Russia’s courageous protesters and why Britain shares the blame for Putin’s rampant corruption

VLADIMIR Putin’s hold on Russia loosened a little this weekend when tens of thousands of people took to the streets in dozens of demonstrations across this vast country.

Hundreds were arrested amid a brutal police crackdown, prompting public outrage and international outcry.

The EU joined the U. S. yesterday in condemning the mass arrests as ‘unacceptable’ and accused Putin’s government of denying its people ‘basic freedom of expression’.

Russian officials responded by claiming many protesters had been paid to take part in the protests as an act of deliberate ‘provocation’.

Optimists hope the protests might be the first tremor in an earthquake that will shake the tyrant from his perch.

Regime

Grounds for anger in the country are all too evident. Russia is still astonishingly illrun and grotesquely corrupt. Only a gilded elite of Kremlin cronies reaps the real benefits of the trillion-pound windfall from gas and oil that has occurred under Putin’s reign.

Mineral wealth and a highly educated population should make Russia a rich country. Instead, it is stagnating. Most of its people endure a clappedout infrastructure and poor public services, while Putin’s regime has utterly failed to diversify the economy away from natural resources.

The all-pervasive corruption throttles the small businesses that should be the bedrock of real prosperity. Russia’s most important currency is not the rouble, but political favours.

While most Russians live in fear of the arbitrary and often brutal police and courts, the elite’s looting binge goes unchecked.

The weekend’s protests were galvanised by a new documentary by the anti- corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny — now jailed for his role in organising them — which laid bare the revoltingly privileged lifestyles of Russia’s ruling class. The film — downloaded 12 million times from the internet — used drone footage to highlight a sumptuous £340 million summer palace, complete with duck house, marina, ski slope, three helipads and a giant outdoor chess set, belonging to prime minister Dmitri Medvedev.

That 200-acre compound was just one of his many residences, the film claimed, adding that he had accepted up to £1 billion in bribes.

The PM’s spokeswoman has dismissed the allegations, but few Russians believe this. They see that there is one law for those who run the country, another for everyone else.

The film’s success is an encouraging sign that the largely uncensored internet has breached the Kremlin’s control of broadcast media. Another hopeful development is that many of those who turned out this weekend were teenagers — who have known no other ruler than Putin.

Moreover, the protests rippled outside the big cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. The regime’s bombastic propaganda has clearly failed to convince all Russians that they are living in paradise.

Now, however, the police have cracked down hard on protesters. One of them was arrested merely for putting a tiny sign on his bike addressed to the country’s elite: ‘Sell your villas, build roads.’

Exact figures were unclear, but a human rights group yesterday said 1,030 people had been arrested in Moscow.

Mr Navlany was fined £280 and sentenced to 15 days in prison. Following the protests, police raided his office, where they seized computers and scoured through documents.

Writing on Twitter before his court appearance yesterday, however, he said: ‘The time will come when we will have

them on trial (only honestly).’ Despite all this evident discontent across the nation, after 30 years of watching Russians struggle against their rulers, I doubt that these protests will be decisive.

The pro- democracy movement that helped topple the Soviet regime in the Nineties was led by political giants: the bear-like Boris Yeltsin and the saintly physicist- dissident Andrei Sakharov.

No one of that stature exists in the thinning ranks of the modern Russian opposition.

My friend Boris Nemtsov, a liberal and true statesman, could have perhaps filled that role. But he was gunned down outside the Kremlin two years ago. Another opposition leader and long-time critic of Putin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, has suffered two bouts of poisoning. Others are exiled.

One other factor in Putin’s favour is that while in its final years the Soviet Union was also plagued by catastrophic economic failure, today Russia’s capitalist economy, though deeply corrupt, is far more resilient.

For all the failures of the Putin regime, by Russia’s dismal historical standards, the past 17 years have been a time of unparalleled freedom, prosperity and stability. Many Russians cherish that. They want no return to what they remember as the chaos and humiliation of the Nineties.

Phoney

They have no illusions about the regime’s corruption and incompetence — but they see little alternative. The overwhelming likelihood, therefore, is that Mr Putin will be re-elected to a second six-year presidential term next year.

The word ‘election’ is hardly appropriate. It implies openness, fairness and competition — all of which are lacking.

A tightly controlled political system allows only phoney rivals — Communists and nationalists who pose no real threat to Mr Putin. For real opposition candidates, even getting on the ballot paper is hard. Campaigns are blocked, activists intimidated. Vote counting is shamefully opaque and open to rigging. A docile legal system offers no effective challenge to this.

This leaves only public protest. This weekend’s demonstrations showed bravery and defiance. But they are not big enough to rattle the Kremlin’s windows.

This gives Mr Putin plenty of room for manoeuvre. He can crack down more brutally on the opposition. He can also use kompromat — blackmail.

Several leading opposition figures have been publicly humiliated by sex videos.

Threat

If he wants to blunt the edge of public discontent, Mr Putin can also change the faces around him. Unimpressive Mr Medvedev would be an obvious candidate for the chop. This could be accompanied by a high-profile anticorruption investigation.

Mr Putin — as in the past — would doubtless pronounce himself shocked and outraged by the faithless and greedy behaviour of his now disgraced subordinate. He might even co-opt Mr Navalny.

But beneath the surface, nothing would change.

The only real threat to Mr Putin’s regime is from outside. If we in the West would stop laundering its ill-gotten gains, the Kremlin’s business model would collapse.

For the money stolen in Russia flows through the City of London and other financial centres. Our bankers, lawyers and accountants are the pinstriped accomplices in the Kremlin’s looting of Russia.

Russians have learned that for all our fine talk about Putin and his cronies, Britain is a place where they can buy respectability.

The U.S. and Estonia have started cracking down on this flow of corrupt cash. If we in Britain want to unsettle the sinister tyrant in the Kremlin, we should follow suit.

Otherwise all our talk of freedom and justice for the long-suffering Russian people will be seen for what it is: a hollow sham.