‘It’s a specific kind of social stagnation. It’s frustration with the sense that we live in a society where everything is treated as a resource – you become dean of philosophy just to exploit it for money, you become editor of a major newspaper just to exploit it for money – it’s a frustration with a society where the only thing that counts is connections and resources and has nothing to do with merit. It is a fear that Russia is turning into an anti-meritocracy: a place where elite oligarchic monopolization represses those that have the capacity to rise.’
For young politicians like Ilya Ponomarev, FSB officers and aspiring oligarchs, this fear was very real. Putin had surrounded himself with people of a similar age and background. Putin’s return meant that they would be staying in the same positions – perhaps until 2024. Those who knew them well said that in the security services this fear was particularly acute. Whether you were a young Duma deputy or a security officer, the ‘vertical of loyalty’ was whispered to mean you would remain middle-rank forever. A similar resentment at the very real gerontocracy of the Brezhnev era had pushed talented apparatchiks around Gorbachev.
In the weeks that dragged through a boring autumn leading into the campaign for the parliamentary elections, Russian journalists began twitching, as if smelling a gas that no one could see. Things had started to go amiss. It began with the mocking jokes – ‘the man referred to as President Medvedev’, or quips about Putin’s seemingly strangely adjusted features: ‘Mr Botox’. And then a flutter of seeming malfunctions in the social order: an audience stood up to clap at a foreign movie screening about jailed Khodorkovsky, cars had begun honking at the long motorcades blocking traffic in the most congested major city in the world as Russia’s leaders belted in black limousines back to their estates on the Rublevka; to the intense distress of a police officer, one man refused to move his car even though he was told ‘Putin is passing’.8 The glamour magazine Afisha was running increasingly political and biting front covers, while across town, United Russia posters were occasionally torn off the walls of housing estates.
Perhaps it was unsurprising as to why people were so disengaged. The party’s leafleting – showing space rockets, fighter jets in formation, combine harvesters and overproducing factories – looked both eerily and irksomely Soviet. The bland slogans on leaflets pushed through letterboxes in Moscow, ‘The Future For Us’, made such little attempt to persuade voters, they reminded elderly residents of Soviet ‘elections’ – where only one candidate had been on the ballot. The corrosive effects of a lack of narrative began to undermine Putinist telepopulism. The Kremlin’s main asset, the popularity of its front man, was no longer what it had been. Opinion polls began to tell a story of flagging enthusiasm. The number of people who trust Putin had fallen to 47 per cent in November 2011 from 69 per cent in 2009.9 His personal approval ratings had slumped from 83 per cent after the Georgian war in 2008, to 61 per cent in November 2011.10 They fell seven points after the announcement of his return that September. In a further poll breakdown only 26 per cent believed that Putin had adequately or successfully coped with Russia’s problems and 50 per cent disapproved of the Russian government.11 The discrepancy between ‘trust’ and ‘approval’ suggested that many were supporting Putin as they saw no alternative.
They say that all outbreaks of unrest take place to a backdrop of exhaustion, and are an unleashing of repressed agitation. It always begins with one event, one unpredictable twist that takes even those who wished for it by surprise. At the end of November 2011 it happened. They booed Putin. It was a mixed martial arts contest – ‘struggle without rules’ in Russian – and the beery crowd, swaying slightly, were the kind of people Putin thought were ‘his people’: lower middle class and interested in fights, the meat of the Putin majority. Stepping onto the stage he moved to congratulate the Russian wrestler who had slammed an American, whose tattoos in Russian Cyrillic for ‘Freedom’ seemed to have earned him little sympathy. ‘A true Russian warrior,’ Putin told the victor, as a whistle comes, then a brave, tentative boo from the safety of the dark stands under spinning spotlights, before an ascending orchestra of booing, first nervous, then a loud and gratuitous: ‘Get out of here.’12 Locked in a moment that to describe as ‘awkward’ would be more than an understatement, the ‘warrior’ with a dropping lower lip looks aghast at the once and future President. The video went viral. In offices and on Facebook pages from Kaliningrad to Sakhalin, people were asking: ‘Have you seen this yet?’
The martial arts fans had achieved something that opposition politicians had long failed to do: to make Putin look weak. The political atmospheric pressure was changing. Occasionally, in bars the perestroika anthem ‘Changes’ by the iconic Soviet rock band Kino was being played. It invoked what Russians refer to as the ‘kitchen period’, when collapse was only muttered about in private for risk of looking unhinged or somebody listening in. The lyrics go: ‘In the kitchen like a blue flower, gas burns, cigarettes in our hands, tea on the table, so there this scheme is easy, there is nothing more left, it’s all up to us.’
The song is about realizing you can revolt, but struggling to make it real. Though the 1980s and 1990s had been a chaotic and hungry time, there had been a sense of hope and not one of pervasive cynicism. Despite material gains, the despondency of the intelligentsia was asphyxiating in the run-up to the 2011 Duma elections. A kitchen period of a sort had emerged in Russia, but in a country awash with consumerism it was far trickier to exit from, a bit of booing none withstanding. Yet even fierce loyalists in United Russia, like the lawmaker Vladimir Burmatov, recognized that something had gone very much awry.
The people simply did not understand the place of Putin in politics after his return. The people did not understand why the swap with Medvedev had happened. And as a party we felt we were the strongest, incontestable and we stopped speaking to certain sectors of society. In the elections that followed we lost them completely: the intelligentsia, the middle class and the young. Especially in Moscow.
The Electoral Detonation
They say it is always the authorities that provoke unrest, although they never do it consciously. When managed democracy had begun, it was done in the name of the elite and the middle class, whipped up into fearing the ‘Bolshevik menace’ of 1996, for people who craved stability in Putin, who wanted modernization in Medvedev. The winter 2011–12 election cycle was seen merely as parliamentary and presidential plebiscites to validate Putin’s decision to return. This was not an ‘engineered’ outcome but an autocratic choice. It was not made in the name of elites and the middle class – like in 1996 – but in spite of them and against them. It was a decision that said Putin had become like a tsar, accountable to no one.
The December 2011 parliamentary election was supposed to have delivered a resounding victory for United Russia in order to pave the way for Putin’s return in the March 2012 presidential vote. It was rigged in the following way. To begin with, parties that might have proved popular were not allowed to register and thus participate. Government-controlled TV relentlessly covered the activities of Putin as ‘prime minister’, giving him in his other capacity as chairman of United Russia a vast air-time bias in favour of the governing party. On the ground, several tactics were promoted to boost Kremlin votes. Many students in state dormitories across the country were informed that if they did not vote for United Russia they risked losing their accommodation. Similar encouragements were made to many state employees. At polling stations themselves a technique known as the ‘carousel’ was in full swing. Paid to vote for United Russia – usually cited at around $15 – crowds were shoved onto buses and then delivered from one polling station to another around their locality, voting for Putin’s party again and again.