enemies who rewrote history? And so I have a break there, and I want to return continuing talking about the Kremlin's noose, but using this, you know, essentially the Berezovsky story

as a way of also exploring how we might sometimes find ourselves seduced into thinking that one can understand recent and modern Russian developments by, in that sort of classic, dangerously seductive way, as the doings of great men. Just the usual mid-episode reminder that you're listening to the In Moscow's Shadows podcast.

Its corporate partner and sponsor is Conducto, which provides software for crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and the like. But you can also support the podcast yourself by going to patreon.com slash inmoscoshadows.

And remember that patrons get a variety of additional perks depending on their tier, as well as knowing that they're supporting this peerless source on all things Russian. And you can also follow me on Twitter at Mark Gagliotti, or on Facebook, Mark Gagliotti on Russia. Now, back to the episode. OK, so, so far I've been rambling on about books, about fictionalised representations of reality, the personalisation of our perceptions of Russia...

and why sometimes when we think we're talking about Russia, we're actually not. And certainly all these ended up as part of Berezovsky's tale. I mean, Berezovsky was the quintessential example of all this. He fictionalized his own life. He exalted the power of individuals, like himself of course,

and abstracted reality into just simply a struggle between himself and other personalised enemies, obviously including Putin. And he managed to develop his identity such that he could be talked up, or would be talked up, as a way of talking down the Kremlin. So his own misdeeds were hidden in plain sight, because by kind of establishing himself as the anti-Kremlin,

then in some ways there are a certain number of people who didn't want, therefore, to really shine a light on his own dealings because he was needed as a way of critiquing the Kremlin. If we look, for example, there are serious reasons to believe that he wasn't just simply the target of gangster action in the 1990s.

but also that he had a role in the 1999 apartment bombings, an atrocity that are typically blamed on a combination of Putin, Patrushev and the FSB. Now, Bob Otto has posited in a usefully provocative article in the Russian Review last year, called the 1999 Moscow bombings reconsidered, that, quote him,

Another plausible version, based on previously unexplored facts combined with extrapolation, points to the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky and his ally, Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Rushailo, as the organisers of the bombings.

Likewise, it was Berezovsky's role as the man who brought Putin to the Kremlin that has been heavily over-dramatised, not least by Berezovsky himself. He wanted to think of himself as the kingmaker, even if, ultimately, the king didn't turn out to be who he expected. And it is true that his subsequent turn against Putin, was it really because of the latter's anti-democratic tendencies?

I mean, this would be a bit rich coming from a man who helped rig the 1996 elections for Yeltsin and indeed levered, certainly played a role in levering Putin into power in 1999-2000 and helping manage the 2000 elections to ensure that Putin had a clear firm mandate.

You know, is this really about anti-democratic tendencies or the fury of a patron challenged by someone he thought was his pliant client? That's a bit of a tongue twister. So, yes, one can question the actual narrative of Berezovsky. But for me, one of the crucial issues is precisely this over-sharp focus on specific individuals and their interactions.

as if somehow that is really the most important factor shaping Russia's evolution. Where are the wider forces that, frankly, are at least as, if not more, important? For example, the nationwide revulsion at the drift and anarchy of the 1990s that did create a genuine desire across society to see the power of the state reaffirmed.

And this is something that made it almost certain that if not actually Putin, that we would get someone like Putin, who was going to be a strong state rebuilder. Secondly, the rise of what we could think of as the Putin generation, and that is of former spooks who have turned economic or political entrepreneurs.

In other words, actually either making money or making money, but not through business, but through facilitating and predating upon business. It is, after all, quite noteworthy that of the people who Putin was facing as rivals, as the potential successor to Yeltsin,

There's the older Yevgeny Primakov, who himself has his Secret Service links, but otherwise there are very, very close contemporaries: Vladimir Shailo, Interior Minister, and Sergei Stepashin, who had been briefly Prime Minister before. All of them were within about a year or so the same age as Putin, and all of them had security or police backgrounds. This was not just about one man being chosen. This was in many ways a generational shift

and also a shift in the nature of power. I mean, if one looks at the whole question about the rise of the siloviki, the men of force, it's very much a feature of the 2000s, which actually has dropped away since. Again, we have to see this in terms of not just Putin's rise, but general forces that were changing.

And look, there was also the fact that the 1990s, the chaos was already beginning to order itself. In the underworld, the turf wars were already beginning to burn themselves out. The whole point was the turf wars that created so much violence or such a backdrop to the 1990s were about establishing pecking orders and establishing turfs in a new environment when really no one knew who was powerful, who was weak.

Likewise in business, you had the chaos of the privatization campaigns, which absolutely were not just simply redounding to the advantage of shrewd businessmen. They were a boom for anyone who had the right connection of money, muscle and connections, which meant everyone from criminal gangs through to mates of the government.

that process had again was playing itself out and we now had increasing desire for some kind of I don't use order because that carries with it implications of you know the tough fist and so forth but regularization of the process there was a lot happening

And we shouldn't just assume that it was just a handful of people getting together in a room to decide who's going to be in power next that actually shaped Russia's evolution. Yes, of course, individuals do matter. But in a matrix of circumstances that constrain some behaviors and encourage others.

Berezovsky would not have been able to bring a Putin to power in 1996 nor would he likely have still been in a position to have done so in 2004. There are moments and moments are created not by the individuals. The irony is though that both Putin and Berezovsky very much share this belief in the great man's school of history and politics.

That essentially all it takes is determination and will, and you can wrench history into tracks of your own choosing. That's very questionable and dangerous in the ways that it flatters the egos and the ambitions of those people who do have a certain amount of power. Both Berezovsky and Putin...

absolutely bit off far more than they can chew however little they might like to be compared with each other. But anyway, amidst all this personalistic stuff that's one of the reasons why in some ways the ruling families of Rus clan, family and kingdom by historians Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrovsky came in some ways as a real breath of fresh air even if it was also a rather dry and dusty air.

Published by Reaction Books, this is a very serious historical work by two very serious historians. I mean, it's worth mentioning of its 320 pages, 65 of them are glossary notes and index. And it's looking at the era of the Kievan Rus and the mechanisms of rule through not the rather anachronistic notion of a dynasty, but instead of discrete ruling families, which absolutely vied with each other all the time,

yet nonetheless perceived each other as part of a loosely defined clan. A clan with its own common norms and interests. It's a deep, complex and fascinating work. It is not, I confess, always the easiest read. I mean, I did, for example, especially appreciate the, or appreciate in a way, the description of collateral succession. Allow me to share this with you. And it is, it has to be said, a complex process.

Succession in Rus' lands was collateral. That is, when a ruler, let us call him A1, died, the priority to succeed him went to his eldest living brother, A2, and so on down to the fourth brother, A4. When the fourth brother died, then the eldest son, A1a,

Now look, I mean

I don't mean to mock, I don't think one can come up with a snappy way of describing that particular process, but it did nonetheless strike me as a tad indigestible at that point. But anyway, as far as I'm concerned, this is a really important book for two reasons beyond medieval scholarship. First of all, at a time when there's a lot of frankly pseudo-historical polemic about the nature and origins of Russia and Ukraine,

from Putin's Ukraine doesn't exist line, all the way through to notions that Kiev and Muscovy were two entirely separate polities. This not only takes, I think, an admirably even-handed approach, but it also implicitly points out just how, again, anachronistic these notions are.

One cannot deny that, in the medieval era at least, this was a single, mixed, but identifiable polity. Over the years and centuries, a variety of forces, especially Polish-Lithuanian rule, would help ensure that Ukraine, and most notably Western Ukraine, evolved in a different way. But as Chris Raffensperger writes in the Acknowledgements,

Rus, as this book aims to show, is solely Rus. It is not Russia, but neither is it Ukraine or Belarus. The ruling families of Rus are the ancestors of the modern nation-states of Ukraine, Belarus and Rus, Russia, and are not the sole property of any of these three. I really think it's useful. I mean, in some ways it's depressing that that needs to be said, but nonetheless I think it is really important. Look, all nations evolve over time.

Peoples settle and migrate and colonize. Dynasties rise and fall. Political systems shift. Britain, one can say, is Britain, but it's been through Norman conquest and Roman conquest. The settlements of the Angles and the Saxons. It has at different times included and not included Scotland and Ireland. Morphing is natural.

The trouble is when these processes attempt to almost create some kind of, well what in the past was described as Whig history, which was a particular school of thought that was a very self-satisfied English school, very dated it has to be said, that more or less regarded the Britain of the time as the absolute pinnacle of world evolution.

and therefore essentially treated all of British history up to that point as just simply how did we get to this great location. So it was all about the forces driving us to where we are now rather than frankly a less satisfying but often much more accurate stuff happens. A lot of stuff has happened in the lands that are now occupied by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus and we have to acknowledge that it is an incredibly complex country

but nonetheless interconnected process which has seen these three nations arise. Anyway, the second, and I think the one I want to spend a bit more time talking about issue, is although the concept of the clan has been widely used as a tool for understanding post-Soviet Russian elite politics, often, frankly, rather sloppily, I think this idea that emerges from this book of a single clan...

within which there are rival but ultimately connected families is actually a very useful construct. Because if you think about it, look, today's elite spans striving 20-something year olds coming out of Kremlin youth programs or just joining a ministry. 30-year-old veterans of the special military operation and assistant department heads who've never seen a Kalashnikov. 40-year-old mayors and majors

50-year-old ministers and governors, 60-year-old senators and oligarchs, and 70-year-old friends of Putin. A huge range of different experiences, perspectives, and interests, but also a shared interest in the preservation of the foundations of the system.

and in the distribution of assets. But at the same time, they want to distribute more of those assets their way, and want to be elevated within that system. But that's the whole point. They want to profit from, rather than necessarily destroy, the system. Raffensperger and Ostrowski define clan as a group that shares a common descent from a single real or semi-mythical ancestor.

Ryurik being the classic one, the notional founder of the lands of the Rus. After almost 25 years in direct and indirect power, I'd suggest that Putin is that common systemic elite ancestor of the Klan. Now, to be sure, there are carryovers from the 90s, from Shoigu to the oligarch Deripaska, but they have all been, I would say, symbolically adopted by the new Patafamilias.

And those who would not or could not, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky or indeed Berezovsky, have been ejected from the Klan. Sometimes murderously, sometimes not. So just as there was a common understanding that a member of the Klan had to be the Grand Prince of Kiev, now I'm talking medieval times now, even if Putin might like to think of that as today,

And the Grand Prince was the first among equals, though not the overall monarch of the Rus. So too today's elite are, I'm sorry to say this, Julia Navalnaya, not going to accept an outsider.

Now that means a successor to Putin might be a technocrat like Moscow Mayor Sobyanin, or a golden child of an existing Klan member like Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Pardushev, or a product of the security apparatus like Alexei Dyumin. Maybe there's even some Gorbachevian reformer waiting in the wings. Remember, Gorbachev was a member of the Soviet nomenklatura, the Klan of its day, although I have to say I think this is not necessarily the most likely outcome.

But ultimately, the successor will have to be a clan member. Now, the speed of change in Russia, barring systemic crises or collapses, is therefore likely to be constrained by the overall speed of attitudinal changes within the clan as a whole, modulated by the fortunes of individual political families, some of which may well be more amenable to reform, others, indeed, to reaction,

And in this respect, I think what we can do is actually look to Soviet times as a potential model. First of all, there was what we could think of as Lenin's dynasty.

a clan that was shaped by the Bolshevik revolution and before that Lenin's single-minded devotion to building the Bolsheviks as a revolutionary party and after that the needs and transitions of the very bloody Russian Civil War because the interesting thing is for example within this clan

Although clearly there were all sorts of rivalries and struggles, nonetheless, in the main there was a common commitment to avoiding factionalism and splitism. And in fact this is something that Stalin was able to manipulate. So everyone else, even while at daggers drawn, was mindful of the need to maintain the clan as a whole. Stalin was much less bothered about that, and indeed Stalin proved ultimately willing to purge the whole clan and form his own.

Even Stalin's new dynasty, Stalin's new clan, could embrace a variety of political families. From Khrushchev's party bloc, Malenkov in due course in the Council of Ministers, and, you know, as happened when he died, Beria's rather implausible reformist police family. You know, all operated within the clan.

not seeking to break or bypass it, willing to keep their rivalries actually as far as possible concealed from the rest of society. And interestingly, given that we're talking about clans and dynasties measured in years or decades rather than centuries, the open question for me is whether Gorbachev should be considered, shall we say, part of Brezhnev's clan, or whether Andropov had, from his hospital bed,

Remember, this man who, after becoming General Secretary, almost immediately then was on dialysis most of his brief period as General Secretary. But anyway, from his hospital bed, managed to actually create a new one, or at least modify the old to include the reformist Gorbachev-Shevardnadze family, again, defined by ideals rather than blood, but nonetheless a family.

Grigory Romanov's modernization through discipline block that was also appealing much more within the KGB along with the old guard represented by Andrei Gromyko, the veteran foreign minister and indeed the younger Viktor Grishin's continuity block and so on. But again this idea that there is a common identity which at that point was the party nomenklatura, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

And within that, a variety of families that were defined sometimes by kinship, but more often by political affiliation. Now, obviously there's a limit to how far medieval politics truly captures the machinations of modern Russia. However, I have long felt that Putin's state is a hybrid one. It's a hybrid of modern bureaucratic institutionalism,

which happens to be residing underneath a personalistic medieval court. So I do think it is worth thinking in these terms, especially this notion that there can be all these various groups, families, which hate and compete with each other and yet also accept a certain sort of common loyalty to the clan, which is often out of self-interest rather than anything else. And in some ways this, after all, was Prigozhin's greatest sin.

It was fine on one level for him to call out Shoigu and Gerasimov and to ask where his ammunition was and so forth, but nonetheless the point at which he broke the clan's loyalties, in part precisely because he always felt himself as a sort of semi-outsider, was the point at which he went beyond the pale. And I think in a future episode I may well sketch out my idea of the current family, shall we say.

But suffice it to say that I did find it very interesting the degree to which, as I was reading the ruling families of Rus' and by the way I'll again provide listings of all these books in the program notes, and obviously medieval times very different from contemporary times in terms of the pressures, the demands, the overall understandings of what the role of the state is, you know, all of that entirely different.

But nonetheless, when it comes down to it, people are people and politics are politics. And I think that, in fact, we could well look much more closely at earlier times to understand the present, but then, you know, historians will always tell you that. But secondly, the other thing that really comes out in Raffensperger and Ostrovsky's book is, ironically, although on one level it is all about people, it is about families and different kin groups and succession and so forth,

But nonetheless, it really brings up the degree to which the political system that emerged was an attempt to try and find some working response to the overall pressures and demands of the time. And so if one compares these three books finally, Daempoli's Wizard of the Kremlin, in which you have someone who presents himself as

as the grand playwright creating this sort of theatrical construct of Russian politics, but who ultimately one realises is kidding himself, that he was nowhere near as powerful, as influential. He had nowhere near the agency that he thought he had. And then Amy Knight's The Kremlin's Noose, that to a degree, I think, accepts too much Berezovsky's own notion

of the personalistic nature of politics, and in the process actually highlights precisely the weaknesses of that way of trying to understand modern Russia. And then Raffensperger and Ostrovsky's The Ruling Families of Rus, about how in much, much more uncertain and dangerous times, a Rus polity emerged. All of these to me highlight the extent to which we have to

balance the newsy and, frankly, much more initially appealing understanding of Russian politics as about people and try and understand more carefully the processes underpinning those personalistic relationships, but also the fact that elites have rules. Those rules may well be unspoken, but they are there. The wizard of the Kremlin understood them and tried to revise them

in his interest and those of his patron. He tried to effectively reshape the clan's operating code. Berezovsky was never willing to accept them, broke them whenever he felt like it, and ultimately fell foul of it. And what Raffensperger and Ostrovsky are saying is that these rules, one can see them emerging in different ways at different times, but they do provide powerful ways of cohering

what otherwise would be elites that have so many disagreements, so many rivalries, that otherwise they would spend all their time fighting with each other and would therefore be incredibly vulnerable to rising forces within and to enemy forces from without, which is, of course, precisely what Putin fears today. Thanks very much.

Well, that's the end of another episode of the In Moscow's Shadow podcast. Just as a reminder, beyond this, you can follow my blog, also called In Moscow's Shadows. Follow me on Twitter, at Mark Gagliotti, or Facebook, Mark Gagliotti on Russia.

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