Behind the shining pomp of the Red Square rally
is a Russia in turmoil
As a Moscow concert marked Putin’s declaration of the
annexation of four regions of Ukraine, the backlash to mobilisation reached
fever pitch
Andrew Roth
Andrew Roth
in Moscow
Fri 30 Sep
2022 18.17 BST
A tide of
Russians flowed toward Red Square as Vladimir Putin declared his annexation of
Ukrainian territory that would herald a shining new era of perpetual war with
Ukraine and the west. “Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Russia!
Together for ever!” read the banner hanging on Manezh Square by the Kremlin.
There were
busloads of tough men from a factory near Moscow alighting by the statue of
Karl Marx to celebrate, university teachers passing out invitations to a pop
concert to their students, workers lugging armfuls of Russian flags to
distribute. Some of the tricolours bore the image of Putin.
This is the
Russia that Putin envisions after 22 years in power: united, simple, cynical
and slavish. But real life is not a staged rally. And as Putin gathered his
lackeys and satraps in the gilded Grand Kremlin Palace, across the country,
from the minority ethnic republics of Dagestan and Buryatia to the hinterlands
of Pskov and Penza, to cosmopolitan Moscow, communities are in turmoil.
Hundreds of
thousands of men are leaving their homes, some contracted and mobilised into
fighting in Ukraine, and still more fleeing for the borders to dodge the draft.
In both cases, they do not know when they will come home.
Tensions
have not been as high as they are now in Russia for decades, according to a new
poll from the state-run Public Opinion Foundation. Of those surveyed by the
centre this week, 69% said they had felt “stress”, nearly double the 35% who told
the pollster they felt tense before Putin announced his mobilisation.
“I feel we
are going into the unknown, going into nowhere,” said Anton, a Moscow resident
who had passed into Georgia after waiting more than three days on the border.
He described men desperate to reach the border before Putin spoke on Friday,
with fears that the annexations would set off a tit-for-tat response with the
west leading to a potential border closure.
At the same
time, videos have shown Russian men called up to the army arriving at
trash-strewn barracks with no officers, or simply dumped in snowy fields with
no tents or instructions. “Nobody needs us,” said one man in a video posted
from a field near Berezniki, in the Ural mountains. “They’ve driven us here
like a herd of sheep.”
These
scenes are nothing compared with the horrors of war that Ukrainians have
endured at Russian hands over the last seven months. But they are new and
shocking for Russians who have tried to ignore the war and now cannot. Polling
shows that Putin’s mobilisation is having a more acute effect on Russian
society – and perhaps on his hold on power – than any event since February.
The
mobilisation has played out as a tragicomedy. In Tuva, southern Siberia, the
authorities will give your family a sheep if you sign up for military service,
the independent media outlet Holod reported. In Dagestan’s Derbent region,
police with loudspeakers drove through residential neighbourhoods telling all
draft-age men to leave their homes and go to local draft centres. “Fucking
idiots!” raged the head of Dagestan, Sergei Melikov, in response, in a video
circulating on social media, as the backlash to the draft and attempts to
mollify the public reached fever pitch.
At the root
of reactions is deep unease at the nuclear standoff that the Russian president
is leading the country into. As soon as the Kremlin event was announced, state
TV began broadcasting a 24-hour countdown to Putin’s speech. By the time the
signing ceremony began in the Grand Kremlin Palace, even some of Putin’s most
loyal supporters looked tense.
“Is
everyone ready to follow Putin into heaven?” asked Tatiana Stanovaya, the
founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik. “Putin is basically proposing
to the world that if the west doesn’t give us Ukraine, then there’s going to be
a nuclear war. Is the Russian elite to support Putin until the end in this bet?
I have great doubts about that.”
The most
enthusiastic are also suspect. “We’ll conquer everyone, we’ll kill everyone,
we’ll loot whoever we need to, and everything will be just as we like it,” said
Vladlen Tatarsky, a Vostok battalion fighter and pro-Kremlin blogger, who was
in the audience for Putin’s speech, in a video blog.
On
Nikolskaya Street, most were preoccupied with just making an appearance at the
concert. One teacher photographed each of his students holding up their
invitations as they entered the event. A group of women fretted about the
weather and the traffic that would delay them coming and going. “Let’s wait
until it starts to go in,” one said.
It was a
very different scene to the one eight years ago, when Russia annexed Crimea and
Putin rode a wave of political euphoria that buoyed his support and fractured
his critics. The opposition never recovered.
And it was
a world away from the picture in 2018, when world flags were hoisted on these
streets by revellers during the World Cup – a triumph for Russia considering it
had fomented war in Ukraine just four years earlier.
Now Russia
has new symbols. In front of the storied Bolshoi theatre, men walked by in hats
bearing Zs, a tactical sign adopted as a pro-war symbol. They carried flags of
the Donetsk People’s Republic and Novorossiya, invented polities that the
Kremlin claims are real. An American in attendance wore a motorcycle jacket
with an image of Stalin and Putin superimposed over the 1945 storming of the
Reichstag.
In Red
Square, the concert began. The pop diva Alla Pugacheva, a Russian icon for
decades, had fled the country with her children days ago. Instead, there were
Oleg Gazmanov and Grigory Leps, loyal artists for the pro-Kremlin masses.
Hours
before the signing, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he needed to
confirm the borders of the territories that Russia was claiming to annex on
Friday.
“This is
truly a historic day,” said a male MC addressing the crowd at the concert. “We
still need to grasp what has happened today. Understand it and endure it. But
look at how together we all are.”
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