The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  This initiative turned Nemtsov and Kara-Murza Jr. into major enemies of the Kremlin. The Russian authorities made no secret of the fact that they loathed Browder; he was portrayed on Russian TV as a thief and scoundrel and gradually replaced Berezovsky as archenemy number one, but still, he was a foreigner. Nemtsov and Kara-Murza were different—they were Russians.

  Nemtsov understood the danger, but he raised the stakes even further when he made it personal. The day he was released from jail in late January 2011, Nemtsov told journalists that the West should cancel any sanctions against Russia as a whole but introduce sanctions against specific people: “This new list should begin with the name of Putin! Because this person, having a legal education, trampled and tore up the Russian Constitution and justice using his feet, hands, teeth, with particular cruelty and contempt.”4

  Throughout 2011, Nemtsov kept pushing for the sanctions, and in early September, he flew to Washington to help Kara-Murza Jr. on the spot. President Obama had just signed a proclamation that strengthened the State Department’s authority to impose visa bans on people who participated in human rights violations. The State Department used it as a way to fight against the Magnitsky legislation.5

  When Nemtsov returned home, he learned that a video had just been posted on YouTube showing a meeting that Nemtsov had held in a Washington, DC, coffee shop with an American rights activist and a Russian environmentalist. It was titled, “Nemtsov is getting instructions in Washington.”6

  It was not a popular video, and it was not widely used as propaganda by the Kremlin. Its intention was slightly different. It was addressed not to the public but to the opposition, and its message was, “You might be out of the country, but we are still watching you.”

  CHAPTER 29

  DESPERATE TIMES

  In late 2011, mass protests hit Moscow. People were angered by Putin’s decision to reclaim the presidency. He had already served two full terms—supposedly the constitutional maximum. He had then ostensibly “stepped aside” and supported his former campaign chairman and supporter Dmitry Medvedev for the presidency, but the new president immediately appointed him premier, in which position he remained just as powerful as before. Now he was taking the unprecedented step of “running” again, and “running” inevitably meant winning. The public protests against his candidacy became the first internal political crisis Putin faced as leader of the country.

  Unlike his predecessor, Yeltsin, Putin never engaged in public political competition and, even during election campaigns, never took part in debates. Now the urban middle class, once so supportive of him, was chanting slogans demanding him to step down and waving placards mocking him. In the face of such public spectacle, Putin’s charm seemed to dissipate overnight.

  He didn’t manage the crisis well. Month after month, people kept taking to the streets. This scared him.

  December is always a bad time to be in Moscow. Muddy snow covers the town, and the sun disappears for weeks.

  On December 24, 2011, over a hundred thousand angry protesters gathered on the Sakharova Prospect, an eight-lane urban thoroughfare in the center of Moscow named after the famous Soviet dissident. Olga Romanova was onstage announcing the protest speakers—liberal journalists, opposition politicians, TV presenters, and a writer of popular thrillers.

  Now people knew Romanova not as a TV anchor and journalist but rather as a public campaigner for her imprisoned husband and for the rights of other Russian inmates. She still appeared on TV frequently, but now she talked only about the terrible conditions in Russian prisons and violations in the penal colonies. Romanova had spent three years fearlessly fighting for her husband and, ultimately, was successful. Three months earlier, the Supreme Court decided to revisit Kozlov’s case, and he was freed from prison during deliberations.

  Right from the beginning of the protests, Romanova had a tricky role: to collect money. A proper protest needed a good sound system and big screens, not to mention a stage. Romanova was in charge of collecting money through Yandex.Money, the Russian version of PayPal.

  She knew nothing about the technology of online fundraising. After his release, Kozlov stepped in to figure out the best way to raise money online. He didn’t hesitate to become political—inspired not only by his prison stay but also by Putin’s decision to return to the Kremlin. The Yandex account he and Olga registered became known as Romanova’s purse. The system worked fairly well: to stage this protest rally on Sakharov Prospect, the organizers needed three million rubles, or about $100,000. In just four days, they had what they needed.

  The hundred-thousand-strong protest rally on Sakharova Prospect was enough to scare Putin. He didn’t understand why people had turned against him and strongly suspected an American conspiracy. He sent his personal friend, a former finance minister, to the stage to speak to the protesters and suggest that they were being duped. From where we stood in the crowd, he didn’t sound convincing.

  Putin was watching carefully. Many people who came onstage to address the crowd were completely unknown to him. The Kremlin had made a deliberate effort to marginalize the liberals and had been successful to a large extent. But a new generation had emerged with its own charismatic leaders and new ways of communicating.1

  Two people onstage stood out to him. The first was Nemtsov, Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, tall, smiling, and handsome. The second was a short, energetic man in a peaked cap who spoke in a fast, agitated manner familiar to millions of Russians—Garry Kasparov, legendary world chess champion turned opposition activist. Kasparov had been involved in politics since 1990, and in the late 2000s, he and Nemtsov ran the opposition movement Solidarnost (Solidarity). Kasparov’s speech that day was optimistic. “There are only a few of them [Putin’s cronies], and they are huddling behind the police,” he said. “They are scared because we have lost fear.”

  To the crowds on Sakharova Prospect, Kasparov was not the most popular speaker, but that hardly mattered to Putin. Back in November 1985, Kasparov, then a young chess genius, challenged the reigning Soviet champion, Anatoly Karpov, in a monumental battle broadcast live on Soviet television. Everybody knew that Karpov, who had the bland and unimpressive look of a government bureaucrat, was supported by the Communist Party and, by extension, the KGB. Putin’s colleagues at the Soviet intelligence post in Dresden, Germany, viewed Kasparov as “an extremely impudent upstart.”2 But Putin, then a thirty-three-year-old Soviet intelligence officer, made it no secret that he favored the upstart. Kasparov won the championship and was a superstar while Putin was his modest fan. Twenty-five years later, when Putin became important, it looked like the idol from his youth was attacking him.

  In March 2012 Putin won the election. No opposing candidate had effectively united the opposition. On May 7, Putin was inaugurated in a grand ceremony at the Kremlin, to which he was driven in a black Mercedes through empty Moscow streets cleansed of passersby.

  Now safely in the Kremlin, he began his counteroffensive using the time-honored tactics of selective repression combined with squeezing troublemakers out of the country. The authorities commissioned more than two hundred investigators to prosecute protesters. The protesters tried to fight back and elected an opposition coordination council to represent all the anti-Putin political groups from liberals to nationalists, but it was a lost cause. With every rally, fewer and fewer people dared to come into the streets. The Kremlin kept sending protesters to jail, and dozens of political activists fled the country. Of thirty people elected to the opposition coordination council by direct vote, nine left the country and several found themselves in prison.

  In March 2012 the court tried Kozlov a second time. He was found guilty again and thrown back into jail, where he would spend another year and a half. Romanova lost her temper and cursed the judge in the courtroom.

  Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. was a member of the opposition coordination council, although, as head of RTVI’s Washington bureau, he was in the United States for most of the protests. But Putin believ
ed the protests were backed by and even organized in Washington. And Kara-Murza was—not coincidentally, in Putin’s mind—walking the corridors of the most powerful government institutions of the United States, lobbying for the imposition of sanctions against Putin’s friends and associates. From time to time, Nemtsov would fly to Washington to add more political weight to Kara-Murza’s lobbying.

  One sunny day, Kara-Murza Jr. and Nemtsov left the US Congress after another series of exhausting meetings about the sanctions. They decided to walk and enjoy the beautiful weather. As they walked along, a car abruptly stopped alongside them. A tinted window rolled down and a hand appeared, holding a camera pointed straight at them. They were openly under surveillance.

  On July 12, 2012, the National Day of Russia marking Russia’s official sovereignty from the Soviet Union, Kara-Murza Jr. drove to the Russian embassy on Wisconsin Avenue for a press briefing. As usual, he gave his name through the intercom and waited for a security guard to open the gate. A brief pause followed. Then a voice said, “You are banned from entering the territory of the embassy of the Russian Federation.” Kara-Murza was puzzled. “Why? Could you give the reason?” he asked. But he was told that those were the orders.

  Kara-Murza Jr. called a spokesperson. “Zhenya, what’s going on?”

  “Sorry, but this is straight from the ambassador. I can’t do anything about it.”

  He called a journalist friend and asked her to call the embassy for an official explanation. The spokesperson explained that Kara-Murza Jr. had no right to enter the embassy because he was no longer a journalist at RTVI and therefore had lost his accreditation.3 That was how Kara-Murza learned he had been fired—not from his bosses at the TV station but from the Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

  Only four months had passed since RTVI’s founder, Vladimir Gusinsky, disenchanted and desperate, had sold the channel to a little-known individual whose previous experience in media was running a TV station for the Russian Ministry of Defense.4 Now the TV channel Gusinsky had personally invested in so much to make it the global Russian voice, independent from Moscow, was firing a journalist in the United States, and the Russian embassy was the first to learn the news.

  The next day, Kara-Murza was trying to wrap his mind around how he would now support his three young children, all of whom had been born in the United States. Nemtsov called from Moscow and told him that, according to his contacts, the Kremlin had had Kara-Murza blacklisted. No Russian media would hire him.

  It was, effectively, a total professional ban.

  If 2012 was a bad year for the Russian opposition, 2013 was going to be even worse. People didn’t see the point of taking to the streets anymore, and the opposition coordination council dissolved itself. Protest leaders felt crushed and confused. Putin was in the Kremlin and supported by the majority of the country.

  In February, Garry Kasparov decided that he would not return to Russia. The law enforcement agencies had started poking around, and he feared imprisonment. Kasparov settled in New York.5

  The next month Boris Berezovsky died mysteriously at his multimillion-pound mansion, Titness Park, near Ascot in Berkshire, England. A bodyguard found the Russian oligarch’s lifeless body lying on the floor of a locked bathroom with a ligature around his neck. It remains an open question whether Berezovsky took his own life or if somebody helped him.6

  His death effectively marked the symbolic end of the first wave of political emigration under Putin. Concentrated in London, Berezovsky had spent years leveraging the public’s perception that he had made Putin president and thus could probably crush him. That era was over.

  Another oligarch was withstanding treatment similar to that of Gusinsky and Berezovsky. A bespectacled man with a habit of speaking in soft, measured tones, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the wealthiest Russian oil tycoon, had fallen out with Putin in the early 2000s. They had clashed over the country’s oil resources. At one point, an overconfident Khodorkovsky publicly challenged Putin in a meeting at the Kremlin.7 Putin promptly had him imprisoned, and by 2013, Khodorkovsky had spent ten years in jail and been stripped of most of his assets.8

  Nevertheless, to Putin, Khodorkovsky remained a problem. The Kremlin suspected that the money he still had was being used to recruit liberal intelligentsia to raise their voices on his behalf. The years-long campaign to release the oligarch became a self-organizing force. The force was not a political party, and Khodorkovsky himself was not a politician, just an oligarch. Nevertheless, the patently unfair trials that had landed him in prison also had served to cement opposition to Putin’s regime. Khodorkovsky, in a penal colony first in Siberia and then in Karelia—the northern region bordering Finland—kept writing articles and sending them to Moscow’s popular newspapers. The newspapers kept printing them, causing debate in Russian society. As the nonpolitician Khodorkovsky became more and more a political figure, the Kremlin liked him less and less. After the protests in Moscow, Putin lost patience. He didn’t want Khodorkovsky in his country. Besides, there was little to fear by sending him abroad, given what had happened to Gusinsky’s and Berezovsky’s once ambitious plans.

  On December 20, 2013, Khodorkovsky was summoned from his cell by prison guards and taken under guard to the St. Petersburg airport. He was put on a plane bound for Germany.

  Putin had agreed to free Khodorkovsky and throw him out of the country; in exchange, Khodorkovsky made a promise not to engage in any political activity. To make sure Khodorkovsky kept this promise, Putin held a hostage: a personal friend of Khodorkovsky’s was also released from prison but banned from leaving the country.

  Kasparov and Khodorkovsky were abroad, along with dozens of other activists who had fled persecution. They were spread all over the world, from the Baltics to Ukraine to the United States. The new Russian opposition in exile now emerged.

  Garry Kasparov worked frantically to change Western public opinion about Putin. He published a book and articles in the United States damning Putin. But his main project was to get Russian activists and opposition politicians together to talk and coordinate their efforts.

  Mikhail Khodorkovsky set up shop first in Switzerland and later moved to London. He also provided the Russian activists—those who lived in Russia and those in exile—the room to gather and talk, organizing conferences in Eastern and Central Europe. His idea was to take advantage of porous borders to work with the people who stayed politically active in Russia. He kept his word to Putin and didn’t organize a political party. But from his luxurious headquarters at 16 Hanover Square, he launched a civil society activists’ organization called Open Russia. Although funded from outside, it was based in Russia with branches in many Russian regions.

  Khodorkovsky believed he could do one other thing. “There are people who are trying to do risky things in Russia—activists, journalists—so we can help them by taking the responsibility and heat on us. We all well understand the risk—it’s Novichok.” Khodorkovsky was referring to the nerve agent used in the poisoning of the Russian former spy Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom. “But we are doing this consciously to help those in Russia.”9

  Khodorkovsky hired Kara-Murza Jr. as deputy head of Open Russia. Kara-Murza, who had been kicking around Washington, DC, with no luck finding a new job, was thrilled to have a chance to go back to Russia and do some meaningful work there. The two had a meeting in New York, and Khodorkovsky very calmly said to Kara-Murza, “I strongly advise you not to take your family with you.”

  Kara-Murza thought that Khodorkovsky might have become a bit paranoid in jail but followed his advice nonetheless. He moved to Moscow but left his wife and three children in Washington, DC, and flew back twice a month to see them.

  Both Kasparov and Khodorkovsky toured the United States and Europe giving talks and lectures about Russia’s political situation. Kasparov joined Nemtsov and Kara-Murza Jr. in lobbying for the Magnitsky legislation in Washington. However, neither Kasparov nor Khodorkovsky were optimistic.

  “The n
ew wave of emigration from Putin’s Russia is younger, more educated. But many of these young people are not eager to fight Putin’s regime. They think it’s senseless. Right now, to be honest, Putin’s achievements at using emigration look better,” Kasparov admitted to us in a midtown café in New York just a day after PutinCon, a conference he’d organized at the New World Stages theater near Times Square. The one-day event was intended to serve as a wake-up call to Americans. Dozens of speakers exposed Putin’s reign in detail. It was an interesting gathering but hardly a game changer.10 “The only potential I see in this emigration is that after Putin’s gone, maybe 10 percent of them would be ready to get back and fill government positions,” Kasparov said.

  Meanwhile, politically active citizens—civic activists, environmentalists, artists, politicians, most in their twenties and early thirties—kept leaving the country. Abroad, they connected with experienced liberals—experts, pundits, journalists, economists—who had been clashing with Putin for many years.

  The number of Russian applications for political asylum in the United States reached 2,664 people in 2017, a twenty-four-year record, exceeding the high of 2,117 in 1994.11 The 2017 figure more than doubled the number of applications by Russians since 2012, when Putin had been elected to a third presidential term.