Page 63 - bne_March 2021_20210303

bne March 2021
Opinion 63
by a general sense of dissatisfaction. Living standards are at their lowest for a decade; issues with acute local impacts, from refuse disposal to municipal services, remain fundamentally unsolved; unemployment is a serious fear.
Corruption – Navalny’s mobilising cause – remains a core national concern (in the most recent Levada tracking survey, 38% identified it as one of their greatest worries). Whether the monument to kitsch on Cape Idokapas is ‘Putin’s Palace’ or, as now implausibly claimed, an apartment hotel being developed by his trusted crony Arkady Rotenberg, is in some ways irrelevant: the story is not about any one individual, but rather an exploitative kleptocracy who have protected their own quality of life at everyone else’s expense.
KoZa in search of a party
KoZa is an inchoate beast. It is contradictory, often able still to respect Putin as the avatar of a nation pulled from the brink
of irrelevance and collapse and back to global status, while despising the system over which he presides. It is fickle, happy
“And all this makes KoZa, possibly an unmobilised, un-led and unrecognised majority, the heart of the new politics”
to embrace anyone who may offer some hope of positive change, relatively unconcerned about their ideology. This is in many ways the strength of Navalny’s ‘smart voting’ scheme that relies on voters being as ready to vote KPRF as LDPR in the name of unseating United Russia (with its uninspiring 29% approval rating).
And all this makes KoZa, possibly an unmobilised, un-led and unrecognised majority, the heart of the new politics. Because the new politics are less about ideology than relevance, in
a system carefully designed precisely to make politics as irrelevant as possible.
The Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov has announced that the KPRF will hold its own nationwide day of protests
of 23 February – Defender of the Fatherland Day – which they promise to be ‘conscious and constructive’. (Presumably the Navalny events were unconscious and unconstructive?) He is right to worry about being outflanked, as while the Communists have benefited from KoZa’s half-hearted support in the past, that need not remain the case in the future.
In an interesting reminder of this, consider the findings of
a survey of supporters of the New People Party. This recent addition to the lists, part of the latest efforts of the Presidential Administration’s political technologists’ efforts to keep the
opposition fragmented, has a broadly centre-right platform especially espousing the interests of entrepreneurs and small business. According to its founder, Aleksei Nechaev, those who voted New People in the September 2020 polls could
be divided into three broad categories.
There were those who definitely supported its platform,
and who otherwise would not have voted. There were those who had voted for other parties in the past and who chose to support New People this time – classic KoZa. And then, most striking, there were those who had previously voted KPRF. But they had done so not because of any passionate commitment to Marxism-Leninism, but simply as a way of opposing United Russia. In other words, they were willing
to vote pro-Communist yesterday and pro-business tomorrow, all in the name of being fed up. KoZa again.
The key challenge will thus be: who will finally manage to cohere it, and how?
Apathy and fear
The state’s strategy is becoming clear. A slow ratcheting up of the old ultra-violence in the hope of deterring street activism and depriving Team Navalny of the kind of momentum that built up in Belarus, calculating that the minatory effect of – quite literally – blood on the streets is more valuable than any outrage it may spark.
Meanwhile, though, it is doubling down on its usual messaging to KoZa. It has long since given up trying to win the beast’s affection, really since the dissipation of the ‘Crimea
effect’. Instead, it speaks to a very powerful and up to now effective concern: that things could be worse.
After all, they could. Standards of living may have slipped but they have done so from an unprecedented high point. This is not the anarchy of the 1990s. It is not the agonised collapse of the 1980s. Putin is not even imposing the grey authoritarianism of the 1970s. The message that change – and especially change driven by street protest – is likely to be for the worse is a negative and depressing one, but it retains power.
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