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

The seemingly looped TV footage of the Medvedev years that had shown the official ‘president’ ordering an iPad 2, visiting Twitter’s Californian headquarters, opening Davos 2011, was all dropped. Putin dressed up as a working-class hero. On one broadcast he was wearing a bomber jacket on the factory floor, on another channel he was screeching out lines from Molotov in a puffer jacket in front of thousands of pensioners, whilst on the evening news he was attending mass with the Patriarch. His slogans were nostalgic – ‘Russia must restore the aristocracy of labour’, Russia needed to ‘carry out the same powerful, all embracing leap forward of the defence industry as the one carried out in the 1930s’. 13

Quietly, Vladislav Surkov was brought back in after his dismissal as Kremlin deputy chief of staff at the height of the protest movement. For a while, the new deputy prime minister, whose responsibilities included modernization, demographics and religious affairs, was mocked by those who once feared him for having such a vague portfolio. Then the campaign of religious anger started. To quote Deacon Alexander Volkov, spokesman for the Patriarch: ‘From Kaliningrad to Vladivostok the real Russia, supports stability and is against the agitation of the creative classes.’ In a country sickened by high rates of TB and HIV, alcoholism and aggression, where people have been turning to the Church for guidance – they now found the Kremlin.

Hipster Moscow fell into a trap. On 21 February 2012 a bunch of women dressed in brightly coloured balaclavas stormed into the unlovely white marble Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Bulldozed by Stalin, its resurrection under a glinting golden-leaf dome is for the Orthodox Church their banner on the Moscow skyline. It incarnates their resurgence to power and grace. The women rushed to its altar, terrified a priest and began gyrating up and down with guitars. They called it a ‘punk prayer’:

Maria, Mother, Virgin,

Drive Putin away, drive Putin away!

Black robes and epaulettes of gold,

Parishioners are crawling and bowing.

The spirit of liberty is up in Heaven,

Gay Pride’s been sent to Siberia, chained.

Their chief saint is the head of the KGB,

Who sends protesters under escort to prison! 14

Three of the women were arrested and charged with ‘hooliganism’. They thought they had made a wonderful art attack. In fact they had handed Surkov something very precious. He could not have concocted a video more riling. The Kremlin political technologists threw themselves with relish into whipping up the Orthodox Church into a frenzy of anti-protester fury. Putin was painted as a defender of the faith; installing chapels in some Moscow metro stations, making sure even ‘missionaries’ were on site in the underground. This turned the religious into their anti-protester faithful, where all their youth movements had failed over the winter. This also snapped any chance of the Patriarch playing the role of negotiator between the Kremlin and the protesters he had flirted with, the role of the Church in Central Europe in the imploding Eastern bloc. This tugged back Orthodox believers from following an opposition anticorruption agenda for a ‘purer Russia’.

The Pussy Riot show trial caught everything that was wrong with the Moscow opposition cultural elites and everything that was dangerous and inflammatory about the Kremlin game. The opposition rushed to give endless speeches, write op-eds and make court appearances defending the girls. Putin’s men laughingly edited them into nightly TV packages. Their verbose performances suggested the opposition were in fact just a Pussy Riot. Putin’s propagandists were overjoyed, mixing in images of protesters shouting ‘Free Pussy Riot’ with informative clips on how the Voina art-group they had split from, which means war, had staged a public orgy in a botanical museum, extensively photographed bits of a raw chicken being shoved up a vagina in a supermarket and hung an effigy of a dead Uzbek in the aisle of a food store.

Rather than being the new Solzhenitsyn, who spoke to everyone with clear moral actions in the USSR, the group captured the vanity and, ironically, the unpolitical nature of the radical art scene. They were interested in protest, not politics. Pyotr Verzilov, 24, the husband of Nadia Tolokonnikova, 22, the lead singer in the ‘band’, pranced around the court grinning, with a scraggly pubic beard, visibly thrilled to be in the floodlights of fame. We talked one afternoon by the courtroom door. I asked him if he realized that so many people I was speaking to in the regions now believed that the opposition was in fact Pussy Riot: ‘Well, if they believe that, there is absolutely nothing that can be done for them.’

One of the three girls on trial, Yekaterina Samutsevich, barely understood what was going on. ‘We were so confused, tired and not sure what was happening,’ she remembered. ‘We did it to show that the Church is now all a bunch of paid-up bureaucrats controlled by the state.’ This was not the first of her stunts. She had been filmed grabbing policewomen in the marble halls of the Moscow metro trying to force-kiss them. ‘We really didn’t understand what was happening during the trial, especially with the lawyers.’ In a squalid signal of how embezzlement permeated all corners of Russian life, some of the girls’ lawyers had been asking for cash to be handed over by journalists for access and even tried to register Pussy Riot as a trademark. 15Nor did Samutsevich appear to have grasped the political repercussions of the stunt. Her two other brightly coloured rioters were sent to prison camps. Luckily, after byzantine negotiations, Samutsevich was freed. We met one evening after her release to talk. She had brown circles under her eyes and the pallor of late nights, or jail cells:

‘Did you think that you might create propaganda for Surkov?’ I asked

‘I don’t know. Maybe. We didn’t think about that,’ she mused looking upwards.

‘So what about the people in the regions that now think the opposition is against the Church?’ I asked.

‘They are not our audience. What people don’t understand is that we are not just a political anti-Putin group. We are an art group. But I do see we created a conflictual situation though.’

The Kremlin, though, had thought things through. Surkov must have been delighted when he checked the polls. Only 10 per cent of Russians felt no punishment was in order and just 30 per cent disapproved of the Church’s new politics. 16It seemed such good fortune that conspiracy theories swirled. Regardless, the show trial captured how vicious, manipulative and devoid of legal basis the Russian legal system had become. It showed that the law only existed as Putin’s weapon. This, of course, was the whole point.

‘They got what they were asking for,’ smirked Putin. 17They may have turned a serious issue into a joke, but their sentence was no laughing matter. Two of the ‘singers’ were sent to a penal colony for two years’ hard labour, one aged twenty-two and the other twenty-four, both mothers of toddlers. Sending half-children with children of their own to places where beating and rapes are routine – as punishment for a silly song – was unspeakably cruel. Nevertheless around that time in Moscow, you could almost hear Surkov’s laughter in the dark that a ‘punk prayer’ they thought was feminism in action, had been inverted into a Putinist dagger to chop up the country.

This sentence was a small part of the wider crackdown. OMON in tundra camouflage and crash helmets burst into opposition bars and grabbed men with white ribbons and T-shirts, others were beaten by them at rallies and detained pending imprisonment. They were more vicious than usual; their salaries had been doubled. Disloyal members of the establishment were more discreetly punished. The dissenting deputy Gennady Gudkov was expelled from the Duma, then forced to fire-sell his business. As he was a former KGB general, the deputies from United Russia shouted ‘Judas! Judas!’ over his final speech. The minor oligarch Alexander Lebedev, who had donated money to opposition causes, was charged with ‘hooliganism’ – the same crime as Pussy Riot, for assaulting someone on TV.