How the Kremlin rewards loyalty with beer and dairy
BREAKING GLASS
A friend of my cousin has a brick-sized bundle of pre-revolutionary Russian rubles, which he gets out and shows off occasionally. The story goes that the friend’s ancestor made a sizable business deal with a Russian aristocrat during World War I and got paid in cash. But then, well, one thing led to another, the monarchy fell, the aristocracy was scattered, the Bolsheviks came to power, and there were some significant alterations to Russia’s constitutional arrangements and economic policy. And those rubles have sat in the safe ever since, not worth the paper they were printed on.
Occasionally, visitors ask if they could have a banknote as a souvenir, but he has preferred to keep them together, perhaps because a lump of them together serves as a reminder to be careful who you do business with. However, some years ago, he did separate out a single 200-ruble bill, which he framed and hung in the downstairs toilet, with these words printed on the glass: “In the event of the restoration of the Russian monarchy, break glass.”
Now, in 2023, the Kremlin has decided to expropriate the assets of Carlsberg and Danone and to distribute them to people who I would call loyalists — except the concept of “loyalty” shouldn’t really require being bribed with spectacularly cash-generating assets such as these. A nephew of Ramzan Kadyrov is now really big in dairy products, and an associate of a close Putin ally is back in charge of Baltika breweries, which he helped to run in the past.
This feels like a full circle for me. I used to drink Baltika beer when I first moved to Saint Petersburg in 1999: It only cost 12 rubles a bottle, unlike imported brews or the local super-premium beer, and although it didn’t taste of much, you could at least rely on it not to leave you feeling like death in the morning or, in a worst-case scenario, turn you blind. In 2000, Carlsberg — presumably attracted by that same combination of reasonable pricing and stolid reliability — bought a stake in the company, which it eventually took over outright. It was not a glamorous business deal, but it was the kind of investment that typified the predictable business climate Vladimir Putin sought to create and that underpinned the prosperity of Putin’s first decade in charge.