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

‘The change failed because the new forces of consolidation of the middle class, within the intelligentsia, the new generation – were not ready and not strong enough. The old forces – the individuals, the Church, the military industrial complex, the siloviks, the conservatives – they were all strong enough. It was a generational change that did not occur. If you go back to Turgenev you find the same thing – this is Fathers and Sons – the fathers don’t want to let go, whilst the sons are too cowardly and not strong enough to make it happen.’

Putin succeeded because others failed. His opponents up until this point were all too rash, weak, corrupted or unpopular to expose him. Medvedev never really was one. Under him the opposition within the elite had failed, but across town from its intrigues a new generation of opposition leaders had started to be heard on blogs and in anti-Putin bars. They were not going to shuffle back so limply at the sound of Putin’s ‘commander’s voice’.

THE EVENING’S political discussion was passing off calmly, even convivially, at the bohemian bar Gogol. Just off a chic Moscow alley lined with luxury boutiques, a small gathering of ‘oppositionists’ were on stage debating the usual topics: Putin, politics and protests. Maybe half the audience knew each other already – in October 2007 the opposition was still a small micro-society of its own, an exclusive set by virtue of being short on recruits. The pretty, political Masha Gaidar, daughter of Yeltsin’s radical prime minister, was talking with a rising anti-Putin star with a nationalist twist. Then from the back somebody started to make some noise. Hecklers, who had been downing vodka all evening (one of their gang having just vomited in the toilet) began to disrupt the panel. The yobs screamed that Gaidar is screwing her handsome debating partner. They then yell more obscenities at her. An outraged activist pours lager on the heckler’s head. Then a beer bottle gets hurled at an opposition activist. Once the talk is over Gaidar’s co-panellist slips off the stage. He is on edge. Things degenerate. He begins to scuffle with the obscenity hollerer. They take it outside. Shots ring out. The man is wounded. Alexey Navalny has blood on his face. Plastic pellets have flown through the air. He has shot the heckler four times with what Russians call a ‘traumatic pistol.’

‘Yeah… Yeah, this happened,’ is how he recounted it to me. ‘The Kremlin had sent these thugs to disrupt our show and at the end of it most of them left. These kinds of guys only work for money. So they just left. One guy was still there shouting at me to come and fight with him. I had three hundred people looking at me right then – I had to do it – so I went out to have a fight with him. I shot him with the traumatic pistol. But like all Russian traumatic guns it was absolutely useless… and so this turned right away into a normal Russian fight.’

This man who fired the plastic rounds is the same opposition rabble-rouser who within a few years would emerge as Putin’s first real challenger. His return crowned Navalny the leader of the other Russia. He answered the opposition’s cry for a leader. It was his slogans that led the protest movement and he was its driving force. He has built the new opposition and his anticorruption efforts have done more to expose the bankruptcy of the ‘dictatorship of law’ than any other.

The fact that the opposition has turned this troubling man into a hero is testament to their desperation at Putin’s return. A showman with a quick temper, Navalny is a pure product of Putinism. His looks as if made to order for TV: chiselled, blond and blue-eyed, definite and charismatic like a younger, finer Putin. In his instinctive paranoia, nationalism and Caucasophobia, he is a man of his time. They have called him an ‘expert at manipulating the Internet mob’. 1This is true, because he is one of Europe’s first Internet politicians. There is no irony that repressive Russia and not tech-savvy Britain should have given birth to an Internet-populist. Putin’s castration of television and de facto ban on potential rivals enjoying screen time on major channels has steadily turned the blogosphere from a fringe activity to an alternative mass media. Just as the blind develop an acute sense of smell, so Navalny has turned this hyper-developed Russian media organ into his support base.

As Putin was a decade ago to all Russia – Navalny is everything to all people in the opposition. The liberal treasurer of the December 2011 protest movement Olga Romanova saw him as a ‘future president’; the nationalist leader Vladimir Tor says he is ‘a man I can do business with’. Nationalist, liberal, blogger, democrat – many opposition activists see themselves in him. In a more sinister way Navalny sometimes speaks like Putin. A decade ago Putin promised to ‘liquidate the oligarchs as a class’; now the blogger-challenger lashes out at the London-based Russian-Jewish oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, hollering that ‘we must exterminate these thieves who are drinking our blood and chewing our livers’. 2Once Putin promised a ‘dictatorship of law’, now Navalny bellows, ‘there is no vertical of power – only chaos’. Where the president promised to ‘waste them in their outhouses’, the Internet activist has said, ‘I suggest a pistol’, to make meat of Islamic gunmen. Putin said he would restore ‘constitutional order’ in the Caucasus, now Navalny demands the region not get preferential treatment, that the government ‘stop feeding the Caucasus’. One by one Navalny has picked up these Putinist themes and inverted them into an anti-Putin opposition agenda. The crisis of Putinism has, ironically, left Putin vulnerable to a ‘real Putin’.

Navalny commands a stern, glaring presence in person. Unlike the shuffling and grey Putin in St Petersburg, he is a natural politician. Whereas Putin needed Surkov, Pavlovsky and their whole team to cut an ‘alpha-male’ image in his early years, without them coming across as shifty and nervous (such as after the sinking of the Kursk), Navalny is capable of pulling charisma on any smartphone clip, mocking post or wry tweet. He has no need for Botox.

Where Putin understood TV, but claims never to use the Internet, Navalny has understood online potential. He has been tweeting his slogans, running anti-Putin YouTube song competitions (prizes include a bottle of whisky) and using crowdsourcing to build activist hubs to fight corruption, utilities fraud and bad roads. In the winter of 2011–12 Moscow bars such as Gogol went silent as he entered; at meetings of opposition committees he mastered the room like the showman he is. He is the first of a new wave of post-Putin politicians, not creations of the 1990s, who have been thrown into prominence by public disgruntlement at Putin’s 2012 return. Navalny’s rise to fame is intertwined with the story of the rise of the Russian opposition from a fringe, elite affair meeting at bars like Gogol, drawing only a crowd of liberal elite, and Novaya Gazeta -reading familiar faces, into a force capable of sustained protests that exposed the end of the Putin consensus and the Putin majority.

Navalny has a theory about his generation being on the cusp: they received a full dose of Soviet ‘irradiation’ in childhood but lived their adult lives in another country. They have no professional experience of socialism, contrary to Putin’s generation who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in the shadow of successful space-station launches and a craze for World War Two spy-thrillers; the party drilling into them authoritarian work-habits during the ‘era of the three funerals’, as Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko passed away. Unlike their cohort, Navalny’s generation have no fond memories of Soviet power. He once remarked, ‘My generation caught the Soviet Union when it had become an absolute game of acting and deceit.’ 3This is how he remembers the USSR: