Toxic Kremlin: a lesson from Portugal for leaders who do not want to lose the elections
Keep my diamonds safe
The Russian corrupt elite has been fantastic for the national coffers of many Western nations.
Having stolen cosmic amounts of wealth from the Russian land and the regular Russians’ pockets, the hyper-rich Russians, in essence, wanted but a few simple things: a beautiful landscape, an elegant house, and delicious food. Better if furthest away from those never smiling, ungracious compatriots inhabiting the objective ugliness of panel houses and still mired in the traumas of Soviet poverty, deprivation and humiliation.
The stolen wealth is best enjoyed in stable countries committed to protecting private property and owners’ identity. An Italian villa, a German yacht, an American private jet, a glass of fine French wine held by a tanned wrist in a Swiss watch: every luxury cliché should be fulfilled.
Yet why all this opulence? Why not invest into something meaningful? Say, founding an educational startup, saving the world from greenhouse emissions, supporting refugees or orphan charities in Russia? Why do these rich Russians need to be so ostentations, exuberant and wasteful?
The mysterious Soviet soul
If there was one thing that the USSR managed to distribute generously and equally to everyone, it is the standardised, dehumanising consumption: one type of cheese, one type of sausage, condensed milk.
Deleting the disgust for your own past misery from memory, consuming every possible worldly pleasure, rebuilding your identity around material possessions is essential for understanding the distinct nature of Russian corruption.
What moves ultra-rich Russians is a desire to prove that they have managed to distill themselves from the plebs. Better still if you can prove to the prosperous West that you can eat their foreign luxury with your money.
Do not expect pity for ‘other’ Russians. The 70 years of inhumane Soviet collectivism, counterintuitively, pushed people into extreme individualism, making trusting one another most expensive. The circle of empathy of a Soviet sapiens further narrowed during the dog-eat-dog 90s, when a deep economic crisis and a collapse of remaining institutions bred violent crime, incentivising mafia-type cooperation, deepening generalised fear and causing people to dislike the society which they happened to be part of.
It has not been comfortable to be a Russian among Russians in Russia. Understanding this de facto anti-nationalism that evolved throughout the past century is key to understanding the specific Russian breed of super-rich and super-corrupt. Do not expect them to care for the ecocide of Siberian forests or nuclear waste illegally buried on the Russian soil: that is for the locals to deal with while you are sipping champagne, pardon yet another cliché, with your friends in Mayfair.
The Brave New Russians
In the early 2000s most Russians were busy conquering the newly opened heights of the middle class. Oil, gas and minerals needed all kinds of services around them, from banking to sushi. The crumbles from the big natural resources pie were starting to reach and nurture a growing class of businessmen and clerks, particularly in Moscow. This fertile economic context led to a true empowerment: having overcome poverty through their own hard work, the new urban middle class slowly started to feel entitled to choose its political destiny.
The test of whether this was possible came in two stages: the parliamentary elections of 2011 and the presidential elections of 2012. Both times the votes ended up being rigged and stolen, causing mass protests by the young generation — the first large scale collective action in the post-Soviet history. This was the time when Alexei Navalny and his LiveJournal blog reached its first large audience, professing justice, new transparency and zero tolerance for corruption.
The decade that followed was spent getting the opposition message out of Moscow into the regions. Thanks to the advent of quadcopters, which allowed to film secret properties from the air, and youtube, which could deliver the message to every provincial smartphone, a new class of Russians started to form: more trusting, more empathetic, more mission-driven, more altruistic and definitely no longer asleep.
Biblical déjà vu
The “new testament” of the Russian history has its precise date: 20th of August 2020, when a truly biblical story began to unfold in front of the incredulous Russians — and by now the entire world.
Now a well known opposition leader, Navalny was poisoned by novichok, a nerve agent, while filming yet another investigation in the Siberian city of Tomsk. With little chances for survival and flown to Germany thanks to unprecedented national and international pressure, the Berlin clinic managed to resurrect him from the dead, presenting him back to the universe walking and cracking his dark jokes.
The miracles did not end there: soon he unscrambled the details of his own poisoning through a prank call to one of the secret service guys, hopped onto a low-coster and reappeared on the soil of a wrong Russian airport — out of vengeance, Kremlin did not allow the plane to land where it was supposed to. Immediately arrested, he left but one message to this new generation of Russians: “I am not afraid, and you should not be either”.
Invisible immigrants
Quietly and invisibly, over the last 20 years Russia has become the third producer of immigrants in the world, surpassed only by India and Mexico. Currently, 10 million Russians — that is an entire Portugal, or two Denmarks, or ten Estonias — reside abroad, and since the nefarious 2011 when mostly the new generation understood that their emancipation could not be translated into political change, the exodus has intensified. By the end of this year, expect another 300 000 Russians to have dissipated across the planet.
The reason why these immigrants are invisible is because most of them blend in with the local student or young professionals population, integrating quickly and working for the local science and business communities.
This is important for the local leaders to grasp. These Russians have been shaping a different perception of Russia in their local communities, making it clear that they stand against dictatorship and kleptocracy.
When Russiagate happened in Portugal and my, and other protesters’ private data was shared by the Lisbon administration with the Russian Embassy and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there was one man particularly ridiculed by the Portuguese: Augusto Santos Silva, the Portuguese Foreign Minister, who declared that “I hope that the Russian authorities comply with the request and delete the data”. It was clear to the Portuguese public that this is not how things work: there was no doubt that the data had been passed on to an evil dictator, and the Portuguese popular opinion was empathetically on the side of local Russians.
Toxic Kremlin
It is hard to tell how much effect the Portuguese Russiagate had on the outcome of the Lisbon elections, where against every intuition and prediction the current mayor, Fernando Medina, whose administration shared our data, lost.
What we can assume is that the popular indignation could have activated the opposition voters, while pushing some of Medina’s supporters to opt for smaller parties or dissuading them from voting altogether.
What is crucial in the Portuguese context is the fact that being the mayor of Lisbon is a launchpad for becoming the next prime minister. Medina had everything going for him, and although he did apologise openly and profusely in front of the entire country for having shared the data — and no one has any reason to assume he was not sincere — he lost 10% of the votes compared to the previous elections, ultimately not winning the 2021 ones.
This brings a key message to every leader: willingly or unwillingly dealing with the current Kremlin is toxic. The Lisbon administration shared the data with Russia due to its own incompetence and absurdity of internal kafkaesque procedures. Yet even innocence by neglect was not left unpunished by the voters.
