Around a decade ago, in the fallout from the financial crisis, some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations started deploying the Left’s “woke” tropes to legitimize their own power and to disarm popular grievances. Since then, and especially in the wake of last year’s election, they have adopted the edgy aesthetics and rhetoric of the online Right in service of the same ends.

In both cases, the underlying message is remarkably similar, notwithstanding the enmity between Left and Right, between woke and anti-woke. The message is that all collective action is ultimately in vain; the individual — be he the anti-racist HR specialist of the Left or the heroic gym bro of the online Right — is the only realistic locus of change.

Take wokeness, which roughly emerged back in 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of an African-American teen, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. This triggered the first Black Lives Matter protests. It was also the year a PR exec named Justine Sacco tweeted a tasteless joke before hopping on a flight to South Africa (“Hope I don’t get AIDS”), only to be fired before the plane hit the Cape Town tarmac. In the ensuing years, wokeness and all the adjacent movements, from DEI to #MeToo, swept through and took hold of our mainstream institutions, reaching a fever pitch in 2020.

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By Travis Aaron

Most conservatives associate wokeness with progressive utopianism, only the most recent attempt to revive Marxism. But this is a mistake. The woke, to be sure, demanded dramatic changes to our public language, monuments, and institutional practices: “unconscious-bias” trainings became de rigueur at workplaces; newspapers began to capitalize the races; Churchill statues were vandalized. But wokeness was far from utopian — quite the contrary, it amounted to an intensely pessimistic worldview. Drawing from the academic tradition of Afro-pessimism, as the scholar Geoff Shullenberger has pointed out, wokeness ended up “inscribing black oppression into the very fabric of reality”.

In the American context, this served an immediate purpose for a Democratic Party seeking to displace blame for the devastation of the black middle class in the Great Recession. It wasn’t that neoliberal Democrats had bailed out big banks while abandoning African-American homeowners to the vagaries of the market. Rather, blacks were immiserated because racial tyranny was and remains “a metaphysical — even ontological — condition”, as Shullenberger neatly puts it. A metaphysical crisis can’t be blamed on any one policy mix or even remedied by normal politics, and that was the point.

Woke cultural actors thus dismissed the legitimate achievements of civil rights and similar movements in Britain and elsewhere: colourblind justice — the ideal that inspired the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. — was framed as racist. Future progress was similarly foreclosed by the racism that stamped the modern West at its material and psychic origins. Even (and especially) those who denied harboring racial animus were, in fact, irredeemably racist.

The only thing left to do was for people to “work” on themselves as individuals: to “unpack” hidden biases, confess their role in structures of “supremacy”, and lower their expectations regarding things such as objectivity and punctuality, now condescendingly recast as white values. Crises which had concrete fixes, such as chronically low wages, were ditched in favor of vaguely defined ones such as “racial capitalism”, with US firms like American Express and CVS lining up to self-flagellate — even as they resisted antitrust, unionisation, caps on interest rates, and other tangible reforms as ferociously as ever.

Who could fail to notice this dynamic when Hillary Clinton assailed Bernie Sanders by suggesting that the Vermont socialist’s proposed bank regulations wouldn’t undo “systemic racism”? Or when the chief diversity officer at the US outdoor-gear chain REI opened a company podcast by making a land acknowledgment — before launching into an anti-union tirade? Or when a vegan-food firm warned its diverse workforce that unions are for “old white guys”?

The role of wokeness as a prop for institutional power is so familiar now as to be cliché, even among many progressives. Much less understood, however, is how corporate power is putting the edgy online Right to the same use today.

The online Right took shape amid the stresses of lockdown and corporate-approved race riots in 2020 and 2021. The streams that fed it included Right-wing populism; the manosphere starring Andrew Tate; crunchy moms, vaccine skeptics, and “chemtrail” watchers; along with sundry edgelords whose anti-woke provocations soon gave way to overt racism, among other tendencies.

There was always an element of bootstrapping individualism here, especially in the American variety of the online Right. Yet in their more productive forms, these subcultures mounted systemic critiques of oligarchy and a “deep state” that included not just government actors, but also corporate power. Pervasive censorship — carried out not by governmental agencies, but Silicon Valley firms — had alerted them to how overweening private actors can imperil freedom. Ditto so-called debanking, a sinister new private-censorship method road-tested on Right-wing populists such as Nigel Farage.

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Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism

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As a result, taming “Big Tech” censorship was all the rage among Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic. Republican lawmakers, for example, took up Section 230 reform, threatening to revoke the special legislative license that permits social-media platforms to censor or promote content but without the defamation liabilities that traditional publishers carry.

Other conservatives, most notably Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, mused about treating such platforms as “common carriers”, the ancient common-law doctrine that bars firms operating things like public toll roads and rail lines from discriminating against customers. Just as your land-line provider can’t drop you based on what you say on the phone, the argument goes, so the likes of Facebook should be barred from un-personing users based on their viewpoints.

It wasn’t just social media. If Silicon Valley giants could amass a vast and unaccountable power, some on the Right wondered, were there other market actors that deserved similar scrutiny? When he was still a relatively sane anchor on Fox News, for example, Tucker Carlson devoted a long and penetrating segment to the asset-stripping of a beloved Midwestern sport-goods chain by Elliott Management, the hedge fund controlled by the uber-hawkish GOP donor Paul Singer. Some on the populist Right in America even took to calling themselves “Khan-servatives” in homage to Lina Khan, then-President Joe Biden’s crusading anti-monopoly czar.

But it all came to naught. That’s because, beginning in 2022 with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), the oligarchy pulled off a rapid and astoundingly successful ideological shape-shift: rebranding itself as the enemy, and the chief victim, of woke middle managers.

Musk is, of course, the figure who best embodies this alchemy of corporate power. Having once promoted DEI in his own firms, he now routinely and positively interacts with X accounts that traffic in explicit racism and antisemitism — agreeing with one, for example, that Jews are behind multiculturalism.

Spicy stuff. But take a closer look: his purchase of X and, I suspect, his toying with edgy memes motivated the Right to abandon Big Tech reform. One of “their own”, after all, was now in charge of the most politically sensitive platform. It didn’t matter that the basic power asymmetry between platform and user remained unchanged. Indeed, censorship still goes on — only now it takes place at the behest of one man, rather than being directed by a bureaucratic class with a clear set of rules and an appeals process with a human being (rather than a robot) on the other end.

Nor were many on the Right bothered by Musk’s blending of governmental authority (the Department of Government Efficiency) and private power (X) that so alarmed them when the ancien régime did the same thing during the pandemic. Seen this way, it becomes clear that Musk rescued not so much free speech as the very narrow class of men who own the social-media platforms.

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Musk is far from alone. Another richly instructive example is Jeff Bezos. Not too long ago, the Amazon boss placed his firm at the forefront of corporate America’s Black Lives Matter push. Moreover, Amazon for years banned When Harry Became Sally, a scholarly critique of gender ideology by the conservative thinker Ryan Anderson.

Yet now Bezos has inexplicably un-banned Anderson’s book and directed The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, to promote free-market and libertarian ideology. His new friendliness with Donald Trump’s GOP earned him and his fiancée an invitation to join the 45th and 47th President on the inauguration dais. The new administration has also handed Amazon a raft of deregulatory wins, not least an early attempt to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, the New Deal agency tasked with enforcing collective bargaining, including at Bezos’s Dickensian warehouses.

Again, the power asymmetry between Amazon and its workers remains unchanged under the firm’s new ideological dispensation. But with rare exceptions, the Right has ceased to speak out about workers oppressed by his mega-firm.

Perhaps most astonishing is how the oligarchs managed to reframe even populist regulators as agents of a woke deep state. Soon after the election, tech oligarchs led by Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (another censorious wokester-turned-Trump bestie) began to complain about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, established in the wake of the financial crisis to combat banking scams, especially those targeting downscale customers, the type who tend to pull for Trump at the ballot box.

Sure enough, one of the new administration’s first steps was to “delete CFPB” (as Musk had called for), compelling it to drop its legal cases — including against banks that insisted on the right to debank customers — and putting the agency under Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, an old-school pro-business Republican.

In a memo setting out its reasoning, the White House described the CFPB as a “woke, weaponized arm” of the deep state that had given “itself the right to regulate Americans’ checking accounts”. Which sounds pretty bad — until you realize that by regulating checking accounts, they meant banning banks from piling on fee after fee on low-income customers who overdraw their accounts. Also cited as an example of the CFPB’s “woke” tyranny was a rule requiring the removal of medical debt from credit reports.

In short, the populist Right’s anti-woke edginess and solicitude for the put-upon “anon” was absorbed, commodified, and elevated into a new “dialect of power”. In the bargain, the movement was divested of its radical policy energies. Much as the Left had cashiered its more radical economic demands for more diversity training, so the Right learned to content itself with CEOs who would “own the libs”.

All that remains now of the online Right is the bootstrapping self-help element: bodybuilding; the consumption of raw milk and animal protein; “trad” marriages that smack of kink; vaccine avoidance; and the like. But here, too, the movement has been of service to the oligarchs, by generating fantasies of the genetically superior CEO or entrepreneur onto whom millions of temporarily embarrassed non-CEOs could project themselves.

The fate of woke and anti-woke alike is a testament to corporate elites’ capacity for absorbing oppositional trends, symbols, and ideals, thus turning potential threats into a means for the upkeep of institutional power. It’s also a reminder of the limits of culture-centric politics for confronting the power differentials generated by markets. Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes — so long as wages and unions are kept down and antitrust regulators are brought to heel.

That is, my friend was extremely anxious even before he found out that he was no longer a normal human being who could only be charged and prosecuted for a specific crime: he had become an “oligarch” and, as such, a criminal associate of war-criminal Putin. This made him subject to the confiscation of whatever he owned anywhere outside Russia, which I imagine is quite a lot.

It was a very 20th-century development: first, create a thoroughly pre-condemned category; then, without any need for evidence, list your enemies as belonging to it. For the Bolsheviks, that category was “counter-revolutionary”, quite enough for a bullet and, under Stalin, a train journey to the gulag. The Nazis had their purely racial definition of “Jew”, thereby preventing escape-by-conversion as in almost all prior persecutions, including Spain’s in 1492.

Then came Mao’s definition of “landlord”: as soon as the Communists came to power, anyone so labelled in a Chinese village, including the owners of very modest plots, lost their house and contents along with their land and food supply. That did not, however, cause much starvation — since many landlords, or rather ex-landlords by then, were simply killed, with any desirable spouses redistributed as concubines or pressured into marrying their late husband’s persecutors. When Mao unleashed his Cultural Revolution in 1966, he needed no fewer than nine categories to snag his millions of enemies: ex-landlords, “rich” peasants (three pigs were enough), counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, capitalist roaders and the “Stinking Ninth”: intellectuals.

Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, already in exile for having inadvertently published the biography of a Communist hero whom Mao secretly hated, had more than one category listed on the heavy placard hanging from his neck when he was brought back to Beijing to run the gauntlet, while Xi’s mother, herself periodically beaten, was shouting abuse at every step. More than 36 million were beaten or killed under one or more of Mao’s nine categories, including those who were sliced, barbecued and eaten in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

So far, nobody has suggested the public execution of the Russian oligarchs. But the category has been very firmly established in the collective minds of public opinion as irremediably criminal, and the names of those listed have been widely publicised and pounced upon. Along with unpublicised restrictions, confiscations and humiliations, Putin’s invasion triggered the much-televised confiscation of yachts all over the world, causing a global effusion of schadenfreude.

It was with a cheerful tweet that French Finance minister Bruno LeMaire personally announced the early seizure of Igor Sechin’s 280-foot yacht Amore Vero in a repair yard near Marseilles: “I thank French customs officers who ensure the respect of the European Union’s sanctions against those near to power in Russia.” There had been no French trial proving that Sechin had committed a crime; with the “category” short-cut, none is needed.

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LeMaire did cite European Union sanctions, which hardly applied when the government of Fiji, nowhere near EU membership, seized the 348-foot Amadea of Suleyman Kerimov. Not to be outdone, the Spanish police seized the 255-foot Tango because its owner was Viktor Vekselberg, whom the US Treasury Department listed as having close ties to Putin.

Italy’s first seizure was the Lady M, only 213 feet long, not much given that its owner was Alexei Mordashov, Russia’s richest businessman. But he was not the richest for nothing: Mordashov’s real yacht with two helicopter pads and a waterfall was safe in the Seychelles. (Yes, the waterfall is a bit much, but the fact remains that no court has proven that Mordashov is a criminal.) Italian officials also seized Gennady Timchenko’s Lena, with five cabins but worth only a measly $8 million: in Portofino, if your yacht is worth $8 million, you anchor it well out of sight, and in Monaco they will not let you in at all. In no case was there a trial, or evidence of wrong-doing presented.

None of this was supposed to happen when the US Treasury published its list of 96 Russian oligarchs in 2018 — that being the mother of all lists but for Canada’s, which includes names unmentioned by anyone else, possibly because of clerical errors. The Treasury document made it crystal clear that it was not listing criminals of any sort: “in no way should [the list] be interpreted to impose sanctions on those individuals or entities.” It continued: “[inclusion in the report] does not constitute the determination by any agency that any of those individuals or entities meet the criteria for designation under any sanctions program… [nor that] the US Government has information about the individual’s involvement in malign activities.”

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So why did the US Treasury publish the list at all? The straightforward answer is that it had no choice: intense lobbying had resulted in the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017” which required the Secretary of the Treasury to submit a detailed report on “senior political figures and oligarchs in the Russian Federation”. The Treasury then published its list, mingling real rogues with lucky businessmen and brilliant entrepreneurs. Officials told the press and all who would listen that the only criterion for inclusion was simply to have a Russian name in Forbes’s list of individuals with a net worth over $1 billion. The 2017 Act had provided for consultations with the Director of National Intelligence to obtain specific information, but none of the 17 different intelligence agencies he controls has more than one or two Russian readers on staff, and they are much too busy to research biographies. And so the pre-condemned category “oligarch” was created…

Back to today, the latest word from Brussels is that European Union officials have become queasy about the indiscriminate use of “oligarch”, which is now displaced by “influential Russian entrepreneur” in EU documents. But this hardly makes a difference; there has been a colossal violation of that very great blessing that allows honest citizens to sleep soundly, and that Russia tragically lacks: The Rule of Law. Defined by just four short Latin words nulla poena sine lege (“no penalty without a law”), it requires specificity in defining crimes and not just a label, whether it is oligarch or the EU’s “influential Russian entrepreneur.

Anybody who is not troubled by what has happened to the 96 listed by the US Treasury, with its categorical but totally ignored disclaimers, is morally in the same boat as those who are indifferent to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Between us and oppression there is only the Rule of Law, which can never be compromised without evil consequences.

The dirty secret is that we were only able to sanction so much wealth because British governments have for decades welcomed Russian oligarchs, encouraged them to spend money here, and pointedly failed to question the origins of that wealth. By providing them with a safe haven for their money, and a playground in which to spend it, we have — in the manner of a particularly-obliging fence for stolen goods — encouraged them to steal evermore egregiously.

And if we were providing a safe haven for Russian oligarchs, we had no need to employ any investigators, which means — now we’ve suddenly changed our minds about the desirability of welcoming dirty money — we have no one sufficiently skilled or experienced to bring cases against them. So, all of this frozen money is in limbo, and its owners aren’t happy about it. The problems will start with legal challenges, the first of which is imminent. Eugene Shvidler is a Russian born UK-US citizen and, according to Forbes, is worth $1.7 billion. The British government sanctioned him last March because of his business ties with Roman Abramovich, saying that he was “involved in obtaining a benefit from or supporting the Government of Russia”, which his lawyers say is plainly unfair.

The case is due to be heard next month, and lawyers certainly sound like they’ve gearing up to bring more cases against the UK’s sanctions. “They are an act of war and a gross departure from the rule of law,” Robert Amsterdam, a partner at Amsterdam & Partners in London who has been working on high-profile oligarch-related cases for decades, told The Times. “Western governments have sanctioned Russians who have nothing to do with Putin and fail to understand that not all rich Russian businessmen are oligarchs and Putin cronies.”

Among the wealthy Russians with substantial amounts of wealth frozen in London are Andrei Guryev, fertiliser tycoon and owner of Witanhurst, the second-biggest house in the capital; Oleg Deripaska, the aluminium baron whose property on Belgrave Square was invaded by anarchists a year ago; Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, bankers who’ve tried using British lawyers to clear their names before; and, of course, Abramovich himself.

It’s easy to see why they might choose to employ their right to challenge the Government’s decision to freeze their assets. Sanctioned oligarchs have a “general licence” to use otherwise-blocked money to pay legal fees, which makes a court challenge a free hit: if you’re going to lose your wealth anyway, you may as well spend it on lawyers. Having imposed limits on dozens of oligarchs, as well as multiple banks, the Office for Financial Sanctions Implementation will be tied up in these cases for years, and ministers don’t know what to do about it. It’s politically impossible for ministers to cancel the sanctions, so the frozen property will become a legal piñata, showering fees down onto any lawyers prepared to give it a whack, and using up ever more of civil servants’ time.

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And that risks distracting us from the most important question we need to ask, which is: why was £18 billion worth of suspicious Kremlin-linked property in Britain in the first place? The UK’s unique combination of a friendly tax regime, biddable politicians, luxury housing and under-resourced law enforcement agencies have made it a home from home for kleptocrats the world over. Unlike in the United States, where federal agencies prosecute financial criminals no matter how deep their pockets, cash-stripped British investigators are vanishingly unlikely to probe the wealth of anyone able to afford a good legal team.

The Government has brought in new legislation over the past year to close some of the worst loopholes in our financial system. It is no longer possible for the ownership of UK properties to be hidden behind offshore shell companies; or for anonymous UK companies to be used to launder money through foreign bank accounts. And that is welcome. However, despite ministers’ claims, they have done nothing to change the core problem, which is that they don’t have enough officers to enforce the laws that politicians pass. Officers at the National Crime Agency are funded at a third of the level of their counterparts at the FBI, and the same is true at lower levels of policing. Financial crime is 41% of all crime committed in the UK, yet receives less than 1% of police resourcing.

Sanctions are law enforcement on the cheap. Yes, they result in assets being frozen, but only because politicians say so, not as part of a legal investigation, which means they don’t result in prosecution, conviction and confiscation. Sanctions don’t lead anywhere: they’re like an aircraft carrier with no planes; or a government construction programme, which never builds any actual hospitals. Yes, they have a propaganda value, but if we wish to move from freezing assets to seizing them, we come up against the consequences of our decades-long failure to invest in law enforcement.

As one official at the National Crime Agency told me laconically: “The lawyers have a look and say to the director general: ‘worst case scenario, this could cost us a billion’. If you’re the DG and your budget is £800 million, that will give you pause for thought.” Whichever agency you pick – the NCA, the Serious Fraud Office, the Metropolitan or City of London Police forces — you find the same picture: it’s under-staffed, under-resourced and under-motivated. Experienced investigators are continuously being poached by City firms keen to staff their compliance departments, which are able to offer more money and less stress. A senior detective joked to me last month that he was pitching his agency to graduates with the promise that “if you work for us, you’ll walk into a job at HSBC in three years’ time”.

In an attempt to ensure its limited resources are used effectively, six years ago the Government created the National Economic Crime Centre. But without sufficient resourcing, it has failed to deliver the “step-change” politicians promised, and instead just issues press releases announcing things that would have happened anyway. Grumpy officers now grumble that its NECC acronym really stands for “National Experts for Claiming Credit”.

Investigating kleptocratic wealth is hard at the best of times: its owners’ identities are hidden behind shell companies in multiple jurisdictions, and are protected by the world’s finest lawyers. When the NCA did bring a case against houses owned by the daughter and grandson of the former president of Kazakhstan, its lawyers were eviscerated by opponents from City gunslingers Mishcon de Reya, ably assisted by the near-bulletproof Panamanian shell structures through which the property was owned. Meanwhile, prosecutors seeking evidence of how wealth has been stolen have to rely on counterparts in the kleptocrats’ home countries, where crooked police officers will not give evidence against their own bosses.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that Britain’s already-stretched officers have two competing demands: first, they have to investigate the wealth brought into our country during the decades-long “no questions asked” period; and secondly, they have to prevent more wealth joining it from other countries plagued by kleptocratic elites, whether they’re elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, in the Far East, South Asia, Africa or elsewhere. London’s new Nine Elms district is just the most visible example of developments built to attract hot money from Far Eastern investors, much of which will be as questionable as the Russian money we welcomed in the past.

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And so the sanctioned Russian wealth is stuck. It cannot be confiscated, because the UK lacks the investigative firepower to bring solid cases to court; but it cannot be released, because to do so would strengthen Vladimir Putin, an indicted war criminal. This stalemate benefits no one, except the lawyers who are paid to maintain it.

Is there a way through? Possibly. But to find it we first need to ask what problem the sanctions were designed to solve. Before February 2022, the threat of them was intended to dissuade Vladimir Putin from attacking Ukraine at all, a task at which they self-evidently failed. When war began, sanctions were employed to deny the Kremlin access to money it could use to fight its war by freezing it in place. That aim has been achieved, but risks being undone if successful legal challenges reduce the amount of wealth that is frozen. Officials now talk about a new aim, which is to confiscate the frozen wealth, and to use it to help Ukraine rebuild its bridges, roads, houses, schools, hospitals, power stations and factories.

Last July, Canada passed a law allowing its government to seize sanctioned assets, in order to help Ukraine and compensate Putin’s victims. In December, it began a confiscation process against wealth owned by one of Abramovich’s companies under this new simplified procedure. Here the Canadians have offered a path for us to follow. It feels wrong to take property away without a court proceedings, but leaving the money in limbo risks it being dissipated in legal fees like a super-charged 21st-century Jarndyce v Jarndyce. And perhaps, if we can confiscate some of this property, we’ll help ourselves too: we’ll cool our super-heated housing market; we’ll drive dirty money out of politics; and we’ll prevent new Putins from building new kleptocracies.

The term “oligarchy” perfectly characterises Boris Yeltsin’s presidency in the Nineties, during which a small number of extremely wealthy men yielded massive influence. These men acquired key state assets, including major parts of the energy, telecommunications, and precious metal sectors, at a fraction of their real value after the Soviet Union fell. In return, these “businessmen” backed the ailing president and helped to ensure his re-election in 1996.

When Putin came to power, he set about dismantling this oligarchy and removing any threat business elites posed to his own political leadership. The deal was that oligarchs could keep their money if they stayed out of politics. Those that didn’t, risked everything — their wealth, their freedom, and their lives. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, spent 10 years in prison on tax charges after setting up a political organisation — Open Russia — to “build and strengthen civil society”. Rather than risk a similar fate, most of the other oligarchs stayed away from politics.

Of course, Putin reduced the Russian people’s political power as well as that of the oligarchs. But people were willing to accept a social contract of economic stability and growth in return for staying out of politics because they were so traumatised by the economic conditions and exploitations to which the oligarchs (and Western advisors and businessmen) contributed so substantially during the transition to capitalism and depredations of the wild Nineties.

In an oligarchy, great wealth guarantees political influence, but in Putin’s Russia, the opposite is true: business elites must suffer the tyranny of officials. State corruption winds its way through all Russian businesses, which require krysha — or protection — from powerful bureaucrats to ensure their company is not expropriated, subject to a hostile takeover, or slandered around the world via “black PR”. The bureaucrats can then exploit their powers of patronage to arrange business opportunities for their friends or family. No wonder so many young Russian professionals want to become bureaucrats, not businessmen.

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In this system, wealthy Russians depend on political approval, not vice versa, which is where the UK’s misunderstanding lies. The business elites have close to zero political influence.

There are two types of super-rich Russians: both powerless to change the course of the war. The first are Putin’s men, for example, Igor Sechin, who derive their wealth exclusively from their proximity to Putin. If they were to abandon or criticise Putin, they would lose everything. The second group is made up of tamed erstwhile oligarchs, many of whom emit coded signals that they do not agree with the war. The sanctioned businessman Mikhail Fridman — who lives in London — is one such. He called the invasion of Ukraine a tragedy, but stopped short at outright condemnation of the war.

In some ways, the UK is to blame for the Russian elites’ lack of leverage. For decades, well-connected Russians kept their money and families safe in the UK, while maintaining their high positions in Russia. British accountants helped to stash their dubious incomes, lawyers settled their divorces and prosecuted libel trials, consultants lobbied politicians for their business associates’ interests, estate agents procured their mansions, private schools educated their children, and museums laundered their reputations.

Given the Russian super-rich had rights and the means to assert them in the UK, they never felt the need to promote — or defend — the rule of law at home. This double life often worked in their favour: if they wanted to bring down an enemy, they could hire a corrupt judge in Russia to ensure an unfair hearing. But when they needed real justice, they could fly to London.

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This “Get out of Russia Free” card couldn’t last forever. In allowing Russians to live the high life away from home, the UK emboldened Putinism in its current form. With the UK offering a safe haven, rich Russians never felt the need to build or maintain strong legal institutions after the fall of the Soviet Union. As a result, there is now no realistic channel of non-centralised power, such as a strong judiciary or small and medium business constituency, that the business elites could use to influence the Kremlin — presuming they even wanted to.

Russia might have been better off following the lead of Poland or Ukraine. In Poland, which also underwent neoliberal “shock therapy” market reforms during the Nineties, measures were taken to guard against oligarchy and build up the SME sector. The Poles built millions of new businesses and gave a group of funds stakes in privatised state firms to prevent the asset-stripping characteristic of Russian oligarchs. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the rivalries between different oligarchs created obstacles for any autocrats, allowing citizens more political freedom. In many ways, Russia has the worst of both worlds: the destructive economic legacy of oligarchy without any of the elite infighting.

None of this is to say that the UK shouldn’t seize the assets of Kremlin-linked officials and businessmen. It’s just that the purpose of doing so should not be to encourage business elites to abandon or persuade or topple Putin — but to stop Russian money from corrupting our national interests and security.

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Ironically, sanctions on oligarchs have given the UK some of its best PR in Russia for decades. Ordinary Russians hate the business elite and have celebrated the West’s sanctions on them. On Russian Telegram channels, announcements of new sanctions on bankers, Putin’s mistress Alina Kabaeva, and other wealthy individuals, are greeted with thousands of likes and jokey comments celebrating the UK: “Thanks London”, “More please!”, and “London is doing us a favour”. As Putin gloated during his State of the Nation speech last month: the West has seized rich Russians’ assets because it views them as “second-class strangers”, but “not a single ordinary citizen in our country feels sorry” for them.

When it comes to sanctions, the British establishment must be careful not to project its outdated historical conceptions onto Russia. The UK is no longer dealing with the influential oligarchs of the Nineties — but with powerless present-day business elites. And while the Kremlin could no doubt use Western business elites to influence our governments, the same is no longer true in reverse. The power of the Russian business elites is a phantom. The oligarchs are long dead. And we helped kill them.

Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani reportedly fled to Dubai after the Taliban takeover of his country in a chopper loaded with hard currency. He joined former Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who moved there to avoid charges following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra, who went into self-imposed exile after he was overthrown in a military coup in 2006.

Yet these men are small fry compared to the global criminal elite who have also moved to the air-conditioned oasis. Irish mobsters the Kinahans left their Spanish hideout for Dubai in 2016, the same year as powerful South African kleptocrats the Gupta brothers. They join Somali pirates and Al Qaeda members in enjoying the Emirate’s bespoke money laundering services. Most recently, the city has been flooded with the villains of the hour: wealthy Russians caught up in sanctions and a tanking economy in need of a safe haven following the invasion of Ukraine.

Dubai, no stranger to patronage networks and opaque systems of governance, is deliberately attracting this money. The state is strongly pushing crypto, and crypto kings have descended on the city — which is beginning to be known as “The Wall Street of crypto”. Today, the Russian elite who have flooded Dubai are largely bringing their money in digital form, rather than in the bank notes of bygone eras.

But there’s no greater appeal for money launderers than bricks and mortar. Dubai offers investor visas for those willing to spend upwards of £1 million on property. With the recent influx of Russian money, property sales increased 45% in April (compared to 2021) and 51% in May. While the sanctions against Russia’s elite have been so biting that Roman Abramovich and his stolen billions are no longer even welcome in London, the original home of blood-soaked wealth, he has been spotted strolling Dubai’s marinas, even docking his superyacht in its harbour. He is not the only Russian kleptocrat said to be shopping for a luxury apartment there.

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For a city that touts its very low crime rate — abuse of blue-collar migrant workers doesn’t count, of course — Dubai now has a dance card that would make Interpol blush. That is, if the agency hadn’t elected Emirati Major General Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi as its president last year. But the city gets away with it, by operating a very simple code for its “colourful” expat community: do your dirty work elsewhere. So long as your enemies aren’t murked on Dubai’s streets, and yachts loaded with cocaine aren’t arriving in the city’s ports, mobsters and tyrants are welcomed with open arms.

The Kinahans, for instance, run a transnational cocaine business and are suspected to be behind some 20 murders in Ireland and Europe. But in Dubai, they have enjoyed the best of what the city has to offer, laundering dirty money into hard assets. Having been deemed “low-risk” by UAE authorities, the Kinahans built a luxury property portfolio and a business front to maintain the ruse that they’re not cons. Ireland and the European Union were frustrated by attempts to catch their man because the UAE does not have an extradition treaty with either.

And yet, the welcome extended to them in Dubai may be cooling. In April, the Emirate agreed to give up the Kinahans and their vast business empire, with extradition to the West appearing likely. Recently, Dubai’s police actually arrested South Africa’s Gupta brothers after Interpol issued a red notice against them.

Why the sudden willingness to give up a few crooks?

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Dubai might be a global tourist and finance destination, but the Emirate is subservient to its big brother Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE. Not only does the latter have most of the oil — indeed, the seventh-largest proven oil reserves in the world — but it used the profits from that oil to come to Dubai’s rescue during the financial crisis of 2008-09, when the city’s over-leveraged property sector was teetering on the verge of collapse. “Dubai has had to give up control over the foreign affairs, and this includes responding to international sanctions and international police requests,” says Christopher M. Davidson, a British academic of the Gulf. “Abu Dhabi likes to play this role of a good international citizen.”

In the case of the Kinahans and Guptas, Dubai was happy to ignore pressure from the United Kingdom, the European Union and South Africa to hand them over. But when both families were sanctioned by the United States (the Guptas in 2019 for corruption, the Kinahans in 2021 for drug running and money laundering), they became a problem that could no longer be ignored.

As a tightly controlled laissez-faire economy, the UAE embodies all the contradictions of 21st-century hyper-globalisation. Emirati rulers buy their clothes in Paris, surveillance systems in Tel Aviv, and their arms in London, Washington and Moscow. They have a station on China’s Belt and Road initiative, send their troops to stamp out terrorism in India, and abstained from a UN vote condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With the exception of Iran, the Emirates are friends and business partners with everyone who matters.

However, the free flow of capital and people through its ports is still the American way of doing business, and America is still the umpire: the US dollar still functions as the world’s reserve currency. Being sanctioned by Washington can destroy an economy overnight, and what would Dubai be left with? A glittering airport and skyscrapers aren’t much use when no one will pass through, and the royal family’s legitimacy is built on an ever-growing economy.

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That’s not to say Dubai has zero leverage. “As a major hydrocarbon producer, the United States, Britain, and the European Union see it as playing a vital role in stabilising international energy markets,” Christopher Davidson says. “In the same context, the US — and now France — have allowed Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman to ‘come in from the cold’. In return, they are expecting full Saudi cooperation with regard to oil production.”

Just as Dubai knows its place in a geopolitical hierarchy, it is alert to the hierarchy of crooks it harbours. Clearly, the Kinahans and Guptas are small change compared to some of that Emirate’s other residents — worth sacrificing to appease the United States. But this of course begs the question: why is Dubai still considered the global safe haven for Russian money since crushing sanctions were put in place after the invasion of Ukraine?

For its part, the UAE has said that it wants to remain neutral and that it  does not want to “lump together” all Russians into one category. After all, the nation has the fifth-highest number of billionaires in the world — 117 per million people — and it’s not as if their home nation is agitating for their extradition. In the end, human rights and just wars are abstract concepts, but the language of business — and oil — is one that all sides can understand. Stability means cutting a deal where everyone feels like a winner, and it appears the West will put up with Dubai housing the Russians it will no longer do business with, in order to appease the Emirates’ diverse political and financial interests.

The United States can ask for plenty from the world’s key oil suppliers, but not everything. After Dubai skated through the Great Recession on the mantra that some companies are “too big to fail”, it’s now navigating a fraught geopolitical stage on the time-honoured idea that some people are simply too rich to jail.

Like many post-Soviet states, upon becoming independent in 1991, Ukraine faced a serious challenge of nation-building. Ukraine is a multinational, multireligious and multilingual country with little historical experience of independent statehood. Its major ethno-linguistic groups include Ukrainians in the west and Russians in the east. Many speak both languages and their histories and cultural practices are deeply intertwined.

An atavistic nationalism that bases political authority on supposed ancient traditions of ethnic-Ukrainians alone is neither consistent with reality, nor capable of uniting the whole Ukrainian people. The challenge of post-Soviet nation-building was, therefore, to craft a civic nationalism, based around a shared commitment to democratic self-government.

Sadly, Ukrainian elites failed in this task. Indeed, as Yuliya Yurchenko documents in her compelling but depressing book, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, they were too busy plundering the remnants of the Soviet economy, with officials and their criminal-business networks transforming themselves into powerful, predatory oligarchs while the rest of their society fell into penury.

From 1990 to 2000, Ukraine’s GDP fell from $81.4bn to just $31.2bn. Hyperinflation, peaking at 10,155% in 1993, destroyed people’s living standards, creating long-term unemployment, especially among the young. The oligarchs had little to offer citizens, relying increasingly on fraud, corruption and intimidation to stay in power.

In this context, reformers — who took power after the 2004 “orange revolution” — looked to EU and Nato membership as a way to transform their society. This attempt to move “from Brezhnev to Brussels” occurred widely in post-communist Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, reformers hoped that EU rules would discipline or destroy the oligarchs and root out corruption by imposing free-market reforms.

But this was a very dangerous strategy. As Yurchenko observes, the EU-Ukraine Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) signed in 2008 would, if fully implemented, devastate small businesses and workers by exposing them to continental competition. Meanwhile, many oligarchs have found ways to exploit the opening of markets and limit measures that would damage their interests.

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Other oligarchs resisted liberalisation by rallying the people of eastern Ukraine into thinking that pro-Western elites were not heeding their interests. Donetsk, where many oligarchic businesses are based, has deeper economic, linguistic and cultural ties to Russia, and people there have often complained of being neglected and sneered at by the West, despite constituting a substantial share of Ukraine’s GDP and population.

The oligarchs began harnessing this resentment, fostering a growing east/west split in Ukrainian politics. The “East” — led by Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions — retook national power following the 2010 presidential election. Yanukovych’s subsequent persecution of his opponents drew the ire of Washington and Brussels, but this only reinforced his preference for stronger ties with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), reflecting the economic needs of his eastern base.

This growing internationalisation of Ukraine’s domestic struggles was perilous, given the geopolitical context. Russia had stridently opposed Nato’s eastward expansion since the Nineties. Gorbachev had asked Washington to disband Nato in exchange for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, while Yeltsin had asked for a new, inclusive security architecture that incorporated Russia into Europe, only to be rebuffed. The latter later warned the West that a Cold War was giving way to a cold peace, with Nato expansion entailing “nothing but humiliation for Russia”.

When the West proceeded anyway, Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, made it clear that Moscow saw Nato expansion as directed at Russia. In April 2008, a Nato summit welcomed Georgia and Ukraine’s aspiration to join the alliance. Putin invaded Georgia a few months later, rather than see it join this anti-Russian bloc. Many analysts, from the Cold Warrior George Kennan to the realist professor John Mearsheimer, predicted disaster if Nato continued to expand towards Russia’s borders.

The same, to a lesser extent, applied to EU expansion. Putin described the DCFTA as a “big threat” to Russia, as it would allow EU exports to enter tariff-free, via Ukraine, and “choke” the Russian economy. EU officials insisted their cooperation with Ukraine was merely technical, refusing to recognise the geopolitical implications.

The 2014 “Euromaidan” crisis saw the culmination of this toxic fracturing of the Ukrainian nation. In 2013, President Yanukovych rejected the DCFTA, opting for closer ties with the EEU. This prompted widespread protests, which were egged on by senior EU and American politicians, despite the growing involvement of far-Right nationalists. Eventually, amid escalating unrest and violence, Yanukovych fled to Russia. But while his opponents in western Ukraine celebrated, his eastern supporters perceived a “fascist” coup against their democratically-elected president. The Ukrainian state’s authority collapsed in the east, allowing opportunistic pro-Russian separatists to seize power in many areas, while Russia reacted by invading Crimea.

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Instead of moving to reassure their fellow citizens and build an inclusive national project, Ukraine’s pro-Western faction instead doubled down. Under the new president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko, the Government purged eastern politicians and officials from the state, sending many fleeing into exile, and banned Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, intensifying the crisis of representation in the east. It also launched military offensives against the separatists, triggering further Russian intervention, producing heavy casualties and a grinding stalemate.

Neither Poroshenko, nor his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have implemented the Minsk accords agreed with Russia in 2014-15, which proposed to settle the conflict by granting autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk. Instead, the new government loudly sought full membership of Nato and the EU — measures that could only undermine Ukraine’s national sovereignty. Yet the EU has not — and will not — actually admit Ukraine, as it is still reeling from the divisions induced by the last round of enlargement into post-communist Eastern Europe and does not want to take responsibility for a war-torn country. But it was happy to pretend otherwise, flattering Ukrainian elites while pushing neoliberal reforms on them.

The Poroshenko government enacted the EU DCFTA, rapidly introducing structural reforms to comply with EU rules. Facing rising debt amid economic decline, the Ukrainian state became economically dependent on the EU and IMF. Foreigners were brought in to run three ministries and IMF advisors were embedded with the central bank, entailing further losses of sovereignty. Austerity, neoliberalism and further privatisation benefited well-positioned oligarchs but did nothing to alleviate mounting poverty.

Far from reaching out to Ukraine’s ethnic Russians, Kyiv has actively promoted a narrowly Ukrainian, anti-Russian form of nationalism, reflected in language policy, “de-communisation”, and the secession of the Ukrainian Orthodox church from its Russian “mother” church. As Yurchenko observes, instead of reconsolidating Ukraine, these measures only “further divided the broken nation”.

This failure of Ukrainian politicians to represent the whole nation has led both sides to turn to foreigners to bolster their domestic position. The pro-Russian faction appears backwards and corrupt, offering little to inspire and unite the country, and ultimately relies on Russian intervention to prevent Ukraine slipping from its grasp. But nor can the pro-Western faction command the consent of the whole nation. It was prepared to overthrow a democratically-elected president to get its own way, and has persistently sought to lock in its preferences against internal opposition by sacrificing Ukrainian national sovereignty to supranational organisations.

Russia’s role in this disaster is obvious. It is hardly surprising that Ukrainian nationalism has taken a sharply anti-Russian turn given the annexation of Crimea, Russian support for separatist fighters, and Putin’s open contempt for Ukrainian independence and sovereignty — let alone the recent invasion.

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But the West has also been reckless and irresponsible. Russia has made perfectly clear that it will not tolerate the expansion of the Western sphere of influence up to its borders. It wants at least a neutral buffer zone between itself and Nato, and ideally a friendly sphere of influence among its post-Soviet neighbours. We might wish this were not so, but it is a geopolitical fact. Russia’s willingness to use force to achieve its goals — at great reputational and economic cost — has been beyond doubt since 2008. To put this into perspective, we can imagine how the US might react if Canada sought to join a Russian-led military alliance — or merely recall Washington’s reaction when Cuba did so.

The West had two strategic options. Either it could acknowledge and accommodate Russian interests, or it could defy them, ushering Ukraine into Nato and deploying overwhelming military power to deter Russia from using force. Instead, it did neither. It allowed its Ukrainian allies falsely to believe that they could rely on the EU and Nato, yet did not nearly enough to deter Putin militarily. This has encouraged the Ukrainian government to prioritise integration with Russia’s enemies over rapprochement with its own citizens, while fanning Russian anxieties. Had Nato been clearer, Ukrainian elites might have come to their senses and pursued a less reckless course of action.

The only solution to this crisis, aside from war and devastation, is for Ukraine to become a neutral state, as Finland was during the Cold War. The sovereignty of the Ukrainian people — their capacity to work out their differences and collectively determine their life together in a peaceful and democratic manner — can only be enhanced if all sides renounce their external ties, and foreign powers cease meddling in Ukrainian politics.

To be truly sovereign, the Ukrainian state must be seen to represent the whole national population. The push towards Nato and EU membership — only intensified by Russia’s aggressive reaction — has fragmented the Ukrainian nation. It is hard to see how it can be reunited if this continues; bloody partition seems more likely.

Sovereignty does not imply total control over the state’s internal or external environment; it only entails self-rule, and this requires political realism. This was a source of some confusion in the Brexit debate. Many Thatcherite Eurosceptics foolishly believed that the UK could restore its sovereignty — its capacity to make laws and adopt policies inconsistent with EU rules — while retaining full access to the EU’s single market. The EU had no interest in agreeing such attractive terms; on the contrary, its interest lay in making Brexit as painful as possible.

Today, the Ukrainians clearly have no more “sovereign right” to join the EU or Nato than Brexit Britain had a “sovereign right” to full access to EU markets. Reflecting their own interests, these organisations will not admit Ukraine. This is the geopolitical reality that any truly sovereign Ukrainian government must reckon with.

Of course, Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. But the only way for the Ukrainian people to achieve national sovereignty is for all sides within Ukraine to cease internationalising their political conflict, and for foreign powers to cease their meddling. Neutrality offers the only context in which Ukraine can restore its territorial integrity and secure peace. It also provides the only context in which pro-Western forces will be forced to reckon with their pro-Russian counterparts, and find a more consensual way to exist.

Making colleagues nod and bootlick when they have no desire to do so is the essence of power. But the despot feels the need for this sham acknowledgment not to demonstrate strength. At root he is irritable, morbid, totally oversensitive. Watching sycophants crawl along marble floors confirms his deep suspicion: human beings are low creatures. This confirmation makes him feel better.

Imagine we are allowed to send one writer into the Kremlin, with the intention of translating its walls and turrets and atavisms into literature. I’d choose Ryszard Kapuściński for the assignment. Nobody ever captured despotism with such vividness; no other witness, and no other stylist comes close. He would have seen the table, and known.

For much of his professional life Kapuściński was communist Poland’s lone foreign correspondent. He was always broke, being shot at, sneaking on to planes, and taking notes. Reporting for PAP, the Polish news agency, he made the brokenness of the world his subject. In Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and eventually with Imperium (1993), in the ashes of the USSR.

“I was an envoy,” he wrote, “engaged to render an account, to transmit, relate.” As envoy, Kapuściński witnessed 27 revolutions. Bolivia, Mozambique, Sudan, Benin, Iran… Rulers changed; governments fell. Surfing the roar and the blood, the only thing Kapuściński thought constant was “helplessness”. A revolution like Iran’s “demolishes so ruthlessly that in the end it annihilates the ideals that called it into being”. Experience taught him to fear desperate crowds chanting slogans.

Three elements combine frictionlessly in his work. There is Kapuściński the reporter, who hangs out everywhere with anyone, observing perpetually, a world-class noticer. Insanely brave and desperately lonely, he is nearly killed by snakes and bullets. He bypasses high politics and slums it in the places where maggots wriggle under people’s skin. This is the Kapuściński who said: “I don’t want to stop at observation. I want to take part.” Then there is Kapuściński the excursive essayist, the expert on anything, who can explain the tragedy of Shi’ism, or the history of the Iranian oil industry. Finally there is Kapuściński the poet, the imaginative genius, armed with metaphor, simile, and a subtle Aesopian language that can hold the universe in a rain drop.

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Wonderfully, vast areas of Kapuściński’s life and work turned out to be lies. The envoy was an occasional spy and willing informer for Poland’s communists. The supposedly journalistic accounts he rendered were exposed: tattered and hole-ridden. His transmissions were deceptions. Kapuściński, often described late in life as the “greatest war correspondent in the world” and “the reporter’s reporter”, had been spinning fantasies for decades. Serious journalists hated this. They were ashen, and felt cheated. They shouldn’t have been shocked. You only needed to read a sentence of Kapuściński to know he was more than a journalist: he was an artist. He had to allow himself more. His ultimate creation was himself.

The character was mottled with fictions. Had he really awaited execution by Belgian mercenaries at Usumba airfield in the Sixties? Did he genuinely witness a massacre in Mexico City in 1968? Was he actually in Santiago for the Pinochet Coup in 1973? Nope: lie, lie, lie. He did not meet Che Guevara before his death in a seething Bolivian jungle. Nor did he meet Patrice Lumumba, nor did he watch fish deflesh the corpses of Idi Amin’s opponents that bobbed on the waters of Lake Victoria. Did his father escape the Katyn massacre, when Stalin murdered 20,000 Polish soldiers, as Kapuściński said he did? Oh, you better believe it’s a lie.

When a friend confronted him with the truth that a Tanzanian riot he wrote about was, in fact, utterly different to his account of it, Kapuściński shouted at her: “You don’t understand a thing! I’m not writing so the details add up: the point is the essence of the matter.” He maintained that formal objectivity was the real lie. Nobody was impartial. Trying to be was the fantasy.

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Adam Hochschild called Kapuściński’s work “magic journalism”. A genre all of his own. And like every good magician Kapuściński was a con artist. Since the full reveal of his lies in 2010 many have chosen to place the emphasis on the con, not the art. But I’d forgive almost anything to read a good paragraph. Kapuściński tuned more of those than most. Many truths are less profound — and frankly, less entertaining — than most of Kapuściński’s lies. The world suffers from a deficit of good paragraphs. It has more than enough facts.

And they’re not straightforward lies either. He liked to make wild literary images stand place for the facts of whole empires. In Imperium he states the simple data of the USSR’s size, twenty-two million square kilometres, with continental borders longer than the equator. So far, so factual. Then he goes further. Kapuściński says that he has never seen these borders without “thick coils of barbed wire.” In the constant snows, heats, and sand storms of the Imperium, the wire quickly deteriorates. The wire must be replaced — “one can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire.” (Can one assume?) But then he goes even further.

What about the prison camps? They must need wire too! What about the wiring for atomic ranges, barracks, warehouses!? Multiply, he demands, the amount of wire needed by the number of years the USSR existed for… That’s why nobody could buy a spoon or a hammer in Smolensk or Omsk in 1987! All the raw materials were “used up in the manufacture of barbed wire.” He imagines the most important telephone call one imperial official could make to another being: “Are you all properly wired in?” The whole flight of fancy is daft. Completely untrue. But does it express the “essence” of the USSR — that it was inefficient, wasteful, cruel, essentially an enormous open-air prison — yes. Like Tony Montana, Kapuściński always tells the truth, even when he lies.

So we parachute Kapuściński into the Kremlin to uncover the “essence” of the place, and of Putin. His credentials for the task, though faked, are peerless. Kapuściński planned, though did not complete, a trilogy on absolute power, its consequences, and its downfall. The two books he did produce, The Emperor (1978) and Shah of Shahs (1982), describe the rule and overthrow of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie and Iran’s Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The third, clinching book would have been about Idi Amin; for some time Kapuściński kept a hand-drawn diagram of the Ugandan despot’s brain in his Warsaw flat. As soon as the USSR began to tremble during the Gorbachev era, Kapuściński realised he had other things to describe.

The Shah and the Emperor are different but the same. Kapuściński plays the surreal medievalism of the Ethiopian court for laughs. After the Emperor’s undoing he claims to have tracked down every flunkey: the pillow-bearer, who slipped the appropriate cushion under Selassie’s feet when he sat on thrones built for taller emperors; the servant who followed the Selassie’s dog around with a satin cloth, ready to wipe away the urine it habitually sprayed on visiting dignitaries; the Minister of the Pen, and the Keeper of the Third Door, and the Servants of the Bed Chamber… Like the Shah’s poets, generals, and economists, the Emperor’s lackeys cringe, push, and jostle.

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Despots seek abjectly loyal men. Their inner circles are composed of galley slaves, without any autonomy. Their property and their lives are always at risk. This is Putin’s world too. “The smart oligarchs get how things work here and the dumb ones aren’t oligarchs any more,” a senior Kremlin official told the Financial Times this week. “Everyone who doesn’t like it is out, or in prison.”

In Kapuściński’s imagination despotism is a guise. He depicts the Shah and the Emperor as actors, with Iran and Ethiopia as tragic stages. The Shah performed “a one character play, and the actor was also a director. Everyone else was an extra.” The aged Selassie weighs a mere fifty kilograms. His knees are stiff and he can barely walk. But he understands his role; he is a “theatrical paternalist”. When watched “he forced a certain elasticity into his muscles, with great effort, so that he moved with dignity”. Everyone, despot included, is forced to pretend. Think of Putin’s “gunslinger gait”. Farcical dissimulation flows from the top down.

Society under the despot is fatalistic and paranoid. Iran and Ethiopia are choked and immobile places. The people exist largely to be spied on. The Emperor’s courtiers are embarrassed that there even are Ethiopians. They lament “provinces where the people are depressingly savage, pagan and naked; without instructions from the police they might do something that might offend His Majesty’s dignity”.

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Iran’s difference with Ethiopia is oil. The Shah gets drunk on it. Like Putin, he confuses petro-billions for strength, wisdom and authority. Kapuściński sees oil as “a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts”. The filthy liquid, and all the billions, poison the Iranians who control it. Western operators scramble — as they have done in Russia for decades — to pick scraps from the table. They ignore the secret police, and the vanished journalists, because the pickings are so sweet.

The Westerners ingratiate themselves with a new class: “the petro-bourgeoisie”. They produce nothing but consume restlessly. The only thing Kapuściński’s Iranian oligarchs don’t buy are English football clubs. In the sight of cramped towns and the sullen majority, the new class “mounts an exhibition of the Iranian dolce vita, knowing no measure in its dissoluteness, rapacity, and cynicism.” Do the upper echelons realise their elegant lives are being played out on a volcano’s edge?

In both cases the mixture of ever more isolated courts and rulers with an ever more immiserated population, eventually produces the explosion that destroys the regime. Though never made explicit, that was Kapuściński’s lesson for the communists who ruled Poland for most his life, and for today’s despots: you will miscalculate in the end. The despot pursues unpopular military adventures, he promises too much, and he is no longer able to see himself from the outside. Their tables stretch longer, and longer still. His people become conscious of the “subjugation, barrenness, vagueness, and the emptiness of existence”. The moment they snap — and Kapuściński calls the timing of such moments “the greatest riddle known to history” — it ends.

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The Shah tries everything. He shoots protestors, and promises democracy. His prisons overflow and they empty out. Repression and liberalisation do an ugly, jolting dance. The despot does not know which partner to choose. In Ethiopia, the Emperor begins to give up; “He was too old to stop the impending avalanche.” All is in vain. In Iran the people “simply did not want a Shah any more”. The performance ends, the lights go out, and the despot trudges off stage.

Despotisms, like great art, linger after they finish. Kapuściński lied about many things, but he was under no illusions about the fate of the despot’s audience. If life was a film they would achieve catharsis. They kill the despot. Their flags fly above the capitol’s square. Flowers are pushed down gun barrels. Kapuściński knew this was wrong. In the real world real damage cannot be undone.

His exiled Shah jets forlornly between five star ski resorts. His senile Emperor is left under house arrest. Endings that are minimal, not maximal. But the audience, their peoples? You can remove the despot, you can use his table for firewood, except he has already salted the earth. Psychologically and socially despotism lives on. What is left behind in Kapuściński’s fables of Ethiopia and Iran is “an empty sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly”.

His fable of today’s Kremlin would end this way if he were alive to write it. There are 144 million Russians. Putin may be assassinated by one of them during a palace coup. They may fill the streets until the pressure scuttles him. He will be removed somehow, one day. But if Kapuściński is right, Putin will live through what he’s done to his people for decades yet.

The Government has announced new measures to “flush out the oligarchs, criminals and kleptocrats who think they can use UK property to hide their illicitly obtained wealth”. But let’s be honest: these people don’t “think” they can use UK property in this way — they know they can, which is why they’ve been doing so on a massive scale.

According to the anti-corruption campaigners, Transparency International, £6.7 billion in “questionable funds” have been invested in UK property since 2016 — £1.5 billion of which was bought by Russians accused of corruption or links to the Kremlin. No wonder that London is a described as a “laundromat” for “suspicious wealth”.

Boris Johnson may claim that “there is no place for dirty money in the UK” but, quite obviously, the UK has been — and still is — a place for dirty money. And the Government is now struggling to do anything about it. Yesterday, Keir Starmer confronted the Prime Minister: “Why are we giving Putin’s cronies 18 months to quietly launder their money out of UK property?”

Good question. Back in 2016, the Government hosted a “landmark” anti-corruption summit at Lancaster House in London. David Cameron, Prime Minister at the time, was very clear about what Britain would do: “First, we will expose corruption so there is nowhere to hide.”

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His specific pledge was to create a “new public register of beneficial ownership” for foreign companies operating in the UK. Instead of hiding behind shell companies and other legal smokescreens, “everyone in the world will be able to see who really owns and controls each and every company”. An accompanying press release promised that this “will include companies who already own property in the UK, not just those wishing to buy”. And to emphasise Britain’s leadership on this matter, it was stated that “this will be the first register of its kind anywhere in the world”.

Well, it might have been had ministers got on with the job; but they dawdled. This week, Boris Johnson finally committed his government to the necessary measures. “We are going faster and harder to tear back the façade,” he said. Let’s hope so — because it’s been almost six years since the Tories promised the property register and it hasn’t happened yet.

In 1085, William the Conqueror ordered a Great Survey, which covered every county of England and named over 13,000 places. Yet William’s surveyors completed their work — which became the Domesday Book — in 1086.

It seems ridiculous that its modern-day equivalent should take so much longer. Admittedly, there are nearly 100,000 properties owned by foreign companies in the UK. Establishing their true ownership is no small task. But that’s all the more reason why the effort should have started years ago. Why then was it delayed?

We can’t really blame David Cameron. Hosting the corruption summit was one of his last acts as PM. Can we blame his successor? Did Theresa May drop the idea when she took over? No, it continued as official policy under her administration — and also Boris Johnson’s. Rather, the problem was the glacial pace of implementation. 

There was a consultation 2017, followed by a draft bill — and yet more consultation. In 2018, the Government expressed its intention for the register to be operational by 2021. That deadline was missed. In fact, until the events of last week, the necessary legislation hadn’t even been scheduled. When pressed to do so, ministers just answered that “we will legislate when parliamentary time allows”. 

This week, a panicked Government pulled its finger out and by Tuesday, the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill made its long overdue appearance. It’s as if it were already drafted, ready-and-waiting to go — so why did it take Putin’s bloody war to prompt ministers to act?

Some might suspect undue influence, but there’s no need for conspiracy theories. The Government’s inactions are consistent with this country’s general lack of transparency over property ownership. 

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For instance, it should be possible to go to an official website and freely access a map showing exactly who owns every piece of land in the country. But you can’t. For a fee, the Land Registry does provide limited information on individual plots. However, to get this data for the whole of England and Wales would be extortionately expensive. Guy Shrubsole — author of Who Owns England? — puts the cost at £72 million. 

Even then, about a sixth of the land in this country isn’t registered at all. There is no requirement that it has to be, unless sold or inherited. The Government could put this right if wanted to — for instance by requiring registration as a condition of receiving farm subsidies — but it hasn’t. Indeed, far from empowering the Land Registry, there were two attempts (while George Osborne was Chancellor) to flog it off to the highest bidder. Fortunately, the privatisation was cancelled by Osborne’s successor, Philip Hammond.

True transparency isn’t just about who owns the land, but also about who controls it. In particular, we need a public register of land options — legal agreements which give property developers an exclusive right to purchase potential building sites. The urgency is that options enable land-banking — the practice of sewing up the supply of potential building sites so that property developers can ration the supply of new housing to the market.  

In 2016, one Cabinet minister, Sajid Javid, had the guts to condemn the land-bankers. Measures to improve transparency were subsequently proposed. But, true to form, the Government has yet to follow through. In fact, it hasn’t even responded to the public consultation which closed in October 2020. 

It’s as if ministers don’t want to blow the lid on the murky world of British property. And no wonder. Government policy still operates on the basis that escalating property prices are a good thing. And nothing can be allowed to get in the way. For instance, Rishi Sunak wasted billions of pounds on propping up the housing market during the pandemic — when it clearly didn’t need any help.

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Inflation is never coming down

By Aris Roussinos

Encouraging overseas investment in British property is an integral part of this insane, inflationary obsession. The Tier 1 Investor Visa scheme is a prime example. Introduced under Gordon Brown in 2008, the idea was to dish out visas on the condition that the recipient invested at least a million pounds in the UK economy. Needless to say, no distinction was drawn between job-creating investment and property speculation which only pushes up the cost of housing. 

Last month, after years of criticism, the scheme was finally shut down with “immediate effect”. Apparently, the Government was concerned that the route was being exploited by money launderers and other criminals. Nothing gets past the Home Office.

Of course, I’m not saying that the London property market is entirely sustained by foreign corruption and criminality. Most of the money that flows into it — including overseas sources — is above board.

Yet this is an under-taxed and under-regulated industry that provides an ideal environment for the world’s worst people. And for what? Inflating land values enriches the wealthy, while those without property — especially the young — pay the price. Our economy is weakened and our democracy damaged.

When William I ordered his Great Survey, it was an act of domination — of taking control of a conquered land. A modern-day Domesday Book would be the precise opposite: a means by which we take back control of our own country.