For three years, Abbas Gallyamov wrote speeches for Vladimir Putin. “When I worked for him, he was totally different from what we see today,” he says in an interview with THE Duty from Israel, where he has gone into exile. Now a strong critic of the regime, the 52-year-old was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison at the end of July for having “discredited” the Russian army.
It was shortly after Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000 that Abbas Gallyamov was first invited to join the Kremlin strongman’s editorial team. “It happened somewhat accidentally,” he explains. “A number of staff members were changing, and there was a kind of vacuum.”
The young political scientist held this position — “minor,” he says — for about a year. Then, in 2008, when Putin handed over the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev to become prime minister, he was invited back to join his speechwriting team. “It was a much more senior position.”
Over the next two years, Abbas Gallyamov put to paper Putin’s public words on a variety of topics, ranging from economics and foreign policy to domestic issues.
Friendly and funny
“I have rubbed shoulders with [Poutine] hundreds of times, he says. He was a very rational, very logical man. You couldn’t have imagined at the time that he would become what he has become today. Even he wouldn’t have believed it of himself.”
Putin was running Russia at that time like a good business leader. “He knew how to ask the right questions to get the right answers and how to distribute tasks so that they were accomplished as efficiently as possible.” And sometimes even with cordiality and humor.
In 2010, during a meeting with regional governors and members of the central government, Putin asked the participants to drop the official speech once the journalists had left the room.
“He asked a fairly young first governor who had just been appointed to explain to him the problems he was facing in his region,” recalls Mr. Gallyamov. “But the governor was completely taken by surprise because he was about to read his speech.”
To lighten the mood, Putin was very cordial, silencing the laughter in the audience and reiterating his request to the governor to tell him, simply and in his own words, what was wrong in his region. “But the governor didn’t know what to say, so he started reading his speech again,” Gallyamov recalled, laughing.
Putin, too, couldn’t help himself and burst out laughing with the audience. “When he doesn’t feel threatened, when no one questions his authority and when he feels that his position of dominance is secure, Putin doesn’t need to prove anything,” his former speechwriter explains. “He’s very friendly then.”
Threat
The situation worsened in the following months, however. In late 2011, major protests broke out in Russia after Putin announced his intention to return to office as president and his United Russia party won parliamentary elections amid concerns about possible electoral fraud.
“Putin became very aggressive at that point,” Mr. Gallyamov recalls. Then, in a dark roll of the dice in 2014, the Kremlin launched the military campaign that allowed it to annex Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula. “That gave his popularity a big boost, and he began to govern more peacefully again.”
But over the years, the “Crimea effect” has faded, popular dissatisfaction has grown, and Putin’s aggressiveness has resurfaced. It is clear to Abbas Gallyamov that the war in Ukraine is not connected with any supposed fascism or Nazism present in Ukraine or with any NATO aggressiveness that is coming too close to the Russian borders, but has everything to do with Russia’s domestic politics.
“It was because he needed a diversionary war and he thought he would simply repeat what he had achieved with Crimea in 2014, with the same effect. [sur sa popularité]. » But the Ukraine that was attacked in February 2022 was much stronger, politically and militarily, than the one that had been amputated from part of its territory in 2014, he emphasizes. With the sequel that we know.
Forced into exile
In 2010, before Putin’s authoritarian drift, Abbas Gallyamov left his job as a speechwriter and returned to the republic of Bashkortostan, where he grew up, to become deputy head of the administration of President Rustem Khamitov. After the annexation of Crimea, the political scientist left the public administration to become an independent political consultant.
Mr. Gallyamov — who describes himself as “pro-democracy and pro-liberal” — says he has maintained a critical stance against the regime over the years. “But before, [le Kremlin] was more tolerant.” Even before the war in Ukraine began, Putin’s former speechwriter chose to go into exile with his family in Israel. “I already didn’t feel safe anymore [en Russie]. »
Interviewed in the media, Mr. Gallyamov has on several occasions voiced criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although he is now out of the Kremlin’s reach, he was sentenced in late July by a Moscow court in absentia, that is, without being present, to eight years in prison for having “discredited the Russian army.”
“They know they can’t put me in jail. But it sends the message [à la population russe] that if you try to do the same thing in Russia, you know what will happen to you,” he says. Despite these excesses, Abbas Gallyamov says he is convinced that Russia has a bright future ahead of it. “It is simply a question of how long it will take and how many bumps we will encounter along the way.”