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

The tigers are pacing up and down the makeshift cage; their incredibly muscular, healthy strides and orange fur jars with the gloomy light and misery of their keepers. The old man smiles at what he loves: ‘God… so that jackal of a president is coming back… until 2018 at least. It’s such a long time. It’s got so bad this is why we said we’d support the boys… didn’t we?’ She has given up trying to make him wash his hands and nods vigorously. ‘We were ready to help the partisans. If they had come to us. We’d have hidden them, fed them… I was ready to take them to the places that only the tigers know in the Taiga where the police would never find them.’

They never came. We drive further north, through hours of low hills and Taiga emptiness. We passed a cement factory. Then we got stopped by the police and were made to hand over money (the car was actually speeding) for a supposed fine. The conversation comes back to the ‘plot against Russia’. They try their best to convince me the bloodsuckers are real: ‘Look mate… look into that forest. There’s a tiger in it. Just because you haven’t seen him doesn’t mean he’s not there.’

Eventually, Kirovsky welcomes us with a Soviet-painted placard to the fallen of the 1941–45 war: ‘We Will Never Forget Our Heroes’. The place is poor but you can still see the outlines of a faintly utopian grid in the leafy streets and neatly placed ‘krushchevki’. They are dilapidated, like uncared for leftovers of an extinct civilization. On the walls of the tenement where Roman Savchenko grew up, and who at eighteen in 2010 was the youngest partisan, is scrawled in English:

‘TRUE TILL DEHTH [sic]’

His truck-driver father is standing there in a wife beater waiting for me. His arms are covered in huge tattoos of Jesus Christ. He has a golden-toothed smile. It’s true, he says, that the police are intimidating locals, beating them up and cultivating fields of cannabis, which they then peddle in the locals schools. But there is something sinister about the gang that took over his son’s life. He leans over the bonnet of his vehicle and speaks softly. ‘My son’s not guilty… all is not as it seems… I think this was an FSB operation gone horribly wrong.’ The theory of Vladimir Savchenko is that some Russian ‘Europeans’ were sent to the local police force. Desperate to get out they started to engineer fights with the local kids in order to frame them as capturing a whole militia. ‘These guys were desperate for a promotion to get back to Europe.’

But it strikes me that this kind of conspiracy theory – the default reaction for a post-totalitarian society – is a way that Vladimir is hiding from the truth. ‘I’ve driven the whole country in my truck,’ he spits. ‘And it’s the same lawlessness everywhere. From here to the snows of the Komi.’ He tells me how deep and bitter the shock was, the day he was called by a friend, when he was working on the APEC buildings to be told, ‘Your son has gone on a shooting spree.’

His wife then appears, a woman clinging onto prettiness in tarty heavy make-up; she doesn’t appear to believe this theory. ‘I feel real pride in what my son did. Because… now everyone knows that the police are drug dealers and criminals. That they live like drug lords and kill young people.’ Roman’s brother was beaten up, killed, and then his body dumped in a forest by the police. ‘The boys just cracked.’

They have smuggled a phone into jail thanks to ‘special ways’ so they can speak to their son. His mother dials him. ‘Darling… are you all right? Is everything fine? I love you.’ She passes the line to me. For a second I am lost for words, until the obvious question hits me – how does a man feel when he shoots a policeman?

‘We felt belief and faith in what we are doing. Pride that Russian guys so young could rise up.’

But how does a man feel inside, I asked him, not intellectually?

Roman thinks for a second. ‘You feel… adrenaline innit. But I’m not a fascist… we are not against Muslims or immigrants… we did this to rise up against the police. They are drug dealers and drug pushers. They are animals. They had killed so many people. How many had their drugs killed? How many lives had they ruined? They had been beating us, beating us for years and years. They were peddling first weed and then heroin. We had to do something to stop them. Putin is a jackal.… Take another route? Take protests? Can you really name one protest in Russian history that has had an effect? Do you really think here, in Russia, there is any other way to stop the police regime than by guns? Do you really?’

I feel I should say something. I don’t. He rambles on:

‘Have you ever read this book? It is called The Gulag Archipelago . It will tell you everything you need to know. The police, Putin and Yeltsin, they are the same thing… They are part of the same structure that has been beating and killing Russians for years. When they wanted us to be strong and to work in their factories it was different, now they want us to be weak and lazy, alcoholics and drug addicts – so they sell us drugs. Do you really think anything other than guns can stop them? We are different here, we’re far from Moscow, that is why we stood up and I feel pride we did.’

There are some clanks that sound like cell bars and Roman says he has to go. ‘Mate, the prosecutor’s coming.’ The line goes dead. His father seems irritated when I tell him the story that his son the partisan had breathlessly told. ‘Let’s go to the market. The market director will tell you everything. He really knows everything.’

We drive to the miserable market place and meet a man called Sacha, with a scraggly beard and a few gold teeth. We stand by our cars. My feet crunch on broken glass. Someone in the market is playing Spanish party music. Vladimir Savchenko crosses his Jesus tattooed arms. The fading dyed Christ glares like a warrior, not a saviour: ‘I told you. This was a KGB or FSB operation gone very wrong. I’m off.’ And off he went. The market director shakes his head.

‘All is not what it seems… I couldn’t say this in front of him… but they were not partisans… they were hooligans. Basically, it’s like this. If you take a helicopter over the Taiga you will see huge gigantic fields cut there – fields of cannabis. This is what it is all about. The police know. They are the drug dealers. What happened… and I know these boys, they were always in this market hanging out… they wanted to be in the racket and take over the drugs trade, in place of the police. It got out of control and they ended up saying all this stuff that hit a nerve when they knew they were dead meat. They were hooligans pretending to be partisans. But that’s not the most important thing. Basically, here there is no state. And there never was one. And there never will be one until it is taken over by another. All this happens because here there is no state. You see?’

The scraggly bearded market director, his skin a moonscape of blotches and scars, gave me a hint to leave the village. After speaking to a few passers-by – one alcoholic hunter, a former military duvet salesman, a belt trader and a hunting-camouflage stallholder – I did. They seemed divided into those who felt that the boys were hooligans pretending to be partisans or hooligans who turned out to be partisans. In short – I got the impression that nobody really knew.

On the six-hour drive back to Vladivostok the ‘photographers’ were silent and sulky. They were bitterly disappointed that on closer inspection the people seemed to think the partisans were as tainted as those they hunted. In a sense, so was I. They smoked furiously, then started to swig cans of beer at the wheel.

I drifted in and out of a shallow sleep, half drunk and dispirited about Russia – for me and the ‘photographers’, for the people who lived here, it had become evident that it was not enough to say ‘Down with Putin’, or ‘Down with United Russia’. Places like this needed much, much more than simply a new president. They needed decades of state building.