The bulk of the participants do seem to have been urban, educated and broadly liberal in their politics. A survey of a miting held on Moscow’s Sakharov Avenue on 24 December 2011 found that three-fifths of those present held a higher degree, and almost half gave their occupation as ‘specialist’. But this was by no means the prosperous bourgeoisie depicted in many Western accounts: 21 per cent said they could only afford essentials, and 40 per cent said they could not afford a car – which in effect disqualified them from the middle class, even according to one of the modest yardsticks widely used at the time.{11}
The idea that these were ‘young professionals’ was also belied by their generational profile: a fifth of those at the 24 December gathering were over fifty-five; a quarter were between eighteen and twenty-four. While some of those attending might well have remembered the demonstrations of 1990, many had come of age under Putin and knew nothing but the present system: the Yeltsin era would have been a chaotic blur, and the USSR something akin to Atlantis. Outside Moscow, the protests were small but heterogeneous, and some occurred in places that still lacked any of the boom-time amenities that supposedly marked a rising middle class.{12} Conversely, large swathes of those who really were members of the ‘middle class’ hailed by Western commentators failed to join the protests – perhaps because many of them would have been state-sector employees, the biudzhetniki who formed a central part of Putin’s support base.
The sociological diversity of the protesters was reflected, too, in their ideological heterogeneity. ‘Russia without Putin’ was the hopeful banner under which many thousands marched. But beyond this basic point in common, they had very different ideas about what that Russia would look like. The protests were a medley that included not only established liberal parties such as Yabloko and Boris Nemtsov’s Solidarity but also leftist groups such as the Russian Socialist Movement and the Left Front, as well as nationalist outfits such as the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) and various groupuscules waving the tricolour of the Romanov dynasty. Alongside all these, there were also a number of social organizations: ecologists protesting the destruction of Khimki forest; the Blue Buckets, campaigning against abuses of authority by traffic police; the local franchise of the e-libertarian Pirate Party; and the avowedly ‘non-political’ League of Voters, which included many prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, such as the TV personality Leonid Parfyonov, ageing rock star Yuri Shevchuk and the writers Dmitrii Bykov, Liudmila Ulitskaia and Grigorii Chkhartishvili (better known as retro-whodunit writer Boris Akunin).
This bewildering political breadth was in part a product of the narrowness of the ‘imitation democratic’ system, which by design excluded most of the political spectrum. Yet within this diversity, the outlines of two camps emerged: a liberal one, focused on the demand ‘For Honest Elections’, and a smaller, leftist one, with a wider social agenda. Though the liberal camp predominated early on, its power quickly waned after it became clear there would be no re-run of the Duma vote, and that Putin would easily canter to victory in the presidential election, rigged or not. By the time protests against Putin’s foreordained inauguration took place in May 2012, it was mainly the leftist groups that were still in the streets – and they bore the brunt of the repression thereafter. It was also an array of leftist groups that inspired the ‘Occupy Abai’ protest that took over a small park in central Moscow in May, before being forcibly expelled by riot police after a couple of weeks.[10]
The differences between the liberal and left wings of the movement were apparent from early on. At the demonstration on 24 December 2011, liberal figurehead Ksenia Sobchak – a TV star and daughter of the former St Petersburg mayor who had been Putin’s boss in the 1990s – told the crowd that ‘the main thing is to exert influence on power, rather than to struggle for power’. She was whistled and booed by sections of the crowd, who no doubt thought precisely the opposite. When the left tried to formulate a list of social demands for the movement to put forward, the liberals rejected the idea as ‘divisive’. Ultimately, ‘For Honest Elections’ – the liberal slogan that became the name of the umbrella organization coordinating the protests – was a demand for the system to function better, rather than for a fundamentally new system.
This disjuncture between a clear but inadequate and easily blocked political goal on the one hand, and a more expansive but largely unarticulated social agenda on the other, was a critical flaw in the anti-Putin movement, and it limited its potential reach across Russian society. But the protesters also faced tremendous obstacles which even a better organized and more widely supported movement would have been hard pressed to surmount. After Putin’s return to the Kremlin, their room for manoeuvre shrank still further.
From 2012 onward, the opposition to Putin was pummelled by a combination of judicial persecution and ideological pressure. Once he had regained the presidency, Putin adopted an increasingly strident nationalistic rhetoric. A new official ideology, which placed ever greater emphasis on ‘civilizational’ differences between East and West, had begun to coalesce before Putin’s re-election as president, hovering in the background of Russia’s confrontations with the US and its allies. Now it moved to the fore – and burst onto the international stage with the annexation of Crimea. But though shaped by external pressures, it was also a strategy for dealing with dissent at home, driving a wedge through Putin’s opponents by framing everything in polarized, friend–enemy terms.
This much became clear even during the 2011–12 protests, which Putin wasted no time in blaming on the US State Department, describing them as another attempt at a ‘Colour Revolution’. In an increasingly tense climate, those criticizing the government risked being tagged as fifth columnists. A similar logic applied to the persecution of Pussy Riot, who were portrayed not only as blasphemers against the Russian Orthodox faith with their ‘Punk Prayer’ but also, given the link commonly made between Orthodoxy and Russian national identity, as traitors to the motherland. Their arrest, trial and incarceration were the opening salvo in a new culture war, pitting pro-Western liberals against ‘patriotic’ defenders of ‘traditional’ Russian values – a modern-day re-run of the nineteenth-century battles between Westernizers and Slavophiles. This time it had an added dose of gender politics, since LGBT rights were presented in the Russian official media as the dividing line between Western ‘decadence’ and an embattled Russian ‘normality’. In this atmosphere, the mere fact of being gay was reframed as an act of subversive foreign propaganda.{13}
As well as the trial of Pussy Riot, the crackdown on the protest movement brought the beating and detention of demonstrators and the arrest and judicial persecution of its leaders. On the evidence of a murky documentary, Sergei Udaltsov, head of the Left Front, was accused of plotting terrorist acts and placed under house arrest in 2013, before eventually being imprisoned the following year (he was released in August 2017). Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and a leading liberal opposition figure since the mid-2000s, went into exile in 2013. The assassination of Boris Nemtsov yards from the Kremlin in February 2015 raised suspicions that an official investigation and trial have done little to quell. Aleksei Navalnyi was twice tried for fraud, in 2013 and again in 2014. The first trial earned him a five-year prison sentence – which was immediately suspended to allow him to run in the September 2013 mayoral election in Moscow. Up against the Kremlin-backed incumbent, Navalnyi managed to pull in more than a quarter of the vote; this was not enough to prevent his opponent from winning a first-round victory, but significantly more than had been expected.
10
The name derived from the statue to a nineteenth-century Kazakh poet, Abai Kunanbaev (or Qunanbaiuli in Kazakh), next to which the camp originally sprang up.