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| Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin by Ben Judah – review | Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin by Ben Judah – review |
| (3 months later) | |
| These are gloomy days for Russia's liberals. Over the past year, since becoming president for a third time, Vladimir Putin has launched a wave of repression. He has forced western-funded NGOs to register as "foreign agents"; arrested anti-government demonstrators; and put on trial the charismatic blogger Alexei Navalny, the closest thing Russia's protest movement has to a leader. A long stretch in jail for Navalny beckons. | These are gloomy days for Russia's liberals. Over the past year, since becoming president for a third time, Vladimir Putin has launched a wave of repression. He has forced western-funded NGOs to register as "foreign agents"; arrested anti-government demonstrators; and put on trial the charismatic blogger Alexei Navalny, the closest thing Russia's protest movement has to a leader. A long stretch in jail for Navalny beckons. |
| In late 2011 and 2012, as protests gripped Moscow, it was dreamily possible to imagine that Putin might be forced out. These days, few think this. The opposition is demoralised and the talented are leaving. (In recent months chess champion Garry Kasparov has scarpered to New York; the progressive economist Sergei Guriev has upped sticks to France. Both cite reasonable fears of imminent arrest.) Putin is still unbudgeably there, dropping into Britain last week for the G8 summit and to berate David Cameron for his support for Syria's rebels. | In late 2011 and 2012, as protests gripped Moscow, it was dreamily possible to imagine that Putin might be forced out. These days, few think this. The opposition is demoralised and the talented are leaving. (In recent months chess champion Garry Kasparov has scarpered to New York; the progressive economist Sergei Guriev has upped sticks to France. Both cite reasonable fears of imminent arrest.) Putin is still unbudgeably there, dropping into Britain last week for the G8 summit and to berate David Cameron for his support for Syria's rebels. |
| Why did this revolution fail? In his lucid study of the never-ending Putin era, Ben Judah argues that the middle-class hipsters who gathered again in the capital last month are themselves, in part, to blame. Moscow, he points out, isn't Russia: it is an affluent mega‑city disconnected from the impoverished small towns where most Russians live. He also detects a whiff of condescension. The well-off activists who took to the streets in the wake of rigged 2011 elections show little interest in the regions, or in their less fortunate co-citizens. | Why did this revolution fail? In his lucid study of the never-ending Putin era, Ben Judah argues that the middle-class hipsters who gathered again in the capital last month are themselves, in part, to blame. Moscow, he points out, isn't Russia: it is an affluent mega‑city disconnected from the impoverished small towns where most Russians live. He also detects a whiff of condescension. The well-off activists who took to the streets in the wake of rigged 2011 elections show little interest in the regions, or in their less fortunate co-citizens. |
| So big is the gap between Moscow and the rest of the country it resembles the historical gulf between Russia's French-speaking aristocracy and its serfs. There has been a revival of the "19th-century dialectic between the intelligentsia and the masses", Judah suggests. (He updates Chekhov: since anyone with cash already lives in Moscow these days, Chekhov's three aristocratic sisters would probably cry: "To London, to London" rather than "To Moscow, to Moscow".) | So big is the gap between Moscow and the rest of the country it resembles the historical gulf between Russia's French-speaking aristocracy and its serfs. There has been a revival of the "19th-century dialectic between the intelligentsia and the masses", Judah suggests. (He updates Chekhov: since anyone with cash already lives in Moscow these days, Chekhov's three aristocratic sisters would probably cry: "To London, to London" rather than "To Moscow, to Moscow".) |
| Putin, by contrast, is a relentless domestic traveller. He has the "most punishing travel schedule of any leader in Russian history", as Judah puts it. Admittedly, his visits are to a Potemkin-village Russia from which dissent has been carefully edited out. But the trips form an essential part of Putin's "videocracy", his TV-mediated autocracy, with federal channels under state control. There is censorship for the masses, but freedom for the web-savvy elite. This postmodern model of control worked, at least until internet use took off. | Putin, by contrast, is a relentless domestic traveller. He has the "most punishing travel schedule of any leader in Russian history", as Judah puts it. Admittedly, his visits are to a Potemkin-village Russia from which dissent has been carefully edited out. But the trips form an essential part of Putin's "videocracy", his TV-mediated autocracy, with federal channels under state control. There is censorship for the masses, but freedom for the web-savvy elite. This postmodern model of control worked, at least until internet use took off. |
| Indeed, the president's recent fight‑back might serve as an example to other authoritarians (such as Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan) who find themselves in a tricky corner. In the face of public protests Putin launched a "culture war", pitting his conservative base – pensioners, state employees, veterans – against Moscow's beautiful people. He has also splashed around a load of cash: doubling salaries for riot police; bumping up funding for the regions; hiking pensions. The state budget has ballooned. | Indeed, the president's recent fight‑back might serve as an example to other authoritarians (such as Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan) who find themselves in a tricky corner. In the face of public protests Putin launched a "culture war", pitting his conservative base – pensioners, state employees, veterans – against Moscow's beautiful people. He has also splashed around a load of cash: doubling salaries for riot police; bumping up funding for the regions; hiking pensions. The state budget has ballooned. |
| Last year the radical feminist outfit Pussy Riot staged an anti-Putin "prayer" in Moscow's Christ the Saviour cathedral. This was the protest movement's biggest stunt yet. And, Judah convincingly suggests, an own goal. It allowed the Kremlin to mobilise the Orthodox church in its anti-bourgeois cultural battle, and to portray the government's enemies as elitists and sexual deviants. (Pussy Riot had previously staged a public orgy in a botanical museum. Two of the three women protesters are still in jail, with Putin remarking "they got what they asked for".) | Last year the radical feminist outfit Pussy Riot staged an anti-Putin "prayer" in Moscow's Christ the Saviour cathedral. This was the protest movement's biggest stunt yet. And, Judah convincingly suggests, an own goal. It allowed the Kremlin to mobilise the Orthodox church in its anti-bourgeois cultural battle, and to portray the government's enemies as elitists and sexual deviants. (Pussy Riot had previously staged a public orgy in a botanical museum. Two of the three women protesters are still in jail, with Putin remarking "they got what they asked for".) |
| For now, Putin has snuffed out this not-quite revolution. In his travels to Russia's ignored corners, Judah discovers little support for the liberal opposition but almost universal discontent. He flies to Tuva in southern Siberia, takes the railway to the Far East, and visits the Urals tank factory town of Nizhny Tagil. Here the air "tastes metallic, thick, like toast". The roads are cracked; rotten wooden cottages sink beneath mud. Instead of too much state, Judah finds virtually no state, with Russia a "fragmented and feudalised society". | For now, Putin has snuffed out this not-quite revolution. In his travels to Russia's ignored corners, Judah discovers little support for the liberal opposition but almost universal discontent. He flies to Tuva in southern Siberia, takes the railway to the Far East, and visits the Urals tank factory town of Nizhny Tagil. Here the air "tastes metallic, thick, like toast". The roads are cracked; rotten wooden cottages sink beneath mud. Instead of too much state, Judah finds virtually no state, with Russia a "fragmented and feudalised society". |
| Judah's lively account of his remote adventures forms the most enjoyable part of Fragile Empire, and puts me in mind of Chekhov's famous 1890 journey to Sakhalin Island. In Nizhny Tagil he discovers that "workers" who told Putin by video they would beat up liberal activists were in fact a PR man and several managers. Here, as elsewhere, the local representatives of Putin's United Russia party are corrupt. Nothing works. A group of enterprising vigilante nationalists have slipped into this vacuum. The town's biggest scourge is heroin; the vigilantes kidnap addicts and chain them to their beds. | Judah's lively account of his remote adventures forms the most enjoyable part of Fragile Empire, and puts me in mind of Chekhov's famous 1890 journey to Sakhalin Island. In Nizhny Tagil he discovers that "workers" who told Putin by video they would beat up liberal activists were in fact a PR man and several managers. Here, as elsewhere, the local representatives of Putin's United Russia party are corrupt. Nothing works. A group of enterprising vigilante nationalists have slipped into this vacuum. The town's biggest scourge is heroin; the vigilantes kidnap addicts and chain them to their beds. |
| One of the Kremlin's recurrent nightmares, meanwhile, is that it might lose its Pacific territories. In Birobidzhan, close to the Chinese border, Judah finds the Chinese are already farming Russian land. The Slavic locals live in squalor. He meets two women selling mushrooms by the side of the road, one with a face "so riven by wrinkles it looks like cracked mud on the bottom of a dry lake". A local teenage girl tells him: "Who gives a fuck about the motherland. There is no fucking motherland." | One of the Kremlin's recurrent nightmares, meanwhile, is that it might lose its Pacific territories. In Birobidzhan, close to the Chinese border, Judah finds the Chinese are already farming Russian land. The Slavic locals live in squalor. He meets two women selling mushrooms by the side of the road, one with a face "so riven by wrinkles it looks like cracked mud on the bottom of a dry lake". A local teenage girl tells him: "Who gives a fuck about the motherland. There is no fucking motherland." |
| Judah is an intrepid reporter and classy political scientist. I first met him in 2008 during the Russian-Georgian war: we found ourselves together on a Russian military truck. The Russian army had crushed an attempt by Georgia's president Mikheil Saakashvili to seize back the province of South Ossetia; Valery Gergiev, a notable Putin fan, was conducting a victory concert in its capital Tskhinvali. Judah identifies this moment as the high point of Putinism. Putin enjoyed rock-star popularity and had humiliated Saakashvili's patron George W Bush. | Judah is an intrepid reporter and classy political scientist. I first met him in 2008 during the Russian-Georgian war: we found ourselves together on a Russian military truck. The Russian army had crushed an attempt by Georgia's president Mikheil Saakashvili to seize back the province of South Ossetia; Valery Gergiev, a notable Putin fan, was conducting a victory concert in its capital Tskhinvali. Judah identifies this moment as the high point of Putinism. Putin enjoyed rock-star popularity and had humiliated Saakashvili's patron George W Bush. |
| The mass consent Putin enjoyed during his first two presidential terms has now gone forever. Paradoxically, it is the middle-class beneficiaries of Russia's economic boom who ripped it up. Judah likens Russia's president not to Leonid Brezhnev – another Russian leader who hung on to power too long – but to Nicholas II. (The tsar, of course, survived the 1905 revolution only to be swept away in 1917.) Russians have fallen out of love with Putin but are thus far unpersuaded that the opposition can deliver anything better. Judah concludes that sooner or later an earthquake may bring down the fragile Kremlin. But then again, it might not happen at all. | The mass consent Putin enjoyed during his first two presidential terms has now gone forever. Paradoxically, it is the middle-class beneficiaries of Russia's economic boom who ripped it up. Judah likens Russia's president not to Leonid Brezhnev – another Russian leader who hung on to power too long – but to Nicholas II. (The tsar, of course, survived the 1905 revolution only to be swept away in 1917.) Russians have fallen out of love with Putin but are thus far unpersuaded that the opposition can deliver anything better. Judah concludes that sooner or later an earthquake may bring down the fragile Kremlin. But then again, it might not happen at all. |
| • Luke Harding's Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia is published by Guardian Books | • Luke Harding's Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia is published by Guardian Books |
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