Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (33 page)

Putin sent flowers to the grave of the murdered fan, and then called the football fan leaders into the Kremlin, where he delivered himself of a long lecture whose theme can be summed up in a single excerpt:

‘I believe that you are a strong force. But unless we learn to control your strength, if we handle it like a lunatic handles a razor, we can destroy our country.'
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The Manezhnaya riot was a minor earth tremor, it seemed, nothing more. Any serious challenge to Putin would need the middle class—so long bought off by Putin's statecraft, by the oil money and the para-phernalia of affluence—to take to the streets. Surely they would never do that?

Russian liberalism and the Western-oriented middle class were sickened by the nationalist right. As discussed in Chapter 7, the working class of a modern economy tends to be culturally divided between those exposed to global labour markets and technocratic conditions, and this beleaguered group oriented to traditional values and national economic solutions.

Absent any solidarity between the plebeian right and the left intelligentsia, the protests against Putin would continue to be small, repressed and ghettoized. Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of the Left Front, would, in the twelve months before the 2011 election, spend a total of eighty-six days in detention. And for some the price of dissent could be higher still. Ask Alexander Litvinenko. Ask Sergei Magnitsky, the anti-corruption lawyer imprisoned without trial, who died in custody after being denied medical assistance. Ask Anna Politkovskaya.

Putin, it seemed, would coast to victory in the 2012 presidential election and the oil and gas money would keep on flowing. Economics, ignorance and brute force would shield Russia from the great wave of unrest that was, by now, sweeping the world. Wouldn't it?

It's November 2011. Two large men—white, fat and shaven-headed—are punching seven bells out of each other in a Moscow sports stadium. They look like giant babies: Fedor Emelianenko, belly wobbling above his swim trunks, and Jeff Monson—stockier, with bigger biceps and a rash of tattoos. This is ‘mixed martial arts'—MMA for short—and the crowd is full of exactly the kind of men and women that have made Russian liberals despair. Men brought up in the ‘cult of the real man'; women who seem happy to be blonde and ornamental.

By round three, as MMA is more or less bare-knuckle, Monson's face is spurting blood and Fedor is landing punches onto his bare skull. This is political theatre, too. Fedor is a deputy for Putin's United Russia party; Monson is a veteran of the Seattle protests in 1999, his skin covered with anti-capitalist body art. As Monson goes to the floor it is the ultimate postmodern spectacle: real violence, real blood, but steeped in irony and histrionics.

And then, as Fedor is given the prize, into the ring steps a third adult baby, also stocky and bald-headed, but in a suit. He takes the microphone and begins to speak. ‘Fedor,' he says, ‘does not only have great muscles: he is a real Russian hero.' It is Vladimir Putin.

And the crowd begins to boo. They might be booing because they don't want to hear corny words; or—as some will later claim—because there are not enough toilets in the venue. But it doesn't matter: the booing, cat-calling and whistling continue until he stops.

Russian TV cut this scene, of course. Putin's media is conditioned only to collude with publicity stunts when they go right, as with his shirtless Siberian photo-shoot, or his miraculous discovery of two sixth-century Greek vases, bang in front of the TV cameras, while diving in the Black Sea. Only when the MMA video was circulated on YouTube, and the blogosphere erupted with sarcasm, did the booing become public in Russia itself.

Putin looked shaken—and he had reason to be. It was the second tremor of the quake to come.

A young man sprints down a long, dim-lit corridor, yelling ‘Stop her!' He's breathless and trying to film with his cellphone as he runs. The scene is polling station number 2945, in Moscow, on 4 December 2011.

Eventually the pursuer—Konstantin Yankauskas, from the youth movement Solidarnosc—gets the cops to listen to his story. He has infiltrated a group trying to submit false ballot papers in the election: they've been equipped to submit eight ballot papers each, for 1,000 roubles, and this is the seventh place they've done it. The woman, and the man with her, place their hands in front of the pursuer's camera. She is the alleged leader of the vote-rigging group and has handed out ‘special passes' to show the election officials, who are also involved.

Yankauskas recovers the fake ballot papers, stuffed into a nearby toilet, and counts them on the floor. They're all stamped and legitimate: in the ballot box they would have counted as votes. ‘The vote riggers are from out of town, poor, and beyond caring about themselves or what happens in their country,' says one of the journalists who've staged the exposé.

It would have made great TV—it would not get on Russian TV, of course. But by the time the polls closed it was already on YouTube.
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Within minutes it had been shared by 50,000 people, then somebody tweeted it. Within forty-eight hours it had been seen by 1.2 million people. And it was not the only evidence: there were scores of videos showing systematic ballot rigging and manipulation of the count. As they circulated through the Russian blogosphere, it dawned on democracy activists that this was the start of something big.

The party supported by Vladimir Putin had won the parliamentary election. But its support had collapsed, despite the systematic abuse shown in the videos.

The Duma elections of December 2011 faced voters with unedifying choices. Electoral law effectively impedes the creation of new, minor parties, and prevents those who poll below 7 per cent from winning seats in parliament. So the choice was, effectively, between the four political blocs that have existed in Russia since the fall of communism.

There was Putin's United Russia party, the party of power, representing the interest of the state, the secret service, the pro-Kremlin rich and the hydrocarbon industry. Then the old Communist Party (no longer just a pensioners' club, it is also supported by some middle-class liberals and social democrats). Then the Liberal Democratic Party—more precisely a far-right nationalist party, led by eccentric anti-Semite Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Finally, the ‘Fair Russia' party, an alliance of social democrats and ex-communists who—though opposing Putin—had aligned themselves with outgoing president Dmitry Medvedev. These were the parties with deputies in the Duma.

Also on the ballot paper were Yabloko, a Western-oriented liberal party; ‘Right Cause', a free-market conservative party, and a communist splinter faction called Patriots of Russia: none of them had seats in the Duma and there was little chance of winning any this time. Sergei Udaltsov's Left Front—the closest Russia has to the Greek Syriza party—had been repeatedly denied registration.

The campaign had been sporadic: the media, owned and dominated by Putin's allies, had provided one long desultory valediction for United Russia. The party's network of officials had, as always, used their public office to promote their own camp. The opinion polls had showed a steady slippage for Putin's party, but still placed it well above 50 per cent on the eve of the vote. The same polls showed that 36 per cent of Russians believed their vote would have no effect.
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So, as the citizens trooped into the polling booths, they might well have expected business as usual.

But by nightfall Russia was seething with discontent. There had been, right in front of the international observers and video monitoring systems, blatant vote rigging. And the count was a farce. ‘The vote count was assessed as bad or very bad in every third polling station observed,' was the verdict of monitors from the OSCE. GOLOS, a Russian NGO set up to promote civil rights, reported widespread ballot-stuffing, miscounting, and a systematic discrepancy between votes tallied at the polling station and the eventual numbers counted.

The election had been conducted on the same principles as an MMA fight: without rules, and to provide a predictable result. But in moral terms Putin had lost. His support had collapsed, from 64 to 49.8 per cent. Worse still, in the big cities—not just in European Russia but in the Urals, Siberia and the far east—United Russia's percentage of the vote had fallen to the low 30s.

‘This party of crooks and thieves like to tell us they represent teachers, doctors and engineers,' wrote the thirty-four-year-old lawyer Alexei Navalny on his influential blog that night. ‘In fact they represent only Chechnya, the corrupt elites in the national republics, oppressed rural areas and the Moscow municipal mafia. That's all that saved United Russia from total failure.'
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And that's what the map showed: only in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia did Putin's party score the kind of 70–90 per cent that is the mark of the successful autocrat.

At 9 pm on election night a few hundred protesters assembled at Ploshchad Revolutsii, calling for the results to be annulled. They were quickly dispersed, the police making more than 200 arrests, including of leading figures from the far right.

The next day, 5 December, 8,000 people gathered in central Moscow and tried to march on the Lubyanka, the secret service headquarters. By now the left, the radicals and the democrats were out in force, with Navalny prominent among them. Navalny's blog had become a focal point for the democracy movement in the run-up to the election and—via LiveJournal—he now distributed YouTube videos and documentary proof of the rigged election. The elite's monopoly of TV news did not matter anymore. Using the same leverage mechanism as the Arab Spring—the social media amplified by Internet TV stations, and then further amplified by the international media—the story was out.

‘For the first time in many years,' wrote Navalny, ‘millions of absolutely different people have chosen a common political strategy and implemented it without serious coordination and succeeded. The main enemy—Mister Nothing Can Ever Change—is not dead, but he has suffered a stroke.'

Andrei Piontkovsky, a seventy-two-year-old maths professor and veteran of the democratic movement, puts it like this:

‘Social media played a crucial role, actually the main role. First, from the point of view of organizing the meetings and uniting people. It was the only channel, the only means of communication. That was its primary function. But it had a broader significance, too. With social media, there are two Russias: the Russia of Channel One and RTR, and the Russia of the internet.'

The Russia of Channel One now responded with systematic and pre-emptive repression. Navalny was arrested on the 6 December demo, together with Boris Nemtsov, the one-time deputy prime minister who had joined the protests. The left's Udaltsov had been pre-emptively arrested on election day itself, ‘for refusing to cross the road as indicated by police officers'. Nashi mobilized thousands of pro-Putin youth in counter-demonstrations and, with the police swamping and arresting any public gathering, the first phase was over.

Now, via Facebook, and in the face of truly herculean efforts to disrupt the mobilization—including a warning from the health minister that demonstrators would catch SARS—60,000 people marched to Moscow's Bolotnaya Square.
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This was the day the opposition politicians moved in, en masse, to shape the movement. The speakers' list read like a roll-call of liberals and social democrats going back to the Yeltsin era. Piontkovsky was aware of the contradiction from the start:

‘Just like after the French Revolution—with the Jacobins—you have the radical wing: Udaltsov, Navalny, Gary Kasparov and me. Our strategy was to cause a rift in the ruling elite: to eliminate the current powers-that-be, and force Putin to resign. And then there was the moderate wing—the ”managed” wing, and its messengers; the liberals within the system. Their aim was to force Putin to compromise, with an eye on the 2018 election. They hate the
siloviki,
but in reality they are its counterbalance within the system.'

The political fragmentation in the movement was revealed the next weekend, when the Yabloko party and the communists both staged their own, party-branded demonstrations (Zhirinovsky's LDP had denounced the demonstrators as foreign puppets early on).

The high point of the post-election wave came on 24 December, when between 60,000 and 120,000 people assembled at Sakharov Avenue. Here the platform reflected the younger, more diverse, more radical coalition that was growing up outside and between the party machineries. As protest followed protest, something else was noticed: a community of opposition had coalesced. ‘We made friends in the protests, we made friends in detention cells. It was like we found our voice,' says Katya; ‘we found each other.'

People who had never been on a demonstration, who enjoyed good jobs and decent salaries, now took to the streets alongside pensioners and radical youths. Many spent their first night ever in a cell in those weeks. They shared their experiences openly on Facebook, VKontakte, LiveJournal. Some were sacked for taking part—and soon the letters of dismissal were being circulated online. And while Moscow remained the centre of the protest, there were now—on every day of action—protests in the key provincial cities as well.

Though outrage at the election result was what sustained the movement between its big street demonstrations, it survived from day to day as a cultural movement. It survived because a few prominent media figures—including TV host Ksenia Sobchak, with half a million Twitter followers—came over to the opposition. But it also survived through the small actions of hundreds of thousands of more anonymous people. In the white ribbons protesters pinned to their clothes, and in the condoms they displayed after Putin compared the ribbons to condoms. In the Internet clips and live performances of Citizen Poet, a duo of comedians dedicated to ripping Putin's reputation to shreds with satire, speech by speech; in the fake tickets for the police arrest bus handed out on every demo. And sometimes just through bitterly earnest songs, in journalism, in 140-character tweets going viral to an online community of millions—actions Putin could never understand, and the FSB could never totally repress.