Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (34 page)

Two months before his election, Vladimir Putin had crowed to the West about its problem with the Occupy movement, who were ‘not just a bunch of outcasts but hundreds of thousands'. Now he had that problem too.

Russia is a lucky country. Since the fall of communism it has been blessed with not just one kleptocratic elite, but two.

Under Boris Yeltsin, the so-called oligarchy was created when a small group of businessmen, initially emerging from the Gorbachevera elite, seized the country's privatized resources with all the subtlety of a lion enclosure at feeding time. Their guiding principle was the free market without the rule of law. Their seizure and re-division of the massive spoils was attended by murders, extortion and the trampling of investors' rights. By 1996, claimed the media magnate Boris Berezovsky, he and six others owned half the country's assets. On top of that they owned the Yeltsin government, and presumed, on his rise to power, that they would own Putin also.

But the history of Putin is the history of the fall of the oligarchs and the creation of a statist capitalism, in which oil, gas and mineral companies would be used to enrich the
siloviki
and their allies.

Berezovsky was forced into exile in 2000. A younger generation, including Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Prokhorov and Roman Abramovich, moved some of their assets abroad and ‘largely abandoned politics in favour of business, skiing and football clubs'.
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Today Russia has 110 billionaires, the top 100 of whom own combined assets worth half a trillion dollars. But it's impossible to speak of them as an ‘oligarchy' in the sense of the group that thrived under Yeltsin, whose project Berezovsky has described as direct interference in politics to prevent the emergence of an authoritarian nationalist state.

Under Putin, it is just this authoritarian nationalist state that has ruled the roost, forming a new elite whose implicit bargain with the private-sector billionaires—‘Get rich and stay out of politics'—was demonstrated by the fate of the man who broke it. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of oil giant Yukos, was jailed for tax evasion in 2003 and remains behind bars. However, he also remains at the centre of a network of influence that extends via his well-funded public affairs machine into Western liberal and social-democratic circles, and now to the protest movement on the Russian streets.

Since 2005, Khodorkovsky—who has been declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International—has embraced a social-liberal agenda, arguing for a ‘left turn' in Russian liberalism, away from the chaotic free-market politics of the Yeltsin years. During the White Ribbon protests, Khodorkovsky publicly threw his weight behind the younger, more radical faction, less tainted by its association with the Yeltsin years, and distanced himself from his former allies.

‘What is going to be taking place is called a revolution, whether we like it or not,' Khodorkovsky wrote from prison in July 2012. ‘The time for soft, slow reforms has slipped away. Our main task is for a non-violent process to ”get going”. The former leaders don't have enough drive for a revolution.'
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The presence of Khodorkovsky ‘within' the radical wing of the protest movement—albeit virtually—further complicates the political challenge it faces. For Khodorkovsky's prolonged imprisonment is the direct result of the scale of Putin's fear of him. This is a man who wields power even from a cellblock in a Karelian prison, power of a type most of the other protest movements described in this book could only dream of.

As the Russian protest movement grew in strength, staging another massive demonstration in February 2012, and a huge protest in Pushkin Square in May, it faced four linked problems that have made its evolution unique among the global protest movements.

First, the problem of powerful allies such as liberal capitalists, the US state department and the remains of the Yeltsin-era free-market elite, plus the leaders of the Duma opposition parties. This gave the movement, at times, the character of a traditional, hierarchical and party-led opposition. Furthermore, the support of the Communists, Yabloko and Fair Russia have, at times, come with conditions, and an agenda.

Second, and in response to that, there is the tendency of the radical wing themselves to operate in a non-horizontal, non-networked way. True, they have understood the need for street power to remain ‘soft', to avoid violent confrontation, etc. But at the May 2012 demonstration they co-signed a manifesto calling for the creation of a Coordinating Committee, elected from across the political spectrum, and authorized to call demonstrations. They set out a basic series of democratic demands, focused on free elections and a new constitution.
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While this kind of shift towards ‘structure' has sustained the movement's momentum, it has arguably stifled the emergence of the low-level, multi-directional direct action and occupation movements that characterized the protests in the West (although, to be fair, when Udaltsov threatened to erect a tent in Pushkin Square he was, once again, immediately arrested).

A study by web analytics group Nodus Labs outlined the relation-ship between organized politics and activism in a series of graphics. It found that membership of the huge Facebook group ‘Putin Must Leave' was in fact dominated by four (fairly separate) sub-networks linked to political parties. Journalists, lawyers and politicians were identified as powerful nodes in such networks. By contrast, ‘the groups formed around a specific practical goal, such as volunteer action and meeting organization, were led by the people who had little to do with politics: event organizers, scientists, researchers, media and creative industries workers, activists of minority rights organizations'.
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The third factor, and with massive implications, is the growing presence of right-wing and nationalist movements within the protest movement. This was most evident on the June 2012 demonstration, where the Nazi salutes and near-replica SS uniforms of the Velikye Rossia movement ranged—surreally—alongside the red flags of the far left and rainbow flags of the Lesbian and Gay movement. And some of the radicals themselves have a closer than comfortable relationship to right-wing nationalism: Navalny attended the ‘Russian March' alongside skinheads and fascists in November 2011, and, when challenged, made clear he favours the emergence of a ‘modern', liberal nationalism.
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Finally, there is the scale of the repression. After the May 2012 demo became violent, the authorities were able to inflict a sustained harassment campaign on most of the recognized leaders of the movement—most importantly Navalny, who was charged with embezzlement, and Udaltsov, who was charged with ‘plotting mass disorder'. Katya, the protest activist, says much of her time is now spent supporting the core dozen people being subjected to prosecutions for the various ‘crimes' they are supposed to have committed during the December days, when hundreds were arrested:

‘This dozen—they are just regular people, like many of the others who went through the same procedures of detention and so on. Why just them? If [the authorities] expand this approach and do it to every-one that was detained, we could be talking about hundreds of people. Now people are worried. They are concerned that there will or might be some kind of payback; some kind of consequences. They don't know how far the state will go.'

Though the Egyptian radicals also faced repression, during the military's year-long fight-back after Mubarak's fall, it was never on a scale to preoccupy or cow them. And though high levels of pre-emptive repression managed to defocus the Occupy movement in America, the radicalism that was driving it did not go away. This leaves the Russian movement as probably the most imperiled of all the democracy move-ments unleashed in 2011—and intensifies its tendency to adopt hierarchies, lean on foreign support and ignore the dangers posed by the far right.

It was Marx who wrote that ‘men make history but not in conditions of their own choosing'—and rarely has this been better illustrated than by the Russian democracy movement. In its youthful makeup, its use of social media, its adoption of humour, cultural activism and non-violence, it is almost a carbon copy of the Occupy and
indignado
camps that Putin believed could not exist in Russia. Yet it is disfigured— possibly fatally—by its emergence from a society in which humanity and public discourse were crushed for nearly seventy years.

The anti-Semitism, the anti-Caucasian prejudice, the dysfunctional nationalism, the infatuation with uniforms and flags, sit in nightmare juxtaposition to Pussy Riot and the condom-headed Putin pastiches. They are as much part of the same reality as when Salafist Muslims protest alongside liberal atheists in Cairo; yet they speak of a nightmare that is ever present, not fading. They are symptoms of the same desperate problem that confronted Russians in those first days after the fall of the USSR, twenty years ago: the atomization of the poor and the extreme power of the rich.

As these tensions have played out, especially during the demonstrations in May and June, 2012, the social character of the movement has changed significantly, says Piontkovsky. ‘In December, the protest crowd mostly consisted of bourgeois people, successful people, with full bellies, good clothes and shoes. In May and June there were, first of all, many more people from outside Moscow. Second, more people from the public sector: teachers, engineers, military officers. Third, the protests have become more radical in terms of their demands and in the way they act when facing the police: they are harsher, tougher.'

And they would have to be. On 21 February 2012, members of the feminist punk performance collective Pussy Riot staged a guerrilla performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. In a performance filled with f-words, they implored the Virgin Mary to ‘throw Putin out'—a protest aimed at the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, who they alleged had been campaigning for Putin.

It was the latest in a series of brilliant, impromptu performances: they had raged from the tops of buses, in luxury shopping malls, at fashion shows and from a rooftop in Red Square, and performed outside Navalny's cell when he was detained. The group drew inspiration from the same mixture of postmodernism and performance art as the OccupyArt movements in America and the student protesters in London in 2010. As they told an interviewer:

Some of us are anarchists, some have leftist liberal positions. We would like horizontal political activity, self-organization and the capability to be aware of oneself as an equal participant in civil politics, to understand one's rights and fight for them to develop. Russian society lacks tolerance and lenience.
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The immediate aim of the culture war they'd started was to fight for the right to unauthorized public demonstrations. But this culture war—previously seen by many as the softest and least threatening part of the Western protest movements—proved to be the scariest thing of all in the eyes of the authorities.

After the Cathedral stunt video went viral on their YouTube channel,
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the three members of Pussy Riot who had been involved—Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Ekaterina Samoutsevitch—were arrested. They were denied sleep and food and staged repeated hunger strikes during their detention. Their trial turned into a vintage Putin-era farce, and turned them into global heroines way beyond the activist movement.

On 17 August 2012, the three women were convicted of'hooliganism' and sentenced to two years in prison. ‘Putin Got Scared', they had sung from the rooftops of Red Square. Their conviction would prove a signal moment for the Putin regime: it revealed what the hero of Chechnya, the great bare-chested leader of the Russian people, is actually scared of. It is the thing that will bring that elites with untram-melled power always fear. It is freedom.

The argument of this book is that the crisis of 2008 shook every part of the global order: not just because of the economic impact, but thanks to its coincidence with an upsurge of self-expression using social media that amounts to a change in the human character; and also because of the expectations that had built up during the neoliberal years, which were now dashed. In the eight months since the English edition was published I have spent hundreds of hours discussing the issues with academics, activists, bloggers, festival-goers and security experts. From such diverse directions the questions are nearly always the same: can non-hierarchical movements ever be more than irritants to those with power? And which is the bigger revolution—the economic discontent, or the human and democratic issues?

Russia's experience since December 2011 helps answer these questions. Those who took to the streets were those to whom Putin's gas-fired state capitalism had delivered a lot. But beyond the iPads, UGG boots and Android phones, what they most wanted was the freedom to live and work in a society that tolerates free speech and diversity, under the rule of law.

This is what the Putin regime cannot offer. It has met every stage of the movement with repression: raiding the homes of its leaders before the May 2012 protest; imposing severe financial sanctions on those par-ticipating in unauthorized demos; forcing GOLOS and other NGOs to register as ‘foreign-backed' organizations; re-criminalizing libel, taking powers to ban ‘extremist' content on the Internet and making ‘homosexual propaganda' a crime.

Putin has created an authoritarianism that dare not bend. It rightly fears swift justice from any new regime brought to power by free and democratic elections.

By the time of the Pussy Riot verdict, large parts of the Russian people had, for certain, given up on Putin. They'd experienced the same kind of ‘regime change of the mind' I saw in Greece, after which official politics becomes an irrelevance, especially to the youth. But the liberal politicians who flocked to support the movement in December 2011 create the same problem for the workers and youth as Moussavi did in Iran in 2009: for the poorest, there is no escape route to the West once you've attempted a revolution and failed. No working class in history—and no intelligentsia—ever launched an all-or-nothing fight for power merely in order to bring in a different set of men in mink
shapkas.