In places like Kaliningrad and Ivanovo the ‘wild 1990s’ were fading away. So had the shock of the Soviet implosion. The state, which had provided free education, free medicine, full employment and the feeling of fear, would never return. But something Soviet had – a pervasive feeling of pressure, that there were locked doors, low humming paranoia and the knowledge that there were things you shouldn’t say in front of power.
This could be seen in a thousand small ways. Drunks on trains began threatening people by saying they were undercover FSB agents to intimidate them into handing over bottles of vodka. What it was acceptable to say in polite company inched more into chauvinism (‘Estonia is an SS state’). Things that had been fringe comments became mainstream once Putin had said it (‘NGOs are behaving like jackals at foreign embassies’). Ideas that belonged to cranks were discussed half-seriously (‘Do you think there is an American–Georgian plot against Russia?’).
When the politics of fear start to be used, normal people feel it first in schools. In Putin’s Russia, one of Gorbachev’s reforms to demilitarize normal life was overturned – in the classrooms. In came the old mandatory Soviet military day. Most people found them comic, with old maps showing massed ranks of German and American tanks as the threat in the West, but the message was not lost on those present – Russia had enemies, Russia must be vigilant. From time to time, reports surfaced of children in particularly repressive regions being made to read poems in praise of Putin and United Russia. Across the board, textbooks were changed to mention that Stalin was an efficient manager and leading historians denounced them as ‘culturally racist’, but taking the sting out of it, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was put on the reading list.65 Yet, for the most part, this was just going through the motions.
Things became less of a laughing matter upon graduation. Russia craves for normal lives to be fully demilitarized and to have a professional army like a ‘civilized country’, but the post-Soviet army is still a conscript force. If you have any possible means of getting out of it – that is, even the slightest ability to pull strings or pay a bribe, get an ‘unfit’ certificate, or go to university – an eighteen-year-old boy will go to any length to do so. This is because a year in the army in Russia is a year that the teenage poor spend being brutalized into men. The really unfortunate have been sent to the ‘internal abroad’ in the Caucasus, but today it is not Chechens that kill the most ethnic Russian boys a year – but their ‘elders’.
This is what they call ‘Dedovschina’, which means ‘Grandpa’s Terror’. This is an endemic hangover from the Soviet, even the tsar’s army, where their officers and elders administer a vicious hazing on the recruits. It is every Russian mother’s worst nightmare. It is not as universal as it once was but is still extremely common for boys to be beaten, humiliated and wounded in their own bases. There are many rapes and murders. The numbers are astounding. In the typical year of 2006 over 3,500 cases of violent abuse were reported and 292 conscripts killed or committed suicide.66 Only thirty-six died fighting in Chechnya.67 That is more deaths in one year than the entire losses of the French, German and Italian NATO troops in over a decade in Afghanistan. But of course most cases go unreported. Even if you are not beaten, a year in the army is still a year in an abusive institution where teenagers at their most impressionable get irradiated with its culture of heavy drinking, fighting and blood brothers against the world. It is little surprise that a lot of the poorest Russian young men are good with guns, prone to alcoholism and violently anti-Caucasian.
The lucky ones go to university – but they do not go to Moscow State University or to MGIMO. The institutes dotted between Smolensk and Kamchatka started to discourage anything ‘Orange’ on campus. How far they go in the name of ‘stability’ really depends on the dean. In one technical college in Moscow, thronged halls on the first day of term were bluntly told: ‘There will be zero political activity here. Anyone who engages in political activity will be expelled.’ In the elite establishments a few kilometres away, where the children of the elite park their Mercedes outside, date Western expats and look down at the scholarship kids from the sticks, hoping to enter the bureaucracy, the deans did little to harass opposition cliques. Yet the chances of a high-profile anti-Putinist speaker being invited, compared to say a senior figure in Putin’s party, are slim.
Beyond Moscow regions, out in the provinces where 120 million Russians live, students involved in anti-Putin and ultra-nationalist cliques became nervous. If you weren’t careful, this was something that could be used against you. In the Baltic city of Kaliningrad I spent an evening listening to a prototype set of fears whilst drinking with some twentysomething chemical engineering students and their girlfriends who were at teacher training college. Though they could not point to any concrete cases – or knew the names of anyone this had happened to – they knew the deans were members of United Russia and that if you crossed an invisible anti-Putin line you could get reprimanded for ‘hooliganism’, or lose your place in the subsidized dorms that they couldn’t survive financially without. In other cities – Ufa, Vladivostok, Ekaterinburg – you hear the same thing.
Nobody knows where this line is, or many people who have crossed it, but it is there inside people’s heads. It wasn’t there before. ‘What for? Lose my accommodation? Lose my chances for a good job? What for? I want to be a teacher, in a state school,’ said Evgenia, aged twenty-four, that evening in the Kaliningrad basement bar. ‘I don’t want to risk this by protesting. Especially when protests don’t work.’
The invisible line began to creep into your choice of work. Journalism, destroyed by the videocracy, came to be seen as a cheap PR hackery, a job for the insincere. ‘Investigative journalism’ was increasingly seen as dangerous and parents discouraged their children from going into it. What was on TV dropped a hint: Putin spoke dismissively after the star-reporter Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in 2006; after thugs tried to kill columnist Oleg Kashin in 2011, Yakemenko mocked ‘the zombie’ while he was in intensive care. The other side of the line grew in popularity: professors, polls and even (fatefully) Mikhail Khodorkovsky, noticed that the bureaucracy was becoming more and more popular as a career path. In remote areas the FSB academies enjoyed a boom in applicants.
One night in 2009 on the Trans-Siberian railway I sat in third class with a railway engineer from Omsk in Siberia, a schoolteacher from near Khabarovsk in the Far East and her fourteen-year-old daughter who was about to go to boarding school. ‘When it was communism,’ her pallid mother explained, ‘I wouldn’t have had to have paid so much…’ But she was cut short. ‘What’s communism, Mummy?’
A wave of horror froze over the mother and momentarily paralyzed the man from Omsk. ‘It’s a country,’ mumbled the engineer, ‘where lots of things are free.’ The mother snapped back – ‘No it isn’t! It’s a country where… where…’ For a split second I had the feeling that I was watching something profound, before I asked the girl a few questions about her boarding school. Bashful, she almost pouted – ‘It’s an FSB boarding school…’ ‘And does that make it a better boarding school?’ I asked. ‘Everybody knows that the FSB are the strongest,’ replied the fourteen-year-old who did not know what communism was.
It was so easy for all Putin’s PR men to bring that invisible line down in the heads of the old, who had been born in what Russians call ‘the Stalin time’. It was very easy to encourage them into old Soviet patterns. One afternoon I sat with a friend in his khrushchevka housing block in south Moscow as his grandmother, called Ninel (Lenin spelt backwards) watched TV in the next room. Through the door she heard the names of politicians (Putin, Surkov, Nemtsov) and tried to tell her grandson to be careful. Don’t speak to a foreigner like this about politics. ‘Stalin was fifty years ago you silly old woman,’ snapped my friend, a trainee diplomat, ‘I can talk politics with a foreigner if I want.’