The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (33 page)

For Katya Obraztsova, the girl who took part in the provocative Putin video and who spent three years as a member of Steel, a militant affiliate of
Nashi
, joining the group was her only chance to get involved in activism on a local level, in a social environment
where spontaneous volunteerism was rare. She had no thought of promoting a particular political movement. “I wasn’t concerned about who was financing it. I liked how as an organization we were able to help war veterans. Or if there’s a problem with bad roads in your town – you can do something about it through the organization.”

She went further:

“It’s not that the movement is doing something and I’m part of it. It’s that I’m developing myself through the movement,” she explained. “Say you come upon a huge forest. And the movement gives you a path through the forest. You walk that path yourself, but that path gives you direction. Otherwise you would get lost.”

The direction is given by
Nashi
, by the state, and, indirectly, by Vladimir Putin.

“Putin gave us the platform for self-realization,” Maria Aleshina, Katya’s colleague, said.

Asked about the path in the woods, and if they felt they were being led by Putin, Katya and Maria paused. “It’s not that he provides the path, it’s that the movement comes from him…. I guess, then, yes, he does provide it. In the sense that it comes from him.”

If the state offered them a path in the woods, it also wanted something in return.

During the pro-Kremlin, anti-opposition rally on December 6 on Triumfalnaya Square, one Sveta Kuritsina, a student at a trade school in Ivanovo, became the poster child for these activists-for-rent after she struggled to explain to a cameraman that United Russia had transformed the country because people “are dressing more better [sic].”

From the standpoint of the opposition, Sveta’s fumbling, painfully naïve and badly memorized speech symbolized those “triumphant thugs” for hire: their manners, their level of education, and their non-existent political awareness. Protesters would turn up at later rallies brandishing her “dressing more better” gaffe. But then Sveta’s threadbare origins emerged: her mother a textile worker, her father a driver, she lived in a meagre, hand-to-mouth world that had no room for political ideas. This explained her motivation as she chanted Putin’s name in the cold for the equivalent of a few dollars in cash. And there were hundreds like her on Triumfalnaya.

Sharing a dilapidated dorm room with four girls on the outskirts of Ivanovo, she was studying to be an accountant. As she faced a bleak provincial future, she groped for every opportunity that presented itself – and when she got a chance to join Steel, she took it eagerly.
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Sveta could be forgiven for believing that she owed what chance of social mobility she had to the state. Maybe she really did adore Putin, but that was only while she was drumming in the cold and chanting his name. As for the rest, she had to do what she had to do, and that only meant climbing a career ladder dangled in front of her by a government that, after more than a millennium, was still the dominant organizing force that “fructifies the earth.”

But if the state was offering these girls a path through the woods – in exchange for beating a drum and chanting Putin’s name, as Sveta and hundreds of others did that December – then where did that path lead?

By 2011,
Nashi
– by sheer virtue of its affiliation and Kremlin funding – had become possibly the most reviled organization in Russia, and even some parts of the political establishment have openly criticized it. By the following year, after a spate of unprecedented protest rallies that put up the biggest challenge to Vladimir Putin’s rule, the organization was all but defunct. Vladislav Surkov was replaced as chief ideologist by the more conventional Vyacheslav Volodin, while Vasily Yakemenko quit the State Agency for Youth. It seemed it was just a matter of time before something more meaningful would be concocted to take its place.

By December 2011, amid a genuinely fomenting middle class that was taking to the streets for the first time in two decades, cheerleading for the state in the manner of
Nashi
– especially for cash – symbolized, for many, the cynical, managed, and orchestrated nature of a democracy that few believed in.

But for over a decade, the group had done its thing – and subsisted on millions of dollars of government funding spent on constructing an ideology that never fully materialized.

Getting its start in 2000 as the obscure Walking Together group, the initiative was reportedly pitched personally by its leader, Vasily
Yakemenko, a former sports trainer and businessman who found himself in the Presidential Administration, to his boss, deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov,
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who liked the idea of reviving a modern version of the youth groups of the Soviet Union, opening doors for its members to coveted careers in the party and the state.

But the rank and file were drawn in through much simpler means – benefits. Vasily Polovinkin, a 26-year-old estate agent, described in 2012 how he was recruited as a teenager with promises of free football game tickets, discounts, and possible career options. “There wasn’t any underlying idea I was aware of,” he said, and he left the group because he didn’t want to take part in political rallies, especially if he didn’t understand the idea behind them.

Walking Together quickly became notorious for carrying out post-Soviet Russia’s first book burning, as activists destroyed the novels of postmodernist writers Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin and threatened them with legal cases. Bizarrely, the group lashed out at the writers not for their political views, but for the “depravity” and the sexual and drug-related content of their books. Touted as an independent group, from the beginning it was widely linked to Surkov, who was in turn deemed to be the only Kremlin official erudite enough and with the black sense of humour necessary to go after writers like Pelevin and Sorokin. Most
Nashi
activists had not even heard of them.

In 2005, the Kremlin reorganized the group to form a larger body called
Nashi
– still under the leadership of Walking Together’s Vasily Yakemenko. In the next six years the group would target oppositionists more aggressively, with some members staging vicious flashmobs to desecrate pictures of dissenters, or hounding and harassing them with legal action. This was not a unified, top-down effort – and Natasha Kovaleva said she disapproved of many of their actions – but to what extent these moves drew on a sincere loyalist position or were more of an attempt to curry favour with higher-standing members of the team is hard to tell. Though its Kremlin sponsorship remained unofficial, most seemed to understand where the group, which would hold rallies of 50,000 each year even as oppositionist groups were being denied the right to assemble, got its protection and patronage.

During the regency of Dmitry Medvedev, the Kremlin
gradually stopped denying its affiliation.
Nashi
was heavily featured at the summer career forums organized by the State Agency for Youth at Lake Seliger, which were regularly graced by Surkov and Vladimir Putin himself. In 2010, Surkov spoke at
Nashi’
s national convention, and specific information about the organization’s funding began to appear in the press.
Nashi
officials initially claimed that the movement was sustained by private donations from businesses – but in 2007 a defector from the group revealed that each unit had a budget of up to £7,000 a month.
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A 2010 study of federal grant and spending records revealed that between 2007 and 2010 the government had invested well over $15 million in the group and its affiliates – the bulk of which came directly from the State Agency for Youth, which Yakemenko had come to head.
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But if the Soviet Union’s Communist Youth rallied members around a particular ideology, in
Nashi’s
case its ideology, or even a unifying idea, was hard to pinpoint. It has at various points called itself “anti-Fascist” – being initially created to fight the numerous, thuggish neo-Nazi movements in Russia. But its official title identified it as a “public organization for the development of sovereign democracy,” a hazy political doctrine hatched by Vladislav Surkov. Given the fact that its most publicized activities have included the harassment of opposition figures, it is fair to call the group simply pro-government, or pro-Putin – supporting all the multifaceted, self-contradictory policies that state power in Russia can come up with.

But for the legions of its members, it was the connections, opportunities and offers of travel that lured them into its fold.

Powerful personal connections – whether the invaluable state officials who could make anyone’s career, or the friends one made from across the country – fostered a personal network that facilitated the biggest challenge for a land as large and inhospitable as Russia: forging communities. For all the notions about Russians being inherently “collectivistic,” sheer distances and irreconcilable differences in value systems made effective networking and civil society hard to achieve. The very idea of organizing so many dispersed, different people was in itself so daunting that the automatic – albeit dismal – consensus was that it could only come from above – and so the Russian state occupied its traditional role in co-opting civil society. Those with a penchant for activism and no reason to
be politically opposed to the state often had few easy alternatives in their communities.

But the central message one would expect from a totalitarian sect – aside from supporting the state – never materialized. Natasha, who was certainly young but not unintelligent, described being mesmerized and confused by regular meetings in the Kremlin with Vladislav Surkov.

“Surkov… is fascinating. He talks about so many complex things. He is super well-read,” she described. “But I don’t always understand what he means. Sometimes he talks about ‘business angels.’” Natasha hadn’t the foggiest idea what he could possibly mean by them, but he was apparently referring to rich people who provide start-up capital.

Nashi’s
lack of ideology, its pragmatic, do-whatever-you’ve-got-to-do-as-long-as-you’re-loyal credo was no afterthought; it was a reflection of a stark, gaping and utterly postmodern lack of ideology unique to Putin’s Russia as a whole.

The path in the woods had led nowhere – and a small minority was indicating to its leader that the fire of his torch had gone out – or had never been lit.

“PUTIN, I DO not want you,” Olga Loseva, a journalism student proclaimed her political stance on a placard as she stood in the cold on Sakharov Prospect, at the second mass protest rally on December 24, 2011. When asked what she meant, she explained that “Putin is a bad person. [
Nashi
poster girl] Sveta [Kuritsina] from Ivanovo said she wants Putin [though Sveta Kuritsina herself said no such thing]. Well, I don’t want him.”

And when Artemy Troitsky, the music critic and TV host took to the stage to speak, his message, too, was personal – not political: “If a president is not doing it with his wife, he is doing it with his country!” he called to roars of applause.

They came with posters, caricatures and hand-crafted puppets, spending all their creative energy to ridicule one man. They painted him as a tyrant, a gangster, a used condom, an orc and a killer of children. In February, weeks before he was about to be re-elected, they came to Revolution Square to celebrate the most pagan of holidays: the welcoming of spring. To celebrate the start of Lent in Orthodox tradition, that pagan vestige was incorporated, as it was incorporated into the Catholic tradition as Fat Tuesday, as a last party before a weeks-long fast, and also as something central to the very fabric of Russian life: the burning of winter in effigy.

What they burned in effigy on Revolution Square that
February wasn’t just winter – it was more like the sacrifice of a sacred king.

The mass protests that erupted in December 2011 materialized like some elemental force. Every few weeks, rallied through viral Facebook posts, tens of thousands would start gathering on central Moscow squares authorised by City Hall for the staging of a protest against… what exactly?

Ostensibly, the “creative class,” as those demonstrators came to be called, had been outraged by the tearing down of a democratic façade, by Putin’s impudence at returning to the presidency, and by the rigged parliamentary elections that garnered a victory for his United Russia party on December 4.

But the elections were no more rigged than countless others that much of this same creative class had ignored in the past. When it immediately became clear that no amount of authorized mass protests would force the Kremlin to hold another election, they turned their attention squarely on the ruler himself. Whatever their new leaders were saying from the stage, the protest movement shared one common denominator with the pro-Kremlin activists that they called “triumphant thugs:” it was all about Putin.

On the face of it, the demographics of the protesters couldn’t have differed more from the clientele that Putin was used to negotiating with. Entrepreneurs, office managers, IT specialists, students, artists, mathematicians, PR specialists, advertisers – and possibly their parents – these were the people who rarely went to the state for anything. Many of them relied on private medicine, studied abroad, sent their children to private kindergartens and tried to stay clear of the police, unless it was to pay an unavoidable bribe to a traffic cop. They got their information over the internet, not on national television, which they despised. Each month, the money they paid in taxes amounted to the salary of a provincial teacher, doctor, or police officer. They formed co-operatives to ensure that they, and not the corrupt municipal authorities, decided how their apartment buildings were managed; outside Moscow, these first true homeowners formed land co-operatives in places where Soviet summer homes, or dachas, once stood. When they needed gas infrastructure, they had the clout and the money to work with local officials and get the job done.