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

For this segment, the state-dependent middle class, you hear this old question across Russia – ‘why should I bite the hand that feeds me?’ And it is quickly followed by this answer: ‘As long as I’m all right, Putin can’t be that bad.’ Crucially, this is held together by the hidden links of black cash and corruption. Russia is as corrupt as Papua New Guinea on indexes – because millions are tied into corruption rackets.

The new opposition could not cut through this. Culturally, they lacked the tools. Russian political culture always divided the country into the vanguard that has the right to rule, and the people who must be led – like cattle. It has endlessly resurfaced since Peter the Great, be it as Bolsheviks or ‘young reformers’. Putin, dreaming of pipelines, behaves as if he has no interest in crowds of Muscovites, whilst Moscow – dreaming of Europe – is disdainful of the rest of Russia.

The opposition counter-elite reacted to defeat childishly. They simply insisted that all those who supported Putin were the least dynamic, most backward and ill-informed parts of society. In reality, things were more knotted and complicated. They, as the leaders of the ‘creative classes’, would win sooner or later. They were the wave of history – online and globalized, middle class and modernized. The way they talked about provincials, their words derogatory and their tone mocking, left one convinced that most of them think they are ‘poor cretins’. It stems from the same belief that the Moscow elites have the right to determine the country’s course, the root of managed democracy in the first place.

Worse still, opposition leaders refuse to spend time over the Volga to make up for this – ‘People are telling me you’re very Moscow based,’ I said to Navalny. ‘I am very Moscow based,’ he snapped back. He repeatedly turned down suggestions from his (at times frustrated) team to take a regional tour, until it was too late. The state, under the guise of an embezzlement investigation, then banned him from leaving Moscow. The old opposition that he supplanted spends its time on the European think-tank tour scene at conferences, not in the industrial cities where Putinism is a grim affair. Kasparov, Nemtsov, Kasyanov are constantly rushing to the airport – and flying out West. When Putin claims these three men are not ‘real Russians’, the fact that they are barely in Moscow only helps.

There is no one like Yeltsin – who in 1991 spoke like a real Russian – or even like Lenin, who craved taking ‘the light’, ‘the revolution’ and ‘electrification’ into every corner. The opposition says they are limited by money: this is not entirely true. What is missing is desire. If Navalny found the time for a holiday in Cancun and a pit stop in New York between the 2012 parliamentary and the presidential elections, before he was banned from leaving Moscow, he could have found the time to take the night train to Kazan. I know many cheap places to stay there. This is why Leonid Parfyonov, another culprit who failed to speak at the Sakharova rally despite public appeals as he was enjoying a European city break, remarked: ‘Navalny is not the leader. He is just very popular. That’s different.’

Figures like this from the opposition may not be present in the regions, but the truly rich, the truly powerful are only half present in Moscow. There cannot be enough pressure on them to make them desperate for change. The oligarchs with resources to throw into battle – their lives are already half-offshore in London, Tel Aviv or Geneva. With half their lives comfortable and secure, it takes the sting out of authoritarianism. It lowers the stakes for risking everything. Why bother, when your children are at an English public school or an American university and your money is in an Austrian or Cypriot bank account? ‘If only we were as far away as Brazil,’ I have heard more than one sigh. Rather than being too far away from Europe, people have come to fear that those who could force change are too integrated and at home in it to modernize Russia. As long as Domodedovo Airport is always there and the border is always open, what is wrong with Russia now will not be enough to push those with real resources into something truly dangerous. How desperate can this super-elite ever become when they have mansions in Kensington?

Only Putin is everywhere and ubiquitous. Only Putin with his retinue and his jet is in every region at once. The TV tells a never-ending story: his hand is kissed by a monk in northern Karelia; he is visiting the tank factories in Nizhny Tagil; he is swimming in the rivers of Tuva; and opening the summit of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Vladivostok. This is one of the secrets of Putinism as telepopulism. He has the most punishing travel schedule of any Russian leader in history. It is a permanent campaign – but it does not bring him any closer to the people. The scene is set (faked, cleaned-up, choreographed) before his every appearance. Insulated from any dissenting comment or unpleasant sight, Putin spends his life visiting a Potemkin Russia. The last time this man went for an unescorted walk or took public transport was the last time he had a job without maximum security – as far back as 1998, before he became head of the FSB.

Managed democracy is insulting to provincials in a way snide comments from the opposition could never be. It does not bemoan them as idiots; it classifies them as cattle, not adult enough to vote. Nor is Putin anymore connected in Moscow, increasingly ‘working from home’ in his palace off the Rublevka as much as possible. He drives from the Kremlin to this palace in an escort that resembles the visits of Western leaders to occupied Baghdad. For Putin to pass, the roads must close. For Putin to spin round the Kremlin, the traffic must stop. On the day of his inauguration in 2012 there was no need for Muscovites. The streets were emptied and sealed. As the black ZIL limousine neared the gates of the power castle, it looked as if Putin was not the tsar, beloved by his people, but the Khan who had conquered Moscow.

While the rest of Russia dreams of Moscow – of the yellow stone Stalin towers lit up like casinos, of the shopping streets that slope towards the Kremlin – Moscow is dreaming of London, New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. No topic is more popular than emigration. No one is cool unless he has spent time and shopped abroad. To see this as a political act is a mistake. For some it is – but for many it is a consumer act. There is nothing trendy about the Urals, and ‘Siberian’ is positively an insult. The only places elite Muscovites want to go to are St Petersburg (for the weekend), the beach at Sochi on the Black Sea or the resort islands of Solovki in the Arctic.

‘Moscow without Putin’, read a placard held by a pretty girl at the protest in June 2012. It meant something. This free city of Moscow, having unmoored itself from Putinism culturally during the 2000s – rejecting Nashi, sneering at members of United Russia and sniggering at photos of Medvedev – has found itself feeling caught. Moscow had shown it was unhappy. The protest movement had brought its cultural elites to the podium, rallied 100,000 of its best-paid and best-informed consumers and shown that Putin no longer had a majority in his capital. It had started a culture war – but Moscow was trapped in Russia.

To stay in power Putin must divide the nation. He realized that he must box the opposition into Moscow and make Russia see them as a bunch of elitist sexual deviants, led by a Yale-educated American spy, a gaggle of mink-coat-wearing hipsters with criminal intent. Kremlin telepopulism was overhauled – to turn the working class against this bourgeoisie. The Putin consensus, the leader as all things to all Russians, was buried. The Kremlin fought back with a conservative culture war.