How to decrypt the Russian political psyche

The job of a Moscow correspondent for a British paper isn’t an easy one at the best of times.

Skripal, Litvinenko and the occasional halfwitism from Gavin Williamson have certainly made sure there have been better periods.

But it’s not the obvious things that cause the most problems.

Yes, you understand your work and movements are monitored. Yes, you’re often faced with hostility, at least initially; the calling card of propaganda. Yes, you have to battle through an information firewall, with newsmakers inclined not to speak even off-record, for fear of problems later.

But the real difficulty is not a lack of information, as much as it is unpicking the hordes that are thrown at you. Understanding who is saying what, why they are saying it, and to whom they are saying it.

Of course, any working journalist should be asking themselves these basic questions. But in the context of Russia’s competing bureaucracies, they take even greater significance. They can turn a white issue black, and vice-versa.

Today, for example, a Moscow court released the theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov from house arrest, a decision that on many fronts should be a cause for jubilation.

The 49-year-old has spent the last 20 months in informational isolation, without the use of a phone or internet. Now he will be allowed to return to work. He can travel to see his elderly father in Rostov-on-Don, even if the decision came too late for his mother, who died last year while he was boxed up in his Moscow flat.

Mr Serebrennikov’s release ahead of trial could be interpreted as a victory for common sense, his liberal backers in the Kremlin, and perhaps, even, for Vladimir Putin, who at one stage called the perpetrators of the case against him “fools”.

But those with longer memories will understand Mr Putin’s public words are never enough to signify his own position, let alone a mechanism by which to see someone released from the grips of Russia’s judicial system.

Much more likely, today’s court decision is the result of a short-term game between competing clans, which almost certainly will be reversed come final sentencing.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Mr Putin has pronounced one thing, and his system has produced quite another. In December, he suggested repressions against Jehovah’s Witnesses were a “nonsense”. Two months later, several of them were tortured by police in Siberia.

Even today, Mr Putin came out with a statement in support of an open internet, just a couple of months after supporting a bill to create a “sovereign” one.

Some have suggested the cognitive disconnect between what Russia’s leaders say and what actually happens indicates that the Kremlin’s “power vertical” isn’t working quite as it intended. Undoubtedly, part of this is true. Off record, sources close to the president insist that some things are simply “not his level”. There are more important matters of meat and missiles, war and peace to attend to, they say.

Another equally viable take would be that parts of the system interpret commands in the way they believe they were intended.

Weighing up these competing explanations – and constantly triangulating the sources you can get hold of – is, as far as I see it, key to reporting on Russia.

It’s always going to be a work in progress.

Yours,

Oliver Carroll

Moscow correspondent