The protest movement showed that it was no longer possible in Russia, if it ever had been, to speak of ‘the masses’ or the ‘people’. The contradictions of Putinism had created different countries on different trajectories for whom the winter’s rallies and marches were a Russian clash of civilizations. In neither was Putin loved or feared, but rather what he represented – stability or stagnation of the state. In a sense, the dividing line in this clash was a question of what period in history frightened you the most: the 1980s stagnation or the 1990s chaos? But in the months that followed, even Navalny had begun to feel he had hit a far bigger problem than the OMON – a brick wall in people’s minds. Something profound had changed in Russia – but far from everyone in it. Navalny sighed:
‘Every time I get arrested I am grabbed and thrown in by the same kind of policemen… and every time I talk to them: “Why are you arresting me? Do you not know that Putin is a thief?” And every time I get the same kind of answers – they all hate United Russia, they don’t really like Putin – but they throw me into the cell and shout the same thing back at me. “It’ll never get any better, mate… It’ll never get any better.”’
He shrugs his shoulders: ‘This is the huge problem. It’s the way people think.’
CHAPTER TEN
MOSCOW IS NOT RUSSIA
THEY MADE a human chain, they let off hundreds of white balloons, they wore white ribbons in parliament, they made beautiful websites, they stuck stickers denouncing him in grimy metro carriages, then held a writer’s walk, then a protest walk and drove round and round the ring road honking ‘Down with the dictator’ and waving their white ribbons, whilst Navalny yelled into the microphone, ‘Down with the party of crooks and thieves, down, down, down with the thieves’, until he was exhausted and simply wanted to go home.
Putin won. The opposition rallies dwindled. The marches got smaller. They dried up outside Moscow. In winter 2012, every few weeks they could still pull out thousands in the capital, this certainly being the demographic in Russia with the best English and the most accustomed to skiing in France. This was the core of something and they called themselves the best of the best. But it was only the beginning of a new opposition, one that could challenge the Kremlin another day. It was not lost on them, that in 2004 when Putin lost in Ukraine, Kiev had been swamped by as many as a million Orange protesters.
‘We are seeing a certain weariness. People had hoped for a quick result,’ said the opposition personality Ilya Yashin, ‘But it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.’1 The movement was not a complete failure. They had torn up the Putin consensus. The new middle class had begun to become political. The old ‘stability’ was over. It was the beginning of the end of Putinism by consent, not the Putin regime. However, though the government was almost illegitimate in the eyes of the Muscovite bourgeoisie, for all their tweets and thunderous speeches they had failed to dislodge him.
The protests failed because Moscow is not Russia. Statistically speaking, the capital is another country. Most people live in drab cities about two to three nights away from the Kremlin by train, where the level of human development is somewhere between third-world Peru and Jamaica.2 Not Moscow – it is comparable to South Korea, has higher salaries than Poland, a bigger GDP than Hong Kong and more billionaires than New York, or anywhere else in the world.3 Most ‘federal subjects’ are economically the size of Ethiopia, Tanzania or other African countries.4 Not Moscow – with about 22 per cent of all Russian GDP, it is a city worth more than Shanghai, Beijing or Istanbul.5 It has become a megacity, culturally and economically, dominating the country like London dominates Britain, or even Stockholm Sweden, but not demographically – even if one accounts for the unregistered and throws in the whole of the wider Moscow region, no more than 20 million out of 142 million Russians are living here.
Defining the mood of the megacity matters enormously. Yet cut off from the rest of the country, the opposition failed to break out and become a national movement. This reflects Moscow’s accelerating economic disconnection with Russia. The incomes of the richest one-fifth of the capital, the protestors on the streets, are over twenty times the income of the poorest one-fifth of Russians – a Latin American disparity.6 If you are a foreigner, Moscow is the third most expensive city in the world.7 If you are working class from the provinces, moving to Moscow is unaffordable. If you are from Siberia or the Far East, a ticket to Moscow would cost you months of wages.8
Cut off economically, means cut off socially and cut off culturally. The new Facebook and white-ribbon opposition mirrored Moscow as a whole. It disdains the hinterland, viscerally, like eighteenth-century Paris. This is because those from the sticks have come here to escape, whilst the ‘creative classes’ that throng the opposition, be they e-workers, globalizers, students or designer-journalists, live like an offshore elite. When they go to the airport they only fly to the south and the west – the oligarchy spend their summers in Tuscany, the ‘creative classes’ spend weekends in Berlin, and those they both call the ‘office plankton’ go to Turkey.
The Moscow elites today are as different from Russians as the tsarist elites of St Petersburg, who spoke in a pretentious pidgin French, took the waters in Baden-Baden and tried to marry into the English aristocracy. This has revived a nineteenth-century dialectic between the intelligentsia and the masses. They speak in the name of a people they are cut off from and do not know; they claim to know what is best for them but actually unnerve these same masses. This leaves them powerless and anguished. ‘I’ve never been to those places… I’ve never been anywhere in Russia really,’ remarked the admin of the main opposition Facebook group, who did his degree in London – ‘I spend my time going from my house to the Red October district and back again, which you know is the place to be.’
They are even more cut off from the hinterland than their tsarist forbears. They never travel ‘to Russia’ and this is a break with the past. The tsarist elite had its estates in Russia – huge lands in Tambov or Rostov to spend the summer on. Chekhov’s three aristocratic sisters longing for the capital (‘To Moscow, to Moscow’) could not be Russian aristocratic characters today. The truly wealthy today are 99 per cent centred on the capital. But they could be working class, of course – or dreaming of somewhere else (‘To London, to London’). Then, even if the estates disappeared, the communist elite also often found itself out of Moscow for years on end – Brezhnev and Chernenko in Chisinau, Andropov in Karelia, Khrushchev in Kiev, Yeltsin in Sverdlovsk. The same went for lowly workers in the military–industrial complex and for anyone in lengthy military service. Not to mention the years of exile that the dissidents – the conscience of the intelligentsia – spent in outer Siberia.
No longer. The new Russian state does not send people on multi-year-long assignments to drain the marshes along the Volga, build institutes in Khabarovsk or settle the Taiga. This is a far less romantic country – but one that is losing its knowledge of self. You get a sense from their blogs and conversation that what these ‘creative classes’ really want is to turn the whole of Moscow into an ersatz London (or Shoreditch), with bicycle lanes and pedestrianized streets, which has sprung up in the cafes they frequent (Bar John Donne, Café Jan-Jak). They do not want to go out, like the Bolsheviks, to convert the people.