Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (32 page)

In the ensuing months Greece ‘got' an immigration policy—albeit one where to claim asylum you have to queue overnight on a Friday, week after week, avoid being beaten by the gangs paid by the police to disrupt the queue, and then somehow bribe your way to the front. A policy where people of colour are shamelessly picked off the streets by plainclothes police and herded onto buses to be processed. One where previously buzzing immigrant neighbourhoods like Agias Pandelemonos in Athens have become, in a matter of months, quiet, orderly, and mostly white.

But it has not stopped Golden Dawn. Theodora Oikonomides, a citizen journalist at the alternative radio network Radio Bubble, who has covered the rise of Golden Dawn, voices a fear common to many:

‘Golden Dawn's favourite themes, such as xenophobia, homophobia and anti-Semitism have now become part of Greek public discourse, whether at the political or at the social level,' she says. ‘By failing to take action against Golden Dawn while nodding and winking to its electorate at every opportunity, the Greek politicians—who are now in power with the support of European partners—have opened a Pandora's box that will not close any time soon.'

On 7 November the Greek coalition imposed its latest and, it promised, ‘last' round of austerity: €13.5 billion a year in cuts and tax rises, in order to release €31 billion worth of bailout money. It went through by just three votes—more or less reducing the PASOK party in parliament to a handful of veteran leaders.

Now the Coalition will just hold on, hoping that its own electoral support does not send it the way the German centrist parties went after 1932. But electoral support is slipping. While New Democracy has maintained its poll rating at 27 per cent (compared to 29 per cent in the election), PASOK—the former governing socialist party—was by November 2012 down to 5.5 per cent, neck and neck with coalition partner Democratic Left. The combined poll rating of the pro-austerity parties is now 38 per cent.

In the meantime, for the majority of people who want the austerity to stop and who do not want to be gassed, truncheoned, menaced or even to go on strike, there is only the ‘love or nothing' strategy. Anecdotally the use of anti-depressants is rising; Penny's book tells numerous tales of former political activists simply stunned by drink and drugs.

Which brings us back to
The Silver Lake.

The ‘love interest' in Kurt Weill's opera doesn't start until the second half, with the arrival of Fennimore, a young woman trapped in a castle with the two losers and a scheming, reactionary aristocrat who has duped them out of their money. Once Fennimore appears, the music becomes mesmerized and lyrical; it focuses on the combined hopelessness of the two men and the girl. And the final sequence—a dream-like fifteen minutes during which the men set out to cross the castle's lake, certain they will drown—is shot through with ecstasy and despair.

‘You escape from the horror,' Fennimore sings, ‘that may destroy all we know. Yet the germ of creation will struggle to grow.'

All this can be a beginning,

And though time turns our day back to night

Yet the hours of dark will lead onwards

To the dawning of glorious light.

I had always struggled to understand this ending. Why, in the last days of Weimar, did Kurt Weill not pen a sustained anthem of defiance against Nazism rather than a work that, ultimately, expresses resignation?

On the streets of Athens there was, by the winter of 2012, an answer. You could feel what it is like when the political system—and even the rule of law—become paralyzed and atrophied. The ‘horrified inertia' begins to grip even the middle classes, as the evidence of organized racist violence encroaches into their lives. Faced with an economic situation dictated by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and a street atmosphere resembling Isherwood's Berlin, the natural human urge is not fight but flight. Flight from danger into the cocoon of drugs, relationships, alternative lifestyles, one's iPod. After the first-night disruption of
The Silver Lake
in Leipzig this is how its director, Douglas Sirk, described the scene at the theatre:

The
sturmabteilung
filled a fairly large part of the theatre and there was a vast crowd of Nazi Party people outside with banners and God knows what, yelling and all the rest of it. But the majority of the public loved the play… And so I thought at first, well, things are going to be tough but perhaps it isn't impossible to overcome … [But] no play, no song, could stop this gruesome trend towards inhumanity.
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And this is how a Greek theatre director in 2012 describes the situation after his own theatre was disrupted by fascists. Laertis Vasiliou's production of
Corpus Christi
—a play with a gay theme—was shut down by demonstrators from Golden Dawn after several nights of rock throwing, tear gas and the beating of audience members:

‘We went ahead with the performance, which started with two hours of delay because of the fight outside the theatre between the police against the Christian fundamentalists and the Nazis. It was like hell. The noise from outside was clear inside the theatre during the performance. People were beaten up by Nazis and Christian fanatics. This was the Greek Kristallnacht. Every day they phone me now, they phone the theatre, saying: your days are numbered.'

His eyes redden and his face begins to tremble as he tells me: ‘They phoned my mother, Golden Dawn. They said we will deliver your son's body to you in a box of little pieces. I want to be told if we are in a democracy or a dictatorship?'

The differences between today's Greece and the last days of Weimar, then, are clear. Under international pressure, the Greek state is still capable of upholding the rule of law; centrist parties, though atrophied, still hold the allegiance of more than one third of voters; there has been no decisive electoral breakthrough by the far right. Crucially, no major business or media groups, and no significant portion of the elite, have swung behind the far right as happened in Germany. But these conditions are eroding.

And the flight to inertia, depression, to personal life may also be more pronounced than in Weimar. Weimar Germany was, after all, a society of intense political engagement; of hierarchical politics, lifelong commitment to social movements, trade unions for the left and centre, military veterans' groups and churches for the right. So while the crisis may be on a scale weaker than the one that collapsed democracy in Greece, the forces holding democracy together may also be weaker.

The leaders of the international community know what the stakes are. Greece is the test bed for an austerity programme dictated by international capital. It is being imposed so that globalization can go on existing: so that bankers will still be able to afford yachts, and banks will never have to write down the mountain of toxic debt hidden inside their balance sheets. Instead of debt, Greek people are being asked to write down their lives and see their society destroyed. It might work: we might get to the exhausted end of it with ‘only' pogroms, broken glass, cancelled plays and a severely curtailed democracy.

If it fails, a whole generation of Greek young people will be left, like Weill's protagonists in
The Silver Lake,
with a choice between love and nothing.

Or to put it another way, they will be left with a choice between the politics of solidarity and what the director of
The Silver Lake
observed: a gruesome trend towards inhumanity.

13

Russia: ‘Putin Got Scared'—From the Football Riots to Pussy Riot

To those who remember Russia straight after the collapse of communism, it is a country radically transformed. In Pushkin Square, twenty years ago, I remember the way forlorn Muscovite women would stand in a line, dazed, their cheap shoes disintegrating in the snow, to sell the last of their possessions. Today Pushkin Square is a monument to economic progress—and progress not just for the oligarchs and crooks who've flaunted their designer watches and girlfriends across the top hotels of Europe for the past two decades. Vladimir Putin's Russia has delivered progress for large numbers of ordinary people.

The raw figures tell the story. In ten years GDP per head grew from $7,000 to $20,000. Though economic growth went into reverse during the global crisis, it resumed afterwards: the Russian economy, which produced $250 billion ten years ago, is now closing in on $2 trillion GDP. In the same period, the value of the country's exports increased fivefold. Unemployment in the Moscow district was down to 2.8 per cent at the start of 2011, and though it remained high in the south and east of Russia, in the politically crucial cities of the west it was below 8 per cent and falling. Russia has become an energy-exporting economy, with a conspicuous consumption sector attached. Its Internet market is second only to Germany's in Europe. Its public finances are in massive surplus.

For Vladimir Putin, his return to the role of president in 2012 was set to be the crowning event of this growth, this new self-confidence, and the oil windfall on which it was all based. With the constitution changed, Putin would be set for two six-year terms, which, if you count his time as prime minister under Dmitry Medvedev, would give him one more year in power than Tsar Nicholas II.

Only one statistic remained troublesome. Despite a rising currency and strong public finances, capital was still pouring out of Russia: out of the banks, out of the business sector. Russia's new wealthy did not want to invest in Russia. The middle class did not want to keep their money there. And the World Bank quietly suggested why: it cited ‘structural factors such as the quality of the investment climate', and ‘rising domestic risks at least partly attributable to political uncertainty associated with the upcoming elections' as reasons for the relentless capital flight.
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Corruption, arbitrary rule, the stifling power of the FSB (a successor to the KGB), and the arrogance of the ‘
siloviki
'—the security elite Putin had brought to power after he broke with the so-called oligarchs: these were the factors driving money offshore on a scale not warranted by economics. And not just money: in their minds, many of the sharp-suited, iPad-toting professionals on the Moscow Metro were already somewhere else, living a ‘virtual' Western lifestyle amid the political barbarity.

Katya, a democracy activist whose identity I am masking for legal reasons here, describes how it feels to live like this:

‘There is no freedom to own property, to do business. There is so much corruption, people don't work with any real professionalism or sincerity. There is a culture of learned helplessness. There is very little trust in society; people are naturally suspicious of each other's motives.'

So there was discomfort among the middle class, even disgust. But was there really ‘political risk', as the World Bank's economists suggested? Putin believed not. There would be no ‘Occupy Moscow', he told an audience of global CEOs two months before the 2011 parliamentary elections, when all across the West ‘hundreds of thousands of people—not just a bunch of outcasts but hundreds of thousands—are coming out onto the streets to demand what their governments are unable to fulfill.'

Russia, by contrast, would fulfill its social obligations, he promised, scheduling a 20 per cent increase in welfare spending for the coming budget.
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If Putin was worried about anything as he prepared to swap roles again with Medvedev, it was the racist and nationalist mobs he had encouraged. The football riot in Manezhnaya Square, on 11 December 2010, two days after London's ‘dubstep rebellion' (see Chapter 4), displayed a neat, dark symmetry with the student rebellions in the West.

Fans of Spartak Moscow protested beneath the walls of the Kremlin over alleged police bribe-taking during the investigation of a fan murdered by a Chechen hoodlum. They pelted the cops with missiles, before being dispersed amid freezing fog and the smoke from orange distress flares. Nazi salutes were given, racist slogans were sprayed and shouted, numerous people who looked foreign were attacked, and 1,300 people were detained. The presence of members of the pro-Putin Nashi movement, and the more extreme Movement Against Illegal Immigration, completes the picture of a classic Russian pogrom.

But even on Manezhnaya there was a foretaste of the trouble to come. Nashi and similar right-wing youth movements had been created as extra-parliamentary activist groups to support the Putin regime. But there was also a strong anti-government sentiment among the rioters.

Oleg, a thirty-three-year-old Spartak fan who spoke on condition I changed his name, said: ‘I came to Manezhnaya Square out of solidarity with the announced purpose of the gathering, which was to protest against what is seen as a corruption-based symbiosis between the country's authorities, in particular police, and ethnic collective entities— mostly from Russia's North Caucasus region.'

He reeled off a litany of complaints about the Caucasus: the way football fans are treated when they travel there, the way Putin has granted it virtual autonomy so that ‘many of yesterday's gangsters have now turned into police or security officers who enjoy all sorts of rights and authority, and can wander around Russia with guns and de facto immunity against criminal liability'.

Alongside racism there had been heard, at Manezhnaya, much rhetoric along the same lines condemning corruption, unaccountable government and the blatant contempt of the political elite for the masses. By 2010, says Oleg, ‘in the subculture of football fans, Putin was widely seen as a crook and a traitor.'

For despite the emergence of a broad middle class, many of the Spartak fans were not part of it. They were from that segment of the population we find in all the places where it has kicked off: low-skilled, poorly educated, resentful of the economic challenge posed by migrants, and now unwilling to act simply as operatic spear-carriers for Putin and Medvedev. Ivan Katanaev, former leader of a Spartak supporters group, told reporters: ‘The crowd who came to the rally has no leaders—only the consciousness that we cannot go on living like this and the desire to change everything.'
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