Page 62 - bneMag February 2021_20210202

62 I Eastern Europe bne February 2021
announcing one location, but secretly organising the rally in another that was shared by SMS amongst participants. The gay pride activists marched as the police raced across the city to the real location to break up the “meeting,” as rallies are called in Russian. Alekseev was arrested and the fine he paid was the result.
“Lots of people support us, but the problem is the general public have been intimidated by the state. Putin was on TV last month and said anyone that goes to unauthorised rallies faces a “beating by police truncheons.” That is totally illegal. He can’t threaten the people with violence under the constitution,” Alekseev explained. “But until the people are willing to take a beating
for their beliefs they won’t participate
in mass rallies.”
Violence
Have Russians reached the point where they will bleed for their beliefs? That is the big question.
The videos shared on social media from the weekend show a new level
of violence. Ordinary Russians have engaged in punch-ups with the OMON clad in full body armour. That is new.
However, while these videos have shocked the rest of the world and are seen by many commentators as likely
to outrage the Russians to the point they will rise up against the authorities, the Kremlin is not unhappy about them, as they also act as a deterrent that will prevent more Russians joining the protests next week. The trick is to get the level of violence right: some, but not too much.
“For the Kremlin, it depends how it
has decided to play the day, which in turn will tell us much about how far we are witnessing an ‘authoritarian turn’ overall following the poisoning, which def went beyond past practice,” bne IntelliNews contributor Mark Galeotti said in a long thread on the Navalny protests. “[The Kremlin] can focus
on managing the day: still enough arrests to signal the risks in participation, but essentially hope[s] to ride out the protest moment. This
www.bne.eu
is what they have largely done in the past.... I am not convinced Kremlin has deftness of touch and control
to calibrate that kind of violence accurately without risking a kind of Bloody Sunday, + I suspect PrezAdmin feels the same.”
This is a delicate moment in Russia’s modern history. There is a very strong argument that the Kremlin should have done nothing and let the protests go ahead unchallenged in the hope that they quickly burn out.
In the last few years Russian civil society has become more active and the number of protests have grown, although they usually focus on local issues like the demolition of a park or the mismanagement of a smelly
deftly taken the initiative and the Kremlin has been forced into a series of heavy-handed errors. It has lost control of the narrative.
Many commentators believe the threat of jail – Navalny is facing 3.5 years from a previous conviction on fraud charges that was suspended and another 10 years from new charges – was designed to keep Navalny in Germany. But he
as called the Kremlin’s bluff, and having threatened to arrest Navalny the Kremlin had to follow through on his return.
Then Navalny provoked the Kremlin again on the day after his arrest with his latest investigation into Putin’s alleged wealth: a two-hour documentary that has already garnered 50mn views.
“Have Russians reached the point where they will bleed for their beliefs? That is the big question”
landfill. The propensity to protests with political demands is not particularly high at the moment and has fallen
this year, while Putin has regained his popularity approval of 65% from
before the 2020 crises.
Navalny’s previous political protests have attracted a few thousand people and are far less popular. However,
after the arrest of the popular governor of Khabarovsk in the far east, Sergei Furgal, the political protests that followed went on for months, suggesting Russians are becoming more interested in politics, although that too was essentially a local issue.
So if the Kremlin is going to react it has to get the level of violence right: too brutal and the Kremlin will put
a match to the touchpaper and could set off a social explosion; too soft
and the protests will not stop. Team Navalny must have been hoping for
a brutal response, as these were by far the largest protests his group has ever managed to organise. Navalny has
And in the same week Navalny called for mass unauthorised demonstrations on January 23, which the Kremlin condemned as illegal and was then forced to send in the police to “uphold the law,” which was guaranteed to end in the scenes we have witnessed.
Numbers
The key part in this plan was the number of people that answered Navalny’s call. If his plan to hold weekly protests in
the style of Belarus is to work, then
a significant number of people needed to come out.
“For Team Navalny, it is about the numbers coming out, the spread of places they come out, and at least as important, what kind of people come out. Can they use it to demonstrate a broadening of their support base?” Galeotti tweeted. “They don’t need to reach Bolotnaya numbers to claim success, certainly
not for a 1st day of protests: tens of thousands in Moscow is enough, esp if – as seems the case – they can also point to protests all across the country.”