The people in the banners and the murals are the folk the Kremlin fears most, men and women that Putin’s government would like society to forget. The Navalny image was discovered at 6am on 28 April and had been painted over by 10.30am. The banner, too, was swiftly removed by the authorities and its creators were tracked down and fined.
The short-lived banner honouring ‘Heroes of Recent Times’ in St Petersburg’s Pushkarsky Park
An official removes Alexei Navalny’s likeness from the same St Petersburg wall
But almost immediately, a new image appeared in the park; this time not a victim, but an enforcer. The anonymous serviceman, dressed in camouflage gear, equipped for battle, with his face hidden behind a balaclava, could have come from any one of the Kremlin’s tools of repression: the OMON riot police who bludgeon and arrest those who dare to voice their opinions on the streets, the masked FSB agents who raid the apartments of journalists and businessmen, or the ‘little green men’ sent undercover to invade foreign countries. The inscription now read, ‘A hero of our time’, the title of Mikhail Lermontov’s famous novel of 1840 whose main character, Pechorin, is recognised by Russians as the symbol of the superfluous man who can find no place in a stagnating, backward-looking society.
In the weeks that followed Navalny’s return to Russia, the state’s masked and camouflaged enforcers had been deployed in cities throughout the country, making over 13,000 arrests in response to the nationwide protests against the corruption and theft that Navalny had exposed. The hulking riot police in their thick body armour and visored helmets, universally known as ‘cosmonauts’, remain anonymous, unworried by personal responsibility, dispensing violence with impunity. But for Putin, there is a dilemma. His modus operandi has been to allow his cronies to pilfer from public funds as a reward for keeping him in power. If they go too far and their greed is embarrassingly publicised, he would normally dispense discreet punishments to curb their appetites. To do so now, however, would be to admit that Navalny and his fellow corruption-busters were in the right, to risk appearing weak in the face of the opposition. With his back against the wall, Putin chose instead to abandon restraint. He sent Navalny to jail on trumped up charges, then set about destroying his movement and his followers. Using the pretext of the COVID crisis to outlaw demonstrations, the Kremlin ruled that any public gathering would henceforth require an official permit and then routinely refused to grant these permits for opposition protests, allowing the cosmonauts a free hand to intimidate, beat and arrest.
Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, the FBK, was singled out for denunciation. ‘Under the guise of liberal slogans,’ declared the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office, ‘[it] is engaged in creating conditions for destabilising the social and the socio-political situation … with the intent to overthrow the foundations of the constitutional order.’ Driven by the fear of a ‘colour revolution’ like the ones that so terrified Putin when they occurred in Georgia and Ukraine, the Kremlin declared Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation an ‘extremist group’, a designation previously reserved for terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda. Anyone deemed to have been associated with FBK or its leaders in the 12 months leading up to the designation was subject to retrospective prosecution and a ban on standing for public office. ‘Association’ was defined as anything from attending a then-legal demonstration, to posting a supportive message online or merely ‘liking’ a message by someone else. Sharing FBK’s investigative reports was now considered ‘disseminating extremist material’.
The catch-all nature of the legislation gave the Kremlin an alarmingly free rein to extend its crackdown. Two of my own media organisations, MBK Media and Open Media, were promptly targeted. These were independent news sources, providing uncensored information to a Russian public that is otherwise deprived of non-state-sponsored reporting. When their online presence was again blocked in August 2021, there was no official announcement and no explanation, other than an indication that it was part of a wider move to target websites which ‘incite unrest, extremist activities, or participation in unauthorised rallies’. Vitaly Borodin, whose Kremlin-backed organisation’s denunciations provided the pretext for the crackdown, declared publicly that investigative journalists are worse than terrorists. Under such circumstances, Russia under Putin has become a killing field. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international NGO that tracks attacks on the press across the globe, at least 58 reporters have been murdered in connection with their work in Russia since 1992. Against a background of such violence, I decided it was no longer possible to continue operating; to do so would put the editorial staff of MBK Media and Open Media at too great a risk. In my statement at the time, I warned that ‘these political repressions, including the silencing of journalists and human-rights defenders, demonstrate the regression of Putin’s regime and of Putin personally towards the archaic Soviet model, with the added factor of his own personal greed and that of his ruling circle.’
A very different ‘Hero of Our Time’ is revealed
Even before the Navalny ruling, the Russian Prosecutor’s Office had declared my political movement Open Russia and my philanthropic organisations – the Future of Russia Foundation, the Khodorkovsky Foundation, the Oxford Russia Fund and European Choice – to be ‘undesirable organisations’. The Khodorkovsky Foundation has for over 20 years helped thousands of children from disadvantaged families to get a good education in Russia and in top European universities. The Oxford Russia Fund, which provides scholarships for Russian students to study at Oxford University, has helped hundreds of young Russian men and women by covering their fees, accommodation and travel costs. Closing down these schemes only increased Russia’s isolation, depriving her citizens of engagement and dialogue with Europe. They have forced many hopeful and active young people to leave their own country. Unfortunately, the trend of intimidation and political repression is growing ever greater.
After the initial onslaught on Navalny, myself and my associates, an increasing number of independent media platforms has been targeted. Meduza and the Dossier Center had their websites blocked. The investigative media outlet, Proekt, was banned in retaliation for its embarrassing revelations about Putin and other officials. Proekt had carried exposés of Putin’s brutal placeman in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the interior minister, Vladimir Kolokoltsev; it had reported on the Kremlin’s bungled response to the COVID crisis and had run a carefully sourced story in 2020 revealing that Putin has an unacknowledged daughter by a secret mistress. Eight Proekt journalists, including its editor, Roman Badanin, were added to a register of ‘foreign agents’, along with the staff of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The ruling made it illegal for other news organisations to link to or quote from their reports, on pain of criminal charges.
As long ago as 2001, the threat to free speech in Russia had prompted me to set up a training scheme for young journalists, in which promising reporters from regional newspapers, television and radio could learn from prominent figures in the industry. Guest lecturers from independent journals such as Novaya Gazeta, Kommersant and the online gazeta.ru tried to develop a spirit of questioning curiosity in our young journalists, but found the task harder than they had expected. One lecturer said he struggled to convince the trainees that they should always distrust the official version of stories promulgated by the central or local authorities. He said they had lost the journalist’s natural reflex to question the motives of politicians and PR men, so he had to make them promise always to ask themselves, ‘Who benefits from this story?’