The team leaders of this fraud were usually state employees, especially teachers, who were offered ‘bonuses’ larger than several months’ wages for this work. Anyone handing out leaflets for the party was paid to do so. Typically in Putin’s ‘elections’ the ‘Citizens Initiative’, headed by none other than his former finance minister Alexey Kudrin, estimated that in big cities 5–10 per cent of votes were cast by ‘controlled voters’ and 5–10 per cent by ‘payroll voters’, or from manipulated lists of ‘dead souls’.13 Their research suggested that with 20–25 per cent of the population as ‘controlled voters’ a low turnaround could easily give the regime the 45–50 per cent it needed to claim victory.14 The orchestrators of this were almost always in the governor’s office, in which the occupants all knew that when United Russia had got only 35 per cent in the 2010 Tver regional elections, the regional chief ‘responsible’ had been fired. It was a warning shot to the rest.
There was no real alternative on the ballot paper itself. Voters found only parties that the Kremlin had permitted to register – tamed parties whose leadership was riddled with collaborators and whose chiefs were on Surkov’s speed dial. The largest, Zyuganov’s KPRF, Zhirinovsky’s LDPR and Just Russia, chaired by Putin’s St Petersburg ally Sergey Mironov, were all essentially state-sanctioned private nomenklaturas, not ‘parties’ in any meaningful sense of the word. However, those who only got their news from controlled national TV were supposed to have been duped into thinking they were the ‘opposition’.
Inside the polling stations vote counts were then sent to the Central Election Commission, where they were often inflated, sometimes by two to three times. An indication of ballot-stuffing on an industrial scale was the statistical spread of the votes – whereas the other parties recorded a normal distribution of some low returns to some high returns in certain constituencies – Putin’s party disproportionally scored high results.15 Voter turnout also displayed a linear correlation to United Russia voting, pointing to massive ballot stuffing.16 The results for voter turnout are studded with precincts reporting exact round numbers – from 80 per cent to 100 per cent, benefiting the Kremlin’s deputies.17 Voters in the military, asylums and prisons, or any other closed-off institution were all suspiciously fervent United Russia supporters. Shamelessly, one Moscow psychiatric hospital reported 99.5 per cent support for Putin’s party.18 On the ground this translated into a ridiculous situation where some neighbouring precincts – well documented from Moscow to Ural Magnitogorsk – would return United Russia votes at around 30 per cent and others at 80 per cent.19 There were none in the middle. Out in the regions, especially in the non-Russian North Caucasus, the numbers had more in common with elections in a Middle Eastern dictatorship, with results of over 90 per cent for the party of power being returned.20 It has been estimated by statisticians that as many as 14 million votes could have been stolen.21
A feeling of impunity had overtaken the vote-riggers. We can impose any result. We can decide on any number, regardless of what polling may say. The results came in at 49.3 per cent of the vote and 238 of 450 seats.22 Yet analysts have estimated they could not have got more than 35 per cent of the vote.23 And it is always when a feeling of impunity overtakes the elite that it enters into grave danger.
Under Putinism the elections were supposed to have been fully converted into ‘plebiscites’, ratifying a decision already taken, and richer Muscovites transformed into an ‘offshore elite’, frightened of the masses and living increasingly well, but in various forms of exile: virtual exile as Internet use boomed, internal exile in the small clubs for the ‘dem-shiza’, or democratic schizophrenics, or in physical exile in London or the Côte d’Azur. In the run-up to the December 2011 parliamentary elections, nobody expected mass protests or that their detonator would be the Russian constitution and an Anglophone dandy working at a management consultancy.
Ilya Faybisovich is exactly the kind of person Putin expected to shut up. Wearing carefully selected tweeds and thick-rimmed glasses popular in Dalston, formerly in London for seven years and working for a global American consultancy, he blends into a generational style of Muscovites in their twenties and early thirties usually labelled ‘the hipsters’. This is the kind of person who may be what is dubbed ‘an office plankton’, but yet dresses immaculately as if for a night out in Shoreditch rather than commuting on the crammed Moscow underground. The city’s ‘hipsters’ come across as self-consciously globalized and at ease with the West, so different from the post-Soviet wounded in much of the country. With a kind of avidity and intensity in fashion that makes up a youth culture, which their ‘Soviet’ parents cannot understand, the ‘hipsters’ were not expected to have a sense of politics. And if they did it was late-night bar chat. Mr Faybisovich, more or less, had shut up. He had been blogging ‘all about London’. He remembers: ‘There is no clear explanation about why what was about to happen, actually happened, but there was real rage at the election results as they came in.’
And the numbers that came in were painful to the ear. In Moscow one exit poll, later withdrawn for ‘inaccuracy’, gave United Russia 27 per cent of the vote but this had jumped to 46.5 per cent of the vote when the Central Elections Commission made its announcement.24 Faybisovich explains:
‘I had registered to be an election observer and gone to my local precinct. I’m not a communist at all, but had registered to observe the vote counting as one of them. So… I turned up at the polling station and they denied me access. They were nervous, scared and clearly implicated. I was accused of “bias”, shown the door – thus ending my short career as an election monitor.’
Faybisovich, angered at being chucked out and with United Russia’s ‘obviously fake poll results’ ringing in his ears, grumpily went to the Moscow non-fiction book fair. ‘It was then I realized that I had to do something. I started sending out a message, a stream of consciousness really to around 120 friends, saying we had to do something.’ It was then that he stumbled upon the fact that one of the fringe opposition parties, that had long struggled to make an impact, was holding on to a protest permit in central Moscow. ‘They are a bit older than us, the kind of guys that though they knew Facebook exists, they didn’t really know it exists because they didn’t know how to really use it to promote things. Their page had hardly anybody going to it. I said, “Let me do some PR for it,” and I became admin for the protest page.’ The next day RSVPs had gone from 180 to 2,700. Calling friends, sending personal messages, writing on walls, the rally that could have been yet another empty occasion was gathering traction. They managed to secure the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy into pitching in some support too – and over 5,000 people turned out.
‘When I saw how many people had turned up at Clean Ponds for the rally’ – the small pool where in the 1990s the police turned a blind eye to the boozers, punk-rockers, skinheads and all-day outdoor drinkers – ‘I just felt relieved,’ recalls Faybisovich. Two days of online activism had turned a non-event into a protest. But not quite a political protest. With makeshift placards against the ‘party of crooks and thieves’, printed with the United Russia bear angrily lugging a giant sack of money out of the map of Russia, those present were making a moral point, not supporting a particular person. Spontaneous, slightly shocked at its own attendance, the gathering at Clean Ponds was as fascinated by itself than those on stage.