Belinsky heaped praise on Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1846 for his first work of fiction, Poor Folk, a novella that traces the relationship of a lowly, nearly destitute clerk and a woman he loves. Twenty-five-year-old Dostoevsky was a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, a group that met to discuss the works of French utopian socialists and other philosophers. It was named after the man who hosted the organization’s secret meetings in his St. Petersburg apartment—a risky business. Infiltrated by some of the tsar’s legions of informers, the circle was broken up in 1849, when its members were arrested and sentenced to death. Reprieved at the last minute, most were sent to Siberian penal colonies, where Dostoevsky’s four-year incarceration helped transform him from an idealistic Westernizer into something close to a Slavophile, a conservative who came to believe Russia’s salvation lay in adopting the Christian model of suffering and forgiveness.
By then, the European revolutions of 1848 had begun splitting the very loose school of Westernizers into two main camps: those who advocated bourgeois society as an ideal and those who adopted radical socialism. No one embodied the split more fully than Alexander Herzen, the philosopher many believe to be Russia’s best. The father of Russian socialism emerged amid the generation of idealistic superfluous men of which Ivan Goncharov’s character Oblomov was a caricature. Twice arrested and exiled to distant Russian parts before 1848, Herzen eventually settled in London, where he published a journal called Kolokol, “the bell.” Initially a Hegelian, Herzen came to believe that no ideology or dogma could explain the human condition, a position that approached existentialism. His conversion began during the revolutions of 1848, when he happened to be in Europe and was shocked to observe the bourgeoisie’s domination over the working classes who had helped it fight the old order. The disappointment prompted him to lose faith in his belief in inevitable progress. Convinced that life’s purpose is life itself, he concluded that abstractions and general principles threatened to tyrannize society.
If progress is the goal, then what is it that we are working for? What is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, recedes instead of rewarding them; who, to console the exhausted and doomed crowds greeting him with morituri te salutant, can only reply with the ironic promise that after their death life on earth will be splendid? Can it be that you, too, doom the people of today to the sad destiny of the caryatids supporting the balcony on which others will someday dance?11
Advocating nonviolent change over revolution, Herzen idealized the peasant commune as an answer to Russia’s social problems. Believing the peasantry’s “communism” superior to Western social structures, he aimed to reconcile it to Western individualism.
Back in Russia, some progress was about to be made. The death of the autocratic Nicholas I in 1855 brought his son Alexander II to power. A reformer who would come to be known as the Liberator for abolishing serfdom, Alexander instituted Russia’s first jury trials and made other changes to combat Russia’s staggering corruption and inefficiency, which were driven home by its humiliating defeat in 1856 at the hands of the British, French and others at the end of the Crimean War. Seen as the last best hope to stabilize the empire, liberalization had the paradoxical effect of further radicalizing the wing of the intelligentsia that believed in revolutionary change.
Many of its members came from a new generation of revolutionaries who emerged in the 1860s and split from their intellectual mentors, the men of the 1840s such as Turgenev and Herzen. Turgenev immortalized the divide in his novel Fathers and Sons. Unlike the “fathers,” who mostly came from the gentry, the hard-bitten “sons” were usually raznochintsy—those of “mixed rank” background, many from clerical families—who harshly criticized their liberal, romantic fathers for being weak.
The new generation was well represented by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the radical literary critic and social philosopher whose novel What Is to Be Done? celebrates young revolutionaries. Along with his protégé Nikolai Dobroliubov, Chernyshevsky believed all endeavors should be subordinated to politics. Denouncing bourgeois liberalism, he, too, idealized the Russian peasant commune as a model for his vision of socialist collectivism. Arrested in 1862 and exiled to eastern Siberia, Chernyshevsky became a hero to many other radicals, including Lenin, who once credited Chernyshevsky’s novel for converting him to revolution.
Chernyshevsky had an especially strong influence on the Russian populist movement that flowered in the 1870s. Radicalized students dispersed into the countryside to educate peasants, whom they believed to have revolutionary instincts. Deeply suspicious of parliamentarianism, which they saw as a tool of bourgeois domination, the populists opposed the call for a liberal constitution, which they were convinced would set back the revolutionary movement by strengthening Russia’s wealthy capitalists. Some turned to terrorism. In 1881, an extremist splinter group called the People’s Will killed Alexander II when it bombed his carriage as it drove along a narrow canal.
The tsar’s reforms ended with his death. In an effort to save the empire from revolution, his son and successor, Alexander III, reversed many of his father’s policies by strengthening his rule at the expense of the nobility and local government. Alexander’s harsh despotism continued under his son Nicholas II, Russia’s last tsar, whose shortsighted bungling helped set the conditions for revolution in 1917.
No serious Westernizer advocates violence today, although a popular street-art group called Voina, “war,” has riled the authorities in St. Petersburg by producing a video of its members setting alight a police truck as a sign of solidarity with political prisoners and spray-painting a giant phallus on a drawbridge that rises opposite the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, the former KGB. The group also gave rise to the all-female punk band Pussy Riot. In general, the opposition leaders, human rights activists, lawyers and others advocating such still-foreign concepts as rule of law and free elections risk arrest and harassment by merely turning up for peaceful demonstrations that call for institutional transparency, freedom of speech and other ideals that would undermine the traditionally closed workings of state affairs. Some have taken up the mantle of Soviet-era dissidents.
Russia’s new generation of human rights campaigners includes Tanya Lokshina, a slight Human Rights Watch activist with a grave demeanor who has risked her life documenting abuses perpetrated by security forces in Chechnya and other regions of the North Caucasus. When I traveled with her on a trip to Chechnya to record the abductions of young men in isolated villages in the Caucasus Mountains, she complained of similarities between her trials and what dissidents under the Soviet Union endured. “I’m a young professional of thirty, and I’m suddenly telling my staff what they have to do if the KGB walks in,” she said. “This belongs in books. It shouldn’t be happening.”
The murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya by an unknown gunman in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in October 2006—one of dozens of unsolved killings of reporters and rights activists—dealt the group a serious blow. Politkovskaya’s courageous investigations into atrocities in Chechnya had made her a household name, and Lokshina said her friend’s death demonstrated the new level of impunity for those who kill Kremlin critics. “When Anna was gone, we all realized to what extent everyone else is vulnerable. If they could do it to her, everyone else is completely unprotected.”
Two young Chechens, brothers of the alleged gunman, and a rogue former security service officer were acquitted of helping stage the shooting, which some officials blamed on foreigners and the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Other techniques for silencing critics have been more overt. In 2005, the head of an NGO that tracked abuses in Chechnya was charged with inciting ethnic hatred in what Lokshina called a “typical political trial.” Soon after Russia’s Supreme Court upheld the organization’s closure, the Kremlin issued a bill increasing its already strict control over human rights groups and other nongovernmental organizations by forcing them to comply with draconian registration and accounting regulations. As legisl
ators sped the bill to a yes vote on a freezing, gray November day, eight young activists tried to protest outside the imposing Stalinist parliament building next to Red Square. Ivan Nenenko, of an environmental group called Groza, told me he was taking part because the new bill would enable the Kremlin to further consolidate its power. “Every activity will be controlled from above, including even nonpolitical actions,” he said before police dragged him away.
The following year, a loose alliance of rights and political groups called the Other Russia, headed by chess master Garry Kasparov, began staging demonstrations ahead of parliamentary elections and a presidential vote that would surely elect Medvedev as Putin’s successor. Each time, officials denied permission before ensuring that many hundreds of riot police, backed by thousands of regular troops, broke up the crowds. Photos of young activists being hauled off to police trucks provided a revealing portrait of Putin’s Russia.
Although reporters are permitted to cover such protests, they’re never safe from police. I was never detained, but I’ve witnessed many arrests of journalists who were hauled off despite their visible credentials and other clear proof they weren’t demonstrators. Attending such rallies is never fun. Expecting the worst, I’ve usually felt an unpleasant foreboding on top of the sinking feeling that the events were largely held in vain because, notwithstanding the attention they generated in foreign media, most Russians didn’t care.
At one rally marking an anniversary of the Beslan school siege—when more than 380 people, half of them children, were taken hostage by Chechen rebels in 2004 and died during a shootout with troops who used grenade launchers and other heavy weaponry—police arrested Lev Ponomaryov, one of the first of many such detentions of leading protest organizers. In the 1980s and ’90s, Ponomaryov, a veteran rights activist and protégé of dissident Andrei Sakharov—the brilliant nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate—organized mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people in protest of Communist Party policies, events that helped bring down the Soviet Union. Ponomaryov, who spent three days in jail after the Beslan anniversary rally, told me in his cramped Moscow offices soon afterward that the former KGB officers who hold top government posts had revived Russia’s police-state culture. “They’re not able to conduct a political dialogue,” he said. “They can only work according to the ‘I’m the boss and you’re the underling’ principle. It’s the way the military functions, and they’ve made the whole country like that.” In 2013, police raided Ponomaryov’s office and forced it to shut down after officials said the lease had expired. Ponomaryov, who insisted the rent had been paid through the end of the month, was thrown out on the street.
International organizations such as Freedom House in Washington put Russia near the bottom of the lists that rank countries’ respect for political and human rights. Despite their difficulties, however, activists are still allowed to work. Liudmilla Alexeyeva, a dissident from the 1970s Brezhnev era who is the doyenne of the human rights movement, helped found the Moscow Helsinki Group, which she still chairs. Now very frail and in her eighties, Alexeyeva told me matters have never become as bad as the days when most dissidents were jailed, put into psychiatric wards, or forced to emigrate. “Back then, if you decided to publicly criticize official ideology,” she said, “it meant you had to have decided to pay for it with your freedom.”
Today’s authorities are more subtle. The government accused Alexeyeva of involvement with British intelligence soon after two British diplomats who were serving as liaisons to the Moscow Helsinki Group and other NGOs were accused of spying with the aid of high-tech communications equipment hidden in a fake rock—which the British authorities later confirmed. “It was done to blacken our reputation,” she said of the accusation that her group was involved in the espionage. “It was based on false documents, and the lies were never punished.”
Alexeyeva has also been threatened by nationalist groups, including one that put her at the top of a list of Russia’s worst enemies. She said the Kremlin encourages such extremists with nationalistic policies such as occasional mass deportations of Georgians and police raids against foreigners working in street markets. Despite the pressure on them, Alexeyeva and other activists kept a tiny flame of protest alive by staging small demonstrations on the thirty-first day of each month, to symbolize the Russian constitution’s article 31, which grants the right to free assembly.
Their doggedness was partly rewarded in 2011. That September, seemingly apolitical members of Moscow’s middle class began grumbling after Putin announced he would follow his four years as prime minister by returning to the presidency for a third term, now extended from four to six years. Russia was starting to look like Brezhnev’s stagnation-era Soviet Union, they said, a perception heightened by Putin’s aging appearance. It was as if his many years in wealth and power had given him the impassive (probably Botoxed) sheen of a haughty dictator. One longtime acquaintance who works as a lawyer for a foreign law firm and whom I’d never heard utter a single word of criticism against Putin—perhaps because her firm profited handsomely from navigating the rising seas of paperwork required of foreign companies—now said she was thinking about moving abroad. Although she seemed more than content with her lifestyle, which includes several nights a week partying with affluent friends in exorbitantly expensive nightclubs and restaurants, she added that she no longer wanted to live in a place that appeared uncomfortably like the sovok, literally a “dustpan” and figuratively the Soviet Union, or Sovetskiy Soyuz.
“Those people want to stay in power for the rest of their lives,” she complained. Putin’s assertion that he and Medvedev had agreed to swap positions years earlier seemed especially insulting to many who had previously appeared unmoved by the widespread expectation that he would return to the Kremlin. After parliamentary elections in December, accusations of massive vote rigging—although no less rife than they were four years earlier—provided an excuse for tens of thousands to take to the streets for the first time since the early 1990s.
Two demonstrations were so big and attracted so many young, respectable-looking professionals in addition to no less respectable middle-aged and even elderly protesters that the authorities dared not refuse them permission to take place. The rallies helped open a new chapter in the Putin era: the protesters who said they were tired of their national leader after his more than a decade in power caught him on his back foot. Forced to react to rather than lead the political discourse for the first time, Putin employed a range of his old tricks, including insulting the opposition, subterfuge and blaming subordinates for corruption and ineptitude. Starting with a dismissal of the protesters as chattering monkeys financed from abroad, he retreated to backing a toothless Medvedev proposal for political reform and reshuffling some of his top officials.
Many took the removal of Vladislav Surkov from his position as the Kremlin’s chief ideologue as a major concession. The wily and surly young official had masterminded the incorporation of fake opposition parties, coined the term “sovereign democracy” to characterize Russia’s political system and justify its growing authoritarianism and devised the youth-movement campaign to denounce Vladimir Sorkin’s novel Blue Lard. Reappointed to first deputy prime minister, Surkov said he would no longer involve himself in domestic politics. However, his successor Vyacheslav Volodin, a loyal enforcer in Putin’s United Russia Party who would help oversee a major crackdown against the opposition, appeared even less democratic.
Another Kremlin ploy for sapping energy from protesters was to secretly back pliant opposition figures. Few were surprised, therefore, when the billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov announced he would run against Putin for president soon after the demonstrations. He later started a political party he said would give civil-society leaders a platform, but many saw that as another attempt to dilute the opposition; Prokhorov himself did not become a member. As 2011 drew to a close, however, Putin’s tactics made him appear out of touch. For the first time in many years, th
ere was hope that at least a small segment of the population, the urban middle class, would finally stand up for genuinely fair elections and other rights—the Western kind—that support their interests.
However, it has since been very rocky going for the opposition, whose strategy has been complicated by a new crackdown on the Kremlin’s critics. One of the main symbolic events took place in May of 2012 after riot police blocked demonstrators from attending an authorized rally against Putin’s inauguration for a third term. After some frustrated protesters ripped off police helmets and lobbed chunks of asphalt at the officers, some thirty police and more than a hundred protesters were wounded. Six hundred people were arrested. Evidence later surfaced that the violence was probably initiated by pro-Kremlin provocateurs organized by the police and was possibly meant to further polarize the opposition. Some began to worry that young, more radical protesters, frustrated by what they see as no options for enacting peaceful change, are becoming increasingly disillusioned—more evidence that Putin’s self-interested authoritarianism is driving his country off a cliff. Few predicted that the authorities would arrest almost thirty of the protesters on charges of participating in mass unrest in what came to be called the Bolotnoye Affair, named after the square on which they were to gather. One of the protesters who pleaded guilty was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in what’s seen as one of the most direct present-day parallels to political repression under communism. The liberal former Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov compared the proceedings to Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s.
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