Letter From Russia
For Putin, Out With the Old Favorites
By ELLEN BARRY
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has rebuilt his popularity by pivoting away from urban elites and the West.
MOSCOW
— When he returned home from work last week, the economist Mikhail E.
Dmitriyev found two strangers waiting for him in the entryway. They
showed no interest in his wallet but seized a bag that contained his
laptop computer, and then beat him so badly he was left with a
concussion.
Mr.
Dmitriyev is a meticulous analyst, not inclined to hyperbole or
speculation. He spent many years inside the system that President Vladimir V. Putin
built, part of a team of economic modernizers that included the
Sberbank chief German O. Gref and Aleksei L. Kudrin, the former finance
minister.
That
is why people paid attention in 2011, when Mr. Dmitriyev’s research
center reported a surging demand for political change from the urban
middle class, describing its swift growth during the Putin era as “a
political detonator which cannot be unscrewed.”
Much
has occurred between now and then. Protests materialized, as Mr.
Dmitriyev predicted, and were quelled. In January, Mr. Dmitriyev was
removed as the president of his organization, the Center for Strategic
Research, telling an interviewer that he may have angered officials by
criticizing the government’s new pension policy. This week, he is trying
to reason his way through the mysterious attack.
“The
police suggested that my business competitors might have stood behind
it, trying to get commercially valuable data, but there was no such
information in my computer which could have justified violent robbery,
and my company is a research center with a rather limited budget,” he
said. “So, one can guess at non-economic reasons behind this crime. We
cannot rule out that this may reflect a growing intolerance to
independent thinking in Russia.”
Moscow
these days is a nervous city. Mr. Putin has rebuilt his popularity by
pivoting away from urban elites to an audience of less privileged,
conservative voters, starting an anti-Western information campaign that
has reached its apex with the standoff over Crimea.
Mr.
Putin’s move to reclaim Crimea is popular among Russians, even liberal
ones. This is a function of history; Nikita S. Khrushchev transferred
Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic for reasons that are debated to this day, not anticipating that the Soviet collapse would sever it from Russia.
But
Mr. Putin is also announcing a change within his society: a turn
inward, away from the West. Russia’s “Western influences,” of course,
are people — economic, political and intellectual elites whose work has
long since woven them into Western Europe and the United States. In a
solemn speech last week, Mr. Putin set the stage for a purge of
dissenters. “Some Western politicians already threaten us not only with
sanctions, but also with the potential for domestic problems,” he said.
“I would like to know what they are implying — the actions of a certain
fifth column, of various national traitors?”
Time
will tell whether this rhetoric will truly translate into a “change of
the elite” — a phrase that pro-Kremlin analysts use with a straight face
these days.
Nikolay
V. Petrov, a professor at the Higher School of Economics, sees the
change this way: Leading economic technocrats, who once served as a
counterpoint to the conservative “shareholders” around Mr. Putin, will
find themselves increasingly limited to technical roles, or replaced by
people perceived as more loyal.
They
were important to Mr. Putin at one time, when he believed liberal
economic reforms could make Russia into a first-rung world power,
Professor Petrov said, but he has given up on that idea, now looking
instead to Russia’s geostrategic position as a way to assert its might.
With
that shift has come something new: pressure on critical voices from the
liberal economic bloc. Sergei M. Guriev, an economic adviser to former
President Dmitri A. Medvedev, moved to France last year, fearing that
he would be targeted in a political prosecution. Sergei V.
Aleksashenko, a former deputy head of Russia’s central bank, took a job
in Washington last year after failing to be re-elected to the board of
Aeroflot.
Mr. Dmitriyev, for his part, plans to continue his work in Russia. Though he will have to get a new laptop.
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