This is ‘deep Russia’ not hipster-land – but this cack-handed performance pulled the plug on Putin’s legitimacy. The ‘national leader’ saw his rating plunge to less than 30 per cent and in the parliamentary elections the party scored just 29 per cent.45 When unrest broke out in Moscow in December 2011, local Facebook protests flared. ‘We had seen the real face of United Russia,’ said the e-organizers. Luck gave them the hook-up that never happened in the capital, sealing the fate of the Yaroslavl ‘bears’. Evgeny Urlashov, a local defector from the establishment, joined the Facebook protests and was tweeted to victory in mayoral elections. This was not an isolated ballot, but the tenth out of fifteen mayoral votes that the Kremlin lost that season.
This scenario on a national level is not unthinkable, though only mayoral elections can be lost so easily as an ‘escape valve’ for discontent. However, the new stubbly mayor, smoking a shisha pipe like the mad hatter in a hockey-themed bar, is as frustrated with the Moscow opposition as some governors are with the Moscow government:
‘The opposition is quite simply scaring people. I think that if the opposition in Russia is trying to pursue some kind of “revolution” then I am against it. I am positive that us Russians are united on one thing. We don’t want to have a revolution. We don’t want war, we don’t want bloodshed, we don’t want slaughter.’
This is a huge problem as he is convinced that the vertical is unworkable:
‘Before, when I was a party member, United Russia wouldn’t let me do anything without orders from Moscow. I wouldn’t do a single thing without waiting for Moscow to say so. I ended up doing nothing at all. Now I can do all kinds of things with power. Look, I can build a kindergarten. But the party of power would do nothing at all without the most explicit directions even for the tiniest of things. The huge problem with this vertical of power is that it has become a vertical of corruption. The vertical prizes loyalty not effectiveness.’
The mayor suddenly had urgency in his voice:
‘Putin needs to be stronger! Putin needs to battle the corrupt thieves. If Putin wants to be the good tsar, to be the great tsar, which I know is his intention… He needs to change the vertical of power. He needs to do battle with the thieves, with free courts, fair elections and with tough rough methods against the corrupt bureaucrats inside the system.’
United Russia is exceptional in Kaluga because it gets things done; United Russia is exceptional in Yaroslavl because it has lost control. Most cities sit somewhere with the ‘bears’ in the middle – incompetent, but in charge. Yet it would be a mistake to think only outliers talk scathingly about the vertical of power. So do the middling conformists. I found the same resentment when I met with the head of a rigging machine that returns over 70 per cent for Putin and his party.46 The blue-eyed Rustem Khatimov, the president of Bashkortostan, an oil-rich and Islamic republic of Russia, claimed he could not think of a single thing about the balding action hero in the Kremlin that displeased him. He spoke about the man as a ‘genius’, and how he was ready to vote for him in 2018. This did not stop him sniping at the system. Read between the lines:
‘I lived in Moscow for a long time and I know sadly, with many Moscow businessmen they begin the conversation with one question – how big is the bribe? We need more responsibility as a region – in terms of the budget, in terms of the control of our natural resources and in controlling the big building projects.’
The vertical that exasperates him has grown stronger in his capital of Ufa. This concrete place is really two towns, a Bashkir-Tatar city of minarets and hard round flatbread, beside a Russian-Soviet town of beer tents and dilapidation. This is a wealthy territory. It calls itself ‘the Muslim capital of Russia’, but it is clean and quiet like authoritarian Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Even this republic was long run like a family business by the president’s predecessor, Murtaza Rakhimov. His son was the biggest Bashkir oil magnate and he stuffed the apparatus with Bashkirs only. He tried to resist the vertical. Those in charge had ‘never commanded as much as three chickens’, Rakhimov snarled, before growling:
‘Right now, everything is decided from above. The level of centralization is worse than it was in Soviet times. With respect to local people, they carry out a policy of distrust and disrespect.’47
Rakhimov’s political career was over. Yet the vertical has not grown more legitimate in his old concrete headquarters. Officials’ whisper, when the president is out of sight, that his going means non-Bashkirs have only just started to be employed again and the ‘local censor’ is softer. In private, though, government advisors are frank about the future: ‘We cannot be independent, so we want to be autonomous, really autonomous, because Moscow is taking all the oil money for itself.’
The vertical feels at its weakest in Siberian Tuva. This is the Russian territory with the lowest level of human development, at the level of Uzbekistan. It has the country’s highest alcohol and murder rates and a male life expectancy lower than Gabon. Annexed by Stalin in 1944, it is over 82 per cent ethnic Tuvan, a Mongol people, and still to be connected to the Russian railway system. Politics amounts to local clans linked to a half-Tuvan Putin ally wrangling rents amongst themselves. In its drab capital, Kyzyl, even those who wear leather jackets are too frightened to step out after dark because of the number of murders. Tuvans lack the metabolism for alcohol but, addicted to vodka, they fight frequently with knives. The city is all shacks and dust tracks, a place where people have fallen back into believing in magic. Without any medical infrastructure for mental health, counselling or psychologists, there were lines outside the Tuvan Shaman’s hutch and the cabin of the Russian-Tatar witch. I asked both what they talked about when locals asked about Russia. ‘It will collapse,’ said both the seer and the witch. The shamans, they said, have long seen the signs. ‘Tuva will not always be part of Russia.’ The witch had hung up a stuffed black eagle to ward off the sprits and, as it happened, was a Navalny supporter. ‘Putin will fall. They will all be washed away.’
Tuva is the size of England, but outside this one town there is almost no state. At the very end of the vertical, in a wood cabin of Russians of ‘old believers’, a breakaway sect that split under Peter the Great, perhaps a day from a paved road, in a village without drainage, without fully functioning electricity, where the children stop going to school at fourteen, then marry right away, all its villagers living subsistence lives, I met a senior member of the United Russia central committee.
I was tired. To reach the village had taken a day by car down a dirt track, past dead hamlets and a brush with a gang of Tuvan gunmen on horseback, through forests thicker than jungles, that made no sound, to a point where the river is shallow. Here there is a pontoon, where an ‘old believer’ with a long beard ushers you over, telling me he was here instead of a bridge – ‘to keep out Asiatics’. Then hours of cratered track, to a bend in the river where the car could go no further. A motorized canoe then carried me over the night black Yenesei, one of the mother-rivers of Siberia. The ‘captain’ was a shirtless drunk with white chest hair and a sailor’s cap. The old man told me it was here, in this valley that Putin had gone on holiday and posed topless, hunting, swimming and fishing: ‘We saw him go by down the river in a huge speed boat.’