The circles around the opposition leadership threw themselves into online elections for their own leadership, plus a busy social calendar promoting these newly found roles as ‘icons’. With few exceptions, the hipster counter-elite were more interested in preaching to the choir in Jan-Jak than riding to the end of the metro lines to agitate in estates, supermarkets or for social rights. ‘The regions? What do I know about the regions? I have no answer for them,’ sneered the popular opposition activist Max Katz, a young man with long greasy hair, as we talked one evening in a ‘space’ where one paid by the minute as pretty people strummed guitars. ‘I’m from Moscow. When the people from the regions do something for themselves, I’ll support them.’ He then went back to talking about his ideas for cycle paths though the big city. ‘I have no answers for the regions.’ At least he was honest.
The Moscow Follies
Behaving like an ‘iPhone only’ social club, interested above all in themselves, they could not overcome the fact that Russia is a country of broken links. These stopped the protest movement in the capital from spreading. The regions are extremely cut off geographically, socially and culturally from the Moscow megacity. But 38 per cent of Russians are living in small towns or in the countryside.9 Here, there are African male life expectancies and the human development levels of Central America.10
The opposition couldn’t spread beyond Moscow, as sociologically that is where the wealth and the well-travelled are concentrated. They couldn’t overcome the class and regional gulfs this lopsided development entailed. These mean broken links between classes, which each distrust the other as ‘backward’ or ‘treacherous’. The workers of the tank factories in the Urals disdain the e-workers of Moscow, just as much as the latter look down on these grubby factory hands. They lacked the leaders to heal the broken links between generations – the young disdain the old as ‘Soviets’, the old disdain the young as ‘office plankton’, every family is divided between those nostalgic for the Soviet Union and those nostalgic for a future Medvedev failed to deliver. All the links that normally tie a country together: elections, functioning institutions, free media, a real public space – have all been broken by Putin.
The brightest in the movement knew that this fragmented, shattered Russia held back change. ‘The main problem with our society,’ said Filip Dzyadko, one of the movement’s most adored journalists and activists, ‘are these broken links. Everything that ties us together between regions, generations, past and present, has been shattered by the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the successor regime to the Soviet Union. We will only become a healthy society once we have rebuilt those connections, somehow.’
But there is something else the opposition could not cut through. Russia is the country of hidden links. Over 40 per cent of the new middle class works for the state or the companies its controls.11 This means only a very small amount of the new middle class is actually independent from the state – most are either bureaucrats, doctors, teachers or working for companies that either operate, offer services or depend on natural resources – i.e. on the companies answerable to Putin.12
So where the new middle class may be around 20–30 per cent of the population, only a very small proportion of that feels secure enough to go out and protest. This way, huge swathes of those who naturally would have something to gain by deposing the regime actually have something to lose. One afternoon I sat with some successful friends drinking coffee, looking out the window of their apartment at the belching smokestacks that spew steam over central Moscow, to keep it warm. A beautiful accountant for Gazprom looked out the window, fed up of questions about Navalny and his ilk. ‘Putin’s Russia is not the best Russia. But we work. We eat. It’s not the worst Russia out of the ones I have lived in. It could be so much worse and our lives are not yet terrible. Do you really think Putin is the worst leader? Compared to the others we followed from time to time?’
For this segment, the state-dependent middle class, you hear this old question across Russia – ‘why should I bite the hand that feeds me?’ And it is quickly followed by this answer: ‘As long as I’m all right, Putin can’t be that bad.’ Crucially, this is held together by the hidden links of black cash and corruption. Russia is as corrupt as Papua New Guinea on indexes – because millions are tied into corruption rackets.
The new opposition could not cut through this. Culturally, they lacked the tools. Russian political culture always divided the country into the vanguard that has the right to rule, and the people who must be led – like cattle. It has endlessly resurfaced since Peter the Great, be it as Bolsheviks or ‘young reformers’. Putin, dreaming of pipelines, behaves as if he has no interest in crowds of Muscovites, whilst Moscow – dreaming of Europe – is disdainful of the rest of Russia.
The opposition counter-elite reacted to defeat childishly. They simply insisted that all those who supported Putin were the least dynamic, most backward and ill-informed parts of society. In reality, things were more knotted and complicated. They, as the leaders of the ‘creative classes’, would win sooner or later. They were the wave of history – online and globalized, middle class and modernized. The way they talked about provincials, their words derogatory and their tone mocking, left one convinced that most of them think they are ‘poor cretins’. It stems from the same belief that the Moscow elites have the right to determine the country’s course, the root of managed democracy in the first place.
Worse still, opposition leaders refuse to spend time over the Volga to make up for this – ‘People are telling me you’re very Moscow based,’ I said to Navalny. ‘I am very Moscow based,’ he snapped back. He repeatedly turned down suggestions from his (at times frustrated) team to take a regional tour, until it was too late. The state, under the guise of an embezzlement investigation, then banned him from leaving Moscow. The old opposition that he supplanted spends its time on the European think-tank tour scene at conferences, not in the industrial cities where Putinism is a grim affair. Kasparov, Nemtsov, Kasyanov are constantly rushing to the airport – and flying out West. When Putin claims these three men are not ‘real Russians’, the fact that they are barely in Moscow only helps.
There is no one like Yeltsin – who in 1991 spoke like a real Russian – or even like Lenin, who craved taking ‘the light’, ‘the revolution’ and ‘electrification’ into every corner. The opposition says they are limited by money: this is not entirely true. What is missing is desire. If Navalny found the time for a holiday in Cancun and a pit stop in New York between the 2012 parliamentary and the presidential elections, before he was banned from leaving Moscow, he could have found the time to take the night train to Kazan. I know many cheap places to stay there. This is why Leonid Parfyonov, another culprit who failed to speak at the Sakharova rally despite public appeals as he was enjoying a European city break, remarked: ‘Navalny is not the leader. He is just very popular. That’s different.’
Figures like this from the opposition may not be present in the regions, but the truly rich, the truly powerful are only half present in Moscow. There cannot be enough pressure on them to make them desperate for change. The oligarchs with resources to throw into battle – their lives are already half-offshore in London, Tel Aviv or Geneva. With half their lives comfortable and secure, it takes the sting out of authoritarianism. It lowers the stakes for risking everything. Why bother, when your children are at an English public school or an American university and your money is in an Austrian or Cypriot bank account? ‘If only we were as far away as Brazil,’ I have heard more than one sigh. Rather than being too far away from Europe, people have come to fear that those who could force change are too integrated and at home in it to modernize Russia. As long as Domodedovo Airport is always there and the border is always open, what is wrong with Russia now will not be enough to push those with real resources into something truly dangerous. How desperate can this super-elite ever become when they have mansions in Kensington?