Younger Russians have known no other ruler, and at least some of them are thirsty for change
Tony Barber
In an episode that would be hilarious if one read it in the works of Nikolai Gogol or Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, but is actually a grim illustration of Russia’s environmental sickness, officials in a Siberian town were reprimanded last year for painting snow white. Pollution in the coal-mining region is so horrendous that the snowfall is thick with soot and ash. The officials responded, in the time-honoured manner of provincial Russian bureaucracy, by painting over a problem they felt helpless to solve.
Environmental protection is one of several fronts on which lines of confrontation are emerging between an increasingly restless Russian public and the power apparatus of President Vladimir Putin. Dozens of protests have been held across Russia against plans to build vast landfills in the countryside for rubbish from the Moscow metropolitan area and other cities. Simmering sources of discontent include inflation, stagnant living standards, rising retirement ages, new road fees for long-haul truck drivers and efforts to control social media.
If political change is to come in Russia, it may arise from these strongly felt irritations of daily life rather than from the narrower cause of democratic reform embraced by Mr Putin’s most vocal critics. True, weekly demonstrations in Moscow in support of free local elections have drawn larger numbers than at any time since the winter unrest of 2011-2012. The outcry against the arrest of Ivan Golunov, an investigative journalist, on trumped-up drugs charges underlined public indignation at the high-handedness of the police and intelligence services.
At a time when representative democracy and the rule of law are under strain in western countries, and even derided by politicians who should know better, the Russian protests — like similar events in central and eastern Europe — are a useful reminder that the human desire for justice, dignity and freedom is irrepressible. However, the political demonstrations in Moscow do not have the mass character of this year’s protests in Hong Kong, Algeria or Venezuela, or for that matter 1917 in tsarist Russia or 1989-1991 in the former Soviet Union.
One reason for the limited impact of the Moscow protests is that they have so far failed to integrate the complaints of Russian society about, say, environmental degradation and the cost of living. In their call for genuinely competitive elections, they resemble last year’s protests in Poland against government-imposed changes to the judicial system aimed at tightening political control of the courts. Both are worthy causes, but both lack the broad appeal that comes from articulating the public’s rawest concerns.
Another argument, espoused by Mr Putin’s sympathisers in the west, is that the president still commands support from Russian society, even if his popularity has fallen from the heights attained after the 2014 annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine. However, opinion polls that purport to measure the popularity of a semi-authoritarian ruler, who imprisons opponents and blocks all ways of replacing him in free and fair votes, must be interpreted with caution.
An opinion poll taken in 1980, when Leonid Brezhnev had ruled the Soviet Union for 16 years and Andrei Sakharov, the dissident physicist and giant of the Soviet human rights movement, was arrested and sent into internal exile, might well have shown Brezhnev to be more popular. How else are people supposed to answer, when they see no prospect of changing the system? Yet as soon as there was a chance of change, which arose in the partly free elections of 1989, Sakharov and other reformers won sweeping victories.
In Mr Putin’s case, matters stand somewhat differently. He was indeed a popular leader from 2000 to 2008, partly for having ended the social turmoil of the Boris Yeltsin era, and for presiding over a rise in incomes and wellbeing that was lifted by high energy export prices. Even if the elections of this period had been freer than any in Russian history — which they were not — he would surely have won them.
In recent years, economic grievances, environmental concerns and complaints about abuses of power have eroded Mr Putin’s standing with the Russian public. To be clear, his hold on power is not weak. After all, he has overwhelming force at his disposal to crush dissent, and an entourage that depends on him for its wealth and survival. Nina Khrushcheva, a New York-based professor of international affairs and the granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the late Soviet leader, observes: “Putin has perfected a system of corruption, suspicion, injustice and intimidation.”
Still, the passage of time matters in Russia, as in any society. The generations that recall the economic and social collapse of the early post-communist period are fading out, making way for younger Russians who have known no ruler but Mr Putin. At least some of them are thirsty for change.
There have been phases like this before in Russian history: in the 1850s, towards the end of Nicholas I’s long, autocratic rule; after the dictator Josef Stalin’s death in 1953; and in the 1980s, as the so-called “era of stagnation” under Brezhnev and his gerontocratic successors drew to its close. In some respects, the story of Russia since Peter the Great has been one of alternating cycles of reform and reaction.
Perhaps it is premature to detect in the Moscow demonstrations and the environmental protests the first stirrings of the next cycle of liberalisation. The Putin system is not yet in serious trouble. But nothing is forever, not even in eternal Russia.
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