Vladimir Kara-Murza: Spotlight on Russia

Many of Vladimir Putin’s public pronouncements, from his promise to “whack terrorists in the shithouse” to his advice to a French reporter to get circumcised so that he will have “nothing growing back,” appear more in need of a psychoanalysis than a political one. The Russian premier’s latest interview with Kommersant newspaper is no exception. In the space of a few sentences, Mr. Putin threatened the opposition with physical violence, asserted that Western countries follow the same model of managed succession as today’s Russia, and pretended to be ignorant of major developments in his own country — all of it in a vulgar street language more suited for a gang leader than a head of government.

Countering criticism for violating the freedom of assembly, Mr. Putin promised that opposition activists who continue to stage protests against his government will be “beaten on their skulls with a truncheon.” “What does the current law say about marches?” the premier continued. “You must receive permission from local authorities. If you received it, go and demonstrate. If not, you don’t have the right. If you come out without the right, you will be beaten on your skull with a truncheon. And that’s that.” The “skull” and “truncheon” expression was used by Mr. Putin three times during the interview.

In reality, no law requires Russian citizens to get “permission” to exercise their freedom of assembly. The constitution’s Article 31 guarantees “the right to gather peacefully, without weapons, and to hold meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets,” and the law on public demonstrations, signed by Mr. Putin himself, only requires rally organizers to notify local authorities ahead of time. But what does it all matter if, according to Vladimir Putin, protesters who stage rallies in London are also (you guessed it) “beaten on their skulls with a truncheon”? Unable to resist a return to his “shithouse” metaphor, the prime minister enquired why opposition leaders insist on holding rallies on Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square when they can say all they want “behind a public toilet.”

During the interview Mr. Putin showed that he holds Russian voters for idiots. When asked about the second trial of former oil magnate and opposition sponsor Mikhail Khodorkovsky currently underway in Moscow, the premier said that he was “very surprised” when he “learned about a second trial.” Mr. Putin also persisted in his claim not to know the legendary Russian rock musician Yuri Shevchuk, who recently confronted him during a televised meeting — a claim as believable as if Barack Obama had pretended not to know Bob Dylan. Responding to criticism for substituting presidential elections with pre-arranged successions, Mr. Putin retorted that it is “international practice” and that “American presidents … always put forward a successor.”

For all his bravado, Mr. Putin knows his regime is on its way out. In two recent Levada Center polls, 37 percent of Russians sympathized with opposition protesters — the very activists being “beaten on their skulls” — while only 27 percent intended to vote for Mr. Putin in a presidential election.

“We … do not have opposition. We have a group of bribed weaklings and blackmailed profiteers and thieves, who take advantage of the times when a lot of people experience hardships, and use substantial financial resources funneled from abroad.” This could well have been said by Vladimir Putin. In fact, it comes from a speech by Slobodan Milošević, then president of Yugoslavia, on February 17, 2000. On September 24, a rigged presidential election provoked protests across the country, culminating in the October 5 mass demonstration in Belgrade that ended with the storming of parliament. On October 7, Mr. Milošević resigned. On April 1, 2001, he was arrested by Serbian police, and on June 28 transferred to a three-by-five-meter prison cell at the Scheveningen detention unit near The Hague. No truncheons could save his regime. No truncheons will save Mr. Putin’s.

In the Russian judicial system, an indictment almost automatically means a conviction. The average rate of acquittals in Russian courts currently stands at 2.4 percent — astonishingly, four times lower than under Stalin. When it comes to opposition leaders tried on political charges, the rate of acquittals drops to zero. Or at least it did until this week. On Tuesday, the leader of the Solidarity movement and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov walked free from Presnensky magistrate court in Moscow after it ruled that there was “not enough evidence” to send him to prison. Officially the case was returned to the police. De facto, according to Mr. Nemtsov’s legal team, this amounts to an acquittal.

Mr. Nemtsov’s “crime” consisted of carrying the Russian flag in downtown Moscow on Aug. 22, which marks the National Flag Day. The holiday originated in 1991, when, following the defeat of the hard-line communist coup, President Boris Yeltsin abolished the Soviet-era red flag, replacing it with the white-blue-red tricolor, symbol of the democratic resistance to coup-plotters. Every year during the 1990s, a giant tricolor was carried through the streets of Moscow to commemorate the birth of Russian democracy. In the Putin era this holiday was all but forgotten: the new regime was ideologically closer to the coup leaders than to the pro-democracy demonstrators of 1991. Indeed, the coup mastermind, former KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, was an honored guest at Vladimir Putin’s inauguration in 2000 and later openly praised the Kremlin leader.

Boris Nemtsov and his supporters attempted to revive the democratic tradition. A few minutes into the march, the former deputy prime minister was arrested, taken to the local precinct, and charged with “disobeying” the authorities. This indictment and an identical one stemming from the opposition rally on July 31 together carried a one-month prison sentence. One of the police officers who conducted the arrest wore a lapel pin of Mr. Putin’s United Russia party — a scene reminiscent not even of the Soviet Union, but of Nazi Germany.

Russian bureaucracy has a reputation for inefficiency, but perhaps this is unfair. As soon as Mr. Nemtsov was locked up, officials located Judge Mikhail Pronyakin at his country dacha and drove him back to Moscow to start the trial. The court session opened at the somewhat unconventional time of 9 p.m. on Sunday and lasted for six hours; it took the judge a further three hours when he resumed the session on Tuesday to decide that it was, after all, legal for Russian citizens to carry the Russian flag on the streets of the Russian capital. The verdict was greeted by the opposition as a victory.

Setting aside the fantastic suggestion that the judge acted independently of the Kremlin, there are two explanations for what happened. Explanation One: the regime has become more sensitive to international opinion and decided to avoid a major scandal. Explanation Two: the regime has become shrewder and decided to avoid increasing public sympathies for the opposition leader ahead of the 2012 presidential election. Perhaps we will know more on Sept. 2, when another Moscow court tries Mr. Nemtsov on the “disobedience” charge from July 31. The bag with books and clothes he had packed for Tuesday’s trial may yet come in handy.

The last decade has brought endless setbacks for Russia’s pro-democracy forces. One after another, the regime claimed new targets in its drive to solidify power: media freedom, electoral competition, judicial independence, regional self-government. It is difficult to name what, if any, victories the opposition has scored against the rising authoritarian tide. Indeed, it seems there have been none – until this week.

On Monday Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party announced its shortlist of candidates for governor of Russia’s western-most region of Kaliningrad (one of the names on this list will be chosen by President Dmitri Medvedev). The list itself does not arouse much interest, except for one thing: it does not include Georgy Boos, the region’s current Putin-appointed United Russia governor.

Just a few months ago Mr. Boos seemed confident of his career prospects. “I plan and want to seek a second term,” he declared publicly during a television broadcast. “Of course we will propose Boos’s candidacy,” promised United Russia chairman and Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov. There didn’t appear to be any obstacles to Mr. Boos’s reappointment: Kaliningrad’s principal media outlets, like elsewhere in Russia, are controlled by the government; the local legislature, which must ratify the president’s choice, is packed with United Russia yes-men. There was just one problem, which until recently would hardly have surfaced on the Kremlin’s radar: public opposition.

“The figures of support for the current governor are not such that we can propose his candidacy,” mumbled the tongue-tied Mr. Gryzlov during his meeting with the president. “Unfortunately, the level of support for our friend and colleague Boos … is insufficient for him to continue his work,” echoed United Russia’s general secretary, Vyacheslav Volodin. Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was more forthright, calling the Kremlin’s retreat over Kaliningrad “the first serious victory for the opposition.”

It is somewhat ironic that a regime so paranoid of “color revolutions” would leave its people no other avenues for expressing discontent than to go out to the streets. This is precisely what the citizens of Kaliningrad did earlier this year on January 30 – more than 12,000 people, a number unseen at pro-democracy demonstrations since the 1990s, rallied in the city’s downtown to demand the resignation of Governor Boos and Prime Minister Putin and the return of gubernatorial elections abolished by the Kremlin in 2004. Having raised transport taxes for the general population while registering his own private jet on the Cayman Islands, Governor Boos may have been a particular irritant to the residents of the region he was appointed to rule. But the demand for a return of gubernatorial elections is a common theme at opposition rallies across the country, from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok: polls consistently show a clear majority of Russians resenting Mr. Putin’s decision to take away their right to elect governors in favor of appointments from Moscow. According to the latest poll by the Levada Center, Russians favor gubernatorial elections by 59-20 percent. President Medvedev’s recent declaration that direct elections will not return for “a hundred years” did little to increase support for the regime. And the problem of government abuse and corruption is by no means restricted to Kaliningrad.

Mr. Boos’s term does not expire until the end of September, so his party colleagues had plenty of time to announce their decision. The timing seemed to have been determined by another planned opposition rally in Kaliningrad on August 21, expected once again to draw thousands. If the Kremlin’s plan was to forestall this mobilization, it backfired: far from being appeased by the removal of Mr. Boos, democratic activists were heartened by the regime’s retreat. The Kaliningrad branch of Solidarity, the pro-democracy movement led by Mr. Nemtsov, has confirmed that the August 21 rally will go ahead as planned, stressing that the opposition’s demand is for the return of elections, not a reshuffling of Kremlin appointees.

History shows that when autocratic regimes begin to openly succumb to public pressure, their days in power are numbered. Kaliningrad is only the beginning.

Russia is famously a country with an unpredictable past. With a brief exception of the 1990s, regimes of the day freely rewrote the historical narrative for their own expediency. A famous Soviet-era joke advised that the latest edition of the encyclopedia had a regrettable misprint: instead of “distinguished statesman, hero of socialist labor” the paragraph should read “enemy of the people, convicted foreign spy.”

Under ex-KGB apparatchiks who seized control of the Russian government a decade ago, the discussion of Soviet crimes became unfashionable. The new leaders declared the USSR’s dissolution “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” reinstated the Stalinist national anthem, approved a school textbook referring to Stalin’s mass purges as “adequate to the task of modernization” and suggested decorating Moscow with posters of Stalin for the 65th anniversary of victory in World War II.

The latest attempt at rewriting history came with a new textbook, History of Russia 1917–2009, coauthored by Moscow University professors Alexander Barsenkov and Alexander Vdovin. The Educational Methodical Association, which is comprised of faculty deans from across the country, has officially recommended the book for use in universities. Intended to rear a new generation of Russian history teachers, the book refers to the 1917 Bolshevik coup as “the great revolution” (p. 11) and calls Stalin a “great hero” in terms of nation-building (13). His policy of forced collectivization that condemned millions of peasants and their families to the Gulag is justified as necessary for the future victory over Nazism (283). So, indeed, is the Great Terror: the textbook quotes (without challenging) Molotov’s assertion that “we owe it to 1937 that we had no fifth column during the [second world] war” (253). According to Professors Barsenkov and Vdovin, “the gigantic diversity of opinions” about Stalin prevents a definitive conclusion about his role in history, although “attempts to judge his role merely negatively,” according to them, “are not succeeding” (391).

The authors appear to be preoccupied with the “Jewish question.” Several passages in the textbook, according to Russian historian and sociologist Anatoly Golubovsky, merit investigation under the racial incitement provisions of the Russian criminal code. The authors lament the “evident disproportion” of Jews in cultural and scientific professions (299) and meticulously count percentages of Jewish members of the Academy of Sciences, the Writers’ Union, and the universities (424). The deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 is explained by a secret plan to establish a Jewish republic on the peninsula (349), while NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria is said to have “allegedly” had “Jewish origins” (388).

Turning to more recent events, the authors assert that Soviet tanks sent to disperse pro-independence demonstrators in Tbilisi, Baku, and Vilnius in 1989–91 were fighting “extremists” (649); the three young Muscovites crushed to death by armored vehicles during the KGB-led coup attempt in August 1991 are referred to as “peaceful” citizens and “defenders” of the Moscow White House (seat of the pro-democracy forces). Both “peaceful” and “defenders” are placed in quotation marks (649), and while it is not immediately obvious what the quotation marks are supposed to mean (the young men were not armed, and they did defend the White House), they are clearly intended as an insult.

In the best-case scenario, university officials who approved this book have simply not read it, relying on the authors’ academic credentials. In the worst case, this is a deliberate attempt to poison the minds of yet another generation of Russian students with a neo-Soviet interpretation of history.

Moscow had to abandon its plan to decorate the city with Stalin posters after it hit a wall of determined public opposition. The Russian academic community has already begun organizing against the offensive textbook. The latest attempt at rewriting history may yet be defeated.

Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow has been a symbol of protest for half a century. In 1960 a group of young activists inaugurated a tradition that led to the emergence of the dissident movement: every weekend they gathered here to read out poetry forbidden by Soviet authorities. These literary meetings, which attracted thousands of Muscovites, soon evolved into political discussions. “This was a very good idea,” recalls Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the original organizers, “We were not committing any crime, just reading poems. But of course only those who are against the Soviet system would come to listen to forbidden poetry.” The authorities did not tolerate this island of freedom for long: snowplows were sent to disperse the gatherings, Komsomol units beat up and detained participants, organizers received harsh prison sentences. The readings were stopped, but the tradition of political dissent born on Triumfalnaya in 1960 was to continue until the red flag was forever lowered over the Kremlin in 1991.

In Putin’s Russia, as the regime once again turned to repression, Triumfalnaya regained its status as a symbol of resistance. On the last day of each month that has 31 days, opposition activists gather on the square in support of the constitution’s Article 31, which guarantees “the right to gather peacefully, without weapons, and to hold meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets.” Just as the Triumfalnaya readings fifty years ago had no explicit political content, no partisan flags, posters or slogans, the “31” movement encompasses people from left and right, nationalists and liberals, socialists and conservatives — all who believe that civic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution should be upheld. And every time, evidently missing the irony, the authorities proceed to disperse these peaceful rallies by force.

Last Saturday, July 31, marked the tenth time that demonstrators on Triumfalnaya Square were met with police batons. The 82 activists detained and taken away in paddy wagons included opposition leader and a former deputy prime minister, Boris Nemtsov. While held in Tverskoy precinct, adorned by portraits of Stalin’s secret police chiefs Lavrentiy Beria and Nikolai Yezhov, Mr. Nemtsov was charged with violating Article 19.3 of the Administrative Offences Code (“impeding the discharge” of police duties), which carries a 15-day prison sentence. As the video from July 31 shows, Mr. Nemtsov could not “impede” anything even if he wanted to: he was attacked by police seconds after arriving on the square. Not that such evidence counts for anything in a Moscow court.

All of this has happened before. Streams of protest, from the 1960 poetry readings and the 1965 Pushkinskaya Square demonstration to the 1980s rallies by the anti-Communist Democratic Union, were similarly crushed by the KGB and police — only to turn into a mighty river that finally swept away the pillars of Soviet control. When on February 4, 1990, more than 500,000 people gathered in downtown Moscow to demand democratic reforms, police batons remained in their holsters.