Toward the middle of the 1990s, Alex wanted to be a psychoanalyst, a profession still in its infancy in Russia. His career took a turn for the unexpected when the fender of his crummy little car nicked that of a Mercedes with tinted windows. The two thugs who got out let him know unceremoniously that the scratch would cost him. As he couldn’t pay, they took him along with them. Believing that his last hour had come, Alex tried to engage them in conversation, not so much to talk to them as, more cleverly, to get them to talk. He insists he doesn’t know how it happened, but after half an hour one of the two was telling cruel stories from his childhood and bawling his eyes out. The story got back to the boss, a big Uzbek mafioso. Several of the boss’s friends had just been killed, and he himself was becoming aware of how precarious life can be; you could say he had a case of the blues, which is how Alex, like in The Sopranos, became a psychoanalyst for the Mafia. The story’s old, but I’m telling it because, based on his expertise, Alex told me what he believed could be expected from the upcoming presidential elections: nothing. Because politics (it’s Alex talking) has no importance in Russia, where real power is in the hands of the Mafias. They act like shareholders who have no problem replacing a CEO with someone a little more presentable, a little more democratic in appearance, the day the CEO stops being popular. So the problem isn’t Putin at all, Alex says: of course he’ll be reelected, and of course if dissatisfaction grows, he’ll be ousted in favor of another straw man, and everything will continue as before. You can travel, say more or less what you want, earn money, steal money, but not participate in governing your country: that’s none of your business. For that to change it would take a true revolution, something nobody wants. Which is why Alex, despite having been a hero on the barricades of 1991, doesn’t have the least inclination to go demonstrate beside the Akunins, Ulitskayas, Bykovs, Parkhomenkos, and all the other swollen-headed VIPs whom the Western commentators so love and whom the term champagne liberals would suit to a T if it weren’t already taken. No, on Sunday he prefers to go play tennis.
It was the first day of my visit to Russia, and just after meeting Alex I went to visit Eduard Limonov. We had to celebrate the success of the book I’d written about him; what’s more, it’s always interesting to hear what he has to say: you can be sure the last thing you’ll be treated to is double-talk. What distinguishes Limonov from Alex is that while Limonov still dreams of revolution, Alex doesn’t at all. But they do see eye to eye in their disdain for the “bourgeois leaders,” as Limonov calls them. He tells me that last fall—when President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin swapped places, followed by legislative elections that were clearly rigged—there was a popular outcry, but this outcry was hijacked and sapped of content by the group of intellectuals who started to make themselves heard the day it became clear that it was no longer dangerous to do so, and who were soon joined by opportunist politicians, all of whom then left on long winter vacations from December 24 to February 4: the blogger Navalny to Mexico and the others to the beach. In what Limonov says it’s hard not to hear the bitterness of the pioneer who was always the first to do something when it took real guts, when you got chucked in jail—and not for a couple of hours but for years—and who now sees his place being taken by people who’ve run about zero risk. But what he also notes is that two months ago everyone thought he was wide of the mark, while today a lot of people say he was right in maintaining that a real opportunity had opened up, not for a revolution but for effective action, a chance to exert pressure on the authorities and obtain demands—electoral reforms, the liberation of political prisoners—but that the opposition wasn’t able take advantage of it. A door opened, then closed, and things went back to how they were before. I’ll hear that a lot.
Car demonstrations are specifically Russian. For an obvious reason: you freeze less in your car than on foot, but also because average Russians spend a lot of time in their cars, stuck in huge traffic jams and sometimes even wearing diapers to relieve their bladders. One of the signs of the arrogance of the rich and powerful that normal people have the hardest time with is when they clamp flashing blue lights on the roofs of their cars to avoid such mutual submission. For the past two or three years more and more websites have sprung up denouncing violations of the Highway Code by people who have no good reason to have a blue light on their car, as well as the huge black Mercedes sedans that hit elderly people or children and then speed off without any further ado, and whose drivers, or their bosses, get off scot-free. More than any other, this topic unites popular discontent, and ever since a certain Pyotr Shkumatov mockingly stuck a blue plastic bucket to the roof of his car, “little blue bucket” demonstrations have taken off and stirred up the opposition. That’s how, my fingers numb with cold, I found myself unrolling duct tape together with a journalist friend to attach one of these buckets to the Audi of Ilya Ponomarev, member of the Russian State Duma from Novosibirsk. I suppose Limonov would make cruel fun of Ponomarev and call him a useful idiot: he’s a member of Spravedlivaya Rossiya—A Just Russia—which many consider a bogus opposition party instrumentalized by the Kremlin. But once you start playing that game, no political formation is above suspicion—or rather only one is, namely Gennady Zyuganov’s Communist Party. But even if you want nothing better than to throw a wrench into Putin’s works, you still have to have a tough stomach to vote for the Communists in Russia. Ponomarev, to resume, is a cheerful, warmhearted young man with a great head on his shoulders, and the six of us crammed into his car had a great time driving on Moscow’s inner ring road while honking and lowering our windows despite the cold to exchange encouraging gestures with the occupants of the other cars equipped, like ours, with blue buckets or white ribbons, which have become the symbol of those opposed to Putin, who pretended to believe that the opposition was brandishing condoms. It was like a wedding procession: people of all ages had taken up positions on the sidewalks to applaud the passage of the white-ribboned cars. Some who didn’t have ribbons waved balloons or plastic bags, the main thing being that whatever they waved should be white. Ponomarev was telephoning right and left to find out how many people were taking part: three thousand cars according to the organizers, three hundred according to the police. Such a discrepancy is classic, but from inside one of the cars it was impossible to get any idea at all, and even three thousand cars don’t make a particularly big procession on a road such as that. Such figures are the stuff of endless one-upmanship: every time the opposition prides itself for having gathered, say, ten thousand people, Putin’s party, United Russia, makes a point of gathering one hundred thousand an hour later. Another challenge is getting the permit: you have to say how many people will take part and what route you want to follow. All of that has to be negotiated with the authorities, and those who have a reputation for being good at such negotiations, such as Boris Nemtsov, former deputy prime minister under Yeltsin, are then suspected of having been compromised, or even of betraying the opposition. That’s what Limonov accuses him of: instead of running the risk of clashing with the government forces and holding a demonstration near the Kremlin, Nemtsov chose a place that posed no threat to the authorities and is appropriately named Bolotnaïa—the swamp. Throughout my stay, one of my main occupations was following the rumors on the Internet announcing demonstrations and counterdemonstrations practically every day, which not many people at all seemed to know about. The League of Voters (a group formed by the “bourgeois leaders” that Limonov so loves to decry) planned a human chain along the Garden Ring road for the Sunday before the first round of the presidential elections, calculating that thirty-four thousand people would have to take part. A website was opened where you could register and choose your spot; a week before it’s due to take place, twelve hundred have signed up. My return flight was booked for just this Sunday; I’ve decided to postpone it.
Moscow’s Artplay complex consists of old warehouses transformed into restaurants, art galleries, and architects’ offices, and everyone who’s anyone in the opposition is squeezed into an exhibition celebrating the creativity of the demonstrators since December: posters, emblazoned T-shirts, carnival disguises, all centering around the theme “Putin must go.” Some are quite amusing; still, one hardly knows what to make of the speed with which this new culture of rebellion has become contemporary art, and one is forced to admit that the problem with this Muscovite opposition is its incorrigible trendiness. You’d think you were at a cocktail party where everyone’s a journalist, an artist, or a performer: everyone has his or her own website or blog, to say nothing of a Facebook page. The authorities call these young people the “hamsters of the Internet.” The young people call themselves “hipsters” (pronounced gamsters and gipsters, respectively, because an aspirated h becomes a g in Russian, in the same way they call Hitler Gitler). You have to smile when Putin insists that these people are foreign infiltrators and are all paid by the CIA; nevertheless you also have to admit that they represent only an infinitesimal minority of the population, and that they bear no relation to the real Russia. Although no one doubts that this “real Russia” will win the elections—and that the vote won’t even need to be rigged—I didn’t run across it during this visit. I simply don’t know anyone who claims to be part of it, and it’s depressing to go to demonstrations alone, especially when it’s freezing outside. But these demonstrations do take place, and they’re massive, although what you see on the Internet is perplexing. Take the big rally in Luzhniki Stadium, which 130,000 people attended, according to the organizers and the police, who agree for once. Since the permit only specified 100,000, the authorities apologized for having assembled too many people and—in an unhabitual show of respect for the law—even paid the fine of two thousand rubles, or a little less than seventy dollars. Although he’s frugal with his appearances, Putin came in person. He harangued the crowd on the topic, precisely, of the real Russia, and the threats posed by those who don’t love it. “Do you love Russia?”
The crowd shouts back, “Yes!”
“Are you ready to defend it?”
“Yes!”
All of this is well and good, but when journalists question the people as they leave the stadium, many are wary and steal away; some admit they were paid to come or even pressured into it. The zeal of those who affirm the contrary is suspicious, such as that of the guy with a morose look on his face carrying the sign I’M HERE OF MY OWN FREE WILL. This crowd may be the real Russia, but it looks above all like the Soviet Union. Back then people didn’t demonstrate, they marched. Today one Russia still marches, and another demonstrates. The one that marches drags its feet more or less; the one that demonstrates does it because it believes in what it’s doing, because it wants to, because it’s fun. No matter how many are on each side, as long as that’s the case, the second has already won.
A film called Twilight Portrait just came out in France, and in my view it’s the best Russian film in a long time. Since the plotline takes some unexpected twists, I won’t give the game away and will just say that it’s about a middle-class young woman whose friends, when they drink toasts to her on her birthday, say she’s content in every way: she has a nice husband who’s not a drunk and earns a good living, an interesting job, an apartment in the center of town. In a nutshell, life is on her side. Until the day she’s picked up by a police patrol, raped, and left on the side of the road—and can count herself lucky that she wasn’t beaten up, too. She hangs around the place where it happened, recognizes one of the rapists, and instead of taking her revenge … I’ll stop there, please go see the film, but I can say this: it’s universal because it’s a love story, but it’s also extremely Russian. It puts a new spin on the old antagonism between Westernists and Slavophiles that runs through the entire nineteenth century and all the great Russian novels. On the one hand a rising middle class wants to live, and by that very fact does live, the way they do in Paris or London: young people who use Facebook and type away on their laptops in big-city Starbucks cafés. On the other, there’s the Russia of the small towns and villages: backward, alcoholic, brutal, and grubby—but, say the Slavophiles, with soul on its side. The heroine of Twilight Portrait embodies the first Russia, the rapist cop the second, and the film undogmatically traces a path between the two. In political terms, the transposition seems to go without saying: the rising middle class owes its growing wealth, comfort, and liberty to Putin, all the while protesting against him; the backward provinces, by contrast, remain faithful to him although they clearly have more reason to complain.
Twilight Portrait was made with little money and a lot of talent by two young women: director Angelina Nikonova, and screenwriter and lead actress Olga Dykhovichnaya. I’d met them briefly in Paris, and when I arrived in Moscow, Olga invited me for dinner at her place. First surprise: her place isn’t a little apartment like the ones most of the Russians I know live in, but a magnificent dacha you get to along Rublyovskoe Highway, which accesses the poshest neighborhoods in the west of Moscow and has become the symbol of the flashing-blue-light culture. In these houses, hidden behind high walls and protected by private militias, live the rich and the powerful. Dear Reader, if, like me, you’ve seen the film and succumbed to Olga’s charm, don’t be disappointed. There is no ostentation in her, no new-Russian bad taste. As in her person, everything in her house is grace and simplicity. This grace and this simplicity, however, are not those of the middle class the film portrays, but of the elite, and I suddenly realize that this elite has not changed much since Soviet times. There must have been dinner parties just like this one, gathering exquisitely civilized, multilingual guests, interspersed with toasts, stints in the sauna that you access by crossing the snow-covered garden, and rhapsodic songs sung by a beautiful Georgian woman accompanying herself on the guitar, in dachas just like Olga’s, in the days when Nikita Mikhalkov wasn’t the dreadful despot he’s now become, but a charming and talented young director. When I broach the subject of politics, no one tries to avoid it. On the contrary, everyone loves talking about it. Of course they’re all against Putin, but against him the way the cultural elite were against Brezhnev forty years ago. They said bad things about him, and the regime, and the Gulag; nevertheless when you were part of the cultural nomenklatura under Brezhnev, you lived like a king; you made the movies you wanted and had no reason to want things to change. So you can laugh—and many do—at ads showing “Russia without Putin” (long lines in front of empty stores, haggard crowds in devastated streets, civil war), but when Putin says, in essence, “The foreign infiltrators wish us nothing better than an Arab spring. But do you want an Arab spring? Do you want Russia to become like Egypt? Or Libya?,” everyone apart from a couple of fanatics such as Limonov will answer: No, that’s not what we want. We’re happy to take part in demonstrations because it’s new and exciting to be able to do it. We would love to have cleaner elections because it’s a complete embarrassment to have the moral standing of a banana republic. We’d be delighted to have someone a little younger and more open than Putin because it’s like with Rambo: episodes one and two are okay, but after that you get the feeling it’s all rehashed. But we only want all of that if we can avoid tossing out the baby with the bathwater. Putin talks above all of stability, and stability is a must.
The Putinists are nowhere to be found. I thought I’d meet some when I left the big city and headed out into the provinces, bastion of the real Russia, but I have to admit that going to see Zakhar Prilepin in Nizhny Novgorod wasn’t the best way of going about it. Not yet forty, Prilepin is respected at home and abroad as one of the best Russian writers of his generation. He’s not a product of the Moscow elite, but a guy from the provinces who was a soldier in Chechnya, then an active member of the National Bolshevik Party, Limonov’s skinheads. Prilepin still has a shaved head, for that matter. He wears Doc Martens and has expressive blue eyes, and something is extremely touching in how he tries to reconcile his situation as a famous author who’s invited abroad and sought out by important people, and his allegiance to the world of the guys he grew up with, and about whom he still writes: not hipsters, but working types who’ve been left by the wayside. They meet up with Prilepin in groups of three or four, together with a gentle and cultivated guy who likes to read the leftist author Alain Badiou and the right-wing author Julius Evola, and who was for a long time the leader of the local chapter of the National Bolshevik Party, and an old democrat who did time for denouncing the atrocities committed by the Russian army in Chechnya. Prilepin, who was in the Russian army and who went to hell and back with it, remembers that on his return from the front he thought the old democrat was a traitor and even toyed with the idea of killing him. But today, almost fifteen years later, they’re the best of friends and agree completely in their analysis of the political situation. It’s a strange election, they say, because there’s no one you can vote for. There’s an enemy everyone knows is going to win, and the people running against him are even less appealing than he is: the eternal nationalist clown Zhirinovsky (whose slogan promises simply, “Zhirinovsky—it will get better”); the old Communist Zyuganov (whose slogan is even simpler: “Vote Zyuganov”); and the billionaire Prokhorov, who’s less stale than the others and whose fast-track reform program you’d like to go along with if you could be more sure that in pretending to oppose the Kremlin he’s not actually supporting it. Such a situation could be off-putting, especially for people such as Prilepin and his friends, who also don’t trust the VIPs who supposedly represent civil society. But they’re not put off at all. They have no illusions, they make fun of everyone, but at heart they’re optimistic, and it’s the nice Badiou fan, the ex-leader of the Nizhny Novgorod National Bolsheviks, who says what is in my view the most sensible thing I’ve heard this whole trip: “No one in this country wants a revolution,” this revolutionary concedes. “And no one can seriously call what’s happened a revolution. May ’68 in France wasn’t a revolution either. It was ‘events’ that profoundly changed society. Sure, after that you had Pompidou in power, and let’s say it was okay to have him. No one wanted Daniel Cohn-Bendit to become president of France. No more than the Russians want someone like Navalny as their leader. But fifteen, twenty years after May ’68, the values of May ’68 won out. The people who made May ’68 happen were in charge. And it will be the same in Russia: the people who made December 2011 happen—those who were at Bolotnaïa—will be in charge here in ten years’ time, and they have every interest in there being a soft transition.” When he says that, you sense that he isn’t personally implicated by what he says. He himself will never be in charge, he’s not the type. But his friend Zakhar is. As long as Limonov—who trained him as he trained so many people in this country—is still active, Zakhar won’t go into politics. But after that … President Prilepin? Minister of culture? We clink glasses and laugh; you want to bet?
Twenty-eight degrees outside—almost springtime—and the big demonstration on the last Sunday before the elections is a success. We hold hands the whole way around the Garden Ring. At some places the chain is thick with people; at others it thins out and reinforcements are sent in. People are in a good mood, the circle is completed without too much effort, and while the police say in the evening that eleven thousand participated, we say that by and large the expected thirty-four thousand must have turned out. I went with a group of Lacanian psychoanalysts. The Lacanian psychoanalysts in Moscow aren’t old and sententious as they are in France. They wear neither bow ties nor herringbone jackets à la François Mitterrand. They, too, are young, enthusiastic, and trendy, typical of what people are starting to call the Bolotnaïa generation, and they fear Putin’s repression far less than the edicts of French Lacanian authority Jacques-Alain Miller. Nevertheless, a shiver went through our little group when young Putinists started demonstrating across from us, holding heart-shaped, mass-produced signs with the words PUTIN LOVES YOU.
“Fascists,” my friends murmured, getting a thrill out of the scare, and I felt as if I’d been transported back to the demonstrations of May ’68. One contrast speaks volumes: the anti-Putinists tend to be in their thirties, they look prosperous and happy, they know each other, kiss each other on the cheek, and exchange news about their friends, while the pro-Putinists are young, often under twenty, wear ill-fitting, grungy black anoraks, and have surly, unattractive, splotchy faces of the kind you see everywhere among soccer fans, and it made me a little uncomfortable when one of my new friends ironically asked one of them, “You come to Moscow often?” All evidence to the contrary, the other guy shouted back that he was from Moscow, but it was clear that he didn’t even know where he was, that he and his buddies had been bused in from their villages in the sticks, and that they’d be bused back that night, without even having the time to party it up in the capital. The question put by my friend, a Muscovite going back three generations, an intellectual who speaks fluent French and English and lives in a beautiful apartment, unwittingly betrayed the most classic class disdain: the yuppie looking down on the worker. It’s no secret that revolutions are made by the up-and-coming middle classes in their own interest; nevertheless I thought to myself that they could be a little more discreet.
Published in Le Nouvel Observateur, March 2012