Putin may have balked at jailing Navalny, but there were plenty of Kremlin critics still languishing behind bars. In normal circumstances, the notoriously stubborn former KGB man would have paid little attention to international appeals for their release. But as Russia geared up to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, Putin was faced with the unsettling prospect of his pet project being marred by uncomfortable questions over these troublesome opposition activists. More significantly, a number of world leaders were considering staying away from the Games in protest at Russia’s human-rights record. For Putin, this was unacceptable. The Winter Olympics were a chance to showcase what he regarded as Russia’s resurgence – economic, political and religious – under his long rule. And so, with less than two months to go until the start of the Games, Russia’s long-time leader initiated a wide-ranging amnesty bill that would see the early release of some 20,000 prisoners, including some of his bitterest foes.
Among the high-profile prisoners who benefited from the amnesty were Pussy Riot’s Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, who walked out of their snowy prison camps in December 2013 with just two months left to serve of their two-year sentences. ‘Russia without Putin!’ shouted Tolokonnikova, as she emerged from captivity into the glare of the media spotlight. Neither of the activists were under any illusions as to the reason for their release. ‘This is not an amnesty. This is a hoax and a PR move,’ said an unrepentant Alyokhina. ‘If I’d had the chance to turn it down, I would have done.’ Tolokonnikova was of a similar opinion, calling the amnesty ‘cynical and disgusting’.1 It was a win-win situation for Putin. With public opinion in Russia firmly against the Pussy Riot activists, there was little danger in their early release. They were, after all, hardly going to lead an enraged mob in the storming of the Kremlin walls. And by freeing them, Putin ruled out the danger of the Sochi Games being marred by a sea of ‘Free Pussy Riot’ T-shirts and banners. Others released under the amnesty included a number of the protesters arrested after the clashes on the eve of Putin’s May 2012 inauguration, as well as international Greenpeace activists, who had been seized while protesting Russia’s gas drilling in the Arctic.
But the biggest surprise of this bout of unexpected clemency came when Putin announced at his annual end-of-year news conference that he would pardon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon and staunch government critic. ‘Not long ago he appealed to me for a pardon. He mentions humanitarian considerations, as his mother is ill,’ Putin told reporters.2 This was a genuine sensation for two reasons: first, Khodorkovsky had not fallen under the terms of the amnesty, and, second, investigators had been making noises about bringing a fresh set of criminal charges against Russia’s once richest man. Speculation immediately arose among opposition activists that Khodorkovsky, who had just nine months of his sentence to serve, had been threatened with a new jail term if he refused to file an appeal for a presidential pardon. Upon his release in December 2013, Khodorkovsky flew straight to Western Europe, where – despite an initial statement that he had no plans to become involved in politics3 – he would quickly become a figurehead of sorts for the swelling numbers of the opposition-in-exile. Domestically, though, Khodorkovsky’s political appeal was limited to a small group of isolated liberals.
The amnesty did not mean freedom for Taisiya Osipova, the young mother who had been sentenced to eight years on hotly disputed drug-possession charges, which her supporters said were revenge for her refusal to incriminate her husband, a radical opposition activist. ‘Putin just wants to make sure that the most well-known prisoners are out of jail before the Olympics, so as to avoid any unpleasant questions at the Games. But Taisiya’s case hasn’t gained anything like the attention of the Pussy Riot trial, for example,’ Osipova’s lawyer, Svetlana Sidorkina, told me. ‘There are plenty of people left behind in jail who shouldn’t be there.’
Left Front leader Udaltsov and his long-suffering sidekick, Razvozzhayev, were also among those whose alleged crimes were considered too serious for the amnesty.
Yet it would take more than the early release of a few internationally known opponents of Putin’s rule to polish Russia’s tarnished image. Prior to the Games, Russia’s parliament passed a law banning the promotion of ‘non-traditional sexual relations’ to minors. Immediately labelled an ‘anti-gay’ law by critics, this was legislation designed solely to shore up support for Putin among more conservative Russians, and it triggered an inevitable spike in violence against members of the country’s beleaguered lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. For gay activists, it was as if Putin had decided to legalize already widespread discrimination and prejudice. Protests against the law were met with violence by Orthodox Christian activists chanting, ‘Moscow is not Sodom!’ as police stood by and watched.
In the West, the controversial law was widely condemned by everyone from the US State Department to British actor Stephen Fry, and led to loud and frequent calls for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Games. But Putin was furious at what he called ‘clearly orchestrated attempts’4 to discredit the Sochi Olympics. After all, as the Kremlin and its allies argued, Russia’s new law did not make homosexuality illegal, nor were jail sentences stipulated for those who broke it. Indeed, Putin lost no time in pointing out that a dozen US states, including Texas and Florida, still had – albeit unconstitutional – anti-sodomy laws on the books. The Russian law also paled in comparison to harsh anti-gay legislation in both Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both staunch US allies. For Putin, the American and European criticism was a clear case of double values. His sense of injustice and anger at the West would simmer throughout and beyond the Games.
Startling claims of corruption also dogged the run-up to the Olympics, which were estimated to cost an eye-watering $51 billion. This was three times the price of the much bigger 2012 Summer Olympics in London, and more expensive than all previous twenty-one Winter Olympics put together.5 In one particularly notorious case, a road built especially for the Games cost an estimated $9 billion, making its construction almost four times as expensive as NASA’s project to send the Curiosity Rover to Mars. The Russian version of Esquire magazine estimated that the thirty-mile road could have been paved with a six-centimetre layer of truffles for the same price, or a one-centimetre layer of black caviar.6 When the newly freed Pussy Riot turned up in Sochi to protest Putin’s vanity project, they were horse-whipped for their trouble by a group of irate Cossacks. Pro-Kremlin bloggers suggested the punk activists had organized the attack on themselves as a publicity stunt.
‘The Games are nothing but a monstrous scam,’ boomed Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister turned opposition leader, when I spoke to him ahead of the opening ceremony in Sochi. In a damning report, Nemtsov and fellow political activist Leonid Martynyuk alleged that some $30 billion of the total cost of the Winter Olympics had been skimmed off in ‘embezzlement and kickbacks’ by Putin’s businessmen friends.7 The report, entitled ‘Winter Olympics in the Subtropics’, was posted online,8 and handed out on the streets of Moscow and other Russian cities in the form of a glossy brochure. ‘Putin needs these Games to prove how great he is,’ Nemtsov seethed. ‘But his friends and the businessmen around him need the Olympics to improve their ratings in Forbes magazine’s richest people in the world listings.’9
The accusations were rebuffed by angry Russian officials. One man who undoubtedly benefited from the Games, however, was Putin’s childhood friend and ex-judo-sparring partner, Arkady Rotenberg, whose companies received orders for Olympic construction projects worth around $7 billion – more than the total cost of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.10 Predictably, state media declined to report on the corruption allegations, and the majority of Russians remained blissfully unaware of the row. ‘Are you making all this up?’ asked an astonished Sochi taxi driver when I reeled off the facts and figures behind the Games.
By the time the lavish Olympic closing ceremony rolled around on 23 February 2014, gay rights and corruption scandals were the least of Putin’s problems. Instead, the Kremlin’s attention was focused firmly on neighbouring Ukraine, where, after months of rallies and vicious street fighting, protesters had toppled the country’s president, Viktor Yanukovych. The demonstrations had been sparked by Yanukovych’s last-minute decision to back out of a trade deal that would have put Ukraine on the path to European Union membership in favour of closer ties with Russia, but they had quickly morphed into a wider show of anger over widespread corruption and nepotism.
Ukraine’s unexpected change of heart on the European Union agreement came after threats by Russia of devastating trade sanctions, as well as thinly veiled warnings that a shift westwards would ‘lead to political and social unrest’11 in the former Soviet state. The Kremlin also had a juicy carrot to go with its stick, in the form of billions of dollars in subsidies, debt forgiveness and duty-free imports.12 Putin had already seen Ukraine slip out of Russia’s sphere of influence once, after the 2004 Orange Revolution, and he clearly did not want a repeat. He had also envisaged Ukraine as a vital part of the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union, a fledgling trade alliance, which already included Belarus and Kazakhstan, and which was seen in some hardline Kremlin circles as a first step towards the partial resurrection of the Soviet Union.
However, neither the Kremlin nor Yanukovych had counted on the depth of pro-European sentiments in Kiev and the west of Ukraine. On the same day that Yanukovych announced that Ukraine was backing out of the European deal, Mustafa Nayem, an Afghan-born journalist who had spent most of his life in Kiev, penned a Facebook post calling for a demonstration on Independence Square, popularly known as Maidan, in the very centre of the Ukrainian capital. Although fewer than a thousand people turned up that evening, within weeks, provoked in part by an ill-advised and heavy-handed attempt by riot police to clear the square, the protests had swelled dramatically. What had begun as a low-key, poorly attended demonstration rapidly transformed into a series of rolling protests bringing together pro-Europe activists, leftists, nationalists, football hooligans, miners and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in the biggest show of dissent in the former Soviet Union for over two decades. There was also an undisguised anti-Putin element to the demonstrations, although – despite claims to the contrary by Kremlin-run media – this did not translate into widespread anti-Russian sentiments. ‘We love Russians, but despise Putin,’ read a prominent banner at the Maidan protest camp.
As heavy snow fell, and temperatures plunged, protesters and police fought running battles for control of Kiev, and thick, acrid smoke from the burning tyres set alight by Maidan activists drifted through the streets of the Ukrainian capital. By the time Yanukovych had been forced from office, escaping to Russia with the Kremlin’s assistance, over a hundred protesters were dead, many gunned down by security forces, while yet others were murdered by still unidentified snipers.
The shockwaves of the Maidan revolution were felt instantly in Russia. ‘When the oil revenues run out in Russia, when it becomes clear that Putin cannot rule, the same thing will happen here,’13 Russian journalist Vladimir Gromov predicted in an article published by the opposition-friendly website Snob. Less than forty-eight hours after Yanukovych had been deposed, Russia’s protest movement took to the glitzy streets of central Moscow. ‘If there is no freedom in Russia, there will be a Maidan!’ shouted a middle-aged man, as some 1,500 people gathered opposite the Kremlin in protest at jail sentences handed down to the demonstrators detained on the eve of Putin’s inauguration for a third term. Jittery riot police pounced instantly, wrestling the protester to the ground, before dragging him away to a police truck. Before the evening was out, hundreds of people would likewise find themselves in police custody.
The chanting of ‘Maidan!’ that evening was not the only indication that Russia’s opposition had been fired up by events in Ukraine. Inspired by Kiev’s barricades of burning rubber, a few hardcore activists had hauled tyres to the demonstration, where they were promptly nabbed by police. Other copycat tactics were also in evidence, such as the singing of the national anthem and the unfurling of the Russian flag, both clear nods to the rousing displays of patriotism by Kiev’s tenacious protesters.
However, it would take more than simply adopting the symbols of the Maidan protests to topple Putin. Russia’s mainly middle-class protesters had so far failed to display anything like the determination of their counterparts in Kiev. With Udaltsov still under house arrest, and his Left Front activists leaderless, there was also a distinct absence of anyone in the movement willing to rough it up with riot police. The uncomfortable truth was that any sustained attempt to dislodge Putin would most likely require – as in Kiev – nationalist forces to provide much of the muscle.
‘For Russia to get its own Maidan, we’d need the participation of at least 7,000 nationalist activists alongside 150,000 other protesters,’ Dmitry Dyomushkin, the ex-head of Russia’s outlawed, ultra-right Slavic Union movement, told me. ‘In this case, we’d see an escalation, victims and open confrontation, and so on. But so far the protests have all been hijacked by liberals.’14 It was unclear, however, if Dyomushkin alone would be able to recruit such numbers to his cause. Aggressively anti-Putin, he had triggered a split in Russia’s nationalist movement with his support for the Kiev protests, and made enemies of many of his former allies on the far right. ‘They want to rip me a new asshole,’ he laughed.
There were also formidable logistical obstacles to sustained street protest in Moscow. Unlike in Ukraine, where western regions seethed with anti-government sentiment, organized dissent has never taken hold in Russia’s provinces, where there is a deep distrust of the figures driving the Moscow-based opposition to Putin. In Ukraine, the Maidan tent camp was supplied by activists making daily runs from opposition-held cities such as Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk. In Russia, any protest camp in Moscow would be likely to be targeted by Putin loyalists shipped in from the mainly conservative heartland.
Equally as significant in Ukraine was the existence of genuine opposition parties with the organizational skills to support the months-long protests in Kiev. In Russia, where Putin has tamed parliament, filling it with fake opposition parties that provide the masses with the illusion of democracy, genuine opposition is impoverished and low on resources. Unlike Yanukovych, Putin also controlled national television, something he would use to devastating effect against the protest movement in the aftermath of Maidan.
Russia, then, was not Ukraine. And Putin was no Yanukovych.
‘In Ukraine, the protesters defeated the monster at the end of level one,’ went a joke, which did the rounds online in the spring of 2014, comparing the two revolutionary struggles to a computer game. ‘But in Russia, they are up against the Big Boss.’
*
He might have appeared to hold all the cards, but the ‘Big Boss’ was taking no chances. Less than a week after Maidan activists had celebrated their unlikely victory at Yanukovych’s deserted presidential residence near Kiev, Navalny was placed under house arrest in connection with fresh allegations that he and his younger brother, Oleg, had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Russian subsidiary of the French cosmetics company Yves Rocher. He was also barred from using the internet, eliminating at a stroke the opposition leader’s most devastating weapon in the ongoing ‘Battle between Good and Neutrality’. This time, public reaction was minimal: there were more riot police than opposition activists in central Moscow on the evening of the court ruling that would see Navalny confined to his apartment for the next year. With Udaltsov likewise under house arrest, the Kremlin had successfully neutralized the anti-Putin protest movement’s leading lights, without making a martyr out of either man.
Still, there were other dangers on the horizon for Putin. The Maidan revolution had thrown up the – albeit distant – possibility that Ukraine could eventually transform into a genuine European democracy, a development that would pose a significant threat to Putin’s autocratic rule. ‘The Kremlin has spent a long time convincing Russians that our troubled history – the Soviet era, the massive wartime destruction, all the revolutions we’ve seen, and so on – is the reason why living standards here are so much lower than in, say, England or France,’ Marat Guelman, the former Kremlin spin doctor turned Putin critic, told me in the wake of the Ukrainian uprising. ‘But if Ukrainians, who share a common past with Russia, can now build a prosperous, democratic country, then this will prove a real problem for Putin. Russians will start to ask, “Why can’t we do the same thing here?”’15
Accordingly, as Kiev crackled with revolutionary euphoria, Kremlin-controlled media launched a wildly successful campaign to discredit the Ukrainian uprising in the eyes of the Russian public. In a series of broadcasts that grew more hysterical with each passing week, Ukraine’s revolution was portrayed as the work of a ‘fascist junta’ backed by Western powers set on the destruction of Mother Russia.16
Almost every family in Russia lost someone during World War II, better known across the former Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War, and the invocation of the spectre of fascism played on powerful historical memories. This was an old Kremlin trick. In the 1950s, Marshall Tito, the maverick socialist leader of Yugoslavia, had been routinely referred to by Kremlin officials as part of a ‘fascist clique’, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Flash forward some sixty years, and Putin was employing the Soviet Union’s tactics against the new government in Ukraine. And by virtue of their open support for the Maidan protests, Putin’s critics at home were tarred with the same brush. In February 2014, I witnessed the bizarre scene of Kremlin supporters chanting, ‘Fascism will not pass!’ at an opposition-led, anti-fascist rally in central Moscow to commemorate the 2009 murders of human-rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova by a neo-Nazi gunman. ‘So-called anti-fascists hide under the cover of anti-fascism to promote their fascist ideas,’ a ruddy-faced Putin activist told me, trying hard not to get entangled in his own twisted logic.
There were, of course, far-right groups involved in the Maidan demonstrations, and the new Ukrainian government would also later be guilty of a shameful appeasement of nationalist sentiments. Other far-right activists were also involved in clashes that resulted in the deaths of dozens of pro-Moscow supporters in Odessa, a city on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. But the Kremlin deliberately and massively exaggerated their numbers and influence. The previously obscure Ukrainian nationalist movement Right Sector was transformed by Kremlin-run television channels into a modern-day bogeyman. In the immediate aftermath of the Maidan protests, Right Sector was mentioned more times by Russian state media than even Putin’s ruling United Russia party, and three times as frequently as the Communist Party.17 ‘Moscow metro ticket prices are going up again – those Right Sector bastards!’ Russian opposition activists joked darkly.
In an indication of Right Sector’s true popularity among Ukrainians, its leader, Dmitry Yarosh, took just over 1% of the popular vote at Ukraine’s 2014 presidential elections. Indeed, between them, Yarosh and Oleh Tyagnibok, of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party, garnered fewer total votes than a Jewish candidate for the presidency, Vadim Rabinovich, who captured just over 2% of the ballot.18 Nevertheless, eager to keep the myth of ‘Nazi Ukraine’ alive as long as possible, Russian state TV erroneously reported on election night that Yarosh was in the lead in the race for the Ukrainian presidency, with 37% of the vote.19 The source for the figures was the website of Ukraine’s election committee, which had reported an online attack by suspected pro-Russia hackers ahead of the polls.
As Ukraine’s interim government struggled with the hazards and complications of a post-revolutionary situation, Russian troops without insignia seized military bases and other key buildings in Crimea, a sun-kissed peninsula in the south of Ukraine with a large ethnic Russian majority. Next, heavily armed gunmen, including Igor Girkin (nom de guerre Strelkov), a shadowy self-proclaimed Russian military intelligence officer, forced Crimean lawmakers to vote for a 16 March 2014 referendum on the territory’s future.20 Two days after more than 95% of Crimeans had voted to join Russia in a hastily arranged and internationally criticized referendum, the Kremlin annexed the peninsula, citing its right to self-determination (a ‘right’ that Russia had twice sent troops to Chechnya to prevent it exercising). Putin later admitted, however, that the plan to seize Crimea had been hatched in advance of the vote.21
The Ukraine crisis invested Putin’s presidency with a new potency and significance. In the months before the Maidan protests broke out, his ratings had slumped to an all-time low of 61%. It was, of course, a figure that would have made most Western leaders envious. But for a politician with total control over state media, the courts and the security forces, it was a poor return. His message of stability was less and less relevant to a generation that had little memory of the chaotic 1990s. From an ill-advised publicity stunt that saw the president pose as the head of a flock of cranes, to a stilted televised admission that he and his wife, Lyudmila, were no longer a couple, Putin had gradually become a figure of fun. The capture of Crimea, gifted to Ukraine from Russia by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, changed all that. For many Russians, the return of the peninsula was the righting of a deep historical wrong. The phrase ‘Krym – Nash!’ – ‘Crimea is ours!’ quickly became the slogan of choice for Kremlin supporters, while Putin’s approval rating soared to over 80%.
‘Congratulations on your return to your native harbour!’ roared the president at a Red Square rally to celebrate the slickly implanted Kremlin operation to annex the peninsula, as an ecstatic crowd waved Russian and Soviet flags. The opposition was not immune to such jingoism. Udaltsov and some of his leftist allies, ruled by an undisguised nostalgia for the Soviet era, were among those who applauded Crimea’s annexation the longest and hardest.
Eduard Limonov, the Kremlin’s former public enemy number one, was another cheerleader for the seizure of Crimea. His enthusiasm for Russia’s new foreign policy even saw him publicly appeal to the Kremlin to ban ‘hostile’ media outlets, such as the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and strip their journalists of Russian citizenship. The appeal was published in the pages of Izvestia, a pro-Kremlin newspaper where Limonov had begun writing a weekly column.22 For a man who had once spoken openly of the need for a new Russian revolution to drive Putin from office, it was a remarkable turnaround. Yet Limonov saw nothing out of the ordinary in his transformation from Kremlin foe to Kremlin-friendly newspaper columnist. ‘Putin has finally come around to my way of thinking,’ he told me.
Navalny also welcomed the return of the peninsula to Russia, if not the role played by Russian troops in its seizure. ‘I think that, despite the fact that Crimea was captured with egregious violations of all international regulations, the reality is that Crimea is now part of Russia,’ he said in a rare radio interview from house arrest. ‘Let’s not deceive ourselves. And I would also strongly advise Ukrainians not to deceive themselves.’ He also stated bluntly that he would not return Crimea to Ukraine if he were to become president of Russia. ‘Is Crimea some sort of sausage sandwich to be passed back and forth?’ he asked, bizarrely.23 Was Navalny pandering to populism? Or was this, as his detractors claimed, yet more evidence that he was not the man to lead Russia towards a genuinely democratic future?
Navalny’s views were shared by many, but by no means all of his fellow opposition figures. But even those in the anti-Putin movement who cautiously welcomed Crimea’s return to its ‘native harbour’ were aghast at the possibility of open conflict with neighbouring Ukraine. On a brilliantly sunny afternoon in late March 2014, some 30,000 ‘free souls’, as one opposition blogger called them, rallied in central Moscow to protest Putin’s aggression. Predictably, state TV portrayed the protest as a poorly attended event with only a random collection of half-baked radicals present. In the minutes before the rally began, a journalist from the Kremlin-controlled NTV channel stood in front of a still empty street – one that would soon be packed with protesters – and reported on the ‘minimal’ turnout. When I quizzed the NTV journalist over her undisguised duplicity, she snapped, ‘You do your job, and I’ll do mine,’ and turned swiftly away from me on her high heels.
If the state media’s ‘job’ was to foster a hatred of Ukraine’s new authorities, as well as the domestic opposition, then it was carrying out its mission with enviable success. It was a task that became even more important in the aftermath of the Maidan protests, when the Kremlin fomented separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region. Led initially by passport-carrying Russian citizens, the conflict would claim almost 7,000 lives by the summer of 2015, and plunge relations between Russia and the West to a post-Cold War low. Although Putin would consistently deny that Russian troops were in action in the Donbass, a swathe of evidence, from the capture of Russians soldiers on Ukrainian territory to the sighting of Russian military hardware in the self-declared Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, left little doubt about Kremlin involvement. Despite Putin’s denials, Russia was, for all intents and purposes, at war. All of which made the opposition more vulnerable than ever.
Daily quick-fire television images of Ukraine’s burning cities and corpse-strewn landscapes, all accompanied by a nervy, incessant soundtrack, served to put millions of Russian TV viewers into what Professor Valeriy Solovey, a Moscow-based media expert, described as a ‘trance-like state’.24 As fighting intensified, Russia’s Channel One aired a purported eyewitness report from a ‘refugee’ who said she had witnessed a young boy being crucified by ‘fascist’ forces loyal to Kiev. The young boy, the distraught women informed millions of Russians on the evening news, had been seized from his mother, a rebel supporter, and nailed to a noticeboard on Lenin Square in Slavyansk, a town in eastern Ukraine. The only problem was there is no Lenin Square in Slavyansk, and locals told independent Russian journalists that they had heard nothing of this gruesome story, which appeared to have been inspired by an episode of the popular US television series Game of Thrones. The woman was also not a resident of Slavyansk. Months later, a Channel One spokesperson admitted the report was false.25 But the damage was done. Anyone now expressing even the mildest opposition to Russia’s policy on Ukraine was fair game.
Even the July 2014 shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 by what an overwhelming body of evidence suggested was a group of separatists armed with a Russian surface-to-air missile system failed to turn the tide of public opinion against the Kremlin. In the immediate aftermath of the downing of the passenger jet, with the loss of all 298 people on board, Russian state-controlled media flooded the airwaves and internet with a bewildering array of conspiracy theories. These ranged from speculation that Ukrainian forces had fired at the plane believing it to be Putin’s personal jet (which was nowhere near eastern Ukraine at the time) to the outlandish suggestion that US President Barack Obama was blaming Russia for the attack because he was angry that Putin had dared to be late for a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Mexico in 2012.26 The fact that separatists and Russian news programmes had triumphantly reported the downing of what they initially believed was a Ukrainian military plane, on the afternoon that flight MH17 was blown out of the sky, was conveniently forgotten.27
The West’s decision to punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea and actions in Ukraine with increasingly tough economic sanctions served to consolidate support for Putin, who spoke often and loudly about what he called a US and European conspiracy to bring Mother Russia to her knees. ‘We are living on a war footing now,’ said Dmitry Oreshkin, the political analyst whose vote monitors had helped spark the 2011–12 protests. ‘The social contract that kept Putin in power for so long is now irrelevant. There is no longer any talk of stability and economic prosperity.’28 Instead, loyalty and a willingness to make sacrifices for the good of Mother Russia were the new buzzwords. ‘When a Russian feels any foreign pressure, he will never give up his leader,’ Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said as the sanctions began to bite. ‘Never. We will survive any hardship in the country – eat less food, use less electricity.’29 Despite the absurdity of one of the richest men in the Russian government, with a family fortune estimated at $220 million, spouting a message of austerity to spite the West, this and other similar appeals to Russians to unite around Putin worked: the president’s approval ratings continued to climb, even after the euphoria of the annexation of Crimea had worn off. ‘It’s no longer just about the economy,’ said Maria Lipman, a Moscow-based political analyst. ‘Many Russians feel like they are living in a besieged fortress, and they believe that Putin is the only one who knows how to protect them. Accordingly, they are prepared to make sacrifices for him.’30
‘I fuck your sanctions,’ read a T-shirt on sale in central Moscow that spring, the image of the Russian flag penetrating the Stars-and-Stripes from behind leaving no room for ambiguity. In such an atmosphere, there could be no room for dissent. As fighting raged in eastern Ukraine, Putin lashed out at those who questioned the Kremlin’s actions, dubbing them ‘a fifth column’ and ‘national traitors’, who were seeking to stir up unrest in Russia for the benefit of their Western masters. Ironically, the latter insult, an unusual expression in Russian political discourse, was a direct translation of ‘nationalverräter’, the term that Adolf Hitler had used to describe his enemies in his autobiography, Mein Kampf. It seems improbable that Putin, a fluent German speaker from his days as a KGB officer in Soviet-controlled East Germany, would have been unaware of this.
Even support for Putin’s actions in Ukraine would not be enough to save opposition leaders. In June 2014, Udaltsov and Razvozzhayev were sentenced to four and a half years each in penal colonies for their part in organizing what the authorities said were the ‘mass riots’ ahead of Putin’s May 2012 return to the Kremlin. Although Udaltsov’s enthusiasm for the pro-Russian ‘people’s republics’ that had sprung up in eastern Ukraine had largely severed his ties with the liberal wing of the opposition, Boris Nemtsov, despite being on the opposing side of the anti-Putin movement, was one of the two dozen or so protesters who gathered outside Moscow city court that afternoon. But despite the presence of machine-gun-toting riot police, there was little of the sense of drama that had accompanied either Navalny’s or Pussy Riot’s trial. ‘This case has not been under the jurisdiction of genuine legality for even a second,’ said Anton Orekh, a commentator for the Echo of Moscow radio station. ‘The court’s decision was not taken due to any facts or evidence that may have existed, but out of a sense of political necessity.’31 By far the best description of the situation, however, was the mock coffins for ‘the law, honour and rights’ that activists left behind them that afternoon on the courthouse lawn.
The war against the opposition was in full swing. Taking its cue from the president, state media stepped up its already hyper-intensive campaign against dissent, overfulfilling hatred quotas to achieve dangerous new levels of vitriol. In the autumn of 2014, the Kremlin-controlled NTV channel aired two hour-long programmes that ‘named and shamed’ thirty high-profile figures (all Russian citizens, with the bizarre exception of Sasha Grey, a US porn star turned film actress) who had dared to speak out over the war in Ukraine. The prime-time programmes were entitled ‘13 Friends of the Junta’ and ‘17 More Friends of the Junta’,32 their titles inspired by Russian state media’s wildly inappropriate name for the new, non-military government in Ukraine. (‘I know what a junta is!’ a red-faced Kremlin supporter screamed at me one afternoon in Moscow, when I attempted to explain that, whatever its faults, the post-Maidan Ukrainian government was not by any stretch of the imagination a ‘junta’.)
The most high profile of the celebrities featured in the programmes was Andrei Makarevich, a Soviet-era rock star whose group, Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine), is popular with top government officials. A one-time Putin voter, Makarevich had gone over to the opposition during the 2011–12 protests. On the eve of the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea, he attended a peace rally in Moscow, and signed an open letter condemning Putin’s aggression.
Makarevich’s acts of rebellion would be neither forgotten nor forgiven. Seizing upon video footage of a concert he had given for children displaced by the conflict in eastern Ukraine, NTV misled viewers into believing that the rock star had entertained Ukrainian government forces, which the channel accused of wiping ‘entire villages from the face of the earth’. Makarevich’s defiant response was to compose a new song. Its title? ‘My Country has Lost its Mind’.33
Within a month of the second ‘Friends of the Junta’ broadcast, NTV went straight for the jugular and aired an obscenity-littered death threat against Olga Romanova, a well-known opposition journalist and head of the prisoners-rights group Russia Behind Bars. In an October 2014 documentary, NTV accused Romanova of siphoning off the group’s donations and diverting them to Right Sector, the Ukrainian nationalist movement. The evidence for her ‘crime’ was flimsy, and Romanova denied the allegations. But during its ‘exposé’ NTV aired an interview with Oleg Protasov, a tough-looking former convict who spoke about what would happen if prisoners discovered that Romanova had been ‘funnelling’ money – that was supposed to improve their lives – to the Ukrainian far right. ‘No matter who you are with, no matter who [expletive beeped out by channel] is protecting you, no matter where you are, you will be found and ripped apart,’ Protasov said, staring menacingly into the camera.34
‘This is the first time a national television channel has aired a cold-blooded pledge to violently take revenge on a Russian citizen,’ wrote opposition journalist Stanislav Kucher.35 ‘We are used to seeing lies, black PR and fairy tales about “fascists” when we watch Putin TV,’ said Nemtsov. ‘We are used to hearing “war is peace,” and “the truth is a lie.” But what NTV has aired, we’ve never seen before.’36
That wasn’t quite true. In another programme aired by NTV just eight days earlier, a masked insurgent in eastern Ukraine said pro-Russia rebels were planning to target the owners of the liberal radio station Echo of Moscow because of the ‘lies’ it had been spreading about the conflict. In an expletive-ridden rant, the rebel vowed that the station’s journalists would ‘see death’. ‘And death will look like this!’ he shouted, poking his fingers towards his eyes.37
For older dissidents who had come of age during the Soviet Union, such aggressive media tactics were eerily familiar. ‘The Kremlin is again pumping out Soviet-style propaganda,’ Lyudmila Alekseyeva, a veteran Soviet-era dissident, told me. ‘And the aim is the same: to unite the people behind their leaders and set us in opposition to the whole world. However, the level of public hatred that has been whipped up towards those who criticize the authorities is probably even greater right now than during Brezhnev’s rule. At that time, there was tiredness in society, and there wasn’t so much anger.’38
There is certainly no shortage of anger in Putin’s Russia. Huge banners decrying Russia’s ‘fifth column’ and ‘national traitors’ started to go up on buildings along the New Arbat, the road in central Moscow that Kremlin officials, including Putin, speed through on their way to work. A shadowy ‘art collective’ called Glavplakat took responsibility for some of the banners, which included opposition figures such as Navalny, Nemtsov and Makarevich, the rock musician. But it is unlikely that the banners could have been unfurled without the approval of Kremlin security agents.39
Aggressive anti-Western rhetoric, including a reminder on state TV that Russia is the ‘only country in the world realistically capable of transforming the United States into radioactive ash’,40 became the new norm. The Russian Foreign Ministry repeatedly warned its citizens against travelling abroad, where US special services were, it alleged, ‘hunting’ for them.41 A leading United Russia lawmaker, Irina Yarovaya, spoke out against the study of foreign languages, claiming it hurt ‘Russia’s traditions’,42 while a pro-Kremlin youth group laser-beamed a racist image of US President Barack Obama eating a banana onto a building opposite the American embassy. ‘Putin believes that the United States organized and orchestrated the Maidan uprising as part of a plot to bring about his downfall,’ Gleb Pavlovsky, the former Kremlin adviser, told me. ‘The toppling of Yanukovych hardened further his attitudes against opposition figures, whom he considers to be agents of the West.’43
It wasn’t only Putin who was seeing Western spies everywhere. In June 2015, a middle-aged man near Yaroslavl, a city some 160 miles north-east of Moscow, beat to death an acquaintance who had made the fatal mistake of revealing that he often travelled abroad. The killer then called the police to inform them that he had uncovered and neutralized an ‘American spy’.44 Predictably, vodka was involved, mixed and shaken with a splash of Russia’s by now all-pervasive atmosphere of hatred.
This rocketing hostility towards the West was something I would experience for myself, when I travelled once more to the Black Earth region to report on the arrests of two of the anti-nickel activists there on what their supporters said were trumped-up blackmail charges. After my visit, local FSB officers questioned every single person I had interviewed. ‘Who brought the American spy here?’ they demanded to know, a source later told me. Of greater concern, however, was that the FSB officers were able to convince a number of the activists that I really was an agent of the US State Department, and part of a grand plot by the West to enslave Russia.45
The time was ripe for men like Yevgeny Fyodorov, the United Russia lawmaker with his wild conspiracy theories. In late 2014, Fyodorov’s National Liberation Movement (NOD) entered into the Anti-Maidan coalition, whose bellicose ranks also included pro-Kremlin Cossacks and the Night Wolves, a gang of leather-clad bikers loyal to Putin. While he would not openly call for violence against the opposition, Fyodorov told me on numerous occasions that he ‘understood’ if people felt they had no choice but to launch physical attacks against the ‘Western-funded fifth column’. Other NOD members were more expressive. ‘You British are all scum!’ yelled a burly NOD activist, his face red with rage, when I tried to interview members of the movement on the streets of Moscow. ‘You and the Yankees want to destroy Russia!’ He thrust a meaty finger in my direction. ‘I’ll tear you and your fifth column apart!’ A senior NOD member, who gave his name as Alexei Pisarev, told me in calmer tones, but no less vicious terms, that ‘fifth columnists are worse than cockroaches. They may be Russians, but they are our enemies. We have to drive them out.’ The Kremlin’s new shock troops made Nashi, the pro-Putin youth organization of the 2000s, seem like wishy-washy liberals in comparison. ‘NOD members often assault us on the streets. Once, they even threw bags of excrement as us,’ Mark Galperin, an opposition activist, told me, wrinkling his nose in disgust.
It was quickly becoming clear the Maidan revolution was far from being the catalyst that would trigger a similar uprising in Russia. In fact, it was quite possibly the worst thing that could have happened to the anti-Putin movement.
As the pressure built, Russia’s protest art grew darker. Gone were the exuberant, carnival-like performances of Pussy Riot. In their place, a gaunt, shaven-headed artist called Petr Pavlensky arrived on the scene, whose speciality was ‘living pain’. As 2014 drew to a close, Pavlensky stripped naked and clambered onto the roof of Moscow’s Serbsky psychiatric centre and – to the horror of onlookers in the street below – casually sawed off his earlobe with a massive kitchen knife. As blood trickled down his neck and onto his chest, Pavlensky, apparently indifferent to the pain and the near-freezing temperatures, remained on the edge of the roof for some two hours, before armed police eventually dragged him away. His act of self-mutilation was a reaction to what opposition activists alleged was the Kremlin’s renewed use of punitive psychiatry to stifle dissent. Other performances by Pavlensky included wrapping himself naked in barbed wire outside St Petersburg’s legislature (the birthplace of Russia’s infamous ‘gay propaganda’ law) and, most notoriously, hammering a long, sharpened nail through his scrotum to pin himself to Red Square’s famous cobblestones in order to draw attention to political apathy. In November 2015, he set alight to the doors of the FSB’s headquarters in Moscow, in what he called a challenge to state ‘terrorism.’ ‘Pavlensky is an artist for this period of disillusionment. He is grim, disciplined, focused, and ready for pain,’ wrote Pussy Riot’s Tolokonnikova.46 It seemed like a recipe for survival in Putin’s new Russia.
As Russia descended into the maelstrom, Navalny was almost entirely out of the picture, under house arrest as he awaited trial on yet more corruption charges. But his supporters were determined to make as much noise as possible in his absence. In October 2014, I joined a group of activists from Navalny’s anti-corruption organization as they attempted to gain access to the grounds of a sprawling villa reportedly belonging to Vladimir Yakunin, the powerful Putin ally and head of the Russian Railways company. The vast property, estimated to be worth some $75 million, was one of a number of similarly impressive constructions at the elite Akulinino gated community near Moscow. Dozens of private security guards manned the entrance, and tall green fences, topped with barbed wire, surrounded the premises. Yakunin’s reported neighbours at this oasis of affluence included a number of other heads of state-owned companies, as well as high-ranking officials from Russia’s domestic intelligence service.
As police blocked access to what was in theory a public road leading to Akulinino, activists whooped with delight as a fellow anti-corruption campaigner armed with a handheld video camera paraglided low over the opulent mansions. For anti-corruption campaigners, it was unclear how Yakunin could afford such a magnificent property on an annual salary of around $2 million. ‘A person can’t spend more than he earns, right?’ said Nikolai Lyaskin, the pro-Navalny activist. ‘We’d just like to know where all these state officials get all this extra money from.’ It was a line of investigation that had great potential for the opposition. Putin’s ratings may have been sky-high, but corruption remained his Achilles heel: pollsters working for Navalny reported that autumn that 87% of Russians wanted to see criminal charges brought against corrupt officials.
Within months of that unscheduled visit to Yakunin’s country home, Navalny was back in front of a judge. On 19 December 2014, state prosecutors asked a Moscow court to jail the opposition leader for ten years on fraud charges. ‘At least it’s easy to count,’ Navalny sighed. Prosecutors also asked for eight years for his younger brother, Oleg. The charges related to the following convoluted scheme: Oleg had undercut his employer, the Russian Post Office, by arranging cheaper delivery prices for the Russian branch of the French cosmetics company Yves Rocher through a company set up by his brother Alexei. The elder Navalny had then outsourced the actual work to a third company. It was not, perhaps, entirely ethical, but, under Russian law, there was nothing criminal about it. Oleg’s contract with the Post Office also did not prevent him from doing business on the side. Yves Rocher employees testified that no crime was committed.
For Navalny and his supporters, the state prosecutor’s enthusiasm in pursuing the charges was clear evidence of a fresh plot to put the opposition figurehead behind bars. But Putin had already appeared to back down once. What had changed now? Was Russia’s long-time leader seeking to dispose of one of his bitterest critics ahead of a possible economic meltdown? The national currency was already reeling: just days before the court hearing, the rouble had briefly crashed to just below 80 to a dollar, completing a 49% slump for the year. In theory, there should have been no better time for the opposition to challenge Putin. In reality, however, the war in Ukraine and the rise in ultra-nationalism that it inspired had marginalized the Kremlin’s critics. But would Putin take the chance of leaving Navalny at liberty?
A Facebook group calling for a ‘discussion of the verdict’, well-known opposition code for a protest rally, on central Moscow’s Manezhnaya Square (colloquially known as Manezhka) was quickly set up: some 15,000 people indicated in the first twenty-four hours that they would attend. As the numbers began to rocket, eventually reaching some 33,000, an unlikely optimism swept through the opposition. ‘This is going to be one of the biggest demos ever,’ declared Roman Dobrokhotov, the opposition activist who had shouted down Medvedev on Constitution Day.47 ‘There is a feeling of change. Don’t miss it – this is history.’ Navalny supporters began to dream about Moscow’s very own Maidan.
But the omens ahead of the court session were ominous. The date for the verdict was 30 December, the fifth anniversary of the conviction of Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon, on a second set of hotly disputed charges. Was history about to repeat itself?
In what was by now becoming something of a ritual, Navalny supporters and pro-Kremlin activists faced off outside the courtroom in central Moscow where the opposition leader and his younger brother’s fate would be decided. ‘Navalny is an agent of the United States,’ a young NOD activist told me, as police pushed back the crowds in freezing temperatures. ‘I want to see him jailed.’
Inside the courthouse, things were chaotic. ‘Put the journalists up against the wall!’ shouted Navalny, with grim humour, as press scrambled to make it inside the tiny courtroom for what was expected to be another marathon verdict-reading session. Instead, in a twist that had even lawyers confused, the judge, Yelena Korobchenko, simply read out the verdicts – both guilty – then swiftly handed Navalny a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence, while jailing his younger brother, Oleg, for the same period. Alexei Navalny was also ordered to remain under house arrest, although no one quite understood on what grounds. There was a second or two of stunned silence. This was an outcome that no one had predicted. Putin, it seemed, had outwitted everyone again. ‘Why are you jailing him? To punish me even more?’ shouted Navalny, with tears in his eyes.
Outside the courthouse, which riot police had by now cordoned off, pro-Putin youth and opposition supporters traded insults and the occasional blow. Few in the opposition had any doubts that the decision to imprison Oleg Navalny had been taken at the highest level. ‘This is called taking hostages,’ said Grigory Alburov, a member of Navalny’s anti-corruption organization. ‘They are putting pressure on Alexei’s family.’48
When he finally made it out of the courthouse, after a long and tearful parting scene with his brother, Navalny was in no mood for compromise. Gone was his talk of peaceful dissent that had so disappointed radicals at the onset of the 2011–12 protests. ‘The authorities are deliberately torturing the relatives of their political opponents,’ a furious Navalny announced, speaking on the snowy steps of the courthouse. ‘Authorities like these have no right to exist. They must be destroyed. I call on everyone to take to the streets today and stay there until they are removed from power.’
The decision to imprison Oleg Navalny realized one of the opposition’s worst fears: Putin had shed his previous reluctance to go after the relatives of his bitterest critics. It was a long-standing practice – even Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s family had been left in peace following the former oligarch’s jailing. Now, the rulebook had been torn up. That same month, Russian investigators also charged Alexandrina Markvo, the wife of Navalny’s ex-top banker ally, Vladimir Ashurkov, with what opposition figures alleged were politically motivated fraud charges connected to her organization of literary festivals in Moscow.49
As news that Oleg Navalny would not be seeing his wife or two small children for the next few years spread via the opposition’s digital grapevine, police began cordoning off Manezhnaya Square, forcing protesters to congregate on the narrow streets around the State Duma. The mood was confrontational: ‘What shall we bring? Tyres, white ribbons, axes?’ asked one opposition activist in an inflammatory tweet. ‘Stalin also loved to jail wives and relatives,’ said another.50 Police took no chances, ordering even small groups of people to disperse. ‘Disperse?’ asked one astonished woman, standing on her own some way from the main protest, after being approached by a riot cop with a megaphone. ‘I’m just here to meet some friends. Is this North Korea, or what?’
No one had considered whether disaffected Muscovites would turn out in numbers for Oleg Navalny, and it soon became clear that attendance at the rally was way down on that ecstatic afternoon in the summer of 2013. It was at times hard to distinguish between those who were protesting, and those who were simply out for a spot of festive shopping. Not that riot police seemed to care, pushing everyone – demonstrators and shoppers – up the central Tverskaya Street. Those who were too slow to comply were snatched and hauled off to waiting police trucks. Some 200 protesters, and a few bemused shoppers, would end up in police custody before the evening was out. Those protesters who remained on the streets were confronted by belligerent activists from the Anti-Maidan movement, including a contingent of pro-Putin Cossacks. Across town, wary police ordered a theatre that had dared to stage a play based on events at the Maidan protest camp to close up for the night.
Even the unexpected arrival of a furious Navalny – who broke house arrest to ride the metro to the protest, where he was immediately seized by police and driven back home – was unable to do more than briefly lift spirits. As arrests mounted, the most stubborn protesters gathered around a huge, glittery New Year’s decoration. But by 9.30 p.m. local time, the area was almost clear, with only a small hardcore remaining. Online chat before the demonstration had been of Molotov cocktails and tent cities, but protesters made no serious effort to resist riot-police snatch squads, with the majority simply content to film arrests on their smartphones. Their reluctance to risk arrest was understandable: Putin had recently signed off on a new law that stipulated five years behind bars for repeated protest-related violations. ‘No Maidan in Moscow!’ read a slogan beamed onto a wall near the Kremlin by pro-Putin supporters. On that night’s evidence, it was hard to argue. ‘Three years ago, we were an opposition,’ lamented Nemtsov, in the wake of the failed rally. ‘Now we are no more than dissidents. The task is to organize a real opposition again.’51 It was an undertaking that would require Herculean efforts.