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

Navalny may have sneered that Lev Ponomarev was making a TV show for CNN, but it was certainly painful to make. Once, at an illegal protest, I was standing next to him when a bruiser in a black T-shirt popped up in the middle of the crowd, quickly said something on his mobile, then in the blink of an eye brutally attacked the seventy-one-year-old man half his size. As the opposition ‘protest-boat’ smashed itself up every odd month in a dreary routine under the Mayakovsky statue, the authorities got increasingly nervous. First, the square started to host special events. One month the square was clogged by a high-speed car demonstration. As opposition activists with A4 paper bearing ‘31’ were being smashed up by OMON, a man and his five-year-old son crossed the road. An OMON with truncheon screamed: ‘Get the hell out of here!’

‘But my son just wants to watch the cars.’

‘Get out now!’

Navalny was not the first political blogger, he was not the first online politician, or even the first opposition leader to understand that Putin’s decision not to implement FSB demands for Chinese-style Internet censors left the online heights waiting to be seized. He was simply the first blogger-politician to do it really effectively. This is because Navalny correctly understood there was a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Putinism. As the state became increasingly authoritarian, society was moving in the other direction. As the regime restored the Soviet anthem and neutered parliament, the economic boom saw computers and mobile phones flood Russia, giving normal citizens the action-tools to participate in an increasingly dense ecosystem of civil society.

The 2000s, not the 1990s, was the decade that Russian civil society really took off. The irony was that even though the country had been more liberal in the 1990s, the economic turmoil of the period wrought havoc on NGO finances, undercut their influence and sapped the spirits of the generous. Scandalous ‘charities’ discredited private giving and the mass slump into poverty hollowed the means to give. Russia had exited the Soviet Union with a fragile NGO ecosystem that simply couldn’t cope with the depression that followed. In 1986 the country only had twenty NGOs. 32In 1991 this had ballooned to over 10,000, each one of them vulnerable. 33Once the Yeltsin decade closed and the economy stabilized, the clusters and dots of social activism began to consolidate. Despite Putinist laws making NGOs vulnerable to state closure in the mid-2000s and his propaganda against them, the decade saw a boom. By 2007 there were well over 100,000 NGOs in Russia. 34This was paralleled in a surge in private giving with over forty well-financed private foundations and $2.5 billion in corporate donations in place by the decade’s end. 35The authoritarian clampdown on access to the Duma or the mysterious murders of journalists did not affect this trend.

It was in these thousands of little initiatives that Putin lost his monopoly to shape society. There were groups that hunted for lost children in Moscow, or priests that gathered to feed the hungry in Siberia; there were anti-heroin vigilantes in the Urals and environmentalists on lake Baikal. They were small in number, often hounded, and lived in resentment of incompetent United Russia officials who they thought were not doing their jobs – but they were everywhere. The new opposition was not going to be rallied by old 1990s politician-outcasts but would grow out of this thickening, crystalizing society. Some called it ‘the civil archipelago’. 36

Bringing all this to a wider audience was the rise of the Internet and mobile phones. When Putin came to power only 1.03 per cent of Russians were online. By 2010 this had risen to 43.37 per cent. 37The same explosive story goes for mobile phone use, which went from virtually nothing in 1999 to almost everyone by 2007. 38As more and more of the mobiles became smartphones, the opposition now had a whole new dimension for activism. The barriers to entry were collapsing and Navalny got caught up in this trend early. He started his own blog in April 2006. He chose to write on his ‘about me’ page that he was ‘a Democrat, who is not delighted with the Liberals’. 39

Yet it was neither a democrat nor a liberal who was the greenest shoot of anti-government activism but a suburban mother of two in her early thirties with an unfashionable fringe haircut living on the edge of Moscow. Evgenia Chirikova lives in a run-down Soviet apartment block in Khimki. That a new form of politics should come from here is no surprise. The town’s fortunes have followed Russia’s since Stalin.

Thrown together by Soviet shock-workers on the eve of the Second World War, it was the furthest point of the German advance, the closest front line to the Kremlin. After the war it became a hub of the space industry and, after the fall of the USSR, a hub for supermarket mega-halls. Under Putin, Khimki saw the best of times and the worst of times. A construction boom saw good-quality apartments flung up in all corners, a huge cluster of metallic malls with an IKEA and Auchan settled on the outskirts like nesting UFOs. Real incomes soared. Yet so did corruption, the beatings of journalists and disregard for the average citizen. In Khimki normal families were not concerned by arcane debates over nationalism or democracy, which obsessed the pseudo-political peacocks in the underground debating halls. They cared about practical problems and the very simple feeling that something was being stolen. Or that they were being trampled on.

Chirikova was walking in Khimki forest with her husband. She had moved to Khimki so their daughters could breathe clean air. In Moscow, if you stand on a balcony, overlooking some of the worst traffic on earth, and face the horizon on a clear evening you see a thick black band of pollution rimming the metropolis. She wanted to live on the other side of that, next to one of the capital’s last forests. Walking one afternoon between the trees with her husband she saw they had been daubed in red paint. They were slated to be chopped down to make way for a new highway that neither she nor the people of Khimki knew anything about. Until that moment she had been commercial and not political. Her anger at the destruction of the forest close to where she had chosen to make a home revealed she was not just a small-time businesswoman but had a civic leader inside her. Sitting with her in her kitchen as she gave her very young daughter a big mug of coffee and insisted I eat some breakfast cheese, I was suddenly struck by something. There was something so different about her from any of the Russian politicians I had ever met. She was normal. Sitting in her kitchen, she was coasting on genuine outrage at the ‘murder of the forest’. She was not a posturing nationalist waving a microphone on a stage, or showing off a ‘Gorbachev Forever’ craft-piece watch whilst downing overpriced cognacs:

‘At first what did I think of Putin? Oh… well I thought he was a young, handsome, sporty man who was doing lots of things for the country, of course. I only became active in the last few years. Before that I was just an ordinary woman… I was a simple businesswoman, and I had absolutely no interest in politics… After the Yeltsin period, when Putin was around at first, I thought he was good… OK, maybe years ago I thought nothing… I didn’t know about corruption… so I just thought Putin was an intelligent man doing something for the country.’

This illusion evaporated for Chirikova when the news of the planned motorway cutting right through the forest suddenly exposed her to the authoritarian, corrupt and violent intrigues the regime was willing to go through to protect its business interests against civil society. Putinism in Khimki was not just consumerism after all. The local authorities and the foreign companies who would be doing most of the work refused to engage with the small protest movement she started to rally. They tweeted, blogged and appeared on TV saying they wanted to keep their trees, but to no avail. This sudden eruption of civil activism electrified the Russian intelligentsia. Right up until 2010 the US Embassy was cabling back to Washington that the country had a ‘third world middle class’, which was now ‘largely risk averse’ and ‘had absorbed the bureaucratic thinking of the majority’. 40Navalny was particularly captivated by Chirikova, especially by her practical-politics-first approach, which he argued had achieved more on a local level than the establishment parties were capable of. As Chirikova and the ‘Khimki Forest Defenders’ grew, they started to symbolize something in Russia: a sudden coming together of improved living standards, the spread of civil society into a new kind of politics. And it was then that the authorities tried to make her stop: