by Sean Mallen
Finally, he shut off his phone, apologized with a winning smile, and gave us the full attention a media-wise Western politician understands instinctively. Like most opposition leaders, he claimed that Putin’s power was eroding.
“If Putin will be so-called re-elected, protests will go on, two, maybe three years because people are tired of him and want change,” he said.
Mikhail Prokhorov was also drawing much attention from foreign reporters, mainly because they actually knew who he was. The billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets NBA team was seeking the highest office in his homeland, with lots of money to pour into a campaign that had to date yielded polling numbers south of 10 percent.
His news conference was jammed with cameras — high-priced communications consultants swarming the room, slick posters stuck up everywhere.
At six-foot-eight in an expensive suit, Prokhorov was easy to spot when he strode into the room. He had the best advice money could buy, but his answers were vague, unquotable. He refused to speak any English, as it would be a sure vote loser. The billionaire’s exact motivations seemed unclear. Oligarchs who challenged Putin often came to unhappy ends, so he was choosing his words carefully and we all wondered exactly what kind of game he was playing.
With a couple of hours of downtime before our next adventure, we split up: Dan back to the hotel for room service, Emmanuel off to do his own work, me to explore the neighbourhood in search of lunch. Moscow is tricky to negotiate for visitors who do not speak Russian and who do not know where to look. I second-guessed myself, fearing that I was playing restaurant roulette before finally settling on a joint called My My, a couple of blocks from the hotel.
It was a cafeteria-type place that at least had some English translation on the posted menu. I asked a server, “Borscht?” She shook her head impassively, which I took to mean they were all out. I pointed at what appeared to be some kind of dumpling stuffed with spinach, which she plopped onto a plate and handed over with hospitality techniques evidently learned in the Gulag. It might have been a yak testicle for all I knew.
I picked up a little dish of what I presumed to be a complementary sauce. The cashier pointed at it with a head shake but I was determined to pretend I actually knew what I was doing. She shrugged. It was some kind of sickly sweet custard that in no way matched the main course, so it was left uneaten. But my yak ball was not bad at all. Even better, it did not make my ass explode, which would have made the rest of the day’s work awkward.
Putin supporters, although seemingly the majority, proved to be tricky to locate. After many phone calls, Emmanuel arranged an interview with one of his more glamorous admirers. Tina Kandelaki was both the host of her own TV show and a former cover girl for the Russian version of the lad’s mag Maxim.
In early evening, we trekked to her office, which resembled a fashion magazine’s digs. Her assistant answered the door, a tall young woman who herself had the look of a supermodel: slender, sky-high heels, and a jawline so sharp it could cut paper. She served us tea and chatted while we waited. Although she would have been perfectly at home on a Paris or New York runway, she told us that she voted Communist in the parliamentary elections. The Soviet Union collapsed when she was a baby, but she believed there were many aspects of the old system that were admirable.
Then Kandelaki bustled in, apologetic for her lateness, saying she had been asked to check out some of the latest allegations of electoral fraud. She oozed TV host: perfect figure, perfect dark hair, lips painted a perfect bright right — a bundle of energy, talking about five things at once, asking our impressions of Russia, and delivering opinions a mile a minute in English that was barely understandable.
Her admiration for Putin seemed more practical than fawning.
“You can agree or disagree, but he knows what he’s going to do.”
She believed that despite the expected dirty tricks and the preordained result, Russian democracy was showing signs of maturing.
“The next election will be with real competition, with a different class who want to take up power.”
“A real democracy?” I asked.
“I hope so, yes.”
We sampled Russian democracy, 2012 style, the next day.
Our small view of voting showed many Muscovites believed in the process enough to show up and cast a ballot. The halls were jammed at the polling station we attended at a school. (Our headaches over getting accreditation were justified — without it we would not have been allowed inside.)
In plain sight were some of the ninety thousand webcams that Putin had ordered installed as a nod to fighting fraud.
A young opposition party observer named Philip Miklashevsky looked at them, shrugged, and said, “It doesn’t make a big difference.”
Fraudsters, he noted, would need to be supremely dumb to do something illegal in sight of the cameras.
A Putin voter told me with a straight face that he thought the election would be clean, offering a ringing endorsement: “I’m voting for Putin because things didn’t get worse under him.”
As we exited, we bumped into a livid Margarita Vladimirovna as she stormed out, declining to cast her ballot, proclaiming loudly that the election was not fair and the voting was badly organized.
Back at the hotel, I started writing my story and incorporating the news from around the country. Turnouts were reported to be high, to the delight of the Putin forces, but observers noted many instances of the so-called carousel voters — people bussed from polling station to polling station to cast multiple ballots.
There was also a welcome outbreak of satire: the protest group FEMEN showed up at Putin’s polling station minutes after he voted, stripped to the waist to reveal the slogan “We steal for Putin” painted across their bare bosoms, and made a joking attempt at taking his ballot box.
Seconds after the polls closed at 9:00 p.m., the Great Man was declared the runaway winner and he appeared on stage at a giant rally near Red Square. There appeared to be tears running down the tough guy’s face as he proclaimed that his victory was a defeat for those who would destroy Russia.
We made the short walk over to the rally so that we could use the happy winners waving their flags as a backdrop for my stand-up. Clearly, many had been toasting the result with several hits of vodka.
We went to bed knowing that the result was not so newsworthy as the expected reaction. We wondered whether Russians would rise in the streets as they had after December’s tainted parliamentary elections. The authorities were not going to make it easy. Even before the polls closed, hundreds of police appeared at the entrances to Red Square in a blunt message of warning.
While pro-Putin factions were given permits for several rallies at choice locations around the city the day after the election, the opposition got exactly one: for Pushkin Square. Naturally, this was where we and the world’s media would descend.
We met for a coffee the morning after the election to work out a plan for the day. But first, Dan had some news: turned out that he had been propositioned by a couple of prostitutes in the lobby of our expensive hotel — they lured him over with broad smiles when he walked in after a pre-bedtime cigarette. He declined.
Emmanuel’s jaw dropped. He had heard of hookers working hotels in Moscow, but never at one of the pricier joints. Hard to imagine it being tolerated so openly in the lobby of a luxury hotel in New York, London, or Paris.
Our first challenge in advance of the rally was to find expert analysis of the election result. Being a small player on the international scene, we were having trouble getting phone calls returned. Emmanuel advised that we head to the studios of RIA Novosti, the government-controlled news agency. Sure enough, the lobby was a pundits marketplace, with multiple interviews underway.
We waited in line for our chance with Nikolai Zlobin, a genial, shaggy academic who was gleaming with sweat by the time our turn came. He took no notice of drips hanging off his nose and cheerfully advised us to fire up the light and ask our questions.
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Zlobin believed that Putin’s real challenge would come not from the critics shouting in the streets, but from his own supporters. The president-elect made many expensive promises that could be difficult to keep.
“I suspect some of his loyal people will turn against Putin because they feel deceived,” he said. “This is bigger problem I think because they have money and influence.”
We rode the Metro to Pushkin Square for the opposition rally and found the station jammed with protestors. Their mood was not improved when the escalator stopped partway on the long journey to the surface, leaving hundreds immobilized, elbow-to-elbow. As the minutes dragged on, some guys in the crowd barked loudly at unconcerned transit cops who were leisurely strolling down the adjacent stairway.
Finally, the escalator came back to life and we emerged on the square. It was dusk. The place was teeming: live TV trucks parked haphazardly around the edge, protestors making their way in to join the show. There was a nod to security as we all had to pass through metal detectors to get in, but the erstwhile guards showed little interest.
Pushkin Square was filled to the brim. There were young people carrying posters depicting Putin in impossible sexual positions and older Muscovites proudly displaying the hammer and sickle, their nostalgic “I told you so” statement that things really were better when Brezhnev and gang ran the show.
As we filtered through the crowd, looking for a place to set up our tripod to record some of the speeches, there was a stir ahead. Someone important had arrived and was drawing the attention of several cameras.
It was the billionaire Prokhorov, who just that morning was pictured with other opposition leaders seated around a table with Putin in a show of unity, despite the dirty tricks. He strode right toward us so I stuck a microphone in his face, asked what he was doing at the anti-Putin rally, and was rewarded with a brief clip in English.
“After … comments after the meeting,” he said, caught off guard. Not exactly a revelatory statement, but at least something.
As the sun set, the temperature dropped and our teeth were chattering despite all the body heat. They were a well-behaved group, mostly middle class and educated, ready to make reasoned arguments but unlikely to storm the barricades of the Kremlin. After listening to the usual suspects make the usual criticisms of Putin, the rally-goers started streaming out.
We lurked around the edges, searching for trouble, and stumbled upon a skirmish. A more hard-core group was making noises about marching on Red Square, but the cops were having none of it.
The riot squad blocked the street that led to the city centre. A few protestors made a show of squeezing past, but got nowhere. The cops by Russian terms were relatively restrained — no one was clubbed, but several of the more persistent guys were given the bum’s rush down the stairs to the Metro.
Dan captured some of the roughhousing, which I knew would make our story. Instinctively I walked into the middle of it, iPhone rolling, and was caught in a squeeze, then spurted out backward as the riot squad marched ahead. I flipped the video back on me for a dandy vlog as I gave a play-by-play description of how the cops were telling us all that it was time to go.
As far as I could tell, no blood was shed and the rally was petering to an end. With deadline approaching we hopped on the Metro back to the hotel to file. Things livened up afterward as the cops arrested a few diehards who refused to vacate the square, including some of the opposition leaders.
But the popular rising against Putin never really happened, even though video cameras captured some carousel voters who admitted to casting as many as five ballots.
Our final day in Moscow was quiet, a feature on Russian emigration already largely shot and written. We got some scenic video just outside Red Square, amidst a touristy outdoor market. I negotiated with a vendor to buy a nesting doll of Russian leaders, from Putin back to the czars. We agreed on a price, which he then upped as soon as I handed over a note and asked for change. Emmanuel looked at me and shrugged as the vendor impassively refused to budge off his new price — our fixer making the point through gesture that one must expect to be fleeced in a place like this.
For lunch, he took us to a restaurant called Uzbekistan, which, strangely enough, featured Uzbek food. It looked like a place out of the Arabian Nights, with plush sofas for seats, carpets hanging from the walls, and rooms named after Scheherazade and Ali Baba. Emmanuel said belly dancers were featured at evening meals.
We were served an Uzbek dish called lagman, a spicy mutton stew, accompanied by a huge loaf of bread in the shape of an oversized donut. We ripped off chunks like Taras Bulba and dipped them in our bowls. Exotic and delicious.
With that, we said farewell to Emmanuel, Dan returned to the hotel to start editing, and I took advantage of a couple of free hours for a bit of sightseeing. Most of the Kremlin museums were closed, but I did get into the armoury for a look at some royal jewels and regalia. The State Historical Museum on the opposite side of Red Square was a huge, slightly dusty tour through Russian history. Uninspiring.
It occurred to me that we had seen only a pinprick of this giant nation, scarcely getting out of central Moscow during our short visit.
After editing our final story, Dan preferred to stay at the hotel to pack his gear, but I could not resist a small night on the town. A couple of friends from the CBC invited me to meet them at a bar, so I ventured out alone, paying for a more expensive hotel taxi to minimize the chances of being hijacked to Tashkent.
The cab arrived at the appointed address, but there was no bar in sight. The driver spoke no English but had been given the address and name by the doorman at the hotel. He pointed to the darkness between two buildings. I thought for a moment about the wisdom of walking down an unlit alley on a cold Moscow night, but took a chance and survived. The entrance was just around a corner and my friends were inside a funky place full of what appeared to be students and young professionals, observing the traditional Russian custom of getting hammered on vodka.
They ordered another round, with glasses of cranberry juice on the side to quench the fire. I made the mistake of sipping my shot glass and was immediately reprimanded for a gross faux pas. In Russia, one always gulps down the entire drink. Another round was ordered to correct my form. And another. And another. Moscow spun slightly.
We called it a night before causing too much damage to ourselves. The CBC Moscow correspondent did me the courtesy of translating for the gypsy cabbie I waved down so that I had at least a shot at getting back to the hotel. The driver quickly became confused, so I just repeated “Bolshoi, Bolshoi,” knowing that the theatre was only around the corner from our place. This he could find.
Swaying only slightly, I stumbled into the hotel lobby where, sure enough, two exceptionally friendly women of a certain age fixed me with a warm smile — apparently the same working ladies who had earlier introduced themselves to Dan. I smiled back and kept walking to the elevator.
Midnight in Moscow and it was time for one more sleep before getting on the plane.
Chapter Twenty-Three
We sprang for the more expensive hotel taxi to get us to the airport: five thousand rubles for a crazed driver who risked life and limb, swerving in and out of lanes in an unnecessary race that against all odds ended with our safe arrival.
Domodedovo was as chaotic on exit as it was on arrival, carry-on bags scattered everywhere as we made our way through security. I was left with about five minutes for shopping and opted for the safe choice: a stuffed Russian teddy bear for Julia.
Moscow was minus ten degrees when we left. London was nine degrees and raining when we landed at Heathrow. Thanks to the time difference, we arrived at noon, allowing me to get home in time to pick up Julia at school. She melted me immediately with her patented run and jump into my arms. There really is nothing better.
But within minutes she was pissed after I denied her request for a Nutella crepe. Crepes had grown into negotiable currency in her first months in London. Ev
ery afternoon there was a lineup of kids waiting outside the kiosk opposite the Hampstead Tube stop getting their after-school treat. For Julia, it was a key element in assuaging the challenges of adapting to a new country. If we allowed it, she would happily eat a Nutella crepe every single day. We agreed to limit her consumption to one a week. I reminded her that she had already had her ration for the week, but strong-willed seven-year-olds are not known for keeping agreements that involve limiting access to sweet treats.
“YOU’RE RUINING MY LIFE!” she wailed.
Julia was becoming noticeably more difficult to handle, showing early signs of teenaged defiance, less willing to listen.
Several stressful strands of our London life were now converging.
I was in negotiations with Vancouver for a possible second year, all contingent on whether the company would pay for Julia’s schooling. And contingent on whether my wife and daughter would even agree to stay. Despite their not infrequent outbursts to the contrary, however, they seemed to be slowly relenting, slowly growing to actually enjoy London, to accept the arguments I made when I got the job, that it is a grand city with many charms and that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Julia had learned that wearing a uniform at school was not fatal and that it was possible to eat at a cafeteria without being poisoned by exotic foods such as “jacket potatoes.” Isabella had made friends, was enjoying her time at Little Hands where she could pursue her long-held desire to improve her sewing skills, and was generally coping with being forced to abandon a much-loved job and move to another country.
Gradually we came to an understanding: if the company would pay for Julia’s school, we would stay another year.
With our bargaining position in hand, I spoke to the same two people who had hired me, explaining how we had grown to love the place and I loved the job, but the economic realities were tough and most expatriate deals included paying for education.
