Winter is Coming (35 page)

Evil has been with us from the beginning of time, and it is not going away. Indeed, technology means it is very close. Today, the available means of creating horror are even more deadly than ever before. I submit that it is vital to believe in evil—it is neither confused nor deterred by vacuous introspection. We should study what is said and written by evil men, and take them at their word. Adolf Hitler told the world exactly what his aspirations were in
Mein Kampf
and in his speeches, but at first the world dismissed his claims as political bluster.

This is very true, and I particularly appreciate the part on taking evil men at their word, as it is something I have been saying for years about Putin. Almost since he came into office Putin has spoken forthrightly about his goals. Yes, he also blatantly lies about some things when it’s convenient, but on the big issues like centralizing power and his contempt for democracy and civil rights, he speaks plainly and has a good track record of backing up what he says.

This is why it was so frustrating to watch the Obama administration, first through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then via her successor, John Kerry, continue to treat Putin as if he would reform his wicked ways if only they treated him kindly enough and offered enough concessions. It turned out Obama would need all of his advertised flexibility in his second term, because he would no longer be able to transmit messages to Vladimir via carrier pigeon Medvedev. He would have to do it in person. Two thousand twelve was an election year in Russia, too.

The adjective “Orwellian” has become cheap currency in modern political discourse. Liberals and conservatives alike in democracies like the United Kingdom and the United States enjoy using the term to describe nearly any infringement on civil liberties by the state. Video cameras to deter crime, wiretaps of suspected terrorists, and security checks at airports—all have been deemed worthy reference to Orwell’s masterpiece,
1984.
I too sense the importance of protecting personal freedoms, even in a democracy, but those of us who have lived in actual police states would prefer to keep certain words in our lexicon that can describe our far more dire circumstances.

The most powerful theme in Orwell’s book is not that of the all-seeing Big Brother, but that of the control and distortion of language, especially in the form of “newspeak.” Words take on inverted meanings, words expressing unapproved ideas are eliminated, and human thought itself is curtailed through the reduction and simplification of vocabulary. This attempt to warp reality via information control is not science fiction to anyone brought up reading
Pravda
in the Soviet Union, or anyone living in Putin’s Russia today.

And so, the presidential election of March 4, 2012, the most fraudulent in Russian history, was proclaimed “fair and clean” by the state-controlled media. Peaceful civilian protests were dubbed “extremist provocations,” and the OMON riot police who brutally suppressed the protestors were “maintaining order.” The public outcry and huge protests over fraud in the December 4, 2011, parliamentary elections were answered by even greater corruption and the preordained reinstallation of a KGB lieutenant colonel who clearly aims to be dictator for life.

I would be a poor patriot if I did not point out that
1984
was modeled on the totalitarian state in the dystopian Russian novel
We,
written by Evgenij Zamjatin in 1921 and, of course, banned in the USSR until 1988. There are still elections in Zamjatin’s futuristic universe and each year “the Benefactor” is reelected unanimously. Disturbingly familiar.

You might not think that they are banning or burning many books in Putin’s “dictatorship-lite,” which attempts to mime the functions of an open society and to keep the most cliched oppression behind the scenes as much as possible. This is partly true, if only because the authorities realize that big piles of burning books look particularly bad on YouTube. Instead, they simply confiscate the books as “extremist materials,” as was done in 2012 with 250,000 copies of former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov’s book detailing Putin’s corruption.

The blatant fraud of the December 4 elections was still apparent three months later. In what we call a “carousel” in Russia, herds of voters were moved from polling station to polling station in quantities large enough to clog the center of Moscow with dozens of buses. Fake polling stations appeared just a few days ahead of the election and collected thousands of votes. Threats went out to CEOs, school administrators, and many others directing them to get out the vote for Putin or suffer cuts in funding or worse.

The regime had to adapt to the awareness of the hundreds of thousands of protestors who had taken to the streets in December, much to the surprise of the government and the opposition alike. Webcams were installed in every polling station and tens of thousands of observers arose from the outraged citizenry. This forced Putin’s election commission leader Vladimir Churov to rely on tricks that could be performed behind the curtains. Supplementary voter rolls, intended for those who need to vote away from where they were registered, swelled to incredible size.

Unsurprisingly, in the precincts where numbers were available, Putin received a much higher percentage of votes cast from the supplementary rolls than in the regular ones. Absentee ballots were also in high demand all of a sudden, as were the services that allow the infirm to vote from home.

Even all of Churov’s wizardry could not get Putin over the 50 percent mark in Moscow, where the official number was just 47 percent even though there were no credible candidates on the ballot. (Our calculations estimated that his real percentage in the capital was closer to 35 percent.) The candidates were all Kremlin approved, from the tired old Communist and Nationalist leaders to the new face of billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, a Putin creature installed on the ticket to syphon away protest votes. The global media descends only on election day and leaves soon afterward, ignoring the root and branch corruption and repression that is the real story.

As Russians tired of Putin, it remained to be seen if the rest of the world would continue to pretend he was the elected ruler of Russia. President Obama waited a few days but eventually called Putin. The modern dictatorship was taking place behind the scenes, but the performance of a democracy was continuing on stage, and Obama played his part.

This was no surprise, as I had received a preview of the Obama administration’s deluded hopes earlier in 2011. Vice President Joe Biden had come to Moscow in March 2011 for talks and he later spoke with me and other opposition members. When Biden arrived he was quite excited after a personal meeting with Putin, saying he’d gone off-script and pressed Putin not to run for the presidency again, saying that it would look terrible and hurt Russia’s constitutional integrity. From Biden’s proud demeanor and the look on the face of incoming Ambassador McFaul, it was clear this had not been part of the White House’s intended message.

I raised my hand to speak and said, “Mr. Biden, you do understand that compared to Putin you and Obama are beggars? You have to go to the Hill for every million while Putin can spend a billion on bribes without signing a piece of paper!” That the Americans still thought Putin cared about what they said or how his actions looked to them or to anyone was, and remains, terribly disappointing.

The Russian protest movement had been transformed at the end of 2011, or so we hoped, after Duma elections that demonstrated a shocking level of fraud even for Russia. Ordinary urban Russians who had done all right under Putin and mostly kept their mouths shut could not accept this latest assault on their dignity. Everyone knew the elections were a joke, and that they had been a charade since 2000. But this time Putin’s party, United Russia, had gone too far. The blatant vote rigging pushed hundreds of thousands of Russians into the streets with a unified anti-Putin, anti-United Russia message. It was a beautiful sight to behold.

There were flags from across the political spectrum, which validated my original 2005 protest concept of accepting anyone who would march against Putin, regardless of ideology. The majority, however, had no real political affiliation at all. They were marching against corruption, against impunity, and against Putin. The mask was all the way off, and Putin made it obvious he was no longer interested in pretending to be a democrat. People were simply sick of him.

As the protests continued through December, reaching over one hundred thousand people on December 24, 2011, the protesters were also marching for a relatively new face at the front of opposition marches, Alexei Navalny. He had been arrested at an earlier march and his release was anticipated by huge crowds. In repressive regimes like that of Vladimir Putin there is a constant struggle between the dictatorship and those who oppose it to restrict, or liberate, vital information. Navalny was the vanguard of the “data dissidents.” He built a network to reveal the corruption of the Putin regime, relentlessly documenting the kleptocracy case by case, with popular outrage as the result.

Navalny’s rise to prominence in the opposition movement was no accident, however. He had worked hard for many years as an organizer and activist. Apart from his persistence and skill, Navalny also possessed the more subtle requirements for leadership in the modern age. His charisma is complemented by a sardonic sense of humor that is ideal for puncturing the propaganda of the gray and humorless Kremlin. His knack for phrasing branded Putin’s United Russia as “the Party of Crooks and Thieves” for all time.

Navalny mastered the blogging and social networks that the opposition depends on since we are banned from the mainstream media. As had already been seen in other countries, groups could organize public protests very quickly online. Of course this did not mean you would not be beaten or arrested when you showed up, as many were. I was hardly an expert on flash mobs or even Twitter back then, but I was happy to march with Navalny on several occasions and work together with him and opposition activists old and new.

Navalny and his new breed of followers were largely undeterred for over a year, and we regularly scheduled large sanctioned protests as Putin’s formal return to the presidency arrived on May 7, 2012. The refreshed opposition movement was symbolized by white ribbons, noted by Putin with his typical vulgarity: “I thought they were condoms.”

The May 6 protests in Bolotnaya Square the night before Putin’s inaugural address were the first to be interrupted with serious violence, as the police intentionally shifted the barriers to create bottlenecks and then attacked protesters who were squeezed outside of them. There were over four hundred arrests, including those of organizers Navalny, Nemtsov, and Udaltsov, and over a hundred people with serious injuries.

I was not scheduled to speak that day because the theme of the rally was to provide an opportunity to the activists and speakers who had come from all over the country to be there. And so after reaching the police cordon at around six o’clock in the evening I passed through and headed for my scheduled appearance on Echo of Moscow to discuss the protest and Putin’s return. I also had a guest in tow that day, the American political consultant Frank Luntz, who was startled to get an up-close view of Russian democracy in action. He called in to Fox News that evening with his impressions.

“The government we remember of the Soviet Union, of the 80s, appears to be back now,” Luntz said. “People are scared. . . . It’s

frightening to think, but it was almost as though the police wanted to have this confrontation, that they wanted to send this message,

24 hours before Putin comes back into office, that dissention and disagreement is not going to be allowed. They certainly didn’t have to do it violently, they certainly did not have to attack. There was no justification whatsoever. . . . I marched in the entire parade and there was a gentleness, there was singing, and chants. These were docile people and they were attacked unfairly.”