His machine is notorious, provoking pained shivers when mentioned amongst the ‘democratic aristocrats’ of the capital. Not only do Roizman and his men intimidate drug dealers, taking them to the police, they try to cure people in several ‘clinics’ where no medically grounded treatment is practised. Addicts were chained to their beds, fed only on garlic, bread and water, then made to do work restoring ruined churches. The cuffs have now been dropped, but the clinics still operate without a single heroin substitute and are clouded in rumours and court cases concerning beatings and murders. This approach makes no sense according to modern medicine. Roizman’s enemies said that instead of clinics he had built a private labour-camp system based on quack counter-narcotics.
With a few exceptions, almost all the leaders of the Russian opposition have told me privately they would let the North Caucasus go. The issues that obsess them are efficiency and immigration, public health and honesty – coming together in hysteria about corruption. The health and purity, not the territorial integrity of the nation: the next national leader will have to bring these together in a way that resonates nationally in the manner that Roizman has done locally. He will have to be someone who somehow speaks to the regions.
The future of Russian politics sounds like Roizman. He, not Putin, is the most popular politician in Nizhny Tagil. To say this man has an odd office is an understatement: his headquarters in nearby Ekaterinburg are in a carved, wooden tsarist building on a street of nondescript blocks with no sense of history, that could be anywhere in Moscow, or anywhere in the developed world. But out in front Roizman has a made a graveyard. It is for buildings. The twenty-odd orthodox crosses are there to remember, and to express his rage, that such beautiful, tsarist wood architecture, the wood cut like frost-flowers, could be demolished by lawless developers.
His hallways are covered by his clumsy paintings of gouache woodlands and moon-eyed peasants in primary colours, his office a cluttered jumble, the colliding emblems of a political agitator and the mementos of a Jewish poet. Above a banner advertising his blog – ‘Strength in Truth’, printed out a dozen times in red and blue – are his framed portraits: a poster of Yuri Gagarin beside a photo of the Russian Patriarch, a sword hanging between them and the fading mugshots of two fallen comrades. An old election poster of his unshaven stare, ‘Peace Upon All’, doubles as a calendar. To the left the glint of an embossed gold Torah, to the right three huge files labelled Gypsies, Tajiks, Drugs.
How this all began, he says: ‘When you see what is happening to your country and you see it like a house in flames. I wanted to put out those flames and stop the fire. The government wasn’t doing it. So I decided I had to do it.’
The vigilante king passed me a leaflet that was covered in photos of scabbed children and half-dead young women entitled ‘Russians Killing Russians’, and he wasted no time in telling me why he was at war:
‘We are a dying nation. The biggest threat to the country is power that lives for power itself. The Russians are dying out. The demographic situation is worsened by immigrants, then by emigrants, then made sicker still by alcoholism, drugs and the continued collapse of medical care. We are a dying country.’
This is also – as his files suggest – an ethnic battle in a country flooded with a tidal wave of Muslim migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia. ‘The City Without Drugs’ began quite simply as a war – there were lots of Gypsies, lots of Tajiks selling drugs on every street corner. I rose up and fought back.’ And nothing through his eyes has changed since the war began. ‘Of course all the drugs in this city are sold by Gypsies and Tajiks.’ At my doubtful expression, he shrugs: ‘You should go to the Gypsy village and see how they live there.’
Roizman is on the same page as the average Russian and on the opposite one to Putin when it comes to empire – he rejects the idea that Muslim Central Asia is part of one ‘post-Soviet space’ that should be preserved. Those out there – Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks – are not part of the family like those from Ukraine and Belarus. They are not welcome in their millions in Russia. He urgently wants a visa wall erected against them, as do most popular opposition figures and a majority of Russians I have spoken to. He snarls: ‘The whole problem is that we have no border with Central Asia. We have no visa regime. The clans that run Tajikistan live by the drugs trade. This means that Russia was hit by a drugs tsunami in the 1990s when drugs began to flood north from Tajikistan and Afghanistan after the collapse of Soviet power and Soviet borders. It hit society when it was at its very weakest.’
As we speak, the Roizman ‘men’ slip in and out of the room as he reclines in an armchair to expound on the failure of the state. They bring photos of stacks of heroin on their iPhones and mutter into his ear about the junkies – ‘Boss, Boss’. If you did not know he was fighting drugs, blink and it would look like Roizman was dealing them. These are his personal army, many of them ‘cured’ by him, and who substitute for the state in Ekaterinburg’s heroin wars. ‘The government simply cannot operate against this. The government cannot deal with this… The country is a dinosaur. This is why I have taken the war on drugs into my own hands – and this is not wrong, simply because there is no war being waged by the authorities.’
On the edge of anger: ‘My biggest mistake was to think that once I had shown I could have an impact that the government would come and join me. But no… The deciding factor as to why the system is not fighting drugs is not corruption. The system just doesn’t want to change. There is no political will.’
Roizman’s winning cocktail of Russian nationalism, vigilante policing and civil society is tinged by resurgent Orthodoxy, in a city with several boxy new churches and newfound church power. With a gesture of the head he takes me to his icon museum next door. Then in the stairwell he falls into a silent funk at the questions: ‘How can someone half-Jewish be a Russian nationalist? Do you consider yourself a Jew or a Christian?’
He seemed not to want to answer – maybe because professing Jews are said to be unelectable to the highest office in Russia, maybe because these were the personal tectonics that had made him want to be a hero for his city. ‘I couldn’t say if I was one religion or the other. I don’t know… I don’t know… I will always say that I am Roizman. I go to church to make some confessions sometimes. I couldn’t say.’
The vigilante had suddenly gone quiet as we sprinted up the stairs to the icons themselves. Maybe because he was trying to show me the answer, we went to look at these pieces of a lost Russia: gold, carved, wooden, ancient. He had dozens of them in a medicinally white room in a modern block next to his office. We walked to the main one – ‘take this, look’ – Roizman had affixed a magnifying glass just below it. ‘Can you see? Can you see…? All those tiny carvings… you cannot see them with the naked eye.’ We looked through the magnifying glass together, at the incredible intricacy in the gold leaf on the robes of the priests as they hailed the messiah. He was smiling.
Roizman – unlike almost any other leader of the Russian opposition, maybe even more so than Navalny in Moscow – is the ‘King over the Water’ here. If there was a democratic election in the Urals he would win it, to be the mayor, the governor or even more. One 2012 poll showed 26.5 per cent of Ekaterinburg want him as mayor – far ahead of anyone else.27 But more ominously, he is a symbol of how under Putin a new, active Russian society had evolved, twisted and disfigured by Putin’s failure to impose order and his harsh, brutal outlook on those that break it. The meaning of Roizman is not lost on the country’s brightest political minds such as Vladimir Milov. ‘This is Russia! What did you think democratic politics would look like here? It will look like Israel or Turkey at best. Post-Putin politics will be competitive, but it will be aggressive too.’