A trump card

Shortly after the announcement of the US election results, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabov declared that his colleagues had been in contact with Donald Trump’s team during the electoral campaign.

We can only guess as to the nature of this strange confession – after all, the Trump campaign staunchly denied any ties with Moscow, and, were it not for Mr Ryabov’s revelation, this thorny question would have been confined to conjecture for a long time to come.

It could be that the Kremlin, wanting to deter Trump from ingratitude, has dropped yet another hint to the president-elect, reminding him of the people to whom he owes no small part of his success. Whatever the case may be, the potential scale of the scandal necessitated a personal intervention from Putin’s press secretary Dmitri Peskov, who assured the public that Moscow had no official contact with Trump’s staff; although Russian experts and political analysts did indeed maintain ties with certain members of his team, Peskov said, these were unofficial – and they maintained analogous ties with the Clinton campaign.

It’s worth nothing that Peskov made his intervention directly from New York, where, at the very height of the US political season, he was attending… yes, you’ve guessed it – the World Chess Championship.

While Peskov devoted his undivided attention to openings and endgames – useful experience for his day job – everyone else in Russia with even the slightest interest in politics was wondering what post-election consequences Moscow would have to contend with.

It’s not only bilateral relations between Russia and the United States that are at stake here (after all, Crimea, sanctions and Syria are multi-variable issues, and Trump hasn’t even been inaugurated yet). The US election has already exerted a powerful, direct impact on another issue entirely – the Russian presidential election of 2018. The expert consensus is clear: the Kremlin must now take the American experience into due consideration, and do so unfailingly.

“The campaign and (most importantly) its outcome have taken the US elite by surprise,” writes Kommersant. “This could prove a very important lesson for the Russian leadership ahead of the coming presidential campaign of 2018. It can now be assumed that one of their main prerequisites […] will be to avoid any and all surprises throughout the duration of the election race.”

Independent journalist Oleg Kashin, meanwhile, expresses a more complex thought. He dubs Putin the “perfect Russian Trump” and asserts that Russia’s “creative class” must learn to communicate with Nizhny Tagil (an analogue of Oklahoma). “If, by the beginning of the Russian presidential campaign, Trump hasn’t yet become a new Obama in the eyes of our propagandists, Putin will try to conduct himself in such a way as to make it seem that his re-election – far from representing the latest chapter in Russia’s long-standing autocracy – is entirely of a piece with global trends (Trump, Brexit, etc).”

But if American society has found in Trump an alternative to the current establishment, Russians don’t have that choice. In the sequence Brexit – Trump – Marine Le Pen (possibly) – Putin, the latter must be regarded as the odd one out. Even the Kremlin’s own propagandists would struggle to repackage Russia’s current president as an anti-establishment candidate.

Yet the grievances held by Americans and Russians against their countries’ respective authorities are all too similar. Grigory Yudin, a professor at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, catalogues the following common concerns: unconstrained elites, the fusion of power and capital, corruption, gross inequality, life on credit, and, finally, the impossibility of controlling one’s own life chances.

Given the obvious dangers ahead, strange then that the faithful disciples of the Russian regime were so inspired by Trump’s election that they, too, have begun making pronouncements that could be applied to Russia with scarcely a tweak. For example, Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Russian Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee, seems particularly short-sighted in his exaltation of Trump’s triumph over the establishment and the status quo: “The demand for change turned out to be stronger than the desire to keep things as they are. […]The system has proved unable to cope with new and unconventional challenges.”

That could just as easily be a description of Putin’s Russia, as Trump’s America. Of course, one could question how much of an outsider a New York billionaire could ever be, with his tax deductions in one pocket, and career politicians in the other. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has proved himself more clear-sighted than most when he asserted that Trump is not the conqueror of the system but its offspring: “Ultimately, it is still the political system that has enabled the current winner [to prevail].”

That is what the Kremlin is hoping will happen in 2018, but who knows. Leonty Byzov of the Moscow Institute of Sociology isn’t excluding the possibility of an analogous Trump scenario in Russia: “They drone on about Putin’s high ratings, and those of United Russia. But in Russia, too, people keep their cards close to their chest when it comes to opinion polls. Which means that at a certain juncture of our historical destiny, everything can be upended in an instant.”

But for that to happen, Russia needs a trump card.