‘Rossiya bez Putina!’ came the chant. Then again, louder now, as if the tens of thousands of protesters had convinced themselves the first time around that such a thing might actually be attainable. ‘Russia without Putin! Russia without Putin!’
The words floated high into the Russian capital’s frigid winter skies. The slogan would, a speaker promised as demonstrators stamped their feet to keep warm, be audible in the nearby Kremlin. Especially if the protesters turned towards its elaborate towers, still topped by Soviet-era ruby-red stars, and shouted the rallying cry once more.
Up until that exact moment, the possibility of a Russia without Vladimir Putin in charge had appeared about as probable as a Moscow winter without snow. Or, perhaps, a Russia without the engrained, high-level corruption that had seen the country slide to the very lower reaches of Transparency International’s global corruption index, sharing 143rd place out of 182 nations with Nigeria.1
But, on 10 December 2011, at Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, less than a week after what had looked like a blatant case of mass vote-rigging to secure Putin’s United Russia party an unlikely parliamentary majority, nothing was unthinkable anymore. Moscow’s richest and most educated residents – the so-called ‘creative class’ – were suddenly out on the streets in an unprecedented show of discontent. Even rank-and-file riot police looked taken aback at the size of the crowd. I spotted a group of officers taking snapshots of protesters, including a bride still in her white wedding dress, on mobile phones. (This could, of course, quite easily have been for surveillance purposes.)
‘To fight for your rights is easy and pleasant. There is nothing to be afraid of,’ said Alexei Navalny, the opposition’s de facto leader, in a message passed out of a Moscow detention facility. ‘Every one of us has the most powerful and only weapon we need – a sense of our own worthiness.’2
Could Putin hear them? I wondered. Could he hear the disparate gathering of liberals, nationalists and leftists? The humiliated and the insulted? And, if he could, what did he feel? Fear? Shock? Or, perhaps, scorn? While large-scale dissent was a new thing for modern Russia, Putin could still boast of approval ratings that were the envy of any Western leader. He also possessed an incomparable control over national television channels, the main source of news for the vast majority of Russians.
I looked around the square at the families, the pensioners, the young men and women flush with the excitement of participation in a genuinely historic moment. ‘I never thought I’d see this,’ a veteran activist told me, the words pouring from her. ‘In the past, a few hundred people turned up to protest rallies, but just look at how many there are here now. A lot of people have come to a demonstration for the first time – and not the last.’
*
The mass anti-Putin protests that began in Moscow that afternoon confounded analysts and inspired Kremlin critics, both of whom had believed that the ex-KGB officer’s long stranglehold over political life meant such a thing was all but impossible. As crowds wearing the white ribbons that quickly became the symbol of the protest movement filled the streets of the Russian capital, Putin’s foes could have been forgiven for believing that their arch-nemesis’s days were numbered. The Kremlin seemed initially uncertain how to respond to the mass protests, alternately threatening and making half-hearted proposals on political reform. ‘It appeared back then to many people that victory was just around the corner,’ recalled Sergei Udaltsov, the fiery, shaven-headed leftist who ‘symbolically’ tore up a Putin portrait to ecstatic applause at a February 2012 Moscow rally.3
It would not be quite so easy to get rid of the man himself. ‘Do we love Russia?’ Putin yelled at a rare presidential election campaign rally in south Moscow in the spring of 2012, jabbing his finger into the driving sleet. ‘Of course we do,’ he continued, after the cries of ‘da’ had faded away. ‘And there are tens of millions of people like us all across Russia.
‘The battle for Russia goes on!’ Putin told the crowd, many of them bussed in en masse from the country’s conservative heartland, as his speech came to an end, his hand reaching up then swiftly down as if to snatch victory from the chill Moscow air. ‘And we will triumph!’4
Inevitably, within weeks of Putin’s controversial return to the Kremlin in May 2012, the long-expected clampdown began. ‘They ruined my big day,’ Putin was reported to have said of the protesters who had marred his inauguration for a third presidential term. ‘Now I’m going to ruin their lives.’5
First, a series of laws designed to make open dissent harder and more dangerous was fast-tracked through a compliant parliament. Next, Putin and his allies in the increasingly powerful Investigative Committee – an FBI-style law-enforcement agency answerable only to the president – systematically set about neutralizing the protest leaders and their most vocal supporters through a combination of smear campaigns, politically motivated criminal charges and darkly absurd show trials.
‘No 1937!’ chanted protesters, a reference to the year that saw the peak of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror, as the first opposition figures were jailed or charged. For many, the analogy was insulting to the millions of victims of Stalin’s purges: after all, for now at least, no one was being shot in the back of the head or sent to the frozen north to be worked to death. But for Russia’s modern-day dissidents, as they languished in grimy pre-trial detention centres or served time in remote penal colonies, there could be little doubt that the Kremlin had regained a taste for political repression.
It was an appetite that swelled to new, monstrous proportions when neighbouring Ukraine erupted with revolutionary fervour, and an unlikely combination of liberals, nationalists and leftists, as well as hundreds of thousands of ‘ordinary’ people, united to drive the country’s pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, from power. Fearful that this passion for protest could spread to Russia, Putin escalated his war on dissent.
In the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, Putin lashed out at his detractors, denouncing them as a ‘fifth column’ and ‘national traitors’, the latter insult a term he had borrowed from Adolf Hitler. Once-marginal nationalist groups gained a new prominence. Less than a week after tens of thousands of Kremlin supporters had marched through central Moscow calling for the ‘destruction’ of the opposition, Boris Nemtsov, one of the anti-Putin movement’s most recognizable figures, was gunned down in front of the Kremlin walls. For many in the opposition who had seen out the first wave of Putin’s fightback, Nemtsov’s murder was the signal to flee Russia, while they still could.
However, even the very real dangers associated with opposing the Kremlin would be unable to extinguish the protest movement entirely. ‘Wake up Russia!’ read a flyer handed out at a Moscow demonstration, and, for many, the protests were life-changing events, transforming thousands of once apathetic Russians into active opponents of Putin’s rule. Backing down when the going got tough was simply not an option.
*
For this book, I have explored Russia’s beleaguered protest movement in all its bewildering diversity, from the radical left-wingers seeking to set the country once more on the path to communism to the iPad-toting hipsters who, as one young activist put it, wish to ‘live in Europe, without leaving Russia’. I sought out not only its high-profile leaders and the lesser-known activists who have formed the backbone of the movement, but also its opponents, from pro-Kremlin officials to church leaders. Like the protest movement itself, my investigations are focused largely, but not exclusively, on Moscow. Discontent may be widespread in the provinces, but it is in the Russian capital that history has always been made.
Over fifteen years after he first addressed Russians as their new president, it is hard to recall a time when the ‘national leader’ of the largest country on Earth was a virtual unknown, a faceless politician who was expected to be little more than a footnote in post-Soviet Russia’s short history. But Putin proved the sceptics wrong, first consolidating and then strengthening his unlikely grip on power. He shows few signs of wanting to let go.