CHAPTER ELEVEN
MOSCOW THE COLONIALIST
‘MOSCOW IS not Russia.’ Wherever you travel from, Kaliningrad to Magadan, they tell you the same thing. ‘Moscow is another country.’ They tell you that Moscow is a bloodsucker: ‘It sucks out all our resources, turns them into petro-dollars and stashes them into the West.’ They tell you that Moscow is an imperialist: ‘The capital takes all our tax returns and gives us only decrees and corruption in return.’ All across the empire ‘federalism’ is a dirty word – it means rule by Moscow.
The first anti-Putin protests were not in Moscow. They were on the extreme edges of Russia. These pre-tremors of discontent were mistaken for isolated incidents during the Medvedev ‘presidency’. First in 2008, thousands demonstrated in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East against Kremlin decrees. The crowd reached almost 10,000 strong, shivering by the Pacific portside. Flanked by police, the deputy prosecutor tried to make them leave. ‘Go home, they are not sending our OMON, they are sending their OMON, they will hurt you.’ The Moscow riot troops landed within hours. They broke up the rally, dragged the steadfast along the pavement and chucked them into vans. They were sent because Putin could not trust the local police. Then in 2010, after the recession, in the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad between EU Poland and EU Lithuania, over 10,000 came out to demonstrate against a Muscovite governor. The banners read: ‘United Russia, Go Back to Russia’.
In both Kaliningrad and Vladivostok, a continent apart, the men and women on the streets had come out in proportional terms to the Moscow protesters. They were not protesting against Putin, an almost abstract entity, but against his vertical – that had passed economic decrees without any considerations as to how they made their money and reduced their business plans to naught.
In 2008 in Vladivostok, anger boiled over when a new tariff was smacked on importing cars from Japan, in a city that lives off importing them and had brought in some 534,000 that year.1 The sudden decree to favour Russian auto manufacturers looked set to kill this business in one fell swoop. What angered those in the Far East the most was that whoever had signed and drafted it, appeared neither to know nor care that their economy was based on car imports. It enraged them that the vertical had robbed them of any veto-points to reverse it.
Despite everything, the party of power secured only 33 per cent of the vote in the Far East during the 2011 elections, far lower than the ‘official’ Moscow result.2 However there was no unrest, because the FSB, the OMON and the local prosecutor’s office treat provincials in ways they would never dare treat Muscovites. The heads of these structures are all selected by the Kremlin and almost always non-natives. They are sardonically called the ‘Vikings’, a nod to Scandinavians who ruled Slavs in medieval Kievan Rus. ‘Moscow treats us like a colony,’ groaned Andrey Dudenok, the man who had led the car protests in the grim Amur city of Khabarovsk. ‘But protests don’t change a thing.’ He had now given up. Not because he was apathetic during the elections, but because he had been intimidated out of protesting. This is what happened when he got involved in politics.
• The FSB phoned ten times to tell him to stop organizing protests. They threatened him unless he ‘stopped this’.
• He was arrested twice. Once he was held in a cell for over twenty-four hours.
• The FSB then threatened his boss with a ‘tax inspection’ unless Dudenok was sacked. He was immediately.
• The authorities then started two court cases against Dudenok for parking fines.
• Police ‘discovered drugs in his car’ and threatened to open narcotics charges against him.
• Dudenok then fled Khabarovsk from March to May 2009.
• The FSB then raided his flat. They seized dozens of books and computers.
When he came back to the city, Dudenok decided to quit politics. ‘When I returned to Khabarovsk,’ he says, ‘I made a deal with the FSB. I would stop, providing that they left my family alone.’ The most dispiriting thing of all is that Dudenok and his opposition friends resent the haughtiness of the Moscow movement almost as much as United Russia. They have had no contact with its leaders, with its Facebook groups, no visits from them and blame them for being missing in action when the car protests happened. It was as if they too viewed the economic livelihood of the Russian Far East as a ‘yawn’ issue.
In Kaliningrad in 2010, over 9,500km to the west, its own protest movement similarly erupted only to fizzle out, leaving only resentment. Life in this enclave had become increasingly claustrophobic since neighbouring Poland and Lithuania joined the EU. As they left Russia behind, they happily put up visa restrictions for them. At first it was as difficult to get a visa to Vilnius as it was to Madrid. Economic ties were chopped, locals were furious that Moscow was refusing to compromise on visa negotiations. ‘We have been left behind in the ghetto,’ croaked a chain-smoking hospital director, ‘they promised us we’d catch up with them but we’ve fallen further behind.’
Kaliningrad feels Moscow has boxed it out of Europe and modernity. They feel cheated when they see that Lithuania can change but they cannot. This city lives on shuttle-trade with its neighbours, but every time they drew up in the EU ‘new member states’, they felt themselves the poorer. Life was getting cleaner there but in Kaliningrad dirty streets were filled with wild dogs, there was a brisk trade exporting blondes, the police collected dead drunks out of the snowdrifts in the morning and the trams still ran on German tracks. Then, the Muscovite governor decided in 2010 to increase taxes by 25 per cent on car imports from the EU.3 He detonated unrest. The streets filled with 10,000 protesters who shouted, ‘United Russia, Back to Russia’.4
The protests fizzled out, its leader ‘leaving the movement’ in a cloud of FSB harassment and financial suspicion. Blind decrees did not stop. In 2012 a sudden redrafting of import regulation laws left thousands of businesses struggling in this cross-border trade city. There was nothing they could do about it. ‘The reason this whole country could collapse,’ says the national celebrity-reporter Oleg Kashin, a native of Kaliningrad, ‘is that everyone outside Moscow thinks they are just a Moscow colony.’ The city gave Putin just 44.5 per cent in 2012 and is very proud of itself.5
Moscow (as synonym for Kremlin, as synonym for elite) is resented everywhere. In Vladivostok, I was told by civil servants with gritted teeth how Moscow doesn’t give a damn about the time difference and wakes them up in the middle of the night, expecting them to work their businesses hours – there is a +7 hour time difference. In Irkutsk, I spoke to students who moaned how they would love Navalny to come and speak but they thought he never would, no matter how many comments they left on his blog asking him to – because they were hicks. In Krasnoyarsk, I smoked with officials who sighed how in an economy based entirely on digging out metals, fights between Moscow aluminium oligarchs decided Kremlin metal decrees, leaving them impotent over the regulations that mattered most to them. In Yakutsk, I drank ‘KGB’ cocktails with local businessmen who snarled that they had been cut out of massive investment projects in the region and that all the contracts had been awarded to ‘Muscovites’. In Ussuriysk, I drank gin and tonic in cans with nationalists who told me Moscow was cross-dressing as a European. In St Petersburg, I ate sponge cake with cultural critics who acidly remarked that Moscow was an Asian monster holding them back from Europe.