Vox: Why Putin wants Alexei Navalny dead

 In 2006, a lawyer named Alexei Navalny started a blog where he wrote about corruption in his home country of Russia. It’s the most prominent problem under the regime of Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia since 2000. Putin has systematically taken over the country’s independent media, oligarchy, elections, and laws to cement his own power and wield corruption to his advantage.

That’s what Navalny set out to expose. And in 2010, he published a groundbreaking investigation into a state-owned transportation company, Transneft, which was funneling state money into the hands of its executives. The post launched Navalny into politics.

By 2016, he had become the face of Russia’s opposition movement, run for mayor, and was running for president against Putin himself. Navalny was unifying Russia’s opposition like no politician had before. That’s why the Kremlin tried to kill him. Navalny survived the assassination attempt, launching a movement never before seen in Russia.

Social Europe: Russia’s path toward a better political capitalism

Many western commentators are obsessed with Putin, alternatively demonising and lionising him, and fail to notice that these three objectives are not particularly novel or original. They are exactly the same as those of Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet leader and his predecessor in the Kremlin. [...]

Yeltsin’s choice of Putin, which was to a large degree fortuitous—Putin was the protégé of the later alienated oligarch Boris Berezovsky—paid off. All three objectives were achieved: Putin was able to end the chaos of the 1990s, he reversed the economic downturn, and he left ‘the family’ (Yeltsin’s) intact with all its money. Putin now hopes in turn that his choice will be equally inspired. [...]

In the ten years after the Global Financial Crisis, Russia’s average annual growth in per capita gross domestic product was 0.3 per cent, against more than 7 per cent for China. Thus, in the past decade alone, the income gap between China and Russia doubled: while in 2009, China’s GDP in international dollars was about 3½ times that of Russia’s, the ratio is 7:1 today. [...]

In that context, the selection as Medvedev’s successor of Mikhail Mishustin, a rather unknown official among Kremlinologists, not only has an element of surprise (which Putin must relish) but, on reflection, makes sense. Who better to jump-start the economy than the person who was able to reform the notoriously corrupt and inefficient system of Russian taxation—so that it now looks, according to the Financial Times, as ‘the tax system of the future’? If Mishustin brings with him likewise technocratically-minded and effective leaders in their 40s and 50s, and if they remain politically shielded by Putin (the way the reformers in China in the 1990s were ‘shielded’ by Deng Xiaoping), Putin might just have a chance to reverse the circular economic history of Russia and produce an economic upturn.

read the article

Politico: Putin’s party takes hit in Moscow election (9/9/19)

Yabloko, a tiny perestroika-era liberal party, won four seats. Its leader Sergei Mitrokhin was initially banned from standing at the polls but was reinstated after a court in Moscow ruled in his favor. “This is a massive achievement,” said Vitali Shkliarov, a political analyst who advised the party. Shkliarov added it is the first time genuine opposition candidates have been elected to the City Duma since the early 1990s.

Members of United Russia ran as “independents” in Moscow in an apparent bid to distance themselves from their increasingly unpopular party, after its ratings plummeted amid an increase to the national pension age and growing poverty. But neither that tactic nor reported voter fraud in favor of United Russia could save one of the party's heavyweights: Andrei Metelsky, the leader of United Russia’s branch in Moscow, lost his seat on Sunday. [...]

Although it is impossible to judge how much influence Navalny’s Smart Voting strategy had on the vote, a number of triumphant candidates acknowledged their debt to the opposition leader’s backing, and noted that had candidates affiliated with him been allowed to run, they would have won instead. Yandiev Magomet, who defeated United Russia’s candidate in central Moscow, admitted that in a fair vote he would have lost to Ilya Yashin, a blacklisted opposition politician. Yashin had a 28-percentage point lead before he was barred from the race, according to an opinion poll.

read the article

CNN: Putin tried to smash the opposition. Instead protests have spiraled

Navalny was released from jail on Friday, but while he was inside another activist has emerged as a leading opposition voice: Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer and activist with Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund. Sobol recently ended a month-long hunger-strike after election officials refused to allow her onto the ballot in upcoming municipal elections; she was also detained and subsequently released ahead of an August 3 protest. [...]

But the protests have now taken on a different rationale: They have become a response to the wide-ranging crackdown on opposition activism. The slogan for the upcoming protest is "against political repression." [...]

And local authorities have carrots, as well as sticks, to deter protests. The Moscow city government organized two last-minute street carnivals that appeared timed to lure Muscovites away from protests (including one barbecue-and-music festival on August 10, dubiously titled "Meat and Beat").

read the article

Bloomberg: What Comes After Putin Could Be Trouble

Olga Kryshtanovskaya: It’s pretty widely understood that Russia is run by clans. Their leaders include Igor Sechin [chairman and chief executive officer of state-controlled oil company Rosneft], Sergei Chemezov [general director of Rostec, a state corporation that deals in military and other technologies], Sergei Ivanov [former defense minister], Nikolai Patrushev [former director of the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the KGB]. There’s no institution that gets together and votes, but somehow they interact and Putin makes the final decisions, keeping in mind the interests of the clans. [...]

It’s somewhat similar to China’s Central Military Commission under Deng Xiaoping. People from Russia’s security services [Putin was a KGB officer] are big fans of China. A lot of them think that if Yuri Andropov [general secretary of the Communist Party from 1982 to 1984] had stayed in power, Russia would have followed the Chinese path. All the levers of power would have remained in the party’s hands, and private business would have been allowed to develop only in certain parts of the economy. So it’s the Deng Xiaoping model. [...]

I looked at it using game theory, and concluded that the elite is likely to betray Putin. As soon as Putin indicates which group's candidate he prefers, the optimal strategy for the other groups is to undermine that candidate — because if he wins, they stand to lose everything.

read the article

Al Jazeera: Alexey Navalny: Putin's sole political nemesis

The demonstrations, which came just days after some 10,000 people attended a major rally in Moscow against the banning of popular messaging app Telegram, were held under the banner "He's Not Our Tsar!" in 90 cities across the country. [...]

A lawyer by profession, Navalny entered politics through the liberal opposition party Yabloko, of which he became a member in 2000. He climbed to the ranks of the party eventually becoming a deputy head of its Moscow branch only to be forced to resign in 2007 over his dealings with ultranationalists.

Navalny has not only attended the far-right "Russian march" and engaged with its organisers, but has also made a number of racist statements, including calling Georgians "rodents" during Russia's war with Georgia in 2008 and comparingmigrants to "insects". He also was the cofounder of a short-lived nationalist movement aimed at fighting for democracy and the rights of ethnic Russians. [...]

"During the [2012] Bolotnaya protests, Navalny was one of the leaders of the Russian opposition, along with Boris Nemtsov, Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, etc," says Kashin. "Then, it was like the nursery rhyme in Agatha Christie's novel 'And then there were none' - one by one, [these leaders] either got killed, left the country or just decided to retire from active work."  [...]

His campaign has maintained vast and sophisticated social media presence, which has emerged as an alternative source of information and criticism of the regime. It has been producing live and recorded high-quality content for YouTube and actively engaging with supporters on all major social media networks.

read the article

The Washington Post: Yes, the Kremlin is worried — about Russia’s own presidential elections

Putin’s regime represents what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way term “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections in hybrid systems like Russia are not designed to determine who rules, but rather to signal the regime’s power and resilience to potential challengers. [...]

In his book “Patronal Politics,” Henry Hale points out that authoritarian regimes deploy every available resource to dominate elections, even when opposition candidates would not win a free and fair contest. Competitive, if unfair, elections send a potent message about the power of incumbent regimes. [...]

The “great power of expectations,” as Hale labels this phenomenon, drives Russian politics — and the Putin regime has set a high bar for itself. Last year, the Kremlin’s top political technologists established a “70 at 70” objective for Putin’s reelection in March 2018 — 70 percent of the vote with 70 percent turnout. In a recent interview, Russian political expert Tatyana Stanovaya remarked, “Putin just needs to be elected quietly and quickly, without fuss, with good turnout, and a good result.” [...]

A Reuters report, meanwhile, suggests the Kremlin ordered major energy and utility companies to supply the Presidential Administration with news items that cast Russia’s leadership in a positive light. A memo to industry leaders requested stories “where it’s possible to say that state support helped lift the economy out of crisis” and benefited local residents. State-run media outlets are supposed to disseminate the stories to the public. [...]

According to a Levada Center poll from late November, 67 percent of likely voters would vote for Putin, with anticipated turnout between 53 and 55 percent — not the 70 percent figure the Kremlin hopes to see. Trailing far behind are the nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the Russian Communist Party’s Gennady Zyuganov, each with just four percent.

read the article

Al Jazeera: Is Vladimir Putin tired?

There is suddenly too much entropy in the Russian political universe. At least some people are acting as if there are no adults in the house. Political campaigns seem to start without the Kremlin's blessing, state TV channels contradict each other in their coverage of important stories, and infighting between Kremlin factions gets into the open. A major player in that infighting has been Igor Sechin, the head of the oil giant Rosneft, who helped engineer the arrest of Economy Minister Alexey Ulyukayev, but who is currently ignoring court summons for the same the case. [...]

Of course, the Russian leader is very much still around, his busy schedule reflected in daily news broadcasts on state TV. But as political expert Gleb Pavlovsky writes: the "the president is disappearing". Currently a critic of Putin's political regime, Pavlovsky was one of its chief architects in the 2000s - definitely a man whose opinion matters on such occasions. In the article, he goes on to describe the Russian leader as a "not-so-young gentleman dogged by power fatigue and accumulated weaknesses". [...]

If the Kremlin allows Navalny to register as a candidate, Putin is still very likely to win, but for him, that means stepping into unchartered territory. Will this let a revolutionary genie out of the bottle, as it happened with Mikhail Gorbachev's limited reforms leading to the colossal release of political energy which destroyed the entire communist system? Will it be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the hardline part of the establishment? And is this allegedly tired man up for the challenge of running a real campaign against a real rival? Can he run in an election that does not use the surrogate opposition leaders who helped the Kremlin maintain a semblance of pluralism in the last three elections? [...]

The second season began with the chaotic revolution in Ukraine, which allowed the political leadership, or - as many Russians say - the "collective Putin", to rebrand the regime by embracing irredentist nationalism and aggressive conservatism, a plagiarised version of the Christian fundamentalism of the US Bible Belt. That transformation culminated in the annexation of Crimea, which sent Putin's approval ratings soaring to almost 90 percent.  

read the article

Al Jazeera: The death of the Russian far right

Today, most of the leaders of the ultranationalist groups that used to organise the march are either in jail or in self-imposed exile. Their supporters consider them to be politically persecuted and complain about increasing state repression. [...]

"Controlled nationalism is about using nationalists in some [political] games. In some cases, [the authorities] would support nationalists in order to keep the regime alive, to fight the threat of a colour revolution," says Anton Shekhovstov, visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Austria. [...]

That same year, the Russian authorities decided to finally do away with the November 7 official holiday celebrating the October Revolution. They moved the allocated day off to November 4 - the day Moscow was liberated from the Poles in 1612, an official holiday in tsarist Russia until 1917. [...]

In August 2011, DPNI was banned by the Russian government (the SS had been banned a year earlier). Nevertheless, the government allowed the Russian march to take place. On November 4, more than 10,000 nationalists, joined by opposition politicians like Alexei Navalny, marched in Lyublino with banners reading "Stop feeding Caucasus". Over the years, the central government has been perceived as being quite generous in its budget allocation to the Chechen Republic in the North Caucasus and has been criticised by both nationalists and liberals for it. [...]

The result was a "schism" in the nationalist movement with one camp supporting the annexation of Crimea and the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the other opposing both and supporting the Ukrainian central government. [...]

Human rights groups have been divided over whether or not to consider the detention and imprisonment of ultranationalists to be political prosecution. Human rights organisation "Memorial" considers that in the case of Belov, there are "signs of political motivation".

read the article

Al Jazeera: Keeping Boris Nemtsov's memory alive

He is part of a small group of concerned citizens who call themselves the Nemtsov Bridge and who have established a 24-hour watch over the makeshift memorial.

They decided to do so after there were attempts shortly after Nemtsov's death to remove the memorial.

Since then it has been attacked a number of times by right-wing activists and also regularly removed by the municipal cleaning service.

Moscow's local authorities have refused to allow the installation of a plaque in the memory of Nemtsov and have rejected suggestions to rename the bridge to bear his name. [...]

Nemtsov's murder has been the latest in a string of political assassinations in Russia since the early 2000s. [...]

In June this year, Nemtsov's daughter Zhanna, said in an interview that he had a plan to run in the 2018 presidential elections.

Unlike opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is likely to be disqualified because of a past criminal conviction, Nemtsov wouldn't have had legal problems to stop him running and challenging Vladimir Putin's presidency.

read the article

The New Yorker: Julian Assange, a Man Without a Country

The problem was obvious. WikiLeaks, like many journalistic organizations, has long insisted on keeping its sources secret. However, Assange was not merely maintaining silence; he was actively pushing a narrative about his sourcing, in which Russia was not involved. He once told me, “WikiLeaks is providing a reference set to undeniably true information about the world.” But what if, in the interest of source protection, he was advancing a falsehood that was more significant than the reference set itself? Arguably, his election publications only underscored what was known about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton. His denials, meanwhile, potentially obfuscated an act of information warfare between two nuclear-armed powers. [...]

Conventional journalism is often an incremental, inefficient process, built on chains of personal trust: between sources and reporters, reporters and editors, editors and readers. Assange has difficulties with the messiness of trust, and in WikiLeaks he invented a system that made it largely unnecessary. By design, the WikiLeaks site prevents him from knowing where submissions come from, so there is no need to trust that he will keep a source’s identity a secret. (In practice, he readily accepts material in less than anonymous ways.) There is no need to trust his editorial judgment, either, because he has vowed to publish everything in full, in as pristine a form as possible. WikiLeaks, in Assange’s ideal, is a populist machine, delivering unmediated secret information directly to readers. [...]

But Assange’s argument made little sense. The Swedish extradition process requires the approval of the nation’s Supreme Court; thus, the scenario that Assange was proposing—a geopolitical plot to use his sex-crimes case as a pretext to deliver him to the United States—would require at least three high justices to act as conspirators. If this were not reason enough for skepticism, under the rules governing European arrest warrants Sweden could not extradite Assange to the U.S. without British approval; in other words, shipping him to Stockholm would only add a layer of bureaucratic obstacles for Washington. In any event, Swedish law prohibits extraditions for “political crimes,” which include espionage, and for cases eligible for the death penalty. [...]

For nearly half a decade, Assange had been cultivating a dislike of Clinton that was partly personal and partly philosophical. Clinton, he suspected, had wanted to assassinate him, and was instrumental in aggravating his conflict with Sweden. Moreover, he saw her as the main gear of a political machine that encompassed Wall Street, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and overseas client nations, like Saudi Arabia. “She’s the smooth central representation of all that,” he once said. “And ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States.” [...]

At times, though, Assange has had questionable associations. In 2010, Israel Shamir, a controversial Russian with extremist views, visited him at Ellingham Hall. (Shamir, a convert from Judaism to Greek Orthodox Christianity, has written several anti-Semitic screeds.) Some WikiLeaks volunteers viewed him as an eccentric hanger-on; some suspected that he had ties to Russian intelligence. During one visit, Assange—who had become lax in his attitude toward the State Department trove—gave him more than ninety thousand unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables concerning Russia, former Soviet-bloc countries, and Israel. Shamir sold some of the material to a magazine friendly to the Kremlin, and delivered other parts of it to Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s authoritarian leader, who used them to arrest opposition figures. (Shamir denies this, citing “a malicious invention by my detractors.”) One Belarusian activist later told the Web site Tablet, “I really hate WikiLeaks. How can they do this? The KGB is telling these people, ‘Your name is in the American cables and you are a traitor, an American agent, and you will be treated like an enemy.’ ” [...]

Assange told me that, as he negotiated the deal, he pushed for editorial freedom. He asked RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, if he could host Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader. “She said, ‘The Kremlin won’t like it, but it would be good for us, because it will show our independence,’ ” he recalled. He then asked about inviting a Chechen terrorist, and got an unambiguous no. Laughing at the memory, he said, “That’s the line: all the way up to a Chechen terrorist.” Assange did invite Navalny, who declined. Navalny’s spokesperson told me that he believed it was indecent to have any contact with RT, saying, “This channel is associated with the spread of lies and propaganda, including about many opposition activists.” [...]

This kind of judgment—deciding what is signal and what is noise—is precisely what Assange’s system was designed to eliminate. In his campaign publications, the results were clear. There were stories of genuine import: an episode in which Donna Brazile, a CNN commentator who became the head of the D.N.C., illicitly leaked debate questions to Clinton; others in which Clinton seemed uncomfortably close to selling political access in exchange for large donations to her family foundation. But there were also thousands of pages of trivia, some of which did harm. E-mail conversations about a pizza place in Washington were spun into a conspiracy theory about child pornography, which ended in an armed attack. The leaks revealed staffers’ personal e-mail addresses and cell-phone numbers and, in one case, a voice mail that captures a parent and a child together at the zoo. Above all, the steady drip from WikiLeaks, always promising some bigger revelation, distracted from an essential inquiry into whether the country’s national sovereignty had been breached. For more than a year, it has often seemed that there is nothing but noise. [...]

In a later conversation, I urged him to articulate a coherent view of Trump, but the prospect seemed to pain him. “It’s hard to sum up in the current climate of polarization,” he told me. It seemed his main concern was that by criticizing Trump he would somehow appear to validate the previous norms of American politics. “Governments are evil,” he told me. “The last government was evil. This government is evil. Does the Trump Administration appear to have a potential to be uniquely bad? Maybe. But in many other respects it’s the same problem that existed under Obama. The difference is that now everyone is talking about it. What is associated with this Administration is a certain aggressive rhetoric, which can make the problem worse if people accept it; on the other hand, it also makes everyone pay attention to problems that have been there for a long time.” He told me that, whatever Trump’s flaws, his Administration had the capacity to challenge entrenched power in Washington, and to disrupt the structure of American power overseas. “I will give you a list of counterintuitive structural positives,” he told me. Several days later, he presented a set of ideas that could be distilled into one: “A complaint from civil libertarians and constitutional scholars is that the power of the Presidency is too strong. O.K., it has been reduced now.”

read the article 

openDemocracy: “The Putinist majority could fast become anti-Putinist”

It seems to me that this understanding of an ideological evolution represents a trap. I do not believe that Russia has, from the beginning of this conservative turn, transformed into a space isolated from the rest of the world, where other laws obtain, other values reign, where even the people themselves have mutated into one or another anthropological type— sovki [derogatory term for people still “stuck” in the Soviet past, for surviving members of Homo Sovieticus - ed.] , zombies, vatniki [literally, “quilted jackets,” a derogatory term for lower class nationalistic Russians -ed.] 

Despite Putin’s Russia’s attempt to transform itself on the level of rhetoric into an alternative to the contemporary world, it remains fully a part of that world. Despite the conservative turn, Russia has not even for a minute ceased to be a part of the world capitalist order ruled by the laws of the market. In this sense, conservative rhetoric is an important constitutive part of the spirit of Russian capitalism. This spirit not only does not contradict basic market values, but gives them a new form, and a new disguise. [...]

From our own life experience we know that Russia is a country of aggressive social inequality, with a fairly atomized and unintegrated society, in which people habitually think of their own interests and take their neighbors and other inhabitants of their cities for suspicious competitors, from whom one can expect only scams and dirty tricks, and who implicitly or explicitly covet our place in the sun. In this sense, Russian society is even more individualistic than Western society, in which various forms of self-organisation are incomparably more developed. [...]

In this version of the conservative turn, there is no special “Russian way.” Of course, we encounter this combination of the market with a veneer of conservative values in other countries. Just such a symbiosis of nationalism, conservatism, religious obscurantism, and a severely pro-market policy (albeit with local specificities and in different proportions), for example, is widespread in Eastern Europe. The same trend reflects the evolution of American Republicans over the past decade. In this sense, Russia is not only not unique, but even the opposite—it stands at the vanguard of some global or pan-European tendencies.  [...]

Second, the current government’s policy is grounded in part on economic liberal principles. If we understand the logic of the government’s reforms in education, health and culture, we will find that it largely corresponds to what is commonly called neoliberalism: the dominance of the principle of profitability, of economic “efficiency” over the interests of society.

read the article 

The New York Review of Books: The New Face of Russian Resistance

The new face of Russian protest is barely pubescent. Reports from the June 12 demonstrations, which brought hundreds and sometimes thousands of people into the streets of just about every Russian city, feature teenagers: a boy in shorts being tackled by police in riot gear, a girl charging a police line, and a paddy wagon full of adolescents. One Russian Facebook user posted a photograph of the teenagers in the paddy wagon with the caption, “Russia has a future.” He posited that “every mass arrest of young people strengthens youth protest,” which, in turn, is sure to bring about the end of the regime.

There is a feverish tone to Russian blog posts in the aftermath of Monday’s protests, a sense of hope struggling to defy fear. Without a doubt, Monday’s protests—often in open defiance of Russian authorities, who in many cities refused to give permits to hold them—were the most geographically widespread in all of Russian history: eight people, including five minors, were detained in the sleepy southern resort town of Yeysk (population 88,000), and nine people were detained five thousand miles across the country, in Blagoveshchensk, on the border with China. In all, more than 1,700 people were thrown in jail—nearly half of them in Moscow—the single largest wave of arrests in many decades. In Moscow, some of the detainees had to spend the night on benches in a police courtyard because there was no room for them inside the precinct. On the other hand, this means that enough people took to the streets on Monday to make that many arrests possible. Most of the detainees were released within hours; many were sentenced to fines and between five and thirty days behind bars; a few will certainly face several years in a prison colony. This is how post-totalitarian terror works—by punishing a randomly chosen few to frighten the many. What is giving some Russians hope is that a new generation of people who are not yet frightened seems to have burst onto the scene. [...]

Still, Navalny seems to have found the key both to staying alive and out of prison and to getting people into the streets. Indeed, it is his ability to mobilize protesters that has kept him out of prison: the regime fears mass protest. Navalny’s single-minded focus on corruption allows him to avoid more controversial issues such as the war in Ukraine, and to appeal to a maximum number of Russians directly: corruption affects everyone, all the time. It was Navalny who called for the protests on June 12. In Moscow, he got a boost from the city administration, which is pursuing a giant urban-renewal project that will cost tens of thousands of Muscovites their homes. This, too, is corruption: Muscovites are convinced that the mayor and his circle will personally benefit from turning city lands over to developers.

read the article 

openDemocracy: Alexei Navalny's campaign: effective management or grassroots movement?

Navalny is conducting a dialogue with the Russian authorities via force. In this context, a sanctioned demonstration — it doesn’t matter what sound equipment you have — doesn’t mean anything. In order to pressure the Kremlin into changing the established scenario of presidential elections in March 2018, he has to constantly raise the pressure — and the level of risk. Only by crossing the boundaries of the permissible can Navalny make himself heard and push against such boundaries, at least a little. The problem is, with Russia’s most prominent protest leader now entering this kind of dialogue with the authorities, how far will Navalny remain open to dialogue with the people who are taking to the streets to protest? [...]

The real agenda — rising poverty, the state’s cruelty and lack of transparency, the never-ending stream of new taxes and cuts to social welfare — will bring more and more people out to protest. You can’t write these people directly into the ranks of Navalny supporters. They are of different views and different ages, but are members of pre-existing social movements. For instance, for people involved in initiative groups against the Moscow city “renovation”, the format of a sanctioned demonstration — where they can make connections and speak to one another — is far more useful than clashes with the police. What Navalny calls the “battle between good and neutrality” doesn’t happen in a vacuum, where there’s only the merciless authorities and the fearless leader of the opposition, but in society, at least a small section of which can still organise itself.

The paradox of Russia’s current protest movement is that it has taken the form of a vertically organised election campaign, when it is, in essence, a broad coalition. This is a “political machine”, and one which is more like a commercial corporation than a political party, where rank-and-file members possess at least formal mechanisms of control over the actions of the leadership. Here, everyone has their own, strictly defined area of work: experts propose solutions, professionals bring them to the public, and the public is left to follow them. The only real justification for this kind of model is that it is effective: the protest wave is building, its geographical spread is constantly growing, and it’s becoming hard to silence it.

read the article 

The New York Times: Across Russia, Protesters Heed Navalny’s Anti-Kremlin Rallying Cry

An extraordinary wave of antigovernment protests swept across Russia on Monday, as thousands of demonstrators gathered in more than 100 cities to denounce corruption and political stagnation despite official attempts to stifle the expression of outrage.

Riot police officers in large cities and small detained hundreds of participants, with more than 700 apprehended in Moscow and 300 in St. Petersburg, according to OVD-Info, an independent organization that tracks arrests. There were reports of about 100 detentions elsewhere across Russia. [...]

It was difficult to assess the exact number of cities or people involved in the demonstrations across this vast continent of a country with 11 time zones. But the proliferation of protests and the predominantly youthful crowds seemed to indicate that Mr. Navalny had succeeded in broadening his movement beyond the more than 80 cities that took part in demonstrations in March. [...]

The protests were ostensibly focused on government corruption, but other issues, like economic doldrums and the mass demolition of apartments, brought people onto the street. Many participants said they were disgusted at the gradual dismantling of democracy in Russia, and of any semblance of a real opposition. [...]

The latest confrontation between Mr. Navalny, 41, and the Kremlin began on March 2, when he released a video depicting Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev as the crooked beneficiary of palaces, yachts and other luxuries paid for by some of Russia’s richest tycoons.

read the article 

The Guardian: Unequal Russia: is anger stirring in the global capital of inequality?

Measuring levels of inequality, rather than simply tracking absolute poverty levels, has become a watchword for economists of late, with some believing it is the uneven distribution of wealth that is one of the key factors driving political discontent and disenfranchisement globally.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, said increased inequality was one of a number of factors leading to the rise of populism around the world – adding she had first warned of these dangers four years ago, but that after the victory of Donald Trump in the US and the increasing popularity of far-right parties across Europe, she hoped people would now pay it more attention.

A recent report by Credit Suisse showed that Russia is the most unequal of all the world’s major economies. The richest 10% of Russians own 87% of all the country’s wealth, according to the report, compared with 76% in the US and 66% in China. According to another measure, by VTB Capital, 1% of the Russian population holds 46% of all the personal bank deposits in the country. [...]

Approximately 23 million Russians – about 16% of the population – now officially subsist below the poverty line, and there are increasing signs that the huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population is starting to annoy more Russians – especially as many of the richest people are government officials, or those close to them. A recent report found that 41% of Russians say they struggle to get enough money together for food and clothing.

read the article 

Slate: What Is Going On in Russia?

Oliver Carroll: Given the fact that perhaps two-thirds of the meetings were unsanctioned—every demonstration in Russia has to go through a process of being agreed to by authorities, that being one of the changes in the law which happened in Putin’s second term—and given that anybody going therefore automatically faced the possibility of arrest and a 15-day jail sentence, the fact that so many turned out obviously took everyone by surprise. And from what I hear it took the Kremlin by surprise as well. The rumors coming out on the day were that if there was a large crowd then there weren’t going to be any arrests because it would seem unsightly. I don’t know whether that was a red herring or whether, during the day, as more and more people turned out, a decision was made saying, “We need to show who’s boss here and crack down.” [...]

The other thing that is surprising to people is the makeup of the demonstrations. Previous demonstrations, such as those in 2011, were mostly made up of middle-class, well-to-do people, people who traveled extensively abroad and saw what was happening in Europe. Now you are looking at teenagers, kids from 13 upwards, and a sizeable proportion in their teens and 20s. It’s a cohort which really the Kremlin wasn’t too interested in. This isn’t something that the Kremlin really thought it needed to deal with but I think now you will see a lot of policies. It’s difficult because you can’t exactly come down with draconian policies on kids. That has really bad optics. But there will a response, you can be sure. [...]

I think his message has slightly changed. Before, he was making common cause with nationalists, which gave him a natural appeal. His nationalism is slightly exaggerated. It’s certainly there, a Russian nationalism. As a colleague said to me, in America he would be a Republican. Some of his statements have been pretty outrageous. But he has toned that down. It’s an anti-corruption and rule of law message now.

What’s important, I suppose, is that for Russians, rule of law and anti-corruption go well but only to a point. They want to have heroes and antiheroes. That’s important to understand. Navalny has managed to create that. They have a superhero in Navalny and someone they can make fun of in Medvedev. It’s a cynical and weary society.

read the article 

The Atlantic: What Russia's Latest Protests Mean for Putin

But Sunday’s protest was different. Unlike the rallies in Nemtsov’s memory or even the 2011-2012 protests, this one did not have a permit from the Moscow city authorities. Over the weekend, the mayor’s office warned people that protestors alone would bear the responsibility for any consequences of attending what they deemed an illegal demonstration. But despite those warnings and despite the fresh memory of some three dozen people being charged—many of whom did prison time—for a protest in May 2012 that turned violent, thousands came out in Moscow. The police estimated attendance at 8,000, but given officials’ predilection for artificially deflating the numbers of those gathered at such events to make them seem less of a threat, the number could easily have been double that. People clogged the length of Tverskaya Street, one of the city’s main drags. The iconic Pushkin Square was packed, and people clung to the lampposts, chanting “Russia will be free!” [...]

What was most remarkable, though, was that the protests happened not just in protest-loving Moscow, but in over 90 cities across the country. People came out by the hundreds in Vladivostok, in the Far East; in Siberian Tomsk; in Krasnodar, in the south; and in Kaliningrad, a tiny Russian enclave in the middle of Poland. They came out in cities like Chelyabinsk, in the Ural Mountains; southern Samara; and in Novosibirsk. (Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet, has a compelling photo essay here.) This is significant because “the regions,” as everything outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg is known, are significantly more conservative and Putin-friendly than the two biggest cities. They are much poorer, much less developed, and people living there are often more dependent on the state to make their living. There is almost no independent media there, except what can be found online, and information critical of the government can be hard to come by. Going against the authorities can result in serious repercussions, both economically and in terms of personal safety, sometimes more so than in Moscow, where people have more money, political connections, and the savviness to solve their problems. [...]

First and foremost, it was a tremendous show of power by Navalny, who has declared that he is running for president of Russia in 2018. He is a longshot at best, and the Kremlin may not even allow him on the ballot. Yet he showed he has real political power and that tens of thousands of people across the country see him as a legitimate leader, despite the Kremlin’s assiduous work to marginalize him by keeping him off government-controlled television—still Russians’ main source of news—and inventing a half-dozen criminal cases against him.

read the article