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

It comes from Russian taxpayers. In the North Caucasus, the vertical of corruption has reached such absurd proportions that it has undermined what the vertical was established for: national unity. ‘Why should they get more money than Smolensk?’ This was exactly the same attitude that saw Russia jettison most of the SSRs. In Gorbachev’s 1991 referendum Muslim Central Asians voted to stay in the USSR, but were not even invited to a secret meeting between Ukraine, Belarus and Russia that killed that Union. There was embarrassment when the leaders realized they had ‘forgotten’ to invite the Kazakh leader Nazarbayev, whom Gorbachev had hoped would be his successor. Nobody cared for the others. In the end it was simple: nobody wanted ‘not to eat’ for Uzbeks and Tajiks.

The fate of the Muslim Soviet Union was thus decided not in the republics, but by the Russians themselves – I feel it will be the same way with the North Caucasus. And these words from a check-out girl I met on the minibus back from Nizhny Tagil, all flaxen hair and green come-hither eyes, captures much of the mood towards them:

‘The Caucasus – I don’t want to go there… I don’t even want them in the minimarket where I work. I don’t want to pay for them. They can go their own way. I hate seeing them around. I don’t want to pay for ski slopes for them… It’s tribute, you know? We should stop feeding them and throw them away… they are all violent tribes.’

Russia has not found its borders. Frontiers are regarded as temporary or unresolved. The majority feels this way as new borders are already developing, with the governor of Krasnodar calling in 2012 to raise ‘Cossacks’ to patrol his territory to keep out Caucasians. 66Instead of stability, what Putin has laid in the North Caucasus is a time bomb. Kadyrov is his vassal, not integrated into the United Russia system. Should Putin fall, with peace depending on the ties between two men alone, catastrophe beckons. ‘The end of subsidies for Kadyrov means death,’ says Orkhan Jemal, Russia’s leading expert on the North Caucasus, son of a Muslim leader, ‘which is why he will do whatever he can to keep the regime going.’ This is why no one can quite kill the rumour in Moscow, that ‘Putin’s Chechens’, will put down the protests should they ever breach the Kremlin walls.

Stability in the North Caucasus is an illusion. Russians realize this, with only 5 per cent thinking that the government fully controls the situation there. 67There is a real risk of renewed conflict in a post-Putin era. There are few ways to imagine that the rulers in Grozny could be made to accept anything other than the ‘vertical of corruption’, even at gunpoint. The North Caucasus is a mosaic – there is no easy way to imagine a new border being drawn. Not all the republics would want to leave. Fewer would be capable of credible statehood. Awfully, the embrace seems as necessary as it is poisonous. Nor is this bitterness just directed at them. The incompetence of the vertical means it is not just the Caucasus that Russians want ‘to stop feeding’ – but Moscow itself.

‘MOSCOW IS not Russia.’ Wherever you travel from, Kaliningrad to Magadan, they tell you the same thing. ‘Moscow is another country.’ They tell you that Moscow is a bloodsucker: ‘It sucks out all our resources, turns them into petro-dollars and stashes them into the West.’ They tell you that Moscow is an imperialist: ‘The capital takes all our tax returns and gives us only decrees and corruption in return.’ All across the empire ‘federalism’ is a dirty word – it means rule by Moscow.

The first anti-Putin protests were not in Moscow. They were on the extreme edges of Russia. These pre-tremors of discontent were mistaken for isolated incidents during the Medvedev ‘presidency’. First in 2008, thousands demonstrated in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East against Kremlin decrees. The crowd reached almost 10,000 strong, shivering by the Pacific portside. Flanked by police, the deputy prosecutor tried to make them leave. ‘Go home, they are not sending our OMON, they are sending their OMON, they will hurt you.’ The Moscow riot troops landed within hours. They broke up the rally, dragged the steadfast along the pavement and chucked them into vans. They were sent because Putin could not trust the local police. Then in 2010, after the recession, in the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad between EU Poland and EU Lithuania, over 10,000 came out to demonstrate against a Muscovite governor. The banners read: ‘United Russia, Go Back to Russia’.

In both Kaliningrad and Vladivostok, a continent apart, the men and women on the streets had come out in proportional terms to the Moscow protesters. They were not protesting against Putin, an almost abstract entity, but against his vertical – that had passed economic decrees without any considerations as to how they made their money and reduced their business plans to naught.

In 2008 in Vladivostok, anger boiled over when a new tariff was smacked on importing cars from Japan, in a city that lives off importing them and had brought in some 534,000 that year. 1The sudden decree to favour Russian auto manufacturers looked set to kill this business in one fell swoop. What angered those in the Far East the most was that whoever had signed and drafted it, appeared neither to know nor care that their economy was based on car imports. It enraged them that the vertical had robbed them of any veto-points to reverse it.

Despite everything, the party of power secured only 33 per cent of the vote in the Far East during the 2011 elections, far lower than the ‘official’ Moscow result. 2However there was no unrest, because the FSB, the OMON and the local prosecutor’s office treat provincials in ways they would never dare treat Muscovites. The heads of these structures are all selected by the Kremlin and almost always non-natives. They are sardonically called the ‘Vikings’, a nod to Scandinavians who ruled Slavs in medieval Kievan Rus. ‘Moscow treats us like a colony,’ groaned Andrey Dudenok, the man who had led the car protests in the grim Amur city of Khabarovsk. ‘But protests don’t change a thing.’ He had now given up. Not because he was apathetic during the elections, but because he had been intimidated out of protesting. This is what happened when he got involved in politics.

• The FSB phoned ten times to tell him to stop organizing protests. They threatened him unless he ‘stopped this’.

• He was arrested twice. Once he was held in a cell for over twenty-four hours.

• The FSB then threatened his boss with a ‘tax inspection’ unless Dudenok was sacked. He was immediately.

• The authorities then started two court cases against Dudenok for parking fines.

• Police ‘discovered drugs in his car’ and threatened to open narcotics charges against him.

• Dudenok then fled Khabarovsk from March to May 2009.

• The FSB then raided his flat. They seized dozens of books and computers.

When he came back to the city, Dudenok decided to quit politics. ‘When I returned to Khabarovsk,’ he says, ‘I made a deal with the FSB. I would stop, providing that they left my family alone.’ The most dispiriting thing of all is that Dudenok and his opposition friends resent the haughtiness of the Moscow movement almost as much as United Russia. They have had no contact with its leaders, with its Facebook groups, no visits from them and blame them for being missing in action when the car protests happened. It was as if they too viewed the economic livelihood of the Russian Far East as a ‘yawn’ issue.

In Kaliningrad in 2010, over 9,500km to the west, its own protest movement similarly erupted only to fizzle out, leaving only resentment. Life in this enclave had become increasingly claustrophobic since neighbouring Poland and Lithuania joined the EU. As they left Russia behind, they happily put up visa restrictions for them. At first it was as difficult to get a visa to Vilnius as it was to Madrid. Economic ties were chopped, locals were furious that Moscow was refusing to compromise on visa negotiations. ‘We have been left behind in the ghetto,’ croaked a chain-smoking hospital director, ‘they promised us we’d catch up with them but we’ve fallen further behind.’