I'm Going to Ruin Their Lives

Inside Putin's War on Russia's Opposition

Marc Bennetts

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781780744322
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Russian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 2012, on the eve of Vladimir Putin's inauguration for a controversial third term as president, mass protests ended in violent clashes between demonstrators and the police. 'They ruined my big day, now I'm going to ruin their lives, ' Putin was alleged to have said. Now Boris Nemtsov is dead, other key opposition leaders are either in prison or under house arrest and the Kremlin is using the situation in Ukraine to further its domestic aims, encouraging the rise of violent pro-Putin groups and labelling protesters 'national traitors'. Journalist and long-time Moscow resident Marc Bennetts examines how Putin and his shadowy advisers crushed Russia's brave new protest movement. Featuring rare interviews with everyone from Nemtsov and other protest leaders to Kremlin insiders, Bennetts provides an unprecedented insight into the realities of politics on the ground. The result is a brilliant portrayal of the battle for Russia's soul – one which continues to this day.

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Putin’s Pact

President Boris Yeltsin had earned a reputation for the sensational and the unpredictable during his two terms in the Kremlin, from ordering tanks to shell an unruly Russian parliament, to playing the spoons on the bald head of Askar Akayev, the president of ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. And, on 31 December 1999, with the world fretting over the potential menace to global security posed by the Y2K millennium computer bug, Yeltsin captured the headlines again.

‘I am leaving. I have done all I could,’ modern Russia’s first president said as he addressed the nation for the final time, his words slurred by a combination of ill health and a well-documented alcohol problem. Bloated and sickly, Yeltsin bore little resemblance to the energetic and charismatic politician who in 1991 had defied Communist hardliners seeking to overturn Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.

The timing of Yeltsin’s departure half a year ahead of the scheduled presidential elections was surprising, but his decision was welcomed by the overwhelming majority of Russians, who had grown weary of the poverty and lawlessness that their country had slid into following the sudden break-up of the Soviet Union.

‘Many of our dreams failed to come true,’ Yeltsin continued, with typical bluntness, as millions watched his televised speech. ‘Things we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully hard. I am sorry that I did not live up to the hopes of people who believed that we could, with a single effort, a single strong push, jump out of our grey, stagnant, totalitarian past and into a bright, wealthy, civilized future.

‘A new generation is coming,’ he went on. ‘They can do more, and better.’‌¹

As the Kremlin clock ticked down to the new millennium, a grim-faced representative of that ‘new generation’ addressed Russia as acting president for the first time.

‘Like you, I intended this evening to listen to the New Year greetings of President Boris Yeltsin,’ said Vladimir Putin, the little-known, former security-services chief Yeltsin had recently appointed as Russia’s third prime minister in less than a year. ‘But things turned out otherwise.’

As if sensing his fellow citizens’ yearning for a strong hand, the new president spoke firmly and deliberately. The contrast with the almost incoherent Yeltsin was striking.

‘I want to warn that any attempt to exceed the limits of Russia’s law and the Russian constitution will be decisively crushed,’ Putin said. Then, without missing a beat, he made a pledge that his opponents would later accuse him of breaking, time and time again.

‘The freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, the freedom of the media and property rights, these fundamental principles of a civilized society will be protected by the state,’ he declared, a Russian flag to his right.

Putin paused. This was the head of state’s annual New Year’s Eve address; even an acting president in the job for less than a day would be expected to offer a holiday toast.

‘Let’s raise a glass for a new century for Russia,’ he said, his tone and expression unchanged. ‘And for love and peace in every one of our homes.’‌² The camera faded out.

Putin had not smiled once during his more than three-minute speech. Watching in the company of Russian friends, I was not alone in noting he had also declined to drink to his own toast.

That night, as Russians saw in the New Year at parties across their vast country, when the talk turned to the new man in the Kremlin, it was inevitably positive. After years of Yeltsin’s drunken antics, the teetotal, German-speaking Putin found strong initial support among young people, residents of Moscow and the highly educated. Ironically, these very same social groups would later form the core of the opposition to his rule.

‘I really liked Putin when he first came to power,’ recalled Yevgenia Chirikova, a bitter Kremlin critic who by her own admission was a ‘political dunce’ throughout most of Putin’s first two terms. ‘I remember how I used to cringe whenever they showed Yeltsin meeting foreign politicians. I’d think, “Oh no, he’s going to embarrass us again.” But Putin didn’t drink, and that was important. He was young and he seemed very capable.’‌³

*

I had arrived in Moscow for the first time in the spring of 1997, early on in Yeltsin’s second term. Life back then in Russia was exhilarating, but also grotesque, as a people cast adrift from the safety nets of the Soviet system floundered in the rough waters of the free market. The ideologies that had dominated political and public life for most of the previous century had been unceremoniously tossed on to history’s garbage dump, leaving a nation accustomed to a frequently dreary, predictable life centred on a lip-service to Marxism and Leninism to adapt to this strange new beast called capitalism. It was a task many were simply not up to: suicide rose, mental-health problems mushroomed and crime rocketed. Contract killings became almost an accepted mode of business negotiation. All over the country, fearful householders fitted steel doors.

Yeltsin and his government had wasted no time in introducing the ‘shock therapy’ economic reforms championed by their US advisers, and millions were quickly plunged into poverty. As ideological and economic uncertainties ravaged Russia, a centuries-old belief in the supernatural and the occult re-emerged to fill the gap left by the sudden collapse of the Soviet system. Russians had once relied on Communist Party officials to organize their lives for them; in the 1990s they turned en masse to wild-eyed ‘psychic healers’ and urban ‘wizards’ to resolve their problems. A people unused to the complexities of capitalism were likewise easy game for financial conmen: millions suffered when a massive Ponzi scheme collapsed in 1994. In a sign of the widespread desperation, liberals began discussing the need for a ‘Russian Pinochet’ – the Chilean dictator who brought his homeland both terror and eventual economic prosperity.

Russia was a dead empire, rotting fast. It was a world where the weak suffered terrible indignities and the rich had no inhibitions about flaunting their newfound fortunes. For me, the chaos of the Yeltsin years was perhaps best summed up by the bribe of $20 that a group of brand-new and very drunk Muscovite friends gave a bus driver late one snowy night to persuade him to alter his scheduled route drastically and drop us off at their doorway. The driver hadn’t even haggled, so eager was he to get his hands on the cash.

The break-up of the Soviet Union meant Russians were freer than they had ever been, but at what cost? Soviet propaganda had depicted life in the West as unrelenting misery for all but the very richest, and the 1990s seemed to prove the Communists had been right. ‘Everything our leaders told us about communism was false. But it turns out that everything they told us about capitalism was true,’ Russians joked bitterly.

Sights that had been almost unthinkable under the Soviet authorities became the norm in the newly independent Russia. Pensioners selling their household possessions piece by piece in filthy underpasses to buy their daily bread. Gangs of homeless children scavenging for food. Crippled soldiers back from Chechnya begging for money to drink away the day. Highly educated people – professors, lawyers, physicists – forced to moonlight as taxi drivers to supplement their meagre, or often non-existent, official salaries. The former superpower was visited by a host of humiliations.

On one evening in my first long, hazy winter in Moscow, I found myself drinking with strangers on a patch of snowy wasteland. ‘We used to be a great country, you know? We could have fucked anyone over,’ an unshaven, off-duty police officer muttered half to himself, half to me, before pouring another shot of vodka into the plastic cups that had appeared from nowhere.

Less than a year later, in August 1998, Russia defaulted on its debt, the rouble was devalued and millions lost their life savings – again.

In the euphoric aftermath of the largely peaceful collapse of the Soviet state, the well-known literary critic Yury Karyakin had declared: ‘For the first time in this century, God has smiled on Russia.’ As the 1990s dragged to an end, the Almighty, went the whispers, had turned His face away from Mother Russia. ‘Russia is cursed,’ a friend wailed late one night just after the default. ‘The sooner I get out of here the better.’

‘Putin Saved Russia’

Putin knew what his fellow citizens wanted and he intended to deliver. ‘Russians have had no sense of stability for the past ten years,’ he told state television in a wide-ranging interview less than two months after taking over from Yeltsin. ‘We hope to return this feeling.’‌⁴ And over the next eight years, he set about doing just that. By May 2008, towards the end of Putin’s second term in office, Russia, on the surface at least, had been transformed. Its major cities, from the Pacific Coast to its European borders, were almost unrecognizable. On the bare spot of land where I had listened to the vodka-guzzling cop, a bright, three-storey shopping centre had sprung up. Salaries were not only being paid on time, but they were also higher than ever before. The disastrous war in Chechnya was as good as over and the devastated republic’s capital, Grozny, was being reconstructed from scratch. Its central thoroughfare would so...