I stumbled exhausted into the wooden cabin that was the ‘lodge’. A woman in home-spun clothes cooked me a reindeer stew, and poured tea made of purple flowers I had never seen before. Her husband, a hunter, couldn’t hold back his enthusiasm for a foreign visitor a moment longer and grabbed his photo album. Seven years ago he had got a throwaway Kodak by chance. After two years he had saved up enough to go to town to get the pictures developed. He had the teeth of a man who had never used a toothbrush and the album of an eighteenth-century Cossack. We went slowly through the photographs. On horseback with guns. On horseback pointing at a wooden village. By the campfire with the pelts of four dead lynx. With the wild-eyed boys holding up the warm bloodied carcass of a bear. I asked; ‘How does a man feel when he is alone in the forest and shoots a bear?’ ‘Alive’. And what do you think of the government? ‘It’s corrupt.’
In places like this you understand how Russia can have African male life expectancies and Central American murder rates. You understand why it is so lawless. As I thought that, the politician walked in. He was wearing a World Wildlife Fund fleece. It was a craze in the Kremlin, he explained, to come and take photos like Putin, posing like Putin, in the ‘Putin places’. And we both ate the reindeer soup, realizing it was actually chopped up reindeer lungs, with what tasted like bitter scones. The peasants sat at the head of the wooden table, her in home-sewn floral patterns, him in hunter’s camouflage. So, the politician chose to speak in English. And throughout the evening a hundred micro-moths came in through the cracks in the cabin. Some got in my eyes. In this muddy hole, the politican felt free to speak:
‘You see they live so wildly here. Soviet power was a myth, like the myth of the vertical of power today. All the regional barons are just living like feudal lords. This means that here in Tuva there was a battle between the clans over who could control the local United Russia. It was a bitter fight and there was nothing that we could do about it. The local ethnic Tuvans run the administration and cut all ethnic Russians out. In the towns they live like an ethnic minority. Here in this valley they are defending themselves, to live like a majority.’
He told me he was leaving the United Russia central committee and taking up a job in the Kremlin, so the political conversation came back to him, what he was going to do, like they always do:
‘It was very clear to us, that for him [Putin], there really was just nobody else. It really was his decision and his conviction that the country would collapse without him. You could leave like a hero in 2012 or leave like a loser in 2018. Hah. That’s what he chose.’
The next day the politician was gone. Driven out by a gigantic four-wheel drive. So, I walked through the woods into the village, which is called Erjei. There were a lot of butterflies. The wooden cabins sunk into dirt tracks. Pigs wandered around. Aryan children played in the mud. Here there was no modern toilet, no computer, no doctor and only one TV; they had been having problems with it. This was what social scientists call ‘natural exchange’. There was no economy, only the river and only the forest, which leered over the wood-stick crosses in their cemetery. I walked up to some men sharing a cigarette by the waterside. They had the faces of men who lived outdoors, thick knuckled hands and beards that smelt of fish:
‘Putin? What do we think of Putin? He never did anything good for the country. He just took all the money from oil and gas production and took it for himself and his mates and did nothing for the country. Why the hell would we support Putin? Who do you think we are?’
Stop Feeding the Caucasus
Nowhere did the vertical fail so completely as in the North Caucasus. You feel this everywhere in Moscow. You see it in the black Mercedes driven by Chechen hoodlums breaking traffic. You see it in the dark posse of leather jackets hanging around the metro. You see it the restaurants, in the fights the football hooligans have. You hear it in the constant racist chatter about the ‘blacks’ in Russian mouths, in their suspicion and distrust. You see it in the gutter press, where every murder is a Chechen murder.
The Caucasus looms over Moscow: everyone knows that money is transferred to keep the peace with the local elites. The government and the liberals call it ‘reconstruction’ and ‘federal funds’, whilst the nationalists and the men who fought in Chechnya, the kind you meet smoking or drinking in train carriages called it ‘tribute’. Everybody outside the United Russia machine talks about the relationship between Putin and the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov as purely feudal.
The region has long ceased to be ‘in social union’ with Russia. They are seen as foreigners: if you marry a North Caucasian (frowned upon) you marry a foreigner; they are seen as ‘immigrants’ in the major cities, as alien as Azeris. Visiting the North Caucasus is to go to an ‘internal abroad’, in Russian minds – you ‘leave Russia’ and ‘come back to Russia’.
The tsars annexed this Muslim region in the late nineteenth century. It was never fully pacified until Stalin – infuriated by endless cut-throat rebellions by the Chechens and the Ingush, worried they would greet Hitler as a liberator – who ordered them to be deported to Central Asia. It was genocide: one-third to half of them died. Returning under Khrushchev these ‘punished people’ never had their own collaborating Soviet nomenklatura like the Tatars or the Bashkirs. This meant that when the collapse came, those who took control were not used to politics, and their games with Moscow ended in two wars and at least 50,000 dead.48 Conflict de-Russified these republics. Today Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia are less than 5 per cent ethnic Russian – a figure less than in independent Moldova, Kyrgyzstan or Estonia.49 War brought enmity into a million social ties. With the destruction of the ‘social union’, the paradoxical situation of the early 2000s – when normal Russians wanted Chechnya in Russia, but not to have a single Chechen living outside of Chechnya – has unravelled. Today post-conflict bitterness has fused with a fury at the excesses of the ‘vertical of corruption’ in Grozny. Russians find Putin’s Caucasian ‘stability’ demeaning and exorbitant. When Putin goes – the popular will would come to bear on this. Chechnya is in personal union with Putin – not Russia. And in the North Caucasus it is the linchpin republic. Most Russians I have spoken to want Muslim Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis out. A powerful opposition leader (he asked not to be quoted by name) speaks for the majority: ‘They are already basically independent in Chechnya. We don’t want to pay for them anymore. They are worthless provinces that contribute nothing to us.’
Reading opinion polls is to come face to face with a damning verdict. Despite Putin’s self-styled ‘historic role’ in the North Caucasus, a full 51 per cent of Russians would not even care if their borders were redrawn to exclude Chechnya.50 The nation is angrier, more nationalist and exclusivist, than it was when he took over – as many as 59 per cent concur with the slogan ‘Russia for Russians’. This is now a country where 56 per cent expect ethnic clashes will soon occur.51 Over one-third feel irritation, dislike or fear at the sight of North Caucasians in their home towns. These are not the statistics of successful reintegration, but frozen disintegration.52
The difference is that today no one thinks that letting Chechnya go will Balkanize Russia. Stability has done the opposite of what Putin expected. Polls show an appetite for a new nationalism that rejects expansionism, in the name of a smaller, purer Russia. It fascinates Navalny. He wants to ride this wave to power. ‘A very interesting thing occurred in the past ten years,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘the nationalists went from being dictatorial and imperialist, rejecting the idea of one inch being given up in the Caucasus, to being pro-democracy and anti-imperialists, wanting to give up on the Caucasus.’ Ironically, it is now Russian liberals who have gone from urging Moscow to give it up, to urging Moscow to think of its ‘commitments’ and ‘civilizing role’.