The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (50 page)

spoken to. And that pretty much

summed it up. Gossip and distrust

had

replaced

solidarity

and

friendship. And if the K G B could

do that to these staunch fighters and

firm friends, just imagine what they

did to the whole country. And that is

how the Russian nation was divided

and ruled.

SPRING?

13

Making a new generation

It was more than a year before I saw

Yakunin again. As I walked down

Moscow’s Maly Kislovsky Lane to

meet him, I could remember exactly

how he had looked when we parted:

dark-green hat pulled down over his

forehead;

black

jacket

tightly

buttoned over a scarf; hands deep in

his

pockets

against

the

cold;

eyebrows together in what was

almost a scowl.

Then it had been winter. Now, it

was a balmy Moscow summer

morning and he looked like a

different man. His open-toed sandals

and light shirt were part of the effect,

of course, but more striking was his

broad smile and clear forehead. He

laughed as I walked up. I tried to

apologize for being late, but he

ignored me. He tucked his arm

through mine by way of a greeting

and marched me down the street.

We were going to buy teabags

and biscuits but it took me a few

minutes to realize that, since he

began to speak immediately and did

not slacken until we had reached the

front of the queue in the shop and it

was time to pay. I have rarely known

glee so irresistible. He checked

regularly that I was paying attention

to him, but need not have worried. I

was impatient for every new word.

‘Did you see what happened here

this winter? Did you see?’

I replied that I had, of course.

‘The spirit of freedom has been

released,’ he said, with a smile of

pure mischief. ‘It is a new world.’

When we had last spoken,

Moscow had been deep in a cynical,

exhausted

funk.

Politics

under

Vladimir Putin was devious and

venal but everyone I knew insisted

that that did not matter. They hardly

cared about government, they said.

They wanted to talk about films and

books: anything, in short, that did

not involve the men in the Kremlin.

Politics boiled down to one

question: when would Putin return

to the presidency? He had stood

down in 2008, having served the

constitutional maximum of two

consecutive terms, and become

prime minister. His old friend

Dmitry Medvedev, who had the

advantages of being less charismatic

and shorter than Putin, had taken

over the top job. Would Putin stand

for election again in 2012? Or would

Medvedev serve another term before

Putin took his old job back?

The meagre nature of the choice

perhaps explains why it did not

inspire great popular enthusiasm. In

September 2011, Putin answered it:

he was coming back. Medvedev,

president of the largest country on

earth, was forced to humiliate

himself and stand down after a

single term, despite having won with

more than 70 per cent of the vote

just

three

and

a

half

years

previously.

Putin,

who

made

the

announcement at the congress of his

United

Russia

party,

which

dominated parliament despite lacking

a

clear

ideology,

presumably

assumed that that was that. The

question was answered: the one man

whose vote counted had voted, and

he would be back in his old job

come March.

The

first

public

sign

that

everything might not go to plan

came on 20 November, when Putin

attended a martial-arts bout. This

was his territory, the kind of macho

arena that he revelled in. He was

famously a black belt in judo, and

regularly had himself photographed

bare-chested in the wilds, fishing or

hunting. Martial-arts fans should

have been his natural constituency.

But when he stepped into the ring to

congratulate the winner, they booed

him. State television cropped the

footage, but a raw video went viral

on the internet.

This was just a fortnight before

his United Russia party was to

compete in parliamentary elections,

and it was ominous. An opposition

campaign was encouraging Russians

to vote for anyone but United

Russia, and had found a surprising

level of support. Cynical, tired

Muscovites

suddenly

gained

inspiration. They flooded to the

polls.

Panicking officials resorted to the

crudest of fakery: stuffing ballot

boxes with votes for United Russia;

changing the official vote count

between the polling station and the

central collating authority. Even so,

United Russia won less than half the

vote and, thanks to cameras on

mobile phones and ordinary people

acting as observers, the frauds were

detected so voters knew that its true

tally had been far lower. There was

no

single

headline-grabbing

moment, just a steady drip of little

incidents that cumulatively were far

more

damaging.

Voters

felt

demeaned, and popular anger among

ordinary middle-class Muscovites

bloomed.

On the night of the poll, 6,000

people protested. That may not

sound like much, but that made it

already one of the biggest opposition

protests since the 1990s. Yakunin

was out of the country at the time

but he made sure he was back for the

big march on 10 December on

Bolotnaya Square. Fifty thousand

people or more turned out in the

depths of the Moscow winter to

demand fair elections.

‘Before when people organized

protests there were 200 people or

500 people, maximum 1,000. And

then this just exploded. You cannot

explain it rationally. It is the spirit of

freedom, and I think it will be

victorious. It has come to our

country at last. I was in the protests,

not at the front or anything but at the

back. It was an amazing feeling,

amazing.’

The leaders of the marches were

mostly young creative Muscovites,

skilled at using the internet to

distribute information about fraud

and about their plans. It was

ominous for Putin. These were the

very people who had benefited from

the stability he had brought. Under

his rule, living standards for all

Russians had improved. He had

raised pensions and state salaries and

had made sure they were paid. He

surely thought the trajectory he had

set would win him loyalty for ever.

But if Putin expected this new

golden youth to be grateful to him,

he had miscalculated. During the

2000s, they had linked up with

contemporaries

abroad,

taken

holidays in Europe and America.

They felt themselves to be modern

Europeans, yet they were being

treated like trash.

A friend of mine, Alexei, told

me, after he had attended the protest

on Bolotnaya Square: ‘I always

thought I was the only one who

thought the way I think, but there

were thousands of us.’ It was the

same wonder expressed by Father

Dmitry’s disciples in the 1970s

when they attended his church

discussions. They had been all alone,

and then suddenly realized they had

the same desires as everyone else.

The trust and hope the K G B had

tried so hard to extinguish in the

1980s had bloomed once more.

Putin’s response to the protesters

was the same as that of his Soviet

predecessors. He tried to disperse

them, to turn them on each other:

liberals against nationalists; believers

against atheists. When it was his own

turn to face election, in March 2012,

he won comfortably with more than

62 per cent. But that was a total

boosted by distant regions, ruled by

local strongmen, who could provide

him with tallies in excess of 80 per

cent. In Chechnya, which is firmly

controlled by Putin’s handpicked

ruler Ramzan Kadyrov, the president

gained more than 99 per cent on a

99 per cent turnout. Other regions

might not have been so extreme in

their expression of loyalty, but they

were not far off.

The regions were a sideshow,

however.

Moscow

was

what

mattered, since it was the largest city,

home to the most educated people,

headquarters of Russia’s largest

companies

and

seat

of

the

government. It is the only city to

have grown consistently under

Putin’s rule. It is resented in the

regions as a hungry parasite that

sucks everything up and gives little

back. If Putin was expecting

gratitude,

however,

he

was

disappointed. Muscovites flooded

into the polling stations both to vote

and to act as observers. Petty fraud

was no longer possible and Putin

won less than half the vote, despite

complete dominance of broadcast

media in the run-up to the election.

‘People were so disturbed by the

violations in December that ten times

as many of them came out as

observers. This civilian control over

the elections changed the situation

radically,’ said Dmitry Oreshkin, a

Russian political analyst who has

advised

the

Central

Election

Commission.

In St Petersburg, Putin’s home

city, there were fewer observers and

officials

had

more

room

for

manoeuvre. Oreshkin explained to

me how they used a loophole

intended for ships and remote

science facilities: they set up sixty-

nine new polling stations within just

five days of the vote, meaning

observers struggled to monitor them.

The turnout in these new stations

was remarkably high at more than

90 per cent, of whom an equally

remarkable 95 per cent voted for

Putin. That added 100,000 votes to

Putin’s

tally

and

independent

observers calculated that, without

these and other distortions, Putin

could well have won less than half in

St Petersburg too.

‘It is a very important conclusion

that the capital cities are prepared to

reject the official resources and that

makes the legitimacy of Putin’s

election

very

doubtful,’

said

Oreshkin. ‘The cities are getting out

of the control of his administrative

resources. This is an irreversible

movement.’

Putin might have won, but his

subsequent actions smacked of

panic: the maddened dash of a cow

who treads on a wasps’ nest. In

weeks, his parliament passed laws

restricting the right to protest and

access

to

the

internet.

He

recriminalized

libel,

meaning

Russians could be jailed in future for

criticizing him. Most demeaning, a

new

law

would

oblige

non-

governmental

organizations

that

raise money abroad – and most do,

as there are few independent cash

sources in Russia – to register as

‘foreign agents’. Putin had made

much of the fact that the protesters

were

serving

foreign

interests,

contrasting them with the patriots