Putin is the latest in the line of Russian autocrats and there are indications that he will be the last. The world is changing; no country – not even North Korea – can hide its archaic practices from the eyes of the world. Where Soviet leaders once retreated behind a wall of secrecy, keeping their abuses hidden and their people in ignorance, Russia today has been swept by the winds of transparency. The outside world can see in, and the Russian people have more chance to see out. Putin’s response has been to increase internal repression, crack down on opposition, and crush individuals and businesses that don’t toe the line. It is the behaviour of a leader who knows he is surrounded by inimical forces, retreating deeper into his bunker, ordering his timorous generals to go out and beat back the unstoppable enemy advance.
Putin uses the myth that the Yeltsin years are proof that a liberal economic order and democracy are not feasible for Russia and that only he and his hardline model of centralised autocracy can keep Russia safe. But justice is the basic moral imperative for successful government and independent polls have shown that most Russians believe the Kremlin leadership is corrupt, motivated not by love for Russia but by self-enrichment. On a moral level, the regime is disowned even by its usual supporters, a significant indicator that real political change is imminent. It is no longer ‘stability and continuity at all costs’ that the Russian people crave; our country yearns for reform.
According to human rights experts, as many as one in six of Russia’s entrepreneurs have been put on trial; prisons hold thousands of them, many of them victims of fabricated legal suits, facilitated by a corrupt criminal justice system. The Levada Center think tank calculates that, in any given year, more than 15 per cent of Russians are forced to bribe bureaucrats and other agents of the state. The country is ruled by Putin’s personal clique, elected by no one and devoid of any legal authority; parliament is run by one party, the United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin, which anyone who wants to be properly assured of their business’s future has to support in some way or other. Such constraints have discouraged the most enterprising members of society, depressed economic activity and filled a vital cohort of the population with resentment for the regime.
The Russian Federation needs new areas of development; it needs modern infrastructure, cheap and fast transport links, and modern industry. None of this is possible unless Russia emerges from the isolation it has been pushed into by the current regime. The resources to achieve all this exist; they simply need to be utilised in a rational manner, rather than bartered for the loyalty of the crooks and cronies of the Kremlin.
In March 2021, I was in London, exiled from my country and waiting by the telephone. It had been a couple of hours since I had last heard from Moscow and I was getting anxious. When the fate of your homeland is at stake, living in exile is an ordeal.
The news I was hoping to hear was from the Open Russia movement, which was taking part in a conference of municipal representatives called to discuss the activities of independent council deputies and their plans for the next round of elections. It was a run-of-the-mill event that in normal countries would attract little attention, a fleeting mention in the media – think, a Lib Dem discussion forum in the UK, or a Democratic strategy group in the US. But Russia in 2021 was not a normal country; things are different there. At 10am Moscow time, the conference began its proceedings and a few minutes later, armed police burst in, yelling, ‘Don’t move! You are all detained!’
Two hundred men and women, young and old, delegates and journalists, were dragged away and bundled into police buses. They were respectable folk – people like Ilya Yashin, Council Leader of Moscow’s Krasnoselsky District; the ex-mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Roizman; the executive director of Open Russia, Andrei Pivovarov; the publicist, Vladimir Kara-Murza; and municipal deputy, Yulia Galyamina – but that didn’t save them. No one was given the chance to object. Yulia tried to ask the police what she had done wrong – ‘I didn’t break any law; I’m a municipal deputy, an elected representative’ – but she got no answer. Only after they had been booked and cautioned in a Moscow police station were the arrestees told that their crime was ‘associating with an undesirable organisation’.
Russian police arrested 200 opposition politicians and municipal deputies for taking part in a forum with an ‘undesirable’ organisation, Open Russia
The concept of ‘undesirable’ is a complicated issue that Vladimir Putin has made simple: in Putin’s Russia, the Kremlin decides who is desirable and who is not. Independent political parties, institutes and think tanks fall unsurprisingly into the latter category. My own affiliated organisations, the Open Russia Civic Movement and the Institute of Modern Russia, are allowed to work freely abroad, but in Russia they are proscribed. Cooperating with either of them makes you liable to detention under Article 20.33 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation; you get a 15,000-rouble fine for your first ‘offence’ followed by escalating penalties if you don’t learn the error of your ways.
In the days that followed the attack on the municipal forum, the police forcibly entered the apartment of Open Russia’s Moscow coordinator, Maria Kuznetsova. On the pretext of looking for ‘materials relating to undesirable organisations’, they took away her laptop and memory sticks. They raided the offices of my news organisation, MBK Media, seizing documents and computers. On 17 March, the Kremlin wrote to Twitter, demanding they ban MBK Media from using their services. When Twitter declined to comply with this and other similar demands, the communications censor, Roskomnadzor, used jamming technology to ‘throttle’ the speed of its tweets in the territory of the Russian Federation.
Vladimir Putin has come to believe he can tell the Russian people whatever he wants. He can tell us that black is white and he expects us to believe it – or, at least, to pretend that we believe it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Kremlin did what all other European countries were doing – it released regular updates on the number of deaths caused by the virus. But even the most cursory analysis revealed that deaths in Russia were being grossly underreported. On 13 March 2021, for example – the day of the police raid on Open Russia – Putin’s state media told the Russian people that a total of 91,695 of their fellow citizens had perished so far. But at the same time, a simple glance at the record of excess deaths – that is, the number by which the current year’s deaths exceed those of previous years – showed that the real figure was more than 400,000. When Alexei Raksha, the (now former) senior statistician at the state statistics agency, Rosstat, pointed out the discrepancy, he was removed from his job.
What’s most worrying is that the vast majority of people thought that this was normal – that this was just how governments behave. Russians are not stupid; people knew Putin was lying, but there was no protest, no outrage. People in Russia have been conditioned to believe there is nothing we can do about it. Years of oppression by an uncaring, authoritarian state have instilled the belief that the individual is impotent in the face of the machine. Two centuries ago, Alexander Pushkin created an enduring image of the little man – the malenky chelovek – who is nightmarishly pursued by a bronze statue of the tsar on horseback and pounded into exhaustion, submission and, eventually, death. Russian society has come to accept that the authorities will abuse and bully and deceive us, and that nothing can be done to change it. The reaction to the lies about COVID deaths, to the collapse of efforts to build a modern economy, to the crushing of civil liberties, the persecution of journalists and opposition politicians, the ingrained corruption and the trampling of free speech, is the same as it always has been – a shrug, a sigh and maybe a few jaundiced jokes about the system we live under.