The New Tsar (72 page)

All of the protest leaders were summoned for questioning the next day, despite the holiday, to prevent them from attending the rally. Navalny encouraged the protest virtually, posting sarcastic messages on Twitter even as he was awaiting interrogation. More than fifty thousand people showed up, emboldened by the searches and arrests, and the speakers vowed to sustain the momentum. The pressure only intensified, though, and the harassment of the movement’s most prominent figures—especially a celebrity like Sobchack—sent a message that not even personal connections to Putin would provide protection for anyone who rose up against him.

It was as if a signal had filtered through the ranks of the bureaucracy. The police, prosecutors, and the new deputies of the Duma and Federation Council, all now had license to staunch the contagion challenging Putin by any means. Within weeks of his inauguration, the Duma swiftly passed a law increasing fines for attending unauthorized protests from 5,000 rubles to 300,000 rubles, nearly $10,000 at the time and many times the average monthly salary. The city of Moscow prohibited the display of white ribbons on cars. The Duma passed one law giving the authorities the power to shut down websites, ostensibly for publishing information unsuitable for children, and another prohibiting the dissemination of “homosexual propaganda.” In July, a new law required organizations that received foreign funding to register as “foreign agents”—a phrase with haunting echoes of Soviet-era persecutions—and another allowing a maximum prison sentence of twenty years for anyone “providing consultative assistance to a foreign
organization” deemed to be acting against the state. Questioned by his own commission on human rights about the harshness and broad scope of the legislation, Putin said he would review it personally. He then signed it into law the very same day. It targeted not just overtly political groups, like Golos, but also others like the Environment Watch of the North Caucasus, which was trying to monitor the environmental damage caused by the Olympic construction in Sochi. In October, the Duma expanded the definition of treason so broadly that someone who unwillingly passed “state secrets” to a foreign state or international organization, even information that was available to the public, could be charged as a traitor.

There was no longer even the carefully choreographed illusion of considered debate, as the Duma and Federation Council spit out new laws one after another. Slander, which Medvedev had decriminalized, became a crime again, while penalties for it and for libel, especially against government officials, increased. Also criminalized were blasphemy and “offending religious feelings,” inspired by the women of Pussy Riot. Those who dissented faced retribution. One Duma deputy who had dared to join the protesters was stripped of his immunity and his mandate. Ksenia Sobchak’s mother, Lyudmila Narusova, was expelled from the seat she had held in the Federation Council for a decade, despite her relationship to Putin.

The flurry of legislating blended the harsh measures of an authoritarian crackdown with patriotic and religious appeals. The result was a potent brew, a cultural war born at the heart of Putin’s new presidency. The trial of Pussy Riot was the first major battle. It opened on July 30, the day that Putin signed into law the legislation on libel and Internet restrictions. In their opening statements, delivered in a glass enclosure surrounded by guards and a snarling dog, the three young women apologized for causing offense but insisted theirs was not an expression of religious animosity. Rather it was a political protest protected by the freedom of speech. It was the core of a defense that no one expected to prevail. The trial was marred by judicial irregularities and the strenuous efforts of prosecuting lawyers to demonstrate the “moral damage” the brief performance inflicted, even on witnesses who had not been there but had only seen the video. One of the defense lawyers, Violetta Volkova, complained that the defendants had not been allowed to review the evidence against them, since it included hundreds of hours of videos they were not allowed to watch in their detention center. She added that
documents for the prosecution had been forged; that she and her colleagues were not once allowed to meet confidentially with their clients; that the defense’s expert witnesses had been barred from testifying; that the court simply ignored the defense’s objections. “There’s a sense right now that we’re not in twenty-first century Russia, but in some alternative universe in a fairy tale like
Alice in Wonderland
, like
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
,” Volkova said, belittling the prosecution’s claim that a few seconds of protest could shatter the foundations of a church with a millennium of history, “and right now this whole ludicrous reality will disappear and crumble like a house of cards.”
¹⁷

Theirs was a show trial that echoed those of Stalin’s era or Brezhnev’s, this time with each twist and statement chronicled on air or in print on the Internet. Although prosecutors did their best to portray the three women as ill-educated deviants, they appeared poised and courageous, well versed in history and religious thought. In their closing statements, they cited the intellectual and moral rebellions of thinkers from Socrates to Jesus, from Dostoyevsky (who once faced a mock execution) to Solzhenitsyn. In her closing statement, Maria Alyokhina compared prison to “Russia in miniature,” where the people had lost the sense of themselves as anything other than hapless victims at the mercy of the prison’s administration.

The trial intensified international outrage over the broader authoritarian turn that Putin had taken, and it dogged him whenever he traveled overseas. He made his first public remarks on the case as he visited London during the 2012 Summer Olympics, the last games to be held before those in Sochi. Putin claimed he had not raised the issue with the British prime minister, David Cameron, though the prime minister’s aides said they had in fact discussed it. Putin’s misstatements, his disregard for facts, were becoming harder to ignore.

“You know, there is nothing good about it,” he said, when asked about the trial. “I do not really want to comment. But I think that if these young ladies went to, say, Israel and desecrated something there (many of you probably know that there are some very strong young men there), they would hardly be able to leave that easy.” If they had done the performance in a mosque in the Northern Caucasus, he said, the police would not have arrested them in time to save them from a crueler fate. Magnanimously, he expressed hope that they would not be judged “too harshly,” though the question of judgment was never really in doubt.

On August 17, to no one’s surprise, the three were convicted, the
judge having dismissed the defense that theirs had been a political protest against the state’s leaders. The prosecutors had asked for three years, but almost certainly Putin’s comments influenced the judge’s decision to sentence them to only two years. Hundreds of the group’s supporters had gathered outside the courthouse, while others swept through Moscow placing colorful balaclavas on statues. The police were prepared and unforgiving. Even before the verdict was read, Garry Kasparov was carried off from an impromptu press conference on the courthouse steps and beaten as the police forced him into a van. Once news of the verdict spread, clashes erupted around the courthouse, with the police arresting dozens. It all played out on state television, fueling the anti-Western sentiment that had become a staple of the Kremlin’s counterattack. In her final statement to the court, Nadezhda had bravely cited Solzhenitsyn’s paean to the power of the word in his novel
The First Circle
. “Just like Solzhenitsyn, I believe the word will break through cement,” she said. Pussy Riot’s case instead had divided and deflated the opposition. The heady enthusiasm of the protests had now been thoroughly stifled, driven back underground or abroad. Pussy Riot became international stars but the movement that spawned them suffered. The two other performers who had been at the cathedral, identified only as Balaclava and Serafima, fled the country after the verdict.

In October, the three women appealed their sentences. Even Dmitri Medvedev, now installed as prime minister, said that while he was sickened by their protest, he believed their continued incarceration was unproductive and unnecessary. They had already been in detention for seven months by then anyway. Katya had hired a new lawyer, and rather than trying to justify the protest, she argued that her conviction should be reversed because she had not had time to even play the guitar before she was hustled off the soleas. Lawyers for the other two argued that comments by Putin and Medvedev had prejudiced the trial, thus justifying a dismissal or retrial. The judge accepted Katya’s argument, releasing her on a suspended sentence, while dismissing the appeals of Nadezhda and Maria. Some suspected that Katya had made a separate deal, or perhaps that the Kremlin wanted to show that the judiciary was in fact free to deliberate fairly. Very few believed that Katya had won her appeal on its merits.

After her release, Katya retreated from public view. She still met the remaining members of Pussy Riot in Moscow, but they no longer performed. She was certain they remained under surveillance. In a vegetarian
café in Moscow after her release, she explained that the meaning of their performances had been badly distorted for the Kremlin’s political ends, but she also acknowledged that the broader public had not been receptive to the message.
¹⁸
The Russian people were not prepared to challenge the system that had slowly taken hold of society. Putin himself was not the villain in the prosecution against them, she believed. He simply represented the face of a conservative and deeply patriarchal society. The villain was the numbing conformity of a system, in culture and in politics, that made any deviation of thought too risky to contemplate. “The problem was not that everyone thought that we were innocent, that the charges brought against us were illegal, that Putin alone was bad, making phone calls and issuing demands in the case,” Katya explained. “The problem was that
everyone
thought we were guilty.”

CHAPTER 23

Alone on Olympus

P
utin turned sixty in October 2012, reaching the official retirement age for Russian men. The limit had no bearing on the president or others holding high offices, but as president, Dmitri Medvedev had made a point of lowering the retirement age from sixty-five. The idea was to “rejuvenate” the ranks of the bulging bureaucracy by making room for younger people to rise up. With his birthday approaching—and with some of his closest allies in government already having passed the milestone—Putin now raised the retirement age to seventy. It seemed a minor adjustment, yet it was part of a pattern to reverse, step by step, whatever legacy Medvedev’s presidency had left. In addition to the retirement age and the decriminalization of slander, Putin restored the two time zones that Medvedev had eliminated, and reversed his unpopular decision to stop changing the clocks twice a year. Medvedev’s political reforms, announced as a concession amid the protests in the winter of 2011–2012 and signed into law as one of his last acts as president, were now diluted so that elections for regional leaders would only involve candidates screened by the Kremlin.

Although Medvedev remained prime minister and the leader of United Russia, the Kremlin seemed intent to airbrush him out of the pantheon of the country’s leaders, as if Putin’s presidency had never been interrupted. The Kremlin went so far as to belittle Medvedev’s accomplishments, revising history in a Soviet style to emphasize Putin’s ultimate responsibility for them. In August, on the fourth anniversary of the war in Georgia, a mysterious forty-seven-minute documentary appeared on YouTube and began to circulate widely. It was called “Lost Day,” and, quoting senior military commanders, it claimed that Medvedev’s indecisiveness in the opening hours of the war had resulted in higher casualties among the Ossetian and Russian forces. This was black PR, a stealthy
technique Russian media strategists had wielded to chilling effect against political opponents and business rivals; only now it was turned on Putin’s long-serving protégé. The film’s details were contradictory, blatantly false in places, simply muddled in others. The film’s core assertion, set to eerie music, was that Medvedev caused the deaths of a thousand people, even though the death toll from all sides in the war was 884. The harshest criticism in the film came from General Yuri Baluyevsky, who, though he stepped down two months before the war began, claimed that the Georgians had launched their attack in South Ossetia hours before they actually had and that Medvedev had acted only when Putin personally intervened from the Summer Olympics in Beijing. “Until there was a kick in the backside—first from Beijing, then a kick personally from, as you say, directly, Vladimir Vladimirovich—everyone, to put it mildly, was afraid of something,” the general said.

The source of the film never became clear, and no one claimed credit; in black PR, anonymity reigns. It was posted on a YouTube account belonging to someone named Aslan Gudiev, and credited to a production company called Alfa, though no studio by that name existed in Russia. The Russian edition of
Forbes
linked the film to a television channel belonging to the National Media Group, partially owned and controlled by Bank Rossiya and its principal shareholder, Putin’s old friend Yuri Kovalchuk.
¹
As it began to circulate, a reporter in the Kremlin press pool queried Putin, who went on to embrace much of what the film asserted, including the claim that he had called Medvedev twice from Beijing, thus directly contradicting the narrative his protégé put forth. Given the Kremlin’s tight control of questions from the press pool, the fact the question was even asked, by a reporter from the state news agency RIA Novosti, suggested that Putin wanted to draw attention to the film. He could easily have repudiated its worst insinuation about his old aide, his friend and protégé, but he did not.