But the problem is not simply that these ideas have been found wanting elsewhere. More importantly, many of them either extend or intensify free-market prescriptions that have already been tried in Russia as well, and have sparked multiple protest movements both before and after the 2011–12 cycle. Since Putin’s return to office, in fact, the small-scale mobilizations evoked earlier have continued. Starting in 2013 there were protests against reforms imposing austerity – officials called it ‘optimization’ – in the healthcare system, followed in 2014 by protests against cuts to education funding. More surprising were the nationwide actions that began in November 2015 as long-distance truck drivers, dal’noboishchiki, protested against increased freight taxes. These were to be levied through a new electronic payment system called Platon, which happened to be owned by the son of Putin’s friend Arkady Rotenberg – a connection which for many encapsulated the injustice and crookedness of the whole scheme. The system was introduced all the same, but the truckers renewed their protests in 2017 – having formed a new trade union in the meantime. The independent labour movement remains active, though it has come under severe judicial pressure: since 2017 both the truckers’ union and the Inter-Regional Trade Union ‘Workers Association’ (MPRA), led by former Ford unionist Etmanov, have had to battle against an official designation as ‘foreign agents’. Environmental actions, too, continue: in 2017, a group of ‘guerrilla pensioners’ in Karelia managed to block a mining company’s bid to fell a forest.{21}
The gap between the policies proposed in the Navalnyi-inspired platform and these wider social realities is only the latest variation on the split that has run through the anti-Putin movement from the outset, and remains unremedied: the disconnection between its political and social components – the one focused on the removal of Putin, the other on the malign consequences of the system over which he presides.
There are many reasons for the persistence of this disparity between the different components of the opposition. But the basic fault line was created by different understandings of the source of contemporary Russia’s ills. For Navalnyi and many others aligned with him, the post-Soviet economy has not thrived as it should because, as Navalnyi himself has put it, ‘The source of money is not entrepreneurial talent… [rather] money is born from power.’ Genuine entrepreneurship is stifled because ‘Komsomol bastards’ have been able to profit from political clout or personal networks.{22} From this perspective the fundamental problem, of which the Putin system is only a symptom, is that Russia’s transition to capitalism is incomplete; a cleaner, fairer, more transparent market-based order would eliminate the distorting statist legacies that have held it back. The Party of Progress, in its attempts to loosen the Russian state’s hold on the economy, in many respects aims to continue and complete the work of the free-market reforms of the 1990s.
Yet this line of thinking rests on at least two mistaken assumptions. One is a belief in an abstract, idealized capitalism that could incarnate free-market principles in an undistorted fashion. No such model exists: there is no capitalism, no market, no economic activity even, outside of history. The ‘capitalism’ Russian oppositionists aspire to emulate is the product of the specific and diverse histories of Europe and the US, shaped by concrete events and flesh-and-blood people. A related but still more consequential error is the idea that what Russia has now is not – or is not yet – capitalism, and that the failure to establish ‘proper’ capitalism is what accounts for the perversions of the present. But many of the characteristic features of the Putin system are directly descended from the post-Communist order installed in the 1990s, which Putin has consolidated and prolonged. The foundational purpose of this ‘imitation democratic’ system was the establishment of capitalism, and it owes its subsequent shape to the desire of Russia’s rulers to maintain that initial commitment and defend their gains. Capitalism, in short, has predominated in Russia for the past three decades, and what many Russian oppositionists see as symptoms of its absence are, instead, structural features of the kind of capitalism the country has.
An opposition that remains committed to fundamental misunderstandings of this kind risks misdirecting its efforts. In seeing the Putin regime as the sole source of the country’s political, economic and social afflictions, it mistakes symptoms for causes. Unless and until it acknowledges that the ultimate source of these afflictions is the form Russian capitalism itself has taken, even if it changes the faces in the Kremlin it will not change the mechanisms that do the most severe and long-lasting damage to the country. The concerns that observers in Russia and elsewhere have raised about Navalnyi being a dangerous chauvinist are valid enough on their own. But even if he were not, his stated policies would leave so much of the substantive content of the post-Soviet system in place that, for the majority of Russians, it would be hard to say what had changed.
It’s that basic disconnection between the political goals of the Navalnyi-led opposition and the social concerns of the broader array of movements that remains, in my view, the great weakness of the anti-Putin opposition as a whole – and it’s only by bridging that gap that the movement will be able to present a viable challenge to the system in the longer run. For that to take place, Putin’s opponents need to do more than imagine another way for Russia to be governed and for its entrepreneurs to make money: they must address the questions of what kind of lives and livelihoods Russia’s citizens are entitled to, whose needs are to be prioritized and what, in the end, the purposes of economic growth are. They would need, in short, to envision an alternative model for Russian society. This would be an extremely tall order for any opposition movement – and not just in Russia. But there as anywhere else, it’s only by keeping one eye on that horizon that progress toward genuine change can be made. For now, that remains a distant prospect, and whatever small gains a progressive anti-Putin movement might make at home are likely to be overshadowed by events on an increasingly tense and turbulent international stage.
CHAPTER 5
After the Maidan
THE EVENTS OF THE PAST few years have created a glaring divide between Russia and the West. How and why did this happen? In the West, the story of how relations with Russia descended to their current abysmal level is often told as one of an ominous drift, under Putin, back toward a Soviet-style showdown between Moscow and its former adversaries – prompting many to conclude that the two sides found themselves waging a ‘New Cold War’. From this perspective, the clashes of the 2000s, especially the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, were early warning signs of Russia’s steady regression to Communist-era thinking, after the liberal interlude of the 1990s. Everything that has happened since 2014 – the annexation of Crimea, sanctions, clashes over Syria, allegations of Russian meddling in the US presidential election – has merely conformed to a sinister pattern that was already in place.
But there are several things wrong with this story. One is the substantive continuities between Putin’s rule and that of Yeltsin; indeed, both regimes should be seen as successive phases in the life cycle of a single post-Soviet system. Secondly, the idea that Russia has wilfully reverted to hostile Soviet type on the international stage rests on an extraordinarily one-sided view of what has actually happened since 1991 – one that ignores the West’s own actions, which have forcefully shaped Russia’s decisions. Indeed, the fundamental fact that has defined relations between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War is the huge imbalance in power and resources between the two sides. All other geopolitical calculations have flowed from it – including both the West’s impulse to drive home its advantage through the expansion of NATO, and Russia’s growing resentment of that process, as well as its inability to halt or reverse it.