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

‘When I look at the leaders of the Orange zone, I find in them the demons and the devils of the 1990s that ruined my country and plagued the great productive power of the Soviet Union, brought the Americans to our secret centres and allowed them to make off with piles of secret documents…

‘Another of its features – this blatant social arrogance. In fact – we can call it the social racism of the current leaders of the street. This is the revolution of the rich, the revolution of mink-wearing revolutionaries in dialogue with the mink-wearing liberal revolutionaries inside the Kremlin over the heads of the people, in total disregard for the people […]

‘The third feature of the Orange street, that has appeared in all Orange revolutions – is the willingness to be led. These Orange revolutionaries are not national leaders. The people may think they are real revolutionaries, not Orange – but the master of their minds is the West – the United States and NATO.’ 35

This kind of visceral state-sanctioned anti-Western propaganda was more reminiscent of Tehran than Moscow, a decade earlier. Yet this crowd was mostly made up of men and women forced to be there. Many were state employees who had been given ‘bonuses’ to head out there, many were migrant workers who could not speak Russian, many were bused in from factories in the provinces to make up the numbers.

To fake the imminent March 2012 presidential elections, the Kremlin needed to fake a protest movement. To fake legitimacy, the $12 billion oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov was encouraged by the Kremlin as a liberal ‘vote catcher’. His policies, as Greece teetered on the edge of default, included ‘joining the Eurozone’. 36This is because his purpose was not liberalism, but to look daft enough to enable Putin to win.

They had also stopped pretending everything was all right. There was no more dreaming with BRICs. One afternoon I went to see the Nashi MP Robert Shlegel for coffee. He was tense:

‘This country is not turning into a dictatorship! I was born in Turkmenistan; I know perfectly know what a dictatorship is… And I know better than anyone how dysfunctional, how incapable, how appallingly badly run this system is, which is why I am fighting every day inside the party to make it better… I never believed the ‘Orange threat’ when I joined Nashi in the first place… but now, it’s real. Those people – Navalny and his friends – they are real revolutionaries, who will wreck this country.’

Putinism had become tautological, its means and ends had become identical. Unable to offer any positive vision for the country, any project to justify Putin to 2018, the propaganda had fallen back on ‘stability’. Russia needed to vote for ‘stability’ to preserve ‘stability’. Unable to conjure up an imagined future, it fell back on invoking half-imagined horrors from the past. It cast support for Putin not as something positive, in the name of an agenda, but as something negative, against ‘chaos’, ‘the Orange Revolution’ or ‘NATO’.

Russia is a wounded nation. From the moment Navalny had shouted out at the crowd ‘there are enough of us here to seize the Kremlin and the White House right now’, the protests began to get smaller and smaller and Putin gathered greater and greater numbers of ‘protesters’ to his own ‘rallies’. Playing on fears and trying to rub wounds with salty fingers, whilst pretending to bandage them, the Kremlin’s propaganda went into overdrive. Videos circulated warning that without Putin the country would simply collapse. 37The Chinese would take Siberia, NATO would enter Kaliningrad, the Internet would be cut off, Navalny would be awarded the Nobel peace prize and hyperinflation would return in a 1990s redux. 38State TV incessantly suggested that the Americans were funding the rallies, Putin said Hillary Clinton was paying for them – ‘the Orange Revolution’ was coming. Those close to the Kremlin felt satisfied by February. ‘The protest wave has peaked,’ said Gleb Pavlovsky, attending one inconspicuously in a thick hat.

A revolution scare went through the population. Little-known voices on the blogosphere put it better than any politician. From Kazan one young woman, a United Russia activist, if a surprisingly eloquent one, wrote about her horrible feelings of history repeating itself. It was hardly a tone of hope:

Of course the collapse of the Soviet Union was a complete shock to them. A large family in which the cities of Minsk, Riga, Kerch, Frunze and Moscow were suddenly divided by international borders and suddenly the phrase ‘rights of the Russian speaking population’ entered into their lexicon. Then the research institutes, where mom and dad worked, stopped paying wages. That’s all, but mom and dad still went to work every day, hoping that their salary was about to be paid. I was small and I did not understand. Then I grew up and I thought this would never be permitted to happen to me and that we had found our place in the new reality. I had not become a millionaire – but I had not slipped into poverty. But more importantly, in contrast to the generation of my parents, who were dissatisfied, who watched in silence during the looting and destruction of the country, I thought my generation would never allow it – never. I was 13, 15 and 17 and I thought I knew everything, but actually I didn’t understand. Now I’m 27, almost 30. And I was horrified to realize that I cannot do anything. And my generation, pushing its completely valid claims, printing out slogans on A4 pieces of paper – without any irony – means my country is getting closer to the abyss. Now, at the rally for ‘Clean Elections’ in Kazan, my Russian friends have come face to face again with those weird-looking guys, shouting separatist slogans on the stage and speaking about the special status of the Tatar language… I am taking the most valuable thing and trying to escape – just like my relatives when Soviet Frunze became Kyrgyz Bishkek. 39

Andrei Zorin, an eminent Russian cultural historian from the University of Oxford, avoided the protests. That December he came to Moscow and felt ill at ease looking at the leaders of the opposition movement and the young anti-Putin journalists organizing the protests, the talented circle behind Bolshoi Gorod, Dozhd and Afisha . He personally taught half of them before he emigrated:

I didn’t go to Bolotnaya. I have this feeling that the situation is actually extremely grave. I don’t think this pleasant joking manner with everyone going to the protests to enjoy them is right. There need to be specific political goals. There need to be specific measurements of the risks, evaluated against those goals. I don’t think that any of them properly realize that this may end in blood sooner or later. One can even argue – it will be OK, that it would be revolution – but I do not sincerely think this is what they believe in. If you ask any of them if Putin’s Russia is really worth giving your life for just to get rid of it – I am not sure any of them would say ‘yes’. It’s like a game and it’s one that is separating them from the fears of the rest of the country… But I am an old man, and I should not say that the creative, modern youth are flawed.

The newborn protest movement was unable to answer these questions. It was not ready to run into the Kremlin, as it could barely walk. Without structure, without a policy platform, it was not resistance ready to break through the OMON to force a recount – it was the very beginning of resistance to Putin. In Moscow, around 50,000 people showed themselves ready to come out every few weeks until summer 2012. Yet even if the protest leaders kept the pressure up with street parades, human chains and escalating Internet activism it could not really answer six simple questions: