The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

"Come on over," Putin had said, smiling.¹⁰ The men of the factory had gone on to form a committee in defense of Putin, who, they wrote in their manifesto, was under attack from "do-nothings in Moscow."

¹¹ In fact, protests were also under way in Nizhny Tagil, the city of roughly three hundred thousand where UralVagonZavod was located: between a hundred and a hundred fifty people had come out on December 10, the day of the first big Bolotnaya protest in Moscow.¹²

Sticking to the narrative that protests were staged only by the idle rich of the big cities, the men of UralVagonZavod had planned to mount their tanks and ride to a pro-Putin counter-rally in the nearest large city of Yekaterinburg. They were asked to leave the tanks home,¹³ but now that Putin was once again president, his first visit outside Moscow was one of gratitude—to UralVagonZavod. The men at the plant wished Putin Happy Victory Day, praised his hockey game, and mentioned the protesters again.

"They are just doing their jobs," said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.

"The country needs stability, and you are certainly the only person who can give it to us," said one of the men.¹⁴

A week later Putin appointed Kholmanskikh his plenipotentiary in the Urals—a miraculous career move for the head of the assembly shop. In the past, only trusted senior officials, a majority of them retired military brass, had been appointed to these posts. Kholmanskikh was now in charge of six Russian regions with a total population of over fourteen million, and their six governors.

On May 10, while Putin was at UralVagonZavod, the parliament was asked to pass a set of amendments to the Law on Public Gatherings. They raised the fines for violating rules on public gatherings to as much as the equivalent of $1,500—backbreaking for most Russians—and they changed the definition of "public gathering" to allow the police to classify any group of people as engaging in one. The bill sped through parliament like probably no piece of legislation ever had. It became law on June 9, three days before a protest march planned to commemorate Russia's 1990 declaration of sovereignty.¹⁵

The crackdown proceeded swiftly. After the law on public gatherings came a law that required nongovernmental organizations that received foreign funding to register as "foreign agents," which, in turn, would subject them to paralyzing financial reporting requirements and would serve as a scarlet letter: such organizations would have to add "foreign agent" to all their public communications, which would presumably range from business cards to op-ed articles. In August, the women of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years' imprisonment for "hooliganism," becoming the first people to receive years in jail for peaceful protest. All along, more people were being arrested in the Bolotnoye case. In September, the Law for the Protection of Children from Information went into effect; by this time, it had been amended to extend to the Internet. In November, laws on espionage and high treason were amended so that their wording reverted to that of the 1930s, when thousands of people were executed on trumped-up charges. Under the new law, working for an international organization whose activities Russia considered to be hostile could open one up to charges of high treason. A month earlier, Russia had ordered the United States Agency for International Development to cease operations in the country—now the new law could conceivably be used against any of the organization's Russian employees or its numerous Russian associates. The new law also made it possible to apply espionage charges to people who obtained classified information without intent to share it with a foreign state, and those who culled information from open sources.¹⁶ In December, ostensibly in response to a new American law introducing sanctions against Russian officials guilty of "gross violations of human rights"— the so-called Magnitsky Act, named for the accountant who was tortured to death in a Moscow jail—Russia passed a law that forbade the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans and also gave the government the right to summarily shut down nongovernmental organizations if they received any funding from American organizations or individuals. The international monitoring organization Human Rights Watch called the developments of 2012 the "worst crackdown since the Soviet era."¹⁷