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

On the edge of anger: ‘My biggest mistake was to think that once I had shown I could have an impact that the government would come and join me. But no… The deciding factor as to why the system is not fighting drugs is not corruption. The system just doesn’t want to change. There is no political will.’

Roizman’s winning cocktail of Russian nationalism, vigilante policing and civil society is tinged by resurgent Orthodoxy, in a city with several boxy new churches and newfound church power. With a gesture of the head he takes me to his icon museum next door. Then in the stairwell he falls into a silent funk at the questions: ‘How can someone half-Jewish be a Russian nationalist? Do you consider yourself a Jew or a Christian?’

He seemed not to want to answer – maybe because professing Jews are said to be unelectable to the highest office in Russia, maybe because these were the personal tectonics that had made him want to be a hero for his city. ‘I couldn’t say if I was one religion or the other. I don’t know… I don’t know… I will always say that I am Roizman. I go to church to make some confessions sometimes. I couldn’t say.’

The vigilante had suddenly gone quiet as we sprinted up the stairs to the icons themselves. Maybe because he was trying to show me the answer, we went to look at these pieces of a lost Russia: gold, carved, wooden, ancient. He had dozens of them in a medicinally white room in a modern block next to his office. We walked to the main one – ‘take this, look’ – Roizman had affixed a magnifying glass just below it. ‘Can you see? Can you see…? All those tiny carvings… you cannot see them with the naked eye.’ We looked through the magnifying glass together, at the incredible intricacy in the gold leaf on the robes of the priests as they hailed the messiah. He was smiling.

Roizman – unlike almost any other leader of the Russian opposition, maybe even more so than Navalny in Moscow – is the ‘King over the Water’ here. If there was a democratic election in the Urals he would win it, to be the mayor, the governor or even more. One 2012 poll showed 26.5 per cent of Ekaterinburg want him as mayor – far ahead of anyone else. 27But more ominously, he is a symbol of how under Putin a new, active Russian society had evolved, twisted and disfigured by Putin’s failure to impose order and his harsh, brutal outlook on those that break it. The meaning of Roizman is not lost on the country’s brightest political minds such as Vladimir Milov. ‘This is Russia! What did you think democratic politics would look like here? It will look like Israel or Turkey at best. Post-Putin politics will be competitive, but it will be aggressive too.’

This brings us back to Egor Bychkov, one of his men. This young man from Nizhny Tagil was highly attracted to Evgeny Roizman and he got what he wanted – barely into his twenties he became the head of the ‘City Without Drugs’ in Nizhny Tagil. His mission was to bring drug addicts to Roizman’s clinics where they could then be cured. This is when Bychkov’s enemies claim that the kidnappings started: ‘I did what I did as there is no war on drugs in Nizhny Tagil at all. The police are doing absolutely nothing to fight this.’

When he arrived to meet me I felt nervous as I got into his car. The clattering vehicle cannot have been less than twenty years old. It smelt of petrol and cigarettes. We drove to the only modern standard cafe in Tagil. Noticing my name he asked: ‘So are there many Semites where you’re from?’ Bychkov is my age and proud of his town. The restaurant served cappuccino; out of the glass window you could see the huge belching industrial works sending pillars of pollution into people’s lungs. ‘There is no war on drugs here as the police are all corrupt. And there is no visa regime with Central Asia so all these Tajiks and other immigrants are migrating here and selling drugs. The Tajiks and the Gypsies are selling drugs here.’

‘So did you kidnap people?’ I asked him.

‘Well it depends on your definition of kidnapping,’ grinned Bychkov. ‘What we used to do is we used to wait outside the houses of the drug dealers and when the addict came out we would jump him and go… unless you work with us we’ll send you to prison. They always agreed to work with us. Then we would get them to go into the dealers’ homes first… and then we’d storm the dealers’ apartments.’

Bychkov says they stopped 300 drug dealers this way. He claims (his facial expressions are unconvincing) that they did not use guns. Then the addicts would be sent to Roizman’s clinics. ‘We’d get the parents to sign consent.’ There they would be forced onto a cold turkey regime and fed only bread, water, onions and salt. They would often be set to work renovating churches and handcuffed to their beds.

Bychkov was charged by the police with seven abductions and accused of forcing them into Roizman’s centres, where they were then alleged to have been starved and abused. He was sentenced to three and a half years in a prison colony. This arrest sparked something very rare in the Urals – a public outcry. Over five hundred protested in Ekaterinburg for his release and, after being pressured by pop-stars and politicians to pardon him so that the ‘City Without Drugs’ could continue its good work, President Medvedev himself ordered him released.

‘Putin is a tsar,’ he says. ‘I am certain of this. Maybe he even thinks of himself as a god.’ Convinced that the police are to blame for the squalid drug addiction of his city, he claims: ‘If they wanted to fight drugs they could stop it in a single day. They don’t want to. That is why this fund exists. Putin could change it all in one day if he wanted to… but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to fight a war on drugs or on alcoholism. He couldn’t give a shit about the country. I don’t believe Putin doesn’t know what is happening here.’

This is how Bychkov came to be the leader of the local protest movement. He arranged two rallies for fair elections – where he claims over 200 people turned up at each one and tried to observe the elections, driving around from polling station to polling station in his clapped-out car, to see how the fraud was taking place. ‘The workers were told to vote for Putin. They were too scared in the polling booths to vote for somebody else. They didn’t realize that they were not going to find who exactly you had voted for.’ Bychkov is also a symbol – as his huge popularity amongst the workers attests to – that 1,800km east from Moscow in the city Putin signalled out as his citadel of support, opposition feeling is tangled together with vigilante policing, a certain thrill in beating the weak and racist hooliganism.

For the rest of my time in Nizhny Tagil I was looking for workers who were ‘ready, ready to come to Moscow to beat up the protesters there’. I found men ready to beat up Tajiks, to smash in the faces of drug dealers, to hit traffic policemen and beat corrupt officials and, of course, the Gypsies. Not protesters, and not for him. I found a city where wages had gone up but lawlessness, degeneration and abuse remained. These wages had legitimized the regime for a decade, but they had not made these men love it indefinitely. But in Nizhny Tagil I did not find uninformed idiots. The criminalization of the local bureaucracy, and United Russia, the ‘party of bureaucrats’ was apparent to all. What I found were people who said they had voted for Putin because they saw ‘no alternative’, the very ‘alternative’ he had taken away from them.

RUSSIA IS not truly sovereign. It is a territory overshadowed by two superpowers – the European Union and China. In the western provinces, the cars people drive are German second-hand, the economy exists off pipelines pumping into the EU and the symbol of success is a multi-entry Schengen visa. Both the Moscow protesters and the Moscow powerbrokers are dreaming of London. The shadow assets of the Kremlin are hidden in European tax havens and its children at British public schools. Those waving anti-Putin placards are exasperated that their home appliances are increasingly from IKEA but their institutions come closer to Kazakhstan.