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

In my main childhood memory I’m standing for milk. The whole time standing in line for milk. When I was seven, my brother was born and he needed a lot of milk. So at the very back the whole time, I had to stand in line […] When people now start telling me stories, especially young ones, which the Soviet Union did not catch, how great it was, I do not need them to tell me, I was in line for milk. My mother and father still remember at five a.m., having to take turns to line up for meat. And this was a military town with a good supply. I do not believe the Soviet Union is indiscriminately to blame for everything. But now we live better than we did then and I have no nostalgia for it whatsoever. There was nothing to eat in the Soviet Union. 4

This feeling might come from the fact that young Navalny was one of the first Russians who knew the 1991 coup d’état that finally destabilized the system was under way, as the tanks that surrounded the White House were manned by the men from the military base he then called home, near Obninsk 100km from the Soviet capital. That they refused to shoot on KGB orders was a legend for the community.

Unlike the flip side of Putin’s generation who turned into Yeltsin’s ‘liberals’ – those dissidents and economists who were professionally incubated in research centres and universities, feeling their creativity suffocated by oppressive thought control – Navalny feels remorse looking at what happened in the 1990s. As a boy during the 1993 shelling of parliament, he dashed into Moscow with a friend to catch the fun of the fair, to hear the shootings and see the snipers. They crept over the fence into the city zoo to be as close to the White House as they could; ‘all around was shooting, and in its cage rushed a terrified tiger. That’s when I understood they would drive us out, repress us and shoot. All this laid the foundations for what is happening now. This Putin did not do.’ 5He has said that he understands now: ‘I share responsibility with what happened then, with a lot of people, because I was also standing behind that position.’ 6

Navalny entered one of the lesser of Moscow’s elite academies, Patrice Lumumba University of People’s Friendship, a slightly run-down establishment founded to educate the Third World in Russian. This dream, like so many others, had failed. By the 1990s the university was a place where nervous Africans dared not come out of their dormitories for fear of skinhead attacks. A failed experiment in multiculturalism made of chipped concrete and declining education standards, it was also the alma mater of another symbol of the Putin era, the tawdry spy Anna Chapman, a ‘honey-trap’ agent deployed in London and New York by Russian foreign intelligence. Maybe they met.

But unlike Chapman who had youthful fantasies of marrying a foreigner and living in the West, Navalny had 1990s dreams that did not come true. ‘To market fundamentalists like me, it seemed like they would all become millionaires. Everybody thought if we were smart, we would soon become rich […] but then it suddenly became apparent that the rich are those that are somehow connected to the government.’ 7He graduated a frustrated young man with a law degree and a specialist diploma in finance, something which had turned out to be a piece of paper whose value he had somewhat overvalued. Success was not forthcoming. Bored by his office job as a legal clerk for a property firm, Navalny began to drift into politics.

At the turn of the century the Russian ‘opposition’ hardly existed. The Russian Communist Party had the largest following in the country but had developed into a monstrous political centaur, neither one thing nor another. Whilst holding onto the flags and symbolism of the Left it had abandoned a meaningful leftist agenda. The party had ditched the call for ‘workers of the world to unite’ as the slogan no longer reflected ‘a real preparedness on the part of the international workers’ and communist movement’. 8Instead it was campaigning on a red-brown mix of Russian nationalism against the ‘worldwide behind the scenes forces’, their descriptions of which smelled strongly anti-Semitic. 9Under the leadership of Gennady Zyuganov, who had been implicated in anti-Gorbachev plots with the KGB in the last years of the USSR, all alternatives within the party for a different kind of leftism, from the democratic socialists to the syndicalists who had flourished during perestroika, were suffocated and destroyed. Whilst lauding Stalin as a ‘great statesman’, Zyuganov also seemed to denounce the revolution of 1917 as caused by ‘in equal degree the errors of the Russian government in its domestic politics and the external, corrupting influence of Western civilization.’ 10Obsessed by the Romanovs, the leader of the zombie carcass of the Communist Party cited his influences as the author of The Decline of the West , Oswald Spengler, and the anti-communist ‘Eurasianist’ Lev Gumilev, espousing a foul-smelling bureaucratic-nationalist intellectual ratatouille. 11

This incoherent mix, drawing support from mainly pensioners, old scientific single industry towns and the lowly ranks of the bureaucracy was not some strange aberration but a reflection of millions of Russians’ own disorientation, personally and intellectually. Navalny considered the party – with its offices across the country, its own governors and large membership base – but dismissed it as ‘ideologically unacceptable’. 12To the Right the clownish Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a half-Jewish anti-Semite whose xenophobic rants mesmerized swathes of the rural and the miserable to vote for him as a protest party, was also deemed unacceptable by Navalny, as it was clearly not ‘serious’. 13Neither of these parties he believed seemed seriously interested in fighting for power. They had accepted their place in the Yeltsin–Putin system as purely parliamentary and regional organizations without a chance of entering the Kremlin. This left only one choice: Yabloko. ‘I joined this party,’ Navalny explained to me, ‘because I was outraged at the plan to raise the threshold for the Duma to 7 per cent to keep out the liberals. It was my personal choice. My act of defiance.’

In 2000 Navalny knocked on the door of the one pro-democracy and pro-market party that had always opposed Yeltsin’s excesses. It was the year of the Kursk . He says he was greeted by suspicion and a lack of understanding as to why on earth he was even trying to join in the first place: ‘This was the beginning of Putin’s time and nobody joined a party out of conviction.’ 14Yabloko was one of the last pieces of perestroika left. It was headed by Grigory Yavlinsky, one of Gorbachev’s ministers and author of the never-implemented 1990 plan to turn the Soviet Union into a market economy. On almost every issue in the 1990s Yavlinsky had seen which way the wind was blowing and gone against it. He paid for this stance. Though he has never said who was behind it, his piano-playing son was once abducted and had his fingers chopped off. He received them by post. This did not stop him opposing shock therapy, trying to mediate in the 1993 clash between the Kremlin and the rebellious Congress, opposing military action in Chechnya and running against Yeltsin in 1996. He is the best president that post-Soviet Russia never had.

This stance had turned his party by the time Navalny signed up into a liberal, intelligentsia equivalent of Zhirinovsky’s ‘Liberal Democrats’: a machine behind a talking head nobody expected to ever win, but who you could cast a protest vote for. He was just like Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky in another way too. All three have been turned into the authoritarian mini-Putins of their own parties, refusing to let other candidates stand for the presidential election or rise up through the ranks. In exactly the same way this personalization of power stunted the Kremlin, it stunted these politicians from creating real political organizations, resulting instead in small nomenklaturas either out in the few regions they controlled in the case of Zhirinovsky and Zyuganov or merely in a Moscow-based organization for Yavlinsky. There was little aimed at real action. ‘The trouble with these guys,’ Navalny moaned, ‘is that they decide one day “I am the coolest” and they just stop listening to anybody. They turn away all outside advice.’