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

Kaliningrad feels Moscow has boxed it out of Europe and modernity. They feel cheated when they see that Lithuania can change but they cannot. This city lives on shuttle-trade with its neighbours, but every time they drew up in the EU ‘new member states’, they felt themselves the poorer. Life was getting cleaner there but in Kaliningrad dirty streets were filled with wild dogs, there was a brisk trade exporting blondes, the police collected dead drunks out of the snowdrifts in the morning and the trams still ran on German tracks. Then, the Muscovite governor decided in 2010 to increase taxes by 25 per cent on car imports from the EU. 3He detonated unrest. The streets filled with 10,000 protesters who shouted, ‘United Russia, Back to Russia’. 4

The protests fizzled out, its leader ‘leaving the movement’ in a cloud of FSB harassment and financial suspicion. Blind decrees did not stop. In 2012 a sudden redrafting of import regulation laws left thousands of businesses struggling in this cross-border trade city. There was nothing they could do about it. ‘The reason this whole country could collapse,’ says the national celebrity-reporter Oleg Kashin, a native of Kaliningrad, ‘is that everyone outside Moscow thinks they are just a Moscow colony.’ The city gave Putin just 44.5 per cent in 2012 and is very proud of itself. 5

Moscow (as synonym for Kremlin, as synonym for elite) is resented everywhere. In Vladivostok, I was told by civil servants with gritted teeth how Moscow doesn’t give a damn about the time difference and wakes them up in the middle of the night, expecting them to work their businesses hours – there is a +7 hour time difference. In Irkutsk, I spoke to students who moaned how they would love Navalny to come and speak but they thought he never would, no matter how many comments they left on his blog asking him to – because they were hicks. In Krasnoyarsk, I smoked with officials who sighed how in an economy based entirely on digging out metals, fights between Moscow aluminium oligarchs decided Kremlin metal decrees, leaving them impotent over the regulations that mattered most to them. In Yakutsk, I drank ‘KGB’ cocktails with local businessmen who snarled that they had been cut out of massive investment projects in the region and that all the contracts had been awarded to ‘Muscovites’. In Ussuriysk, I drank gin and tonic in cans with nationalists who told me Moscow was cross-dressing as a European. In St Petersburg, I ate sponge cake with cultural critics who acidly remarked that Moscow was an Asian monster holding them back from Europe.

Russia has swung from craving a tough hand, to resenting it. Every corner has its own story of failed protests that the Moscow opposition had been unsuccessful in knitting into a national opposition. Even in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on the remote north Pacific shore, over 3,000 rallied against decrees changing the time zone. They waved loud banners – ‘we refuse to live in the dark’ – only to be ignored. 6

Indifference to waking hours is one thing, money quite another. Everywhere you can send men ‘in the know’ apoplectic by asking them about company registration. In the Far East locals threw their hands up in disgust that the Far Eastern Shipping Company had its headquarters in Moscow, and was paying its taxes in the capital. 7In Siberia, I saw the same reaction when asking why oil and gas giants have their headquarters in St Petersburg.

This slogan is popular everywhere: ‘Stop feeding Moscow’. Across the country ‘federalism’ has become a dirty word, synonymous with the dirty wars in the Caucasus for which Moscow wants their sons, with dirty deals that Moscow does with its governors, with their resources extracted to be sold in the electronic markets inside the blue-glass skyscrapers of Moscow city, leaving them to only hope Putin will throw a kindergarten or two into their begging bowls.

Putin says: ‘From the very beginning Russia was created as a super-centralized state. That’s practically laid down in its genetic code, its traditions and the mentality of its people.’ 8He is wrong. A new form of anti-bureaucratic, anti-federal resentment is fizzing. It is turning into viciously anti-official, anti-Putin anguish, which looks at the prancing Moscow oppositions as but a faction of an elite that sucks them dry. ‘Russia has never been a democracy,’ said a middle-aged man in Vladivostok, ‘and we have always been a colony.’

The rejection of the vertical is written in the polling data. It stems from the idea that central authority is corrupt authority – only 1 per cent believe in officials’ income declarations. 9It shows itself in the routine polls from the late 2000s showing that more than 65 per cent of Russians wanted the return of elected governors, growing to more than 85 per cent of those in the big cities. 10Only 8 per cent said they were happy with the current system. 11It is a rejection of the very desire for centralization that accompanied Putin to power. This is why the only concession that the Kremlin was in the long run willing to make to the protest movement was the piecemeal return of governors’ elections with a ‘Presidential filter’.

The Moscow opposition – speaking the language of romance and rights whilst the regions’ protest banners are scrawled in the language of decentralization and efficiency – has missed the real concerns of Russians. They are desperate for a state that will actually do something for them. This is why Russia has a catchphrase when it comes to politics at the moment: ‘If not Putin, who?’

This anguish has been picked up in surveys. The Centre for Strategic Research, originally founded to advise Putin, found that in winter 2012 a majority of those in its focus groups across Russia spoke of revolution. 12It showed the popularity of the government slipping, as well as the opposition. For now, Navalny and his allies are seen as a Pussy Riot opposition that cannot give them what they want – a modern state. Time is on their side, but a fragmented and feudalized country only helps the Kremlin snap anything before it coheres. In fact, Russian regions are so isolated one from another, feeling the enormity of their country, that each place feels they are engulfed by an ocean that backs the regime, caring naught for them. Even Moscow. This is why the Kremlin invented Nizhny Tagil.

Putin is trying his best to look relaxed, to pull the same wisecracks that he always has in front of the cameras, to show complete, untroubled authority in his four-and-a-half-hour-long ‘phone in’, straight ‘from the people’ live on national TV.

This is December 2011 and the protest movement has yet to peak. Things look deeply uncertain. The live-link to the regions jumps from the Caucasus to the Pacific to the north, each with a different message to Putin, almost all of them supportive. Now to the Urals, to the industrial plants of Nizhny Tagil. Five men in black overalls are standing in front of a tank on their shop floor. Their tired-eyed foreman in a silver tie starts to speak to power. The men are unflinching:

‘I want to say about these meetings, if our militia – or as they’re known now the police – are no longer able to work, can no longer cope then we are ready with the lads to come out and defend our stability… but of course, within the law.’ 13

Putin seems touched, genuinely surprised and seems to sigh with appreciation, smiling: ‘Not yet… hopefully it won’t come to that.’ 14

It was through this message from ‘the workers committee to support Vladimir Putin’ that Moscow learnt about Nizhny Tagil, and that this city was the one that the Kremlin PR department had chosen to represent their supposed support in ‘real Russia’. Again and again images of ‘workers’ protesting for Putin in the sleet were shown on federal TV. There were printed placards announcing: