Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Another well-known Kremlin opponent, the journalist and music critic Artemy Troitsky, was also a protest organizer. He describes the Kremlin’s relationship to the country’s creative classes as a “Cold Civil War.” The crackdown has prompted many conversations among his friends about where to go when they flee Russia. “Young, smart professionals, the very people this country needs, want to go,” he lamented. “They want to leave behind what’s turning into a country of drunkards and corrupt officials who can steal all they want of Russia’s oil wealth.”

  Mikhail Prokhorov was already the talk of the town in late 2011 for being forced from his leadership of the Kremlin-friendly, pro-market Right Cause Party. Because it had been assumed he’d taken the post at the Kremlin’s bidding, he surprised many by convening a meeting of supporters to denounce Surkov as a “puppet master” for attempting to control the party. Although no one could tell whether his accusation had been coordinated with Kremlin agents to provide the appearance of dissent, Russians watching video footage of the event were transfixed. The transgression of a top oligarch—whose continuing good fortune depended on the Kremlin’s goodwill—in condemning a top ideologue injected longed-for drama into Russia’s otherwise stage-managed politics. Not that anyone saw any of the news on television. The video showed on Dozhd, meaning “rain,” a burgeoning Internet television site, while the main state-controlled news channels, which had regularly shown Prokhorov on nightly newscasts, barely mentioned him.

  That was no coincidence. Much of the innovation taking place in Russia happens on the Internet, where serious newsmagazines such as Gazeta.ru publish uncensored news and incisive analysis of events. Well-designed culture-oriented sites—such as Openspace.ru, which helped lead the way until its recent closure—post reviews of Russian and international literature and art that are often more illuminating than, say, The New Yorker’s. Journalist Kirill Rogov—the founding editor of Russia’s first major political news site, Polit.ru, in the late 1990s—credited the Internet with enabling reporters, scholars and bloggers to bring topics to public discussion outside the “controlled, traditional media.” Indeed, social commentators divide the country between “Internet Russia,” consisting of mostly young, increasingly globalized readers who can access whatever information they want, and “television Russia,” which hears what the authorities want it to.

  With roughly eighty million Russians—around 60 percent of the population, according to the Levada Center—already online, Russia has Europe’s largest Internet audience, and readership dynamics continue steadily tilting in that direction. Surveys also show that the number of people going online every day, those who tend to use social media and get their news from the Internet, is growing fast. In April of 2012, the country’s biggest search engine, Yandex, attracted more daily visitors than Channel 1, the most popular state television channel, for the first time. Forty-three percent of Internet users regularly use Facebook and Twitter, up from 33 percent the previous year, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2012, and the Russian version of Facebook, VKontakte, is even more popular than either of those sites. No surprise that the Federal Security Service demanded that VKontakte’s young founder, Pavel Durov, close protest organizers’ pages at the height of the demonstrations in December 2011, although it dropped the case after he ignored a summons and refused to answer when police rang his doorbell. That may have only bought him some time; shortly thereafter, two of Durov’s founding partners were convinced to sell their shares in the company to a businessman who was rumored to be a Kremlin agent. After a police officer accused Durov of running over him in his car, he fled abroad amid predictions that the Kremlin aims to take over the site.12

  With crucial media outlets constrained by Kremlin-friendly owners within certain editorial limits—chief among them a ban against outright criticism of Putin, Medvedev and the highest-ranking members of their circles—blogs are playing an increasingly central role in the national debate. Many originate on the country’s most popular platform, LiveJournal. Embattled opposition leaders who are seeking to build on their support from largely educated, middle-class urbanites are also counting on social media to help mobilize Russians throughout the country to tackle the authorities in local politics. The first significant evidence of the effort took place during the presidential election of 2012, when thousands of monitors used Twitter to report widespread violations such as ballot stuffing and “carousel voting”—groups of people voting multiple times at various ballot stations. “People are increasingly skeptical about traditional political parties,” a veteran newspaper editor and protest organizer named Sergei Parkhomenko told me soon afterward. “If social media can facilitate building nonhierarchical networks of people to disseminate information and coordinate activities, their role will become far more important.” That remains to be seen.

  Andrei Lipsky is a veteran editor at Novaya Gazeta, a stalwart independent newspaper co-owned by Mikhail Gorbachev. He, too, believes the dynamic is changing, thanks partly to the Internet. Lipsky, whose aging, cigarette-smoke-filled offices are home to some of Russia’s best investigative journalists, said, “More people want an active part in life, for their voices to be heard. And that’s the hope—the slow growth of civil consciousness.” Kirill Rogov of Polit.ru told me that daily Internet use is driving up the number of people who get their news online. Before the election protests of 2012 began, just 5 percent of people got their news online, but the number is growing. “The Internet has started to become politicized,” he said.

  Although the authorities can monitor everything posted on Russian websites, they had long considered censorship unnecessary because control over the national media enabled them to influence the vast majority of Russians. That has begun to change. Nikolai Patrushev, a former Federal Security Service chief who now heads the Kremlin’s security council, recently cited China as an example of “reasonable regulation” of the Internet, ostensibly for combating extremism.

  Soon after Putin’s reelection, parliament passed legislation enabling the government to close websites as part of a broad crackdown on the protest movement. Although the bill’s backers said it was aimed at sites that display child pornography or promote suicide or drug abuse, critics feared it would pave the way toward censorship. Wikipedia’s Russian version protested by going offline for a day and Google said the bill “threatens users’ access to legal sites.” According to at least one human rights group, the year 2012 marked a turning point for the authorities, who now see the Internet as “the main threat to [their] well-being and stability.”13 The report cited 103 criminal prosecutions among measures across the country it said were aimed at censoring online information. The Kremlin also prevailed on Internet service providers to install software that enables officials to block sites banned for their supposed extremism. Still, statements by other officials, including Medvedev—who’s called Internet censorship “impossible and senseless”—reinforce expert opinion that it is too late to impose controls without major political risk.

  But the Kremlin has been fighting back in other ways. While the government backed friendly news sites, compromising videos appeared on the Internet alongside leaks of hacked telephone conversations and private e-mails from opposition figures’ accounts. Some of the transcripts appeared on a pro-Kremlin tabloid site called Lifenews.ru, which falsely accused Boris Nemtsov of spending New Year’s with a prostitute in Dubai. Other tactics came to light when hackers posted their own trove of e-mails from accounts they said belonged to overseers of the Kremlin-backed youth group Nashi. The messages discuss the deployment of abusive trolls—people who post inflammatory comments on websites—and the launching of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against media sites. The e-mails suggest that journalists and bloggers were directed to extol Putin’s popularity and attack his critics.

  Despite the ardent hopes of many in the West that the Internet’s rise would help undermine authoritarianism in Russia, observers say it hasn’t happene
d, at least not yet. Alexei Simonov, head of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a group that advocates freedom of the press, believes that’s partly because most Internet use is for social networking and entertainment. “The Internet isn’t a panacea,” he told me. “It’s only a medium, an opportunity to access information.”

  The rise of anticorruption crusader Alexei Navalny was among the Internet’s most significant developments for the opposition. His site, Rospil.ru, where volunteers have exposed crooked deals by posting information and documents about state business transactions, helped make Navalny the leading voice among opposition figures before a suspended five-year prison sentence in 2013 made him Russia’s most famous political dissident. A lawyer and blogger who held a six-month fellowship at Yale, he began his crusade against the corruption he said was choking his country by buying small stakes in some of the country’s largest companies and then demanding information about how their managers spent their profits. He went after the giants of Russia’s energy industry, including Gazprom and Rosneft, and published what he said was a leaked audit of Transneft, the state oil pipeline monopoly. The audit described shell companies that produced fake contracts and siphoned off some four billion dollars from funds intended for the construction of a pipeline to China. “When I read every day how those people are buying soccer clubs, flying on private airplanes, partying at luxurious ski resorts,” Navalny said, “I understood it was funded by the money stolen from me. That’s why I decided to do a very simple thing. If crimes are being committed so openly, why not just try to go to court or write prosecutors? It’s simple enough; it’s just that no one did it before me.”

  A blond thirty-seven-year-old who exudes confidence, Navalny runs his operation with a handful of others from cramped quarters rented in a Soviet-era building near a busy train station. Sitting behind a laptop in his office, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, he was relaxed, well-spoken, and lawyerly in developing his arguments. Official corruption is so widespread in Russia, he said, that even the government admits that more than thirty-five billion dollars is stolen from state contracts each year. “Corruption is so hardy here because it forms the very basis of the power structure,” he added. One of his biggest successes was branding Putin’s United Russia as the “party of crooks and thieves,” which, along with Navalny’s fiery rhetoric and apparent fearlessness, helped make him the biggest draw at anti-Putin protests. Although he’s received almost no coverage on state television, one poll found his name recognition across Russia shot up to 37 percent by 2013.

  He also became a leading Kremlin target. Convicted on embezzlement charges he dismisses as absurd and aimed to keep him from running for political office—although he remains free—Navalny has been compared to Khodorkovsky. Like the oligarch, he was sentenced after he refused to flee. “I want my children to live here and speak Russian,” he told a reporter during his trial. “I want to pass on a country that’s a little better.” Some believe Putin’s disinclination to mention Navalny’s name when publicly criticizing him is evidence that he sees him as his main rival. Not everyone agrees that Navalny is the pioneer he claims to be, however. Galina Mikhalyova, a prominent member of the once popular social-democratic political party Yabloko, to which Navalny once belonged, reminded me that Yabloko members have been silenced in the past for campaigns against corruption that posed a threat to the authorities. “We know in our party how that kind of activity ends,” she said. “One of our chairmen was killed, several of our members are under criminal investigation and others have been sentenced to jail.” The death in 2003 of Yabloko member Yuri Shchekochikhin, a crusading investigative reporter who often guided me and other foreign correspondents toward the hidden sources of corruption, was among the most disturbing of Russia’s many unsolved killings. He was looking into criminal allegations involving the Federal Security Service in 2003 when he suddenly fell ill and died from what his family says was poisoning.

  No typical Westernizer, Navalny has extreme views about nationalism that have alienated would-be allies. Mikhalyova often sparred with Navalny before he was expelled from Yabloko in 2007 for his support of right-wing nationalist groups such as the militant Movement Against Illegal Immigration. He later helped organize annual marches of xenophobic groups, part of what appeared to be a new tactic among some young opposition members for attracting followers. He said Russia was swamped by illegal immigrants and plagued by “ethnic crime” that prompted conflicts, including attacks against the immigrants themselves. “Those are real issues today,” he said. “But for some reason the liberal movement believes they should be made taboo because discussing them will unleash mythic dark parts of the Russian soul and result in the emergence of a new Hitler. That’s idiotic.”

  Such bickering partly explains why the liberal opposition has been unable to mount a serious challenge to Putin. Clashes of ego have played a large role in its leaders’ failure to form a unified political bloc that could contest parliamentary elections or rally behind a single candidate for president. Although some organizations have joined forces, Grigory Yavlinsky, a gifted economist and co-founder of Yabloko—who represents an older generation of liberal opposition leaders—is among those who remain steadfastly opposed to joining any other group. Aided by the government’s multifaceted strategy to marginalize the opposition and prevent the emergence of a challenger to Putin—including propaganda, refusal to register parties on technicalities and banishment from state television—the failure to get along has dogged several attempts to forge a united movement.

  In addition to stoking tensions among the opposition, Navalny’s nationalism gives serious reason to worry about what Russian protesters may really want. Most of those who turned against Putin’s regime in 2011 did so for some of the same reasons Russians have criticized their leaders for centuries: not necessarily because they want reform but because they perceive that their leaders have moral failings. Putin’s return for a third term as president was a step too far, exposing naked greed that flew in the face of his professions of sacrifice and exhaustion (he once compared himself to a galley slave). Polls indicate that rather than a Western form of government, many of the disgruntled probably still want a strongman in the Kremlin—just a better one.

  Regardless of Russia’s immediate future—including Putin’s possible return for another six-year term in 2018, which would make him the longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin—the vast majority of Russians will continue to endure great difficulties, not least from the grinding bureaucracy and huge inefficiency that kills productivity. A Levada Center poll in 2013 reported that more than 70 percent of respondents said they would refuse to take part in protests against falling living standards or in support of their rights. Although the Communist Party’s treatment of rocket mastermind Sergei Korolev and others of their best innovators lies in the past, government repression, waste, shoddiness and corruption remain prominent in the present.

  The great contrasts they help generate have contributed to the creativity of artists and other intellectuals, including the opposition politicians and rights activists battling the odds to establish some of the universal values envisioned by Soviet-era dissidents and their nineteenth-century predecessors, the writers and philosophers—some of them, at least—who established Russia’s intellectual traditions and hoped their country would join enlightened Europe.

  The call is still being made, not for revolutionary change but evolutionary introduction of the institutions and practices democracies require. Among the civil-society initiatives to come out of the 2011–12 protests was Demokratiya2, a website enabling visitors to join groups taking part in, among other things, environmental activism, election monitoring and involvement in regional politics. Its organizers proposed a grassroots party that would elect leaders in regular direct online voting and be financed by its members, which Navalny once praised as the best hope for changing the dynamics of Russia’s bickering, top-down party structures by drawing “real activists” into a bottom-up syst
em of politics.

  However, such Internet-reliant projects haven’t fared well under the onslaught of new repression during Putin’s third term. As the protest movement ran out of steam in late 2012, Navalny directed his energies toward the maintenance of apartment buildings. Seeking to sustain momentum, he set up a website on which users attacked the laziness and slovenliness of municipal plumbers and electricians by filing complaints about the lack of lightbulbs, broken elevators and other failures in the maintenance of communal areas. He has also continued to expose officials’ hidden wealth by publicizing the work of bloggers digging up such evidence as registration forms for property held outside the country.

  If such creative efforts help today’s Westernizers draw enough support to challenge the status quo, they may eventually be able to help put Russia back on the difficult path from which Putin diverted it in 2000, after the short run of reforms following the collapse of the USSR. However, although predicting the future is futile, my observation of the deep-seated continuities in Russian behavior makes me pessimistic about the chances that my children will live to see Russia become a genuine part of Europe even if it abandons its current path in the near future. If the experience of the 1990s showed anything, it’s that the country is too large and its character too ingrained to change more quickly. That’s a deeply disappointing conclusion for those who, in 1991, hoped the transition would be far quicker—including me, my friends and members of my family, especially my father, who loved Russia thanks largely to the company of his long-suffering friends, almost all of whom were Westernizers.