Vladimir Yakunin seems to be collecting “formers” – the “former head of Russian Railways” is now also the “former candidate for the Federation Council’s Kaliningrad seat” and, according to some scenarios, a “former candidate for higher office.” Instead, he has decided that in the aftermath of his did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed departure from RZhD – Russian Railways – not to accept the honorable sinecure of a senatorial seat after all, which some touted as a route for greater things.
Instead, he can contemplate his immense wealth, his mansion, and his nationalist thinktank, the Dialogue of Civilizations. As he put it, “I hope I will be able to continue being useful to society by concentrating on academic and public activities, primarily in the area of international relations and intercivilizational dialogue.”
This very definitely underlines the limitations of punditry. We didn’t know at the time why he had left RZhD. Was it primarily because of Putin’s own dissatisfaction with the performance of a man who, after all, was a personal friend? The subsequent leaking of what sounded like the bad-tempered way Putin had encouraged him to leave (“so go”) certainly sounded like it. Was it because a new technocratic elite was being groomed for office, or clients of the even-richer Rotenberg brothers were moving in? Is it that he craved the immunity from prosecution that a senatorial seat would grant? (I never bought this was a primary issue: if Putin is still your protector, you don’t need it, and if he is your enemy, it won’t save you.)
The risk of this is that pundits build up their own assumptions as to what is going on, and when something changes – as with Yakunin’s decision to decline the Kaliningrad seat – they are left asking what has changed, is some plan in crisis? The fact of the matter is that we don’t know there ever was a plan, so much as a rich man out of a job and wondering if he wanted another.
At the time, I speculated that maybe “he wants to spend more time with his money” and this may prove to be the case. Perversely, if that is what is happening, I wonder if that might be a positive sign. Let me explain.
One of the key weaknesses of kleptocratic regimes with no rule of law is that there is no safe provision to retire from the elite. Everything you have, you have not because it is yours and protected by the law, but because of political power and protection. Just as a shark will drown once it stops swimming, a kleptocrat runs the risk of being savaged and impoverished as soon as she (or she) relinquishes power, however informal or formal it may be.
In the Soviet era, it led to the obscene gerontocracy that led to figures such as Brezhnev surviving in office beyond the time in which they had the mental capacities almost to appreciate where they were, and a Politburo line-up on top of the Kremlin mausoleum that looked as if the zombies had come from their crypt for the day.
Later, it meant options were differently limited. You could try and shift as much of your money abroad as possible – a route now rather harder – but even then risked being targeted for legal actions or even perhaps physical harm. But power was never reliable, security only transient – just ask Khodorkovsky, or Berezovsky, or Gusinsky – and thus you needed to stay in the game just to protect what you had.
What if things might be changing? What if Yakunin really will back out of direct political life, play with his vanity thinktank project, give the odd interview (and some of his views are very odd), buy some more furs and hunt some grouse? And what if no one comes after him? On one level, it may stick in the craw to wish a long and pleasant retirement to a man whose assets have been won first and foremost through patronage, and spent with little regard for the lot of his country and its people. But is it better for Russia to force its kleptocrats to fight to the death, or to encourage them into a gilded irrelevance, while tightening the rules behind them to ensure the next generation are less able to steal with such abandon.
There’s little evidence of the second element of the equation yet, and frankly it will probably rest with Putin’s successor. But this generation of oligarchs, while as arrogant and acquisitive as can be, are at least less brazen, violent and exploitative than their 1990s counterparts. Arguably, the Yeltsin generation just stole; the Putin generation stole, but also built. Who knows, maybe the late-Putin or post-Putin generation will build more than they steal, and then head off to go fishing on their private yachts without feeling they need to rig another election to keep them.
