‘Revolyutsiya Budet!’ (There Will Be a Revolution!) proclaimed a piece of stylized graffiti – the slogan sprayed under a clenched fist – on a wall near my home in central Moscow in mid-2005. In a Russia where the R-word had not been uttered seriously for many years, the sentiment was somehow jarring. Hopelessly dated or a forewarning of turmoil to come? I took a photo. The next day the graffiti was gone.
The clenched fist was the symbol of Oborona (Defence), an anti-Putin youth movement openly inspired by the so-called Colour Revolutions that had toppled Moscow-friendly regimes in ex-Soviet republics in 2003–5, as well as an earlier, similar uprising in Serbia. The symbol had been used in one form or another in all of these revolts, and was intended by Oborona’s founders to ‘elicit shock and rage’ in the Kremlin.
The Colour Revolutions had begun with the Rose Revolution in Georgia in late 2003, when protests over rigged parliamentary polls swept a pro-Western politician called Mikheil Saakashvili into power. Events repeated themselves a little over a year later during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, when around a million people camped out in the country’s capital, Kiev, to demand the annulment of the results of disputed presidential elections. The eventual rerun of the vote saw victory for a pro-American candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, who pledged to take Ukraine into NATO. The pattern continued in the spring of 2005 in Kyrgyzstan, when President Askar Akayev (the man whose bald head Yeltsin had once played the spoons on) and his government were toppled following parliamentary polls. All three Colour Revolutions had been viewed with extreme nervousness by Putin and his administration, but it was the loss of Ukraine that was hardest to take. Many Russians, including Putin, consider Ukraine a mere extension of Russia. One in every six people in Ukraine is an ethnic Russian, and millions in the east of the country speak no Ukrainian at all. ‘Ukraine is not even a state,’ Putin reportedly told George W. Bush in 2008.1 Putin had been so enraged by the Orange Revolution protests in Kiev that he had urged the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, to use force to clear the streets. Kuchma, to his credit, refused.2
It was against this background of rising tensions that Oborona was formed, when groups of young anti-Putin activists came together in an attempt to up the pressure on the Kremlin. Youth movements had played a leading role in the uprisings in Ukraine, Georgia and Serbia, and Oborona was seeking to repeat their success in Russia. Oleg Kozlovsky, a young, well-spoken Muscovite who was one of the movement’s leading figures, explained its aims to me as the following: ‘Unite the opposition, empower the youth, and help a popular non-violent democratic protest come about.’3 But turnout at the movement’s first rally was modest: a few hundred people attended a demonstration in Moscow in mid-2005 entitled ‘That’s Enough Putin!’
Times were hard for anti-Kremlin movements, especially those that were so open about their inspirations. State-controlled media had focused heavily on the presence of US pro-democracy groups in both Georgia and Ukraine, airing allegations that the revolts were part of a NATO plot to encircle and eventually invade Russia. Orange suddenly became a very unpopular colour. ‘With state propaganda in Russia focused on discrediting both the domestic opposition and the Orange Revolution, it wasn’t an easy thing to be linked to both,’ admitted Kozlovsky.4
Despite Oborona’s modest resources and limited appeal, the Kremlin was keen to crack down. The group was frequently targeted by the authorities, with raids on its tiny office and the open harassment of its members. Kozlovsky was even illegally drafted into Russia’s brutal army for six months.
Such heavy-handed tactics puzzled many Russia watchers. Why did the authorities feel it necessary to clamp down on marginal groups that had little or no popular support? Surely by doing so, they simply gifted these protest movements both publicity and credibility?
For Kozlovsky, the answer was obvious. ‘The authorities understood that, if they allowed small groups to protest freely, these groups could grow very quickly and become uncontrollable. So they wanted to suffocate the revolution while it was still small, by showing society where the red line was,’ he said. ‘And, for a while, these tactics worked.’
The Colour Revolutions taught Putin an important lesson. In the event of the ‘Orange threat’ spreading to Russia, the Kremlin would require its own protesters. These loyalists would need to be young, physically strong and ready to break up the kind of mass demonstrations that had been seen in Ukraine. Widespread political apathy among young people had played into Putin’s hands in the early years of his presidency, but now he needed their active support. There were parliamentary elections approaching in 2007, and presidential polls set for the year after: the Kremlin would need to be vigilant. After all, the Colour Revolutions had all been sparked by disputed vote counts.
With the grey cardinal, Surkov, calling the shots, a massive overhaul of a previously existing pro-Putin youth group, Walking Together, was launched. ‘We almost completely lost the youth of the nineties,’ Surkov said. ‘They had little interest in politics, and perhaps that was even a good thing.’5 But times had changed. The unguided energies of youth were too potent to be left to chance. To prepare the ground for the impending launch of Surkov’s ‘super-patriotic’ youth organization, pro-Kremlin activists travelled around universities and colleges, outlining the dangers of what they called a US plot to enslave Russia.
In April 2005, a little over a year after the Orange Revolution, Surkov unveiled his latest creation: Nashi. The youth movement’s name can be translated as ‘our’, ‘ours’ or – and most accurately when speaking of Surkov’s brainchild – ‘one of ours’. Historically used from the nineteenth century onwards to divide the world into friends and enemies, the expression had taken on a powerful political sense in the Soviet period. When interrogating dissidents, a KGB officer frequently began by saying, ‘You’re not one of ours,’ to which a second officer, playing the ‘good cop’, would reply, ‘But you’re one of ours, aren’t you?’6 It was a potent choice of moniker and played upon Russians’ traditionally strong sense of patriotism and collectivism. You were, the movement’s name suggested, with the motherland, or against it.
‘The first guys who joined [Nashi] were super-patriotic,’ said Sergei Markov, a political consultant who worked with Surkov on the project. ‘And the first rule was geography. They had to live within ten hours’ drive of Moscow so that they could take the night bus and be in Moscow in the morning and occupy Red Square to defend the sovereignty of the state.’7
Nashi was not just defensive in nature: its members regularly disrupted anti-Putin protests and beat up opposition activists and journalists. In one notorious incident, Nashi members defecated on a parked vehicle belonging to a young protest movement figure. The Kremlin-backed movement treated anti-Putin activists like their enemies, rather than political opponents. With them, it was personal. The youth group also harassed foreign diplomats, notably UK ambassador Anthony Brenton, who was targeted after he attended an opposition conference in the Russian capital. Nashi members stalked him for the next six months, even camping outside his house, until the Russian Foreign Ministry belatedly ordered them to back off. To inspire and educate its members, Nashi held annual summer camps at a lake north of Moscow, where activists married at mass weddings and attended seminars on Russia and Putin’s greatness.
‘Nashi is worse than a cult,’ Oleg Kashin, an opposition journalist who wrote extensively on the movement, told me. ‘It’s a mixture of cult and criminal gang that combines an almost religious-like belief in Putin with illegal activities.’8
The head of Nashi from its inception until its disbandment in 2012 was an acerbic, thirty-something named Vasily Yakemenko. Hailing from the tough, working-class Moscow commuter town of Lyubertsy, Yakemenko had rumoured connections to a criminal gang that once routinely decapitated its enemies. The gang also cut off its victims’ hands for good measure.9 While the Nashi leader denied any past involvement in organized crime, he made no secret of his ties to violent football hooligans. In 2005, he boasted that, if Russia were to be faced with an Orange Revolution scenario, he would ‘summon’ thousands of thugs from the Spartak Moscow FC fan movement to disperse ‘Western-backed’ protesters.10 ‘Ukraine always used to be a Russian colony,’ Yakemenko said in the same speech. ‘And now it is an American colony. But the real target for the United States is Russia.’11
After 60,000 Nashi members marched through central Moscow in a show of support for Putin in the spring of 2005, Surkov was rumoured to have promised Nashi’s leaders that they would one day inherit Russia. When asked to comment by a persistent BBC reporter, the architect of sovereign democracy sidestepped the question. ‘They are young and so naturally they will receive the country. Who else should?’ He smiled. ‘But I don’t think they are up to it right now.’12 Nevertheless, not long afterwards, Yakemenko was named head of Russia’s youth ministry.
As Putin’s rule became increasingly authoritarian in the aftermath of the Beslan massacre and the Colour Revolutions, the previously splintered opposition had little choice but to unite. While world leaders were converging in St Petersburg for a G8 summit in July 2006, Western-style democrats, leftists and nationalists gathered in Moscow to launch the Other Russia opposition coalition. The group’s figureheads included some unlikely allies, such as Garry Kasparov, the world-famous chess champ turned liberal politician, and Eduard Limonov, a radical writer and head of the National Bolshevik Party, a direct-action movement that fused the hard left and the ultra-right.
Surkov, watching developments from his Kremlin office, was not impressed. Comparing protest leaders to the violent revolutionaries described by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel Demons, the Kremlin’s chief ideologue derided the newly united opposition as ‘fake liberals and genuine Nazis’ – a ‘fifth column’ in the pay of the West. ‘They say they share a hatred of Putin’s Russia,’ he seethed. ‘But it is Russia itself that they hate.’13
The Other Russia coalition may have been wracked from the very beginning by internecine conflicts, but its leaders managed to forget about their differences – and egos – for long enough to organize a series of so-called Marches of Dissent. It was at these rallies, which took place in over a dozen cities, that the slogan ‘Russia without Putin!’ was first aired. Although they never attracted more than a few thousand protesters, the marches punched far above their weight, gaining widespread media coverage both at home and abroad and providing a genuine focus for discontent. For beleaguered opposition activists, they were like a breath of fresh air amid the stifling atmosphere of Putinism. ‘I didn’t even want to smoke as we marched. Like how you don’t want to smoke in the mountains or at the sea. I wanted to breathe,’ recalled Valery Panyushkin, a journalist and author who sympathized with the protest movement.14
The marches also triggered a predictable response from the security forces. In April 2007, around 2,000 protesters were confronted in central Moscow by at least four times as many police and Interior Ministry troops. As a police helicopter hovered above and demonstrators chanted, ‘We need another Russia’, riot police in body armour hauled away protest leaders, while other officers lashed out with truncheons. Police later pursued activists to nearby metro stations, where they made more arrests. State-run TV showed brief footage of the protest, but not the police crackdown. That evening’s news bulletin led with Putin attending a martial arts match.
One of the protesters detained that afternoon in central Moscow was Kasparov, the Other Russia co-leader. The world’s number-one-ranked chess player for nineteen consecutive years, Kasparov had quit professional chess in the spring of 2005 to concentrate on ‘preserving electoral democracy’ in Russia. But, despite his considerable financial and personal resources, the chess champ’s undisguised fondness for the West severely limited his appeal to ordinary Russians and made him an easy target for the Kremlin. He was also mercilessly hounded by Nashi activists; members of the pro-Putin youth group once famously disrupted one of his news conferences with a radio-controlled, flying plastic penis. Kasparov looked on furiously while a bodyguard jumped into the air to swat down the X-rated aerial intruder. Another time, a pro-Putin supporter requested an autograph on a chessboard and then walloped him around the head with it.15
Putin was also keen on taking the occasional potshot. ‘Why do you think Mr Kasparov was speaking English rather than Russian when he was detained?’ Putin asked in late 2007, shortly after the Other Russia leader had been arrested at another protest. ‘His deeds were not aimed at his own people but rather at a Western audience. A person who works for an international audience can never be a leader in his own country.’16
Kasparov later made the extremely valid points that he was speaking to a US journalist when the police nabbed him, and that – anyway – he was de facto banned from airing his views on Russian national television, but the damage was done.
However, the main problem faced by the anti-Putin opposition throughout the 2000s was neither Nashi nor the Kremlin domination of state media. The real drawback was that the majority of the protest movement’s ‘leaders’ led almost no one and inspired even fewer. The Kremlin’s opponents were viewed by the vast majority of Russians as, at best, an irrelevance and, at worst, a potentially dangerous throwback to the deprivations of the Yeltsin era. Aside from marginal groups like Oborona and the easily sidelined Kasparov, other key protest leaders were Boris Nemtsov and Mikhail Kasyanov, both wealthy former government insiders. Nemtsov was tainted by his time as a deputy prime minister in the loathed Yeltsin government, while Kasyanov had earned himself the nickname ‘Misha 2%’ for his alleged fondness for kickbacks while first finance minister and then prime minister during Putin’s first term.17 What could they offer Russia that Putin could not? For Surkov, discrediting these men was almost an insult to his talents. ‘They are a shadow cast by a lamp on the wall,’ mocked best-selling author Sergei Minayev, whose 2006 novel, Soulless, was an epitaph for a generation of newly well-off, yet cynical Muscovites. ‘Putin is the only competent politician who has appeared here in the last 16 years.’18
Not everyone in the early opposition to Putin was as toothless. The Kremlin’s most visible and stubborn critic throughout the 1990s and much of the 2000s, Other Russia co-leader Eduard Limonov, at the peak of his popularity, was able to boast a following of thousands of young supporters. Many of them addressed him as ‘vozhd’ – the Soviet-era term of respect for Communist Party leaders like Lenin and Stalin. ‘Russia is rich in generals without armies,’ Kasparov admitted. ‘But Limonov has foot soldiers. He commands street power.’19
An avant-garde poet who fled the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, Limonov found his way to New York, where he got to know punk stars like The Ramones and Richard Hell at the legendary CBGB club. ‘These punks weren’t so different from the artists and musicians I’d been hanging out with in Moscow,’ Limonov later told me.
It was during his stay in the States that he penned It’s Me, Eddie, a fictional memoir of deviant immigrant life. The book earned him international acclaim for its bleak depiction of American society, as well as eternal notoriety in his homeland for its depiction of gay sex with a black vagrant, an unthinkable thing for a Soviet author to have written. A massive success in Europe, Limonov later moved to France, where he was granted citizenship in 1987. But the West’s love affair with this uncompromising and complex Russian writer would not last long. When civil war broke out in Yugoslavia, Limonov took a trip to the hills around Sarajevo, where he was filmed shooting a high-powered sniper rifle into the besieged city in the company of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadži´c. The incident, captured by Bafta award-winning director Paweł Pawlikowski in his Serbian Epics documentary and shown at Karadži´c’s trial at the Hague, cost Limonov publishing contracts in both Europe and the USA. Limonov maintained he was ‘set up’ by Pawlikowski, although he also appeared to admit, in print, taking shots at the city.20
Limonov returned to Russia shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union, where he thrived on the uncertainty and anarchy of the post-Communist years. In 1993, he linked up with Yegor Letov, the foul-mouthed father of Russian punk, to form the National Bolshevik Party. The movement’s instantly recognizable flag was an explosive mix of Nazi and Communist imagery. ‘Stalin, Beria, gulag!’ chanted the National Bolsheviks – or NatsBols, as they came to be known – on the streets of Russia’s cities, their exhortation of the Soviet dictator, his secret-police chief and the labour camps that killed millions designed to provoke Russians suffering from brutal economic reforms. ‘Our aim is a national Russian revolution!’ Limonov screamed from a stage in Siberia in 1994, as an audience of thousands yelled back in approval. ‘We are the largest white race in Europe! Glory to Russia! Law and a new order! A Russian order!’21
Punks, skinheads and kids from broken homes flocked to Limonov to seize the opportunity to fight against a system they loathed and that related to them with indifference at best. The NatsBol ‘prayer’, which party members recited en masse at street protests, went like this:
I, a warrior of the National Bolshevik Party, welcome the new day.
In this hour of the united party, I am with my brothers!
I sense the power of all brothers of the party, wherever they may be.
Let my blood mix with the blood of the party.
Let us become one.
The NatsBols quickly became veterans of street battles with the OMON, Russia’s equally infamous riot police, as well as activists from the pro-Kremlin youth movement, Nashi. Seemingly indifferent to long prison sentences and police brutality, the NatsBols were streetwise, tough and uncompromising. They got beaten and came back to get beaten once more. Sometimes fatally.
‘I was fourteen when I left my home in the provinces to join up with Limonov,’ Matvei Krylov, a baby-faced, tattooed activist, told me, as we ate dumplings in a kitschy Soviet-themed café in Moscow. ‘I was a skinhead and I’d been reading lots of books about revolution, about Lenin and Trotsky and so on, and Limonov seemed to me to be a living example of all that. He was the father I’d never had. I called him “dad” or “uncle”.’23
Membership of Limonov’s movement came with terrible risks. Nashi leader Yakemenko had identified the group as one of the threats to Russia’s sovereignty, and pro-Putin thugs targeted NatsBols wherever they could find them. ‘Lots of my friends were badly beaten, even killed after being set upon in the street,’ Krylov said. ‘We had to start carrying weapons to defend ourselves.’
In late 2007, just two days before a March of Dissent in Moscow, a young NatsBol named Yury Chervochkin was attacked by five men carrying baseball bats. ‘Just don’t hit my head!’ he yelled. Minutes later, he lay unconscious in the snow. He slipped into a coma and died just over two weeks later without ever having regained consciousness. An opposition journalist later said Chervochkin had called him less than an hour before the attack to say he was being trailed by plainclothes police officers, two of whom he recognized. The investigation into Chervochkin’s murder was closed in 2009. No one has ever been charged with his death.24
Judges, likewise, showed little mercy to the NatsBols: seven young men from the movement were sent to penal colonies for three years each in 2004 after storming into the Health Ministry headquarters to protest social-benefit cuts. Limonov also saw the inside of prison cells. In 2001, the former New York punker was locked up for two years on weapons charges after being initially accused of organizing an armed uprising among the Russian-speaking population of eastern Kazakhstan. The evidence against him – the testimony of two youths caught buying guns in central Russia – was widely viewed as flimsy, but there was little international coverage of the trial. Limonov’s politics were too extreme to allow his case to become a cause célèbre. The West liked a certain kind of Russian dissident, and Limonov simply didn’t fit the bill. Not that Limonov, as he later told me and anyone else who cared to listen, gave a ‘fuck about the West’. He wrote eight books while inside.
After his release from jail, Limonov abandoned his nationalist rhetoric, as he joined forces with liberals like the chess grandmaster Kasparov in the Other Russia coalition. There had been a suspicion all long, anyhow, that his far-right posturing had been little more than an extension of his art, a reaching back to the slogans of fascism and Nazism to shine a spotlight on the violent reality of post-Soviet Russia. ‘Why would we bother playing with fascism anymore when the Kremlin is already fascist?’ he admitted later. ‘We are an opposition party. And today the most radical position of all is to fight for democracy and elections – against Putin’s fascism. It’s far-right fascism that is banal and oppressive now.’25
*
Like any would-be revolutionary leader worth his salt, Limonov had his hideouts. I met the taciturn youth who would take me to one of them at the entrance to a Moscow branch of Mothercare. It was an incongruous start to our meeting, but, for a man who embodied much of the chaos and contradictions of his post-Soviet homeland, it somehow seemed apt.
Limonov opened the door to the sparsely decorated apartment he was using as a base and ushered me through the corridor into a room with walls that were bare save for two large, framed photographs of scenes from his career in alternative politics. With his glasses, greying moustache and goatee, he resembled no one so much as Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary murdered by Stalin. In keeping with the ‘dress code for the future’ he had outlined in one of his more than forty books, Limonov was clad in black from head to toe.
I got straight to the point. What did Limonov feel, I wanted to know, when his young supporters were killed by the Kremlin’s goons or locked up in brutal, disease-ridden penal colonies? Did he regret encouraging them to resist Putin’s rule, when the price for this resistance was often so very high? After all, by his own admission, the situation in Russia under Putin was ‘bearable’. Russia was not North Korea. Or, come to that, the Soviet Union. Limonov visibly bristled. ‘You can’t change the world without losing some of the buttons on your jacket,’ he replied instantly. ‘These young people, they are sane, and they know what they are doing. They are strong, and ruled by passion. Prison is nothing in comparison with the freedom of the country.
‘Russia is not yet a fascist state, it’s true,’ he admitted, staring out at the impressively urban Moscow skyline. ‘It’s a police state, with no free elections. That’s a different thing. But we can see some signs of fascism. I cannot find another state which has created such an enormous lie. Putin wants Russia to seem normal and democratic, but every decision is taken from the position of brutality.’
It was one thing to gather a few thousand people in Moscow and shout anti-Kremlin slogans, but something entirely different to offer serious resistance to a government that controlled the media, the security services and the courts. What, I wondered, was the chink in Putin’s armour he hoped to exploit? Did he really believe that he and his allies in Other Russia could bring down Putin?
‘We have no chance, if you look at the situation as static,’ Limonov shrugged, stroking his beard. ‘But, if we apply more and more pressure, we can create a conflict again and again. We are aiming to create a great upheaval in society. If we can do this, everyone will follow us.’
Hidden away in his headquarters, waited on by young men and women who jumped at the sound of his voice, Limonov had lost touch with reality. He may have been able to inspire a hard core of devoted activists, but his appeal could not go wider. Russians are both tired and scared of radical social change, and Limonov is about as radical as it gets. This is, after all, a man who once proposed solving Russia’s demographic crisis by forcing ‘every woman between 25 and 35 to have four children’. The children would then be taken away from their parents when they began to walk, and educated in a House of Childhood. ‘Boys and girls will be taught to shoot from grenade launchers, to jump from helicopters, to besiege villages and cities, to skin sheep and pigs, to cook good hot food and to write poetry,’ Limonov wrote, in one of a series of essays for his followers entitled ‘Outlines for the Future’. ‘Many types of people will have to disappear,’ he added ominously.
‘Fuck,’ Limonov replied, when I quizzed him on the extract. ‘I even forgot I wrote that. I feel free to use dreams and thinking in my work. I may be as wrong as hell, but, if so, I’ll say, “OK, don’t do it.” You have too square a view of me,’ he sneered.
It was wrong to think of Limonov as a politician. He was, like Surkov, the Kremlin’s mysterious ideologue, an artist who had turned his talents to shaping and manipulating events in his volatile homeland. Surkov conjured up the illusion of stability out of chaos, while Limonov worked with the gaudy colours of rebellion, drawing inspiration from friction and contradiction. He could not come to power, because power was not his aim. He was addicted to struggle, to the adrenaline kick of his role as an eternal outsider. ‘Life is conflict,’ Limonov told me, before I left him.
Putin’s hold over Russian politics throughout the 2000s was absolute. Who could rival him? The parliamentary opposition was under Surkov’s thumb, while the protest movement’s leaders were so convenient for the Kremlin it was tempting to suspect that the grey cardinal had been meddling here, too. Putin seemed to have Russia locked down. But he was about to be faced with a dilemma, the solution to which would both define his long rule and sow the seeds for increasing dissent. Putin had to decide whether to stay or go. In the end, he chose both.