The New Tsar (71 page)

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B
ack in February, when she arrived at Christ the Savior Cathedral for Pussy Riot’s performance, the guitarist Yekaterina Samustevich sensed that something had gone wrong with their clandestine plan. Men with video cameras were already in the church. The guards reacted so quickly that it seemed they had been expecting their arrival. Yekaterina—Katya, to her friends—suspected there had been a leak from one of the cameramen they brought along to record their performance. Or perhaps the FSB had begun monitoring them as their videos went viral through the protest movement. When they left the church, there were also journalists waiting for them outside.
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She was never certain, but perhaps it was a setup all along. Either way it was clear that the authorities had taken an interest in their stunts and wanted to put an end to them.

The day after the video circulated, the church’s spokesman, Archpriest Vsevelod Chaplin, denounced it as a mortal sin, a crime against God. Prosecutors promptly announced that they had opened an investigation, and it was only a matter of time before the full force of the state came down on Pussy Riot. On the day before Putin’s reelection, the police arrested three women and a man; the following day, two more women were arrested. The police, still unsure of the group’s identities, released four of them, but they had found two of the members who had been in the cathedral that day in February: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina. Katya was arrested two weeks later, on March 16. They were charged not with hooliganism, a petty violation that would normally not warrant more than a fine, but with hooliganism carried out by an organized group motivated by religious hatred, an ominous sign of the intent to make an example of their actions. The indictment that followed accused them of undermining “the spiritual foundations” not just of the church, but also “of the state.” Conviction could mean as many as seven years in prison. The members of Pussy Riot had wanted to call attention to the communion of church and state, and they were about to learn how right they had been. All three were held without bail despite the fact that Nadezhda and Maria were both mothers of young children.

The arrests, and the gravity of the charges, provoked new outrage, now infused with dismay over the inability of the protests to do more than tarnish Putin’s easy electoral victory. The three women became international celebrities, admired for their defiance of an authoritarian regime. Amnesty International declared them prisoners of conscience,
while prominent musicians—Faith No More, Madonna, Pete Townshend, Paul McCartney—championed their cause. In Russia, however, their fate proved to be far more complicated: their protest divided the already fractured opposition and, with the Kremlin’s gleeful connivance, did as much to discredit it in the eyes of the broader public as anything else. Aleksei Navalny, viewed warily by liberals for some of his nationalistic views, denounced their detention but called their stunt idiotic. “I would not like it, to put it mildly, if at the moment I was in church some crazy girls ran in and began to run around the altar,” he wrote on his blog.
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Instead of provoking a debate over politics, as they had intended, the case fueled the culture war within society in a way that ultimately favored Putin. The church remained one of the most respected institutions in Russia, on a par with the presidency itself. More than 70 percent of Russians identified themselves as Orthodox, even if many wore their faith lightly, rarely practicing or attending church.

The “Punk Prayer” backfired. It rallied the faithful to the defense of the church, despite the scandals over its corruption and mercantile behavior. To believe was to be patriotic. To be patriotic was to believe. In April, on the Sunday after Easter, tens of thousands heeded a call by the patriarch for a special demonstration at Christ the Savior. The crowd swelled to sixty-five thousand, according to the official estimates. Even if those numbers were inflated, the demonstration was larger than any of the protests that continued to sputter on after Putin’s election victory. Kirill emerged from the church that day in a procession of bishops and priests carrying icons that had been desecrated in Soviet times, including one with bullet holes dating to the 1920s. The “attack of persecutors” against the faith today could not be compared to Soviet repression, he said, but the liberalism of the West was a threat because it regarded “the very fact of blasphemy and sacrilege, of the mockery of shrines,” as “the lawful manifestation of human freedom, as something that should be defended in modern society.” He never mentioned Pussy Riot, but they had been turned into the symbol of a contagion seeping through the borders of Russia. As for the priests who called for forgiveness for the three in prison, and they were some, citing the mercy of Jesus, Kirill called them “traitors in cassocks.”
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O
n the eve of Putin’s inauguration on May 7, the protest leaders planned one more rally, this one authorized to take place in Bolotnaya Square, across the river from the Kremlin where Medvedev would relinquish the
reins of power that were never fully his own. The weather was warm with the onset of spring, which almost certainly swelled the crowds, as had the prosecution of Pussy Riot. So many people thronged the square that the phalanxes of police officers abruptly blocked the entrance, creating a scrum of protesters jammed on the streets. Those outside the blocked perimeter staged a sit-in; someone even pitched a tent, an ominous sign for the police, who had orders not to allow the kind of encampment seen in the Orange Revolution. For a time, the protest remained peaceful, but when the police began picking off protesters for arrest, it turned into a melee. The crowds began surging to the defense of those arrested, and the police responded by swinging truncheons; some in the crowd responded by throwing chunks of asphalt. Boris Nemstov was shouting, “Russia will be free,” from atop a riser when officers led him away. When Navalny was arrested near the stage, he scolded the officer, his invective recorded by a microphone he was wearing for a documentary about the anti-Putin movement. “I will jail you later,” he said, spitting out the names of Putin and his business cronies, Arkady Rotenberg and Gennady Timchenko. He vowed they would be on the wanted list when he came to power.
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By evening, the protest had ended with more than four hundred arrests. Dozens were injured, including twenty-nine police officers. They were dutifully interviewed on state television lying on hospital gurneys, scenes that many believed had been staged. Putin’s usually affable press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, a man known to channel his boss’s sentiments, expressed disappointment that the police had acted with such restraint. “I would have liked them to act more harshly,” he said.
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The crackdown continued the next day, even though the streets of central Moscow had been cleared of traffic for the inauguration ceremony. Police officers roaming the capital arrested dozens more, many for no apparent reason other than that they were wearing a white ribbon. A squadron of interior troops even raided what had become known as an unofficial headquarters of the opposition movement. It was a French restaurant, called Jean-Jacques, the sort of place that had sprung up in Moscow during the years of economic boom and made it seem more like a modern, vibrant European capital, full of young, creative Muscovites ordering foreign beers and wines off chalkboard menus. By the end of the day, more than seven hundred people were detained around Moscow. Scores of young men who haunted places like Jean-Jacques were taken to draft offices for induction into the army, just as they had been warned when the protests first started. “I think this is to show who is
boss,” said Oleg Orlov of Memorial, the human rights organization. “A new tsar has come.”
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Putin’s inauguration unfolded at midday with the pomp of the others, broadcast to the nation solemnly and ceremoniously, just as before. Only this time the cameras met Putin at the office of the prime minister in the White House, followed him down the carpeted stairs of the main entrance to a waiting Mercedes-Benz. For six minutes, an aerial camera followed the procession of police motorcycles escorting Putin’s car and two others as it made its way to the Kremlin, where Medvedev waited, having already saluted the honor guard. The motorcade passed through streets that had been emptied not only of traffic but, eerily, of people, too. No one watched. No one waved or cheered that sunny morning. No one even dared be outside.

In 2000, Putin had taken his first oath of office against a backdrop of economic and political uncertainty and war in Chechnya. His second inauguration, more subdued, took place in the shadow of that war, amid the tightening of political freedoms and the dismantling of Yukos, but also in the midst of an economic revival that had trickled down to more Russians than at any time in the country’s history. Medvedev took the oath in 2008 at a time of hope that Russia had overcome its turbulent history and would pass power to a new generation of leaders, soon perhaps to leaders who knew only modern Russia, not the Soviet Union. Now Putin returned to take the oath a third time, pledging to faithfully serve and protect the country for six more years. But he and the country had changed. He had returned to power by dividing the nation, by stoking fear of the enemies within that wanted to seize power and reverse all that had been accomplished since he first swore the oath. He had returned to power because he made himself the only real choice at the ballot. He no longer seemed to be president for all Russia but only for the Putin majority. For the opposition, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

He retraced the long walk through the Grand Kremlin Palace he had taken twelve years before. The defeated candidates were there, though not in the front. So were Mikhail Gorbachev and foreign leaders, like Silvio Berlusconi, a friend now, whose three terms as prime minister of Italy nearly matched his longevity, but whose political life had come to an end amid a swirl of inquiries into his finances and sex life. Medvedev spoke first, briefly, saying continuity was essential to Russia’s future and, characteristically, as Yeltsin had but Putin had not, acknowledging the shortcomings of his presidency. “We did not succeed in doing everything
we hoped and did not manage to complete everything we planned,” he said. Putin appeared grave and unflappable. He was older, his face tightened by cosmetic surgery, his thinning hair having receded further, but at fifty-nine, he remained fit and lithe. “I see the whole sense and purpose of my life as being to serve our country and serve our people, whose support gives me the inspiration and help I need,” he began. He said the coming years would be crucial in shaping the country Russia would become, a Russia that had, he said, restored its “dignity as a great nation” and would be the center of gravity for all of Eurasia. “The world has seen a Russia arisen anew.”

After his brief remarks, he left the dais alone, striding directly past Lyudmila, who stood beside Medvedev’s wife and Patriarch Kirill during the ceremony. She appeared pained at moments. Her disappearance from public life had become the source of speculation, sympathy, and ridicule. Putin stopped two paces beyond her, then turned around and returned to her. He leaned over a red rope and brushed her cheek with a kiss, and then departed.

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I
f there was any expectation that Putin’s third term would herald a softer, less authoritarian approach, it dissipated almost immediately. The authorities launched a sweeping investigation of the melee at Bolotnaya, which officials were now describing as a mass riot and even an attempted coup. Criminal charges were brought against twenty-seven people—not the leaders of the protest movement, not radicals, but ordinary people who had joined the protest in the heady desire to have their voices heard. They included students, a freelance journalist, a sales manager, an artist, a subway worker, and the press aide of one of the few opposition lawmakers in the Duma. One wanted activist, Leonid Razvozzhayev, fled to Ukraine but was arrested there by masked agents and returned to Moscow, where he claimed he had been kidnapped and tortured.
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The defendants faced years in prison, often based on flimsy evidence from videos and the testimony of injured and aggrieved riot police officers. There were no mass arrests after Putin’s inauguration, no Great Terror against dissidents, but rather a steady, selective accretion of prosecutorial pressure against those who stood against him. The authorities used the Bolotnaya investigation as a pretext to carry out investigations across the country for years to come, even in cases that had little connection to the melee that day, including one in 2013 against two human rights activists in Orel, hundreds of miles from Moscow.
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When opposition leaders planned a new rally for June 12, the holiday that marks Russia’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, teams of police investigators swept through Moscow, raiding the apartments of the most prominent leaders of the opposition, including Aleksei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yasin, and Ksenia Sobchak, the television star, socialite, and daughter of Putin’s political mentor, a man once heralded as a symbol of Russia’s fledgling democracy. Her role in the protests—which were viewed with skepticism by some because of her celebrity, her wealth, and her family connections to the man at the top—underscored the depth of the opposition Putin had faced in certain quarters upon his return to the Kremlin. “I never thought I would say this,” a rattled Ksenia Sobchack told a television station after the search of her apartment, “but how good that my father wasn’t here to see this.”
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