Russia: Demolishing the final vestiges of democracy
President Vladimir Putin is no longer hiding his authoritarianism, said Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev in Foreign Policy (U.S.). For 20 years, the Russian leader ran a “hybrid” autocracy, disguising his gangster-like regime with a façade of democracy. Repression was meted out carefully. But now “the Kremlin has decided to dispense with this pretense and go full autocracy.” The shift in strategy began in April after tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in support of Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader who was poisoned by suspected Kremlin agents last year. The crackdown “has been extensive and brutal.” Our already limited freedoms—of the press, civil society, and assembly—have been erased. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation was branded an extremist group and its top members arrested. The news site that I work for, Meduza.io—which is based in Latvia but staffed mostly by Russians in Moscow—was officially labeled a foreign agent and effectively shut down. Dozens of activists and journalists have been arrested, their homes and offices ransacked, some for merely posting about a protest on social media. The Kremlin “will no longer tolerate even token opposition or the hint of any threat to its rule.”
The decision to poison Navalny was the “tipping point,” said Mark Galeotti in The Moscow Times (Russia). Since then, the need for ever more repression has snowballed: Navalny had to be locked away, then the protests to free him had to be squelched, and finally media covering the protests had to be silenced. Putin and his allies were determined to avoid a repeat of the crisis in neighboring Belarus, where a mass uprising “triggered by the especially blatant rigging” of last summer’s election led the Belarusian regime to engage in “open war with the people.” Given Navalny’s success in persuading people to vote against the Kremlin, Putin may have decided that “some repression now would forestall the need for a lot of repression later.”
Putin is not necessarily the center of power anymore, said Yulia Latynina in Novaya Gazeta (Russia). His popularity has plummeted—fewer than 30 percent of Russians now say they trust him. His televised state propaganda is no longer effective with the young, many of whom watch Navalny’s entertaining YouTube exposés of Kremlin corruption. And the increasingly impoverished Russian population is getting angry and restless. Faced with such an unstable situation, state terror is the only response. And that means true power lies with the FSB—the KGB successor agency that is charged with keeping the populace in check. A Belarus-like scenario may be inevitable, said Leonid Gozman, also in Novaya Gazeta. Authorities are placing surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology in our cities, so they can identify and arrest anyone who dares protest in the street. Most people will stop attending rallies, and those few who keep demonstrating will become ever more radicalized. This is the Kremlin’s plan: They want to turn peaceful protesters into violent revolutionaries. “Blood and explosions” will give the regime yet another excuse to curtail our freedoms.