The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  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 supporting his own cause.

  And police harassed the protest leaders too. Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite and television personality who morphed into an opposition activist despite her father having been Putin’s boss in the 1990s, had her flat raided in June 2012, her safe opened and all her money ‘confiscated’. Anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny was charged with defrauding a state timber company, with a potential sentence of a decade in jail.

  The faces of this wave of repression were, however, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, three young women accused of being part of a formless punk collective called Pussy Riot. Their music, in truth, is not likely to win them many fans, but that did not matter. It was the bold nature of their protests that made them stand out. They had already swarmed on to Red Square with their guitars and trademark brightly coloured balaclavas. Then, on 21 February, after Patriarch Kirill of the Orthodox Church had directly intervened in politics by praising Putin as a ‘miracle’, they decided to go further. They ran into the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow (which was rebuilt after 1991, having been demolished by Stalin). There, they donned their balaclavas and jumped around in front of the icon screen. Set to music, the video featured the lyric ‘Mother of God, drive out Putin’. On the internet, it was a sensation.

  Officials decided that this was a case they could make an example of. The women had insulted the Orthodox Church and could thus be presented as non-patriotic. Arrested, they were charged with ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ and held in detention awaiting trial for five months. The charges carried a potential sentence of seven years. Putin, stung by the outcry abroad, appealed to the court to be merciful, and their final sentence was two years (though Samutsevich was later released on appeal). Two of them are young mothers, but were barred from seeing their children.

  ‘Gera thinks it’s like a Russian fairy-tale: her mother is a princess who has been captured by an evil villain and put in a cage . . . Which, of course, is basically true,’ Pyotr Verzilov, Tolokonnikova’s husband, told a British journalist during the trial. Gera is their four-year-old daughter.

  The trial was the blackest of farces. The judge blocked any petition from the defence, while allowing prosecutors any liberties they asked for. Lawyers for the girls said the case was worse even than those in Soviet times, while, for many observers, it was quite simply the 1960s all over again. The raft of restrictive laws was equivalent to 1967’s Article 190, which banned ‘knowingly false fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system’.

  The young women themselves made the parallel complete with dignified closing speeches that could have been lifted from the darkest pages of the 1970s.

  ‘Katya, Masha and I are in jail but I don’t consider that we’ve been defeated, just as the dissidents weren’t defeated. When they disappeared into psychiatric hospitals and prisons, they passed judgement on the country,’ said Tolokonnikova.

  That made the women from Pussy Riot the new Sinyavsky and Daniel, the writers jailed in 1966 for publishing their works abroad. That trial too had been intended to demonstrate strength and firmness. It succeeded only in creating the dissident movement. This new protest movement was armed, not with carbon-copied statements passed from hand to hand, but with the whole internet. Its followers numbered not hundreds but hundreds of thousands.

  ‘The Pussy Riot trial damages Russia’s reputation no less than the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel damaged the Soviet Union’s reputation almost 50 years ago. The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial created a rift between the political leadership and the cultural and intellectual segments of society, one that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union,’ wrote Konstantin Sonin, a professor and vice president of the New Economic School, in his column in a Moscow daily. ‘The Pussy Riot case has been a major blow to Russian society by effectively excluding this country from the list of civilized nations. Whatever shocking words the female punk rockers might have yelled in Moscow’s main cathedral, how can that justify putting them in handcuffs, escorting them with police Rottweillers and jailing them before the trial as if they were dangerous criminals?’

  I was not sure how Yakunin would react to Pussy Riot, given that they had behaved disrespectfully in an Orthodox church. Inevitably, however, he had an explanation all of his own, and looked deep into the Russian past to find it. In medieval times, the Russian people had few means to resist its government, he said. Perhaps the only one, in fact, was the Holy Fools – in Russian, Yurodivie – who claimed divine inspiration and spoke the truth fearlessly to their all-powerful rulers.

  ‘These fools used to go around naked and they would piss in church, and demonstrate that priests were acting wrongly. They did it to the tsars too,’ said Yakunin.

  The most famous of all the Holy Fools was St Basil, who is said to have once upbraided Tsar Ivan the Terrible for not paying attention in church. He also offered the tsar meat during Lent, saying it did not matter whether he kept the religious fast or not, since he had committed so many murders. This public expression of the nation’s private anger at its king won him the love of Muscovites. The great multi-coloured tulip-domed cathedral on Red Square, the most famous church in Russia, still bears his name. When he died, the tsar himself helped carry his coffin.

  ‘This is what these girls were doing. They were telling the truth in the name of the people. They did not disrespect the church. They crossed themselves correctly, they did everything right. If they had sung “Praise Putin, give him a long reign” they would have been rewarded. But they did not do so. They told the truth.’

  We had finally returned from the shop, and were sitting and drinking our tea and eating our biscuits. Yakunin holds his own religious services in the basement we were sitting in, as he tries to keep alive the spirit of challenge that the dissident priests of the 1970s represented. With Father Dmitry dead and compromised, and Father Alexander Men murdered, only Yakunin is left.

  His movement is ever more distant from the official Orthodox Church. Under Putin, the Church has moved close to top officials. Patriarch Kirill lives in great splendour and regularly meets the president. That has inevitably made him a target for criticism, not least when a photo of him was digitally altered to remove his Breguet watch, worth many thousands of pounds. The watch was still visible in a reflection in the polished table.

  Putin and the patriarch are undaunted, however. They have used the Church to harness the religious feelings of Russia’s citizens behind the government. This was most obvious in October 2011 when one of Putin’s oldest friends arranged for a piece of the Virgin Mary’s belt to tour Russia. It was of course no coincidence that the relic should have arrived during the election campaign.

  The man who arranged for the belt to visit Russia was Vladimir Yakunin (no relation of Father Gleb’s), head of the huge Russian Railways company. He is also head of a shadowy religious organization called the St Andrew the First-Called Foundation, whose supervisory council includes l
eading figures from state television, the interior ministry, the railways company and the presidential administration.

  The Virgin Mary’s belt normally lives on Mount Athos, a rocky Greek peninsula studded with monasteries, with which the Russian Church has had close relations for centuries. The belt is said to aid fertility in women who gaze upon it, although it is hard to know how it gained this reputation as no women are allowed on Mount Athos. Even female animals are banned (except for chickens and, some say, cats).

  Putin travelled to Vnukovo airport on 20 October 2011, to welcome the belt and its escorting monks, and met them again at the end of their fifteen-city tour. Archimandrite Ephraim, one of the belt’s escorts, praised the faith of the 3 million people who had come to see the relic, and took the opportunity to ask for Putin to help Greece, which was still in the depths of economic crisis.

  Putin sidestepped the request, and focused instead on the belt’s miraculous properties for barren women. Ephraim confirmed that miracles had taken place: ‘We are permanently receiving telephone calls, in which people say that a miracle has happened: “I have been married for ten years, and now I have a child.” Twenty examples of such miracles have been recorded already. And there is already an agreement that, after the Virgin’s Belt’s trip around Russia, a book will be published about the miracles that have taken place.’

  Such births would indeed be miraculous. The belt had arrived in the country just thirty-eight days previously and children had already been born. It is a testament to the new parents’ faith that they were pleased, rather than traumatized, by the experience. Putin sounded suitably impressed.