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

Moscow was aghast. Into this, the deepest of Russia’s historical wounds, the Americans were keen to push the NATO alliance. Ukrainians see this as their right as an independent country, but real horror gripped the Kremlin. ‘This was our 9/11,’ says Pavlovsky – or a moment Moscow realized its defences simply weren’t there. Rewinding back to 1991, when the intelligentsia clapped as Yeltsin cut loose the other SSRs, as the country as a whole shrugged off the independence of the Ukraine – because nobody wanted to pay to keep these people – there was an overriding conviction that it didn’t matter if they became independent. People thought, ‘They will just stay where they are.’ The foreign policy establishment thought an expensive empire would be converted into a cost-effective sphere of influence, not truly independent. Had Russians thought at the time that Ukrainians could join a NATO alliance led by George W. Bush they would have gone to war to stop it exiting the USSR.

Not only did Putin’s foreign policy machine look completely kaput, but key figures in the establishment, the same men who were supposed to be keeping his regime afloat, failed as well. The outcome in Kiev was considered so vital that the Kremlin assigned its most experienced agents to the task. None other than Dmitry Medvedev (then almost unrecognizably pudgier), the Kremlin chief of staff, ran the case. He had dispatched the spin doctors who had manufactured Putin’s own election victory – Gleb Pavlovsky and his sidekick Sergey Markov – off to Kiev.

Putin’s agents failed so utterly in 2005 that his leading spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky was forced to flee his hotel and the rest of Kiev like a thief. He had been assigned by the Kremlin to swing the election for the pro-Moscow candidate, but flopped so miserably that the Western-looking opposition had triumphed. This was the Orange Revolution and Kiev was ecstatic, but Pavlovsky was terrified. He needed to get out of the country of his birth, Ukraine, as quickly as he could. But Pavlovsky did not want to leave anything to chance. So, he slipped on an orange scarf and an orange hat, and disappeared into the throng as it shouted pro-American slogans, among a crowd dizzy with delight that they had wrestled back a rigged election. This is when Pavlovsky drew the obvious conclusion – they needed their own protesters.

Moscow changed tack. They reinstalled the old soundtrack of Soviet propaganda. Out went screeching about ‘international terrorism’, in came campaigns against ‘the enemy within’. Then they began rebuilding the Komsomol, the youth league that had fed recruits into the party and mobilized red youths to parade through the streets.

The Kremlin likes to have outfits on the shelf in case it needs them – and in January 2005 it whipped out a small sponsored rabble it had toyed around with and sent the spin doctors who had failed in Ukraine to give it a massive upgrade. The outfit in question was called ‘Walking Together’ and had flickered in and out of importance as a Kremlin experiment in Putin’s first term. These were nasty people. The guy in charge was Vasily Yakemenko, the government’s favourite ‘youth’. This was a man who had grown up in the gyms and gangs of Lyubertsy, a working-class Moscow commuter slum, synonymous with the mob. According to the former head of Russian Interpol, this friend of the Kremlin had been an active gang member in a circle of criminal weightlifters who carried pictures of Hitler in their wallets. 60He was certain some gang members had being raping the local girls and staging robberies across Moscow.

From what we know about their techniques, the KGB, then the FSB always found a use for such thugs. What we know for certain is that in 2000 Yakemenko became the head of ‘Walking Together’, a youth group that was supposed to bring toughs out onto the street to cheer Putin. At first it received only a limited amount of attention and cash, but jumped to notoriety nevertheless. Yakemenko, destined to be a minister, and a posse that included several future members of parliament, began a campaign against writers. In particular they took against Vladimir Sorokin, the enfant terrible of Moscow post-modernism, who writes about endless queues in which nobody knows what is being queued for, a Russia whose citizens are every day required to eat a daily ration of cellophane-packed human faeces, or a gay sex scene between none other than clones of Khrushchev and Stalin.

The Kremlin-supported ‘Walking Together’ began suing the country’s leading satirist, harassing Sorokin for being a ‘pornographer’ and distributing the offending passages as leaflets on street corners. In a scene worthy of the artist’s work, the Putin youth mounted a gigantic papier-mâché toilet, brimming with foam, before ceremoniously throwing in some of the 6,700 books by ‘pornographic’ authors they had assembled: Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin and Karl Marx. The following morning, this ‘book toilet’ was exploded with 400 grams of TNT. Nevertheless, the organization had neither proved particularly useful or able to mobilize the ‘youth’ and it sunk into disrepute. Members in St Petersburg were exposed as trading in pornographic tapes.

The Kremlin was too desperate to care about this. What had been a marginal experiment after the Orange Revolution went mainstream. This scandalous flop was earmarked a $17 million budget and was converted into a mass organization that is now synonymous with Putinism: Nashi, ‘Ours’. 61Yet the atmosphere inside Russia was jittery after what had happened in Ukraine, jittery enough for Surkov himself to arrange a meeting with the biggest names in Russian rock to ask that, if Orange unrest ever broke out, they would at least stay neutral.

Top officials were not being paranoid about protests. There really was unrest bubbling across Russia. In 2000, the state statistical service had recorded only 80 strikes, falling to 67 in 2003 before exploding to 5,993 the following year. 62With all eyes in the government focused on Kiev on 1 January 2005, few would have thought about Federal Law 122 coming into force that day. The reform replacing in-kind benefits with cash also stripped pensioners of their Soviet right to free public transport. This sparked the biggest protest wave since the 1990s. It was huge. Some estimates suggest over 300,000 people demonstrated across the country. 63Superficially these protests were against Federal Law 122, but in reality they were about post-Soviet injustice and the miserable conditions that the generation who had won the ‘great patriotic war’ had been reduced to. In Moscow, St Petersburg and car-producing Tolyatti thousands of old Soviets and young radicals took to the squares (conspicuously absent was Putin’s ‘generation emptiness’) demanding less reform and more benefits. A disorganized rabble of twentysomething leftists, old communists and aggrieved pensioners even briefly blocked the road linking Moscow to Sheremetyevo Airport.

There was never a serious threat to the regime, but having seen how suddenly managed democracy unravelled in Kiev, it was paranoid. Nashi was created so that they would never be caught out in future. Nervously, the government immediately slowed the pace of economic reform, from then on attempting few structural changes that incurred social pain. ‘We felt the troops were massing somewhere close,’ recalled Pavlovsky. ‘We needed something to fight against the ideology of colour revolutions, pro-Western anticorruption nationalism,’ said Sergey Markov, his sidekick in Kiev. He was now also assigned to Nashi.

Yakemenko’s army was ready by March 2005. Come ‘Victory Day’, when Russia decks itself out in red and remembers the more than 30 million who were devoured by Hitler’s war, the self-styled ‘Anti-Fascist Youth Group’ was marching 60,000 strong on this emotive day, through the streets of Moscow. 64