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'Kremlin's Chief Ideological Manipulator' Vladislav Surkov Profiled

 

The New Times

March 7, 2011

Article by Zoya Svetova with Yegor Mostovshchikov: "Spin Doctor of All Russia. Vladislav Surkov -- the Man With a Thousand Faces"

 

The Kremlin virtuoso

 

It is nice to think that Russian policy is made by eminences grises. Both Boris Berezovskiy and Aleksandr Voloshin, in their day, were dubbed Russian Richelieus. But the man who in recent years has become a true master of the craft, a great and terrible courtier whose power is the subject of legends and whose name the other players on the Kremlin political stage are afraid to pronounce aloud, is Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov, the 46-year-old first deputy chief of the Kremlin (Presidential) Staff. Some people call him a cynical intriguer, a manipulator capable of the dirtiest provocations. Others consider him a talented creative type who knows not only how to generate brilliant ideas but also how to successfully organize the process of their implementation. Who is Mr Surkov? (Preceding four words published in English) -- The New Times asked.

 

"Surkov is a private person with a whole heap of devils. He has great difficulty forming relationships with people, he has always tried to be either 'above' or, at worst, 'below' them. Either the master or the slave" (Leonid Nevzlin, ex-head of the Yukos oil company).

 

"Slava (diminutive of Vladislav) was one of the best. A very strong student. He behaved modestly, he did not draw attention to himself" (Lidiya Znamenskaya, mathematics teacher at School No. 62 in the city of Skopin).

 

"This is a person who has a political concept and philosophy, he is a real implementer, whoever may be his chief" (Gleb Pavlovskiy, political expert).

 

"I was surprised when he spoke of his decision to go to the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys. Because he has a creative spirit -- what are alloys to him! But Slava said he needed a concrete specialty in order to help his mom and family" (Vera Rozhko, literature teacher at School No. 1, Skopin).

 

"Surkov is a born manipulator. He does approximately what the Chekists (secret police) used to do in the 1920s and 1930s. Everyone has a weakness that can be seized on. Fear, greed, personal vices. This approach destroys not only the target of recruitment but the recruiter himself" (Dmitriy Oreshkin, political expert).

 

"His tentacles, the web into which he has woven today's cultural and political world in Russia, affect everyone in one way or another. Few people have such an active, powerful, and strange influence on the present-day context" (Aleksandr Prokhanov, writer).

 

"Surkov has many masks" (Vladimir Lukin, human rights plenipotentiary under the Russian president). The New Times

 

looked for these masks: in the city of Skopin where Surkov grew up, among the governors of companies where he worked, among his friends and enemies.

 

Capital Achievements

 

Vladislav Surkov's career record looks simple: MENATEP Bank -- Alfa Bank -- the Kremlin. The last decade was the pinnacle of Surkov's career. In the 2000s it was he, the unchanging deputy chief of the Presidential Staff (under both Putin and Medvedev), who shaped and now controls the country's domestic policy. He was the promulgator of Vladimir Putin's most important initiatives aimed at establishing the vertical power hierarchy, such as the elimination of a real multiparty system, the abolition of elections of regional leaders, and total control of the press and television. The Unity political bloc, to which Boris Berezovskiy gave birth, was converted by him into the country's main party, United Russia, which enjoys the support of 45% of Russian citizens (footnote) (figures from a January Levada Center poll). He invented "sovereign democracy," he is the chief client and censor of the main news and analysis programs on the country's main television channels. Until recently the leaders and chief editors of the leading media would meet every Thursday with Surkov at conference/briefings in the Kremlin. But now they no longer need "guidance": They know themselves what they can write, whom they can show on the air and for how many seconds, and whom they can never show. And this is the man who, in the coming year, will create the new (old?) president.

 

What motivates Surkov? An idea -- but whose idea, when everyone he has worked for speaks of him as an absolutely loyal implementer ("a dictator to his subordinates, a loyalist to his bosses," said one of those who paid his wages), and what kind of idea is it? Hunger for power on the part of a boy from a small town forgotten by God and man, from a broken home and with a father who was a "person of Caucasian nationality," one of a people repressed by the Soviet authorities, who made his own way in life and scrambled up as best he could? Passion for money, the memory of a young man who hung around the hostels, earning a living wherever and however he could, and dropped out of two institutes? "Slava respects himself: You cannot just offer him a million as a bribe," one of The New Times 's sources, for whom Surkov worked in the 1990s, believes. "Surkov is a very rich man: He made money with Khodorkovskiy and Fridman and he manages the Kremlin's 'black fund,'" the politician Boris Nemtsov asserts. "But, for him, power comes second."

 

Childhood

 

In childhoold Slava was just like everyone else

 

The small town of Skopin in Ryazan Oblast where Vladislav Surkov went to school and grew up is a little place 284 kilometers from Moscow. To the north it is cut off from the outside world by a 6-meter railroad embankment reminiscent of a fortress wall. A narrow tunnel passes through it, which the locals call simply "the pipe." From the other directions, the city border is protected by an ancient barrier of felled trees. Inside this stronghold the map of the city is divided up by the standard socialist collection of streets: Lenin, Karl Marx, Ordzhonikidze, Lermontov, Komsomol. The historic center consists entirely of one- and two-story houses, frozen streets, and many abandoned buildings. The Sberbank, a half-abandoned movie theater with the civil registrar's office on the second floor, a lot of car workshops, a cafe, the Kolos food store, the King Midas jeweler's. Only just over 30,000 people live here.

 

Fellow countrymen of Surkov's mother told The New Times 's correspondents that the future theorist of sovereign democracy was born in 1964 in the city of Chaplygin in Lipetsk Oblast (70 kilometers from Skopin). His mother, Zoya Antonovna Surkova, after graduating from the Chaplygin teaching institute, was assigned to work in the Chechen-Ingush ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic), at the village school in Duba-Yurt. She came home pregnant, gave birth to a son, and went away to teach again. Slava was raised by his grandmother and grandfather, who had an apiary in the village of Solntsevo in Chaplyginskiy Rayon. "I remember him well," Sergey Kaverin, a fellow countryman of his mother, recalls. "He was quick-witted, smart. Our tractor driver, when I took Vladislav to see him, said: 'What a boy! That one will be some kind of special expert.

 

People in Skopin recall Zoya Antonovna Surkova with kind words -- she was

 

always a good colleague and teacher

 

Mother and son lived modestly in Skopin; the mother's brother Ivan, leader of the local sovkhoz (state farm), helped. He arranged a room for his sister and nephew in a hostel (the teachers' home), and later they received an apartment -- in short, the usual problems of a single mother.

 

However, people from the village of Duba-Yurt assert that Surkov was actually born in Chechnya, in the Shali District Hospital. And that he lived until the age of five in Duba-Yurt with his mother and his father, Andarbek Danilbekovich Dudayev, who belonged to the rare mountain clan of Zandarkoy. Father and mother taught at the same school. But people from Duba-Yurt say that Andarbek abandoned his family, left for Leningrad, and did not return to Chechnya. So mother and son had to return to Lipetsk Oblast. "I found out that S urkov is a Chechen from the man himself when we met at a reception at Alfa Bank many years ago," Aslambek Aslakhanov, member of the Federation Council and former adviser to President Putin, recalls. "He introduced himself and said that his father, whom he hardly remembers, was a Chechen." They say that in the 1990s, while working at Alfa Bank, Surkov would sometimes boast of being a relative of Dzhokhar Dudayev (one-time president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria) and would bring in members of the Chechen diaspora to resolve certain monetary disputes. In short, no matter where he was born, in 1971 little Slava entered the first grade in eight-year school No. 62 in the city of Skopin, where his mother, by then, was working as a teacher of art and geography.

 

School

 

The freshly painted green facade of School No. 5 (formerly No. 62) stands out sharply against the background of dingy Skopin. The features of the former station can be guessed at in the rather long single-story building. Inside, the well-maintained corridors and walls are hung with children's pictures and information posters. On one display stand -- "Pride of the School" -- is a photograph and biography of First Deputy Chief of Presidential Staff Vladislav Surkov. And no wonder: They say here that it was thanks to him that the school received 9 million rubles for complete restoration and repair.

 

Graduation class 10A in 1981. Vladislav Surkov is smiling -- he has a great

 

career ahead of him

 

The teachers recall Surkov's mother with pleasure: She wrote poems and plays, staged dances, stood in for the history teacher, knitted, sewed, and raised two children. "An industrious and decent Russian (russkaya: ethnic Russian) woman," chemistry teacher Valentina Androsova emphasized. "She passed that on to her children." Zoya Surkova/Podsvetova (her second husband's surname) worked here for 25 years and still regularly sends letters to the school, calls them, and sends them her pictures. Now dozens of these pictures, depicting baskets of flowers and night skies, hang in the assembly hall. In the director's office they keep a 230-page collection -- published independently by the Surkovs -- of Zoya Antonovna's poems, Dreams and Hopes, with a gift inscription. Underneath the poems, the places where they were written are indicated: Moscow, Skopin, Duba-Yurt, Uspenskoye, Voskresensk, Moscow "Airport."

 

Slava the schoolboy is spoken of as a "top pupil": diligent, talented, attentive, he played the bayan (type of accordion), built railroad models, was an authority in the class, was not rude, possessed a unique capability for work, was popular with the girls, and knew how to make friends, according to Lidiya Znamenskaya, who taught Surkov mathematics. School Director Mikhail Sivtsov notes that in his youth Surkov showed signs of leadership: He put together an amateur hockey team and once told his mom that "the kids would follow him into fire."

 

In order to talk with the teachers, The New Times 's correspondents had to obtain permission from the city administration, from a certain Nikolay Anashkin, who was previously administrator of affairs here, but now his post has no title: According to him, he simply "resolves issues." The official gave the "go-ahead," wished us every success, and asked us not to write that Surkov is a Chechen.

 

After completing eight grades with excellence, the future Kremlin ideologist moved to School No. 1, which is in the very center of Skopin. This school, incidentally, has also now been refurbished.

 

Good-looking and a poet

 

Surkov's classmates recall that "Slavka (a further diminutive of Slava) was considered good-looking, he was constantly pursued by female admirers." He enjoyed music, listened to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple, tried to look good and fashionable, wore velvet jeans, and wrote a lot of poems and stories. Literature teacher Vera Petrovna Rozh ko recalls that he was reserved in his manner and looked more grown-up than the others. However, his gang of three boys is now recalled as "cheerful, idle hooligans." He was ironical and liked to joke. The man who created the Nashi (pro-Kremlin youth) movement, in his youth, had a humorous attitude toward Komsomol (Communist Youth League) meetings and on one occasion, when the Komsomol organizer complained, was summoned before the director over it. He wrote excellent compositions: They would read them out in the teachers' common room. He read almost the whole of Dostoyevskiy: "He was probably attracted by the fact that all Dostoyevskiy's anguished heroes are totally the opposite to him," Vera Petrovna says. She still keeps in a blue folder at home a shabby exercise book, yellowed by time, containing Surkov's compositions, which she handles with an almost religious awe -- she shows it reluctantly, without letting it out of her hands, and does not allow it to be photographed: "Only with his permission." Tall bold handwriting, a precise style, with irony breaking through in places: "Mayakovskiy wrote: 'Life is good and living is good,' though admittedly a few years later, in spite of this, he shot himself." Or this, in a composition about Yesenin: "Yesenin writes that he does not regret anything in the past, but clearly something in life does not satisfy him. Maybe he should have determined his path in life with a little more conviction and precision?" -- the future author of Okolonolya (Close to Zero, Surkov's pseudonymously published novel) opines with youthful ease: The course and existence of his thoughts is, so to speak, plain to see. "Quasi-novel, doll, strawman. A fiction" -- it says in the foreword to the second edition of Okolonolya.

 

First Love

 

Natalya Yeganova -- Vladislav Surkov's school girlfriend

 

At School No. 1 Surkov was, as they used to say back then, "going with" a girl called Natalya Yeganova, who was a student in the year below him. Skopin is a small town, everyone knew about the relationship. "It was a beautiful love," Yekaterina Tikhonova, who was a Pioneer (youth group) leader at the time, recalls. Now Natalya's surname is Rimskaya, she works as an editor in local television, and her father is mayor of the city, in his second term. She is reluctant to speak about her former admirer, but she makes it clear that there is a story to tell. "His life was not at all easy, I am glad he got out, although I do not really sympathize with the situation in the country."

 

The young people were bound together by music: Natalya would play an out-of-tune piano and sing "In the count's park there is a black pond/Where the lilies flower" (song from 1979 Soviet TV series "D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers") and the future Kremlin ideologist would sing along and write poems and lovely letters. "We would go to movie theaters and parties. The whole city admired us," Rimskaya reminisces.

 

No sooner had Surkov finished secondary school (with fives (the top mark in the 1-to-5 marking system) and only three fours: for labor, physical culture, and drawing) than they parted. He set off to conquer Moscow and join the Institute of Steel and Alloys. Out of Surkov's people, only his mother's sister Nadezhda and her husband Mikhail Yashkin, a former military man, are still in Skopin. They live in a modest wooden hut and are noticeably nervous about talking to our correspondents. They are worried about damaging their nephew's career. His relatives are proud of him: "We see how he has changed on television -- he grew up strong, he looks respectable, he achieved it all himself." On the Yashkin's table is the book Vladislav Surkov. Texts, 97-07. This book is treasured in Skopin. The city has a political club called "Guiding Line," and Surkov's book is a cult object there too. The club meets once a month and at these sessions various sociopolitical issues are discussed. It is the club's cherished dream to invite Vladislav Surkov to one of these meetings.

 

Universities

 

In 1981 Vladislav Surkov joined the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys in the faculty of ferrous metals and alloys. His classmates recall that in the summer vacations he would visit relatives in Chechnya. He spent less than two years studying to be a metallurgist. According to one of his classmates, Surkov dropped out because he is not technically minded, he would quite often skip classes, and, in general, was a hippie. On 2 June 1983 he submitted an application for discharge at his own request "in connection with difficult family circumstances." In the application he stated that his mother and sister are dependent on him because his father does not live with them. The discharge order was signed and Surkov was sent to serve in the Soviet Army. Twenty years later he would write the following, in a song for the band Agatha Christie (Agata Kristi): "I will be like you/You will be like him/We will be like everyone." According to the official biography of the first deputy chief of the Presidential Staff, he paid his debt to the Motherland in an artillery unit in the Southern Group of Troops, based in Hungary. True, in 2006 the then Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov told the television program "Vesti" that Surkov actually performed his compulsory service in the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) spetsnaz (special forces). Vladislav Yuryevich himself has neither confirmed nor denied this. Although he could have done so: The New Times sent an official request for an interview, but it has yet to receive a response.

 

After being demobilized, in 1986 our hero joined the Moscow Institute of Culture (known as "Kulek" (a diminutive from "kultura")), in the faculty of directing and acting. But after the first year he was dismissed. Both his classmates and his teachers refused point-blank to talk about this episode in Surkov's life. The official story is that he left the Institute because of "family circumstances." The unofficial one is that he was dismissed because of a fight in the hostel. "Slava had returned from the Army, and evidently it had left its mark on him," one graduate of the Moscow Institute of Culture told The New Times. "The guy he beat up was opposed to Army service, and they quarreled fiercely. It ended in a fistfight and the police were called. One of the teachers went to the dean: Such a case was unusual for the faculty, and Slava was dismissed."

 

Another of his classmates recalls that Surkov was a very contradictory person: He liked the counter-culture, he loved the abstractionists, like Kandinskiy, but asserted that everyone should eat the same sausages and share a common fate. At the same time, his type of role as an actor tended toward the heroic. Over the years Vladislav Surkov's desire to provide his fellow citizens with the same sausages only grew stronger, though he only rarely indulges in counter-culture. "The times are gloomy, the holidays, the peace and quiet are over./These black riders come breaking down the door./It is me they want," Agatha Christie sings a song with words by the former Kulek student. Sukhov did not go to any more institutes. But in the late 1990s he unexpectedly became the holder of a diploma from the International University in Moscow: "They bought it, for respectability," one former Yukos staffer told The New Times.

 

The Wild 1990s

 

Nobody knows how Surkov's life would have turned out if he and his former classmate Aleksandr Kosyanenko had not taken up unarmed combat in the late 1980s with the trainer Tadeush Kasyanov, who was also training Mikhail Khodorkovskiy. "Slava turned up in 1989. At that time we felt we needed bodyguards and Tadeush recommended these two guys to Khodorkovskiy," Leonid Nevzlin, one of the directors of MENATEP Bank in the early 1990s, recalls. "The guys turned out to be intelligent and protection turned out not to be so necessary, so Khodorkovskiy set about cultivating their talents."

 

Nevzlin recalls that at that time Surkov was a "diffident, intellectual guy who would get embarrassed and blush." "His capabilities in the sphere of advertising and creative work in general was soon discovered," Nevzlin continues. "He not only thought up ideas, he knew how to push them through. He got publicity for the bank's logo onto the Vremya program on Channel One. Before us, the logo of the Italian firm Olivetti was prominent there. He knew how to convince people he was right. Posters on the streets, trolley buses painted with the logo, articles in newspapers, interviews with top managers -- all this was his doing."

 

In less than 10 years Surkov had risen to the post of vice president and chief of the department for relations with state organizations in the company Rosprom ZAO (closed-type joint-stock company) (footnote) (one of MENATEP's structures) and had become a member of the MENATEP Bank board of directors.

 

The MENATEP people remember Surkov's weaknesses too: He could go off on a drinking spree until he passed out, he knew no moderation, he would have to be rescued from the police station or the hospital, he would fight with colleagues, he was quick-tempered to the point of cruelty.

 

In 1996 Surkov left MENATEP: The position of a mere hired manager no longer suited him, his aim was to become a partner and receive a proportion of the shares. But the MENATEP people did not want to accept him. "We discussed this in our inner circle and we did not want it," Nevzlin explains. "We trusted him, he knew a lot, he was involved in the most sensitive projects. But partnership -- that is the next level of trust, it is like a close friendship. And he was not a friend." However, Nevzlin is sure that Surkov was not offended. "In business, he might have become a second or third partner, but what he has achieved today is much higher. Political manager of all Russia -- that is a title."

 

On the Road to the Kremlin

 

Surkov moved from one bank to another -- Alfa Bank: He was a student with its chief and founder Mikhail Fridman at the Institute of Steel and Alloys, though in different faculties. In the late 1990s Surkov was considered one of Russia's most effective lobbyists. That reputation secured him not only the post of first deputy chairman of the board of Alfa Bank but also, soon after, the place of first deputy general director and public relations director at ORT (Public Russian Television) (now Channel One). "There Surkov became acquainted with all the important players on the political field," someone who has known him since 1992 recalls. "At first, in this 'troupe' that included Berezovskiy, Voloshin, Abramovich, and Yumashev, Surkov was nobody, but gradually his capabilities began to be valued." Boris Berezovskiy, owner of the biggest bloc of ORT shares in the late 1990s, told The New Times that Surkov was "a good, even an excellent implementer, he worked for me and Badri (footnote) (Badri Patarkatsishvili, Berezovskiy's business partner) at ORT and for me in the CIS" (footnote) (in 1998-1999 Boris Berezovskiy was executive secretary of the CIS).

 

And by 1999 Vladislav Surkov ended up in the Presidential Staff. Chief of Staff Aleksandr Voloshin recruited him as his assistant. "At that time he stood out from all the rest because of his extremely unbureaucratic appearance, he looked more like a designer than an official," political expert Gleb Pavlovskiy says. "He has many brilliant qualities. He has always determined the idea and concept of the work for himself, he himself devises elegant solutions." One PR person who has known Surkov well since the late 1990s says that Surkov "did not know what it means to negotiate, he brought into politics the methods that he had used successfully in business. There were two of these methods, and both are simple and effective: You must either break a person or buy him. Money in an envelope immediately -- job done."

 

Dreams Come True

 

In August 1999 Vladislav Surkov became deputy chief of the Presidential Staff. At the same time Vladimir Putin soared onto the political Olympus. How did they come to coincide, so fortunately for both of them and hardly less fortunately for the country? Boris Berezovskiy asserts that he "did not play any part in Surkov's promotion to the Kremlin: To the best of my knowledge it was Alfa that lobbied for him."

 

Vladislav Surkov is always loyal to his bosses, although they say he

 

considers himself smarter and better than them. Photo from 2005

 

In any event, it was from that moment that Surkov's transformation into what he is now -- the Kremlin's chief ideological manipulator -- began. "Slava, so to speak, takes the form of a vessel," Boris Nemtsov says. "With Yeltsin he was a democrat, with Putin he became an autocrat. He has his own system that reflects the bosses' viewpoint."

 

Almost everyone who has encountered him in business or politics and is still dependent on him, is afraid to talk openly about the new Surkov. They do not want a quarrel: They note that he is harsh and bears grudges, God forbid one should become his enemy. If someone has ever offended him in any way, he can well and truly get back at them.

 

He talks to different people in different ways. He may shout and swear at one person, change his tone. With someone else he will speak softly, envelop them calmly and with a smile, as if lazily. They say that he can commission an article from journalists about some oppositionist or other, but if the person in question refuses to write anything too "dirty" he will agree to a more civil version, as long as the article gets published. Others claim that he is not picky about his methods. Boris Nemtsov, for instance, is sure that his arrest for 10 days on 31 December 2010 and all the subsequent provocations against him were sanctioned by Surkov. "The 31 rallies (demonstrations held on the 31st of the month in defense of Article 31 of the Constitution on freedom of assembly), the provocations -- on these issues the Moscow police generals are subordinate to Surkov. I do not think he gave the order to put someone suffering from tuberculosis in my prison cell, but as for the fact that my cellmates were offered $3,000 to tell how they supposedly raped me -- he gave the 'go-ahead' for that," Boris Nemtsov told The New Times.

 

BOTh opponents and supporters of Surkov who knew him in the 1990s or encountered him in the 2000s agree on one thing: He is very inventive when it comes to intrigue, he is really creative here.

 

Wealth Or Power?

 

According to his official tax declaration in 2009 Vladislav Surkov made 6,325,286 rubles. He does not own any residential real estate. Or land. There is one apartment of 59.4 square meters in his name.

 

People who knew Surkov well in the 1990s told The New Times that by then he was already flaunting gold credit cards, which were a rarity at the time. However, there is no information about Surkov's bank accounts in his official declaration.

 

However, there is information about the income of his present wife, Natalya Dubovitskaya. In 2010 she made 56.4 million rubles (footnote) (Natalya Dubovitskaya is deputy general director of public relations at RKP Group of Industrial Enterprises OAO (open-type joint-stock company). The group is engaged in the starch business). It is known that in 2006 Dubovitskaya owned 18.47% of Ibredkrakhmalpatoka OAO, which is involved in the production of treacle and starch, as well as 16.1% of Partner-Garant OAO. In her spare time from business she has borne three children to Vladislav Yuryevich. Surkov is also raising a son by his first wife Yuliya Vishnevskaya, founder of the Unique Dolls Museum, who has been living in London since 2004.

 

"Surkov is different from the corrupt officials: He is not trying to line his pockets," Boris Nemtsov says. "Money is important to Surkov," political expert Stanislav Belkovskiy disagrees, "and he gets offered bribes too. He works with the kind of people for whom money is the most important thing. Other people confuse or irritate him. His main human tragedy is that by the standards of the system he is not rich. Abramovich and Timchenko are much richer than him."

 

Peer Group

 

People who know Surkov while note that he has his own code of honor. Put simply: Family, children, friends -- whom, if you have climbed to the top, you must help. They say that in September 2009 a school in Moscow refused to accept Mikhail Khodorkovskiy's twin sons Ilya and Gleb. Surkov was called, and he got the boys into a good school. How can this perfectly understandable act be reconciled with the letter written against Khodorkovskiy by members of United Russia (which is overseen and instructed in seminars by none other than Vladislav Surkov) or Nemtsov's 10-day arrest on New Year's Eve?

 

"Surkov wants to think he is a decent person," one big businessman says, on condition of anonymity. "He has a peer group and he does not want them to think ill of him." Admittedly he added: "But with Nemtsov he overstepped the mark."

 

Yevroset chief Yevgeniy Chichvarkin considers Surkov a brilliant man. There is a persistent rumor in Moscow business circles that it was Surkov who halted the "witch hunt" against Chichvarkin. A jury acquitted the Yevroset staffers and the Supreme Court confirmed the verdict. The case against Chichvarkin was closed. "In terms of intellect he is superior to everyone I have ever seen who is in the state service," the former owner of Yevroset told The New Times. "When someone told me that one of the branches of power is displeased with him and he might end up going, I was upset. Surkov is the navigator steering a plane that is flying through a storm toward the mountain. He is doing everything to ensure that the plane does not crash."

 

Surkov, however, does not always "steer subtly and accurately." Art expert Andrey Yerofeyev (footnote) (he was sentenced to a fine of 150,000 rubles for organizing the "Forbidden Art" exhibition at the Sakharov Center) recounts that his brother the writer Viktor Yerofeyev and gallery owner Marat Gelman, without colluding, approached Surkov within an hour of each other to ask for the criminal case relating to the exhibition to be closed, as being absolutely absurd and damaging to the country's image. "Surkov listened to them attentively, said he knew nothing about the matter, looked at the pictures, and promised to help. The case was not closed, and instead of one prosecutor at my trial there turned out to be two."

 

The Outsider

 

Recently the first deputy chief of the Presidential Staff has begun to appear in public more. He goes to exhibitions at the fashionable Garage gallery and to the "Flower of the Night" club where the young and rich in-crowd hang out. He has published two art criticism columns in the journal Russkiy Pioner. The first is about the Spanish surrealist artist Joan Miro; Surkov the schoolboy happened to come across a book about him in the Skopin library. The second is about the fashionable Russian artist Nikolay Polisskiy. "Not to be understood is a tragedy for an artist," the first deputy chief of the Presidential Staff writes. "To be understood is simple human happiness. To be misunderstood is the privilege of genius."

 

Surkov's tragedy, people in the know believe, is that he is ambitious and high-flying and he imagines himself to be smarter and better than many people, including his bosses, but he is always in supporting roles. "Putin realizes tha t Surkov is capable of a great deal, and therefore he always puts someone above him who is less creative but more loyal. So that there is no temptation to begin an independent game. Especially since Surkov is an 'outsider.' He is not from the Ozero cooperative," political expert Dmitriy Oreshkin believes (footnote) (the dacha cooperative in Priozerskiy Rayon, Leningrad Oblast, where Putin had a dacha in 1996 and where his closest friends lived who later forged careers: Vladimir Yakunin, Yuriy Kovalchuk, Andrey Fursenko, and others)."I have noticed that he finds it very hard to like the people to whom he is subordinate," Nevzlin says. "But he has learned to cope with this to some extent." "Surkov is an implementer," a New Times source who knew Surkov well from business is convinced. "He will always work for the boss." "A schmuck with an inferiority complex. When he is not implementing, but trying to run things" -- Berezovskiy is extremely trenchant and contemptuous. "For that reason, he is of no interest."

 

Vladislav Surkov named his novel -- now a show that is being performed on the country's premier stage (a stage play by Kirill Serebrennikov, based on the novel, was premiered in Moscow's Chekhov Theater in January) -- "Okolonolya": How should we read that -- "around zero (okolo nolya)," in the sense of around "zeroes" -- is it about the country? About the people whom he manipulates, whom he breaks and buys? About the bosses? Or about himself: "I am not a zero"?