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

The vertical feels at its weakest in Siberian Tuva. This is the Russian territory with the lowest level of human development, at the level of Uzbekistan. It has the country’s highest alcohol and murder rates and a male life expectancy lower than Gabon. Annexed by Stalin in 1944, it is over 82 per cent ethnic Tuvan, a Mongol people, and still to be connected to the Russian railway system. Politics amounts to local clans linked to a half-Tuvan Putin ally wrangling rents amongst themselves. In its drab capital, Kyzyl, even those who wear leather jackets are too frightened to step out after dark because of the number of murders. Tuvans lack the metabolism for alcohol but, addicted to vodka, they fight frequently with knives. The city is all shacks and dust tracks, a place where people have fallen back into believing in magic. Without any medical infrastructure for mental health, counselling or psychologists, there were lines outside the Tuvan Shaman’s hutch and the cabin of the Russian-Tatar witch. I asked both what they talked about when locals asked about Russia. ‘It will collapse,’ said both the seer and the witch. The shamans, they said, have long seen the signs. ‘Tuva will not always be part of Russia.’ The witch had hung up a stuffed black eagle to ward off the sprits and, as it happened, was a Navalny supporter. ‘Putin will fall. They will all be washed away.’

Tuva is the size of England, but outside this one town there is almost no state. At the very end of the vertical, in a wood cabin of Russians of ‘old believers’, a breakaway sect that split under Peter the Great, perhaps a day from a paved road, in a village without drainage, without fully functioning electricity, where the children stop going to school at fourteen, then marry right away, all its villagers living subsistence lives, I met a senior member of the United Russia central committee.

I was tired. To reach the village had taken a day by car down a dirt track, past dead hamlets and a brush with a gang of Tuvan gunmen on horseback, through forests thicker than jungles, that made no sound, to a point where the river is shallow. Here there is a pontoon, where an ‘old believer’ with a long beard ushers you over, telling me he was here instead of a bridge – ‘to keep out Asiatics’. Then hours of cratered track, to a bend in the river where the car could go no further. A motorized canoe then carried me over the night black Yenesei, one of the mother-rivers of Siberia. The ‘captain’ was a shirtless drunk with white chest hair and a sailor’s cap. The old man told me it was here, in this valley that Putin had gone on holiday and posed topless, hunting, swimming and fishing: ‘We saw him go by down the river in a huge speed boat.’

I stumbled exhausted into the wooden cabin that was the ‘lodge’. A woman in home-spun clothes cooked me a reindeer stew, and poured tea made of purple flowers I had never seen before. Her husband, a hunter, couldn’t hold back his enthusiasm for a foreign visitor a moment longer and grabbed his photo album. Seven years ago he had got a throwaway Kodak by chance. After two years he had saved up enough to go to town to get the pictures developed. He had the teeth of a man who had never used a toothbrush and the album of an eighteenth-century Cossack. We went slowly through the photographs. On horseback with guns. On horseback pointing at a wooden village. By the campfire with the pelts of four dead lynx. With the wild-eyed boys holding up the warm bloodied carcass of a bear. I asked; ‘How does a man feel when he is alone in the forest and shoots a bear?’ ‘Alive’. And what do you think of the government? ‘It’s corrupt.’

In places like this you understand how Russia can have African male life expectancies and Central American murder rates. You understand why it is so lawless. As I thought that, the politician walked in. He was wearing a World Wildlife Fund fleece. It was a craze in the Kremlin, he explained, to come and take photos like Putin, posing like Putin, in the ‘Putin places’. And we both ate the reindeer soup, realizing it was actually chopped up reindeer lungs, with what tasted like bitter scones. The peasants sat at the head of the wooden table, her in home-sewn floral patterns, him in hunter’s camouflage. So, the politician chose to speak in English. And throughout the evening a hundred micro-moths came in through the cracks in the cabin. Some got in my eyes. In this muddy hole, the politican felt free to speak:

‘You see they live so wildly here. Soviet power was a myth, like the myth of the vertical of power today. All the regional barons are just living like feudal lords. This means that here in Tuva there was a battle between the clans over who could control the local United Russia. It was a bitter fight and there was nothing that we could do about it. The local ethnic Tuvans run the administration and cut all ethnic Russians out. In the towns they live like an ethnic minority. Here in this valley they are defending themselves, to live like a majority.’

He told me he was leaving the United Russia central committee and taking up a job in the Kremlin, so the political conversation came back to him, what he was going to do, like they always do:

‘It was very clear to us, that for him [Putin], there really was just nobody else. It really was his decision and his conviction that the country would collapse without him. You could leave like a hero in 2012 or leave like a loser in 2018. Hah. That’s what he chose.’

The next day the politician was gone. Driven out by a gigantic four-wheel drive. So, I walked through the woods into the village, which is called Erjei. There were a lot of butterflies. The wooden cabins sunk into dirt tracks. Pigs wandered around. Aryan children played in the mud. Here there was no modern toilet, no computer, no doctor and only one TV; they had been having problems with it. This was what social scientists call ‘natural exchange’. There was no economy, only the river and only the forest, which leered over the wood-stick crosses in their cemetery. I walked up to some men sharing a cigarette by the waterside. They had the faces of men who lived outdoors, thick knuckled hands and beards that smelt of fish:

‘Putin? What do we think of Putin? He never did anything good for the country. He just took all the money from oil and gas production and took it for himself and his mates and did nothing for the country. Why the hell would we support Putin? Who do you think we are?’

Nowhere did the vertical fail so completely as in the North Caucasus. You feel this everywhere in Moscow. You see it in the black Mercedes driven by Chechen hoodlums breaking traffic. You see it in the dark posse of leather jackets hanging around the metro. You see it the restaurants, in the fights the football hooligans have. You hear it in the constant racist chatter about the ‘blacks’ in Russian mouths, in their suspicion and distrust. You see it in the gutter press, where every murder is a Chechen murder.

The Caucasus looms over Moscow: everyone knows that money is transferred to keep the peace with the local elites. The government and the liberals call it ‘reconstruction’ and ‘federal funds’, whilst the nationalists and the men who fought in Chechnya, the kind you meet smoking or drinking in train carriages called it ‘tribute’. Everybody outside the United Russia machine talks about the relationship between Putin and the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov as purely feudal.

The region has long ceased to be ‘in social union’ with Russia. They are seen as foreigners: if you marry a North Caucasian (frowned upon) you marry a foreigner; they are seen as ‘immigrants’ in the major cities, as alien as Azeris. Visiting the North Caucasus is to go to an ‘internal abroad’, in Russian minds – you ‘leave Russia’ and ‘come back to Russia’.