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

For such people, Nashi was a godsend. If you lived in a small town like Ivanovo, where 40 per cent of the population in 2005 lived below the Russian poverty line, it offered the promise to be suddenly lifted into a respectable structure that could get you to Moscow: conferences, a badge, events, even a career. 57This is why over 120,000 rushed into an organization that celebrated Putin’s birthday and marched along the boulevards round the Kremlin with hundreds of slightly comic drummers leading the way.

The crowning event in the annual calendar for a Nashist was camp ‘Seliger’. There was cheering as Putin and other Kremlin hands did ‘guest lectures’, but crucially there was a good time with free booze, camping and encouragement to ‘reproduce for Russia’. Pavlovsky was worried that those who turned up were really there for the beer and not battle, hectoring them that they lacked ‘brutality’. But Nashi leader Yakemenko was on a high, spending the night with a teenager in her Seliger camp tent. 58

The kind of girls who turned up at Seliger were poor, vulnerable people. One girl, Sveta Kuritsina, was cornered at an official conference and prodded to explain why she supported Vladimir Putin. This girl, dressed in fake white fur collar, mouthed such an astoundingly inarticulate response that she became an Internet sensation:

Nashist: My name is Sveta and I am from Ivanovo city. United Russia has made a lot of achievements. They lifted the economy, we became… more better dressed… and it ain’t always been like it is now! And it was a very big achievement. And for the farmers’ thing are going very well too.

Reporter: What exactly have they done for the farmers?

Nashist: Eurgh… There is like more land… eurghhh… Umm… I dunno what to say… I saw more land… Ummm… and more vegetables… 59

This poor girl was universally mocked by the new middle class, by Moscow TV and by thousands of bloggers, as a symbol of ‘the churls and careerists’ that had joined Nashi. What she could not explain is that she lived in a ‘hostel’ with bare, damp walls and a faded poster of Angelina Jolie, in a town filled with alcoholics, heroin addicts and post-industrial decay. Coming to Moscow with five hundred people from Ivanovo to drum for Putin and Yakemenko was the highlight of her life. ‘He is a great leader… The youth understands,’ she told a reporter, ‘and anyway I like older men.’ 60

These people would have shouted anything – and the ‘political technologists’ knew it. So the slogans that they encouraged this ‘anti-fascist youth group’ to chant were ones designed to reawaken as much viciousness out of historical pain as possible. To ward off the ‘Orange menace’ they chose to inject into the country a neurotic dose of hysteria and paranoia that Russia had been healing from – the Cold War atomic scares, the Nazi dimension, the foreign agents trying to break up the nation (like they had in 1991), the plotters waiting to attack Russia by surprise when she was sleeping (like they had in 1941). In other words: the enemy within. ‘Drawing heavily from collective memory,’ recalled Pavlovsky, ‘was the stimulation of all past experiences of violence and insecurity – against which the authorities would be the only safeguard.’ 61

The enemy within was not readily available, so Nashi began to harass those who might be the sponsors of this shadowy presence – the ambassadors of state with which Moscow had imperfect ties. Nashi went into action waving placards such as ‘Wanted the ambaSSador of eSStonia’. After the British ambassador Tony Brenton delivered what he calls ‘a rather dull speech’, they launched a campaign against him. ‘You get a good insight into the psychology of paranoia,’ he sighed, ‘when something like that happens to you.’ People like Sveta from Ivanovo were sent to stand outside his residence with posters that were either odd, ‘ANTONY BRENTON: LOSER’, or merely risible, ‘SAVE RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY FROM TONY BRENTON’. More were sent to follow him around, jumping out at conferences, on planes, pretty much on any occasion, waving their fists and screaming things like, ‘B- rr -enton! Apologise! B- rr -enton Apologise!’ or ‘B- rr -enton! Fascists Always Run First… B- rr -enton! Come back!’

This whole campaign was not in actual fact designed to make Brenton feel paranoid and humiliated, but to be played endlessly on national television, to make Russians feel paranoid and humiliated. The months of the anti-Brenton campaign were shouting to those on the couch not to listen to ‘the Orange siren song’ as these were the voices of the enemy who had beaten Russia in the Cold War and then ‘humiliated her’ in the 1990s.

It did not take long to whip up residual neuroticism in a country fed such propaganda non-stop until the time of Gorbachev. Television again was the main instrument. ‘Experts’ invited to ‘debate’ issues started to come from anti-Western, nationalist or ‘Eurasianist’ think-tanks, whose purpose was not to think or write reports but to comment hysterically in every news source about shadowy villains. These ‘intellectuals’ pushed onto the talk shows were men such as Alexander Dugin: this ‘thinker’ frothed at the mouth calling for a restored empire, identified with the ‘Eurasianist’ architects of the Holocaust and shrieked what was needed was a Russian–Arab alliance to counter Washington. Flicking on the TV news one was bombarded by clips of officials making chauvinistic comments about Georgians, Estonians, Ukrainians and ‘documentaries’ about the ‘attacks’ on the ethnic Russian minorities in those countries. Broadcasts flagged up irritants such as human rights organizations as suspects of MI6 or CIA infestation, as a means of slandering them. They even accused mysterious foreign powers of financing the insurgency in the North Caucasus.

For Pavlovsky and the black PR artists, the Bush administration was a gift. To vilify an America that actually was invading third world countries, running a shadowy prison camp system for ‘enemy combatants’ caught in the ‘Global War on Terror’, which growled about bombing Iran as Dick Cheney pitched up ‘promoting democracy’ in Kiev and Tbilisi – was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. They could not have invented a better cast of villains if they had tried.

The West, which Russia had craved contact with in totalitarian times, was vilified by Putin. Britain, he said, ‘forgets it is not a colonial power’, and whilst the PR campaign surrounding a law to limit the same kind of NGOs receiving foreign funding that had foxed the Kremlin in Kiev was pushed through, the ‘national leader’ snarled that they were ‘behaving like jackals at foreign embassies’. 62The fall of the USSR, said Putin, was nothing less than ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’. 63He publically lamented the authorities chose not to fight to save the Soviet Union. 64This verse removed in 1956 reappeared in one of the busiest Moscow metro stations – ‘Stalin reared us on loyalty to the people. He inspired us to labour and heroism.’

What Surkov was creating were people who, unlike him, did not understand that the totalitarian state – with its gigantic empire, hypocrisy and prison camps, which had incited Russians to make such sacrifices and given such little back – really had been something of a parasite. He was creating a cohesive cadre of future politicians around Yakemenko, who thought of it only as a vanished superpower.

In places like Kaliningrad and Ivanovo the ‘wild 1990s’ were fading away. So had the shock of the Soviet implosion. The state, which had provided free education, free medicine, full employment and the feeling of fear, would never return. But something Soviet had – a pervasive feeling of pressure, that there were locked doors, low humming paranoia and the knowledge that there were things you shouldn’t say in front of power.