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

Defining the mood of the megacity matters enormously. Yet cut off from the rest of the country, the opposition failed to break out and become a national movement. This reflects Moscow’s accelerating economic disconnection with Russia. The incomes of the richest one-fifth of the capital, the protestors on the streets, are over twenty times the income of the poorest one-fifth of Russians – a Latin American disparity. 6If you are a foreigner, Moscow is the third most expensive city in the world. 7If you are working class from the provinces, moving to Moscow is unaffordable. If you are from Siberia or the Far East, a ticket to Moscow would cost you months of wages. 8

Cut off economically, means cut off socially and cut off culturally. The new Facebook and white-ribbon opposition mirrored Moscow as a whole. It disdains the hinterland, viscerally, like eighteenth-century Paris. This is because those from the sticks have come here to escape, whilst the ‘creative classes’ that throng the opposition, be they e-workers, globalizers, students or designer-journalists, live like an offshore elite. When they go to the airport they only fly to the south and the west – the oligarchy spend their summers in Tuscany, the ‘creative classes’ spend weekends in Berlin, and those they both call the ‘office plankton’ go to Turkey.

The Moscow elites today are as different from Russians as the tsarist elites of St Petersburg, who spoke in a pretentious pidgin French, took the waters in Baden-Baden and tried to marry into the English aristocracy. This has revived a nineteenth-century dialectic between the intelligentsia and the masses. They speak in the name of a people they are cut off from and do not know; they claim to know what is best for them but actually unnerve these same masses. This leaves them powerless and anguished. ‘I’ve never been to those places … I’ve never been anywhere in Russia really,’ remarked the admin of the main opposition Facebook group, who did his degree in London – ‘I spend my time going from my house to the Red October district and back again, which you know is the place to be.’

They are even more cut off from the hinterland than their tsarist forbears. They never travel ‘to Russia’ and this is a break with the past. The tsarist elite had its estates in Russia – huge lands in Tambov or Rostov to spend the summer on. Chekhov’s three aristocratic sisters longing for the capital (‘ To Moscow, to Moscow ’) could not be Russian aristocratic characters today. The truly wealthy today are 99 per cent centred on the capital. But they could be working class, of course – or dreaming of somewhere else (‘ To London, to London ’). Then, even if the estates disappeared, the communist elite also often found itself out of Moscow for years on end – Brezhnev and Chernenko in Chisinau, Andropov in Karelia, Khrushchev in Kiev, Yeltsin in Sverdlovsk. The same went for lowly workers in the military–industrial complex and for anyone in lengthy military service. Not to mention the years of exile that the dissidents – the conscience of the intelligentsia – spent in outer Siberia.

No longer. The new Russian state does not send people on multi-year-long assignments to drain the marshes along the Volga, build institutes in Khabarovsk or settle the Taiga. This is a far less romantic country – but one that is losing its knowledge of self. You get a sense from their blogs and conversation that what these ‘creative classes’ really want is to turn the whole of Moscow into an ersatz London (or Shoreditch), with bicycle lanes and pedestrianized streets, which has sprung up in the cafes they frequent (Bar John Donne, Café Jan-Jak). They do not want to go out, like the Bolsheviks, to convert the people.

The circles around the opposition leadership threw themselves into online elections for their own leadership, plus a busy social calendar promoting these newly found roles as ‘icons’. With few exceptions, the hipster counter-elite were more interested in preaching to the choir in Jan-Jak than riding to the end of the metro lines to agitate in estates, supermarkets or for social rights. ‘The regions? What do I know about the regions? I have no answer for them,’ sneered the popular opposition activist Max Katz, a young man with long greasy hair, as we talked one evening in a ‘space’ where one paid by the minute as pretty people strummed guitars. ‘I’m from Moscow. When the people from the regions do something for themselves, I’ll support them.’ He then went back to talking about his ideas for cycle paths though the big city. ‘I have no answers for the regions.’ At least he was honest.

Behaving like an ‘iPhone only’ social club, interested above all in themselves, they could not overcome the fact that Russia is a country of broken links. These stopped the protest movement in the capital from spreading. The regions are extremely cut off geographically, socially and culturally from the Moscow megacity. But 38 per cent of Russians are living in small towns or in the countryside. 9Here, there are African male life expectancies and the human development levels of Central America. 10

The opposition couldn’t spread beyond Moscow, as sociologically that is where the wealth and the well-travelled are concentrated. They couldn’t overcome the class and regional gulfs this lopsided development entailed. These mean broken links between classes, which each distrust the other as ‘backward’ or ‘treacherous’. The workers of the tank factories in the Urals disdain the e-workers of Moscow, just as much as the latter look down on these grubby factory hands. They lacked the leaders to heal the broken links between generations – the young disdain the old as ‘Soviets’, the old disdain the young as ‘office plankton’, every family is divided between those nostalgic for the Soviet Union and those nostalgic for a future Medvedev failed to deliver. All the links that normally tie a country together: elections, functioning institutions, free media, a real public space – have all been broken by Putin.

The brightest in the movement knew that this fragmented, shattered Russia held back change. ‘The main problem with our society,’ said Filip Dzyadko, one of the movement’s most adored journalists and activists, ‘are these broken links. Everything that ties us together between regions, generations, past and present, has been shattered by the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the successor regime to the Soviet Union. We will only become a healthy society once we have rebuilt those connections, somehow.’

But there is something else the opposition could not cut through. Russia is the country of hidden links. Over 40 per cent of the new middle class works for the state or the companies its controls. 11This means only a very small amount of the new middle class is actually independent from the state – most are either bureaucrats, doctors, teachers or working for companies that either operate, offer services or depend on natural resources – i.e. on the companies answerable to Putin. 12

So where the new middle class may be around 20–30 per cent of the population, only a very small proportion of that feels secure enough to go out and protest. This way, huge swathes of those who naturally would have something to gain by deposing the regime actually have something to lose. One afternoon I sat with some successful friends drinking coffee, looking out the window of their apartment at the belching smokestacks that spew steam over central Moscow, to keep it warm. A beautiful accountant for Gazprom looked out the window, fed up of questions about Navalny and his ilk. ‘Putin’s Russia is not the best Russia. But we work. We eat. It’s not the worst Russia out of the ones I have lived in. It could be so much worse and our lives are not yet terrible. Do you really think Putin is the worst leader? Compared to the others we followed from time to time?’