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

‘Looking back I don’t think we made any mistakes in the winter wave. It was so spontaneous. It was completely grassroots, totally chaotic and spontaneous, it was real…’ smiles Navalny. ‘But I am certain I did one thing right. It was absolutely the right thing to go and be so aggressive that night with my speech about the “killer hamster”.’ He smiles to himself, as if about to giggle at the words ‘killer hamster’. ‘It was absolutely the right thing to do to go on the illegal march.’ Navalny says that thrown into custody and cut off, he had no idea what was happening outside. ‘In prison we heard that things were getting exciting outside. And we were thinking, ‘Oh, it would be so cool if 10,000 people came to the next protests. Oh, we thought it would be incredibly cool if 15,000 people came to the next protest. We were sitting in prison and just had no idea.’

Over the next few weeks a wave of elation tore up the Putin consensus in the Moscow bourgeoisie. There was a raw gas in the air of the cafes – that left those who breathed it in dizzy, then giddy, with the sensation that their energy was mounting, that it would simply prevail, that they were winning. The activists who had thrown together the rally at Clean Ponds threw themselves into a Facebook feed about further protests. By one big stroke of luck, the hard-left skinhead activist Sergey Udaltsov was holding on to a permit for a protest on 10 December. All they needed now was permission from the authorities to carry it off and enough people to turn up. What became known as the ‘Orgkomitet’ began to take shape. Senior editors at the glamour magazine Afisha came on board, joined by celebrity reporter Oleg Kashin and the well-known publisher Sergey Parkhomenko, who is Faybisovich’s stepfather, and other bloggers and ‘men-about-town’. Together with the activists from the old, ‘political’, opposition they began negotiating with Moscow city hall and publicizing the gathering. With RSVPs hitting over 20,000, big-name celebrities started to come on board: from the singer Yury Sevchuk to the TV personality Leonid Parfyonov and the writer Boris Akunin. Parfyonov says he felt he had no choice: ‘I decided I had to be there, when Akunin phoned me. He said, “We just have to go. The people who are protesting are our audiences, our auditorium. We have to be there for them.” ’

All those writers, hipsters and TV presenters previously uninvolved in politics were rushing to make suggestions to the ‘Orgkomitet’, urging people to come out to shout Navalny’s slogans because they felt sure the ‘old opposition’ was feckless enough to let the moment slip with its ugly 1990s faces who would inspire no one to show up. The tense, last-minute negotiations with the Town Hall and the deputy Kremlin chief of staff to get the final go-ahead for the rally, and the Facebook groups to get people out, were not only about clean elections. It was a revolt against the old opposition – and with it the birth of a new opposition.

Across town Boris Nemtsov had been taken by surprise by the lead-up to ‘Clean Ponds’, but he was sure that a generational change was under way. The former deputy prime minister who most Russians associate with the liberal cabinet during the 1998 default, told me he was sure that the younger generation were now immune to Putin’s endless refrain – ‘Without us we’ll be back in the 1990s’. As he said this, he turned to the blonde beside him: ‘My girlfriend is born in 1990… she does not know what is Yeltsin… she thinks that Yeltsin – is me!’

Despite announcements from the police they would be ‘looking for draft dodgers’ at any protests, official health warnings that the mass gathering could trigger a SARS outbreak, sudden orders that the planned protest day was a compulsory school test for all city students, and cries for Internet censorship inside the ‘organs’, the authorities relented – the rally could go ahead at ‘Bolotnaya’, or ‘the swamp’, a thin strip of land between the Moscow river consisting of a walkway and a small park, home to thirteen ghoulish bronze statues called ‘Children are the Victims of Adult Vices: sadism, theft, ignorance, violence…’

Over 60,000 people went to ‘the swamp’ that day. An appalling sound-system meant that no one could hear the stage, but that hardly mattered. Mikhail Fishman, a prominent anti-Kremlin journalist, who had once been filmed in a compromising situation in what was believed to be a government sting, waved away suggestions that the emerging protest movement was badly organized: ‘the organization, the politics the programme didn’t matter that day, what mattered was the crowds who were looking into each others’ eyes, and seeing they were there.’

There was mild euphoria, with shouts of ‘clean elections’, ‘re-elections’ or ‘down with Surkovian Propaganda’. The Kremlin control of TV was suddenly relaxed and the rally was allowed to be covered, impartially, on national TV. Some claim that the costs of the rally were covered by dissenting MPs from the formerly tightly Kremlin-controlled Just Russia party, others pointed to the complete incoherence of those on the stage – from one man shouting for the restoration of ‘Soviet power’, to an angry nationalist being heckled – but it was the TV superstar Leonid Parfyonov who stole the show.

‘I was shaking,’ Parfyonov told me. ‘I had been waiting ages and I was incredibly cold. I had never given this kind of speech before, to a rally and I certainly had never spoken in the street before. I climbed onto the podium and I suddenly saw hands raise – each with an iPhone, each hand with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in their fists – and I instantly saw exactly what kind of people had come to the swamp.’

His nerves did not show. With a clear, rising tone, instantly recognizable and trustworthy to any Russian TV viewer, he told ‘the swamp’:

‘I’ve spent roughly half my life in my motherland, in the Vologda region, and half my life living in Moscow, and I can quite easily imagine the moods of these two regions. In the Vologda region United Russia received 33 per cent of the vote. Although this place is quite conservative and reliable, “Vologda guards do not like to joke”, and so on, this figure in general does not surprise me: one-third of the country boys for Soviet power, not more. And the governor of Vologda Pozgalev, yesterday, after a meeting with Vladislav Surkov, could honestly tell the press, “We had an honest election.” What could I do? But 50 per cent for United Russia in Moscow, this is utterly hard to believe. Vologda region is now for the first time more liberal than Moscow? It is not unlikely, it is just ridiculous.’ 26

This sense of the insult to Moscow, the insult to intelligent, liberal, clear-thinking people who cared about their votes as well as their cars, resonated out across ‘the swamp’. The official presidential twitter feed had re-tweeted the following: ‘It has become clear that if a person writes the expression “party of crooks and thieves” in their blog then they are a stupid sheep getting fucked in the mouth :).’ 27On television Putin himself sneered at ‘the swamp’. Asked what he was doing during the protests he replied, ‘I was learning how to play ice-hockey,’ adding that he thought the white-ribbons the crowds had starting pinning to their clothes as their symbol reminded him of ‘contraceptives’ – pale limp condoms. 28

As activists threw themselves into a new round of protest planning it was becoming clear that Putin, with such comments, was not in control of events. It was also very clear which personalities he had lost. The glamorous elite of journalists and personalities like Parfyonov – who a few years ago had said, ‘my job is to report, not climb the barricades’ – had turned on Putin. The new dominant pole in the Russian chattering classes was now what you could call ‘champagne anti-Putinism’.