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

It was far harder to pin down who exactly were the ‘masses in the swamp’. Moscow struggled to put a name to them – ‘creative classes’ was too exclusive and classist and ‘new middle class’ was too narrow a term that didn’t capture the ranks of students, state employees, elderly or just simply ‘lower middle class’ that turned up. A large but broadly aspirational section of the population had broken off from the Putin majority. One poll suggested 70 per cent considered themselves ‘well off’, reading the news online, in a city where only half feel ‘well off’ and in a country where around a quarter do. 29This was the ‘insulted minority’.

In Moscow, their semi-revolutionary sentiment that winter may have, at times, even been dominant. What was so frightening about the rallies was constant chants of the slogan: ‘Russia has no future.’ The protests were the beginning of the rejection of the ‘Stability First’ national ethos driving politics since the default. ‘Stability’ had come for the Moscow middle class to mean stagnation – and the eclipse of the future.

In the bohemian club Masterskaya, with its stage, wooden tables and old-fashioned lampshades, I have watched an open mike and photo-slideshow on ‘tell us about your Soviet childhood’, overheard dull conversations about Moleskines and apps, listened to the Israeli novelist Etgar Keret describe Moscow as a ‘sexy kind of hell’, but before the protest movement I had never seen politics there. Not the stage filled with girls exhorting you to join their ‘anti-Putin metro flash-mob’, opposition activists explaining that ‘@wakeupru’ was their twitter feed and explaining the entry and exit points to the planned mass demonstration on 24 December. Everyone was so excited, even sharp minds such as Maxim Trudolyubov, the opinion-page editor of Vedomosti , Russia’s leading broadsheet. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘like in 1991 when the atmosphere… was the exultation of the nation. December 2011 was that… in miniature.’

This was mania. Bound up with a sudden sense of release after years of Putin and the delirious lives these young activists and opposition leaders were leading – mixing in all the alcohol, the late nights, the snow and the adrenaline rush of new technology. Later, I learnt that this behaviour was not real political enthusiasm, but similar to the ‘1968 revolution’, that everyone was ‘enjoying so much’, rejecting De Gaulle and his stuffy slightly authoritarian leadership in France over forty years ago. Once the Moscow ‘spring’ was all over, I told the ‘68 student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit about this buoyant atmosphere. He smiled: ‘Revolutions where people seize the Winter Palace are now impossible, an illusion… the only kind of revolution possible now has to be a moment that changes values.’

On the metro – with the girls in the flash mob – as the North Caucasians pushed by in their uniform black leather jackets and the police in crash helmets looked on, we boarded the metro carriage. Stations may be marble, with colonnades, chandeliers of Siberian crystals or bronze-works of Socialist workers but the carriages are always the inverse, yellow lighting, cramped, Soviet 1970s, careering down tunnels with an aircraft-like roar that obscures the tinned woman’s voice asking you to ‘mind the closing doors’. Between the central stations the flash mob covered their mouths in stickers – ‘They stole our voice’, which is the same word as for ‘vote’ in Russian – and stickered the windows with exhortations to come to the mass protest on Sakharova – leaflets showing Putin’s face in a crossed-through red circle. Moving from one carriage to the next, with police coming after us in their tundra-blue uniforms, a friend said: ‘I now realize how absurd this is, that you can be arrested for anything, and that they are chasing stupid anti-Putin kids when they should be doing something about criminals.’ We got on another train, but for a while we were too nervous, without the flash mob, or for that matter of the police, to slap up the stickers. My friend croaks: ‘OK, yes I will slap it up then, I don’t want to be afraid.’

Less than three metro stops from the bohemian idealism of Masterskaya, where the previous day an overexcited radio host had told me he could be the ‘next’ foreign minister, the city was neither completely free, nor completely afraid. Most people were deeply uncertain. It was unclear in the arguments I had with friends that lived at stations beyond the Garden Ring, but also in most Russians minds, what was more frightening – stagnation or a revolution. Long-supressed arguments had come to the surface. About the Soviet collapse, about the Americans, about the Chechens, about whether Russia was even worth saving. People began discussing if the regime might actually fall.

Prospect Sakharova – an auspicious name for a venue hosting a mass rally on 24 December 2011 – is so called after the nuclear physicist, who had watched Soviet hydrogen bombs explode like giant red balloons on the steppes of Kazakhstan, then mutated into a dissident and moral sage whom the intelligentsia rallied around during perestroika. Prospect Sakharova – the place where Nashi came to trample, rally, shout out ‘Putin, Putin’ and drum their trademark drums. Those who came out of the metro station came out with a gulp in their throats. The enormity of the crowd, its fur coats, ski jackets, craning its neck to see the stage, wide-eyed and legs sunk on the sidewalk into the dirty, pollution-singed piles of snow they call ‘porridge’, seemed frightened of its own size. A crowd large enough to lose mobile coverage in, to lose friends in, or children. Right ahead were anarchists putting on balaclavas, a gang waving a banner inscribed with ‘all power to the Soviets’, some girls in pink lipstick with a cardboard placard ‘Yes We Can Too’, racist football hooligans waving the Romanov flag, the yellow-black-white of the nationalists, a small cluster shouting ‘Bring back the tsar’.

‘Oh my God,’ winced a nuclear technician, ‘I have come to a rally with, ‘Bring back the tsar? Bring back Soviet power? So what is it – after Putin – the deluge? This is too populist…’

Maybe not quite: over 100,000 people came to stand on Prospect Sakharova that day, the temperature a few degrees below zero. 30Many more came to take a look, then left. Out came those who had broken off the Putin majority. Countless thousands had meandered in and out during the long afternoon rally. Though the flags of the nationalists, the communists, the hard-leftists and the other parties of cranks and fools together were about even with the orange and green banners of the democrats, most of those who came were ordinary Muscovites who had come to make a moral point. A lot of interest was being paid to the ‘make your own poster’ tent and the ‘free protesters tea’ stand. The politicians were wooing them, not the other way round. It was a carnival of political naivety. Faybisovich, worried about nationalists at the front, put it this way: ‘This is what happens when you don’t have politics for ten years.’

Those clusters of flag-wavers and leafleteers were a parade of the politicized, upon whom the sleeping pills named ‘Zyuganov’ and ‘Zhirinovsky’ had worn off. This agitation was a sign that the hegemony of the Kremlin’s two tame parties, the KPRF and the LDPR, was slowly wearing off on the Left and the Right. The most popular leftists were the ‘Left Front’, who scrawled ‘1917–2017 COMING SOON’ on the side of railway tracks, wore leather jackets and flew the red star. They worshipped their leader, Sergey Udaltsov, the skinhead great-grandson of a Bolshevik general, who in shades and leather had the punk look, they crowed, ‘of a guy who really knows what its like inside prison.’