What it means to be middle class in Moscow now
As sanctions bite and Western luxuries vanish, pressure mounts on ordinary Russians, finds The Telegraph’s foreign correspondent
For millions of Russians who believed they lived a stable, middle-class life, an entire world disappeared in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s savage invasion of Ukraine.
“The hipster bars we went to, the holidays we took in Europe, the idea that we could live a normal life, even in a messed up country – that was all an illusion,” says Valentina, 44, who works for a Moscow literary magazine. Like most of the people talking to me today, she feared for her freedom if identified.
“In just a few days, we realised that everything we thought we shared with the civilised world was borrowed. It was never ours. And now it’s been taken away.”
The cash went first, disappearing from central Moscow ATMs and exchange booths as Russians lined up to withdraw their dwindling savings. The value of the rouble has tumbled by 40 per cent against its pre-war value, and at several cashpoints, the daily withdrawal limit shrank to under £3.
For the first time since the last days of the Soviet Union, what was effectively a black market in hard-toobtain hard currency sprang up, with one exchange office off Moscow’s New Arbat quoting 300 roubles to the euro, against an official exchange rate of 145.
Then the bank cards went. As Swift, the international payment system, disconnected 80 per cent of Russian banks, people desperately trying to buy tickets with foreign airlines found their cards disabled, and Russians abroad were stranded.
“I laughed at my friends when they said I should open an account in Riga [Latvia] a few months ago,” said Svetlana T, 38, a manager at a Moscow furniture import business who is now stuck in Milan, unable to pay for her hotel room with any of her Sberbank or VTB-issued cards.
“I said they were paranoid, told them that we live in a connected world.”
Svetlana’s company is also unable to make payments to their Italian suppliers – and the collapsing value of the rouble will make any future orders prohibitively expensive. “Our business is dead,” she says. “I’m out of a job.”
By the time ApplePay shut down at the end of the war’s first week, blocking payments on the Moscow Metro and in taxi apps, thousands of wealthier Muscovites were racing to leave the country. Except almost all the ways out were blocked as the EU, US, Canada and a number of other countries closed their airspace to Russian flights.
“It was like that last scene in Inglourious Basterds, when the cinema is burning and all the exits were locked,” joked Nikita, 27, a Moscow-based video technician. “My mother insisted that I leave in case I got drafted. She gave me £250 for a ticket, so I checked Skyscanner and saw lots of cheap flights and thought: ‘Great, I’ll take a holiday.’”
But those cheap flights turned out to be ghosts left in the machine from pre-war days. This weekend, one-way tickets on Turkish Airlines to Istanbul – one of the few destinations still currently accepting flights from Moscow – were listed at £1,550, with limited availability.
Protests flared across Russia on the first days of the war – especially in St Petersburg, where, on Saturday evening, several thousand gathered outside Gostiny Dvor shopping centre on Nevsky Prospekt. A smaller crowd walked down Moscow’s Rozhdestvensky Boulevard. But all protests have been met with an overwhelming police presence, usually several times more numerous than the demonstrators.
In Pushkin Square, a few hundred yards from the Kremlin, barriers shut off the central square. Trios of Omon, Russia’s feared paramilitary policemen in motorcycle-style helmets, military urban camouflage uniforms and body armour, were positioned like chessmen every five yards across along the pavements.
A few dozen young people sheepishly gathered, chatting and smoking in groups of three or four. Whenever six or more gathered, uniformed police swooped to check documents and rifle through bags.
“Everyone who comes out here has a death wish,” said 20-year-old Sasha, a filmmaker. “It’s not bravery. It’s insanity. We’re all risking throwing our lives away.”
The authorities’ machine of repression has been honed over two decades, to a high degree of sophistication. Rather than breaking heads and teargassing crowds, Russian police get up close and personal, putting young protesters on a pseudolegal conveyor that threatens to destroy their lives if they persist.
People arrested for “participation in an unsanctioned meeting” for the first time receive a 20,000-rouble (£120) fine, and get a criminal record. The penalty is issued on the spot, upon the signature of a confession.
Suspects who refuse to sign are remanded in custody for weeks, awaiting a court hearing – with a 99.5 per cent likelihood of their being
‘Everything we thought we shared with the civilised world was taken away’
Valentina
convicted anyway. For the second arrest, the penalty is 15 days in jail – unless police choose to charge suspects for organising a meeting, for which they could face three months. A third arrest could mean charges of treason, a law updated last week to include an open-ended definition of acts designed to “undermine the security and stability of the state”, which carries a penalty of up to 15 years.
“We’ve been taken in,” messaged Asya, 20, a film student, to her friends last Sunday night. “We’re sitting in a police paddy wagon. Bad news: we’re in here with guys who have two, three prior arrests. We’re screwed, guys.”
Every young activist in the WhatsApp group set up to connect friends at a Moscow protest knew immediately why Asya was so alarmed. Police have been arresting so many protesters that they don’t bother writing up separate charge sheets – they simply write the same one for everyone in each police van.
Usually, the charges are framed to nail the most hardcore protesters of every bunch. “They’re saying we swore. Bad. They took our fingerprints and they’re checking our phones,” Asya told the group hours later, warning them that she was about to delete her incriminating WhatsApp and Telegram apps, before a representative of the Federal Security Service on duty at the police station could get to them.
Asya and her friend Yasha were eventually released at 5am. Sitting dazed and subdued in a friend’s apartment the next day, both students had been deeply chastened by the experience. “My father says he’s going to send me out of the country if I go to another protest again,” said Yasha, 21, with a grim smile. “But even if he wanted to send me, I can’t leave Russia until I have paid my fine. And that will take at least two months.”
Our conversation was interrupted by more bad news. Another friend – with a fateful three convictions for protesting over the past five years – was picked up by police near a public prayer meeting on Gogolevsky Boulevard.
“We’ve been taken to the police department in Ryazan,” wrote the arrested friend – meaning that the prisoners had been driven to a town three hours to the east of Moscow for processing. “We’re still in the truck without food or water. A lawyer has been waiting for three hours at the entrance to the station. The police are inside deciding what to charge us with.”
That arbitrary decision on charging would determine whether the detainees would serve months or years behind bars. He signed off with the slang for his particular form of incommunicado detention: “They’ve put us in the ‘fortress’.” The next day, news came in from the protester’s lawyer that she’d got him off with mere “organisation”, rather than treason; he was facing three months inside.
Facebook and Instagram – the favoured platforms for anti-Putin commentary – have been intermittently blocked this week. Some of the most vocal voices have gone silent for fear of criminal prosecution for posts. Others, including the children of some of Russia’s richest and most powerful men, have been outspoken.
Sofia Abramovich, whose father is Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, told her 50,000 Instagram followers that “the biggest and most successful lie out of the Kremlin propaganda is that most Russians are with Putin”.
Elizaveta Peskova, 24, daughter of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, posted “No to the war” on Instagram, while Boris Yeltsin’s granddaughter Maria Yumasheva, 19, also posted in support of Ukraine. Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of Putin’s political mentor, former St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak and now a TV presenter and politician, also urged peace.
“No one, including me, until the last, believed that there would be a real conflict with Ukraine,” Sobchak wrote on Instagram. “What’s next, how will at least today’s endless day end? It’s impossible to calculate. The only thing known for sure is that people are dying.” Days later, Sobchak left with her daughter for Turkey.
This weekend, with the prospect of a short, victorious war for Putin receded and the Russian Ministry of Defence forced to concede that hundreds of Russian soldiers were dying in Ukraine, the authorities stepped up the pressure on dissent. Radio Echo Moskvy, long tolerated by the Kremlin as a final bastion of free speech, was shut down, as was Novaya Gazeta, whose editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, received last year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Meduza, a Riga-based news platform, was forced to remove all news about the war from its site, which was in any case restricted for most of its Russian users, and the internetbased Dozhd TV was also raided by police and shut down.
More terrifyingly still, the Russian Duma introduced a new law that carried a 15-year jail term for spreading misinformation about the war. Or, to give the law its full, Kafka-esque title: “On dissemination on public forums of obviously false information on the military deployments of Russia in defence of its citizens and in support of international peace and security.” The new law clearly includes social media as a “public forum” – immediately criminalising anyone who dares to post anything “false” about the war, defined by the Duma as “contrary to the public statements of the Ministry of Defence”.
The law marks an escalation into “pure Stalinism”, according to a senior television editor who works for Kremlin-controlled media. “But we’re at war now. Isn’t some Stalinism what we need? Stalin led us to Berlin, remember?”
The sad truth is that this vicious joke actually speaks for the majority of Russians. A recent poll by the state-run VTsIOM centre showed that 68 per cent of Russians approved of the war, with just 26 per cent against. That’s because the metropolitan middle-class of Moscow, St Petersburg and a handful of other major Russian cities lives in a much different motherland to that of their less well-off neighbours in those very cities’ sprawling, workingclass suburbs, let alone the country’s vast rural hinterland.
While the young cosmopolitan crowd now get their news online, 70 per cent of Russians rely on Kremlinproduced TV for their news – which, by no coincidence, exactly corresponds to the numbers backing Putin.
All week, Russian television has run marathon political talk shows running for up to six hours, filled with angry talking heads denouncing Nato, the West, Ukrainian “fascists” and “provocateurs”. At the same time, the Vesti nightly news did not broadcast images of fighting at all for the first five days of the invasion, preferring to quote politicians speaking about the progress of the “limited military operation” in Ukraine, and, in a surreal throwback to Soviet times, showing what seemed to be prerecorded footage of Putin visiting a technology plant.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s propagandists have been in overdrive to rally Russians to ignore the collapsing value of their currency. The surreal main message? Russia must stand firm in its fight to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, and against the “fascist” regime in Kyiv’s Western backers.
“I know some of you are finding this tough,” said Vladimir Solovyov, a Russian TV host, as he complained about how sanctions against him were threatening his Italian villa on Lake Como. “We’ll overcome it all, we’ll endure it all. We’ll rebuild our own economy from scratch, an independent banking system, manufacturing and industry. We’ll rely on ourselves.”
Improbable as it may be to Westerners, the narrative of that message – along with one that speaks of a Ukrainian “genocide” against Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine – has convinced many Russians.
“When you see someone beating up their wife, a real man doesn’t pass by,” said Slava, a Moscow taxi driver. “You have to go in and help. It’s our duty to help our Ukrainian brothers get rid of these little fascists.”
It seems even the mothers whose sons are serving in the Russian
‘No one, including me, really believed that there would be a conflict with Ukraine’
Ksenia Sobchak
army are passionately behind Putin’s war. “It’s men’s duty to defend the Motherland,” said Viktoria Torchak, 44, a Moscow sales assistant whose husband was a paratrooper who served in Chechnya, and whose 19-year-old son is currently doing his military service. “And it’s women’s duty to give birth to men to defend us.”
The war has thrown two Russias into sharp opposition. One is urban, educated, internet-savvy and relatively wealthy – the people who have most to lose from an economic crash and will miss imported goods, foreign holidays and their middle-class European lifestyle. The other is a Russia that values patriotism over material goods, prefers to believe in glorious, feelgood television news, rather than uncomfortable internet truths, and trusts the wise man in the Kremlin to guide and protect them from the enemies all around.
Unfortunately for Russia’s economic future, the former are leaving in droves. And, unfortunately for its political future, it’s the latter that forms Russia’s overwhelming majority.
*We’ve removed people’s surnames. The author is a journalist in Russia who we are keeping anonymous for safety reasons.