The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (12 page)

Again, she was right. Several months later, in June, one of Yevgenia’s colleagues came across workers felling trees in the forest near Sheremetyevo airport. When the colleague demanded to see a work permit, the construction crews quickly packed up and left. Sensing that the workers would return, Yevgenia and more than two hundred supporters set up a camp in the forest so they could guard these woods day and night.

The attack she long expected came at 5:00 a.m. on July 23. While the environmentalists slept, nearly a hundred men wearing masks attacked their camp, tearing down banners, collapsing tents, and beating many of the activists as they emerged. “
These were big guys, very
aggressive,” Yevgenia later told me. “They looked like skinheads. They started to chase us away and threatened to tear us to pieces, to kill us.” The attack had clearly been coordinated alongside the plans for construction, because crews of workers started to cut trees just as the attack occurred. They had brought a large, Japanese-made harvester that could quickly separate trees from their roots. Yevgenia called the police, but they were slow to arrive. When they did, they refused to do anything about the skinheads. What the police did do was call for backup: specifically, the OMON, Russian special forces. (The OMON has a reputation for a rough, hard-edged brand of crowd control; its motto is “We know no mercy and do not ask for any.”) When the OMON unit arrived, they arrested Yevgenia and the other protesters.

In the wake of this, and another attack on the environmentalists five days later, Yevgenia decided she had to regroup. She needed to broaden the fight, and she needed an ally who could give her effort a boost. She called Yuri Shevchuk, a famous Soviet and Russian rock star. Shevchuk had long lent his name to human rights causes, and Yevgenia thought the music icon might be sympathetic. A couple of months earlier, in a rare live television appearance of Putin with a collection of famous Russian musicians, Shevchuk had shocked the viewing audience by asking the visibly annoyed prime minister why Russia had no freedom of the press. After Yevgenia’s phone call, Shevchuk came to Khimki. Yevgenia described her shock. “
He had always been my idol since student times,” she said, “and he came.” Sitting in her kitchen, Shevchuk had a simple solution: “Let’s do a concert to support you guys,” recalled Yevgenia.

On August 22, in Pushkin Square, more than two thousand people attended a concert in support of the fight to save the forest, an impressive number at the time for any public rally in Russia. Police prevented a sound truck from coming to the square, but Shevchuk performed anyway. Two nights later, Bono invited Shevchuk onstage to perform during U2’s first-ever concert in Moscow. Many interpreted it as support for Shevchuk and his fight against Russian authorities, and Bono later spoke out in favor of the Russian environmentalists while still in Moscow.

At that moment, the idea of the Russian government clear-cutting a forest seemed particularly poorly timed. The country had just
endured one of its worst heat waves on record, and wildfires that summer had consumed nearly two million acres of forests, farms, and villages across the country.
According to a poll conducted by the Levada Center, 73 percent of Russians were supportive of the fight to preserve this rare green belt outside Moscow. In the face of so much public pressure, President Dmitri Medvedev decided he should intervene.
In an unexpected move, Medvedev announced on his video blog that the construction in Khimki would temporarily stop until the government could “conduct further civic and expert discussions.”

Publicly, Yevgenia called it a victory, but privately she suspected it was a ploy. Again, her instincts were right. In December, the government commission that had been convened to study the highway project announced that the construction would proceed. All that was required was the president’s signature.

But the powerful interests behind the highway did not wait for Medvedev’s pen. Yevgenia soon exposed that a real estate development company was already selling off tracts in Khimki Forest, even without Medvedev’s approval. (Yevgenia simply called the company, posing as a potential buyer. She asked the company representative, whose name was Oleg, if it was possible to buy a tract near Oak Roof, where Khimki residents bottle their spring water. Oleg replied, “Yes, that’s possible.” The whole exchange was posted on YouTube.)

In March 2011, members of the Defenders of Khimki Forest contacted me to describe how the pressure on Yevgenia was stepping up. Rather than coming after her directly, they were targeting her family. That month officials raided her husband’s firm. Although they brought no charges and had no court order, they interrogated him and several of his employees and seized company documents and paperwork. The harassment of her husband’s company had begun months earlier when authorities demanded that the firm account for all of its transactions in the past twelve months. The justification for the order was the outlandish claim that the electrical engineering firm was somehow financing “extremists.” Once clients and banks understood that authorities had singled out the company, they began to back away. The March raid hadn’t been a complete surprise. A few days beforehand, someone had left a comment on the Defenders of Khimki Forest Web site, writing, “We’ll raid your company in the nearest future, prepare your papers!”

More frightening was when the government targeted Yevgenia’s daughters. Representatives of the municipal department of guardianship unexpectedly “dropped by” her apartment. The officials alleged that they had received a letter from one of her neighbors claiming that Yevgenia “beats” and “starves” her daughters, Liza and Sasha. Afraid that they would attempt to take her children, Yevgenia refused to open her door. Later, the department admitted that none of her neighbors had written such a letter. It had simply been its “duty” to check on the children’s well-being. I hadn’t been able to speak with Yevgenia immediately after this incident, but I remembered how much she talked about her girls. I suspected that this threat had probably shaken her the most.

The day we had walked through Khimki Forest together, I had asked her if she ever feared for herself or her family.

“Many times I have asked myself, ‘Yevgenia, what are you doing here in this forest?’ I have everything. Why am I, a normal woman, working in this dangerous place?” she says. “I’ve just forbidden myself to think about it; otherwise I would go crazy. Because living in Russia and attempting to think about what can happen to you the next day, you can get yourself sick.”

Earlier that week, I had met with Boris Nemtsov, one of the leaders of Solidarity, the Russian opposition group. “
The main idea of Putin [is] to reduce the level of political activity of the population. This is his absolutely cynical strategy,” Nemtsov told me. “He is very lucky when people say ‘nothing depends on my view.’ He is very much afraid of independent views. This is his main idea.”

Nemtsov’s statement could just as easily have applied to the Chinese Communist Party, to Hugo Chávez, or to almost any other strongman. Widespread political apathy is the grease that helps any authoritarian system hum. And in the smoothest-functioning authoritarian systems, the regimes have gone to great lengths to turn disinterest in political life into a public virtue. When that is the case, the Yevgenia Chirikovas of the world are the people whom dictators may fear most. They possess the independence and persistence to challenge the prevailing system, the dreaded antidote to the apathy that an authoritarian regime requires to succeed. It doesn’t matter if the fight is over a rigged election, corrupt courts, or a serene forest. Such people are capable of emerging from the least likely places to infect
others with their stubborn ideas. Looking out over the spring at Oak Roof that day, Yevgenia summed it up. “Because [Putin] didn’t take into account my opinion, he is being punished.”

Then we walked out of the forest.

Omar Afifi was proud of his police uniform. In 1981, when he was sixteen years old, he had entered the police academy, the same year that Hosni Mubarak replaced the assassinated Anwar Sadat as Egypt’s president. He had been attracted to the job because of the pay and security; finding a job working for the Egyptian government was one of the few paths to a stable paycheck. What he had appreciated less was how becoming an Egyptian police officer would change his status in the community. The first time he returned to his village wearing his uniform, he was astounded by how people reacted. Old men, people who had known him since he was a boy, stood when he walked into a room. He was treated with a deference he had never known. Of course, he quickly realized it wasn’t so much respect as fear. “
The tailor has his tools, and so does the police officer,” says Afifi. “The government wanted everyone to be scared of the police. The air of intimidation was worse than the bad acts. We defeated the people before we even made contact with them.”

Despite its reputation, Afifi never believed that joining the Egyptian police necessitated that you become a monster. Far from it. He thought well of most of his fellow officers and believed that only a minority—maybe one in seven—were the cruel, abusive bullies that so many people feared. And for the most part, his first two years on the force did nothing to change his opinion. His work seemed entirely routine, very much the job that he thought he had signed up for when he first entered the academy. But that changed in his third year wearing the uniform. He had what he would later call the first of his “three no’s.”

A police officer had been killed. As it would be for any police force, apprehending the man who had slain their colleague was a top priority. The authorities were tipped off that the man they believed to be the killer was on the outskirts of Cairo, hiding in a cornfield. Afifi
was among those dispatched to find him. Police units were stationed at points around the field. Afifi and other officers were to start on one side of the field and, walking in close formation, slowly advance through the high rows of corn until they flushed the fugitive out. Minutes later, as Afifi made his way through the field, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. The stalks several yards ahead of him had moved. It was the suspected killer. He ran, and Afifi and his fellow officers gave chase. The stalks of corn cut his face as the distance between them slowly shrank. He estimates the suspect ran full tilt for nearly two miles. But the pursuit ended when the man stumbled, exhausted and unable to run any farther. He surrendered, cowering in the middle of a cornfield, his arms raised above his head. The alleged killer, unarmed and unable to catch his breath, was surrounded. Then the superior officer ordered Afifi to shoot him. Afifi didn’t understand. “Why should I kill him when he has surrendered?” he protested. “No, I can’t.” The senior officer looked at Afifi in disgust. “You are too soft. Go! Get out of here!” he barked. Afifi walked alone the distance back to where they had left their squad cars. As he did, he heard a battery of shots ring out. They were enough to leave the man’s body riddled with bullets. “This made me change,” Afifi told me. He knew now that there were tasks he could not perform and that his refusal to do so would probably have consequences. It also changed how fellow officers viewed him. “My superiors wouldn’t include me on missions that did not have a legal basis.” This was his first no.

The second and third no came in 1995 in quick succession. Egypt’s parliamentary elections were a week away. Afifi’s career as a police officer had largely stalled, if only because senior officers didn’t believe he could be trusted. In 1995, he was working as the warden of a small police jail in the center of Cairo. On that afternoon, a state security officer unexpectedly showed up at his jailhouse with nearly five hundred people in tow. They were supporters of opposition parties, and by the look of them Afifi believed many of them had been severely beaten during their arrest. The officer told Afifi he was dropping off the protesters to be detained in his jail. “Okay,” Afifi replied. “Give me the arrest warrant with the order they be detained.” The state security officer looked at him incredulously. “There are no papers. These are orders from on high. It’s an emergency.”

Afifi wasn’t moved, and he stood his ground. He argued that some of the protesters looked as if they needed medical attention. If they died in one of his cells, Afifi would need the paper trail to explain why they were being housed there; otherwise he could be blamed for their deaths. The state security officer shook his head because both men knew that someone dying in an Egyptian jailhouse would hardly lead to an inquiry, let alone an uproar. “Why aren’t you being more cooperative?” asked the officer, becoming more frustrated. “You must obey our order. These are the enemies of Egypt.” Afifi didn’t argue that point with him; he just repeated his condition. “I know,” he replied. “But I need the arrest order from someone, from the judge, from you, from someone.” Afifi didn’t entirely understand why he wasn’t backing down. He simply didn’t want to be an accomplice to the abuse of these citizens. “I was acting on my conscience,” he told me. “That’s it. I knew nothing of human rights.” And he also suspected that state security would be either too lazy or unwilling to create a paper trail. And he was right. The state security officer left to find somewhere else he could detain his prisoners. Afifi believes they were ultimately held in police barracks. That was the second time he said no.

It only took six days for him to find himself again at odds with his superiors. The night before the parliamentary elections the chief of the Cairo police, Habib el-Adly, called together a meeting of seven or eight hundred officers. (By 2011, Adly had risen to be Egypt’s interior minister, becoming one of the most feared men in Mubarak’s regime.) Adly warned the officers that if the opposition won the elections, they would lose their jobs, maybe even their lives. Given the stakes, he said, they would play a special role on Election Day. The officers were to show up the next day in plain clothes, leaving their IDs and guns at home. Most would be expected to distribute marked ballots at polling stations. If they were prevented from doing that for some reason, he instructed the officers to start a fight outside the polling place. Once the scuffle began, officers would make arrests while others would stuff ballot boxes inside. If for some reason even this failed to work, then the officers were to detain the men responsible for transporting the ballot boxes after voting had ended. The officers could then either stuff the boxes with previously marked ballots or await further instructions. “There was no imagination or intelligence
to the plan. [Adly] didn’t even understand how voting worked,” Afifi told me. “His only qualification was that he had no conscience.”