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

We drove a bit more. We stopped by the dirt track that the tanks roll off towards the train tracks. Women were wandering down it. They had been picking berries in the pristine unpolluted forests close by. Vasily lights another cigarette and sighs: ‘In this factory I think about 25 per cent of people are alcoholic wrecks… it’s really sad. They drink. They work. They drink. They are real wrecks. Then about 50 per cent only think about one thing – fishing. They are fishing fanatics. Rods… that’s all they talk about. They could not give a damn about politics or Putin. About 25 per cent of people watch the news. They are not Putin fanatics. They like stability, but they hate corruption too. But I don’t know anyone who’d go to Moscow to beat people up, or anyone who trusts the opposition in Moscow for that matter.’

The actual election results showed that Vasily was in fact in the majority. Less than a third of those in Nizhny Tagil had in fact voted for United Russia back in December 2011. 18But he felt completely alone: ‘The thing is I think 100 per cent… 110 per cent… 130 per cent all believe in the ‘good tsar and the bad boyars’. They think all the awful things happening in Nizhny Tagil have nothing to do with Putin… and that he doesn’t know how bad it is here.’

And really terrible things have been happening in Nizhny Tagil. The worst of it all was dug up by a dog. It was 2007, the height of public confidence in ‘stability’, in a village 40km from the city that a stray found as many as thirty decomposing bodies of young girls tossed into a mass grave. ‘As many as thirty’, as it is impossible to say exactly how many there were – because they had rotted past the point of being easily identified. This pit seemed like the tip of an iceberg: in the previous two years alone 462 people had gone missing in Nizhny Tagil and these cases remain unsolved. 19It pointed to a pattern of police indifference, carelessness or even (as most locals believe) complicity in a murder ring of the kind usually found not in Russia but in Central America, or Roberto Bolaño novels.

For years the families of missing girls had been putting up home-printed posters, phoning the authorities and appealing to the police to help them find their daughters – and nothing had happened as a criminal ring preyed on the city. The criminals had been using an eerily attractive, blue-eyed young man to lure girls as young as thirteen back to an apartment. There they would then gang-rape them on the floor. If they refused to become prostitutes, they would be killed.

This is how the bodies had ended up in the pit. The gang was so confident that no one was coming after them that they had barely bothered to cover the latest bodies with much earth. They just tossed them into the pit. Some reports suggested that the mob leader gang-raped, then murdered, his own fourteen-year-old daughter. Distraught families begged the police for help but got none. In one telling case, the police even actually began to investigate the brother of the missing teenager, however unlikely it was that he had murdered her. When the gang was finally arrested they were linked to fourteen murders and suspected of up to fifty in total. Yet they were not even the biggest killers in Nizhny Tagil. They were nothing compared to the tidal wave of drugs and addiction that had hit the Urals after Gorbachev started ‘restructuring’.

The collapse hit Nizhny Tagil harder than most. Everything – from the roads to the factories and the hospitals received no investment and fell into disrepair. The collapse of the Soviet Union is something very literal here. It was the collapse of public services. Workers went unpaid and mafia gangs brazenly shot each other on the streets. With the bureaucracy and the economy in breakdown, the city was at its most vulnerable to a tidal wave of heroin from Central Asia. Russia found itself with open borders with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which turned into trafficking routes for Afghan heroin as the farmers of these former Soviet states and satellites turned to the drugs trade to make up for the loss of agricultural subsidies from Moscow.

Socially, it was as if the city had been hit by a plague. The population fell by almost 100,000 between 1989 and 2002. Heroin addiction and Aids had been rarities in the Soviet Union. They now became ubiquitous. Drug use exploded by 400 per cent between 1992 and 2002. 20The number of heroin addicts climbed during the Yeltsin and Putin years from virtually nil to almost 2.5 million. 21There are today a minimum of 1 million Aids cases in Russia, which also consumes almost one-fifth of the world’s heroin. 22Alcoholism rose, with as many as 0.5 million drinking themselves to death every year. 23

Nizhny Tagil and the rest of the Sverdlovsk region were amongst the hardest hit of all ‘oblasts’ in Russia. The addiction rate in the province did not double or treble, but jumped more than seventy-four times over, between the years 1990 and 2000. One of the many who turned into a junkie was the brother of Vasily Sigarev, a playwright from Nizhny Tagil. He wasn’t a playwright in those days but was driving whores around at night. He would wait outside in the car until they came back. Luck brought him to Ekaterinburg; talent found him a stage in Moscow, for plays that combine the despair of Samuel Beckett with the brutality of a Russian cop-thriller. They are about boys drinking the night before being sent to Chechnya, about an abusive couple lost at a clapped-out railway station, but essentially they are all about this one speech, in one play, that an actor yells out at the audience:

When you get back to your capital you can tell them how people live in Russia, ‘cause they don’t have the faintest idea. Even if God was supposed to knock us out equal, we’re only equal on the outside. Two arms, two legs and a head with a body. Every other way we’re different. We’re so different it’s frightening. 24

Why had people ever voted for Putin in the first place, then? I began to ask Vasily this question as we went into his apartment. Outside children were playing in a skip. ‘Go on… take a picture of our poverty then, if you’re so interested in it!’ These two-room apartments were mostly bought on mortgages from the plant. We sat on his balcony and drank beer and smoked a packet of tarry Apollo-Soyuz. ‘I voted for Putin twice,’ he explained. He had four main arguments.

• Workers’ salaries had risen from 2,500 rubles a month to 35,000 rubles a month.

• Street killings had stopped (more or less).

• He had gone on holiday to Egypt (once).

• He had bought a computer (for his son).

In fact Vasily’s decision to stop voting for Putin and choose Prokhorov, the liberal-minded oligarch asked to run by the Kremlin to catch protest votes – ‘He’s the best manager in the country. He’d manage all this mess really well’ – caught two themes that he shared with the other workers in the factory I spoke to. In industrial Russia there was a similar sense of angst at the dysfunctions of Putinism, but it was not phrased around rights like in Moscow, but inefficiency. There was complete indifference to the freedoms of the media, Khodorkovsky (‘That Jew deserves jail!’) or the right to compete fairly in the elections, but real anger at the squalid state of public services.

‘In the 1990s it was so much worse. It was a dangerous time,’ sighed Vasily. ‘Things have got better. But Navalny that provocateur is right – things will not get any better as the United Russia party is the party of crooks and thieves. All the policemen and the judges and the bureaucrats that I know that are stealing in Nizhny Tagil are members of that party… But there’s one guy you have to meet. Go meet Bychkov. He’s the leader of the opposition here. Good lad.’