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

They say that all outbreaks of unrest take place to a backdrop of exhaustion, and are an unleashing of repressed agitation. It always begins with one event, one unpredictable twist that takes even those who wished for it by surprise. At the end of November 2011 it happened. They booed Putin. It was a mixed martial arts contest – ‘struggle without rules’ in Russian – and the beery crowd, swaying slightly, were the kind of people Putin thought were ‘his people’: lower middle class and interested in fights, the meat of the Putin majority. Stepping onto the stage he moved to congratulate the Russian wrestler who had slammed an American, whose tattoos in Russian Cyrillic for ‘Freedom’ seemed to have earned him little sympathy. ‘A true Russian warrior,’ Putin told the victor, as a whistle comes, then a brave, tentative boo from the safety of the dark stands under spinning spotlights, before an ascending orchestra of booing, first nervous, then a loud and gratuitous: ‘Get out of here.’ 12Locked in a moment that to describe as ‘awkward’ would be more than an understatement, the ‘warrior’ with a dropping lower lip looks aghast at the once and future President. The video went viral. In offices and on Facebook pages from Kaliningrad to Sakhalin, people were asking: ‘Have you seen this yet?’

The martial arts fans had achieved something that opposition politicians had long failed to do: to make Putin look weak. The political atmospheric pressure was changing. Occasionally, in bars the perestroika anthem ‘Changes’ by the iconic Soviet rock band Kino was being played. It invoked what Russians refer to as the ‘kitchen period’, when collapse was only muttered about in private for risk of looking unhinged or somebody listening in. The lyrics go: ‘In the kitchen like a blue flower, gas burns, cigarettes in our hands, tea on the table, so there this scheme is easy, there is nothing more left, it’s all up to us.’

The song is about realizing you can revolt, but struggling to make it real. Though the 1980s and 1990s had been a chaotic and hungry time, there had been a sense of hope and not one of pervasive cynicism. Despite material gains, the despondency of the intelligentsia was asphyxiating in the run-up to the 2011 Duma elections. A kitchen period of a sort had emerged in Russia, but in a country awash with consumerism it was far trickier to exit from, a bit of booing none withstanding. Yet even fierce loyalists in United Russia, like the lawmaker Vladimir Burmatov, recognized that something had gone very much awry.

The people simply did not understand the place of Putin in politics after his return. The people did not understand why the swap with Medvedev had happened. And as a party we felt we were the strongest, incontestable and we stopped speaking to certain sectors of society. In the elections that followed we lost them completely: the intelligentsia, the middle class and the young. Especially in Moscow.

They say it is always the authorities that provoke unrest, although they never do it consciously. When managed democracy had begun, it was done in the name of the elite and the middle class, whipped up into fearing the ‘Bolshevik menace’ of 1996, for people who craved stability in Putin, who wanted modernization in Medvedev. The winter 2011–12 election cycle was seen merely as parliamentary and presidential plebiscites to validate Putin’s decision to return. This was not an ‘engineered’ outcome but an autocratic choice. It was not made in the name of elites and the middle class – like in 1996 – but in spite of them and against them. It was a decision that said Putin had become like a tsar, accountable to no one.

The December 2011 parliamentary election was supposed to have delivered a resounding victory for United Russia in order to pave the way for Putin’s return in the March 2012 presidential vote. It was rigged in the following way. To begin with, parties that might have proved popular were not allowed to register and thus participate. Government-controlled TV relentlessly covered the activities of Putin as ‘prime minister’, giving him in his other capacity as chairman of United Russia a vast air-time bias in favour of the governing party. On the ground, several tactics were promoted to boost Kremlin votes. Many students in state dormitories across the country were informed that if they did not vote for United Russia they risked losing their accommodation. Similar encouragements were made to many state employees. At polling stations themselves a technique known as the ‘carousel’ was in full swing. Paid to vote for United Russia – usually cited at around $15 – crowds were shoved onto buses and then delivered from one polling station to another around their locality, voting for Putin’s party again and again.

The team leaders of this fraud were usually state employees, especially teachers, who were offered ‘bonuses’ larger than several months’ wages for this work. Anyone handing out leaflets for the party was paid to do so. Typically in Putin’s ‘elections’ the ‘Citizens Initiative’, headed by none other than his former finance minister Alexey Kudrin, estimated that in big cities 5–10 per cent of votes were cast by ‘controlled voters’ and 5–10 per cent by ‘payroll voters’, or from manipulated lists of ‘dead souls’. 13Their research suggested that with 20–25 per cent of the population as ‘controlled voters’ a low turnaround could easily give the regime the 45–50 per cent it needed to claim victory. 14The orchestrators of this were almost always in the governor’s office, in which the occupants all knew that when United Russia had got only 35 per cent in the 2010 Tver regional elections, the regional chief ‘responsible’ had been fired. It was a warning shot to the rest.

There was no real alternative on the ballot paper itself. Voters found only parties that the Kremlin had permitted to register – tamed parties whose leadership was riddled with collaborators and whose chiefs were on Surkov’s speed dial. The largest, Zyuganov’s KPRF, Zhirinovsky’s LDPR and Just Russia, chaired by Putin’s St Petersburg ally Sergey Mironov, were all essentially state-sanctioned private nomenklaturas, not ‘parties’ in any meaningful sense of the word. However, those who only got their news from controlled national TV were supposed to have been duped into thinking they were the ‘opposition’.

Inside the polling stations vote counts were then sent to the Central Election Commission, where they were often inflated, sometimes by two to three times. An indication of ballot-stuffing on an industrial scale was the statistical spread of the votes – whereas the other parties recorded a normal distribution of some low returns to some high returns in certain constituencies – Putin’s party disproportionally scored high results. 15Voter turnout also displayed a linear correlation to United Russia voting, pointing to massive ballot stuffing. 16The results for voter turnout are studded with precincts reporting exact round numbers – from 80 per cent to 100 per cent, benefiting the Kremlin’s deputies. 17Voters in the military, asylums and prisons, or any other closed-off institution were all suspiciously fervent United Russia supporters. Shamelessly, one Moscow psychiatric hospital reported 99.5 per cent support for Putin’s party. 18On the ground this translated into a ridiculous situation where some neighbouring precincts – well documented from Moscow to Ural Magnitogorsk – would return United Russia votes at around 30 per cent and others at 80 per cent. 19There were none in the middle. Out in the regions, especially in the non-Russian North Caucasus, the numbers had more in common with elections in a Middle Eastern dictatorship, with results of over 90 per cent for the party of power being returned. 20It has been estimated by statisticians that as many as 14 million votes could have been stolen. 21