The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (39 page)

Oksana Abdulayeva, the kindergarten teacher cajoled to turn up to the rally, had been happy to see Putin.

“As a person, as a celebrity, it was nice that he showed up,” she said. But it seemed as though she hadn’t really articulated her thoughts on this until I asked her – and it surfaced that in reality, she resented him.

She had been trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant, but her teacher’s salary wasn’t nearly enough for
in vitro
fertilization.

“He keeps saying, ‘have more children,’” she said. “But how? And why? So that they can be sent to Chechnya and be killed?”

She said she would not vote for him, or for any of the other candidates. But despite her judgment and her resentment, she had, like thousands of others, turned out for a rally to support him, simply for being asked. In a week’s time, 45.6 million Russians would cast
their vote for Putin. Of those people, some genuinely believed in him, some liked him and thought he was smart. But there were also millions who marked the ballot much in the same way that Oksana Abdulayeva, despite her resentment and disgust, attended a rally to support him – for simplicity’s sake, for lack of an alternative, for money, or for being asked.

It was just past 6 a.m. on the morning of the presidential elections on March 4, 2012, and I was stumbling through ankle-deep snow, blinking against the flurries in the excruciating pre-dawn darkness, trying to find Alexander Pypin’s car.

Pypin, a soft-spoken commercial real estate analyst in his late 30s, had found himself, to his own surprise, organizing a team of volunteer election observers in the village of Nizhneye Myachkovo, twenty kilometres southeast of Moscow, where he had purchased a home a few years ago. He would drive me to the polling station, where, under the watchful eyes of the election commission chairman, we would pretend to have met for the first time.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said as I got into the back seat.

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to the Russian people,” he joked.

He explained that he had gone as an observer during the December parliamentary election because he felt some light needed to be shed on the black hole that was municipal politics in the Moscow region. State officials were quietly being sold choice land plots; nosy people were getting beaten up. The violations he saw at his polling station meant that his accidental foray into politics, at least for him, was the start of an uphill, ultimately fruitless battle that he was forced to engage in. “Our people don’t understand what an election is. They don’t know how to make a choice,” he said.

The presidential election of 2012 saw tens of thousands of middle class volunteers like Pypin flood polling stations across the country; some compared it to the Narodniki movement, the 19th century revolutionary-minded urban students who started “going to the people” in search of their roots, seeking to adopt what they saw as the peasants’ collectivism as the basis of socialism in Russia.

My own decision to become an election observer came out of lofty intentions that quickly descended into the banal. I initially felt that the only hope for change was for those urban protesters I had stood among in Moscow to “go to the people,” and to convince them that ballot stuffing was wrong. And, like many volunteers, I believed that I should also try to convince these harried, provincial women administrators who followed orders that following illegal orders was wrong.

But at that particular polling station, where everything seemed to have been decided before I even showed up, there was little use in my presence other than simply watching, because in the end, we were proven utterly powerless.

Anton Dugin, a tall, suave red-haired man in his late 20s, stood among the election observers at the provincial polling station where he was chairman, chatting them up about politics. A local administration official, he wore a well-cut suit to spend nearly twenty-four hours at a village sports hall set up with ballot booths and tables. On March 4, 2012, he seemed to be juggling two tasks: to ensure that the voting process went smoothly in accordance with the paper law, and to ensure that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin got the necessary number of votes in accordance with the living law, passed down from the Presidential Administration in the Kremlin to Dugin’s boss in the governor’s administration of the Moscow region.

How to achieve the former was easy: that was written down in a series of federal laws. But how to achieve the latter, well, that was entirely up to Dugin, and him alone.

“It’s as if you don’t know your history,” he was telling two middle-aged women. “Russia has always had autocracy. It has always had a Tsar. And that has always been good for some people and bad for others.”

After a few minutes, as Dugin casually moved to chat up the younger observers and distract them, one of the older women would stand up and stuff ten ballots into the box. As the younger observers stood in a commotion around the ballot box, filming its contents and noisily calling the police, Dugin, who just a few moments ago had suppressed a hearty giggle over a joke involving Putin’s alleged mistress Alina Kabayeva, remained unperturbed and refused to acknowledge that any ballot stuffing had taken place. The folded
pack of ten ballots was clearly visible in the transparent container, but when confronted with the protests, Dugin offered a perfectly reasonable answer: “Well, yes, it’s a ballot box, and there are a lot of ballots in it. What’s the problem?”

The problem was that Dugin, like most election committee chairmen around the country, hardly needed ballot stuffing and other visible examples of voter fraud to guarantee Putin a secure victory in the presidential race. Opinion polls in February placed the number of people who planned to cast their ballot for Putin at 63 percent of those who said they would go and vote – well above the 50 percent Putin would have needed to formally avoid a runoff. There had been hope – and evidence of high-level debate – that recent protests and Putin’s dip in popularity would result in a two-round election that would force him to fight for his votes and do what was unthinkable for a Tsar: take part in campaign debates.

But that never happened. An unwritten order emerged from the new Kremlin ideologue, Vyacheslav Volodin – Putin’s trusted United Russia handler who was brought in to replace Vladislav Surkov – that regional governors and administration officials were to ensure a victory for Putin in the first round. The aura of power could not be allowed to diminish, the Kremlin was not ready for politics, and neither were the Russian people, that message seemed to say. The elections were not a debate between politicians convincing voters of the good of their policies; they were a formality crowning a battle for power. The battle, as pro-Kremlin sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya told me at the time, was as it had always been in Russia – not to win, but to destroy, to wrest power or to maintain it. It was no wonder that, in this context, Putin would continue presenting his campaign as a matter of life and death. “They are looking for a sacred victim,” he would say of the opposition. “They’ll whack him, if you’ll pardon the word, and then blame the government.”

That battle lay at the heart of the numbers. What the opinion polls seemed to mask was the key mystery of Putin’s twelve-year rule: the illusion of his popularity. Taken at face value, the polls presented a politician far more popular than other contenders. What they did not reflect was why people chose Putin, and the psychology behind their choice. The numbers, the façade of the election process, the polls, and the media dressed an ancient sentiment in modern clothes:
even devoid of the slightest voting irregularities, even under the most pristine polling conditions, without violating a single law, the people were not choosing a favoured politician. They were following orders. By picking out of five presidential candidates, they were not choosing a policy. They were deciding whether to obey or to rebel.

In the sports hall of Nizhneye Myachkovo, I was greeted by two sleepy policemen and the cordial Anton Dugin. To my request to see bound books with the list of 800 voters registered to that station, he politely waved it off as “later.” And while I initially brushed this minor violation off to the bustle of setting up the polling station in time for its 8 a.m. opening, I would later learn that it was no coincidence.

The morning hours amounted to an endless rotation of aging pensioners. At least three women in their 80s accosted me with a shaking hand, “Where is Putin’s name, little daughter? Sign it for me, I cannot see.” I had to refuse: though election officials regularly told these women to approach us for help, by law I could be kicked out for simply touching her ballot.

But these old women were not the only ones who gave Putin his victory.

At half past ten, about seven weather-beaten men in working clothes piled into the room. Each one of them was holding an absentee voting certificate, which allowed them to vote away from their place of residence. As suspicious observers accosted them about their registration (they had none), one fellow volunteer whispered to me: “Where I live, United Russia got over 50 percent in the fairest of votes.” The volunteer was Anatoly Zakharov, a 28-year-old engineering consultant who worked for a construction company in nearby Zhukovsky. His mother had worked as an election official at his local polling station, and from colleagues, he knew about the latest approach to obeying the living law without visibly violating the paper law.

“Everything is transparent now,” he told me as we stood next to the transparent ballot box, in full view of the camera that Putin had ordered installed at every polling station. “No ballot stuffing is necessary, because there’s another method that’s far more efficient.”

As Zakharov described it, contractors from a town’s key industry – such as the Pikalevo factory – are driven to a meeting
with local administrative authorities. The local officials explain, very politely, that that they need to go and vote – hinting that if they do not, they will not get coveted government contracts. They are not necessarily told who to vote for. “They understand the signal,” Zakharov said. “On what basis can our contracts be annulled?” Zakharov overheard at another meeting with local officials. “On the basis that you are not a patriot.”

The seven workers lined up to receive their ballots in another room out of the view of the observers. After emerging, one of them, suffering from what appeared to be a hangover, stood staring at his ballot in bewilderment. He didn’t seem to have an inkling of what he was supposed to do with it, until an observer directed him to a voting booth and told him to check the box next to his chosen candidate.

After the seven men voted, they walked out, single file, and piled furtively into a silver Mitsubishi pick-up truck standing outside in the sunlit snow. As Zakharov began filming the truck, its driver, after eyeing us suspiciously for a few moments, walked over, and said: “Who are you, and why are you filming?”

Zakharov explained that he was an election observer and was filming the premises in accordance with the law. The driver, who would not give his name, looked as if he wanted to explain something to us, as if he had something weighing on his conscience. “I’m a working Russian man, don’t you understand?” he told us. “I just want the right choice to be made.”

No evident violations were committed by driving seven workers to vote using absentee ballots, and we didn’t have the means to trace this Mitsubishi truck to see if it appeared later at other polling stations. But as I learned later from the Golos election watchdog, voting by absentee ballot appeared to be the method of choice to increase Putin’s results at the 2012 elections. On informal orders from regional or local government officials, factory bosses would buy up absentee ballots given out at each polling station, and workers would be bussed in to ensure that they voted. Companies would register themselves as enterprises that had to work on weekends to ensure that they were eligible to receive absentee ballots in bulk. In total, 1.6 million people voted by absentee ballot in March 2012 – an increase of about 400,000 people compared to the turnout for the
Duma elections, according to the most commonly cited figures.
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As the night wore on, the observers – Pypin, Zakharov and a younger man named Alexei – were engaged in a polite, silent battle of wills with Dugin, struggling to comply with every letter of the paper law and force Dugin to do the same. It had become clear that the minor violations – like Dugin’s reluctance to show us the lists of voters – had not been a mere oversight. Once the votes were counted, he insisted on pencilling the results into the protocol on the wall, instead of writing in pen as required by law. One number remained missing in that protocol, and it was the number of ballots handed out. Very likely, had we seen the books and the list of absentee voters, we would learn that the numbers would not add up. To keep this concealed from us, Dugin just kept us waiting, hoping that after twenty hours at the polling station we would get too tired and leave.

Determined to stay to the end, Pypin and Zakharov would make a note of each violation in a calm voice, turning on their cameras. They had repeatedly demanded to see the lists of registered voters to ensure that the number of ballots handed out did not exceed the number of people who came to vote. But Dugin wouldn’t budge. “We’ll do it later,” he said. “The women are drinking tea.”

I sat down for tea with Yelena Kiselyova, one of the commission members, and asked her if the observers were getting to her. They were. An employee in the district administration, she had worked at polling stations for twenty years, she said, and people had voted “correctly,” without election observers getting in the way. I would never learn what exactly she meant by “correctly.”

Dugin, meanwhile, was overheard telling the other officials to try to wait until the observers left, otherwise they would never manage to “hide” discrepancies in the lists. By three in the morning, Dugin merely told observers that the lists had already been counted without them – and sat down with two other women over a calculator to come up with the right number to pencil into the protocol.