Last Sunday a bomb exploded in a St Petersburg café and the damage is still not contained. The blast killed an outspoken nationalist commentator but it also shed light on the murky world of Russia’s “turbo-patriots” and their growing strength and hostility towards the Kremlin.
Killing Fomin
The target of this attack was Maxim Fomin, better known as Vladlen Tatarsky. A Ukrainian from the Donbas region, he escaped from a prison cell in the chaos of early 2014 where he was serving a sentence for bank robbery. Making his way to the rebel-held, pro-Russian city of Donetsk in the east, he joined the Vostok Battalion, a militia closely tied to Moscow.
Over time, he swapped Kalashnikov for keyboard, becoming one of the so-called “milbloggers”— military commentators and cheerleaders for Vladimir Putin’s imperialist adventure.
As with so many milbloggers, Tatarsky was an ultra-nationalist. Indeed, he was close to outright neo-fascist groups such as the Rusich militia — which welcomed the Russian invasion in February of last year, but became increasingly angry when hopes of a quick and easy victory gave way to a reality shaped by incompetence, corruption and stalemate.
The Prigozhin connection
These “turbo-patriots”, as they have become known, are not a homogenous force. Tatarsky, who became infamous for his unapologetic claim that “we will kill and rob everyone we need to” in Ukraine, became close to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the figure behind the Wagner mercenary army. In return for his support, Tatarsky used his Telegram social media channel, with some 560,000 subscribers, to amplify Prigozhin’s increasingly angry attacks on the military high command. He even turned up in the beleaguered city of Bakhmut, accompanying Prigozhin on a “fact-finding mission”.
Little surprise, then, that when he was killed, Tatarsky was addressing a gathering of a group of like-minded nationalists who called themselves Cyber Front Z, in a café that Prigozhin used to own, which has since become an unofficial haunt of his social media trolls and mercenary groupies.
Whodunnit?
Although it is difficult to be certain of the details, especially given the unreliability of official accounts, Tatarsky appears to have been killed by a bomb concealed in a bust with which he had been presented by one Daria Trepova.
She claims to have been set up. An activist opposed to the regime, she believed she was being “auditioned” for a job with an anti-Putin propaganda outfit in Kyiv. This has inevitably been presented by the government as evidence that Tatarsky was killed by the Ukrainian intelligence agencies; certainly, no one in Kyiv was mourning his death.
Yet it was striking how quickly many turbo-patriots instead turned their ire against their own government — and especially the Federal Security Service (FSB).They were outraged that, seven months after the killing of Darya Dugina, daughter of the nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, another high-profile supporter of the war had been murdered. The FSB’s admission that it had been aware of a threat to Tatarsky only deepened their anger. One commentator fulminated: “Is it more worrying if the FSB is incompetent or doing the [Ukrainians’] job for them?”
The Kremlin’s hand?
After all, some suspected that the FSB might even have been behind the assassination, whether to silence Tatarsky or as a warning to Prigozhin. While the businessman depends on Kremlin contracts, and cannot turn against Putin, he has made himself increasingly inconvenient to many powerful figures. This may have been a case of taking a pawn off the board to keep a rook in play.
However, to others it was a sign of something rather broader, a push-back against a turbo-patriot community, which was becoming a threat.
Armed and angry
Turbo-patriots are still very much a minority in Russia, and although millions follow their social media channels and watch their tirades on YouTube, this by no means translates into real support.
Nonetheless, what makes them disproportionately worrying to the Kremlin is that their support base is not among the middle-class metropolitans of the near-defunct liberal opposition, but serving and former members of the military and security apparatus. In other words, the men with guns, on whose support Putin would have to depend in a crisis.
Strelkov unchained
This helps explain why they have had unusual latitude. At a time when even the mildest implied criticism has put liberal commentators behind bars, figures such as the former FSB officer Igor Girkin have been lambasting the regime and the way it has been conducting the war with gusto and impunity. Better known by his nom de guerre Strelkov (“shooter”), Girkin was prominently involved in seizing Crimea for Russia. He became a prime mover in the early days of the Donbas conflict in 2014. Moscow removed him from his position as “defence minister” of the rebellious pseudo-states when he became too politically inconvenient after his forces shot down a Malaysian civilian airliner, killing all 298 people on board.
Girkin has since been unstinting in his criticisms of the Kremlin. Some of his distinctive and derisive epithets such as “the Plywood Marshal” for Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, and “Our Unique Strategic Advantage” for Putin himself have gone viral in nationalist social media.
Even though his attempts to join the fighting were blocked, Girkin has been allowed to continue his campaign of criticism. To a large degree this is because he is not so much a leader as spokesman for many turbo-patriots within the security forces. There is a fear that trying to silence him would at once make him a martyr and drive this faction deeper underground.
Patriots against Putin
Among Russia’s nationalists, there seems to be a growing sense that Putin has outstayed his welcome, and that it is patriotic to be opposed to the current regime. For many, this is implicit, as they shy away from directly criticising the president and pile on to figures such as Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of general staff for the armed forces, as safer proxies.
Others, though, are much more explicit in their commitment to political change. It was probably no more than coincidence that on the very day Tatarsky was killed, a new political movement, the Club of Angry Patriots, was announced.
Led by figures such as Girkin, Pavel Gubarev, the former self-proclaimed governor of Donetsk, and Viktor Alksnis — known as the “Black Colonel”— co-chairman of the National-Patriotic Forces of Russia movement and a veteran of the ultra-nationalist movement since the late Soviet era, it advocates for an even more aggressive assertion of what they see as Russia’s right to dominate its strategic neighbourhood. Yet they are also critical both of the regime (although they carefully say they are not seeking to topple it) and its use of Prigozhin’s mercenaries. As a supporter later put it, “these criminals bring shame to Russia’s honour”.
If they ever came to power, these extremists would presumably unleash an even more brutal campaign against Ukraine. But many of them believe the reason why Russia has become so corrupt and inefficient is the lack of meaningful controls on the president. Before the war, Girkin was calling for checks and balances on the executive, a truly independent judiciary and greater democracy, sure that the Russian people would endorse his vision.
Hollowing out the state
The turbo-patriots are still too few and too divided to pose a direct threat to the regime — yet. Instead they are a symptom of its decay. The three pillars of Putin’s system — its popular legitimacy, its capacity to throw money at problems, and, ultimately, its coercive power — are being eroded. Popular support is declining, the economy is under growing pressure, and even the forces of repression are dissatisfied. The insider social media channels on which members of the paramilitary National Guard share their opinions, for example, are increasingly disenchanted.
There is of course a policy consequence to all of this. Having to keep an eye on his nationalist flank makes it harder for Putin to make a compromise deal in Ukraine — perhaps most notably on the future of Crimea, which the Zelensky administration signalled last week it would be prepared to negotiate on.
In due course, the growing discontent inside Russia may well lead to protests. When it does, the loyalties of the security forces will be exposed; they may not be directly opposed to Putin, but their enthusiasm to crack skulls to keep him in power is fading.
The true threat to Putin posed by the turbo-patriots is twofold.
First, they exert a gravitational pull on the Kremlin’s actions, reducing the leader’s room for manoeuvre. Second, while they may not seek to topple Putin themselves, they are hollowing out the structures on which he will have to rely if someone else tries to do that, be they conspirators in the government or mobs on the streets. The patriots are boxing the president in and may yet destroy the system that protects him, as surely as a bomb hidden in a bust can lay waste to a St Petersburg café.
