MG: It will expand.
RL: Does Putin understand that?
MG: I believe he does. He senses it. After all, up till now nobody has taken to the streets, other than the old people when they were deprived of their welfare benefits. They, incidentally, were the first to come out in the freezing cold to block roads. They set an example for the young to follow. I am quite sure there will be no progress without increasing pressure. And it will increase, and become more organized and more politicized. Putin will not be able to ignore that.
Was this a prediction or more a wish I was expressing to the newly elected president? Probably a bit of both.
A decision to tighten the screws
The political situation was different after the presidential election: there was no longer the Medvedev–Putin tandem: Putin’s ‘vertical of power’ was recreated in unregenerate form, without any of the ‘uncertainties’, real or imagined, of the Medvedev period. In the circumstances, it behove, in my opinion, both the government and opposition forces to avoid creating or worsening a split in society. ‘Both the state authorities and the opposition forces must prevent a split in society, and they should do everything in their power to avoid one’, I said in an interview for Interfax in early May. Unfortunately, the situation moved in the opposite direction. There was increasing mistrust and hostility. Who was more to blame? I am far from pronouncing the opposition blameless, but think the government bore more responsibility. After winning the election, it should have done everything possible to start healing the wounds and seek a basis for social harmony.
As for the protest movement, I advised that it should remain a movement for free and fair elections. On that basis, it was possible to present the necessary united front. Beyond that, however, the question inevitably arose of how both the protest movement and society as a whole should be structured. Accordingly, I reiterated the need for strong, ideologically meaningful political parties. The current ones were useless. Above all, there was a need for a party professing the ideals of social democracy, which already had a historically validated record, particularly in Europe. I was entirely willing to facilitate this to the best of my ability, but, of course, could not and did not want to take on the role of leader: my age and health simply did not allow that. I have to admit that one of the greatest disappointments of recent years has been the absence of people prepared to take on the task of realizing this political alternative. We are still deficient in the skill of organizing ourselves to implement major, long-term political projects. The regime, meanwhile, having bolstered itself with a new elite of officials, most certainly does have a project: keeping things the way they are.
On 6 May, on the eve of the presidential inauguration, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Moscow to demand change. What happened at that rally? According to the police report, which became public knowledge a year later, there were no major incidents, let alone mass riots on Bolotnaya Square: ‘As a result of the measures taken by the Interior Ministry agencies in Moscow, the tasks of ensuring public order and safety were implemented in full and no serious incidents were able to develop.’ From the same report, we learned that to maintain order almost 13,000 law-enforcement personnel were drafted in!
The vast majority of the protesters were calm and behaved peacefully, but a criminal case was manufactured out of a few incidents, and the proceedings dragged on for over a year. Dozens of people were arrested.
A month later, the Duma adopted as an emergency measure, and the president signed, a law on meetings that introduced a whole raft of sanctions, with fines from 300–10,000 roubles, and even restrictions on ‘simultaneous mass presence of citizens in public places’. Moreover, the wording of the law was such that it left scope for the authorities to interpret it to prohibit anything they pleased. The fact that the law flagrantly contradicted the constitutionally guaranteed principle of freedom of assembly was so obvious that I, like many others, had hopes until the last moment that the president would not sign it. When he nevertheless did, I said, ‘This is an error and it will have to be corrected.’
At the same high speed, an emergency law was passed on ‘non-profit organizations performing the function of a foreign agent’. Its avowed aim was to prevent foreign states from interfering in Russian politics, and ensuring transparency in the activities and financial affairs of public organizations. These would seem to be commendable aims, and there was nothing to prevent their being achieved within the framework of existing laws. However, the wording the Duma so hastily rubber-stamped without discussion, and which the president signed into law, the use of the words ‘foreign agent’ and the fact that there immediately followed mass ‘inspections’ of nongovernmental organizations with involvement of the State Prosecutor’s Office, and the treating of all public activity as political, left no doubt that the intention was to straitjacket every social initiative not approved by the regime.
By late 2012, the intention of the Russian state authorities to restrict civic activity and wholly subordinate society to its own purposes was unambiguously clear. Among the zealous defenders of this policy was the president of the Constitutional Court, Valeriy Zorkin. I could not leave his stance unchallenged. My response was published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
To the president of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, V. D. Zorkin:
Esteemed Valeriy Dmitrievich,
Your article ‘There is no morality in chaos’, published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta on 11 December 2012, came to my attention after some delay. I will not disguise the fact that much in the text surprised me precisely because it was written by the president of the Constitutional Court of Russia and published in our government newspaper.
Polemicizing with the highly subjective judgements of the American political scientist, Leon Aron, ‘On moral and personal choice in constructing the Russian state’ (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 28 November 2012), you ascribe, absolutely without foundation and contrary to the well-known historical facts, an absence of any positive moral values to Gorbachev’s Perestroika. You find it ‘guilty’ of sedition, as a form of chaos devoid of morality.
As if there had not been the first free elections with alternative candidates for decades of Russian history in 1989 and 1990! As if there had not been Glasnost, which allowed people to say freely what they were thinking!
As if there had been no opening up to citizens of access to information and the wealth of Russian and world literature! As if there had been no introduction of the freedom for citizens to leave and return to their homeland!
And what of the law on freedom of conscience and religious organization, the return of places of worship to believers and the extensive celebration of a millennium since the Christianization of Russia? Why do you overlook the resumption of the suspended rehabilitation of victims of Stalinist repression and the release of political prisoners? To say nothing of the ending of the Cold War and real steps towards removing the danger of nuclear war and towards arms reduction. Can you not see ‘positive moral content’ in this?
I can well imagine whose interests the clarion calls and orders to vilify Perestroika served, and why they are now being reissued. I did not expect, however, that a writer of your level of authority, ranting against those who ‘extol’ Gorbachev’s Perestroika, would literally in the next phrase start trying to identify it with the upheavals and crimes of the 1990s and use that to denigrate the new ‘Perestroika sedition’ which is supposedly aiming to ‘further this degradation of society’.