The New Tsar (69 page)

Putin remained defiant—to the point that he seemed oblivious to the dangerous discontent that seethed beneath Russia’s chimera of progress and prosperity. “It’s too early to organize my funeral,” he told the Valdai gathering barely a week before the vote, brushing aside even the fawning or dutiful questions of those who attended.
¹⁵
The fate of United Russia was another matter. Its popularity had plummeted, and polls suggested that it would lose its constitutional majority; it might not even win a majority at all. All the bureaucrats and boyars who depended on Putin’s system were increasingly haunted by the specter of the Orange Revolution, and now the Arab Spring, which had toppled strongman after strongman like dominoes. Suddenly, the armies of subversion seemed to be everywhere. Mubarak was in jail, Qaddafi was dead, and Assad was besieged by an armed rebellion that had fractured Syria along bloody fault lines. Putin would not be the next.

The Kremlin’s anxiety manifested itself in heavy-handed efforts to ensure a high enough turnout and vote for United Russia. Even before election day, a voting-rights organization called Golos—the word for “vote,” as well as “voice”—recorded thousands of violations of the country’s election laws. Funded by foreign organizations supporting democracy, Golos annotated the violations on an online map that soon went viral, picked up by even relatively loyal newspapers and websites. Putin told steelworkers in Petersburg that election observers were the agents of foreign powers trying to destabilize the country. He even compared Golos to Judas. The group was promptly fined for violating the election law it was determined to enforce by publishing its map; its director was detained for hours at a Moscow airport the night before the election and released only after surrendering her laptop. The organization’s website came under a computer attack that shut it down just as voting began. The same thing happened to other sites, including the popular and influential radio station Ekho Moskvy, which remained offline, almost certainly not coincidentally, until the polls closed.
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The Kremlin, which had once acted as if the Internet were a harmless diversion of the spoiled elite, now moved decisively to curtail its influence.

Although all the previous elections of Putin’s Russia had been marred
by abuses and manipulation, the fraud that unfolded on December 4 was far more widespread and cynical. Despite the efforts of the authorities, the Internet now allowed evidence of violations to spread through the public consciousness. Official election observers could not be everywhere, but amateur videos taken with cell phones appeared online showing apparatchiks flagrantly stuffing ballot boxes, shepherding busloads of voters from polling station to polling station, even using invisible ink on ballots. In one video taken by a volunteer activist and promptly uploaded to YouTube, the elderly director of Polling Place No. 2501 in Moscow sat at a desk dutifully marking a stack of ballots. The international observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe concluded that one in three polling stations experienced some sort of suspect activity—but that only counted the small percentage where observers were present.
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The flagrant disregard for electoral decency provoked outrage when unofficial results showed that United Russia had won just under 50 percent of the vote—enough, given the parties that did not make it to the threshold for winning seats, to allow it to retain a majority in the new Duma. It was clear that even that diminished result was a fraud, one that required the complicity of thousands upon thousands of people to carry out—from election officials like Vladimir Churov, a KGB colleague of Putin’s from Petersburg, to state workers, forced by fear or favor to staff the polling stations, to the journalists of state media who struggled to report it all with straight faces. Even Putin, appearing to declare victory with Medvedev at United Russia’s campaign headquarters, appeared less than exultant. The scale of the fraud at last was enough to stir thousands from the political apathy that had accompanied the rise of Putinism and the stultifying bureaucratic stagnation that it had produced.

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O
n the night after the election, as the final and official results were announced, the small opposition party Solidarity held a rally at Chistye Prudy, near the center of Moscow. The party’s periodic protests typically drew a few hundred people, who were always outnumbered by the police officers deployed to keep a close watch. This time, despite a cold rain, thousands showed up, drawn by appeals on the Internet. Speaker after speaker clutched a microphone and made demands and ultimatums. The people there were diverse, their ideas inchoate. Some of the old opposition leaders—the veterans of glasnost and the liberals of the Yeltsin years—were there, but others had never attended a protest
before. The speaker who got the most attention was Aleksei Navalny, whose campaign against corruption arguably contributed most to this outburst of activism. He had an enormous following online, but now here he stood in the flesh, shouting into a microphone to a crowd that waved flags and handmade banners with slogans like “Putin—Thief” and the scarcely imaginable “Russia without Putin.” “They can call us microbloggers or Internet hamsters,” he roared. “I am an Internet hamster, and I’ll be at the throats of those beasts!”
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Navalny and dozens of other protesters and protest organizers were arrested as they left the park to march toward the election commission’s headquarters. He was jailed for fifteen days, charged with resisting arrest, and yet the protests continued. They even began to swell. The next Saturday tens of thousands showed up in Bolotnaya Square, across the river from the Kremlin. They proved undaunted by the arrests; undaunted by counterprotests that had been organized by the virulent youth group Nashi, which had been created after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution for just this purpose; undaunted by veiled threats from the authorities, including a warning that young men of draft age would be picked up and inducted into the army. Two weeks later, on December 24, nearly a hundred thousand massed, this time on the avenue named after Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and Soviet dissident whose legacy of championing a democratic society had by then diminished significantly. Navalny was there this time; after his fifteen days in prison, he had emerged to a throng of supporters chanting his name on a dark, snowy evening. He said he had gone into prison in one country and come out into a new one. He turned his attention beyond the fraud in the parliamentary elections to the fraud in the presidential election scheduled for March 4. “What will happen on the fourth of March,” he told them, “if it will happen, will be an illegal succession to the throne.”
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The protests were the largest of the Putin era, the largest, in fact, since those in 1991 that had resisted the August putsch. They spread to other cities, attracting a broad spectrum of society: government workers, laborers, pensioners, students, the workers who filled the offices of new businesses that capitalism had brought. That the protests were peaceful made them even more terrifying to the Kremlin. Putin had said little at first, ignoring the allegations of fraud, but he greeted the prospect of a popular uprising with icy, sarcastic derision. Three days after the vote, speaking to organizers of his coming presidential campaign, he blamed the on-going protests on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton,
who had criticized the conduct of the election. “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” he said. “They heard the signal and with the support of the State Department began active work.” Even his use of the phrase “active work”—a term he had learned in the KGB—underscored his belief that the protests were neither indigenous nor spontaneous, but rather an intelligence operation. In his annual televised call-in show in December, he went further. He mocked the white ribbons that protesters had adopted as a symbol of their cause, saying they reminded him of condoms pinned to their coats. He compared the protesters to the Bandar-log, the wild monkeys of Rudyard Kipling’s
The Jungle Book
, which had appeared as a Soviet television series when Putin was a teenager. You could not really reason with them, the monkeys, but they were afraid of the snake Kaa, who ultimately subdued them with his hypnotic power. “I’ve loved Kipling since I was a child,” Putin said with an impish smile.

Despite his nonchalance, the vast bureaucracy beneath Putin seemed deeply shaken, and Putin’s scorn seemed to embolden those protesting and attract even more. Protesters now showed up at rallies with condoms blown up like balloons, with stuffed animals and posters depicting monkeys and apes—and Putin as Kaa, strangling the nation. The government’s outward unity began to show signs of the divisions inside. Medvedev first claimed that the viral videos of ballot stuffing were faked, but later he promised that the authorities would investigate any allegations. The speaker of the Duma, Boris Gryzlov, promised to allow members of opposition parties to serve as committee chairmen, hoping to temper the anger at United Russia’s dominance. Then, under pressure, he resigned. The Kremlin demoted its “gray cardinal,” Vladislav Surkov, the strategist who was credited—and reviled—for erecting the “managed democracy” that was the focus of the protesters’ ire. Only days before, Surkov had said the protesters represented “the best part of our society, or, more accurately, the most productive part.” Journalists at NTV, owned by Gazprom, refused to go on the air if the channel refused to cover the December 10 protest and, for the first time, the Kremlin’s media masters relented, allowing the public display of dissent to appear on television channels broadcasting across the country (though without mentioning the anger directed toward Putin).
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Members of the Putin elite—the academics, political strategists, bureaucrats, even the clerics of the Orthodox Church, who had always remained loyal—began to raise questions about the fraud, including Aleksei Kudrin, who spoke at
the rally on December 24 and called on his former bosses to make the system more accountable.

Few, not even the protesters braving the cold, believed the protests would succeed in bringing about a new election or even a meaningful investigation of the fraud, and fewer still doubted that Putin would be reelected in March, but for the first time uncertainty haunted Putin’s rule. The Russian stock market slumped after the election, and as in every crisis, capital flight accelerated. A fear crept into the elite, above all those most heavily invested in Putin’s leadership. Vladimir Litvinenko, the rector of the Mining Institute in Petersburg where Putin had written his thesis, expressed the sentiments of many of them. He had remained close to his former student, and he had become a wealthy man, compensated, he claimed, for the consultation work he had done for the government with shares in PhosAgro, a company whose core asset had been seized from Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s financial empire after his conviction. Only months before, the company had gone public on the London Stock Exchange. His fear now echoed Putin’s of the past: the fear of the mob, the unruly hordes in the street, demanding respect and justice, the rabble toppling those in power and coating the street in blood. “I horribly fear the street,” he said as the protests swelled. “This is an uprising. This is revolution, not evolution, with all the negative consequences of disorder on the street. This is the path to nowhere, I am certain. This is a catastrophe. We will do everything to prevent this in my country.”
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PART FIVE

CHAPTER 22

The Restoration

O
n a cold gray morning in February 2012, less than two weeks before Putin’s reelection, five young women appeared in the ornate, reconstructed church in Moscow that is, to believers, a landmark of the resurrection of the Orthodox faith after its repression by the Soviet state, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. They mounted the elevated soleas in the front of the church’s iconostasis and shed their winter coats to reveal colorful, sleeveless dresses and mismatched leggings. They pulled colorful balaclavas over their faces and began to dance and shout, their arms punching the air and their voices a discordant echo reverberating in the mostly empty church. One of them, Yekaterina Samutsevich, did not manage to slip the strap of her guitar over her shoulder before a guard ushered her off. The other four carried on, their words difficult to understand at times, though a few came through.

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin!

Banish Putin!

The episode lasted less than a minute. The women, accompanied by a couple of men, hustled out of the church after being stopped by guards. By the end of the evening, a music video appeared online, spliced with material previously filmed in another church in Moscow, this time with lighting, sound, and a background that in the quick cuts could pass for Christ the Savior. It opened with a melodic hymnal chant, but then abruptly shifted to the grinding chords of the hardest punk, punctuated with vulgarities. The lyrics ridiculed the church and its priests as KGB collaborators, as mercantile and corrupted, repressive toward women, bigoted against gays and lesbians. The song was called “Punk Prayer,” using a liturgical word for a special prayer service in times of national crisis,
moleben
.
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It was the newest protest from a new amorphous guerrilla-art collective that—inspired by third-wave feminism,
the Riot Grrrl movement in the United States, and Putin’s return to the presidency—called itself Pussy Riot.

The women of Pussy Riot, roughly a dozen, though their membership and identities were kept secret, had created the group in the wake of Putin’s announcement, joining the wave of dissent that spilled into the streets after the parliamentary election. The group included members of Voina, or War, an art collective that specialized in provocative, politically themed art performances. In one, they filmed five couples having sex in Moscow’s museum of biology on the eve of Medvedev’s election in 2008, mocking the government’s appeals to increase birth rates to avert demographic collapse. In another, they painted a giant penis on a drawbridge in Petersburg, which, when raised, faced the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt, where Putin had once worked. Putin’s imminent return to the Kremlin now focused the group’s creative energy squarely on him.