Down with the Tsar: For a New 1917

Thousands of protesters gather in St. Petersburgh on January 23

Rob Jones, Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (ISA in Russia)

2021 started with spectacular scenes as tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets, sometimes braving temperatures lower than -30 degrees Celsius in over a hundred cities across Russia. Beginning over seven time zones away in Vladivostok and other towns on Russia’s Pacific coast, they spread across Siberia and European Russia before ending up in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. After big turnouts on January 23 and 31, the latest phase culminated on the evening of February 2, the day a Moscow court sent Alexey Navalny to prison for nearly three years.

The authorities acted with brutality and ruthless repression. Ten thousand demonstrators were detained, often violently, over the three protests. The vast majority were taken to emergency courts and given hefty fines; one member of Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (Socialist Alternative - ISA in Russia) was fined 200,000 rubles (around $2,700) – about ten times his monthly wage. Dozens were imprisoned on criminal charges while many known activists were forced into exile.

Even participants who were not arrested are now facing repression at work or college. Students identified to have participated have been kicked out of universities, school students have been harassed for Tik-Tok posts, and even front-line COVID workers from Moscow’s emergency virus hospitals have been fired. In the far-northern city of Archangelsk, a young school student was arrested for “organising a mass picket.” She had built four snowmen with anti-Putin placards! Why So Much Anger?

The spark for these protests was the return of Alexey Navalny to Russia. He had been in Germany recovering from an attempt by the Russian secret police to assassinate him using a nerve agent spread into his underpants. Hundreds of supporters went to the airport to meet him, only to find that his flight was diverted to another airfield at the last minute. There he was immediately arrested for breaking his bail conditions from a previous trumped-up charge and sent to jail. This is despite the fact he had been sent to Germany with Kremlin agreement while still in a coma.

The following day, Navalny released a video exposing a palace built on Russia’s Black Sea coast and apparently owned by Putin, or at least someone very close to him. This

showed incredible extravagance, including toilet brushes that cost $800, more than twice what an ordinary Russian can earn in a month. The video was viewed over 100 million times!

Who is Alexey Navalny?

quickly arrested anyone seen to be taking initiatives. Understandably, consciousness focused on anti-corruption, in favor of democratic freedoms and was generally progressive, but the ideas were not fully formulated nor given organizational expression. Practically the only political organization to in-

Navalny has built a reputation as a fighter against corrup- tervene was SA, which smuggled in leaflets in rucksacks and tion. There is, of course, more to him than that. He is really the up jacket sleeves, and distributed them whenever there were only leader still active from the last wave of protests in Russia no police around. in 2012 against election rigging. Others, mainly pro-western Of course, we are now four years on from this. COVID has liberals, are either in exile, too old, or have been assassinated. ravaged Russia – it still holds fourth place in the world league At the time, the “left,” personified by Sergey Udaltsov, who of infections and deaths. As elsewhere, the economic situacame from a Stalinist tradition, worked in a block with the tion has considerably worsened – the latest statistics show a liberals and the far right. After a period in prison, Udaltsov fall in GDP of over 3% in 2020. Family incomes have fallen has now joined the Communist Party – loyal to the Kremlin. back to the level of ten years ago. This period has also seen a

But Navalny, who was then a liberal with far-right leanings stepping up of authoritarian methods. Just one example: the has moved in a populist way towards a more “left” position. first COVID lockdown was monitored in Moscow using faHe talks of the need for a minimum wage, for nationaliza- cial recognition technology to ensure people were observing tion of resources stolen by government bureaucrats (implying quarantine. Now the same system is being used to identify this also means the country’s oil and gas companies), and he and arrest participants in the protests. For these reasons, Naeven said recently he was disappointed that Bernie Sanders valny’s new calls for protests fell on fertile ground. The three had given up his campaign – he would have supported him. months of protests in neighboring Belarus also played a role After this comment the other liberal leaders and organizations in raising confidence. – which are already seen as a hangover from the horrific days of the 1990s, when neoliberal shock therapy combined with New Mood capitalist restoration led to a massive collapse in the economy No longer do the protests move along in silence. Now the – have distanced themselves from Navalny, accusing him of chants “Free Navalny,” “Free all political prisoners,” “Putin is making concessions to “socialism.” a thief,” and “Down with the Tsar” are widely heard. Though

Navalny’s rebranding (though he is still in essence a liberal there are still few handmade placards, and again practically no pro-capitalist) is not so much to do with him rethinking his political banners – this means that Sotsialisticheskaya Alterideas, but because there has been a signif- nativa becomes very noticeable. But there icant shift leftwards particularly of Russia’s youth. Anyone under thirty has lived their whole life under capitalism, anyone there has been a significant shift leftwards are other important differences to 2012. Then, the protests were mostly restricted to Moscow and St Petersburg, and although younger than 20 under Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime. They are fed up with high education costs, precarious particularly of Russia’s youth. Anyone under thirty a large part of those demonstrations was made up of young workers, there was the active participation of liberal pro-capitalist wages, the reactionary political position of the ruling elite, and the so-called “systematic parties” including the Commuhas lived their whole life under capitalism, anyone and Stalinist parties, with a fair smattering of the far right and speakers’ platforms full of “status politicians.” nist Party that maintain Putin in power. The discontent has been compounded, because in the period following the 2008 younger than 20 under Putin’s increasingly This year’s protests have been without the participation of such political organizations. Significantly, they spread across RusGreat Recession, Russia had another recession in 2014. Already low living stanauthoritarian regime. sia. The median age of protestors was in the mid-twenties, with a significant number of dards have been stagnating. school students. Half of the participants are female. It is clear from discussions and the people who have Socialists Intervene now come into contact with SA that there is the involvement

Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa understood the changes in of a large layer of young workers and working-class youth. mood taking place particularly amongst the youth, so when In such a situation, socialists clearly need to not just parNavalny first made his call to come out onto the streets in ticipate, but play an active role in agitating for socialist ideas 2017, we were prepared. Tens of thousands of youth came and organization. In an authoritarian regime like Russia’s, of out onto illegal demonstrations to walk around the main city course, this is not easy. There is always the risk of arrest. Last center streets – without placards, banners, chants or speech- week, women activists established a “peace chain” in one of es. The robocop like riot police, popularly called cosmonauts, Moscow’s pedestrian areas only to be met with online and

physical threats, including against activists of Sotsialisticheskaya Feministicheskaya Alternativa, our Feminist platform, from the Kremlin-backed far right.

Social networks also play a big role – well-designed Instagram posts are a good way to contact youth. Although we cannot claim to have reached the fifty million viewers that have seen Navalny’s film this week, our publications have been viewed by thousands, and in one case by 17,000 people.

But there are plenty of online “revolutionaries” in Russia who sit at home when people are out on the streets. Some say we shouldn’t participate, because Navalny is a liberal. But in those former Stalinist states where “colored revolutions” have occurred, it is critically important that the left intervene precisely so that the liberals cannot seize the leadership by default. The key is to be at the center of events with well-designed placards and banners, leaflets for distribution, and most important of all, with a clear program and strategy. Particularly effective has been our banner “A New Tsar needs a New 1917.” Not only were participants applauding as we marched, it was widely covered in the national and even international press.

Need for Organization

Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa argues that a firm base for this movement needs to be established by setting up democratically elected action committees that can decide strategy and demands. Although the main support for this movement currently comes from school students and youth in the universities and in precarious jobs, it is necessary to establish a firm link with the wider working class. Our demand for a 300 rubles an hour ($4) minimum wage, and for free health care and education will be of critical importance here. We also argue for a constituent assembly in which all layers of the working class are represented, so that we can ensure the complete dismantling of the Putin regime and its replacement by a genuinely free and democratic socialist society.

Our call for establishing a democratic structure for the movement is in direct contrast to the top-down methods of Navalny’s team. Many of those who had participated in this year’s protests at considerable risk were shocked when his office declared that the protests were being wound down to prepare for September’s elections. Clearly under pressure, a bit later Navalny’s office called a protest for a Sunday evening, asking supporters to gather in their courtyards to shine lights from their telephones. SA used this call to meet up with activists in our own courtyards. As if to underline that these protests were more working class, the more active regions were on the poorer outskirts of Moscow.

Of course, our intervention was not without difficulties. In Kazan – a city with a population of over a million, capital of the Tatarstan, one of the Russian Federation’s internal republics – the authorities allowed a small protest against political repression. We used the chance of a legal protest to send a delegation to the city, where we organized a meeting with lo-

Members of ISA in Russia participate in protests, with banners calling for a new 1917.

cal activists, took part with our banners in the protest, and were allowed to speak. The local police, however, were not friendly. Nine were arrested, with two fined and one comrade sent to prison for seven days. Nevertheless, our visit was a success. We were covered widely in the local press, a YouTube video of our intervention was viewed by 49,000 people, and in the following week we recruited our first member in Kazan.

For a Successful International Womens’ Day

Navalny’s team believes that it should spend the next six months training observers for this fall’s parliamentary election, in which the tactic of “smart voting” will be used. This means that all the opposition parties unite behind the candidate with the best chance in each constituency of defeating Putin’s “United Russia” candidate. This has already been tried, and more often than not, when elected such “opposition” candidates (usually from one of the Kremlin-approved “opposition parties”) have shown no real determination to actually oppose the regime in any meaningful way. But the Kremlin is already preparing to change the election law so independent observers will no longer be allowed. At the same time anger is growing. Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa and Sotsialisticheskaya Feministicheskaya Alternativa are growing and confidently preparing to mark International Womens’ Day with a two-hour strike on March 5. We have already had interest in joining in from people in 30 cities. The more we can build our forces now, the better we will be prepared for the coming explosions, not just of the youth but the wider working class too. J

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