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

1 Who appointed you as the opposition?

2 What have you got to say to people who are not Muscovites?

3 What would you do if you took power?

4 Who exactly is your leader?

5 What exactly do you believe in?

6 What policies to do you have to fix a broken state?

Without a clear answer to these questions, in a country where the oldest voters were born under Stalin and the youngest under Yeltsin, even the protesters themselves did not want a revolution. They did not want to seize the Kremlin; they wanted managed democracy to evolve into democracy. Even those on the streets were frightened at what mass violence or confrontations with the police might bring. At many protests, right at the back of the crowds, sometimes wearing a hat just to make sure he was fully disguised, was Dmitry Polikanov, the chubby-cheeked deputy head of the Central Committee of United Russia. ‘I went as an observer, to see what was happening,’ he told me, ‘but I was calmed, when I observed that the crowds did not treat those on the stage as their leaders.’

He was right. Fears like this kept Putin in power and stopped the protest movement turning into a full-blown revolution. But the protest movement illustrated just how unstable Putinism really is. It illustrated that the Putin consensus was over and that the Putin majority had dissolved. The regime, for all its attempts to build a vertical of power and enthusiastic support with youth groups like Nashi, was forced to pay people to attend its rallies and to use the most fearmongering rhetoric to clinch victory in the ‘plebiscite-election’, despite Putin’s only permitted opponents being ones who could not seriously challenge him.

The official results of the March 2012 election came in at 64 per cent, but independent experts placed his true share of the vote somewhere between 45 and 50 per cent. 40This would include all those state employees paid or compelled to vote for him. Almost all the votes used to make up the difference had been shifted from the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who according to one independent estimate saw his vote-share shrink from over 21 per cent to 7 per cent. 41In an open contest these votes would have been cast for a liberal anti-Putin candidate. Perhaps this is why – standing in front of a crowd of 110,000 – as the exit polls came in that he had, after all, ‘won’ the election, Putin had to wipe tears from his eyes. Imitating Navalny he shouted over the crowd bused in from the sticks and given free vodka, ‘We won,’ and the ‘enemies of Russia that only want to bring chaos to our country’ had been defeated. ‘Glory to Russia,’ he finished, with tears in his eyes. Tears of exhaustion? 42Or realization at how fragile his ‘stability’ was after all? Russia had changed, but the regime had not.

Over the weeks that followed, the blogosphere seemed to drown in elegies, but not for Putin. One bitter blogger posted a few days later the reasons that the movement failed to stop Putin’s return:

The answer is very simple: the ‘swamp’ was not really directed against the political regime, but against the country with the name of Russia, as it has existentially been for centuries. On the ‘swamp’ people came out to say that they are tired of living in the novels of Gogol and Shchedrin’s stories, in this darkness, in this filth with the heads of fools. It was a real testament (paradoxically) to the success of Putin’s modernization: the political class had emerged capable of forming the demands of civilization, including the rules of civilized politics. On the ‘swamp’ was born a new country, but it was not this pained baby that won on 4 March. Putin raised up the old Russia in its boots and galoshes, wife-beating and vodka-tippling. They came and destroyed our iPhones. 43

The winter protests were not an earthquake on a Richter scale strong enough to bring down the Kremlin walls, but tremors unsettling enough to make cracks appear in the rooms of the palace, exposing the fault lines under the regime. They were the birth pangs of a new opposition, of a new Moscow – the first malfunction at the beginning of the unravelling of managed democracy. The demonstrations ended the Putin consensus and the Putin majority. They exposed that all was not well, in a system with no ‘the dictatorship of law’ and an incompetent ‘vertical’.

The protest movement showed that it was no longer possible in Russia, if it ever had been, to speak of ‘the masses’ or the ‘people’. The contradictions of Putinism had created different countries on different trajectories for whom the winter’s rallies and marches were a Russian clash of civilizations. In neither was Putin loved or feared, but rather what he represented – stability or stagnation of the state. In a sense, the dividing line in this clash was a question of what period in history frightened you the most: the 1980s stagnation or the 1990s chaos? But in the months that followed, even Navalny had begun to feel he had hit a far bigger problem than the OMON – a brick wall in people’s minds. Something profound had changed in Russia – but far from everyone in it. Navalny sighed:

‘Every time I get arrested I am grabbed and thrown in by the same kind of policemen… and every time I talk to them: “Why are you arresting me? Do you not know that Putin is a thief?” And every time I get the same kind of answers – they all hate United Russia, they don’t really like Putin – but they throw me into the cell and shout the same thing back at me. “It’ll never get any better, mate… It’ll never get any better.”’

He shrugs his shoulders: ‘This is the huge problem. It’s the way people think.’

THEY MADE a human chain, they let off hundreds of white balloons, they wore white ribbons in parliament, they made beautiful websites, they stuck stickers denouncing him in grimy metro carriages, then held a writer’s walk, then a protest walk and drove round and round the ring road honking ‘Down with the dictator’ and waving their white ribbons, whilst Navalny yelled into the microphone, ‘Down with the party of crooks and thieves, down, down, down with the thieves’, until he was exhausted and simply wanted to go home.

Putin won. The opposition rallies dwindled. The marches got smaller. They dried up outside Moscow. In winter 2012, every few weeks they could still pull out thousands in the capital, this certainly being the demographic in Russia with the best English and the most accustomed to skiing in France. This was the core of something and they called themselves the best of the best. But it was only the beginning of a new opposition, one that could challenge the Kremlin another day. It was not lost on them, that in 2004 when Putin lost in Ukraine, Kiev had been swamped by as many as a million Orange protesters.

‘We are seeing a certain weariness. People had hoped for a quick result,’ said the opposition personality Ilya Yashin, ‘But it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.’ 1The movement was not a complete failure. They had torn up the Putin consensus. The new middle class had begun to become political. The old ‘stability’ was over. It was the beginning of the end of Putinism by consent, not the Putin regime. However, though the government was almost illegitimate in the eyes of the Muscovite bourgeoisie, for all their tweets and thunderous speeches they had failed to dislodge him.

The protests failed because Moscow is not Russia. Statistically speaking, the capital is another country. Most people live in drab cities about two to three nights away from the Kremlin by train, where the level of human development is somewhere between third-world Peru and Jamaica. 2Not Moscow – it is comparable to South Korea, has higher salaries than Poland, a bigger GDP than Hong Kong and more billionaires than New York, or anywhere else in the world. 3Most ‘federal subjects’ are economically the size of Ethiopia, Tanzania or other African countries. 4Not Moscow – with about 22 per cent of all Russian GDP, it is a city worth more than Shanghai, Beijing or Istanbul. 5It has become a megacity, culturally and economically, dominating the country like London dominates Britain, or even Stockholm Sweden, but not demographically – even if one accounts for the unregistered and throws in the whole of the wider Moscow region, no more than 20 million out of 142 million Russians are living here.