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

I’m going:

Dissenters’ March

The March: Moscow is a Russian Town!

Green March

GLORY TO RUSSIA!

P.S.: I basically love Marches! 23

We talked about this – his nationalism – in a Vietnamese cafe near his small office in Taganskaya, a run-down district on the edge of central Moscow. ‘Do you think Russia is for Russians?’ Navalny raised his head and waves his hand:

‘No, not like that… I think Russia is for Russian citizens… that’s a totally stupid, totally old-fashioned way of thinking. I don’t want that. I want a visa regime with Central Asia to stop uncontrolled mass immigration. France has visas with North Africa. Britain has visas with India. Does that make me a nationalist?’

Then he went still and looked me in the eye: ‘I have some conservative views, but I joined Yabloko for a reason… I’m more or less a liberal kind of guy. I believe in law and order and getting things done. Not this ideological mumbo-jumbo.’

We are left to presume either that NAROD and all the rest was positioning, or that Navalny changes his mind.

‘You know, what my real dream is?’ asked Navalny quietly, putting down his fork. It was not nationalism. Like Putin had promised, he wanted a gigantic transfer of assets out of illegitimate hands. ‘My dream is that somehow… all the money that left Russia, that was taken away by the crooks and thieves and stashed in London or Switzerland can be brought back.’

He then started to talk about who, in a perfect world, he would like to see tried in court for robbing the Russian people. ‘All Putin’s friends in the Ozero gang and the oligarchs Abramovich and Usmanov.’

‘That could mean redistributing over 40 per cent of the Russian economy,’ I said, slightly thrown at what economic disruption post-Putinism might entail.

‘So what? There are plenty of minority shareholders, plenty of windfall taxes and ways to make this happen. We could also have lustration against anyone who was in United Russia down to the regional leader level… But only if we come to power with over 70 per cent of the people behind us.’

It struck me while talking to Navalny in the dingy cafe that his anger about corruption, towards the ‘thieves’, was not just a turn of phrase aimed at Putin. It was a new form of old rage, close to the anger at unjust privatization, the 1990s fury at the oligarchs who robbed Russia – but where Putin had eclipsed Berezovsky in the cosmology of bloodsuckers as the ‘Tsar of Thieves’. To restore ownership to the nation, to take it out of the hands of a cabal, had been the very promise of Putinism. But then what? When Russia had woken up from this nightmare, what did Navalny want to breathe and see? ‘I want Russia to be a big, irrational, metaphysical Canada.’

I left Navalny baffled, both drawn to him, but unsure if I even liked him.

Navalny has come to sneer at ‘mumbo-jumbo’ politics because nothing he was involved with in 2007 made any impact. Medvedev became president and even more governors and deputies turned into ‘bears’. Yet the opposition was evolving away from being old perestroika personalities on talk shows. But like the ‘systemic opposition’ before it, the movement failed to make any impact on the 2007 parliamentary and 2008 presidential elections. The dissenters’ marches made no difference. The Russian March made no difference. Neither, unsurprisingly, did the Green March, or any of the marches Navalny attended. Soon Limonov saw more and more of his activists jailed and their ‘cool’ factor wavered. Instead another tsarist throwback was developing – a cultural underground.

As his commitment to Yabloko flagged and the dissenters were dispersed and dismissed as crazy during the boom years by the Putin majority, Navalny became a king of the ‘Stray Dog Cafés’ of the new century. Under Nicholas II, the artists of the imperial city gathered at the ‘Stray Dog Café’, named because unlike the hounds that ran with the regime, they were strays without owners or leashes. As Russian politics suffocated under Stolypin, it was in these fashionable bars – or rather salons, or small theatres – where Blok sat with Akhmatova and Gumilev and other cultural luminaries, during the pre-revolutionary ‘silver age’. It was an intensely creative world. In the late 2000s a Putinist descendant began to emerge in Moscow. Salons such as Masterskaya near the secret service’s Lubyanka headquarters, or Gogol near the Moscow mayoralty, began to host constant political debates, poetry readings and discussions. Navalny together with Masha Gaidar turned himself into a showman and host of these underground talk shows. They invited liberals, journalists, Putinists, all and sundry, to have the debates that would never have appeared on television. Everybody shouted, argued about where Russia was going, drank fancy wines, imported beers and smoked heavily. The underground was fun, but known to almost no one outside of the chattering classes. Yet Russia is a bit like France, where Parisian elites have a stranglehold on influence – and this was enough to worry the authorities. They wanted to be the only political show in town.

This is where Navalny attracted his first ‘fan’ in the Kremlin. In his office Vladislav Surkov, a trained theatre director, was said to be fuming at the smash hit of the debates. At the time, the power of this half-Chechen consigliere was mythical. He was the ‘grey cardinal’. At a private briefing two Russian journalists once saw a cockroach scurry between his papers. 24The girls screamed, but what unnerved the reporters was that as Surkov flicked the red roach with the back of his hand off his desk, it occurred to them that he could do the same to any United Russia deputy. The opposition was also living with the same impression of Surkov’s power. Accusations and counter-accusations swirled of FSB plants and moles. Any disruption was seen as ‘Surkovian puppetry’. Navalny grins: ‘I heard that Surkov had been really impressed by me. You have to understand. The online space at that point was really limited. We had no TV space at all. It was so important for us to have these debates. And they sent guys to break up even this.’

This brings us back to the shooting. When hecklers tried to disrupt Navalny’s debate with Masha Gaidar, he claimed the yobs were football hooligans, that they mentioned Surkov’s name, and were sent to the Gogol bar by Surkov himself. On the photos blogged from the scene they don’t exactly look like football fans. One of those present said that Navalny did not fire in self-defence. Navalny then effectively argued it was all right as he wasn’t trying to kill him and did not fire at his head, adding that it was acceptable as he shot him: ‘a) outside the debate hall; b) not to the head; c) from an acceptable distance.’ 25The Gogol shooting captures the ambiguities of both Putinism and the opposition: in his instinctual aggression and paranoia Navalny was behaving like a product of Putinism. Answering a xenophobic question on his blog demanding the right for Russians to carry guns, he posted: ‘All the rest are hiding behind the defences of the “Holocaust” fund. It’s stronger than any pistol.’ 26The case against him was dropped. In opposition circles it was debated whether this was a sign of the authorities’ complicity or Navalny’s political ties. Both options are two sides of the same coin – a society without proper gun legislation, easy on the trigger, without proper rule of law.

Surkov may or may not have been behind the heckles, but the opposition still failed to be heard outside the Garden Ring, the name for the ring road that encircles Moscow’s wealthy heart. The 2007 parliamentary elections and the 2008 presidential elections swept more ‘bears’ into the Duma and placed Medvedev in the Kremlin. The dissenters’ marches had died down. The National Bolsheviks’ bunkers were no longer thronged. Opposition leaders were still unattractive and uninspiring to normal Russians: mostly ex-ministers, sprinkled with ex-dissidents.