In December 2011, after the Kremlin rigged parliamentary elections, tens of thousands of Muscovites took to the streets. It was the biggest protest since the early 1990s and it marked not a revolution, but the transformation of the middle class from consumers to citizens. They demanded to be treated with the same respect by the state as they received as consumers. It seemed like a carnival rather than an uprising. People wore white ribbons and carried white balloons with the slogan ‘If you blow us out again we will burst’. There were students, businessmen, journalists, pensioners, teachers and managers of different backgrounds and views. Some sported ski jackets previously worn on European slopes; others wore Russian felt boots and sheepskin coats.
Putin’s rating started to slide and the trust in the media wobbled. Surkov’s system of imitations was clearly failing. People who came out on the streets were real. Worse still, Putin with his PR stunts, which included his flying with cranes or diving for (planted) amphorae, evoked laughter. He had turned into a butt of jokes – just like the old Soviet leaders. He was out of fashion.
Putin was angry and rattled. He likened the protesters to the tribe of unruly monkeys from Kipling’s The Jungle Book and ridiculed their ribbons and balloons by comparing them to condoms. The people who came out on the streets chanting ‘Russia without Putin’ were once his supporters and owed everything they had to his ten-year rule.
The protest was driven not by opposition politicians – they were largely caught by surprise – but by civil activists, journalists, writers and Internet bloggers. These were the ideologists of the protests who set its agenda and articulated its demands and slogans. They spread the ideas through social networks, mainly Facebook.
Afisha, a popular fashion and entertainment magazine that set the fashion and tastes of Moscow’s creative class and which constructed the image of Moscow as a European city, became one of the voices of the protest movement. Its young editors – the children of the Soviet-era intelligentsia – found themselves in the same position as their parents had done thirty years earlier.
Like the intelligentsia of the 1970s that had been fostered in closed research institutes, Moscow’s creative class grew up in the folds of an oil-rich authoritarian state. For much of the 2000s this creative class eschewed politics for the make-believe world of fashion. Now politics became the fashion. Russia’s most fashion-sensitive television journalist, Leonid Parfenov, who had ridiculed Evgeny Kiselev for climbing the barricades a decade earlier, addressed his audience of successful, Westernized professionals frustrated by the lack of prospects for personal fulfilment in Russia from the stage of a street rally.
What the middle class wanted was institutions and lifestyle, not another political leader or a revolution. In fact, they mistrusted all political parties and organizations. They were happy to organize themselves into civil-society groups, and monitor the elections, but they were not prepared to delegate their power to any party or politician, including Alexei Navalny, a popular anti-corruption blogger turned politician who galvanized the protest in the first place.
A young, charismatic and blue-eyed lawyer in jeans and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, he was a Russian version of an American-style grass-roots politician whose style and tactics were inspired by The Wire, an American television drama. He used the Internet to circumvent the state monopoly over television and turned his social media followers into real crowds.
Navalny was born in 1974 into a military family and grew up in the semi-closed garrison towns around Moscow. He was an ardent supporter of Chubais and the team of radical market reformers of the early 1990s and rejected them as ‘failures’ in the 2010s. He represented the first generational shift in Russia since Putin’s generation seized power. For all their differences – in age, background, status and values – Navalny struck at the same two issues as Yeltsin did in the 1980s: corruption (the unfair privileges of the party bosses in Yeltsin’s days) and nationalism (independence from the rest of the empire). Navalny was no liberal and his appeal was far broader than the creative middle class. He positioned himself as a European-style nationalist and took part in their marches against immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Russia, he insisted, must shake off its imperial legacy and build a nation-state. He played on popular resentment of Chechnya, now ruled by Putin’s protégé Ramzan Kadyrov, formerly a rebel fighter.
But his main line of attack was the Kremlin’s kleptocracy and lies. He exposed the riches of Putin’s elite, published photographs of their palaces and the names of the English schools where they sent their children. He described the Kremlin nomenclatura not as dark villains or even gangsters, but as parasites who had hijacked power in the country and used it for personal enrichment. He branded the ruling United Russia Party as ‘the party of crooks and thieves’ – thereby deliberately lowering the tone. Despite the Kremlin’s tight control over the television, the term spread throughout the country like a rash.
The protest in the cities started to resonate within the provinces. The fastest decline in Putin’s support was among poorer people over fifty-five years of age who felt Putin had not honoured his promises, and who were tired of waiting. They were also aggrieved by the impudence of United Russia Party bosses who grabbed land and built large mansions. It was losing legitimacy across different social strata and risking a broader discontent. The revolution was happening not in the streets but in people’s heads, and that could not be stopped by the police force.
To dissuade ordinary people from joining their protests, Russian security services orchestrated clashes between protesters and the police, who threw ordinary and mostly innocent protesters into jail. But repression was limited in scale. Using real force against protesters as China had done in 1989 would have made things worse. Violence would have deprived the Kremlin of the remains of its legitimacy. Putin needed to defeat protesters ideologically. He had to change the narrative of the country and trump the political agenda set by the leaders of the protest movement.
Putin countered the idea of Russia as a modern, European-style nation-state by inciting traditionalist values of the state and the church. By prosecuting Pussy Riot, the young women punk singers who performed obscenely in front of the altar of Russia’s main cathedral, banning the promotion of homosexuality and barring the adoption of Russian children by American couples, the Kremlin was able to present the liberals, who protested against all this, as a bunch of homosexual, blasphemous mercenaries ready to sell Russian children. Having lost the loyalty of the middle class, Putin tried to cement his core, paternalistic and traditionalist electorate. He moved towards a personalized Franco-style rule, sidelining the elites whom he deemed opportunistic and unreliable, and appealing directly to the people.
He turned to anti-Americanism as the only ideological tenet that had survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia no longer aspired to be like the West, or sought its approval and recognition. Instead, it trumpeted its difference. Maxim Shevchenko, a TV journalist and a Kremlin-approved crusader against liberalism, argued in a newspaper column headlined ‘WE ARE NOT EUROPE? AND THANK GOD FOR THAT!’ that ‘Russia and the West are at war… There is a growing feeling that most Western people belong to a different humanoid group from us; that we are only superficially similar, but fundamentally different.’2