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

In the first few years of Putinism, before the 2003 Duma elections, these parties put up little committed and even less effective resistance to his policies. The communists were withering as a genuine party as they accepted funds from Khodorkovsky, letting their ‘socialist’ deputies vote repeatedly against tax increases on oil, which would harm the oligarch’s profits. But Putinism did not yet feel fully authoritarian. For the misfits and political obsessives such as Navalny, leafleting for Yabloko, they never expected Yavlinsky to become president but, as he puts it, that they could ‘build a big democratic coalition that could capture a big chunk of power’. 15The constant stream of mishandled terrorist attacks that were the backdrop to Khodorkovsky’s swagger and ambitions made this seem a distinct possibility. Instead the 2003 election came and horrified the opposition parties. Yabloko failed to make it to parliament for the first time. They claimed they were the victims of electoral fraud and accused the Kremlin of foul play. Navalny was having none of it. He was convinced the party had failed to make it into the Duma because it had lost touch.

At the time, Navalny spent long hours campaigning with Ilya Yashin, the leader of ‘Youth Yabloko’. He is terribly fond of him – ‘He is a great guy, he really thinks outside the box.’ A persistent campaigner with a taste for fashion brands, Yashin summed up the opposition for a lot of people in the mid-2000s. He once did an illegal bungee jump off a Moscow bridge shouting ‘bring back the elections you bastards’, only to be left hanging there for hours. Another time he donned special fireproof clothing, doused himself in gasoline and set himself alight with a placard ‘No successor or burn in hell’. He ended up hospitalized from inhaling the smoke, with mild but painful burns. To young Muscovites studying at top universities this kind of opposition seemed attention-seeking, silly and unable to answer any question that touched on real politics, let alone the economy. For all their stunts and campaigning, neither Yashin nor Navalny were particularly well liked or effective in Yabloko. Looking back on what went wrong, Yashin says, ‘The thing is that opposition was previously just failed 1990s politicians and celebrities… too many officers and not enough foot soldiers. We may not have been populist enough in the past.’ As nothing they did seem to make a dent in the Putin consensus, Navalny and Yashin began to realize that the ‘systemic’ opposition of registered parties competing for the Duma would never bring them to power.

This is because Putin and Surkov were systematically destroying the Duma. First the ‘bears’ from United Russia were brought in as a parliamentary majority, then with the destruction of Yukos major alternative revenue streams for parties other than the Kremlin disappeared. Following Beslan, the Duma laws were modified to effectively remove any chance of an independent being elected to the chamber. Finally, after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the state shifted from denouncing ‘international terrorism’ as its main public enemy to the ‘Orange threat’, or the enemy within. This transformed the opposition. This left the old ‘systemic’ opposition such as Zyuganov, Zhirinovsky and Yavlinksy with their deputies in the Duma too constrained and passed-by to be meaningful politicians. These measures began to unnerve many of those who had given Putin the benefit of the doubt. It was only as late as 2004 that Yeltsin’s former protégé Boris Nemtsov began warning of a dictatorship, and only after Beslan the same year that chess champion Garry Kasparov finally decided to go into politics. Away from the cameras, a process of radicalization was under way amongst the ranks of the discontented. Just as Tsar Nicholas II’s refusal to work with the original Duma in the lead-up to the First World War had seen the nature of his foes morph into increasingly radical and conspiratorial factions, a new ‘anti-systemic’ opposition of marches, punks, movements and protests was emerging. Navalny followed the wind.

By the year 2006, the dissenters’ marches had begun. They were the baby steps of anti-Putin protest politics. In St Petersburg over three thousand protesters marched down Nevsky Prospect towards the Winter Palace shouting ‘shame’, ‘down with Putin’, ‘out with corrupt power’. Over three thousand OMON riot police met them, in tundra camouflage and crash helmets. As always, the Kremlin had picked the provincial OMON to beat up and arrest some demonstrators, knowing full well that guys from the sticks were particularly eager to truncheon liberal urbanites. Those demonstrating were a different kind of people. Under the common cry of ‘we want another Russia’, a coalition was forming called the Other Russia, bringing together psychedelic punk fascists, liberals, nationalists and democrats all interested in direct action. The authorities’ response only radicalized them further. Warnings were placed on the metro urging people not to join the dissenters. State TV warned about ‘extremists’. Navalny and other ‘systemic’ activists joined them.

At an opposition conference entitled ‘A new agenda for liberal Russian forces’, held in a hotel in St Petersburg, I had a chance to talk to Garry Kasparov in the lobby. In the build-up to further dissenters’ marches, he cut a sad figure. Crowds were gathering outside but not to overthrow Putin. The electronics giant Samsung was distributing exciting balloons. Kasparov’s manner was an instant turn-off. An American beside him was gushing, ‘Garry, Garry-y.’ He snorted at suggestions that the opposition was going nowhere, ‘I wouldn’t be so pessimistic. The window of opportunity is open and though time is slowly running out, more and more people are coming round to our point of view.’ He glared at suggestions that his ‘Other Russia’ coalition with cultish extremists like the National Bolsheviks was a turn-off for liberals, insisting, ‘Though we have received criticism for bringing in groups such as the National Bolshevik party we have strongly moderated their position. We do this because we need another Russia.’

Kasparov was not as successful as he made out. By mid-decade the punk-poet Eduard Limonov and his National Bolsheviks were in the front line of the opposition, egging officials, occupying government buildings, plotting a coup in Kazakhstan and waving their cartoon flag blending Nazi and Soviet imagery: a black hammer and sickle in a white circle on crimson. To meet Limonov you had to call special numbers, which were often changed, and wait at meeting points for his lieutenants to take you to his ‘secret location’. I was told to wait outside a Moscow McDonalds on a bright summer’s day for one of his goons. He arrived in a long black leather coat of the kind seen in The Matrix, an orange fleece and black sunglasses. I was told to close my eyes as we entered a Stalinist baroque block of flats, and forbidden to open them until we were inside the apartments. The leather men smoked in the kitchen and tippled as I talked with the man they called ‘father’. I sat down. He explained some of his policies:

• moving the capital to a new purpose-built city in Siberia safe from NATO attack;

• creating large quantities of martyrs;

• re-creating a totalitarian USSR.

Limonov rubbed and stroked his arms as we talked. He spoke softly, sometimes in a hiss. His eyes never seemed to stay still. He croaked from time to time and insisted we spent the afternoon speaking in his impeccable French, which only made him seem stranger still. He had been a dissident and a writer, who escaped the USSR on an Israel exit visa gained by pretending to be Jewish, and famous for his autobiographical novel about gay sex with black drug pushers while living as a down-and-out exile in Manhattan. In the novel, he asks his black lovers to call him ‘Eddie’.