how nationalism and machine politics mix in russiaHaving already lost the support of large numbers of Moscow and
St Petersburg urbanites, and wanting to isolate their restiveness
as much as possible from the rest of the country, the authorities
began sounding a set of ‘conservative’ and nationalist themes that
it had previously largely avoided and that would not only appeal
to Russia’s vast countryside and smaller cities but would drive a
wedge between them and the urbanites. The Kremlin had previ-
ously tended to avoid such issues because they were divisive, but
with so many of the urbanites’ support lost anyway, the appeal to
conservative and ‘new’ nationalist values promised to reconnect
strongly with the rest of the country, which was in the end the
majority.
This ‘conservative’ turn included a number of steps. One of the
first and most visible was the dramatic arrest, trial and media cov-
erage of three young women from the art- punk collective Pussy
Riot, whose name alone made it extremely tempting for a Kremlin
interested in playing wedge politics. The women had donned
their trademark coloured balaclavas and illicitly filmed a raucous
protest music video in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral, ‘praying’
that Putin be taken away. They were stopped mid- film, arrested
and ultimately sentenced to two years in prison. Media at the time
gave all this extensive coverage, emphasising the moral outrage
that they said many Russians felt at seeing one of their holy sanc-
tuaries defiled.^3 Protests in the women’s support were covered so
as to show that the Muscovite protest leaders were also corrupted
and disrespectful of traditional Russian values, attempting to lead
Russia down a road to sin and debauchery. Polls indicate the
media effort ultimately worked, with majorities tending to think
that Pussy Riot deserved punishment (Levada Centre 2012a).
This set the stage for a rapid- fire series of laws (the parlia-
ment’s printer run amok, by one snarky account) that staked
out ‘conservative’ pro- Kremlin positions on issues that could
be used to inflame passions and shore up new support. One
barred ‘propagandising homosexuality to minors’. Another made
it illegal to offend religious beliefs. After the US government
imposed sanctions on a list of officials it believed were linked
to the prison death of anti- corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitskii,
and after a tragic case was reported in which an adopted Russian