But if the Soviet Union’s Communist Youth rallied members around a particular ideology, in Nashi’s case its ideology, or even a unifying idea, was hard to pinpoint. It has at various points called itself “anti-Fascist” – being initially created to fight the numerous, thuggish neo-Nazi movements in Russia. But its official title identified it as a “public organization for the development of sovereign democracy,” a hazy political doctrine hatched by Vladislav Surkov. Given the fact that its most publicized activities have included the harassment of opposition figures, it is fair to call the group simply pro-government, or pro-Putin – supporting all the multifaceted, self-contradictory policies that state power in Russia can come up with.
But for the legions of its members, it was the connections, opportunities and offers of travel that lured them into its fold.
Powerful personal connections – whether the invaluable state officials who could make anyone’s career, or the friends one made from across the country – fostered a personal network that facilitated the biggest challenge for a land as large and inhospitable as Russia: forging communities. For all the notions about Russians being inherently “collectivistic,” sheer distances and irreconcilable differences in value systems made effective networking and civil society hard to achieve. The very idea of organizing so many dispersed, different people was in itself so daunting that the automatic – albeit dismal – consensus was that it could only come from above – and so the Russian state occupied its traditional role in co-opting civil society. Those with a penchant for activism and no reason to be politically opposed to the state often had few easy alternatives in their communities.
But the central message one would expect from a totalitarian sect – aside from supporting the state – never materialized. Natasha, who was certainly young but not unintelligent, described being mesmerized and confused by regular meetings in the Kremlin with Vladislav Surkov.
“Surkov… is fascinating. He talks about so many complex things. He is super well-read,” she described. “But I don’t always understand what he means. Sometimes he talks about ‘business angels.’” Natasha hadn’t the foggiest idea what he could possibly mean by them, but he was apparently referring to rich people who provide start-up capital.
Nashi’s lack of ideology, its pragmatic, do-whatever-you’ve-got-to-do-as-long-as-you’re-loyal credo was no afterthought; it was a reflection of a stark, gaping and utterly postmodern lack of ideology unique to Putin’s Russia as a whole.
The path in the woods had led nowhere – and a small minority was indicating to its leader that the fire of his torch had gone out – or had never been lit.
Chapter 15
The Heretics
1.
“PUTIN, I DO not want you,” Olga Loseva, a journalism student proclaimed her political stance on a placard as she stood in the cold on Sakharov Prospect, at the second mass protest rally on December 24, 2011. When asked what she meant, she explained that “Putin is a bad person. [Nashi poster girl] Sveta [Kuritsina] from Ivanovo said she wants Putin [though Sveta Kuritsina herself said no such thing]. Well, I don’t want him.”
And when Artemy Troitsky, the music critic and TV host took to the stage to speak, his message, too, was personal – not political: “If a president is not doing it with his wife, he is doing it with his country!” he called to roars of applause.
They came with posters, caricatures and hand-crafted puppets, spending all their creative energy to ridicule one man. They painted him as a tyrant, a gangster, a used condom, an orc and a killer of children. In February, weeks before he was about to be re-elected, they came to Revolution Square to celebrate the most pagan of holidays: the welcoming of spring. To celebrate the start of Lent in Orthodox tradition, that pagan vestige was incorporated, as it was incorporated into the Catholic tradition as Fat Tuesday, as a last party before a weeks-long fast, and also as something central to the very fabric of Russian life: the burning of winter in effigy.
What they burned in effigy on Revolution Square that February wasn’t just winter – it was more like the sacrifice of a sacred king.
The mass protests that erupted in December 2011 materialized like some elemental force. Every few weeks, rallied through viral Facebook posts, tens of thousands would start gathering on central Moscow squares authorised by City Hall for the staging of a protest against… what exactly?
Ostensibly, the “creative class,” as those demonstrators came to be called, had been outraged by the tearing down of a democratic façade, by Putin’s impudence at returning to the presidency, and by the rigged parliamentary elections that garnered a victory for his United Russia party on December 4.
But the elections were no more rigged than countless others that much of this same creative class had ignored in the past. When it immediately became clear that no amount of authorized mass protests would force the Kremlin to hold another election, they turned their attention squarely on the ruler himself. Whatever their new leaders were saying from the stage, the protest movement shared one common denominator with the pro-Kremlin activists that they called “triumphant thugs:” it was all about Putin.
On the face of it, the demographics of the protesters couldn’t have differed more from the clientele that Putin was used to negotiating with. Entrepreneurs, office managers, IT specialists, students, artists, mathematicians, PR specialists, advertisers – and possibly their parents – these were the people who rarely went to the state for anything. Many of them relied on private medicine, studied abroad, sent their children to private kindergartens and tried to stay clear of the police, unless it was to pay an unavoidable bribe to a traffic cop. They got their information over the internet, not on national television, which they despised. Each month, the money they paid in taxes amounted to the salary of a provincial teacher, doctor, or police officer. They formed co-operatives to ensure that they, and not the corrupt municipal authorities, decided how their apartment buildings were managed; outside Moscow, these first true homeowners formed land co-operatives in places where Soviet summer homes, or dachas, once stood. When they needed gas infrastructure, they had the clout and the money to work with local officials and get the job done.
And yet this active, energetic middle class constituted, by various accounts, less than 15 percent of the population of Russia. (Judging by salary alone, recent research from the Russian Academy of Science estimated that the middle class constituted no more than 8 percent of the population. At 59 percent the country boasted the largest class of the working poor, and according to the same research, just 19 percent of the population had a household computer.)236
The protesting segment of the middle class seemed to be projecting on to Putin everything they didn’t like about Russians on the other side of the gaping divide: the perceived backwardness, xenophobia, homophobia – even hanging a rug on the wall became a symbol of entrenched backwardness. The passive acceptance of Putin was equated with ignorance, cowardice and fear. By contrast, the protest class took to drinking wine at the increasing number of hipster venues popping up around Moscow. By the end of that winter, the hipster was the protester and the protester was the hipster; the ability to navigate (and afford) iPhones and drink French wine at Moscow’s Jean Jaques café chain suddenly identified one as an opponent of Putin, for in that Manichean divide, where good was beautiful and innovative and technological and bad was corrupt and old and Putin, there was no other political programme to identify with.
When Putin admitted that he had mistaken their white ribbons for condoms, the comment was taken as proof that Putin was not “with it” and never would be again.
And so they turned up for half a dozen mass demonstrations that were closer to carnival than politics: brandishing placards of Putin with condoms dangling out of his eyes, or a condom wrapped around his head, or even of Putin as a condom – stitched up and about to be used for a third time. Demonstrators handed out real condoms with large inscriptions on the wrapping warning that they could only be used once.
For the first time in Russia’s history, an autocrat was tolerating the abuse, allowing tens of thousands of people to gather in the street and call him a used condom. It was a precarious balance that went against the very foundation of an autocracy: soon, either one or the other would have to go.
2.
At first, these “angry cosmopolitans,” as Vladislav Surkov had dubbed them, had no formal leader. But over a few months, one emerged: Alexei Navalny, a young, charismatic political activist, anti-corruption blogger and lawyer.
On the surface, he was the prototype of a dynamic, Western-style professional politician – in a society where only power mattered, he had all the potential to bring politics into the equation.
First emerging as a talented young debater in 2006, Navalny gained notoriety by organizing a series of televised political debates. As a lawyer, he was bent on using existing mechanisms and institutions to fight what he saw as the country’s chief ill – corruption. In January 2011 he launched the RosPil website – aptly named for the Russian slang word pilit, “to saw” – a euphemism for illicitly “sawing” or siphoning funds from a budget. A wildly successful internet fundraising campaign brought him hundreds of thousands of dollars that he would use to hire lawyers and experts to pursue each allegation case-by-case, meticulously tracking and battling government-level embezzlement.
Navalny first called United Russia a party of “crooks and thieves” in a February 2, 2011 radio interview – but in the coming months the slogan went viral. By the end of the year it had become so ubiquitously associated with the party of power that a good chunk of the credit in diminishing the number of votes that it garnered – rigging notwithstanding – should go to Navalny.
By 2013, his corruption exposés achieved something unprecedented: after being outed by Navalny as the owner of millions of dollars of foreign real estate, Vladimir Pekhtin, a member of the State Duma Ethics Commission, found himself forced to resign.
From the beginning, Navalny had come to represent what a better-developed democracy would have clearly groomed as presidential material. But it was a testament to the primitive nature of the fight for power in Russia that its most promising oppositionist – who had spent seven years in the Yabloko party – did not initially attempt to run for public office at the beginning of his political career. Only when threatened with a 10-year jail sentence, and a show trial that he could turn into a political manifestation, did Navalny finally admit, in April 2013, that he wanted to be president. His campaign for Moscow mayor in September 2013 – which he lost with a nevertheless impressive 27 percent of the vote – was fuelled in part by his persecution by the state.
Was he biding his time, crafting a powerful image and a reputation as a successful anti-corruption crusader to reveal his cards when the moment was right? Or was he simply waiting for the government to make the first move? “This is not an election, it’s a coronation. When we have real elections, I’ll run,” he told me during a protest in February 2012. But only Putin seemed powerful enough to give them those elections.
Whatever moves the government would need to make in order to propel Navalny into the political limelight, it had yet to make them in the winter of 2011–2012. Without a leader and a clear ideological platform, a carnival seemed all that the protesters had left as spring approached and as Putin’s re-election became an inevitability. It was as though they themselves had accepted that Putin’s return to the presidency was not the culmination of a logical set of events, but an elemental force that they could combat only by turning to the gods – “philosophical demands,” as one activist described it.
“If someone knew what to do in this situation, then Putin would be gone. There isn’t any know-how,” Maria Baronova, an activist leader who was prosecuted for inciting mass protest in the repressive crackdown that eventually followed the demonstrations, told me in November 2012. “People who have a philosophical education, but who’ve never served in the army – what can they do? We’re not hungry, we’re not in poverty, and people who aren’t hungry can’t keep this up for long, making philosophical demands. You can’t build a civil society on philosophical demands.”
Throughout the winter and spring of 2012, the protesters seemed to be testing Putin: how brutal, how repressive are you going to get? The game of chicken that the standoff had become had turned passive-aggressive. If the protest movement had a strategy, it appeared to be to get its opponent to strike first, cause grievous harm, and discredit itself. Protesters appeared to be trying to outdo each other in creative ways to insult Putin, while Putin – in a move that is rather unprecedented for a true autocrat – continued to allow the protests to take place, all the while blaming them on the US Department of State.
With Putin’s re-election, that strategy had disintegrated. Thousands signed up as election monitors, but their presence at the polling stations only exposed the mechanisms of rigging, rather than ensuring a clean vote. Looking behind the façade, seeing the people who were actually doing the rigging, and the votes that were being cast for Putin, only underscored the difficulty of institutional change, fuelling the desperation.
May 6, 2012, the eve of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration and his physical re-entry into the Kremlin, was a turning point. Between 50,000 and 100,000 people gathered for a planned demonstration on Bolotnaya Square, just across the bridge from the Kremlin, and despite their purported programme, what was really on people’s minds – even if not everyone spoke their thoughts – was physically preventing Putin from entering that fortress.
It wasn’t exactly clear who provoked whom on that day – either police had deliberately made it difficult for protesters to enter a previously authorized demonstration area, or planted provocateurs started taunting riot police that they were going to storm the Kremlin. All of a sudden, frustrated protesters pushed through a police line, knocking down several metal detectors. And that was when all hell broke loose. Protesters threw bricks and bottles at an equally belligerent police force. Police helmets floated in the river nearby.
On the embankment, strewn with litter and bloodied napkins, a group of enraged protesters chanting “We are the power” were confronted by an equally enraged riot police officer. “You are not the power, you are scum,” he told them, visibly agitated. Another officer held him by the shoulders, as a man will hold a friend at bay when he thinks a fight is about to break out.
Police eventually dispersed the rally, but sporadic protests would erupt daily on Moscow’s squares for the remainder of that month…
The protesting class, joined by writers, sympathizing journalists and beautiful people in general, took to the streets, insisting that they were merely taking a stroll. In the manner of Occupy Wall Street, they occupied a boulevard square in central Moscow, taking to the fashionable cafés that surrounded it.
But unlike Occupy Wall Street, there was far more at stake.
3.
It was shortly after the May 6 rally that the repressions began. The Tsars of Russian history, for all their brutality, quartered their convicted traitors, but, unlike the English, did not publicly disembowel them. Yemelian Pugachev, who led an insurrection against Catherine the Great, was sentenced to be quartered on Bolotnaya Square in 1775. Nearly two and a half centuries later, Putin’s charming spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, made a private remark that was nothing short of a historical Freudian slip: “The protesters who injured the police should have their livers smeared over the asphalt.”237 He was referring to Bolotnaya Square and the riots that had transpired there on May 6, 2012.
By June, police had raided the homes of a dozen activists. Dozens would be arrested in the following months, facing jail terms of up to ten years. Virtually the moment that Putin was back in the Kremlin, he introduced three bills toughening criminal penalties for inciting mass unrest, forcing NGOs with foreign financing to register as foreign agents, and setting up a registry that would have the power to shut down websites deemed extremist. Parliament rushed to pass all three bi
lls within weeks. In an unprecedented move, the State Duma would strip one of its deputies, Gennady Gudkov, of his mandate for taking part in the protest movement – although the official pretext would be an allegedly illicit security business. And criminal proceedings would be launched against the most promising leader of the protest movement, Alexei Navalny – on the official pretext of embezzlement.
It was a crackdown so haphazard and confusing that it left oppositionist leaders disoriented – as though, on the spectrum of Russian history, they weren’t harsh enough. “These are not repressions. These are spasms,” Ilya Ponomaryov, one of the few parliamentarians leading the protest movement, told me that autumn. “This government only knows how to use instruments of petty harassment.”
Indeed, what seemed to aggravate the protesters was the ideological confusion of the repressive apparatus – the targeted arrests of Putin’s government appeared puny.
“What is happening is not totalitarianism. It’s not democracy. It’s simply insane,” Maria Baronova said.
It was no wonder, then, that at their height, the protest rallies had regularly attracted monarchist groups – and these were not old ladies holding up pictures of Tsar Nicholas II. They were young people in anonymous masks.
The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult Page 26
