Russian protest crackdown reflects elite concerns
Heavy-handed police action against demonstrators is a break with the recent past
Investigators have spent this week building criminal cases against organisers of the July 27 demonstration in Moscow as well as participants accused of violent behaviour. Peaceful protests against official attempts to disqualify opposition candidates from Moscow council elections were met with a level of force not seen in the capital since 2012, with over 1,300 arrests.
What next
The Moscow mayor's office has authorised a follow-on protest for August 3 in an outlying area, not a central square as requested. If protesters defy this and gather in central Moscow, the authorities will double down on repression. This is a test of the Kremlin's view of how to run September's regional elections: whether to let opposition candidates run in small numbers or to shut down such attempts. The latter would signal a shift to a significantly tougher approach to 'political management'.
Subsidiary Impacts
- Further heavy-handed responses may not galvanise further protests but will undermine government legitimacy.
- While this is not beginning of the end for either regime or opposition, any earlier truce between them looks untenable.
- Tensions between the regular police and the National Guard will likely grow, especially as police are forced into public order roles.
Analysis
Moscow city council is a relatively weak body, especially compared with the mayor's office, and its elections rarely arouse much excitement. In 2014, the pro-government United Russia bloc took 38 of the 45 seats and the rest went to government-friendly candidates. Turnout was just 21%.
Ahead of the September 8 council election -- one of several regional ballots taking place on the same day -- activists close to lynchpin opposition figure Alexey Navalny gathered enough signatures to stand. Several looked likely to win seats.
The election authorities responded by disallowing applications on the grounds that supporting signatures were fake. Candidates came back with evidence that showed up the official reasons for disqualification as unfounded, poorly conceived and clumsy even by the usual standards of electoral manipulation.
Opposition looking for a cause
Opposition forces have of late been seeking ways to connect with the wider mood of protest and dissatisfaction in Russia.
They chose Moscow's electoral disputes as an issue around which to cohere and arranged a series of appeals, individual protests and an officially sanctioned rally on July 20 that gathered some 20,000 participants.
When the authorities refused to back down on the disqualifications, Navalny called on protesters to march to Mayor Sergey Sobyanin's office on July 20. Seen as an escalation, this call led to Navalny being jailed for 30 days.
Rebels, now with a cause
The current opposition (outside the 'systemic opposition' such as the Communists and Liberal democrats) is a diffuse movement.
Navalny is the key figure, and his ally Lyubov Sobol; she is among those prevented from running for office and has gained prominence in the media.
Other actors include liberal politicians such as Ilya Yashin and Dmitry Gudkov who have their own agendas. They too were seeking to stand in the city council elections.
This heterogeneity explains why the opposition is still looking for ways to connect with the wider mood of protest and dissatisfaction in Russia.
Moscow's election mess provided the opposition with a platform
The growing sense of disenchantment across the country stems from a stagnating economy, the sense of political drift and the disconnect between official claims of rising living standards and the lived experience of most Russians (see PROSPECTS H2 2019: Russian economy - June 14, 2019).
Last month the Levada Centre, an independent polling agency seen as Russia's most reputable, reported that 27% of survey respondents said they would be willing to march against falling living standards -- almost double last year's figures -- and 22% would take part in protests that had an explicitly political goal.
Heavy-handed but some restraint
The policing response to the July 27 protests was violent by recent standards (see RUSSIA: Protest response suggests tougher line - July 29, 2019). Yet it was nowhere near as extreme as it could have been, and with some telling nuances.
Both police and the National Guard were deployed. The police, who answer to the mayor's office and the Interior Ministry, appeared less enthusiastic to take the fight to the protesters.
The National Guard, with its own command structure and subordination to the Kremlin, showed no such qualms. This suggests tactical and political divisions among different structures (see RUSSIA: New National Guard reflects stability worries - April 8, 2016).
While baton charges were widely used, a decision was made not to deploy or use tear gas or water cannons, still less units with firearms. The authorities wanted to avoid looking desperate.
Most of those detained were soon freed, fined or given a few days' detention. More severe penalties were imposed on a minority who had come to Moscow from elsewhere in Russia. A developing official narrative holds that this was no peaceful expression of public opinion, but 'mass unrest' manipulated by malcontents, some with connections abroad.
In the days that followed, as prosecutors began shaping criminal cases against alleged ringleaders, media outlets that had reported more neutrally on the 2018 pension reform protests followed the new official line and portrayed riot police as victims forced to defend themselves against rioters stirred up by troublemakers from outside Moscow.
Mayor under pressure
There seems to have been a genuine belief within the opposition that Mayor Sobyanin, who intervened to let Navalny run against him in 2010 to lend greater legitimacy to his election, would opt for compromise. This was a miscalculation.
Sobyanin needed to demonstrate that he was a tough leader because he is under pressure from political rivals. He is a target because he is mooted as a possible successor to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and, some say, President Vladimir Putin.
Nor is Sobyanin in a position to direct the electoral process. The election campaign team in place in Moscow is weaker than during the 2018 mayoral election. Andrey Yarin, head of the presidential administration's internal policy department, is playing a much more active role and is seen as a hardliner with links to the security forces.
A worried elite
Navalny and the opposition do not now pose a direct threat to Putin's rule. Navalny's national network is thinly spread and vulnerable, and he has not yet managed to plug directly into wider resentments.
The security forces still retain ample capacity to disperse any protests and arrest any activists they choose.
The scale and ferocity of the response in Moscow is instead reflective of more general concerns within an elite worried about what will happen in 2024 (when Putin is due to step down) or before that. Discussion of a 'post-Putin' Russia is increasingly commonplace, and there is no clear steer from the Kremlin about future plans.
In this empty space, pre-existing ideological and factional divides are widening and the self-confidence of the elite is dwindling.
The tough new approach sends messages of intent to all sides
The heavy-handed action on July 27 was intended to deliver messages to different audiences:
- to tell the opposition that recent concessions -- compromising on an unpopular cathedral project in Yekaterinburg and releasing journalist Ivan Golunov after acknowledging that he was framed -- must not be construed as weakness (see PROSPECTS H2 2019: Russian politics - June 21, 2019) and (see RUSSIA: Kremlin hopes cathedral dispute fixed - May 24, 2019);
- to warn the wider public that joining explicitly political protests is dangerous; and
- to reassure the elite that the state still has the means and above all the will to protect its political monopoly.
None of these points is definitive and none of the issues can be permanently resolved by a single show of force. It is likely there are more contests to come.
