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Opinion
March 31, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 18
COMMENT: A new crackdown against dissent is coming in Russia – it’s only a matter of time
Natalia Antonova in New York
Last weekend, anti-corruption protests rocked
the country. Instead of being concentrated only in Moscow and St Petersburg, Russia’s traditional “protest hubs”, they took place in nearly 100 cities. The regional protests, organised by anti-corrup- tion campaigner and presidential hopeful Alexei Navalny, did not occur out of the blue either – from farmers in Krasnodar to truckers nationwide, visible dissatisfaction within groups not tradition- ally associated with dissent has been on the rise for some time now.
As many observers have noted, last weekend’s protests also had one distinct characteristic: many of the people who turned up were young. Those protesting teenagers – who didn’t care if the pro- tests were sanctioned or not as they didn’t feel the need to have the government’s permission to go out into the streets – are harder to manipulate as they don’t take everything said on state television as gospel.
They also have no experience of the Soviet Union, having been born too late for that, and are there- fore harder to scare.
Plenty of people both inside and outside Russia have taken all this as a sign that real change is finally coming to Russia – and by “change” I mean greater government transparency and more politi- cal pluralism.
Personally, I am doubtful. One of the greatest les- sons of the Arab Spring, for example, is that youth dissatisfaction can certainly help change the po- litical landscape – but at a cost. Precisely because
Visible dissatisfaction within groups not traditionally associated with dissent has been on the rise for some time now.
young people are harder to “break”, officials often feel they have no choice but to push back violently against them.
And while I don’t think that Vladimir Putin is in- terested in gunning teenagers down in the street or acting out any other apocalyptic scenario, the truth is that the system he presides over is by default rigid, inflexible and aggressive towards the citizens it is meant to serve.
When we think of regime aggression, we think of
it as something abstract and/or ideological. The truth is, Russian regime aggression is most visible on the individual level, and usually manifests itself as a kind of inertia.
I’ll give you a good example of what I mean: a few weeks ago, a friend in Moscow had her phone stolen in a mall. She walked over to the local police precinct to file a complaint, and was immediately subjected to abuse. Note, she wasn’t dragged there for civil disobedience. She just wanted to report a crime – but was treated as a criminal herself.
She was first subjected to a humiliating search. Then one policeman explained that her registra- tion papers weren’t in order – perhaps he ought to investigate that instead of the actual theft, he said. The phone was not turned off and could eas- ily be tracked to a warehouse nearby, as my friend repeatedly explained – at which the officers just laughed.
Why did the police behave this way? First of all, because they knew they could. But, on a deeper