The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (34 page)

And yet this active, energetic middle class constituted, by various accounts, less than 15 percent of the population of Russia. (Judging by salary alone, recent research from the Russian Academy of Science estimated that the middle class constituted no more than 8 percent of the population. At 59 percent the country boasted the largest class of the working poor, and according to the same research, just 19 percent of the population had a household computer.)
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The protesting segment of the middle class seemed to be projecting on to Putin everything they didn’t like about Russians on the other side of the gaping divide: the perceived backwardness, xenophobia, homophobia – even hanging a rug on the wall became a symbol of entrenched backwardness. The passive acceptance of Putin was equated with ignorance, cowardice and fear. By contrast, the protest class took to drinking wine at the increasing number of hipster venues popping up around Moscow. By the end of that winter, the hipster was the protester and the protester was the hipster; the ability to navigate (and afford) iPhones and drink French wine at Moscow’s Jean Jaques café chain suddenly identified one as an opponent of Putin, for in that Manichean divide, where good was beautiful and innovative and technological and bad was corrupt and old and Putin, there was no other political programme to identify with.

When Putin admitted that he had mistaken their white ribbons for condoms, the comment was taken as proof that Putin was not “with it” and never would be again.

And so they turned up for half a dozen mass demonstrations that were closer to carnival than politics: brandishing placards of Putin with condoms dangling out of his eyes, or a condom wrapped around his head, or even of Putin as a condom – stitched up and about to be used for a third time. Demonstrators handed out real condoms with large inscriptions on the wrapping warning that they could only be used once.

For the first time in Russia’s history, an autocrat was tolerating the abuse, allowing tens of thousands of people to gather in the street and call him a used condom. It was a precarious balance that went against the very foundation of an autocracy: soon, either one or the other would have to go.

At first, these “angry cosmopolitans,” as Vladislav Surkov had dubbed them, had no formal leader. But over a few months, one emerged: Alexei Navalny, a young, charismatic political activist, anti-corruption blogger and lawyer.

On the surface, he was the prototype of a dynamic, Western-style professional politician – in a society where only power mattered, he had all the potential to bring politics into the equation.

First emerging as a talented young debater in 2006, Navalny gained notoriety by organizing a series of televised political debates. As a lawyer, he was bent on using existing mechanisms and institutions to fight what he saw as the country’s chief ill – corruption. In January 2011 he launched the RosPil website – aptly named for the Russian slang word
pilit
, “to saw” – a euphemism for illicitly “sawing” or siphoning funds from a budget. A wildly successful internet fundraising campaign brought him hundreds of thousands of dollars that he would use to hire lawyers and experts to pursue each allegation case-by-case, meticulously tracking and battling government-level embezzlement.

Navalny first called United Russia a party of “crooks and thieves” in a February 2, 2011 radio interview – but in the coming months the slogan went viral. By the end of the year it had become so ubiquitously associated with the party of power that a good chunk of the credit in diminishing the number of votes that it garnered – rigging notwithstanding – should go to Navalny.

By 2013, his corruption exposés achieved something unprecedented: after being outed by Navalny as the owner of millions of dollars of foreign real estate, Vladimir Pekhtin, a member of the State Duma Ethics Commission, found himself forced to resign.

From the beginning, Navalny had come to represent what a better-developed democracy would have clearly groomed as presidential material. But it was a testament to the primitive nature of the fight for power in Russia that its most promising oppositionist – who had spent seven years in the Yabloko party – did not initially attempt to run for public office at the beginning of his political career. Only when threatened with a 10-year jail sentence, and a show trial that he could turn into a political manifestation, did
Navalny finally admit, in April 2013, that he wanted to be president. His campaign for Moscow mayor in September 2013 – which he lost with a nevertheless impressive 27 percent of the vote – was fuelled in part by his persecution by the state.

Was he biding his time, crafting a powerful image and a reputation as a successful anti-corruption crusader to reveal his cards when the moment was right? Or was he simply waiting for the government to make the first move? “This is not an election, it’s a coronation. When we have real elections, I’ll run,” he told me during a protest in February 2012. But only Putin seemed powerful enough to give them those elections.

Whatever moves the government would need to make in order to propel Navalny into the political limelight, it had yet to make them in the winter of 2011–2012. Without a leader and a clear ideological platform, a carnival seemed all that the protesters had left as spring approached and as Putin’s re-election became an inevitability. It was as though they themselves had accepted that Putin’s return to the presidency was not the culmination of a logical set of events, but an elemental force that they could combat only by turning to the gods – “philosophical demands,” as one activist described it.

“If someone knew what to do in this situation, then Putin would be gone. There isn’t any know-how,” Maria Baronova, an activist leader who was prosecuted for inciting mass protest in the repressive crackdown that eventually followed the demonstrations, told me in November 2012. “People who have a philosophical education, but who’ve never served in the army – what can they do? We’re not hungry, we’re not in poverty, and people who aren’t hungry can’t keep this up for long, making philosophical demands. You can’t build a civil society on philosophical demands.”

Throughout the winter and spring of 2012, the protesters seemed to be testing Putin: how brutal, how repressive are you going to get? The game of chicken that the standoff had become had turned passive-aggressive. If the protest movement had a strategy, it appeared to be to get its opponent to strike first, cause grievous harm, and discredit itself. Protesters appeared to be trying to outdo each other in creative ways to insult Putin, while Putin – in a move that is rather unprecedented for a true autocrat – continued to allow the protests to take place, all the while blaming them on the US
Department of State.

With Putin’s re-election, that strategy had disintegrated. Thousands signed up as election monitors, but their presence at the polling stations only exposed the mechanisms of rigging, rather than ensuring a clean vote. Looking behind the façade, seeing the people who were actually doing the rigging, and the votes that were being cast for Putin, only underscored the difficulty of institutional change, fuelling the desperation.

May 6, 2012, the eve of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration and his physical re-entry into the Kremlin, was a turning point. Between 50,000 and 100,000 people gathered for a planned demonstration on Bolotnaya Square, just across the bridge from the Kremlin, and despite their purported programme, what was really on people’s minds – even if not everyone spoke their thoughts – was physically preventing Putin from entering that fortress.

It wasn’t exactly clear who provoked whom on that day – either police had deliberately made it difficult for protesters to enter a previously authorized demonstration area, or planted provocateurs started taunting riot police that they were going to storm the Kremlin. All of a sudden, frustrated protesters pushed through a police line, knocking down several metal detectors. And that was when all hell broke loose. Protesters threw bricks and bottles at an equally belligerent police force. Police helmets floated in the river nearby.

On the embankment, strewn with litter and bloodied napkins, a group of enraged protesters chanting “We are the power” were confronted by an equally enraged riot police officer. “You are not the power, you are scum,” he told them, visibly agitated. Another officer held him by the shoulders, as a man will hold a friend at bay when he thinks a fight is about to break out.

Police eventually dispersed the rally, but sporadic protests would erupt daily on Moscow’s squares for the remainder of that month…

The protesting class, joined by writers, sympathizing journalists and beautiful people in general, took to the streets, insisting that they were merely taking a stroll. In the manner of Occupy Wall Street, they occupied a boulevard square in central Moscow, taking to the fashionable cafés that surrounded it.

But unlike Occupy Wall Street, there was far more at stake.

It was shortly after the May 6 rally that the repressions began. The Tsars of Russian history, for all their brutality, quartered their convicted traitors, but, unlike the English, did not publicly disembowel them. Yemelian Pugachev, who led an insurrection against Catherine the Great, was sentenced to be quartered on Bolotnaya Square in 1775. Nearly two and a half centuries later, Putin’s charming spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, made a private remark that was nothing short of a historical Freudian slip: “The protesters who injured the police should have their livers smeared over the asphalt.”
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He was referring to Bolotnaya Square and the riots that had transpired there on May 6, 2012.

By June, police had raided the homes of a dozen activists. Dozens would be arrested in the following months, facing jail terms of up to ten years. Virtually the moment that Putin was back in the Kremlin, he introduced three bills toughening criminal penalties for inciting mass unrest, forcing NGOs with foreign financing to register as foreign agents, and setting up a registry that would have the power to shut down websites deemed extremist. Parliament rushed to pass all three bills within weeks. In an unprecedented move, the State Duma would strip one of its deputies, Gennady Gudkov, of his mandate for taking part in the protest movement – although the official pretext would be an allegedly illicit security business. And criminal proceedings would be launched against the most promising leader of the protest movement, Alexei Navalny – on the official pretext of embezzlement.

It was a crackdown so haphazard and confusing that it left oppositionist leaders disoriented – as though, on the spectrum of Russian history, they weren’t harsh enough. “These are not repressions. These are spasms,” Ilya Ponomaryov, one of the few parliamentarians leading the protest movement, told me that autumn. “This government only knows how to use instruments of petty harassment.”

Indeed, what seemed to aggravate the protesters was the ideological confusion of the repressive apparatus – the targeted arrests of Putin’s government appeared puny.

“What is happening is not totalitarianism. It’s not democracy.
It’s simply insane,” Maria Baronova said.

It was no wonder, then, that at their height, the protest rallies had regularly attracted monarchist groups – and these were not old ladies holding up pictures of Tsar Nicholas II. They were young people in anonymous masks.

One of them, a young civil worker named Alexei who said he lost his job for his political views, said that Russia needed a monarch who “has gone through military service.” But hadn’t Putin served in the KGB?

Putin wouldn’t do for a monarch, Alexei said. “He is a sellout. It is not his path.” There is nothing holy in him, and therefore nothing that he can teach his people.

By 2013, little remained of a protest drive of the sort that Russia had not seen since 1989. The protest rallies would dwindle back to the marginal figure of a few thousand people. If, at the end of 2011, the government felt threatened enough by the movement for Putin to make overtures to the protesters, within a year the government stopped paying attention altogether. Many of the leaders were jailed or demoralized; Navalny was facing trial, and Maria Baronova was depressed.

And yet, one tiny, marginal group – feminist punks on the fringe of the radical art scene – had managed somehow to join the protest movement, split it asunder, and achieve the one thing that demonstrators had been craving, viscerally, all along: to provoke Putin into showing his true face.

They were Pussy Riot, the five girls who donned balaclavas in Russia’s biggest cathedral and prayed to the Virgin Mary to banish Putin.

The story of Pussy Riot wasn’t so much about their protest art stunt as it was about their punishment. In other words, Vladimir Putin’s reaction to what five girls did in a church was far more interesting than what they actually did. This is not to diminish their courage, since two of them remain in jail as of November 2013 – but that courage only appeared once they were facing jail sentences for something they never expected to result in such a
colossal persecution.

Let us look closely at the series of events that led up to the Pussy Riot verdict, for they speak for themselves.

February 8, 2012. It is the height of the presidential election campaign. It is also a period of unprecedented dissent against Putin, with mass protests targeting Putin’s “sacred” image.

Putin meets with Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church, and representatives of other religions. The Patriarch calls the years during which Putin ruled a “miracle of God.” Whatever else he said, the meeting itself is perceived in the public eye as a blessing.

February 21. Five masked members of Pussy Riot perform a “punk prayer” on the altar steps of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral, forbidden to laymen and especially to women. They ask the Virgin Mary to “chase Putin away.” Their stunt is a direct allusion, as they would explain later, to the Patriarch’s meeting with Putin. They are chased out but not arrested.

February 22. Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin – a
de facto
mouth-piece for the church – condemns their act. “This is a sin that violates the law of God. The most important law. ‘For the wages of sin is death,’” he tells news media, quoting from Romans 6:23.