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

They called themselves the ‘Primorsky Partisans’ and this shaky October 2010 video was their attempt to explain themselves. The boys claimed they had been driven to assassinate others, because they could no longer bear the blows of an abusive state, but in the same video they revelled in showing off the ID card of a policeman they had shot, grinning as they recounted how they had found him as ‘drunk as a pig’, before they ended his life. They damned the police in their village for terrorizing them, for being cold-blooded killers, but shot dead officers from other towns and mocked the ‘drunk pig’ they slaughtered for only having bottles of vodka and not weapons in his secure safe.

Who these boys actually were and what had actually happened in Kirovsky was clouded in the same uncertainty as anything that happens in Russia’s lawless hinterland. In Putin’s outback – police being gangsters, mafia pretending to be nationalists, nationalists who are actually police – is nothing abnormal. What was new was that a gang had justified themselves in a political language that had electrified the nation. The Kremlin was horrified that according to an independent poll by the radio station Ekho Moskvy over 60 per cent of respondents were ready to help the partisans and saw them as ‘Robin Hood’ figures. 35This could be seen on the streets, as across Vladivostok graffiti started appearing – ‘GLORY TO THE PARTISANS’.

The partisan video had hit a raw nerve – exhaustion with police brutality and the fusion of gangsterism and officialdom at the lowest level. According to the Russian Academy of Sciences, 34 per cent of the nation ‘always feel like killing’ corrupt officials, whilst a further 38 per cent ‘sometimes feel like killing’ them. 36

The regime was so frightened that it sent more than 1,000 officers into action to crush these boys, a force numerically larger than some EU states’ contributions to the Afghan campaign. Tracked down to a flat in the drab town of Ussurisyk, which lives half the year in snow, the other half in gloom and drizzle, the gang held out for a few hours, firing out of the apartment. Their perceived leader died before the rest were arrested.

In Vladivostok, everyone was shaken by the failed ‘partisan insurgency’ but most do not blame the boys. They feel they were driven to guns because in ‘the depths’ the situation is so out of control they had little other choice. There is a sense of satisfaction that somebody, somehow – however deranged – gave the police the sock in the face that it needed in order to see how angry the people were at corruption and official hooliganism.

Normal people in the Far East do not see the 2010 shooting as a bizarre local incident. They see the partisans as part of the same protest wave against the regime, but in its purest, crudest form. Russians in the Far East feel that Navalny and the Moscow opposition are simply the most sophisticated expression of simmering anger at a state that does nothing for them. In their minds Putin’s state is now personified by his criminalized policemen. Unlike in Moscow, this is not anger at authoritarianism but anger about inefficiency and incompetence. Putin’s failure is that he has not pulled the bureaucracy out of the 1990s, along with the national economy. This is anger at a weak, not a strong state, which cannot stop its agents moonlighting as killers. This is why they call them the ‘werewolves’.

It is a drizzly afternoon in Vladivostok and outside the district court, policemen shelter by the door, smoking and telling dirty jokes. Inside, through the security check, an air of oppressive absurdity reigns. This is the trial of the partisans. As it would happen, all the documents that would incriminate the law enforcement agencies in this case have suddenly ‘disappeared’. The judges, their secretaries and even the prosecutor himself seem to hold an ironic distance from the proceedings. In the courtroom itself the partisans stand in a cage gormlessly waiting for the case to resume, once a decision is taken concerning the ‘disappeared’ documents. In the linoleum corridors, their lawyers insist that this is evidence that the Kirovsky police were not only criminals, but viciously persecuting these young men. In the confusion I slipped into the courtroom to speak to the partisans through the bars of their cage. I only had time for one question before the policemen rushed towards me then threw me out of the courtroom. ‘Why did you do it?’

The baby-faced killer Roman Savchenko (b. 1992), grabs the bars and shouts: ‘Because the police are drug dealers!’ The rest start to holler with him out of the cage. ‘That’s why we did it! Because the police are all drug dealers!’

The door slammed, the truth – if there even was one, would be in the village. That evening, I told the director of the local museum, Victor Shalai, in his favourite hipster bar, the Café Montmartre, that I was planning to go to the village. He was horrified. Like everyone who lives in Vladivostok he considered the villages lawless and dangerous. ‘Don’t go without protection.’ The ‘protection’ the effete intellectual convinced me to take turned out to be two anti-Semitic ‘photographers’, formally unemployed, who make ends meet taking pictures of ‘girls, most topless’. One beefy, the other lanky – and in possession of a tough Mitsubishi – they agreed to drive me to Kirovsky.

We met at 6 a.m. by the bullying Statue for the Fighters of Soviet Power on the portside and drove north. Though hardly ‘opposition’ the photographers despised Putin, admired the partisans and bandied around Navalny slogans in a slightly unnerving (but in the provinces very common) manner. ‘The party of crooks and thieves’, in their minds, was none other than a mysterious plot against Russia, orchestrated by the Jews. ‘We need a clean Russia’, was not a call for government efficiency and anticorruption, but a more systematic purification of undesirables. But as we drove on the rutted main road to Khabarovsk, practically a farm track in places, it was clear they were unsure on a lot of the details of ‘the plot against Russia’. The driver shouted into the backseat:

‘Moscow is a vampire. It’s a bloodsucker. The Soviets would take money and invest in these places, in the villages, in the cities – now Moscow sucks up our oil, minerals and gold… and leaves us weak, begging them for some crumbs… They steal all our money and send it out to America and Britain. They’ve been working inside… the plot against Russia… for years you see. But Russia survived a lot… We survived the Tatar-Mongol yoke, we survived the Polish yoke, we survived the yoke of the Yids… we’ll survive the Putin yoke.’

The lanky photographer is suddenly a bit confused. ‘But didn’t you say that Putin’s yoke was the yoke of the Yids the other day?’ The conversation fades into whether or not Putin is a Jew.

We stop before the village. ‘We want to show you the kind of Russians that keep up the sky.’ Past empty hills of Taiga and mist we come to the dying village of Spassk, or ‘blessed’, on the very edge of China. Here, down a mud track, lives in unexpected penury a former Soviet zoologist and his wife, with their bric-a-brac zoo. There are two Amur tigers behind barbed wire, two bears going crazy in tiny cages that do not fit them, and shambolic netting thrown over some timid lynx. They came when it was the future for Soviet science. They ended up feeding the animals off their meagre pensions and some geese they keep.

‘What the hell happened?’ half laughs the sad ‘zookeeper’. ‘We used to be half the world with all those socialists countries… and now what the hell are we? We are practically enemies with Belarus and Ukraine.’

‘Wash your hands, they are covered in tiger shit,’ sighs his wife, before telling us how she tastes disappointment: ‘The village is dead. The Chinese cross the border whenever they want in cooperation with the mafia that call themselves the border police. This all happened because of the plot! The enemy within! Those groups that have been working to destroy Russia from the inside all these years… they finally managed.’