Putin’s security state in spotlight
Pandemic gives Russian president chance to show clout of rigid governance
MOSCOW—For Vladimir Putin’s budding police state, the coronavirus is an unexpected dress rehearsal.
As the Russian president has consolidated power, the police and security services have spent years upgrading their capabilities, from facial-recognition tools to crowd-control methods. Now, the spread of the virus provides a sudden test for those capabilities — and a high-stakes opportunity for Putin to win support for his hardline measures.
Russia reported its biggest one-day jump in coronavirus cases earlier this week, with 52 new patients identified across 23 regions. Moscow, which has nearly half of the 199 total cases countrywide, reported the first death of a coronavirus patient in the country.
To fight the virus, Russia is taking steps to limit personal freedoms that in many ways mirror those taken recently by western democracies. Schools, museums and theatres were closed countrywide, and gatherings of more than 50 people have been banned in Moscow and other cities. Anyone arriving from abroad is now required to enter quarantine.
But for Russia, those steps carry an additional significance: they are an opportunity for Putin to show an uneasy public the effectiveness of rigid top-down governance and of a strong, centralized state.
“A state of emergency is a happy time for any law-enforcement authorities,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and former member of Putin’s human-rights council. Referring to the stakes for the Kremlin as it navigates the crisis, she added: “On the one hand, you are viewed as a protector and a saviour. On the other, you can become the focus of discontent.”
Putin’s grand bargain with Russians has been to provide stability, competent governance and greater respect on the world stage, at the cost of fewer democratic rights. The public’s support of the bargain has slipped in recent years amid declining incomes and anger over official corruption.
The coming weeks are shaping up to be critical for Putin as he tries to cement his power. A national vote to approve constitutional amendments that would allow him to serve as president until 2036 is scheduled for late April. For now, he has avoided much public blowback against the move to hold on to power, but the government’s ability to control the coronavirus outbreak will test his argument that Russia needs his steady leadership in a time of crisis.
Officials ascribe Russia’s relatively low total case count — with more than 133,000 tests performed, according to official figures — to aggressive quarantine efforts and the government’s move in late January to close the border with China. But many Russians believe the total is far higher, and some are drawing comparisons to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, when the Soviet government was slow to admit the scale of the problem.
“Everybody’s talking about, ‘Oh, it’s Chernobyl again,’” Anna Filippova, a 26-year-old freelance journalist, said in an interview at a Moscow bookstore. “We know the government’s going to lie again, and we’re not going to get any of the truth to come out, so we feel very lost, because maybe they’re underestimating it, maybe they’re overestimating — nobody knows.”