The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (51 page)

supporting his own cause.

And police harassed the protest

leaders too. Ksenia Sobchak, a

socialite and television personality

who morphed into an opposition

activist despite her father having

been Putin’s boss in the 1990s, had

her flat raided in June 2012, her safe

opened

and

all

her

money

‘confiscated’.

Anti-corruption

blogger Alexei Navalny was charged

with defrauding a state timber

company, with a potential sentence

of a decade in jail.

The faces of this wave of

repression were, however, Nadezhda

Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and

Yekaterina

Samutsevich,

three

young women accused of being part

of a formless punk collective called

Pussy Riot. Their music, in truth, is

not likely to win them many fans,

but that did not matter. It was the

bold nature of their protests that

made them stand out. They had

already swarmed on to Red Square

with their guitars and trademark

brightly coloured balaclavas. Then,

on 21 February, after Patriarch Kirill

of the Orthodox Church had directly

intervened in politics by praising

Putin as a ‘miracle’, they decided to

go further. They ran into the

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in

central Moscow (which was rebuilt

after 1991, having been demolished

by Stalin). There, they donned their

balaclavas and jumped around in

front of the icon screen. Set to

music, the video featured the lyric

‘Mother of God, drive out Putin’.

On the internet, it was a sensation.

Officials decided that this was a

case they could make an example of.

The

women

had

insulted

the

Orthodox Church and could thus be

presented as non-patriotic. Arrested,

they were charged with ‘hooliganism

motivated by religious hatred’ and

held in detention awaiting trial for

five months. The charges carried a

potential sentence of seven years.

Putin, stung by the outcry abroad,

appealed to the court to be merciful,

and their final sentence was two

years (though Samutsevich was later

released on appeal). Two of them are

young mothers, but were barred

from seeing their children.

‘Gera thinks it’s like a Russian

fairy-tale: her mother is a princess

who has been captured by an evil

villain and put in a cage . . . Which,

of course, is basically true,’ Pyotr

Verzilov, Tolokonnikova’s husband,

told a British journalist during the

trial. Gera is their four-year-old

daughter.

The trial was the blackest of

farces. The judge blocked any

petition from the defence, while

allowing prosecutors any liberties

they asked for. Lawyers for the girls

said the case was worse even than

those in Soviet times, while, for

many observers, it was quite simply

the 1960s all over again. The raft of

restrictive laws was equivalent to

1967’s Article 190, which banned

‘knowingly false fabrications that

defame the Soviet state and social

system’.

The young women themselves

made the parallel complete with

dignified closing speeches that could

have been lifted from the darkest

pages of the 1970s.

‘Katya, Masha and I are in jail

but I don’t consider that we’ve been

defeated, just as the dissidents

weren’t

defeated.

When

they

disappeared

into

psychiatric

hospitals and prisons, they passed

judgement on the country,’ said

Tolokonnikova.

That made the women from

Pussy Riot the new Sinyavsky and

Daniel, the writers jailed in 1966 for

publishing their works abroad. That

trial too had been intended to

demonstrate strength and firmness. It

succeeded only in creating the

dissident

movement. This

new

protest movement was armed, not

with

carbon-copied

statements

passed from hand to hand, but with

the whole internet. Its followers

numbered

not

hundreds

but

hundreds of thousands.

‘The Pussy Riot trial damages

Russia’s reputation no less than the

trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli

Daniel damaged the Soviet Union’s

reputation almost 50 years ago. The

Sinyavsky–Daniel trial created a rift

between the political leadership and

the cultural and intellectual segments

of society, one that lasted until the

collapse of the Soviet Union,’ wrote

Konstantin Sonin, a professor and

vice president of the New Economic

School, in his column in a Moscow

daily. ‘The Pussy Riot case has been

a major blow to Russian society by

effectively excluding this country

from the list of civilized nations.

Whatever shocking words the female

punk rockers might have yelled in

Moscow’s main cathedral, how can

that

justify

putting

them

in

handcuffs, escorting them with

police Rottweillers and jailing them

before the trial as if they were

dangerous criminals?’

I was not sure how Yakunin

would react to Pussy Riot, given that

they had behaved disrespectfully in

an Orthodox church. Inevitably,

however, he had an explanation all

of his own, and looked deep into the

Russian past to find it. In medieval

times, the Russian people had few

means to resist its government, he

said. Perhaps the only one, in fact,

was the Holy Fools – in Russian,

Yurodivie
– who claimed divine

inspiration and spoke the truth

fearlessly to their all-powerful rulers.

‘These fools used to go around

naked and they would piss in

church, and demonstrate that priests

were acting wrongly. They did it to

the tsars too,’ said Yakunin.

The most famous of all the Holy

Fools was St Basil, who is said to

have once upbraided Tsar Ivan the

Terrible for not paying attention in

church. He also offered the tsar meat

during Lent, saying it did not matter

whether he kept the religious fast or

not, since he had committed so many

murders. This public expression of

the nation’s private anger at its king

won him the love of Muscovites.

The great multi-coloured tulip-

domed cathedral on Red Square, the

most famous church in Russia, still

bears his name. When he died, the

tsar himself helped carry his coffin.

‘This is what these girls were

doing. They were telling the truth in

the name of the people. They did not

disrespect the church. They crossed

themselves

correctly,

they

did

everything right. If they had sung

“Praise Putin, give him a long reign”

they would have been rewarded. But

they did not do so. They told the

truth.’

We had finally returned from the

shop, and were sitting and drinking

our tea and eating our biscuits.

Yakunin holds his own religious

services in the basement we were

sitting in, as he tries to keep alive the

spirit of challenge that the dissident

priests of the 1970s represented.

With Father Dmitry dead and

compromised, and Father Alexander

Men murdered, only Yakunin is left.

His movement is ever more

distant from the official Orthodox

Church. Under Putin, the Church has

moved

close

to

top

officials.

Patriarch

Kirill

lives

in

great

splendour and regularly meets the

president. That has inevitably made

him a target for criticism, not least

when a photo of him was digitally

altered to remove his Breguet watch,

worth many thousands of pounds.

The watch was still visible in a

reflection in the polished table.

Putin and the patriarch are

undaunted, however. They have

used the Church to harness the

religious feelings of Russia’s citizens

behind the government. This was

most obvious in October 2011 when

one

of

Putin’s

oldest

friends

arranged for a piece of the Virgin

Mary’s belt to tour Russia. It was of

course no coincidence that the relic

should have arrived during the

election campaign.

The man who arranged for the

belt to visit Russia was Vladimir

Yakunin (no relation of Father

Gleb’s), head of the huge Russian

Railways company. He is also head

of a shadowy religious organization

called the St Andrew the First-Called

Foundation,

whose

supervisory

council includes leading figures

from state television, the interior

ministry, the railways company and

the presidential administration.

The Virgin Mary’s belt normally

lives on Mount Athos, a rocky

Greek

peninsula

studded

with

monasteries, with which the Russian

Church has had close relations for

centuries. The belt is said to aid

fertility in women who gaze upon it,

although it is hard to know how it

gained this reputation as no women

are allowed on Mount Athos. Even

female animals are banned (except

for chickens and, some say, cats).

Putin travelled to Vnukovo

airport on 20 October 2011, to

welcome the belt and its escorting

monks, and met them again at the

end of their fifteen-city tour.

Archimandrite Ephraim, one of the

belt’s escorts, praised the faith of the

3 million people who had come to

see

the

relic,

and

took

the

opportunity to ask for Putin to help

Greece, which was still in the depths

of economic crisis.

Putin sidestepped the request,

and focused instead on the belt’s

miraculous properties for barren

women. Ephraim confirmed that

miracles had taken place: ‘We are

permanently

receiving

telephone

calls, in which people say that a

miracle has happened: “I have been

married for ten years, and now I

have a child.” Twenty examples of

such miracles have been recorded

already. And there is already an

agreement that, after the Virgin’s

Belt’s trip around Russia, a book

will be published about the miracles

that have taken place.’

Such births would indeed be

miraculous. The belt had arrived in

the country just thirty-eight days

previously and children had already

been born. It is a testament to the

new parents’ faith that they were

pleased, rather than traumatized, by

the

experience.

Putin

sounded

suitably impressed.

‘If this helps to solve our

demographic issue, it would come in

handy. In any case, I hope it will,’

he said.

Gleb Yakunin, however, said the

government

had

completely

miscalculated the belt’s powers. He

pointed out that the belt had been

making its progress around the

country when Putin was booed at the

martial-arts bout. According to him,

Putin’s

humiliation

before

his

supporters was the true miracle

wrought by the Virgin Mary.

‘Everything began when they

brought the belt here. That was when

the spirit of freedom was unleashed,’

he said.

The ability to cure infertility is

only one of the belt’s minor

qualities, he said. Far more important

is its ability to protect a nation from

its enemies. Yakunin said that, in

bringing in the belt, Putin had

undermined himself. He had not

realized that he is in fact his own

nation’s enemy.