Comment
Two cheers for the appearance on the British stage of Russia’s financial stars
The Times – April 8, 2004
You may feel a twinge of envy if someone you know makes millions. But, as an uptight Brit, you probably suppress it. So you can hardly imagine the agony that someone else’s success causes to a Russian.
Resenting other people who do too well, too easily, is one of those national characteristics that Russians take a perverse pride in (like their weakness for vodka). They tell bleak little folk tales with indulgent smiles, showing how natural and understandable it is to begrudge the lucky. A typical one is about a conversation between God and a peasant. God says to Ivan, “You’re a good man, and I’m going to give you a gift. But I’m going to give your neighbour the same thing twice over.” Horrified that his neighbour might do better than him, Ivan thinks long and hard about what to request. Finally he says: “God, put out one of my eyes.”
Imagine, then, how ordinary Russians feel about the oligarchs – the men who made billions from the corrupt privatization of the country’s natural resources. These half-dozen oligarchs spent the Nineties living lives of such fabulous excess that they outshone any fairy tale. Helicopters, palaces, business empires, the run of the Kremlin and its nominal bosses, whole provinces of Russia to rule, children at Millfield or Oxford, and globetrotting between Moscow and the Cote d’Azur: it drove the masses mad with envy.
The oligarchs are thieves, Russians would rant; they stole the assets that communism taught belonged equally to every citizen. Add to this envy the fact that the billionaire set are at least half-Jewish – in a land that has never quite shaken off its fear of an international conspiracy by rootless cosmopolitans – and you get a very explosive mix of emotions. No wonder, then, that when Vladimir Putin took power four years ago and began efficiently closing down all rival centres of authority – including the oligarchs on the Right – so many of his voters were thrilled.
They loved it when, back in 2000, Putin stomped on his first two media barons (even though one of them, Boris Berezovsky, had led the Kremlin cabal which had pushed the unknown Putin into power). As Berezovsky’s and Vladimir Gusinsky’s empires were stripped and their once outspoken media outlets came under state control, the nation cheered. So great was their joy at seeing these Enemies of the People fleeing into exile that most ignored liberal worries that Russia’s new freedoms – including freedom of speech – were also being whittled away.
They cheered again last autumn when Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the boss of Russia’s biggest oil company and a man with political ambitions, was jailed.
No one thinks that the oligarch story will end there. Putin has surrounded himself with quiet former KGB men such as himself who hate rich show-offs. The head of Russia’s audit commission, Sergei Stepashin, is sniffing threateningly at Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea football club. Stepashin clearly sees it as part of his remit to needle Abramovich about his morals, asking why he spends hundreds of times as much on foreign football as on Russian charity. Politically astute; Russians preparing for next week’s presidential election like that sort of thing. Putin’s ratings shot up after Khodorkovsky’s arrest.
There have been plenty of targets for Putin’s crackdown (Chechnya is the obvious example). But his fight with the oligarchs is the most watched spectator sport. Billionaires in Bentleys are more picturesque than the other post-communist genies still out of the Soviet bottle: the powerless political parties run by ugly men in specs, or the oppressed minorities represented by stubbly men with gold teeth and strange accents.
The 1995 privatisations that made the oligarchs rich were questionable, but the oligarchs were only taking what the Government offered – it was Russia’s cackhanded route to capitalism. True, they didn’t spend their windfalls on the Russian economy. They spent their money on their own clans, or took it abroad. Burt Khodorkovsky was the first to make a point of probity. Until his arrest, he gave the business community hope that the Russian economy could at last come clean.
Still, it is not in British interests to complain too much, as we’ve become the exiled oligarchs’ home. Britain has welcomed them – Berezovsky got asylum last year – partly out of a sense that they have been unfairly picked on. Mostly, though, these larger-than-life characters appeal to our love of individualism. If someone spends £150 million stocking a football team with stars, what’s not to like? We’re learning to enjoy their hubristic flights to the financial heavens, their destructive falls from grace, and the bizarre conspiracy theories that swirl around them. (Who stole Abramovich’s computer from Chelsea in December? And was the death of Yukos’s top British employee in a helicopter crash this week really an accident?) The oligarchs’ arrival in London is like getting a new soap opera, John le Caree novel and Royal Family all rolled into one.
The British, who never expected so much free entertainment, are doing well from Putin’s crackdown. The Russians, so taken up with hissing off the oligarchs that they have failed to notice their own political rights disappear, are the only losers.
ENDS