John Lloyd: Why Trendy Russians are New-age Bolsheviks

John Lloyd is a contributing editor at the FT.

We – and I wholeheartedly include the Russians in the “we” – are long past democratic euphoria of the 1989 kind. Too much dirty water has passed under that bridge: too many elections won on empty populism, too many minorities made victims of roused majorities, too many free votes transformed into “managed” democracy. And of course all of these have happened in the past decade of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

But if Russians continued to admire him through that, they became increasingly angered by the corruption and consumption attending his court. And for all their cynicism about democracy, they were stirred to anger by the one breach of democratic practice which, beyond any other, seems to enragenormally docile electorates: the apparently widespread falsification of results.

I went, last week – as I had many times as a correspondent in Moscow in the 1990s – to Moscow State University, to talk to a class taken by a friend, Natasha Starkova, in the university’s sociology faculty. Wary of striding into their politics, I spoke of the European crisis, in which they took an interest more polite than passionate. Their passion was the election: Had I seen the results and appreciated the extent of the fraud?

They could, they said, have told me this would happen, had I been there a week before, for they had prefigured the outcome. Elections for their student council had taken place, and the outgoing council, composed of members of Mr Putin’s party, United Russia, had announced that the student body should vote for it. Some chance. Instead, they voted for the Communists, in first place; then, the liberal Yabloko (Apple) party and only in limping third place, the party of (fading) power.

So had they turned Bolshevik – these young and stylish men and women?..