This brings us back to Egor Bychkov, one of his men. This young man from Nizhny Tagil was highly attracted to Evgeny Roizman and he got what he wanted – barely into his twenties he became the head of the ‘City Without Drugs’ in Nizhny Tagil. His mission was to bring drug addicts to Roizman’s clinics where they could then be cured. This is when Bychkov’s enemies claim that the kidnappings started: ‘I did what I did as there is no war on drugs in Nizhny Tagil at all. The police are doing absolutely nothing to fight this.’
When he arrived to meet me I felt nervous as I got into his car. The clattering vehicle cannot have been less than twenty years old. It smelt of petrol and cigarettes. We drove to the only modern standard cafe in Tagil. Noticing my name he asked: ‘So are there many Semites where you’re from?’ Bychkov is my age and proud of his town. The restaurant served cappuccino; out of the glass window you could see the huge belching industrial works sending pillars of pollution into people’s lungs. ‘There is no war on drugs here as the police are all corrupt. And there is no visa regime with Central Asia so all these Tajiks and other immigrants are migrating here and selling drugs. The Tajiks and the Gypsies are selling drugs here.’
‘So did you kidnap people?’ I asked him.
‘Well it depends on your definition of kidnapping,’ grinned Bychkov. ‘What we used to do is we used to wait outside the houses of the drug dealers and when the addict came out we would jump him and go… unless you work with us we’ll send you to prison. They always agreed to work with us. Then we would get them to go into the dealers’ homes first… and then we’d storm the dealers’ apartments.’
Bychkov says they stopped 300 drug dealers this way. He claims (his facial expressions are unconvincing) that they did not use guns. Then the addicts would be sent to Roizman’s clinics. ‘We’d get the parents to sign consent.’ There they would be forced onto a cold turkey regime and fed only bread, water, onions and salt. They would often be set to work renovating churches and handcuffed to their beds.
Bychkov was charged by the police with seven abductions and accused of forcing them into Roizman’s centres, where they were then alleged to have been starved and abused. He was sentenced to three and a half years in a prison colony. This arrest sparked something very rare in the Urals – a public outcry. Over five hundred protested in Ekaterinburg for his release and, after being pressured by pop-stars and politicians to pardon him so that the ‘City Without Drugs’ could continue its good work, President Medvedev himself ordered him released.
‘Putin is a tsar,’ he says. ‘I am certain of this. Maybe he even thinks of himself as a god.’ Convinced that the police are to blame for the squalid drug addiction of his city, he claims: ‘If they wanted to fight drugs they could stop it in a single day. They don’t want to. That is why this fund exists. Putin could change it all in one day if he wanted to… but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to fight a war on drugs or on alcoholism. He couldn’t give a shit about the country. I don’t believe Putin doesn’t know what is happening here.’
This is how Bychkov came to be the leader of the local protest movement. He arranged two rallies for fair elections – where he claims over 200 people turned up at each one and tried to observe the elections, driving around from polling station to polling station in his clapped-out car, to see how the fraud was taking place. ‘The workers were told to vote for Putin. They were too scared in the polling booths to vote for somebody else. They didn’t realize that they were not going to find who exactly you had voted for.’ Bychkov is also a symbol – as his huge popularity amongst the workers attests to – that 1,800km east from Moscow in the city Putin signalled out as his citadel of support, opposition feeling is tangled together with vigilante policing, a certain thrill in beating the weak and racist hooliganism.
For the rest of my time in Nizhny Tagil I was looking for workers who were ‘ready, ready to come to Moscow to beat up the protesters there’. I found men ready to beat up Tajiks, to smash in the faces of drug dealers, to hit traffic policemen and beat corrupt officials and, of course, the Gypsies. Not protesters, and not for him. I found a city where wages had gone up but lawlessness, degeneration and abuse remained. These wages had legitimized the regime for a decade, but they had not made these men love it indefinitely. But in Nizhny Tagil I did not find uninformed idiots. The criminalization of the local bureaucracy, and United Russia, the ‘party of bureaucrats’ was apparent to all. What I found were people who said they had voted for Putin because they saw ‘no alternative’, the very ‘alternative’ he had taken away from them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHINESE NIGHTMARES
RUSSIA IS not truly sovereign. It is a territory overshadowed by two superpowers – the European Union and China. In the western provinces, the cars people drive are German second-hand, the economy exists off pipelines pumping into the EU and the symbol of success is a multi-entry Schengen visa. Both the Moscow protesters and the Moscow powerbrokers are dreaming of London. The shadow assets of the Kremlin are hidden in European tax havens and its children at British public schools. Those waving anti-Putin placards are exasperated that their home appliances are increasingly from IKEA but their institutions come closer to Kazakhstan.
Putinism is so dysfunctional that in Russia’s most western province, Kaliningrad, those who live there are quietly trying to Europeanize themselves. They are proud that they have bicycle lanes – and Asiatic Moscow does not. They are proud that 60 per cent of them have Schengen multi-entry visas, in a country where 80 per cent have never travelled abroad.1 The best thing money can buy is a European passport. Local experts predict that at current growth rates half its population will by hook or by crook have become EU citizens by 2040.2 This rejection of Russia even applies to the name – almost a quarter want to rename Kaliningrad as Konigsberg, as it was known before the city was conquered and annexed out of German East Prussia in 1945.3
Knowing how they are tied into Europe, the Russian elite has become paranoid about its eastern territory. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis, white men all over the world have become hysterical about China. The 2008 market crash pricked the Brussels delusion-bubble that Europe would be a normative superpower and the Washington fantasy ‘Project for a new American century’.4 In their disorientation, the Western political class became obsessed about Chinese GDP figures, which they read as a synonym for power, and saw in the glass-tower cities that sprang up overnight in the Pearl Delta shimmering reflections of the eclipse of the West. When China Rules the World became a best-seller.5 In Russia, the policy wonks were also worried, especially Sergey Karaganov, a bald authority, consulted by both Yeltsin and Putin. He warned: ‘If the current economic trends persist, it is very likely that Russia east of the Urals and later the whole country will turn into an appendage of China – first as a warehouse of resources, and then economically and politically. This will happen without any ‘aggressive’ or unfriendly efforts by China, it will happen by default.’6