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

A feeling of impunity had overtaken the vote-riggers. We can impose any result. We can decide on any number, regardless of what polling may say. The results came in at 49.3 per cent of the vote and 238 of 450 seats. 22Yet analysts have estimated they could not have got more than 35 per cent of the vote. 23And it is always when a feeling of impunity overtakes the elite that it enters into grave danger.

Under Putinism the elections were supposed to have been fully converted into ‘plebiscites’, ratifying a decision already taken, and richer Muscovites transformed into an ‘offshore elite’, frightened of the masses and living increasingly well, but in various forms of exile: virtual exile as Internet use boomed, internal exile in the small clubs for the ‘dem-shiza’, or democratic schizophrenics, or in physical exile in London or the Côte d’Azur. In the run-up to the December 2011 parliamentary elections, nobody expected mass protests or that their detonator would be the Russian constitution and an Anglophone dandy working at a management consultancy.

Ilya Faybisovich is exactly the kind of person Putin expected to shut up. Wearing carefully selected tweeds and thick-rimmed glasses popular in Dalston, formerly in London for seven years and working for a global American consultancy, he blends into a generational style of Muscovites in their twenties and early thirties usually labelled ‘the hipsters’. This is the kind of person who may be what is dubbed ‘an office plankton’, but yet dresses immaculately as if for a night out in Shoreditch rather than commuting on the crammed Moscow underground. The city’s ‘hipsters’ come across as self-consciously globalized and at ease with the West, so different from the post-Soviet wounded in much of the country. With a kind of avidity and intensity in fashion that makes up a youth culture, which their ‘Soviet’ parents cannot understand, the ‘hipsters’ were not expected to have a sense of politics. And if they did it was late-night bar chat. Mr Faybisovich, more or less, had shut up. He had been blogging ‘all about London’. He remembers: ‘There is no clear explanation about why what was about to happen, actually happened, but there was real rage at the election results as they came in.’

And the numbers that came in were painful to the ear. In Moscow one exit poll, later withdrawn for ‘inaccuracy’, gave United Russia 27 per cent of the vote but this had jumped to 46.5 per cent of the vote when the Central Elections Commission made its announcement. 24Faybisovich explains:

‘I had registered to be an election observer and gone to my local precinct. I’m not a communist at all, but had registered to observe the vote counting as one of them. So… I turned up at the polling station and they denied me access. They were nervous, scared and clearly implicated. I was accused of “bias”, shown the door – thus ending my short career as an election monitor.’

Faybisovich, angered at being chucked out and with United Russia’s ‘obviously fake poll results’ ringing in his ears, grumpily went to the Moscow non-fiction book fair. ‘It was then I realized that I had to do something. I started sending out a message, a stream of consciousness really to around 120 friends, saying we had to do something.’ It was then that he stumbled upon the fact that one of the fringe opposition parties, that had long struggled to make an impact, was holding on to a protest permit in central Moscow. ‘They are a bit older than us, the kind of guys that though they knew Facebook exists, they didn’t really know it exists because they didn’t know how to really use it to promote things. Their page had hardly anybody going to it. I said, “Let me do some PR for it,” and I became admin for the protest page.’ The next day RSVPs had gone from 180 to 2,700. Calling friends, sending personal messages, writing on walls, the rally that could have been yet another empty occasion was gathering traction. They managed to secure the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy into pitching in some support too – and over 5,000 people turned out.

‘When I saw how many people had turned up at Clean Ponds for the rally’ – the small pool where in the 1990s the police turned a blind eye to the boozers, punk-rockers, skinheads and all-day outdoor drinkers – ‘I just felt relieved,’ recalls Faybisovich. Two days of online activism had turned a non-event into a protest. But not quite a political protest. With makeshift placards against the ‘party of crooks and thieves’, printed with the United Russia bear angrily lugging a giant sack of money out of the map of Russia, those present were making a moral point, not supporting a particular person. Spontaneous, slightly shocked at its own attendance, the gathering at Clean Ponds was as fascinated by itself than those on stage.

The protest needed a hero and it found it in Navalny. His slogans were the ones they chanted, his ideas were the ones they talked about. It was a spontaneous protest: these were not his people, but they looked to him with fascination, as something just short of their leader. The rise in discontent, the exasperation with the old opposition, had turned his into a household name in Moscow in 2011. They called him a phenomenon. Shouting into the snow, he was yelling, ‘They call us “micro-bloggers” and “network hamsters” – I am a hamster and I will gnaw through the throats of this cattle.’

That somebody unknown could organize this rally, said two things. First, there was a huge desire for somebody, anybody, to do something. Second, that yet again, the old establishment opposition of Nemtsov, Milov and Yavlinsky were missing in action. Faybisovich, the unlikely Facebook spark, thinks that three things brought people together that evening:

‘It’s a simple thing really. Before there were not enough people who had enough to eat to care about where the country was going, but now there are enough people who have enough to eat to care about what kind of country their children will live in. You throw in the fact during the 2007 elections that we had no smartphones, now all kinds of electoral violations are recorded and spread over the Internet and then finally the slogan – the campaign from Navalny branding United Russia the “party of crooks and thieves”.’

Clean Ponds was instantly dubbed the ‘rally of the ruined shoes’ because under 5,000 pairs of feet, the snow had given way into liquid mud. But the name also said something about the kind of shoes these people were wearing. It was rather the ‘rally of the ruined expensive shoes’. Those there were pleased to see that it was a rally of the ‘right sort’. Over 80 per cent had some sort of post-secondary-school education, compared to just 30 per cent of Russians at large. 25There was also a faint echo of the Decembrists, the failed 1825 elite uprising of St Petersburg’s finest aristocratic officers who, having experienced the West during the Napoleonic wars, wanted a constitution. That night in December was a demonstration from inside the Schengen visa-holding Moscow elite, but unlike the tsar’s officers they were far from the point of picking up their muskets. This was a protest to say ‘we exist’, not ‘we want power’.

Then it seemed it had all gone wrong – with arrests and the Moscow riot police wielding batons, grabbing Navalny into custody as he pulled back shouting, ‘all for one, and one for all’.

The police had not quite jumped the protests. Navalny and his friend, the opposition activist Ilya Yashin, well-known for stunts including anti-Putin bungee jumps off Moscow bridges, decided to walk to the Lubyanka, the KGB turned FSB headquarters. ‘Why?’ groans one organizer, ‘Because they wanted to feel shivers run down their spines.’ This was not in the permit and the organs reacted clumsily, arresting over 1,000 people, not realizing they were scoring an own goal. ‘It helped us massively, but I do not feel guilty about this as their police brutality is what they have been doing every day for years,’ grins Faybisovich. Police, brutality ignited a protest movement out of the Facebook-fuelled gathering. The mood combusted out of a mix of elation and surprise in Moscow’s small world of ‘the right sort’, overjoyed to have found itself on the streets, sparked by their outrage at the castling and industrial ballot stuffing.