The New Tsar (70 page)

Pussy Riot’s first furtive performance in public occurred in October 2011, a month after the
rokirovka
. They filmed themselves at various locations inside Moscow’s metro, at one point atop a workers’ scaffold. Their faces covered with colorful balaclavas, they screamed as much as sang a song that alluded to the protests in Cairo that brought down Mubarak and called for the same in Red Square. In January, they performed in Red Square itself, atop the Lobnoye Mesto, a stone platform built in the sixteenth century and used to read out the tsars’ decrees. This time, eight members of the group performed a song titled “Putin Pissed Himself,” inspired by the government’s palpable fear and confusion in the face of the protests. The song repeated Aleksei Navalny’s exhortation from the night of the first protest, which they too had joined. “Riot in Russia,” they sang, “we exist.”

At first the authorities did not seem to be paying the group much attention. The performers were often detained and questioned, but they were careful to give false names and were usually let go after a few hours. Their videos, though, careered through the virtual world where Russia’s protest movement now had the momentum. The group’s protests and even its name—rendered in English because the equivalent expression in Russian would have sounded far more vulgar—perfectly suited the insurrectionary mood that had somehow survived the winter and carried on into the new year and the presidential election season. The Kremlin’s foundations seemed to shudder in the face of it. Despite all expectation, there was a glimmer of hope that somehow the protests might forestall Putin’s certain reelection in March.

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“H
e’s a little less buoyant now,” Henry Kissinger said not long after meeting Putin in Moscow in January 2012, as the protests continued.
²
The elder statesman of realpolitik had met regularly with Putin ever since he came to power. Putin admiringly recalled their first encounter when he picked Kissinger up from the airport in Petersburg in the 1990s and the older man flattered him by saying “all decent people get their start in intelligence.” Putin considered Kissinger a trusted counselor, one who respected him and Russia’s national interests, whatever the changing state of relations with the United States. Kissinger, the old Cold Warrior who had long advocated deeper cooperation with Russia, reciprocated the admiration. “Putin is not a Stalin who feels obliged to destroy anyone who might potentially at some future point disagree with him,” he had once said. “Putin is somebody who wants to amass the power needed to accomplish his immediate task.”
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As Putin’s reelection campaign began, the immediate task was to somehow contain the street protests. And Kissinger sensed that Putin’s resolve—his usually steely assuredness—had waned at least a bit.

The Kremlin, still nominally headed by Dmitri Medvedev, initially offered concessions to defuse the protesters’ anger. They included the restoration of the regional elections that Putin had abolished in 2004 and an easing of restrictions on forming new political parties, as well as securing a spot on the presidential ballot. Even the Orthodox Church called on the government to address the grievances of those in the streets. In an interview on state television on the Orthodox Christmas, January 7, the church’s leader, Patriarch Kirill, said that a crackdown on the protesters would be as misguided as the repressions of the Soviet era. It was a startling statement from an institution that had allied itself so closely with the authorities.
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Other church leaders began to echo similar sympathies, offering to mediate between the government and the protesters.

Then, abruptly, the church’s tone shifted. Less than a month later, Putin convened the leaders of all the country’s faiths—Orthodox, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Roman Catholic, Armenian Catholic, even the Seventh-day Adventists, an evangelical faith that struggled without official recognition or support—at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. Kirill, acting as host, now lavished praise on Putin, followed by the other clerics, rabbis, lamas, and muftis. Kirill recalled the hardships of the 1990s before Putin appeared on the scene, comparing the era to the Time of Troubles at the turn of the seventeenth century, and to Napoleon’s
invasion in 1812 and Hitler’s in 1941. “What were the 2000s then?” he said. “Through a miracle of God, with the active participation of the country’s leadership, we managed to exit this horrible, systemic crisis.” He then spoke directly to Putin to thank him for the “massive role” he played in correcting “this crooked twist of our history.”
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The church’s support for Putin, an ostentatious if not deeply devout believer, was not surprising, but in a secular nation with a constitution that formally separated church and state, the choreographed display of fealty to Putin at the height of a turbulent election season provoked outrage, including Pussy Riot’s protest at Christ the Savior. Rumors swirled that the Kremlin had pressured the patriarch and the others to appear with Putin. Articles soon appeared in the opposition press recycling old rumors of Kirill’s KGB affiliations, his commercial ventures importing tobacco in the 1990s, and his taste for finer luxuries, including a large dacha, a private yacht, and expensive watches. (He denied owning the latter until the unartful airbrushing of an official photograph left the reflection of a fancy watch on a glossy tabletop.) The church, once heavily repressed, had emerged from the Soviet collapse as one of the most respected institutions in the country, viewed by many of its adherents as an institution above the country’s politics. Now Kirill led the faithful directly into an alliance with the state; just a month after expressing sympathy for the protesters, he now complained that their demands were the “ear-piercing shrieks” of those who valued a Western consumer culture incompatible with Russia’s traditions.

Kirill’s reversal was striking and to critics infuriating, but it reflected the emergence of a central narrative for Putin’s return. It was a narrative rooted not in nostalgia for Soviet times but for the more distant tsarist past, one articulated in the writings of, among others, Ivan Ilyin, the political philosopher Putin had been citing in his speeches since 2005. In the face of mass unrest, Putin portrayed himself not just as the guarantor of the gains achieved since the Soviet era, but also as the leader of the nation in a deeper way. He was the protector of its social and cultural values. In a series of seven campaign declarations reprinted in leading newspapers, he outlined a new starkly conservative vision of the country that referred to Russia’s “civilizational model,” one diametrically opposed to the decadent values of the West, represented in large part by those now protesting his rule on the streets. He had chosen a counterattack, and it was strikingly effective.

At the height of the protests in December and January, opinion polls
suggested that he might not win half the votes, which would force a runoff, but by February, his ratings began to climb again. The Kremlin’s media apparatus remained at his service, portraying him as the steady master of a state under siege. His opponents were too feeble or too extreme, aided by the saboteurs within and their masters abroad, bent on destroying the nation. The arrival of a new American ambassador, Michael McFaul, and an ill-timed meeting with opposition leaders on his second day in the embassy became fodder for state television, which portrayed the protests as an alien incursion. The opposition wanted confrontation, Putin would say at the end of the month, even to the point of committing murder. “I know this,” he said, alluding to the defense that had first circulated after the deaths of Anna Politkovskaya and Aleksandr Litvinenko, and using the language he had once used against the rebels in Chechnya. “They are even looking for a sacred victim, someone famous. They will waste him, if you will pardon the expression, and then blame the government.”
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The day before, the state television network Channel One had disclosed weeks-old arrests of two suspects in Ukraine who had allegedly been plotting to assassinate Putin, or perhaps other senior officials, by bombing their motorcades in Moscow. As the election approached, the choice facing Russians seemed stark and existential, as it was meant to: Putin or the abyss.

As in his previous elections Putin did not campaign directly, but his official duties increasingly had overtly military themes. In January, on the anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad, he visited the cemetery where a research organization had established that his brother, Viktor, was buried during the war. Days later he visited the scientists at the Sarov center (where the world’s polonium-210 is made) and vowed to equip ten new regiments with new missiles capable of striking deep inside Europe. In February, he held his only public rally at Luzhniki on the old Red Army holiday, now rebranded as the Defenders of the Fatherland Day. The state channels reported that 130,000 attended, though the stadium’s capacity was only 80,000, and many of those in attendance were government employees, some bused in from distant cities. All that mattered was the panorama shown over and over on the nation’s television screens. Putin strode to the blue-carpeted platform at a midfield, wearing a black parka to ward off a light snow and clutching a microphone. Alone at the center of a sea of flags and banners, he began awkwardly. “Do we love Russia?” he shouted. As he lurched around the stage, a rage seemed to well up within him. He implored the audience
“not to look overseas, not to run to the left or to the side, and not to betray your homeland, but to be with us, work for Russia and love her as we do—with our whole hearts.” As Kirill had in their meeting, he invoked the Battle of Borodino that had defeated Napoleon on the outskirts of Moscow. He was appealing to the country’s hallowed tradition of resistance to foreign invasion. He even quoted the famous poem of Mikhail Lermontov published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Borodino, in which a colonel calls on his men to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend the Fatherland.

“Guys, is Moscow not for us?

Then we shall die near Moscow

As our brothers died”

And we promised to die

Two centuries later, the battle for Russia continued, Putin thundered in conclusion, his taut face wrenched into a grimace, but victory is “in our
genes
.”

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B
y the night of March 4, Putin’s victory had been secured, as almost everyone expected. He won 63 percent of the vote in the first round, less than in his or Medvedev’s previous elections, but still a solid majority. Zyuganov, in his fourth run, finished a distant second, as usual, with 17 percent. To defuse the accusations that marred the parliamentary elections, Putin ordered cameras installed in nearly every polling station in the country, but evidence of fraud, including carousel voting and ballot stuffing, nonetheless cast doubt on the tally. By some estimates, millions of votes padded Putin’s total, though even his harshest critics had to acknowledge that he had the support of most Russians. Putin won every region of the country except Moscow, the epicenter of the disgruntled elite, where he still won 47 percent. In his native Petersburg, where an outburst of political activism had also spread after the December voting, he drew 59 percent. Putin declared victory in a brief speech in Manezh Square with the towers of the Kremlin as a television-perfect backdrop. A large crowd gathered before a small platform. Many were from outside Moscow, as at his only campaign rally, bused into the heavily secured zone where Putin would appear. These were Putin’s people, not the trendy
hipsteri
, the intellectuals and radicals, the “rootless cosmopolitans”
who would drag Russia away from its historic roots and traditions. “We have demonstrated that our people are able to tell one thing from another,” Putin said that night after Medvedev introduced him, “the genuine desire to achieve modernity despite the political provocations that have only one goal: to destroy Russia as a nation and usurp power.” As he spoke, tears streamed down his face, the first he had shed in public since Anatoly Sobchak’s funeral twelve years before. It appeared to be a genuine display of emotion, but the Kremlin later insisted it was just the bitter wind.

The election left Putin’s opponents dispirited and disoriented. The celebratory mood of the first large protests faded into despair. The protesters were united by a cause, or a variety of them, but not by any strategy for achieving their goals. It became clear that nothing had changed, and perhaps nothing ever would. Except in the most abstract notions of a pluralistic, democratic society, who would step in if there were a “Russia without Putin”? A protest was planned for Pushkin Square the next evening, less than a mile from the Kremlin, but what now was the point? Instead of the masses who had surged to earlier protests, this time perhaps twenty thousand attended.

“We overestimated our force,” Navalny said that night. By the end of the allotted two hours for protest, enough in the authorities’ view to release some of the steam, fewer than two thousand remained in the square where they had gathered. They seemed uncertain whether to heed the calls by Navalny and a more aggressive opposition leader, Sergei Udaltsov, to remain in the streets, even to set up a tent camp the way the Ukrainians had in Kyiv in 2004, or the protesters in Cairo had the year before. Instead, the riot police swept through, swinging their truncheons. More than 250 people were arrested, dozens were injured. The streets of Moscow stayed clear.

Protests continued in the weeks and months ahead, but with each one the momentum dwindled. Many Russians wanted to end a system that had become so deeply cynical and corrupt, but only a very few, even among Putin’s most ardent critics, wanted a revolution, which was what it would take to force a change. At the height of those protests, one of the Kremlin’s political strategists, Sergei Markov, had compared the protesters to spoiled children demanding a toy, the Kremlin to a frustrated but firm parent. “It is not correct to go out and buy the child a toy,” he said, “but rather to distract him with something else.”
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