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

‘They started to pressure us. They pressured my business – we have a small engineering firm, you see – they came to our bank and asked for all our bank details… but worst of all was what they did to our clients… they went around telling them that we were involved in extremism! So the bank gave us no more credit… and as you can imagine, this was a huge blow.’

As she explains what happened, her child begins to looks worried:

‘The worst was when they tried to take my children away. They sent round here a woman from the government with this computer typed-out sheet without a signature on it… it was an anonymous denouncement. I was terrified. Anonymous denouncements… as if straight from the time of Stalin! It said that I was not a fit mother… that I was not looking after them, not feeding them! But they didn’t get them and this made me deeply determined to keep being socially active.’

This was not yet the moment that brought home the true gangsterism of the authorities. Journalists started to be detained after covering the forest protests. The editor of the local paper, Mikhail Beketov, started writing about corruption and embezzlement in connection with the motorway project. So, someone blew up his car. Then he was beaten up so savagely that he lost three fingers, a leg and fell into a coma. Another reporter was later attacked with an iron bar. Chirikova sighs:

‘It was only after what happened to Mikhail Beketov that I really understood the depth of corruption in this country. I’m not afraid of what they will do. I’m not afraid of tomorrow. I was born in a communist country. And I just look at how everything changed… fifty years can change in a single day. And though I see a really, really depressing situation I remember the 1990s. I remember many, many tramps in the street… many, many pornographic magazines being sold in the street… I remember my teacher leaving… I remember lack of money for food… I remember we had to grow food and eat it with water. And my father was a scientist! A physicist! Growing his own vegetables to eat! My father has a PhD! So I am not afraid of turmoil after this… I am afraid that Russia has no future.’

Not all these groups were so sweet – but many were shaped by the problems and prejudices of Putinism itself. One evening near the gritty roundabout under the squat tsarist turrets of Belorusskaya Station, where the rails lead to Minsk and the west, I met up with a small vigilante group called ‘Svetlaya Rus’’, or ‘Bright Russia’. Their name alludes to the memory of a purer, whiter time. Some were reformed skinheads in metal-tipped boots. Others were pimply nationalists who had found the group through blogging, not fighting. ‘We are an NGO,’ they said as we walked towards some apartment blocks, ‘dedicated to cleaning the filth out of the basements.’ We came to one locked door. A heavy smashed it open. We ran through the dank, urine-smelling cellars until we found the ‘vermin’. A group of Uzbek migrants living there illegally. The boys frogmarched them outside and made them throw their meagre possessions into a skip.

Humiliated and silent with furious, brown eyes, the migrants glared as they were forced to sit on the pavement. I could not bring myself to meet that gaze. The ‘civic activists’ laughed: ‘We need a little Russian Buchenwald we do.’ The migrants were then told to scarper, homeless into the night. The boys did three or so raids a week – sometimes turfing out hundreds of Central Asians. ‘We are kind of “whatever” about Putin,’ said one, a school history teacher, who compared contemporary nationalist leaders unfavourable to the Nazi pantheon, ‘but we hate United Russia, it’s a party of crooks. The local housing officials are the ones filling basements with migrant filth.’ Groups like these were incredibly popular – the ones that blended a love for vigilante policing born out of Putin’s weakness, with the same talk about beatings and strength that his telepopulism is made of.

One evening I went for a walk with a friend of this vigilante group. Andrei Mironov was an old, small man. It turned out that he thought the vigilante group were fascists, but was pleased on some level that someone was fighting off the illegal squatters that filled every basement in the neighbourhood with health hazards. Mironov is one of the last Soviet dissidents to have been imprisoned for his political beliefs, with the signature of Gorbachev himself. We walked around one of Moscow’s nicest districts, the Patriarch’s Ponds. It is leafy and quiet, with elegant tsarist houses. This is where in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margerita the Devil and his cat are first sighted on a park bench, offering cigarettes in whatever brand you can imagine. But this area is being destroyed. One by one, corrupt developers with fake papers are pulling down these discreet buildings and replacing them with nasty, cheap high-rises that make them more money. ‘They will rip the whole of Moscow down,’ says Mironov as we stand by the latest wreck. Yet after twenty years he sees something by way of hope. ‘I call it the Chirikova generation. I remember that day in 1991 when the coup d’état to impose Stalinism again was foiled. I saw this twelve-year-old girl. She was so proud, so happy, that she had won her dignity. And I thought – they will never be able to take that away from her. This is what is happening now. That girl and that generation have grown up.’

Navalny was amazed by the Khimki ‘forest defenders’. Their protests had forced Medvedev himself to postpone the construction work. True, the forest had been smashed through to make way for the motorway. True, their leading lady came across as ill-informed and at times a bit kooky on screen. But it was indisputable that these suburban eco-warriors had done something stunning. Unlike any of the projects Yabloko or NAROD had peddled, the Khimki front had grabbed the front pages and mobilized an entire town against the authorities. It promised a new kind of social politics. Its message to the opposition was clear. Practical politics not principles was the way forward. Once again Navalny got the message and went with the flow. Long discussions on ‘Russianness’ and ‘democratic-nationalism’ were out. He was reinventing himself as a corruption-busting blogger. He was convinced that you could mobilize people with the very simple idea that something had been stolen. He was right.

Navalny’s webpage announced that its mission was to win the ‘final battle between good and neutrality’. Each post was aimed at undermining cynicism and apathy by concrete action. Slowly these pages were turning into the front page for his politics. The site tried to come across as everything that Putinism was not: funny, forward-looking and morally upstanding. He made people laugh, announcing his pride at a new son so that ‘pink would no longer be dominant’ at home, typing excitedly that he was looking forward to the toy guns. 41His tweets were irreverent – from re-tweeting a ‘dubstep cat’ to shouting out how much he loved CAP LOCKS. 42But he could also make people angry at the authorities by posting his anger at wasted funds and dilapidated infrastructure. Navalny made Putin seem old. This was an online island of wit and wisecracks in an ocean of state TV propaganda.

As Navalny’s following steadily built up, he was not only gathering readers just to entertain them. He was building up followers for his forthcoming announcements. In the same way that Chirikova had gathered support to save her forest, Navalny decided to put his financial–legal training to use and become a minority shareholder. Russians sympathized with Khimki being trampled on and losing its beloved forest. They were riveted by a shareholder fighting under a simple slogan – that something was being stolen.