Андрей Солдатов - The Red Web - The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

On August 1 Putin visited a camp on Seliger Lake where his pro-Kremlin youth movement assembled. Inevitably he was asked about his plans for elections, and he didn’t respond. Nobody understood why Putin and Medvedev could not decide who would run for president. Both teams tried to push their candidates toward announcing, and Pavlovsky, who had once been a Putin spin doctor, said that “silence of the president and prime minister costs the country dearly.” [11] Komsomolskaya Pravda radio broadcast, August 1, 2011.

But still they hesitated.

On Saturday, September 24, 2011, there was a stir in the seats at Luzhniki, Moscow’s vast sports arena, which was filled with members of the establishment, the people of Putin’s era, as Putin walked to the podium. Spread out in front of him was a sea of government officials and bureaucrats, famous sportsmen and celebrities, all attending the second day of a party congress for United Russia, Putin’s party and the dominant force in parliament and the corridors of power. As the foot soldiers in the party of power looked on from the stadium to a stage decorated with a bear and the Russian flag, a question lingered: Would Medvedev run for president again? Or was he just a puppet, a temporary stand-in for Putin? The Kremlin functioned in such an opaque manner that no one was really sure.

Putin took the stage with a swagger of self-confidence. He leaned on the podium, offered a few pleasantries, then declared that he and Medvedev had settled things among themselves years ago. He spoke slowly and seriously. Putin said that people had wanted him to lead the party ticket in the coming elections for parliament and president, but perhaps it was best to leave that to the current president, Medvedev.

Then Medvedev took the stage. After a long, detailed policy speech, he finally came around to what everyone was waiting for: he was in fact endorsing Putin for a return to the presidency, that he was not going to run again.

The applause from the party people was long and enthusiastic. The real power was coming home to the Kremlin—again.

One of Medvedev’s close advisers, Arkady Dvorkovich, was watching on television. He let everyone know of his disappointment on Twitter. “Well, nothing to be happy about,” he wrote.

The moment was the first tremor in what would become a wave of discontent in Russia. The boisterous democracy of Yeltsin’s era had all but died by this point. The Putin party, United Russia, was gray and unremarkable, without any serious ideology other than loyalty, made up of legions of bureaucrats, politicians, and those who depended on them. But unquestionably United Russia was boss. It had no serious competition for power.

On the day of the party congress Zygar, the editor of TV Dozhd, was in the city of Perm attending a theater premiere. [12] Zygar, interview with authors, August 2014. When the Moscow office called with the news that Putin was returning, he was sitting with his wife at a café. It was already cold and snowy in Perm in the Ural Mountains, 725 miles east of Moscow. Zygar went out on the street. In shirt-sleeves in the cold, he made round after round of calls on his cell phone to his producers, journalists, technical personnel, then to the anchor and the chief executive of the channel, Sindeeva. It took almost two hours. His first instinct was to react professionally, to cover the news and only later to think about his personal feelings of melancholy.

At 11:21 p.m., broadcasting from Moscow, TV Dozhd launched a special edition of their show Here and Now . The show was aired under the heading “The Third Term: The Next Twelve Years with Vladimir Putin,” and it opened with the words that the “castling” was over—a chess reference to a special move, allowed only once in a game by each player, in which the king is transferred from his original square to another. The announcer said ominously, “Putin returns to the presidency.” The guests on the show talked about illusions they held that Medvedev might have remained and how they lost these illusions. The mood at the studio was gloomy.

Elsewhere in Moscow emotions poured out on social media, a torrent of surprise and disappointment. “Well, the first twelve years went by fast,” wrote Yuri Saprykin, editor-in-chief of the magazine Rambler-Afisha . When his friend Svetlana Romanova pointed out that Putin could serve as president until 2024 and she would be Yuri’s age by then, he replied, “Svetlana, some spent all their lives under Ivan the Terrible, or under Stalin, twenty-nine years,” then added, “those who survived.”

Much of the disappointment was about symbols. The sense of loss was not about Medvedev personally—after all, he was part of Putin’s machine. But many felt they had lost a chance to exit the past toward something new and promising. There was also a vague feeling of being insulted, that it was wrong in a democracy for two guys to decide who would be in power, to have worked it all out in advance, as Putin had implied. Wasn’t it rather condescending of Medvedev and Putin to just declare who would be the next president of Russia? Weren’t the voters supposed to have a say?

On the same day Boris Nemtsov, a longtime leader of the opposition to Putin who had earlier been a deputy prime minister under Yeltsin, held a party congress in Moscow. It was a small party of three well-known politicians, and they were all critical of Putin. The congress was convened to decide what line the party should take at the upcoming parliamentary elections. Nemtsov heard of the news of Putin’s announcement when he was at the congress, and he was furious. “The form is mocking,” he declared of the Putin-Medvedev job swap. “The Russian people were just told that these two—whether Dolce and Gabbana, whether Socrates and Spinoza—thought it would be like that, period. In principle, it’s all about the arrogance and humiliation!” He claimed that Putin’s decision was the worst scenario for Russia. [13] Alexander Podrabinek, “Boris Nemtsov on the Rokirovka in the Tandem: It’s the Worst Scenario for Russia,” RFI, September 24, 2011, http://ru.rfi.fr/rossiya/20110924-boris-nemtsov-o-rokirovke-v-rossiiskom-vlastnom-tandeme-eto-khudshii-stsenarii-dlya . Nemtsov was under constant pressure, and surveillance. In fact, a video had just recently been posted on YouTube of a meeting he held in a Washington, DC, coffee shop with an American rights activist and a Russian environmentalist. The video had been recorded just a few weeks earlier—and its appearance was an ominous signal that he was being watched, even on US soil. [14] Nemtsov visited the United States on September 15–16, 2011, to take part in a panel at the Harriman Institute on the Russian elections. The video is available at YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZemHhZcpKsQ .

On September 25 a rally of the still-small political opposition to Putin was scheduled at Pushkin Square in the center of Moscow; it had been approved before Putin and Medvedev’s announcement. For five years the authors had attended almost all of these small rallies by the opposition in the city. Once again, on this day it seemed that we already knew all the participants. Only a few hundred people came. The leaders of the opposition sensed the mood of helplessness we all shared. Ilya Yashin, a twenty-nine-year-old opposition activist, declared somewhat desperately to the crowd, “Yes, there are very few of us. But yesterday the last romantics lost their illusions about the thaw, liberalization, or democratization, modernization…. Many people today are starting to think about how to leave the country. People are counting how old they will be in twelve years. People don’t want to spend their life under Putin. But I ask you, and your relatives and friends, not to leave our country. We should not give it to bastards!”