VICTORY DAY
TEXT ALAN DEAN
DESIGN OWEN MCCALLUM-KEELER
ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON
NEWS
Street action and the future of the Russian opposition
03
In June of last year, the Russia that I had quickly and unexpectedly departed three months prior, as universities shut down and United States citizens were told to come home, was coming back to life like the exhausted cliché of the bear emerging from hibernation. Russia’s Covid cases, official and real, were on the decline, and its population of 144 million wasn’t merely returning to normal, it was celebrating. Among the casualties of the first wave was the much anticipated 75th annual Victory Day parade celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany, usually held on May 9. On the heels of yet another crisis, the parade, even if delayed, was non-negotiable. In addition to the parade there was another grand exercise in pageantry afoot: the similarly rescheduled constitutional referendum. The final results—a questionable 79% in favor—granted Vladimir Putin two additional six year terms in office and amended a number of other deeply conservative laws into the Russian constitution. Though it was quite clear what the result would be as voting got underway, tensions were running high. I reached out to some of my Russian classmates and friends who, only a few weeks prior, had been directing their questions at me as the Black Lives Matter protests spread across every major city in the US. “How’re you planning to vote?” I asked. “Against.” “Against.” “I’m not voting.” “Well, in principle I’m apolitical, but my dad is voting against so maybe I will too.” The last response struck me the most, as indicating something deeper about the apathy that pervades Russian politics. With this still in the back of my mind, I was surprised to see, half a year later at the end of this January, the same friend post a shaky video captioned “going to my first protest…”. In the video was the same Moscow street—where only three-quarters of a year earlier, I had been coming from or going to classes, restaurants or bars—filled by a massive crowd from sidewalk to sidewalk. As I flipped through the next few clips, the crowd was slowly superseded by tear gas, batons and an equally large mass of OMON (Russian riot police) and the optimistic captions by a series of expletives. What these images immediately brought to mind was the US last summer as militarized police imposed de facto martial law throughout the country. The parallels between the two are more significant than they may at first appear—beyond the visual resemblance of violent state repression, both situations demand the question of what comes next when spontaneous protest movements run up against the boundaries of what the existing political system is able to offer. How do we move forward when the obstacle isn’t within the order of things, but that order itself? +++ The protest in question was part of a wave of dissent set off by opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s arrest on January 17 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from an attempted poisoning in August. Navalny, the most prominent opposition figure of the past decade, was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent, allegedly by Russian state security agents. Navalny’s medical evacuation out of the country was ruled a violation of his parole terms, the result of a 2014 sentencing for embezzlement widely considered to be politically motivated. Undeterred, Navalny landed in Moscow, stepped off the plane (not unironically operated by the budget airline Pobeda, or ‘Victory’) and was immediately detained at passport control. In response, his supporters and the Russian opposition at large urgently called for protests. The initial protests on January 23 were the largest since the 2011-13 protests which first elevated Navalny to prominence within the opposition. Moscow saw up to 40,000 people in the streets and 1,500 arrests—thousands more protested and another 3,500 were arrested in other cities. Footage of horrific police brutality spread online like wildfire. In one widely shared video, St. Petersburg police kicked an unarmed elderly woman to the ground when she tried to speak to a detainee. Another officer points a loaded handgun at the crowd. A clip of Moscow police captioned “ANIMALS” shows them viciously beating a mass of bloodied, unarmed protesters on the asphalt. Navalny was not released. On February 2, the Moscow City Court sentenced him to two and a half years in an infamously harsh penal colony in Vladimir Oblast. The emergency protests staged on Manezhnaya Square in Moscow that same night were brutally put down. Almost cartoonishly dystopian pictures of OMON walling off the city center were followed by videos of people cornered and outnumbered, chanting “We don’t have weapons!” as the police continue to assault them. Two days later, Navalny’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov called off the protests, urging supporters to refocus their attention away from street action towards the upcoming Duma elections this fall. Sporadic actions have continued, but the momentum, energy and rage of the protests have dissipated as quickly as they came. Demonstrations have largely shifted to small, symbolic gatherings aiming to stay as much as possible within the law and out of harm’s way. While the elections are sure to bring a fresh wave of protests to the streets, the chances for an opposition victory (or even substantial gains) are slim. By all appearances, the Russian opposition is spinning in circles. As dangerously close to bursting as the rickety political boiler system may seem, the order built by the Putin government over the last two decades ultimately appears to be as stable as ever.
+++ The complex politics beneath Navalny’s individual spectacle of martyrdom have found little traction in Western coverage of the protests—Navalny has for years been the chosen favorite of Western media seeking a foil for Putin. The incredible personal courage and self-sacrifice he demonstrated in his return only bolsters that image. If the past two months have done anything, it is to further entrench Navalny’s status as a persecuted dissident—which, of course, he is— often to the detriment of understanding his actual politics and the politics of Russia writ large. In fact, beyond his canonization as the anti-Putin, the actual substance of Navalny’s political programs and beliefs rarely seems to interest Western media. The prominence of the persecuted dissident narrative in such coverage often obscures more than it reveals (even when factually true), as it reduces Russian politics to a clash of the heroic individual and the monolithic state. It is likewise unable to account for the Russian opposition’s undeniable failure, despite both its own tremendous effort and the precariousness of the government’s situation. The past decade has seen a declining economy, rising inequality and a torrent of other political crises, but against expectations, Putin seems to emerge stronger each time. If the struggle was won by self-sacrifice and moral righteousness, Navalny would have toppled Putin long ago. To truly grasp the situation and, more importantly, to change it, something more is required. While the dualistic account of Navalny as the counter-Putin remains largely unchallenged, Navalny’s increased prominence has forced Western media to finally acknowledge his long-running nationalism and cooperation with the far-right. This association ranged from regular attendance at the yearly ultranationalist ‘Russian March’ (for which he was expelled from the social democratic Yabloko party in 2007) to a series of abhorrent—and proudly unrecanted—statements from the 2000s comparing migrants to cockroaches and rotten teeth. This distasteful history has ‘flummoxed’ prominent liberal critics like Masha Gessen. In light of this, on February 24, Amnesty International stripped Navalny of his status as a prisoner of conscience. Though this belated controversy has done little to change broader coverage of Navalny in either Russia or the west, it reveals fundamental fault lines in the political coalition that has brought him to this point. After Amnesty’s decision, the first response of Navalny’s core liberal base was to attack his critics on the Russian left as state collaborators orchestrating a conspiracy against him. What is lost in this important debate on Navalny’s far-right connections is the fact that, by and large, there is not a single prominent Russian politician of the past thirty years who hasn’t flirted with hardline nationalism—as an instrument to power or as a genuine belief. Some of the most active protest movements of the 1990s and 2000s were driven primarily by left-right coalitions such as the National Bolshevik Party (which, since being outlawed in 2007, has rebranded as ‘The Other Russia,’ swapping its former logo of a hammer and sickle on a Nazi flag for a graphic of a grenade). In more pressing and more practical terms, however, Navalny’s connections to the far right are not only disturbing opportunism but a political dead end. If the Putin regime
