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

Don’t Allow the Country to Go back to the ‘90s!

We want Stability and Development!

Stop DESTABILIZING the country!

The ‘Workers Committee’ of Nizhny Tagil was supposed to say that the 27 per cent of the Russian workforce employed in industry, and especially the over 2.5 million workers in the military–industrial complex had none of the doubts about Putin that the cosmopolitan elite had contracted. 15It was the centrepiece of the campaign to firm up the regime’s support base amongst the working class.

Nizhny Tagil became the poster-boy for Putin’s ‘heartland support’. This is a city with history. It was here, 18km over the theoretical border with the Asian continent, that Stalin evacuated the Kharkov tank factory. It was the mass production of tanks here that enabled the Soviet Union to hold off Nazi armour on the edge of the great Eurasian steppe, at the fringes of the heartland near Kursk and Stalingrad.

They call the Urals, ‘the spine of Russia’. As the cracked, uneven motorway jolts the minibus to Putin’s bastion, past the ridges and the birch forests of the Urals, it is impossible not to think of Hitler. Nizhny Tagil is an alternate ending to the Second World War. Hitler had wanted these ridges to be where a generation of Germans would fight a guerrilla war against the Slavs – pushed into Asia forever. The distance – 1,800km from Moscow – is a testament to the absurdity of his imperial dream, the one that Albert Speer only grasped when he saw a thick line in pencil, cutting down the Urals, on the Führer’s globe in the Berghof. I am hungover, half imagining German troops on the road north (would they have been exhausted, elated, completely lost… could they ever have even got here?) when the minibus passes a lonely election poster: ‘Strong Country – Strong Leader’. It is for Putin.

Had the Germans ever arrived in Nizhny Tagil they would have found a starving population of Gulag inmates and those only technically ‘free’ slaving in the plants. Not that they would have cared, their Generalplan-Ost for the next 25–30 years after victory included the extermination of 50–60 per cent of Russians with 15 per cent marched into Siberia, and 75 per cent of Belarusians and 65 per cent of Ukrainians also sentenced to death in the ‘big plan’. 16As the rain obscured the forests and made the windows run, my mind wandered.

Nizhny Tagil is now the codename of a disinformation campaign – ‘real Russians’ are behind Putin. As the minivan pulls into the rutted mud lanes, at the outskirts of this city of 350,000, it starts to feel like the Kremlin has made an off choice. This is no showcase of the successes of Putinism – or was every other industrial town vastly worse? The roads are so cracked and potholed they look as if they have come under attack. Rotten wooden cottages sink into the mud by the roadside before giving way to a gypsy colony and a crumbling train station. Behind it, belching smokestacks, flares and industrial metal works spew chemicals and pollutants into the town. The air tastes metallic, thick, like toast. Inside, everything in the dingy hotels and government buildings of Nizhny Tagil appeared to be broken. As I’m sure it had been on the day they opened.

The life of the town is completely dominated by the two giant industrial works erected during the Soviet period. There is the massive iron and steel works of NTMK and the enormous train and tank factory, Uralwagonzavod. All employment and the entire economy are entirely dependent on these two plants. In this respect Nizhny Tagil has a diversified economy: a study by the Russian Ministry of the Economy at the start of Putin’s rule classified two out of five of all cities, home to 25 million people, as ‘mono-gorods’, dependent on a single industry. 17‘They are our most serious economic problem,’ as a deputy minister privately put it, ‘people are just trapped in them.’

They are also a social problem. Those who live in them will never be able to lead truly modern lives. It is easy to understand why people in these cities feel nostalgic for Soviet power. The bulk of the labour force is still working in the same government-dependent mega-enterprises, the only difference is that the profits of the mega-works are privatized, with all pollution socialized. The local government is still run by a monopoly party of power – not a totalitarian but a tawdry one.

I had come to Nizhny Tagil to find these ardent supporters of the regime who had threatened to come to Moscow to beat up the opposition. They were nowhere to be seen. The ‘workers committee’ had disappeared, nor could I find a single worker who had taken part in it. Full of anguish and riled at having been taken for a ride, every factory man I spoke to sighed that it was a fiction invented by the plant’s management in order to please Putin. The ‘workers’ in the video-clip were managers and one of the organizers was a PR agent who had previously been the judge of ‘Miss Nizhny Tagil in Bikini’.

‘It was a complete joke,’ grumbled my new friend, Vasily, a chain-smoker in his forties. He had worked all his life in the gigantic Uralwagonzavod works, the same factory as the so-called ‘committee’. ‘There was no mass worker movement… we were not going to come and beat people up. There were only a dozen of them… bosses and PR men the lot of them!’

Vasily, like most of the men who worked in the factory, was paranoid of enemy agents. He knew full well that the plant he worked in had built a tank armada to fight World War Three and that if the CIA were really after Russian secrets, they would be snooping around here. ‘All your documents, I need to be sure,’ he said to me. But after a while he relented. ‘You see, I have to be careful… I didn’t vote for him … I’m opposition you see.’ The workers told me that to make sure everyone voted for Putin, they had been given lectures inside the plant. ‘They said we’d all go home starving if Putin didn’t win… because then the opposition would come to power and they’d cancel all our orders.’ The workers were then issued with a barcode and told on the election day that a van would be waiting outside each polling station – and if they handed it in, having voted for Putin, they would get a ‘bonus’: ‘Those idiots didn’t realize that you give it in anyway and get the bonus and not vote for Putin. They are all frightened. If you lose your job at the two factories – you’re finished here really.’

Vasily and his sons took me for a drive around Tagil in their clapped out Lada car. ‘Five years ago I thought Putin was a hero,’ he snarled as the car bumped and swerved over huge potholes the size of children on the main street. ‘Then he refused to go. He’s greedy for power. And I know all the people in his party are crooks in this town. So why should I think he’s not like that too?’

Vasily had never heard about the huge corruption scandals that implicate the Kremlin, which have never been shown on TV, all he knew was the behaviour of the local predatory United Russia cadres. We stopped by the war memorial. We stopped by a tank on a plinth. ‘I think the problem here,’ muttered Vasily, ‘is the mentality.’ He went a bit quieter. ‘Not everyone who came here was free. The grandparents, the parents… were in camps. There were camps here. It takes generations to go.’

The gulags, even though no one ever talks of them, are in the blood, in a hundred gestures, in a hundred thousand – ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.’ We stopped by the roadside in his part of town – the Derzhinsky district, named after the founder of the Cheka and thus the KGB. ‘You see that spot?’ There is nothing there but punctured old tarmac. ‘That is where my grandmother starved to death in the war… I just wanted to show you that.’