Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  The Kremlin undoubtedly hoped the reform would facilitate the rise of multiple new parties that would further fragment the already eviscerated opposition. However, the opposition hoped it would help institutionalize the nascent protest movement by allowing new groups to take part in regional elections in the fall. Among the promising developments was the merger of the liberal Republican Party—led by the dynamic young former legislator Vladimir Ryzhkov—with Boris Nemtsov’s Parnas movement, which took place after the government allowed the former to register for elections. In the end, the authorities made the next regional elections irrelevant by stepping up efforts to strong-arm, cajole and undermine opposition candidates back to the political margins. After pro-Kremlin candidates swept to victory in voting that opposition leaders said was rigged, Putin declared that the results confirmed he was pursuing the right course.

  Faced with the need to transform his regime to ensure its long-term survival, he instead resorted to the old tactic of superficial reappointments and nominal changes. Soon after his election, he resigned his chairmanship of United Russia, a party he never formally joined—a clear symbol of his disdain for any institution that would constrain his power, even one whose real raison d’être was to support him. “The president is a consolidating figure for all political forces, for all citizens,” he explained. Medvedev—also not a party member at the time, despite having headed its voting list in parliamentary elections—took his place.

  Dmitri Travin, a keen political commentator from St. Petersburg, stressed that United Russia wasn’t a real party. He compared it to the Soviet-era nomenklatura, which he said did nothing to try to preserve communism when it collapsed. “The nomenklatura used its privileges to privatize part of the state enterprises, and to make big money doing so, rather than save the USSR. In other words,” he wrote, “the nomenklatura lived well in Soviet times under a totalitarian system and exploited the crisis to make sure it was well set up in the new, market-economy Russia… United Russia is doing exactly the same.”17 Were Putin’s regime to collapse, Travin concluded, “these people wouldn’t lift a finger to preserve it: they would prefer to go into business (or even to go and live in the West) with the capital they are busy accumulating through corrupt practices.”

  Putin has since continued tweaking electoral rules while setting about compensating for United Russia’s declining popularity by turning to his Popular Front, which developed into an official mass organization directly subordinate to him. The Kremlin fought back in other ways that reflect the dirty nature of politics in a state headed by a former KGB officer, including on the Internet. While the government backed friendly news sites, the notorious Kremlin youth group Nashi deployed online “trolls”—abusive comments—and bombarded Internet sites with distributed denial-of-service attacks that temporarily shut down critical media sites. As noted earlier, compromising videos appeared on the Internet along with transcripts of hacked telephone conversations and private e-mails from the accounts of Alexei Navalny and other opposition figures. Many of the transcripts appeared on the pro-Kremlin tabloid site Lifenews.ru.

  The authorities’ attempts to discredit the opposition by manipulating Internet sites have often backfired, however. When bloggers noticed that a photo of Navalny had apparently been doctored by a newspaper to make it appear as though he were standing alongside the Kremlin’s archenemy Berezovsky, an outpouring of online ridicule compared the tactic to clumsy Soviet propaganda.

  Some of the practices came to light in 2012, when hackers calling themselves the Russian wing of the Internet hacker group Anonymous posted their own trove of e-mails from accounts they said belonged to Nashi’s overseers. Many of the messages appeared to be from the head of the Federal Youth Agency, Vassily Yakemenko, and its spokeswoman. They were shown directing journalists and bloggers to extol Putin’s popularity and attack his critics. The e-mails describe price lists and payments and discuss schemes to file hundreds of comments on websites and create a video cartoon comparing Navalny to Hitler. Yakemenko stepped down soon afterward to found a new political party he promised would attract young “creative or middle-class” people because the old generation, “whose thinking remains weighed down with ideas from Soviet times, must be squeezed out of the ruling elite.”18 After that especially transparent attempt to co-opt opposition-party supporters failed, he opened a café.19

  But even those who found Yakemenko laughable were deeply troubled by the Kremlin’s renewed crackdown on protesters. Putin took the oath of office in May, virtually snarling his words in a lavish coronation-like Kremlin ceremony after police emptied roads and swept the city center for protesters. Some, including Nemtsov, were beaten and arrested in a popular opposition hangout, a French café called Jean Jacques. Nemtsov said the empty streets exposed Putin’s fear of his own people. “This is not how you celebrate a holiday,” he scoffed. “This is how you celebrate seizing power.”20

  As the opposition settled into what has become a long-term struggle, demonstrators took to playing cat and mouse with police by staging impromptu rallies and “promenades” around the capital. Parliament, where a handful of critics displayed symbolic stirrings of dissent against the pro-Kremlin majority, proceeded to take action. Fines and other penalties for protesters accused of violating public order are now almost ten thousand dollars, or sixty times what they used to be. The following month, legislators passed a series of bills restricting civil society, free speech and launching what appeared to be an opening salvo against Internet freedom. NGOs that receive funding from abroad are now required to declare themselves “foreign agents,” a term clearly meant to associate them with espionage.

  Soon afterward, Putin appeared to signal yet another campaign against NGOs in a speech that ordered the FSB to boost scrutiny of such groups—which he accused of “putting pressure on Russia.” Many had refused to register as foreign agents. Teams of officials from departments ranging from the tax police to fire inspectors soon began harassing human rights groups, charities and even the offices of foreign think tanks with raids and audits. Golos—which threatened the authorities as no other group did because it was the country’s only independent election monitoring agency—became the first to be charged under the new law and fined ten thousand dollars.

  The Investigative Committee—the group set up by Putin and headed by his close former KGB crony Alexander Bastrykin—took the lead role in the crackdown. Russians had been shown a glimpse of Bastrykin’s character during his clash with a newspaper editor in 2012. Angered by an article in the crusading investigative paper Novaya Gazeta that called him and Putin “servants” of organized criminal groups, Bastrykin had the journalist driven to a forest outside Moscow. There he ordered his own bodyguards to leave, and—the newspaper later reported—threatened to cut off the journalist’s head and legs. Then he joked that he would investigate the murder himself. A public outcry forced Bastrykin to apologize, but no censure followed.

  Soon afterward, on the day before a mass protest in June, Investigative Committee officers raided the homes of not only Navalny but also Ksenia Sobchak, a TV host turned protester and Russia’s chief “it girl,” as well as other opposition leaders and their families. “I never thought we’d return to such repression in this country,” Sobchak tweeted.

  In October, the Investigative Committee placed another young opposition leader, the outspoken leftist Sergei Udaltsov, under house arrest on charges of plotting a violent uprising after investigators escorted by masked commandos searched his apartment for more than five hours. The authorities later charged him with the more serious indictment of “staging” riots. His trademark dark sunglasses, austere military-style jackets and many arrests for dogged protesting had burnished his reputation as a brave young radical. Now state television aired a documentary alleging he was plotting a violent uprising against the government with the help of an exiled banker and Chechen militants. The film included blurred footage, allegedly taken by a hidden camera, that recorded him plotting a coup
in Russia with a Georgian member of parliament. Later, a member of his Left Front movement who criticized the authorities before trying to apply to the UN for political refugee status in Ukraine was kidnapped from a Kiev street by masked men and sent to jail in Siberia.

  Another dissident whose work as a rocket engineer gave the FSB even more reason to suspect him hanged himself in a holding cell in the Netherlands after the authorities there rejected his asylum application. His death brought attention to a growing list of Kremlin critics, many of them minor, previously unheard-of figures, who have had difficulties seeking refuge abroad.

  Navalny, however, refused to flee, even after it became clear he would be tried on the on-again, off-again embezzlement charges against him that were revived after he embarrassed the Investigative Committee’s Bastrykin by disclosing that he secretly owned property in the Czech Republic, then further angered the Kremlin by attending an unsanctioned rally in front of Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters. Accused of stealing around five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of timber from a state-controlled firm in 2009 while serving as an adviser to the governor of the Kirov region, northeast of Moscow, he went on trial in April 2013. Navalny dismissed the accusation against him—one of four, and the first to reach the trial stage—as an attempt to silence his criticism, and he declared he wanted to run for president.

  His trial was a first of such a prominent opposition leader. The case against him was based largely on the testimony of one of his alleged conspirators, who worked with the prosecutors. During the trial, the man provided contradictory evidence, and the judge refused to allow Navalny’s lawyers to cross-examine him. The defense was also blocked from calling a dozen witnesses. The judge found Navalny—who spent most of the trial blogging and tweeting—guilty and sentenced him to five years in prison. However, he was unexpectedly released on bail after the verdict prompted angry protests in Moscow and other cities.

  Navalny had already begun campaigning for Moscow’s first relatively free mayoral election in almost a decade. His release prompted speculation about whether it represented a small breath of democracy, a split within the ruling elite, or an attempt to bestow legitimacy on the vote. Although the unbeatable incumbent, the dour Putin ally Sergei Sobyanin, clearly wanted the legitimacy of a clean vote, the Kremlin’s main motives probably included the desire to keep outsiders confused about the extent of Putin’s authoritarianism: The speculation distracted from the inevitability of Sobyanin’s victory.

  Navalny proceeded to cement his image as Putin’s main rival by mounting an energetic, Western-style grassroots campaign in which he addressed voters on stages and streets across the capital. After he won an astounding 27 percent of the vote—losing to Sobyanin’s 51 percent—a judge suspended his five-year sentence. More than to appear unpredictable, that decision also reflected Putin’s longtime strategy of backing off when his actions appear highly unpopular. In that case, the Kremlin probably saw more repression as less productive than freeing Navalny. His conviction bars him from running for office again, and the threat that the authorities can drag him back to jail at any time still hangs over his head.

  Whether or not he remains free, the charges against him were so flimsy that they appeared to signify a return to Soviet-style justice against political opponents, demonstratively showing that the facts matter far less than the state’s determination to eliminate its critics. Still, the authorities had launched the proceedings only when few were inclined to object. By early 2013, much of the blog traffic and op-ed discussion about the protest movement concerned the disillusionment that had set in among opposition supporters and the moral crisis among its leaders. The hounding of a prominent economist cemented the sense of hoplessness. Sergei Guriev, the well-connected rector of the leading New Economic School and board member of Russia’s largest consumer bank, was a key supporter of some of then-President Medvedev’s highest-profile projects. After he annnouncd he’d donated money to Navalny, however, the Investigative Committee repeatedly interrogated him about his contribution to a report criticizing Khodorkovsky’s prosecution years earlier. After fleeing to Paris, where his family lived, he said he feared arrest.

  The pro-Kremlin analyst Sergei Markov appeared to make the government’s case when he went so far as to allege that the New Economic School is a tool for “the Western political and economic elite to exert its influence on Russia’s ruling circles… Sergei Guriev was the intellectual center of that group that developed and implemented a project to replace Putin with a more easily controlled politician.”21 Like similar Soviet-era attacks, they hid deeper political motives: impugning Guriev was a way for hostile clans to assert themselves and weaken Medvedev.

  Although such measures to stifle displays of public dissatisfaction blunted the movement, they have also added fuel to its fire, which will burn as long as Kremlin critics are prevented from expressing their views. What kind of country the new-old president ultimately bequeaths will partly depend on how far he is willing to go to cement his legacy. Even if he steps down at the end of his current term in 2018, no doubt he will seek to install a loyal successor to guarantee his security, as he did Yeltsin’s.

  Rumors about possible replacements are a staple in Moscow. Among the top candidates, in theory, are Moscow Mayor Sobyanin—a former Putin chief of staff—and a nationalist deputy prime minister named Dmitri Rogozin. Both have been singled out as possible compromise figures who may appeal to enough political clans to assume the president’s role of arbiter. Insiders believe the engineering of Medvedev’s election in 2008—when the clan wars first emerged in public—will provide the model for the second succession.

  No development can be ruled out, however. One observer who compares Putin’s system to Fascist regimes believes it shares their brittleness partly because leaders’ cults become unsustainable as they grow old and decrepit.22 Infighting between fragmented elites and a growing refusal among the educated, young and middle class to submit to unconditional authority and humiliation also contribute to the serious risk of breakdown, a possibility that will no doubt increasingly beset the authorities. Putin’s health became a concern when he skipped a number of scheduled events in late 2012 after having been photographed grimacing at a conference and clutching his chair. After denying anything was the matter, the Kremlin said he’d hurt his back practicing judo.

  Putin soon returned and if he remains healthy, the critical question for Russia’s future will probably be whether his political system can consolidate by uniting the competing political clans following the transfer of his personal power when he finally steps down. Among those who have stacked government agencies with his protégés, Sergei Ivanov—a steely former KGB general who lost to Medvedev as Putin’s pick for president in 2008—has since regrouped and made inroads against his rivals. Meanwhile, some opposition leaders hope that emboldening disaffected voters to reject Putin will enable them to convince the rich and powerful that their positions would be more secure under a more moderate leader. A recent Levada Center poll showed a solid majority still supports Putin—who has said he hasn’t ruled out running for a fourth term in 2018. But it also showed a growing number of Russians believe he represents only the narrow interests of those in power.

  Whatever happens, the real battle for the country’s future will require more than merely installing a new group in power. It will mean addressing the old behavior Putin did so much to reinforce in so many facets of life. Conventional wisdom long held that his great popularity rested on a tacit social contract: as long as booming oil prices buoyed living standards, most Russians were willing to close their eyes to authoritarianism. But the uncomfortable reality is that at least half of what is called the middle class, that great hope for Russia’s future, consists of government officials. More than that, even progressive-seeming professionals and entrepreneurs who admit to preferring life in the West nevertheless profit from the abuses of office that have crippled major institutions at home. They may not want real reform. “These people
who dine, dress and holiday well want the quality in Russia’s political kitchen to correspond to that of [restaurateur Arkady] Novikov’s [fancy] restaurants,” Yulia Latynina wrote during the height of the protests in 2011. “Their problem with the authorities is aesthetic: they don’t want to go out for oysters then have to come home to last century’s spoiled gruel.”

  One of the main prerequisites for genuine reform is overhauling the institutions Putin’s crony establishment has done much to undermine, not least of which is the legal system. In the early 1990s, when laws were in flux, White and Case’s John Erickson represented several Russian companies along with his Western clients. Among them, the Salyut Design Bureau, a former Soviet agency that oversaw satellite launches into space, sought Erickson out when a foreign investment bank attempted to overcharge it for advisory work. Such fairly common behavior, which reinforced the going view of capitalism as a predatory activity, appalled Erickson, who was therefore gratified to witness Western executives occasionally learning lessons about how business was conducted in Russia.

  Describing a typical deal in those days, Erickson told me that important meetings with CEOs and their lawyers would often begin in the standard way, with negotiations about a list of open points. The two sides would settle each by compromise, usually until “about point number seven, when it would be clear from what the Russians were saying that they felt they really hadn’t agreed to anything on points one to six.”

  Even signed contracts remained open to interpretation. “The Russians viewed them not as binding agreements,” Erickson said, “but simply guidelines about how they might act in the future. Maybe they’d comply, maybe they wouldn’t. Of course they didn’t have to care because you really couldn’t sue them effectively in the courts.” When Erickson drafted Western-style commercial regulations, versions often came back from government offices with roughly 10 percent of the text remaining. “It made me realize very quickly that Russia wasn’t America or Germany. It was a different country with its own system, its own way of doing things.”