The Last Man in Russia

13 Making a new generation

It was more than a year before I saw Yakunin again. As I walked down Moscow’s Maly Kislovsky Lane to meet him, I could remember exactly how he had looked when we parted: dark-green hat pulled down over his forehead; black jacket tightly buttoned over a scarf; hands deep in his pockets against the cold; eyebrows together in what was almost a scowl.

Then it had been winter. Now, it was a balmy Moscow summer morning and he looked like a different man. His open-toed sandals and light shirt were part of the effect, of course, but more striking was his broad smile and clear forehead. He laughed as I walked up. I tried to apologize for being late, but he ignored me. He tucked his arm through mine by way of a greeting and marched me down the street.

We were going to buy teabags and biscuits but it took me a few minutes to realize that, since he began to speak immediately and did not slacken until we had reached the front of the queue in the shop and it was time to pay. I have rarely known glee so irresistible. He checked regularly that I was paying attention to him, but need not have worried. I was impatient for every new word.

‘Did you see what happened here this winter? Did you see?’

I replied that I had, of course.

‘The spirit of freedom has been released,’ he said, with a smile of pure mischief. ‘It is a new world.’

When we had last spoken, Moscow had been deep in a cynical, exhausted funk. Politics under Vladimir Putin was devious and venal but everyone I knew insisted that that did not matter. They hardly cared about government, they said. They wanted to talk about films and books: anything, in short, that did not involve the men in the Kremlin.

Politics boiled down to one question: when would Putin return to the presidency? He had stood down in 2008, having served the constitutional maximum of two consecutive terms, and become prime minister. His old friend Dmitry Medvedev, who had the advantages of being less charismatic and shorter than Putin, had taken over the top job. Would Putin stand for election again in 2012? Or would Medvedev serve another term before Putin took his old job back?

The meagre nature of the choice perhaps explains why it did not inspire great popular enthusiasm. In September 2011, Putin answered it: he was coming back. Medvedev, president of the largest country on earth, was forced to humiliate himself and stand down after a single term, despite having won with more than 70 per cent of the vote just three and a half years previously.

Putin, who made the announcement at the congress of his United Russia party, which dominated parliament despite lacking a clear ideology, presumably assumed that that was that. The question was answered: the one man whose vote counted had voted, and he would be back in his old job come March.

The first public sign that everything might not go to plan came on 20 November, when Putin attended a martial-arts bout. This was his territory, the kind of macho arena that he revelled in. He was famously a black belt in judo, and regularly had himself photographed bare-chested in the wilds, fishing or hunting. Martial-arts fans should have been his natural constituency. But when he stepped into the ring to congratulate the winner, they booed him. State television cropped the footage, but a raw video went viral on the internet.

This was just a fortnight before his United Russia party was to compete in parliamentary elections, and it was ominous. An opposition campaign was encouraging Russians to vote for anyone but United Russia, and had found a surprising level of support. Cynical, tired Muscovites suddenly gained inspiration. They flooded to the polls.

Panicking officials resorted to the crudest of fakery: stuffing ballot boxes with votes for United Russia; changing the official vote count between the polling station and the central collating authority. Even so, United Russia won less than half the vote and, thanks to cameras on mobile phones and ordinary people acting as observers, the frauds were detected so voters knew that its true tally had been far lower. There was no single headline-grabbing moment, just a steady drip of little incidents that cumulatively were far more damaging. Voters felt demeaned, and popular anger among ordinary middle-class Muscovites bloomed.

On the night of the poll, 6,000 people protested. That may not sound like much, but that made it already one of the biggest opposition protests since the 1990s. Yakunin was out of the country at the time but he made sure he was back for the big march on 10 December on Bolotnaya Square. Fifty thousand people or more turned out in the depths of the Moscow winter to demand fair elections.

‘Before when people organized protests there were 200 people or 500 people, maximum 1,000. And then this just exploded. You cannot explain it rationally. It is the spirit of freedom, and I think it will be victorious. It has come to our country at last. I was in the protests, not at the front or anything but at the back. It was an amazing feeling, amazing.’

The leaders of the marches were mostly young creative Muscovites, skilled at using the internet to distribute information about fraud and about their plans. It was ominous for Putin. These were the very people who had benefited from the stability he had brought. Under his rule, living standards for all Russians had improved. He had raised pensions and state salaries and had made sure they were paid. He surely thought the trajectory he had set would win him loyalty for ever. But if Putin expected this new golden youth to be grateful to him, he had miscalculated. During the 2000s, they had linked up with contemporaries abroad, taken holidays in Europe and America. They felt themselves to be modern Europeans, yet they were being treated like trash.

A friend of mine, Alexei, told me, after he had attended the protest on Bolotnaya Square: ‘I always thought I was the only one who thought the way I think, but there were thousands of us.’ It was the same wonder expressed by Father Dmitry’s disciples in the 1970s when they attended his church discussions. They had been all alone, and then suddenly realized they had the same desires as everyone else. The trust and hope the KGB had tried so hard to extinguish in the 1980s had bloomed once more.

Putin’s response to the protesters was the same as that of his Soviet predecessors. He tried to disperse them, to turn them on each other: liberals against nationalists; believers against atheists. When it was his own turn to face election, in March 2012, he won comfortably with more than 62 per cent. But that was a total boosted by distant regions, ruled by local strongmen, who could provide him with tallies in excess of 80 per cent. In Chechnya, which is firmly controlled by Putin’s handpicked ruler Ramzan Kadyrov, the president gained more than 99 per cent on a 99 per cent turnout. Other regions might not have been so extreme in their expression of loyalty, but they were not far off.

The regions were a sideshow, however. Moscow was what mattered, since it was the largest city, home to the most educated people, headquarters of Russia’s largest companies and seat of the government. It is the only city to have grown consistently under Putin’s rule. It is resented in the regions as a hungry parasite that sucks everything up and gives little back. If Putin was expecting gratitude, however, he was disappointed. Muscovites flooded into the polling stations both to vote and to act as observers. Petty fraud was no longer possible and Putin won less than half the vote, despite complete dominance of broadcast media in the run-up to the election.

‘People were so disturbed by the violations in December that ten times as many of them came out as observers. This civilian control over the elections changed the situation radically,’ said Dmitry Oreshkin, a Russian political analyst who has advised the Central Election Commission.

In St Petersburg, Putin’s home city, there were fewer observers and officials had more room for manoeuvre. Oreshkin explained to me how they used a loophole intended for ships and remote science facilities: they set up sixty-nine new polling stations within just five days of the vote, meaning observers struggled to monitor them.

The turnout in these new stations was remarkably high at more than 90 per cent, of whom an equally remarkable 95 per cent voted for Putin. That added 100,000 votes to Putin’s tally and independent observers calculated that, without these and other distortions, Putin could well have won less than half in St Petersburg too.

‘It is a very important conclusion that the capital cities are prepared to reject the official resources and that makes the legitimacy of Putin’s election very doubtful,’ said Oreshkin. ‘The cities are getting out of the control of his administrative resources. This is an irreversible movement.’

Putin might have won, but his subsequent actions smacked of panic: the maddened dash of a cow who treads on a wasps’ nest. In weeks, his parliament passed laws restricting the right to protest and access to the internet. He recriminalized libel, meaning Russians could be jailed in future for criticizing him. Most demeaning, a new law would oblige non-governmental organizations that raise money abroad – and most do, as there are few independent cash sources in Russia – to register as ‘foreign agents’. Putin had made much of the fact that the protesters were serving foreign interests, contrasting them with the patriots supporting his own cause.

And police harassed the protest leaders too. Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite and television personality who morphed into an opposition activist despite her father having been Putin’s boss in the 1990s, had her flat raided in June 2012, her safe opened and all her money ‘confiscated’. Anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny was charged with defrauding a state timber company, with a potential sentence of a decade in jail.

The faces of this wave of repression were, however, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, three young women accused of being part of a formless punk collective called Pussy Riot. Their music, in truth, is not likely to win them many fans, but that did not matter. It was the bold nature of their protests that made them stand out. They had already swarmed on to Red Square with their guitars and trademark brightly coloured balaclavas. Then, on 21 February, after Patriarch Kirill of the Orthodox Church had directly intervened in politics by praising Putin as a ‘miracle’, they decided to go further. They ran into the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow (which was rebuilt after 1991, having been demolished by Stalin). There, they donned their balaclavas and jumped around in front of the icon screen. Set to music, the video featured the lyric ‘Mother of God, drive out Putin’. On the internet, it was a sensation.

Officials decided that this was a case they could make an example of. The women had insulted the Orthodox Church and could thus be presented as non-patriotic. Arrested, they were charged with ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ and held in detention awaiting trial for five months. The charges carried a potential sentence of seven years. Putin, stung by the outcry abroad, appealed to the court to be merciful, and their final sentence was two years (though Samutsevich was later released on appeal). Two of them are young mothers, but were barred from seeing their children.

‘Gera thinks it’s like a Russian fairy-tale: her mother is a princess who has been captured by an evil villain and put in a cage… Which, of course, is basically true,’ Pyotr Verzilov, Tolokonnikova’s husband, told a British journalist during the trial. Gera is their four-year-old daughter.

The trial was the blackest of farces. The judge blocked any petition from the defence, while allowing prosecutors any liberties they asked for. Lawyers for the girls said the case was worse even than those in Soviet times, while, for many observers, it was quite simply the 1960s all over again. The raft of restrictive laws was equivalent to 1967’s Article 190, which banned ‘knowingly false fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system’.

The young women themselves made the parallel complete with dignified closing speeches that could have been lifted from the darkest pages of the 1970s.

‘Katya, Masha and I are in jail but I don’t consider that we’ve been defeated, just as the dissidents weren’t defeated. When they disappeared into psychiatric hospitals and prisons, they passed judgement on the country,’ said Tolokonnikova.

That made the women from Pussy Riot the new Sinyavsky and Daniel, the writers jailed in 1966 for publishing their works abroad. That trial too had been intended to demonstrate strength and firmness. It succeeded only in creating the dissident movement. This new protest movement was armed, not with carbon-copied statements passed from hand to hand, but with the whole internet. Its followers numbered not hundreds but hundreds of thousands.

‘The Pussy Riot trial damages Russia’s reputation no less than the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel damaged the Soviet Union’s reputation almost 50 years ago. The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial created a rift between the political leadership and the cultural and intellectual segments of society, one that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union,’ wrote Konstantin Sonin, a professor and vice president of the New Economic School, in his column in a Moscow daily. ‘The Pussy Riot case has been a major blow to Russian society by effectively excluding this country from the list of civilized nations. Whatever shocking words the female punk rockers might have yelled in Moscow’s main cathedral, how can that justify putting them in handcuffs, escorting them with police Rottweillers and jailing them before the trial as if they were dangerous criminals?’

I was not sure how Yakunin would react to Pussy Riot, given that they had behaved disrespectfully in an Orthodox church. Inevitably, however, he had an explanation all of his own, and looked deep into the Russian past to find it. In medieval times, the Russian people had few means to resist its government, he said. Perhaps the only one, in fact, was the Holy Fools – in Russian, Yurodivie – who claimed divine inspiration and spoke the truth fearlessly to their all-powerful rulers.

‘These fools used to go around naked and they would piss in church, and demonstrate that priests were acting wrongly. They did it to the tsars too,’ said Yakunin.

The most famous of all the Holy Fools was St Basil, who is said to have once upbraided Tsar Ivan the Terrible for not paying attention in church. He also offered the tsar meat during Lent, saying it did not matter whether he kept the religious fast or not, since he had committed so many murders. This public expression of the nation’s private anger at its king won him the love of Muscovites. The great multi-coloured tulip-domed cathedral on Red Square, the most famous church in Russia, still bears his name. When he died, the tsar himself helped carry his coffin.

‘This is what these girls were doing. They were telling the truth in the name of the people. They did not disrespect the church. They crossed themselves correctly, they did everything right. If they had sung “Praise Putin, give him a long reign” they would have been rewarded. But they did not do so. They told the truth.’

We had finally returned from the shop, and were sitting and drinking our tea and eating our biscuits. Yakunin holds his own religious services in the basement we were sitting in, as he tries to keep alive the spirit of challenge that the dissident priests of the 1970s represented. With Father Dmitry dead and compromised, and Father Alexander Men murdered, only Yakunin is left.

His movement is ever more distant from the official Orthodox Church. Under Putin, the Church has moved close to top officials. Patriarch Kirill lives in great splendour and regularly meets the president. That has inevitably made him a target for criticism, not least when a photo of him was digitally altered to remove his Breguet watch, worth many thousands of pounds. The watch was still visible in a reflection in the polished table.

Putin and the patriarch are undaunted, however. They have used the Church to harness the religious feelings of Russia’s citizens behind the government. This was most obvious in October 2011 when one of Putin’s oldest friends arranged for a piece of the Virgin Mary’s belt to tour Russia. It was of course no coincidence that the relic should have arrived during the election campaign.

The man who arranged for the belt to visit Russia was Vladimir Yakunin (no relation of Father Gleb’s), head of the huge Russian Railways company. He is also head of a shadowy religious organization called the St Andrew the First-Called Foundation, whose supervisory council includes leading figures from state television, the interior ministry, the railways company and the presidential administration.

The Virgin Mary’s belt normally lives on Mount Athos, a rocky Greek peninsula studded with monasteries, with which the Russian Church has had close relations for centuries. The belt is said to aid fertility in women who gaze upon it, although it is hard to know how it gained this reputation as no women are allowed on Mount Athos. Even female animals are banned (except for chickens and, some say, cats).

Putin travelled to Vnukovo airport on 20 October 2011, to welcome the belt and its escorting monks, and met them again at the end of their fifteen-city tour. Archimandrite Ephraim, one of the belt’s escorts, praised the faith of the 3 million people who had come to see the relic, and took the opportunity to ask for Putin to help Greece, which was still in the depths of economic crisis.

Putin sidestepped the request, and focused instead on the belt’s miraculous properties for barren women. Ephraim confirmed that miracles had taken place: ‘We are permanently receiving telephone calls, in which people say that a miracle has happened: “I have been married for ten years, and now I have a child.” Twenty examples of such miracles have been recorded already. And there is already an agreement that, after the Virgin’s Belt’s trip around Russia, a book will be published about the miracles that have taken place.’

Such births would indeed be miraculous. The belt had arrived in the country just thirty-eight days previously and children had already been born. It is a testament to the new parents’ faith that they were pleased, rather than traumatized, by the experience. Putin sounded suitably impressed.

‘If this helps to solve our demographic issue, it would come in handy. In any case, I hope it will,’ he said.

Gleb Yakunin, however, said the government had completely miscalculated the belt’s powers. He pointed out that the belt had been making its progress around the country when Putin was booed at the martial-arts bout. According to him, Putin’s humiliation before his supporters was the true miracle wrought by the Virgin Mary.

‘Everything began when they brought the belt here. That was when the spirit of freedom was unleashed,’ he said.

The ability to cure infertility is only one of the belt’s minor qualities, he said. Far more important is its ability to protect a nation from its enemies. Yakunin said that, in bringing in the belt, Putin had undermined himself. He had not realized that he is in fact his own nation’s enemy.

‘It was an act of blasphemy because Putin is not a true believer, and now the belt is miraculously causing the nation to rise up,’ he said. ‘Whatever Putin does now it is too late. Business is opposed to him, the young people too. Trying to suffocate the movement and turn us into North Korea is just stupid.’

His delight in what had happened was overpowering. He laughed and nodded constantly, convinced that Putin had succeeded in defeating himself. He even seemed amused by the thought that he could be arrested once more, and sent back to the camps.

When Yakunin was sent to prison in 1981, he rode in a prison train, guarded and shackled. When I took the same line in 2012, I had one of the luxurious berths favoured by richer Russians and foreigners. I had been forced to change my ticket at the last minute, and all the cheapest berths were gone, meaning I was sharing a compartment with a well-tanned family from one of the oil towns of Siberia. They were returning home from holiday in Italy, where the weather had apparently been fantastic.

The father of the family discussed sport with great persistence, but I managed to fall asleep anyway and in the morning they were gone, their places taken by two brunettes and a blonde from Nizhny Novgorod. They were off to a training seminar organized by their bank, but their conversation centred on a serial killer on the prowl in their hometown. He prefers blondes, said the blonde.

This was the famous Trans-Siberian Mainline, and our train was heading for Beijing. My fellow passengers included two French women, a Brazilian man in tight shorts and at least a dozen Americans. Everyone disembarked at every stop and swarmed round the women selling pies, beer and soft drinks. The Americans were staying on the train all the way to China, a journey that would take them a week. I, however, reached the city of Perm that evening, swung my bag on to my shoulder and climbed down on to the platform.

When Yakunin travelled from Perm to his camp, he was locked in a metal cage in the back of a truck. Once again I had a more comfortable time, sitting in the front seat of a four-wheel-drive truck driven by Alexander Ogaryshev, a local opposition politician who had volunteered to show me around. We pulled out of Perm through heavy traffic and over the River Kama, a tributary to the Volga, and into the forest that stretches from here for thousands of kilometres to the north and east.

Alexander is a Perm native who trained as a lawyer at the interior ministry’s academy in Nizhny Novgorod. That is an elite institution, and graduating should have led to a highly lucrative position in the police, where income from bribes can exceed official salaries many times over. He said, however, that he had been so revolted by the corruption, and the difference between the high ideals preached at the academy and actual police practice, that he quit and went into business with some friends.

‘The corruption was total. They were just there to serve their own interests. Who paid more was all they cared about,’ he had said a couple of days before we drove into the forest, as we sat over coffee.

‘If I went to the station, they were all drinking. They respected nothing. The police should serve the state, they should want to be honest and to help people. They should not be serving just for the chance to make money.’

He and his friends owned a network of casinos until the government made casinos illegal in 2009. Casinos still exist, of course, and there was one disguised as an internet café opposite my hotel, but now they are run by corrupt officials who are immune to the law. Alexander and his friends moved into the restaurant business in response, and he now owned three venues across Perm. We sat in one of them while he told me about winter 2011–12. He had driven all the way to Moscow to take part in the protests, a journey of more than 1,000 kilometres. On arriving there on 10 December, he went straight to Bolotnaya Square without having slept.

‘Our hope was that finally something could be changed in the country. Previously people just wanted to leave. I had this sense there that we could change things. I can sell up and leave at any time. I have a friend in Germany. For the first time, however, there was hope that we could change things, instead of this apathy. We need to keep this going. The protest was like a great unification. There were all these creative people with slogans that they invented themselves. The most creative people support the opposition, it was wonderful.’

The Perm region itself did not see any particular protests against United Russia’s election. That may be because the party gained only 36 per cent there, which was down among the lowest levels in Russia, so there was not much to protest against.

The lack of protests is unlikely to be because Perm residents are too cynical and apathetic to take action, however. They are descended from generations of exiles, and it has been a favoured dumping ground for the Russian government’s unwanted citizens for generations. Elmira Polubesova, a fifty-three-year-old activist from a liberal pressure group called Solidarity whom we were sitting with, boasted that Perm’s tradition of exile made it an island of freedom in an oppressive sea.

‘Judging by my own children, they have a chance to go to Canada but they say they want to stay here, they want to create conditions for a family, to change things. In Soviet times it was prestigious to be employed by someone, to have worked somewhere for forty years. The situation was such that you had to stay put, people were scared to leave or to speak out because they could lose their pension. But now people have changed, they work for themselves. The generation that was repressed is dying. Even I did not experience the repression that my mother had, and when people have not been personally affected they are not scared to decide things for themselves.’

A ten-minute drive from the restaurant in Alexander’s four-wheel-drive was the puppet theatre, a shabby beige building closed for the summer. In the 1930s it had a different function: a detention centre for those suspected of counter-revolutionary crimes. In almost any other Russian city, its past would have been forgotten. In Perm, however, a group of local activists had persuaded the theatre’s management to let them set up a small museum round the back. Alexander Kalikh, a lean middle-aged man, is in charge of the project and he had agreed to show us around.

We walked across the courtyard to a brick annexe, opened a steel door and ducked inside. Incongruously, puppets hung on the walls alongside the displays about the repressions of the Stalin years. This was still a theatre after all. Kalikh said he was planning to reopen a bricked-up window that had looked on to the courtyard, and through which prisoners had once spoken to their relatives.

‘No one kept here was aware that they would be taken to be shot but many people still alive remember seeing their relatives for the last time through that window.’

A few officials were even assisting him in his efforts to commemorate the past, he said, including the Federal Prisons Service, which had provided a genuine grille from an old window. He speculated that officials from the Service might have a guilt complex through working for the organization that had imprisoned so many people.

‘The FSB is different, however. They haven’t helped us in twenty years, they must have an order not to. The local government does help us a little, but that’s because this is Perm, you know, it would not happen in other places.’

Schoolchildren now come to the building not just for the puppet performances, but to learn about how the secret police arrested people on token charges, penned them up and then shot them. The museum has lists of the people who were kept here, and can always find people who lived on the same street as the visiting children.

‘We can show them the route the prisoners took to get here. That means for young people history is before their eyes. They have to sense that all this happened close to them, that it was not somewhere completely different. And we can show them that the times have not really changed. Look at the similarities between Stalin and Putin, now there has been a whole series of repressive reforms: to NGOs, to libel, to protest. Whose methods are these? Your rights mean nothing, we do not even know what will happen in a year.’

On the way out, he pointed to a poster on the wall with a quote from the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko that loosely translates as ‘If we forget, we are cattle. If we remember, we’re a nation.’ As a slogan, it is defiant and proud. If you surrender to officials’ demands to forget their victims, you are collaborating in the crime.

The Perm region was home to three of the last camps for political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Perm-35, Perm-36 and Perm-37 were nicknamed the Perm triangle. Perm was a major centre of the weapons industry in Soviet times and was thus closed to foreigners, which made it a good place to keep dissidents.

Its glorious weapon-building past is attested to by a gigantic Order of Lenin in the centre of town, awarded in 1971 for its ‘great successes in the development of industrial production’. The fruits of that production are on show in a museum on the outskirts. Visitors can see everything from a tsarist-era cannon to a ballistic missile that could fly 9,600 kilometres and deliver a 0.6-megaton atomic device. More powerful missiles have been made since, but were not on display.

Alexander Ogaryshev and I were on our way to Perm-36. Perm-35 and Perm-37 (where Yakunin served his term) still operate as prisons and are thus closed to visitors. Perm-36, however, the last point in the triangle, was abandoned. Former prisoners and members of Memorial, a charity devoted to historical research and human rights, took it over in 1992. At first they just wanted to preserve it, so future generations could see what a functioning camp had looked like. Having patched it up, however, they were faced with the question of what to do with it.

The obvious solution was to open it to visitors, which is what they did. It remains the only functioning museum on the territory of the gulag anywhere in Russia, which means it is the closest equivalent Russia has to the memorial at Auschwitz. Perm-36 may not have been one of the most terrible islands in Solzhenitsyn’s archipelago, but it remains a unique memorial to the inhumanity of the twentieth century, and deserves to be far better known.

Driving there from Perm took about two hours, a distance considered insignificant by locals but deeply monotonous for those not used to the forest. The trees were occasionally birch with white trunks and light-green leaves, but normally pines, all orange trunks and dark needles. Sometimes fields opened out on either side of the road, and they heralded a village of single-storey houses huddled together. When the turning to Perm-36 finally appeared to the right of the road it was a relief.

We passed through the village of Kuchino, which seemed largely abandoned, then Makhnutino, which looked little better. The road was gravel, and we trailed a cloud of dust that billowed around us when we stopped at the police checkpoint. This was the weekend of the year when Perm-36 organizes a festival. Organizers expected 10,000 visitors and the police were taking a close interest. Among the blue-shirted officers, however, were volunteers in red T-shirts with the words ‘Territory of Freedom’ on the back, and they waved us through.

The camp headquarters was a two-storey cream building on a bluff above the River Chusovaya. The river curved away around a broad flat field. Sand banks stretched alluringly out into the water, offering the chance of a swim. Swallows swooped to sip the river, and fish left ripples on its smooth surface. The prisoners, of course, saw none of this. They arrived in closed trucks and were ushered immediately behind the camp’s high fences and barbed wire. Often they had no clear idea of where they were. According to a camp legend, one intake of prisoners included an ornithologist who was able to judge by the birds he heard that they were near the Ural Mountains. Previously, no one had known.

The headquarters is the only building in the camp above a single storey, and most of the others are brick and timber barracks overshadowed by green watchtowers armed with searchlights. These were where the prisoners lived for the duration of their sentences.

We were among the first people to arrive for the three-day festival, and the camp was still largely deserted. We joined a tour run by a local pensioner called Sergei Spodin, who guided his group of eight with great skill and knowledge. The camp, he said, had included both living quarters and working quarters, where prisoners were expected to earn their keep. Outside the barracks were multiple rings of fences and barbed wire. Inside the barracks were informers paid with privileges like an extra tea ration.

‘In forty-one years there was not a single escape. The system worked very well.’

Between this Tough Regime section of the camp and a second section, where prisoners lived in the even harsher Special Regime conditions, was a shooting range where the guards practised.

‘There was shooting day and night. As you can imagine, this had a significant effect on people’s psychology, because everyone knew they were not practising to shoot rabbits but to shoot people. This is a quiet region and you could hear the shooting 10 or 20 kilometres away. Everything was done to try to break people’s spirits.’

Despite the guards’ best efforts, when Yakunin arrived in the Perm triangle in 1981 the dissidents were as defiant as ever. They had evolved a highly complex game to play with their jailers. Their aim was to publicize their plight and to smuggle information to the West, whence it would be broadcast back on foreign radio. This would embarrass the Soviet government, which insisted it protected its citizens’ human rights. The jailers’ aim was to break the dissidents’ spirits, to make them recant as Father Dmitry had done. Failing that, they just wanted to interrupt the flow of news updates.

Yakunin’s arrival was heralded by an immediate flurry of reports on his progress in the underground Chronicle of Current Events (even now, he refused to tell me how the news reached the outside world).

‘Not long before Yakunin’s arrival in the camp all the Bibles were confiscated. On Yakunin’s arrival, his Bible was also confiscated,’ said the Chronicle’s issue number 62, dated July 1981.

On 4 May 1981, it said, Yakunin and a group of others had started a hunger strike to protest against the Soviet Union’s failure to fulfil its international commitments to protect the human rights of its citizens. The hunger strike, Yakunin told me, had been the one weapon of the dissidents.

‘We wrote these statements for anniversaries and so on, and we were always smuggling them out. We organized hunger strikes and the guards hated it. They would beat us but they couldn’t stop us,’ he said, with a chuckle. ‘We wanted to show we were not broken, that we were taking part in the struggle in as far as we could.’

Throughout the 1980s, the jailed dissidents risked their health and sometimes their lives by forcing themselves to go for extended periods without food. Sakharov went on hunger strike for the right of his wife to have medical treatment abroad, Yakunin for the right to have a Bible, others just to show they were alive. This was in itself a sign of how much the camps had changed since Stalin’s days. In the 1930s, a hunger strike would have led inevitably to death, since no one cared whether prisoners ate or not. Now, thanks to the pressure exerted by Western states, officials were under orders to keep the dissidents alive, and that gave the prisoners a lever to exert pressure on their guards.

There was always something to go on hunger strike for, if only for the right to be officially considered a political prisoner. Anatoly Marchenko died in 1986 after a three-month hunger strike aiming to secure the release of political prisoners.

Other prisoners looked for less terrible ways to make their points. Vladimir Bukovsky, a poet imprisoned in the 1970s, described the lengths prisoners would go to to irritate their jailers, whose time could be wasted almost indefinitely by exploiting the bureaucratic complaints procedure.

As he wrote in his memoirs:

Bukovsky and his comrades had no intention of compromising. They reacted to every departure from strict procedure by writing an official complaint, and they could write up to thirty letters of complaint a day. They patiently sent them higher and higher up the chain of command, then branched out sideways in ever more elaborate directions.

The guards came, if not to respect this kind of activism, at least to fear it and the extra work it created. Complaints could trigger committees of investigation, which had to be responded to, and it was best to avoid generating them. Although political prisoners had no special status in the camp system, they won the right to be addressed with the respectful plural form of the word ‘you’ and by their first name and patronymic. In any other prison, inmates were treated like rats.

This peculiar ritualized battle has been all but forgotten in Russia today. If you have not read the history of the dissident movement, and do not understand the complex relationship between the officials’ equal but opposite desires to punish the prisoners while avoiding publicity, it makes no sense at all. Spodin, however, as he guided us around Perm-36, spoke of the prisoners like the heroes they were.

‘Everything was done to break their spirits, to demean them, but they resisted.’

Further down the track was the Special Regime camp, which made the ordinary Tough Regime barracks seem luxurious. Here the cells were gloomy, their windows fitted with downward-slanting slats so prisoners would never see outside. The cell walls were plastered with uneven concrete – called ‘fur’ in prison slang – to make them ugly and uncomfortable to lean against. The exercise yard is a square of three paces by three paces. Its walls are three metres high, and topped with a mesh of barbed wire, meaning inmates here would never see anything but sky and walls.

‘When I was a teenager, I thought this was a warehouse,’ said Spodin. ‘There were never any people, it was so quiet, it was only later I realized it was a camp. Our parents used to say people were locked up because of the war. They never told us these were political prisoners or anything.’

As we walked out of the barracks and back into the open air, Spodin described his own family’s experiences of repression. His father’s parents came from Ukraine and were sent to the Urals in 1934 during the collectivization campaign. Some of his father’s siblings remained behind, and he had aunts and cousins in Ukraine whom he had never met. His family was lucky, however: at least the children had been able to remain with family members.

‘The state often isolated the parents and raised the children itself. The state wanted to create a culture of informers,’ he said.

His confession unlocked something in the other members of the tour, and people began to volunteer details about their own past.

‘My grandmother was also repressed,’ said a burly man in a blue T-shirt.

‘My family was from Ukraine too, but was sent here,’ said a woman in a red dress.

This is the kind of experience the museum directors want to provide for everyone. They want to make ordinary people realize that the country’s history is their history too, and that it stretches forward to today. As we walked out, we saw a group of nine officers from the OMON, Russia’s riot police, all in uniform. They were beginning a tour of their own. These are the government’s enforcers, and their image is of mindless, brainwashed thugs. Yet here they were, standing patiently while a young woman explained the repressive system of the Soviet state.

‘Those are the kind of comrades who really need this place,’ said the burly man in the blue T-shirt, with an emphasis on the word ‘comrades’. Everyone laughed.

The director of the museum is Viktor Shmurov, a heavyset man with a salt-and-pepper beard. He is a historian and was the first person to spot the unique possibilities of the Perm-36 site. Since it dates back to the Stalin years, it has the wooden barracks and facilities of the original gulag camps, which is why he was so keen to preserve it.

He and his friends, short of cash and building materials, even managed to get the camp’s old sawmilling equipment working. They ran a timber business in the early 1990s, ploughing the profits back into the camp. The Russian word for a saw bench – pilorama – gives its name to the yearly festival.

‘This has been a gradual process. We were building the museum for a long time, and it was hard. We wanted to present it in a positive way,’ he said. In 2005, on the tenth anniversary of the museum’s opening, they organized a concert.

‘I don’t like speeches, congratulations, things like that, but we invited a lot of bards and poets to perform. They went on to the stage, it was a beautiful concert and that is how Pilorama started.’

Two years later, they brought in political experts and activists to hold discussions and the shape of the festival was created: music, film and free conversation, all on a site where previously none of these things had been possible.

‘Here are thousands of free people who behave absolutely as free people,’ he said. ‘If Pilorama is ever cancelled, it will show things have got very bad here, something will be rotten in Denmark. But I have no doubt that we will continue.’

One festival does not equal political freedom, but it is a start. If the winter of protests does lead to Russia’s sclerotic politics becoming a little livelier, it could have an important impact on Russia’s population crisis. Estonia had similar health problems to Russia (though not quite as bad) when part of the Soviet Union. After independence, the life expectancy of the average Estonian man initially sank, but then soared to all-time highs. You can see a similar pattern in other communist countries that have joined the European Union: Romania, Hungary, Slovakia. Prosperity and democracy does seem to be a good way to wean a population off massive alcohol abuse.

The Pilorama discussion sessions inevitably focused on the winter election season, with highly technical statistical presentations showing how fraud had been committed, and what ordinary citizens could do to stop it. The mobilization of thousands of Muscovites to observe the polls had forced electoral officials to behave more honestly, the experts explained, proving it with graphs and photographs. In the December election, the results from Moscow followed no conceivable statistical logic. It was clear officials had falsified the returns. By March, however, the curve was almost identical to that seen in a Western European election. Officials had been forced to record accurate results. It was a heady demonstration of the power of free citizens to affect their own destiny.

Every one of the sixty chairs was full, and another thirty or forty people were standing at the back.

It is a mark of the importance of the event that a group of young people from a Kremlin-linked youth group attempted to sabotage the discussions, asking aggressive questions and accusing the speakers of serving foreign interests. Sergei Kovalyov, a human rights veteran who served time in Perm-36 in the 1980s, fielded the remarks with admirable restraint, considering one of the young men was wearing a hammer and sickle T-shirt. I could not help wondering what would happen if a man of a similar age wore a swastika into Auschwitz.

‘It would be very good if we had decommunistication, like they have had denazification,’ said Kovalyov after he had finally extricated himself from the discussion. ‘You see the support that there still is for the Soviet Union, and among people that were not even born at its height. They were all born after the death of Stalin, and even after Khrushchev. The oldest among them is probably only forty. There are some people among them you can talk to, but their emotions keep getting in the way.’

He was on his way to the toilet when I interrupted him. It is a rectangular building in the corner of the camp, where inmates had squatted at twelve squalid concrete holes above a noisome pit of slurry. I asked him if it was not peculiar to be using the same toilet again after all these years away.

‘That was the only toilet, and you had to walk from the barracks over there. It is a long way, particularly in the cold, and many of the old men had dirtied their clothes before they reached it. Think how long it would take someone if he had a walking stick,’ he said. ‘In fact, if you don’t stop asking me questions, I risk the same fate.’

The popular weekly Arguments and Facts had launched a publicity campaign against Pilorama, running an interview with a former prison guard who rubbished the dissidents’ claims to have been treated badly here. Vladimir Kurguzov is chairman of the Council of Veterans of Perm-35, by which he means the people who served as guards over the dissidents, rather than the dissidents themselves. His testimony was intended to be aggressive but was unintentionally rather sad, revealing an old man who has been left behind by events. He boasted of the dissidents he had jailed, including Kovalyov, and then described seeing Kovalyov again.

‘Do you remember me?’ he had asked. Kovalyov said he did not.

‘That cannot be. I abused you in Perm-35 and 36, how can you not remember your major oppressor? I worked here for days on end, everything came through me. So why don’t they remember the main monster?’ he replied. He may have been trying to be sarcastic, but was clearly offended by how history had flipped round. He had been in a position of power, and was now one of life’s losers, while Kovalyov is fêted around the world.

He insisted that conditions in the camp had actually been very pleasant, that the dissidents ate better than most people in the country and had had nothing to complain about.

‘They were in the warm and dry, they ate at a table with a tablecloth, having previously looked at a menu. Apart from that their books were published abroad. When they needed new glasses, they declared a hunger strike or refused to work. Therefore, people did not die in our camp, like they did in Kolyma,’ he said.

It was a telling comment, with its total incomprehension of the motivation of people he had seen every day for years. He seemed unable to understand that it was the fact of being locked up that was the problem, not the conditions. If you have been imprisoned for writing a poem, no amount of tablecloths is going to make you happy about it. The difference between this Kurguzov and the likes of Kovalyov is – ironically, considering the positions they used to occupy – that between a slave and a free man.

Kurguzov, like the young men sent to disrupt the Pilorama discussions, insisted that the festival was funded from abroad (it is, in fact, mostly supported by the local government) to harm the image of Russia. That is an argument that only works if you look the wrong way down the telescope. If you turn it round you see, not the shameful fact of the camp, but the heroic resistance of the inmates. The attendees of the festival preferred to focus on the trust and respect among the former prisoners, rather than the whining of their former guards.

The festival had erected a stage in the centre of the camp, and the performers could look down the length of the barracks to the front gate. I had wondered who would play for the finale, expecting an earnest bard with a guitar and a songbook of protests. Fortunately, the organizers knew their audience better than that, and out came Markscheider Kunst, a Russian ska band with a horn section exuberant even by the magnificent standards of the St Petersburg music scene.

Their two drummers whipped out their irresistible rhythm, while the saxophone and trumpet sent a torrent of glorious brass through the old cells, between the bars, over the fences and into the forest beyond. No evil spirit of the past could withstand such joyful playfulness, and the crowd whooped along. A young woman at the front jumped up and down, her long glossy dark hair whipping back and forth in time with the music.

They are not a political band, but it was hard not to notice the lyrics to their anthemic ‘Krasivo Sleva’. ‘Winter is ending, we’ll start again from the beginning, winter is ending, winter is ending,’ they sang, and once again the horns blasted out their glorious crescendo.

The night before, my tent had been one of hundreds by the river in a field noisy with music, laughter and singing. Beneath all those sounds though, from the other tents, from all directions, had come the muffled but unmistakable sounds of young Russians getting busy making a new generation.