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

‘It’s a novel… it is… a fantasy… a fantasy,’ Limonov groaned, massaging the muscle in his left arm as the swallows swirled in a faint blue sky.

Returning from exile, his newly formed National Bolsheviks had campaigned for totalitarian restoration under the slogan: ‘Stalin, Beria, Gulag!’ Announcing in the 1990s, ‘enough walks in the park with red-cheeked girls, it is time to walk with loyal comrades underneath a red flag’, Limonov had casually paid a visit to Serb forces shelling Sarajevo and fired a sympathy round into the city with them. 16The fact that in the mid-2000s this man could have attracted a dedicated following of hundreds of young Russians alienated by the regime and been considered a leading opposition politician is a testament to two things: the sickness of politics and the utter failure of the establishment democrats. Limonov raised his voice:

‘You know why I went into politics? Because politics is the greatest of the arts… Politics combines rhetoric, theatre, literature and cinema. When you stand and address a crowd of 200,000 people screaming your name – Limonov! Limonov! – It feels just like a drug. It washes right through you like a drug.’

The fact that hundreds of alienated kids joined the National Bolsheviks was a damning verdict on all the country’s politicians. Limonov in alliance with Garry Kasparov was a key driver behind the mid-2000s ‘Other Russia’ coalition. Yet these underground psychedelic-fascist pseudo-revolutionary communes of the National Bolsheviks impressed none other than the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She saw them as the first faction that dared take direct action. But theirs was a strange punk world, as much a rejection of the conformity of Putin-worshipping Nashi as the lawyer-economist dreams of Navalny and his generation. Navalny’s good friend and ally, Zakhar Prilepin, reminisced in his blockbuster novel about the National Bolsheviks:

The atmosphere in the bunker was always joyful and noisy. It was like a boarding school for delinquents, the studio of a crazy painter, or the military encampment of some barbarians that had decided to go to war God knows where. And there were girls – their faces jarringly mixing both disgust for the world and the noblest of ambitions for this same planet. This may seem strange – but that was the essence of who they were. 17

They were the first rebels against post-Soviet cynicism. In Zakhar Prilepin’s novel San’kia, a book close to the hearts of a generation of lost, angry young Russians, repression begins to brutalize the likes of them. The gang of ‘unionists’, a thinly disguised National Bolshevik cell, gets beaten up and their faces bloodied at protests, then arrested and eventually, mentally scarred. As the pages turn, the rather sweet – if stupid – boys brawling with men from the Caucasus at market stalls after a few shots of vodka are planning murders, becoming terrorists with a plot to shoot their way into the governor’s office. Along the way a caricature of a Russian Jew tries to dissuade them as they move to smash their heads in on the bars of the state. In the novel, the punk-fascist is a failed, tragic hero. And it was with his good friend Zakhar Prilepin, whose first name he gave to his first-born son – that Navalny began a journey into nationalism.

Context is everything and in the mid-2000s Putinist anti-terror nationalism was beginning to boomerang. As war and poverty drove ever greater numbers of gun-wielding young men north out of the Caucasus into ethnic Russia in search of enough money to eat, the same generation of young, heavy-drinking and conscripted guys sent to fight them began to brawl with them in their home towns. The regime was starting to feel blowback as fragments of their wars came home. As in Prilepin’s novel, town after town saw the vertical of power and ‘the dictatorship of law’ collapse.

The first implosion of order was in Yandikh on the Caspian Sea, on the fringes of Europe, in 2005. Natives brawled with local Chechens in ethnic clashes that eventually needed the OMON to restore a semblance of peace. The following year in the far northern city of Kondopoga, near the Finnish and EU border, the same thing happened. For several days the town was gripped by mass ethnic clashes after a gang member from the Caucasus shot a Slavic Russian. Nationalist leaders descended on the town to demand ‘expulsion’, as Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov threatened the region if his people were harmed. It was the following year that Navalny and Prilepin, who fought in an OMON squad in Chechnya, together with other ‘democratic-nationalists’ launched NAROD, a Russian word close to the German ‘Volk’, or a blood-tied nation. Their manifesto bombastically began: ‘Russia is facing a national catastrophe’ and announced the state’s mission was to stop ‘the degradation of Russian civilization and create the preconditions and development of the Russian people, their cultural, language and historic territory.’ 18Alongside a demand for free elections and free TV their policies included a wholesome range of proposals including:

• Restoring the ‘organic unity of Russia’s past’, from Kievan Rus to the USSR.

• Recognition of the breakaway statelets Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

• Refusal to accept the various amnesties offered by Putin to Chechen fighters in his first term.

• Tax exemptions for small businesses. 19

The breakdown of order in these towns were the crucible for a new Russian nationalism. NAROD and other movements are products of Putinism, blending a literalist understanding of its propaganda against ‘terrorists’ and ‘oligarchs’, frustration with an increasingly muzzled TV and parliament with a seething rage at Putinism’s perceived non-nationalist hypocrisy – allowing mass migration from Muslim ex-Soviet states and paying generous subsidies to Kadyrov. As the flame-haired opposition commentator Yulia Latynina once explained to me, ‘What is happening here is what happened in the Arab states. The Sheiks ruled, saying “We are the real Muslims”, whilst they stole, drank oil and shopped in the West. When they failed to deliver development, the extremists came to the street shouting, “No, we are the real Muslims!” Putin said he was a nationalist, but now the real nationalists are starting to come out onto the streets.’

NAROD were busy making videos. One shows Navalny as a ‘dentist’ extracting teeth, the kind of ‘extraction’ that he cheerfully recommends should happen to illegal immigrants; in another video Navalny in front of a green screen is explaining how to kill roaches with a fly swatter. A video-screen jumps from a picture of roaches and flies to one of a North Caucasian insurgent – with ‘Homo Lawless-icus’ written underneath. One erupts into the studio and Navalny flies into action. The smoke clears. He has shot the rebel, ‘I suggest a pistol.’ 20He smiles. When his friend Masha Gaidar (whose heckler Navalny had shot four times in bar Gogol) saw the video, she said: ‘This is fascism.’ 21Even his mother refused to speak about politics with him.

Navalny was expelled from Yabloko in 2007. He stormed out shouting ‘Slava Rossii’, which signalling ‘Glory to Russia’ – a very ethnic understanding of the word – is a taboo for well-to-do Russian liberals. He began warning of the dangers of the ‘Islamification’ of Russia. 22Nor did Navalny stop at words or videos. He was loudly agitating for Russian gun rights.

Soon Navalny was invited by far-right nationalist leaders to co-organize their annual flagship event, the ‘Russian March’. As the culture of street protests (though still fringe) was growing, Russian nationalists were staging an annual jamboree in Moscow. Navalny was proudly marching side by side with chanting nationalists: skinheaded holocaust deniers, men howling ‘stop feeding the Caucasus’, calls of ‘Russians, onwards’, football hooligans, anti-immigrant organizers, all waving the Romanov flag, with the black, yellow and white they had made their colours. Navalny not only organized these rallies, but spoke at them every year. He could frequently be heard saying that Russia and Ukraine could become one country again, and started to use the aggressive football hooligan’s slogan: ‘don’t forget, don’t forgive’. Trying to explain himself as still being a democrat after all that, he rather goofily held up a placard in front of a camera: