Ben Judah - Fragile Empire - How Russia Fell in and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin

Instead of creating a symbol for his prowess, Putin had created a symbol of his incompetence – one for Navalny and the opposition to ‘audit’. They called it ‘one giant act of theft’. Then, with only weeks to go before the APEC summit, the new $1 billion road from the airport to the bridge cracked and began to collapse under heavy rain. This was not due to ‘lack of funds’, as every kilometre of this road had cost $20 million – when the average for a road in the EU is $6.9 million. 28It was due to shoddy work and probably the embezzlement of those same funds. The government was forced to admit that the project had resulted in almost $500 million dollars having been stolen. 29

Incompetent, inefficient, corrupt and outrageously expensive, but the Russian state and not Chinese economic power is lord in Vladivostok. This hit home when I spent a day with a crestfallen Chinese nationalist. This visitor from Shenzhen, a frequent commentator on angry websites demanding China ‘stand up’, had taken the Trans-Siberian to see the lands to the east of Irkutsk, which he said ‘were once Chinese, and should be China’s living space in the future’. The dream of this mild-mannered IT specialist with the geopolitical appetite of Genghis Khan, he confided as we strolled along the port side, then past the Memorial to Fighters for Soviet Power, was to live on a ranch as a colonialist on the island of Sakhalin, ‘once we make it Chinese again… I love nature so much you see…. Nature is… so beautiful .’

His inflated hopes of a Chinese takeover had been punctured by the lack of any visible community of his kinsmen. A short visit together to the Chinese-dominated market would destroy them for good. Moving down the market from a car mat vendor, to a crockery salesman, through a bag peddler and a belt trader, the patriot accosted these poor people from Manchuria: ‘Do you know this was China? What do you think about getting it back?’ The responses did not enthuse him. Only two market hands were really aware that this territory had been Chinese and said they would like it back, a further four said this was so impossible they didn’t think about it, the remaining six we spoke to neither knew, nor cared. ‘They are not righteous Chinese,’ the nationalist mumbled, visibly deflated and a bit confused. ‘They are all business focused. Like most Chinese… it makes me…. so sad .’

The Kremlin is felt so keenly as an overlord in Vladivostok that ‘federalism’ is a term of abuse. Moscow is seen as a colonial force that dispatches its policemen, its FSB colonels and its prosecutors to control the ‘Primorye’, or Maritime, province. Here, as in all regions of Russia, ‘rotation’ means that all the commanding posts in the local ‘silovik’ structures are held by men chosen by the Kremlin. They are usually ‘foreigners’ from different Russian regions.

The Russians of the Far East are angry at their paradox – they feel their hinterland is a treasure trove, but because all mining subsoil rights belong to Moscow they will forever be begging the capital for funds that will come from the profits extracted from their own wilderness. Local elites believe Moscow is taking ‘their’ rightful tax revenues from natural resources. ‘It’s not just that Moscow takes all the money,’ says Andrei Kachalinsky, ‘but it takes the best money, like the revenues from the port and the pipeline. This makes people angry. In Primorye we are not separatists… but against Moscow.’ This is why United Russia only scored 32.9 per cent in the parliamentary elections here. 30In the local elections the following year only 10 per cent turned out to vote. 31

China is not exploiting this region as a colony – Moscow is. In the name of defending Russian territory against Asian hordes, the state has decided to launch a whole series of new initiatives to consolidate its ‘tough hand’ on this resource rich territory. In all the ‘frontier regions’ it is illegal for foreigners to buy land. They have upgraded the ‘tough’ governor of Khabarovsk province to head the new Ministry for Far Eastern Development. This is not a process that they trust the locals themselves to be directing, as Moscow is preparing new legislation to tighten its grip on what really matters here: the geology.

A new gigantic ‘State Corporation for the Development of Siberia and the Far East’, answerable directly to Putin, is being planned. 32Dubbed the ‘Far Eastern Republic’ it would have preferential access to resources in all sixteen districts of eastern Siberia and the Far East and have the right to allot licences to mine for natural resources such as gold – currently something only federal or regional authorities can do. Answering directly to Putin, the future mega-corporation’s decisions would not be answerable to any regional or federal authorities other than the Kremlin itself.

Moscow, they say here, ‘is a colonialist’. Moscow, they say ‘only cares about itself’. Resentment against the vertical has fused with resentment against the police, the prosecutor and the interior ministry troops – the local ‘silovik structures’. Sent from the capital on ‘rotation’, often engaged in corruption rackets and violent extortion, many have started to blame corruption on the centre.

On the Pacific, where Russia is so starkly an empire that treats all of its provinces as Kremlin geology-colonies, this fury erupted in 2010 into a crime that shook Vladivostok and the whole country. It was as if Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed had come to life, in a Putinist form in the remote village of Kirovsky over 300km into the Taiga and the north. It was here in an impoverished, jobless, wreck of a collective farm, without any oil-wealth pumped in to resuscitate it, that a gang of boys barely in their twenties tried to wage a partisan war. Not against imaginary Chinese colonialists, but the police – ‘the werewolves in uniform’.

They made the video themselves. The camera shakes and presses unprofessionally close to the ‘partisans’. These are four Slavic young men crouched in a damp hutch. Their leader, topless and unshaven, with his fist on the barrel of an AK-47, puffs out his chest and holds forth with the grim pomposity of a YouTube Jihadist, but in the slurred Russian of the working class:

‘We are honest people, and you are scum, so we will fight you till the end, until you kill us, or until we win… most likely you will kill us. But we are not afraid of you… People will be on our side, anyway, because justice is on our side. We have already won. We killed the fear and cowardice in ourselves, you could never do this… we don’t have any weapons to fight you, but still we are not afraid of you and will fight.’ 33

The boy ‘partisans’ smile cretinously – one buttoned up in camouflage hunting gear waves a pistol, another grins in a black baseball cap. They seem so excited to be on film. They have been on the run, but two of them barely need to shave. Yet this is not the kind of Internet video that male football hooligans or opposition activists aged eighteen to twenty-two usually post, all sound and fury against the Kremlin, as a prelude to absolutely nothing. Because for the past few weeks they have been on a killing spree. They have shot two policemen and two drug dealers, stolen one police car and robbed a police station, before leaving it in flames. They claim this is politics – not hooliganism, that they are partisans – not brigands:

‘And this is not some spontaneous act… no, we planned and did it on purpose in order to specifically kill you gangsters. You are the real criminals, you can’t be named in any other way… You cover drug trafficking, prostitution, you steal the woods… everyone perfectly knows about it and everyone is afraid of you because you have all the powers to do that… People are afraid of you, but be aware that there are still people who are not afraid of you… The only thing you can do is to terrorize helpless and submissive people, who are accustomed to indignity… And your mighty so-called empire, the Russian Federation, is entirely based on alcoholism, slavery and cowardice. One day it will collapse, and you will fall into the abyss together with it.’ 34