Navalny had broken two Russian barriers – the sound barrier and the trust barrier. In a decade, which had begun with Putin imposing a ‘videocracy’, he had found a way to circumvent it and reach the Russians who were not supposed to know about him. In a decade, which had been marked by a bottomless cynicism and distrust of all politicians (‘PR-shiks’) he was taken at his word. No opposition politician had been trusted on his claims about accountings like this before. By April 2011 independent polls showed that 68 per cent considered Navalny’s allegations about corruption reliable, rising to 88 per cent amongst Muscovites, 79 per cent amongst the wealthy and 76 per cent of young people. Navalny was becoming more than an opposition leader.49 He was leaving Nemtsov, Milov and Chirikova behind – he was fast becoming a Russian hero.
Navalny became a hero because he was the young man in whom young Russians saw themselves. He was a hero of his time. He has depicted his enemies – corrupt officials – as the enemies of Russia whilst presenting himself as the defender of Russia against these ‘bloodsuckers’. Navalny brought together in one personality all the virtues and vices of the generation that had become men under Putin. Navalny is his generation in his instinctive Caucasophobia, rumbling nationalism and aggressive streak that fired plastic pellets at a heckler outside a bar. Navalny is his generation in his selfless activism, witty blogging and anti-authoritarian willingness to debate an issue and lose a vote.
He summed up the paradoxical consequences of Putinism. The propaganda that the Kremlin’s relentless PR machine had been feeding Russia had left it a much angrier and more Islamophobic country than Yeltsin left it. Yet that same Kremlin’s overarching projects to build a ‘United Russia state’ with a tame television system had left the country far more anti-authoritarian and sure of its commitment to free speech and a fair vote than it had been in the 1990s. All of this comes together in Alexey Navalny, the democrat who breathed the independence of the Internet, but marched with fascists every year screaming ‘stop feeding the Caucasus’. Playing to his Aryan looks he cuts the part of a leader and smiles in this self-mocking way that would have been such a hit in the Central Committee or Hollywood. But his is a weak, cold, handshake.
‘Are you ever worried they are going to kill you?’ I asked as we picked at a disappointing lunch deal at the Vietnamese cafe near his office.
‘Look… I really, really hate this regime,’ he replied, menacingly. The way he said it made me suddenly try to hold his gaze, but his eyes tipped slightly downwards, as if talking to someone other than just me.
‘They are leading this country into a catastrophe. It is not the opposition that will make the country collapse. Putin will make the country fall apart. But it’s not like they will kill me tomorrow. There is a risk of course… There is a risk they could do… but it’s completely ridiculous to compare me to those guys that were fighting apartheid. There is a constant routine… they raided my flat, they hack my account, there are people who follow me… you’re speaking English… so “you’re a spy”. But… here I am sitting in this cafe.’
Navalny’s wife Yulia was not quite so calm. After he had given a presentation to a crowd of adoring and, thanks to him, worked-up students at the New Economic School, one of them asked him that same question. And she burst into inconsolable tears.50 He was not going to stop:
‘By coming back Putin has decided to turn Russia into an authoritarian state like Belarus. He is pushing, a bit here, a bit there, to find out how far he can go. And there is only one thing that can stop him. A gigantic protest, or the West.’
CHAPTER NINE
THE DECEMBRISTS
THE KGB always thought Putin was flawed. Personnel training for Soviet foreign intelligence was onerous, pursued with a rigor and exactitude second only to that given to its cosmonauts. Agents were subjected to months of psychological tests, pulse measurements, head scans, role-plays and ‘Western’ life-simulations in its sealed academies, between bouts of form-filling and hours of language classes, broken up only by over-boiled institutional meals in its canteens, which sometimes were more or less the high point of the day. The agents would chatter about where they would all wind up – would it be London, Tokyo or West Berlin? Everyone wanted to be in a ‘real foreign country’ with blue-jeans and cassette-players, not in the empty-shelved Warsaw Pact or anywhere near ‘socialist’ consumer goods, which were of such pitiable quality during Putin’s education that over 2,000 Soviet colour TVs were self-combusting in Moscow every year.1
But the agency, for now, just wanted to catalogue their weaknesses, because identifying flaws in others is the same as knowing exactly where you can make your incisions. Putin admits the KGB evaluated him as a stunted man. The instructors concluded he was at risk, but not in the slightest to succumbing to the temptations of women or drink, but due to a pervasive ‘lowered sense of danger’.2 He was also classified as a man unhelpfully unsocial, quite closed-off. This may explain why the KGB chose to place him in a second-tier East German city, not over the front line in the West, where a TV self-combusting was simply unheard of and a Soviet agent needed to be on his guard. A posting to Dresden can only have been a disappointment. Years later, Putin still only grudgingly half admits the agency’s character assessment. ‘I don’t think that I had a lowered sense of danger, but the psychologists came to this conclusion having followed my behaviour for a long time.’3
But they were right. This same stunted sense of danger saw Putin misjudge the public mood and hostility present in Russia to his 2012 return to the Kremlin. No sooner had the announcement been made but disgruntlement, with a shadow of defiance, seemed to have seeped through the capital, to hang in the smoke-trailed air of the bars that Moscow’s intelligentsia and moneyed elite had made their hang-outs. In these shallow places, where politics had been waved away during the boom years, snatches of political conversations began to be overheard, muffled by talk of emigration, London and frustration. For the denizens of Moscow’s trendiest haunts, like the fashionable fake French bistro Jan-Jak, a different kind of blog was becoming more popular – the easy materialism of Look At Me was out and Navalny’s page that said he was waging the ‘final battle between good and neutrality’ was in.4
‘This repoliticization happened slowly, the way everyone used to wear Levis, but now everyone wants Diesel jeans. I think I was always talking about politics, but maybe even I wasn’t,’ pauses a friend and magazine editor in a Georgian restaurant with Dubai prices and a slick feel, such that even to call it a Georgian restaurant, the Russian equivalent of an Indian takeaway, seems somewhat misleading. ‘But then it started to get stronger. It started with the financial crisis, which shook us up. At first a few at the table wanted to talk politics. Then more did. And without really noticing we were all talking about politics again.’
Celebrities, for whom guessing the public mood was necessary to stay in the public eye, began to flirt with a shallow, smirking, anti-Putinism. At one end, the beaten journalist and former sailor Oleg Kashin found himself turning into a celebrity. With a terrible spittle lisp, f-ing his way through his analysis, Kashin’s line had once been as fringe as him. ‘Whenever you get the hell out of Moscow, you know what they tell you? They say: “We are just a bloody Moscow colony.” This whole place could just collapse in ten years or so,’ mouthed off Kashin, at the same table, in the same Georgian restaurant. ‘Russia could collapse all over again.’ But Kashin was now being invited to give speeches, more or less like this, at the nightclub Bright Night, belonging to the grumpy oligarch Mikhail Friedman. They hit a nerve. Kashin had once been a nobody, and a reporter for a pro-Putin newspaper. The sourer the political chatter got, the more famous he became. At the other end of the spectrum, celebrities who wanted to stay the centre of attention began to snigger publicly at the Putinists.