MOSCOW — Speaking at the Russia Calling! investor conference, hosted by state-owned VTB Capital, on Thursday, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin tried to reassure both Russian and foreign investors that, despite Russia's recent political uncertainty, despite the tanking Russian stock indexes, despite the sliding ruble, despite more money than usual fleeing Russia, despite the bad to worse news coming out of Europe, despite all this, everything in Russia is going to be OK. The future is clear and under control.
"I'd like to speak about our priorities, about Russia's strategic plans, so that investors and business can understand the logic and motives of our behavior, especially now, in these uncertain times," Putin said. "And, of course, it is exactly in such times that the trust of our partners is so important. And you -- we understand this -- need predictability and openness." His speech was flecked with the vocabulary of reassurance. Soothing phrases like "we understand," "we see," "we know" broadcast the image of a captain at the wheel, steering the ship of state past all that ice in the water because, don't worry, he sees it.
Putin had already tried to smooth these choppy waters two weeks ago at the conference of United Russia, his ruling party, by announcing his return to the presidency, potentially for 12 years. The point was to erase the uncertainty that had the bureaucracy playing musical chairs all summer and return some stability to the system. But that quickly backfired. "Brezhnev" and "stagnation" quickly became the words of the day, and not two days later, Alexei Kudrin -- finance minister and darling of the West, whose conservative budgetary policy had saved Russia from calamity in 2008 -- was fired by a jumpy Dmitry Medvedev. The plan to stabilize things had, in other words, opened up a whole new can of entropy. Or, as one prominent Western investor in Russia described the whole thing in the couloirs of yesterday's conference, "Yeah, it was a fuckup."
Thursday's performance was a take two of sorts. Putin seemed to be speaking not only to the class of people who squeegee money around the world, but to a broader audience of those who wonder what's in store for Russia with another decade of Putin on the horizon. Putin's answer today was, in so many words, that Putin's back, and he's the same Putin he's always been.
"Changes are, without a doubt, necessary, and they will happen," Putin intoned from the podium, "but it will be an evolutionary path. We don't need great shocks, we need a great Russia!" Responding to a question about the growing number of Russians wishing to emigrate, Putin said:
Both I and the acting president Dmitry Anatolievich Medvedev have sent a clear and precise signal to the country: We are not going to destroy, mangle, or demolish anything. We're going to develop our political system, but we want to strengthen its fundamental foundations. We have lots of political bustlers -- faster, higher, stronger, use your saber to chop this, hack that. But we've already gone through this. We've seen this several times in our history: We'll destroy everything, and then? And then what?
"We'll build a new world, whoever was nobody will become somebody." We all know these words [from the Internationale] from our childhoods. And what came of it? What came of it is that, in the 1990s, everything collapsed. So all of this "hack," "chop," "run without turning back" -- we have to put an end to all this. We have to calculate, carefully pinpoint the destination point of our progress, and confidently move in that direction. That is how we should act, and I'm certain that that's when your mood will change, too. It's not an easy task, but we can do it. We can do it!
Here, certainly, is the language of a Russia traumatized by a revolution whose pain is still all too fresh. But it is also the language of Putin the standpatter, and invokes his favorite straw man: the 1990s. There are many people in Russia -- people now in their thirties, for example, or the educated, urban elite -- who remember the 1990s as a golden age of liberation. Not so for those who fell into penury, or for Putin. Reared in one of the most conservative organs of the Soviet state, the KGB, Putin saw the change of the 1990s as a destructive, negative force. (Which, of course, it was, too.) His spin-doctors use this narrative to legitimize the stability of Putin's own era: the peaceful golden years after the storm.
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