Nizhny Tagil is now the codename of a disinformation campaign – ‘real Russians’ are behind Putin. As the minivan pulls into the rutted mud lanes, at the outskirts of this city of 350,000, it starts to feel like the Kremlin has made an off choice. This is no showcase of the successes of Putinism – or was every other industrial town vastly worse? The roads are so cracked and potholed they look as if they have come under attack. Rotten wooden cottages sink into the mud by the roadside before giving way to a gypsy colony and a crumbling train station. Behind it, belching smokestacks, flares and industrial metal works spew chemicals and pollutants into the town. The air tastes metallic, thick, like toast. Inside, everything in the dingy hotels and government buildings of Nizhny Tagil appeared to be broken. As I’m sure it had been on the day they opened.
The life of the town is completely dominated by the two giant industrial works erected during the Soviet period. There is the massive iron and steel works of NTMK and the enormous train and tank factory, Uralwagonzavod. All employment and the entire economy are entirely dependent on these two plants. In this respect Nizhny Tagil has a diversified economy: a study by the Russian Ministry of the Economy at the start of Putin’s rule classified two out of five of all cities, home to 25 million people, as ‘mono-gorods’, dependent on a single industry.17 ‘They are our most serious economic problem,’ as a deputy minister privately put it, ‘people are just trapped in them.’
They are also a social problem. Those who live in them will never be able to lead truly modern lives. It is easy to understand why people in these cities feel nostalgic for Soviet power. The bulk of the labour force is still working in the same government-dependent mega-enterprises, the only difference is that the profits of the mega-works are privatized, with all pollution socialized. The local government is still run by a monopoly party of power – not a totalitarian but a tawdry one.
I had come to Nizhny Tagil to find these ardent supporters of the regime who had threatened to come to Moscow to beat up the opposition. They were nowhere to be seen. The ‘workers committee’ had disappeared, nor could I find a single worker who had taken part in it. Full of anguish and riled at having been taken for a ride, every factory man I spoke to sighed that it was a fiction invented by the plant’s management in order to please Putin. The ‘workers’ in the video-clip were managers and one of the organizers was a PR agent who had previously been the judge of ‘Miss Nizhny Tagil in Bikini’.
‘It was a complete joke,’ grumbled my new friend, Vasily, a chain-smoker in his forties. He had worked all his life in the gigantic Uralwagonzavod works, the same factory as the so-called ‘committee’. ‘There was no mass worker movement… we were not going to come and beat people up. There were only a dozen of them… bosses and PR men the lot of them!’
Vasily, like most of the men who worked in the factory, was paranoid of enemy agents. He knew full well that the plant he worked in had built a tank armada to fight World War Three and that if the CIA were really after Russian secrets, they would be snooping around here. ‘All your documents, I need to be sure,’ he said to me. But after a while he relented. ‘You see, I have to be careful… I didn’t vote for him… I’m opposition you see.’ The workers told me that to make sure everyone voted for Putin, they had been given lectures inside the plant. ‘They said we’d all go home starving if Putin didn’t win… because then the opposition would come to power and they’d cancel all our orders.’ The workers were then issued with a barcode and told on the election day that a van would be waiting outside each polling station – and if they handed it in, having voted for Putin, they would get a ‘bonus’: ‘Those idiots didn’t realize that you give it in anyway and get the bonus and not vote for Putin. They are all frightened. If you lose your job at the two factories – you’re finished here really.’
Vasily and his sons took me for a drive around Tagil in their clapped out Lada car. ‘Five years ago I thought Putin was a hero,’ he snarled as the car bumped and swerved over huge potholes the size of children on the main street. ‘Then he refused to go. He’s greedy for power. And I know all the people in his party are crooks in this town. So why should I think he’s not like that too?’
Vasily had never heard about the huge corruption scandals that implicate the Kremlin, which have never been shown on TV, all he knew was the behaviour of the local predatory United Russia cadres. We stopped by the war memorial. We stopped by a tank on a plinth. ‘I think the problem here,’ muttered Vasily, ‘is the mentality.’ He went a bit quieter. ‘Not everyone who came here was free. The grandparents, the parents… were in camps. There were camps here. It takes generations to go.’
The gulags, even though no one ever talks of them, are in the blood, in a hundred gestures, in a hundred thousand – ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.’ We stopped by the roadside in his part of town – the Derzhinsky district, named after the founder of the Cheka and thus the KGB. ‘You see that spot?’ There is nothing there but punctured old tarmac. ‘That is where my grandmother starved to death in the war… I just wanted to show you that.’
We drove a bit more. We stopped by the dirt track that the tanks roll off towards the train tracks. Women were wandering down it. They had been picking berries in the pristine unpolluted forests close by. Vasily lights another cigarette and sighs: ‘In this factory I think about 25 per cent of people are alcoholic wrecks… it’s really sad. They drink. They work. They drink. They are real wrecks. Then about 50 per cent only think about one thing – fishing. They are fishing fanatics. Rods… that’s all they talk about. They could not give a damn about politics or Putin. About 25 per cent of people watch the news. They are not Putin fanatics. They like stability, but they hate corruption too. But I don’t know anyone who’d go to Moscow to beat people up, or anyone who trusts the opposition in Moscow for that matter.’
The actual election results showed that Vasily was in fact in the majority. Less than a third of those in Nizhny Tagil had in fact voted for United Russia back in December 2011.18 But he felt completely alone: ‘The thing is I think 100 per cent… 110 per cent… 130 per cent all believe in the ‘good tsar and the bad boyars’. They think all the awful things happening in Nizhny Tagil have nothing to do with Putin… and that he doesn’t know how bad it is here.’
And really terrible things have been happening in Nizhny Tagil. The worst of it all was dug up by a dog. It was 2007, the height of public confidence in ‘stability’, in a village 40km from the city that a stray found as many as thirty decomposing bodies of young girls tossed into a mass grave. ‘As many as thirty’, as it is impossible to say exactly how many there were – because they had rotted past the point of being easily identified. This pit seemed like the tip of an iceberg: in the previous two years alone 462 people had gone missing in Nizhny Tagil and these cases remain unsolved.19 It pointed to a pattern of police indifference, carelessness or even (as most locals believe) complicity in a murder ring of the kind usually found not in Russia but in Central America, or Roberto Bolaño novels.
For years the families of missing girls had been putting up home-printed posters, phoning the authorities and appealing to the police to help them find their daughters – and nothing had happened as a criminal ring preyed on the city. The criminals had been using an eerily attractive, blue-eyed young man to lure girls as young as thirteen back to an apartment. There they would then gang-rape them on the floor. If they refused to become prostitutes, they would be killed.