The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (11 page)

It is safe to assume that if the Kremlin even had known who Yevgenia Chirikova was, it would have never perceived her as a threat. The petite thirty-three-year-old mother of two with blue eyes, a delicate figure, and a round, smiling face doesn’t look like a troublemaker. She earned good grades studying electrical engineering at Moscow Aviation University. Later, she studied for her M.B.A. and spent several years working as a management consultant, before joining her husband in the engineering firm he founded before they married. She wasn’t raised in a political family, and growing up, she had no interest in social issues. Like most Russians, she considered politics a remote activity, something to be viewed from a distance, best left to elites or other powerful interests. “I didn’t know anything about elections. I never participated in anything. I was an absolutely nonpolitical person,” she tells me. “My family did not cultivate in me civic feelings, the feeling that you are a citizen and you are in charge of your country and in charge of what’s going on around you.” A few moments later,
smiling, she says, “There were no signs in my childhood that I would become a fighter.”

The first time that Yevgenia and I met was at a popular Italian restaurant near Moscow’s Pushkin Square. She greeted me with a smile and a firm handshake. Over three hours, her most striking feature wasn’t her friendly demeanor; it was her gift for strategic thinking. Every challenge she detailed, every scenario she described, was broken down and diagnosed. Every government action was analyzed and dissected and met with a logical and well-reasoned response from her and her small band of supporters. She attributed much of her approach to her business school education, but to me it seemed more innate. “I understand that no one can withstand constant pressure,” she said between sips of her cappuccino. “Even strong people like our mayor and governor cannot withstand systematic pressure. If I have a little more time, like two years, I am sure we are going to fend off Putin, too … if we are systematic and persistent.” She would have seemed entirely methodical, if her personality wasn’t so warm. Here was Napoleon, without the complex.

If she was looking for a fight, she soon found it. People who had signed up to join Yevgenia’s campaign quickly became targets of harassment. The group’s meetings were disrupted or banned by officials. Police officers fined activists for handing out leaflets; some supporters were detained arbitrarily. Authorities held sham public hearings that they would abruptly end as soon as citizens began to voice their complaints. Supporters began to receive threatening phone calls. “One of my colleagues, she was threatened to have her eyes gouged out,” Yevgenia recalls. “The next day she stopped working with us.”

The threats were real. Her close friend and one of the grassroots supporters of the effort to save Khimki Forest was Mikhail Beketov, a local journalist. A former Russian paratrooper and enormous bear of a man, Beketov established a small paper in 2006 with a circulation of roughly ten thousand called the
Khimkinskaya Pravda
, or
Khimki Truth
. When the government’s plans to turn the forest into timber were revealed, Yevgenia says that Beketov was the first journalist to write about it. Week after week, Beketov criticized government officials for their backroom deals and the corruption that he believed was
behind their plans. He began to receive threatening phone calls. He found his dog dead on his doorstep. After he called for the resignation of Khimki’s mayor, his car was blown up in the middle of the night. But Beketov did not let up. Then, in November 2008, when he returned home from a trip to the grocery store, he was beaten and left for dead outside his house on the edge of Khimki Forest. A neighbor found him unconscious in the snow the next day. The beating was so severe he was left with permanent brain damage. He lost a leg, and three of his fingers had to be amputated. When he woke from his coma, he had no memory of how many attackers there had been.
Even in his Khimki hospital bed, he remained a target; someone called the room to say he would come back to finish him. “It’s a very sad story,” Yevgenia says as she comes to the end. “After Beketov was attacked, the mayor thought we would close our mouths, there would be no more protests, there would be nothing in the newspapers. But it was a mistake. Beketov is paralyzed at the moment, but the whole world knows about him.” She pulls out a map of the Moscow region and puts it on the table between us. “Look on this map, Khimki Forest is not even marked. It is so small, but it has become important.”

Of course, there is no proof that the authorities ordered the attack on Beketov. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists,
Russia was until recently the third-deadliest country in the world in which to be a journalist, behind only Iraq and the Philippines. Just as troubling, almost all the attacks or murders of journalists in Russia remain unsolved. (Between 2000 and 2010,
18 journalists were murdered with no one held accountable.) And the Khimki struggle is no exception. Yevgenia points out that the politicians Putin has charged with governing the Moscow region don’t have a typical political pedigree.
The governor, Gromov, led the Fortieth Army during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and was the last Soviet commander to leave the war-torn country. Khimki’s mayor is another veteran of the Afghan campaign. In Yevgenia’s view, they only understand force, and they underestimated the public relations disaster that would result from Beketov’s attempted murder. “Clever politicians do not kill journalists,” she says.

Far from being intimidated, Yevgenia stepped up her campaign. Her supporters issued press releases and contacted every journalist
who would listen to tell the story of what happened to Mikhail Beketov. Stories appeared in papers across Russia and Europe. “We analyzed our situation, and we understood that the less people or activists use media, the less that they are known, the more danger they face. This is not a guarantee, of course,” says Yevgenia. “But openness is our main weapon.”

Openness—and Russian election laws. Nothing could be more public than to challenge the mayor directly. So, in the fall of 2009, Yevgenia decided that she would run against Strelchenko for mayor of Khimki. It was a bold gambit. She had no illusions about her chances of defeating United Russia’s candidate for mayor. She was relatively unknown, had no money to finance a campaign, and wouldn’t be permitted any media attention. Instead, as she explained, “The election campaign was a part of my forest campaign.” Strategically, she had three goals. First, by merely challenging Khimki’s mayor, she would gain attention for her cause. She decided to run as a single-issue candidate, so everywhere she went she talked about one thing: the preservation of Khimki’s environment. Second, she had a tactical goal. The day she announced her candidacy, she filed two applications. The first was the necessary paperwork to enter the election. The second was a request to hold a local referendum on the cancellation of the highway construction project. She had calculated that if the mayor believed he would receive enough pressure on the project, from both her election campaign and the prospect of a referendum, he might scrap his support for the plan. She was right. “In three days, the mayor canceled his edict,” says Yevgenia. “He was forced to cancel. If he would have stayed with his approval of this routing, he would have lost a lot of voters during the election.” Several weeks later, Governor Gromov also withdrew his order approving the highway’s route through the forest.

Her third goal was to use her candidacy as a test of the strength of her cause. She wanted to know just how much environmental issues weighed on voters in Russia and in Khimki in particular. Ultimately, she was only allowed to campaign for seven days. Even though she had paid the necessary fees, twice local authorities claimed she had not, barring her from campaigning. But in those seven days, the mother of two turned activist secured enough support to win 15 percent of the vote. It was a bigger foothold than she had ever expected to gain.

The fact that both the governor and the mayor had withdrawn their construction orders was only a temporary victory. On November 5, 2009, Prime Minister Putin stepped into the battle over Khimki Forest. On that day, he signed a decree saying that the environmentally protected forest could be rezoned as land for a commercial highway or construction project. The problem for Putin is that according to Russian federal law, his decree is actually illegal. The country’s federal law forbids changing the use of protected forestland if alternative routes for construction are available. Of course, it would be easy enough for the Transportation Ministry to claim that there were no viable alternatives. Unfortunately for Putin, a year earlier the deputy minister of transport had officially admitted that other routes did exist. Yevgenia’s group immediately launched a legal challenge to Putin’s order in Russian courts and brought a suit in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. Again, Yevgenia has no illusions about her ability to challenge Putin in his own courts. Smiling, she says, “In life, you can have only one choice, which has been selected by Putin.”

But for Putin and his political allies, Yevgenia had yet to exact her biggest price. To build this increasingly controversial highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, the Russian government was counting on foreign financing from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank. In fact, roughly two-thirds of the money to build the highway was going to come from European banks. Yevgenia saw the foreign money as the Russian government’s soft spot. She knew that the European public would be much less tolerant of its banks financing a construction project that promised to damage the environment. So she shifted part of her campaign to reach that foreign audience. For example, the French construction firm Vinci had signed on to the construction project. So Yevgenia and her fellow activists staged a protest in which they piled “Khimki firewood” outside the firm’s office in Moscow. Yevgenia also reached out to Europe’s Green parties. The Greens in the European Parliament passed a resolution warning the Continent’s investors off the Khimki project. More than forty environmental organizations from Russia and abroad signed an open letter insisting that European banks and companies steer clear of Khimki. Ultimately, the resolution, media coverage, and Yevgenia’s own lobbying convinced
the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank to suspend their funding. The cost to the Russian government was more than $750 million in foreign investment. It was an enormous victory for Yevgenia and her movement. “We managed to destroy their financing,” she tells me proudly. “To raise money in Russia, it will take a long time, and time in this situation works for us.”

It would be too much to say that Yevgenia Chirikova had Russian authorities locked in a stalemate. If Vladimir Putin ordered Khimki Forest razed, it would be done overnight. And yet, three years after Yevgenia wrote her first letter of inquiry, at a time when the Kremlin would have expected the highway project to be near completion, it hadn’t begun. The country’s political leaders probably believed that with a few simple steps, they would be pouring asphalt. And yet the road connecting Moscow and St. Petersburg existed only on blueprints.

Why? Like Pu in China, Yevgenia skillfully exploited the subtle vulnerabilities of the modern authoritarian regime. While the Russian government sees law as a tool to wield selectively against its opponents, she used the same system of laws to expose the regime’s inconsistencies and contradictions. While the regime seeks to benefit from maintaining ties to the outside world, Yevgenia proved adept at marshaling international opinion in her favor and was able to leverage those very relationships against the regime. She succeeded in raising the costs for the regime in the places where it mattered most. For a government that had rarely encountered credible political opponents, she proved a terribly worthy adversary. What’s more, by embarking on a single-issue campaign, Yevgenia denied the regime its most common means of smearing an opponent, pronouncing her a threat to the nation’s security. Yevgenia was no radical, asking Khimki’s voters to topple the government. She was not, in a sense, even asking them to support her. Her campaign merely asked that citizens care about their own environment. Faced with such a modest and politically benign agenda, the local authorities had little recourse other than to try to scuttle her campaign through trumped-up technicalities.

A few days after our first meeting, I traveled out to Khimki so that Yevgenia could take me on a walk through the forest she has spent the last three years fighting to preserve. It was a drizzly April afternoon,
and the ground was still damp from the morning’s rain. Although we were only a few minutes’ walk from her home and Khimki’s streets, it was surprisingly quiet once we were surrounded by the oaks. In each direction, they stood almost perfectly straight, swaying only when a cold wind blew from the north. We walked deeper into the forest. After about ten minutes, we came across a place locals call Oak Roof. It’s a natural spring, and while we stood there talking about her struggle to keep the government at bay, six people came and went, filling up plastic jugs with the ice-cold water to take back to their homes. We began asking each of them if they had heard about the plans to build a highway on the very ground on which we all stood. They had, and they were angry about it. One man in his mid-thirties wearing a dark jacket and blue jeans said, “Yes, I am upset about it.” And then, jokingly, “Where are the weapons?”

We laughed for a minute as each of us imagined the diminutive Yevgenia and her ragtag army of Khimki residents taking up arms against an armada of Kremlin bulldozers. As we continued our walk, I asked her what she thought the government would do next, what would be its next move? She didn’t think the battle was close to finished.

Her supporters had set up forest patrols, keeping a lookout for the first sign of construction crews. “The next step is probably that they will start building, and there will be resistance,” she replies, stiffening. “We are ready. We have thought through all of the various scenarios. We are sure that the construction is not going to pass in a quiet way. It is going to be very loud.”