The Russia Conundrum

Throughout all his lying and deceit, and even after those moments when the mask fell, Putin carried on pretending to be a man of principle. He was good at pretending; people found it hard to see through him. It was a crucial time for Russia and I wanted to ensure our country took the path of legality, transparency and Western standards of integrity. If Russia were to founder in the old, familiar ways of corruption, cronyism and patronage, it would be impossible for Yukos to continue to function as an open, Western-style corporation; all sorts of doors would be closed to us and things would start to get worse. It was Putin who had to make that crucial choice for Russia’s future. And when I saw he was going down the wrong path, I knew I had to go on the offensive. Sooner or later, I would have to challenge the hardline Siloviki who were surrounding him and try to turn the tide.

By the early 2000s, it became clear that many of Vladimir Putin’s closest aides were no longer interested in democratic freedoms, but were instead determined to return Russia to the old ways of corruption and personalised autocracy. My first reaction was to tell Russians – and, in particular, young Russians – that things don’t have to be this way. I knew Russia could still take a different course from the one the Siloviki were proposing, and I believed Putin himself had not made a final decision. I believed he could still be persuaded to take the path of freedom and democracy. With the benefit of hindsight, it is evident that I was wrong; but in the early 2000s, I and those who shared my values campaigned with genuine optimism to promote the ethos of unfettered liberal thinking.

When I founded my educational and philanthropic organisation Open Russia in 2001, I took my inspiration from George Soros’s Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations) and its mission statement of ‘building inclusive and vibrant democracies … changing the way we think about each other and the way we work together.’ I wanted Open Russia to effect real societal change in our country, not just to patch up the failures of the current regime. And back then, I was full of optimism. In 2002, I gave an interview to the Washington Post, in which I laid out my hopes for how we could improve Russia’s future: ‘We believe the key point here is education, and that’s why we give money for education in various aspects – teaching kids how to use the internet, establishing contacts between young people in the UK, the US and Russia, training young journalists etc. The aim is very simple. Twenty years have passed. Another twenty or thirty years and we might become a normal country.’

We were prioritising young people because they are the way forward; their thinking has not been colonised by the old spirit of cowed conformity. They are the future ‘elite policymakers’ identified by the Chatham House think tank on international affairs as necessary for ‘the emergence of advanced democratic institutions after Putin leaves’. So, Open Russia ran summer camps where children would camp in tents, play games and learn the basic tenets of a democratic society. We called it ‘New Civilisation’ and we cheekily copied the outdoor learning activities from the American Scout movement. The children played the roles of businesspeople, workers, state officials and politicians. For the duration of the camp, they were asked to run their own society in microcosm, setting up businesses, hiring and firing workers, collecting taxes and providing pensions, calling elections and running campaigns, and having votes. We were showing Russia’s young generation how a free-market democracy can and should function, opening their eyes to another, better way than Putin’s ‘managed democracy’ in which they were growing up – where the hand of the state was guided by the criminal group in the Kremlin.

Open Russia supported Schools of Public Politics in regional centres around the country that would take in youngsters interested in a political career and teach them the values of multi-party democracy. We supported schools for young journalists, helping them realise the importance of the profession and master its secrets. Our Federation of Internet Education trained more than 50,000 teachers and promoted opportunities for access to alternative sources of information and communication, to challenge the monolith of media narratives propagated by Putin’s state.

Our ideas and achievements would all subsequently be appropriated by the Kremlin’s own youth movement, Nashi, which espoused very different aims. Like the Young Pioneers before them, Putin’s Nashi has taken a hold on young people’s minds, inculcating the statist, anti-Western values of the Kremlin. Putin’s methods of shaping people’s thinking – young and old – are powerful and are supported by all the resources of the state. Does that mean he is certain to win? Maybe, or maybe not.