The Dissident Who Came In From the Cold

Dozens of villagers are lined up at the gates of the decrepit local boatyard on a breezy Saturday morning to witness an unheard-of event. They gaze in wonder as the visitor arrives: never in living memory has a regional governor paid a call to the backwater town of Arkul, on the Vyatka River, roughly 500 miles northeast of Moscow. Climbing out of his battered Land Cruiser in scuffed jeans and a New York Yankees cap, Nikita Belykh makes a startling contrast to Russia's standard-issue provincial bureaucrats. (Article continued below...)

Looks are the least of the differences: Belykh made his name opposing those entrenched post-Soviet apparatchiks as one of the most determined pro-democracy activists in the country. Old friends were shocked and angry when he abruptly abandoned their street protests and took a Kremlin appointment as governor of Kirov oblast, deep in Russia's neglected heartland. But Belykh is tackling his new job with all the energy he used to radiate as an opposition leader. He immediately begins peppering the boatyard's director with questions—especially about what needs fixing. "Tell me what you do!" Belykh says briskly. "Tell me everything!"

The shipyard is one small piece of an experiment he hopes will transform Russia—and so far, at least, he has the blessing of no less than Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev. It was Medvedev who appointed Belykh to the job late last year, essentially granting him a socioeconomic laboratory slightly larger than England. Kirov is a microcosm of Russia and its problems—chronic unemployment, decaying Soviet infrastructure and wretched public-health conditions, to name only three. Medvedev has made it clear that Kirov is his personal project and Belykh his protégé. If Belykh can raise Kirov up from its knees, there will be a clear precedent for applying the same management style across Russia. "Maybe some people would like to see us liberals fail," says Belykh. "My job is to prove the opposite."

And fast. Medvedev publicly deplores Russia's economic plight and has called for massive changes, but he may not have much longer to do anything about it. Former president Vladimir Putin, the KGB veteran who chose him as successor, recently dropped broad hints that he intends to take the presidency back at the next election, in 2012. Worse yet for both Medvedev and Belykh, hostility toward the Kirov project is growing, even within Medvedev's (and Putin's) own United Russia party. Two weeks ago the party's youth wing, the Young Guards, marched against Belykh's plan to hold a conference on regional development in Kirov. Whipped up by false rumors that the conference was sponsored by the U.S. International Republican Institute, the protesters carried professionally made banners with slogans like GET OUT WASHINGTON ORGANIZERS! and YANKEE GO HOME! They displayed no qualms about publicly attacking Medvedev's protégé—a sign of bigger challenges ahead.

But Belykh seems undeterred. Even by the standards of Russian democratic activists, he has a mind of his own. He grew up in a well-educated family near the Urals city of Perm. His parents expected him to study at one of the top schools in Moscow, but when he was 16 his father died of a heart attack, and Belykh stayed in Perm to look after his mother. That was the year Boris Yeltsin stood atop a tank and defied an attempted coup by hardliners trying to roll back democratic reforms. To this day, Russia's first post-Soviet president remains Belykh's hero. "I come from a generation of Yeltsin democrats," he says. "Nobody else but Yeltsin dared to give people freedom in the conditions Russia lived in the 1990s. Unfortunately we did not manage to keep that hard-won freedom." Belykh adds, "Now our job is to rehabilitate democracy."

A high flier from the start, Belykh majored in law and economics simultaneously at Perm State. At 23 he was made vice president of a local investment house, and at 28 he was appointed the region's vice governor. The next year—2003—he ran for Parliament on the reformist Union of Right Forces ticket, but the tide had turned against the progressives: the party won no seats at all. Belykh stuck with the party anyway and moved to Moscow to become its leader, but times grew even tougher, and members began talking about making peace with Putin. Belykh opposed any such idea. "I did not see myself as a part of the Kremlin's project," he recalls. He quit the party in protest.

Putin's strong-arm tactics had effectively neutered Russia's liberal opposition. And yet Belykh couldn't just stand by while the country deteriorated. While Putin has won heavy domestic support with his loud, aggressive foreign policy, Russia is hollowing out inside. Reform at the local level gets no attention, but it's essential if the country is ever to thrive.

That's where Belykh decided to focus his efforts. He passed a message to Medvedev that he wanted to work in regional government. He knew his old associates would accuse him of selling out, but he saw no other way he could make a difference. He was still struggling with himself when Medvedev suggested making him governor of Kirov. The Kremlin wasn't taking chances. Belykh's first interview was with Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin's chief ideologist, who warned him to keep his mouth shut in public about national issues like the war with Georgia. Belykh would be permitted to do a weekly radio show called A Governor's Diary on the liberal Moscow-based Radio Echo network—but only if the program stayed away from "provocative" questions.