As Navalny spoke, 100,000 people wondered if they were watching a revolution in Russia and asked themselves, their breath turning to a vapour in the cold air, if Putin’s career could be measured in years or months. But with the right pair of eyes, looking over the crowds and the Romanov flags, to Navalny clutching the microphone with bulging pupils, you could see his speech was the point where the wave broke and began to roll back. It hit a wall inside Russians minds, because this is still a cautious country. The meaning of Sakharova was not revolutionary – because most Russians did not want a revolution, they wanted change but not at any price. The protests reflected both how much Russia had changed under Putinism but also how it was still a scarred country, not at ease with itself. After the rally Navalny clicked play on the video: ‘Afterwards I watched that speech online and I thought… “Oh my God what a bullshit.”’
Anti-Orange
Three days later Vladislav Surkov found himself demoted. ‘Stabilization had devoured its children,’ he snarled on the radio, before letting out a sudden laugh. ‘I am too odious for this brave new world.’34 Surkov was reassigned to a ministerial portfolio. ‘We are already in the future,’ he remarked, ‘and the future is not calm.’ He said he would no longer play domestic politics. Out amongst the protesters his new brief as minister for modernization projects was mockingly referred to as the ‘minister for nothing’.
Cutting the cords from the puppet master was not the end of the show. It set the stage for a huge and hateful firework display of political ventriloquism to keep Putin in power and jump the hurdle of the March 2012 presidential election. The first act was designed to distract the opposition and give the illusion of concessions to those out on the streets. The lead role was taken by Dmitry Medvedev who, in tones of concern and aghast expressions, proposed a package of reforms that at first glance appeared to be concessions: the return of gubernatorial elections, easing party registration, meetings with senior editors and selected protest leaders. But not Navalny. Medvedev began parroting protest slogans and encouraging his subordinates to do the same. At first these declarations were greeted excitedly, until it transpired that a ‘presidential filter’ would apply to gubernatorial elections and the eased party registration had seen a rush of obvious Kremlin clones like the Party of Beer Lovers.
This was a distracting flare from the main propaganda effort; the main stage would be the most emotive high point in Moscow, the Poklonnaya Hill. The name means loosely ‘the kneeling hill’, the place of submission, where Napoleon had waited in vain after the battle of Borodino for the Kremlin keys to be handed to him. It is today home to the gigantic dome of the victory park, the memorial to the 1941–5 war, the site of the eternal flame and the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It is not a place to desecrate, this is a place emotively visited by that now frail generation in their final years.
Here the ‘anti-Orange’ protest took place. To demonstrate to those in the swamp that whatever they could muster, they could muster more, an estimated 125,000 people were brought to Poklonnaya on 4 February 2012. From a stage emblazoned with the slogans ‘Meeting of Patriotic Strength’, and ‘Russia Forever’, the crowd was told that the opposition would hand the keys of Russia’s nuclear weapons to the United States. The agitators bellowed and frothed at the mouth. The speakers of the ‘anti-Orange committee’ tried to scratch every Russian scar in the crowd until it drew blood. The ‘Anti-Orange Appeal’ announced:
‘When I look at the leaders of the Orange zone, I find in them the demons and the devils of the 1990s that ruined my country and plagued the great productive power of the Soviet Union, brought the Americans to our secret centres and allowed them to make off with piles of secret documents…
‘Another of its features – this blatant social arrogance. In fact – we can call it the social racism of the current leaders of the street. This is the revolution of the rich, the revolution of mink-wearing revolutionaries in dialogue with the mink-wearing liberal revolutionaries inside the Kremlin over the heads of the people, in total disregard for the people […]
‘The third feature of the Orange street, that has appeared in all Orange revolutions – is the willingness to be led. These Orange revolutionaries are not national leaders. The people may think they are real revolutionaries, not Orange – but the master of their minds is the West – the United States and NATO.’35
This kind of visceral state-sanctioned anti-Western propaganda was more reminiscent of Tehran than Moscow, a decade earlier. Yet this crowd was mostly made up of men and women forced to be there. Many were state employees who had been given ‘bonuses’ to head out there, many were migrant workers who could not speak Russian, many were bused in from factories in the provinces to make up the numbers.
To fake the imminent March 2012 presidential elections, the Kremlin needed to fake a protest movement. To fake legitimacy, the $12 billion oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov was encouraged by the Kremlin as a liberal ‘vote catcher’. His policies, as Greece teetered on the edge of default, included ‘joining the Eurozone’.36 This is because his purpose was not liberalism, but to look daft enough to enable Putin to win.
They had also stopped pretending everything was all right. There was no more dreaming with BRICs. One afternoon I went to see the Nashi MP Robert Shlegel for coffee. He was tense:
‘This country is not turning into a dictatorship! I was born in Turkmenistan; I know perfectly know what a dictatorship is… And I know better than anyone how dysfunctional, how incapable, how appallingly badly run this system is, which is why I am fighting every day inside the party to make it better… I never believed the ‘Orange threat’ when I joined Nashi in the first place… but now, it’s real. Those people – Navalny and his friends – they are real revolutionaries, who will wreck this country.’
Putinism had become tautological, its means and ends had become identical. Unable to offer any positive vision for the country, any project to justify Putin to 2018, the propaganda had fallen back on ‘stability’. Russia needed to vote for ‘stability’ to preserve ‘stability’. Unable to conjure up an imagined future, it fell back on invoking half-imagined horrors from the past. It cast support for Putin not as something positive, in the name of an agenda, but as something negative, against ‘chaos’, ‘the Orange Revolution’ or ‘NATO’.
Russia is a wounded nation. From the moment Navalny had shouted out at the crowd ‘there are enough of us here to seize the Kremlin and the White House right now’, the protests began to get smaller and smaller and Putin gathered greater and greater numbers of ‘protesters’ to his own ‘rallies’. Playing on fears and trying to rub wounds with salty fingers, whilst pretending to bandage them, the Kremlin’s propaganda went into overdrive. Videos circulated warning that without Putin the country would simply collapse.37 The Chinese would take Siberia, NATO would enter Kaliningrad, the Internet would be cut off, Navalny would be awarded the Nobel peace prize and hyperinflation would return in a 1990s redux.38 State TV incessantly suggested that the Americans were funding the rallies, Putin said Hillary Clinton was paying for them – ‘the Orange Revolution’ was coming. Those close to the Kremlin felt satisfied by February. ‘The protest wave has peaked,’ said Gleb Pavlovsky, attending one inconspicuously in a thick hat.