Page 60 - bne_Magazine_May_2017_print

60 Opinion
bne May 2017
A new crackdown against dissent is coming in Russia – it’s only a matter of time
Natalia Antonova in New York
At the end of March, 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-corruption 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 traditionally associated with dissent has been on the rise for some time now.
As many observers have noted, the protests also had one distinct characteristic: many of the people who turned up were young. Those protesting teenagers – who didn’t care if the protests 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 therefore 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 political pluralism.
Personally, I am doubtful. One of the greatest lessons of the Arab Spring, for example, is that youth dissatisfaction
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People are walking on Tverskaya street during unauthorized demonstration against corruption of Russian government
can certainly help change the political landscape – but at a cost. Precisely because 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 interested 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 registration 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 easily be tracked to a warehouse nearby, as my friend repeat- edly explained – at which the officers just laughed.