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2019
SOMETHING
SPECIAL JUST
HAPPENED IN
RUSSIA

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Profesor:Luis
income Velasquez
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Something Special Just Happened in Russia

It’s hard to pin down the exact moment when it became clear the protests on
Saturday in Russia — where tens of thousands of people, stretching across
the country, called for the release of the jailed opposition leader Aleksei
Navalny — were something special.

It definitely wasn’t the violence doled out to protesters and even bystanders
— like a woman in St. Petersburg being casually kicked in the gut by a police
officer in riot gear — or the deliberate targeting of reporters. Such
occurrences are sadly commonplace. It wasn’t even the people coming out
to protest in the unlikeliest corners of Russia, like Yakutsk, where the
temperatures dipped to minus-60 Fahrenheit. Extreme cold and remoteness
have never before stopped Russians from expressing their displeasure.

No, if there was one incident that suggested the significance of Saturday’s
protests, it was probably the footage of the riot police in Moscow looking lost
and disoriented as a crowd blitzed them with snowballs. Or perhaps another
video of young men charging at the fully clad riot police so ferociously that
the officers, who clearly didn’t expect to meet such resistance, almost backed
down.

These acts of defiance and escalation — in the past, people have

been convicted of throwing plastic cups and bottles in the general direction
of police officers — underscored the depth of popular dissatisfaction with life
under President Vladimir Putin. These protests, summoned by an
imprisoned opposition leader and undertaken against the government’s
warnings, are a significant development. After years of relative calm, Russia
is restive once more.

To judge by the government’s response, it knows it has trouble on its hands.

The crackdown is breaking records. On July 27, 2019, in what was one of
the largest roundups of protesters in decades, 1,373 people were detained.
On Saturday, around 3,100 were hauled in. At times the process was almost
mechanical: In one exchange caught on video, a protester, realizing that a
police officer wants only to fulfill an arrest quota, offers himself in place of
another — and is duly led away.

The calm manner of that arrest — far from common on Saturday, which saw
many ugly displays of heavy-handed policing — harked back to the
precursors of today’s protest movements. During the Strategy 31 movement,
named after the article of the Russian Constitution that guarantees freedom
of assembly, from 2009 to late 2011, protesters gathered in Moscow on the
last day of every 31-day month. Though never permitted by the authorities,
the protests were orderly and pointedly legalistic.

The habit stuck. Before holding a demonstration, protesters over the past
decade have tended to seek permission from the authorities. Some of
the biggest rallies for fair elections in late 2011 and 2012 were sanctioned by
Moscow’s city government; so was the “Digital Resistance” protest in April
2018 against the government’s attempt to ban Telegram, a popular
messaging app.

Not this time. If, permit or not, you are at risk of being beaten, detained and
forced to face absurd charges, why bother with the paperwork? The lack of
central organization on Saturday — instead of confining themselves to one
central square or street, crowds moved across cities and towns — is a
notable feature. It also makes counting heads difficult. For Moscow alone,
estimates of the number of protesters vary from 4,000 to 10 times that.

Several factors have led to this point. The obvious one is Aleksei Navalny
himself. A decade of anti-corruption activism long ago elevated him to a
position of authority among those who oppose the president. By the time of
his poisoning in August, which he claimed was undertaken at Mr. Putin’s
behest, he effectively embodied the opposition. His brave return to Russia
this month, knowing he would be arrested immediately, won him more
acclaim. That thousands of people, all across the country, defied the
government’s order to stay home testifies to the strength of his appeal.

What’s more, while Mr. Navalny was in jail last week, staff members at his
nonprofit organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, released a
nearly two-hour video that claimed to reveal the details of an opulent
mansion on the shore of the Black Sea — complete with spa, hockey rink
and casino hall — owned by Mr. Putin through a network of intermediaries.
(Mr. Putin denies the allegations.)

While it’s hard to know what effect the revelations had on the protests, some
suggested that the video, which has been watched well over a hundred
million times, played a role in turning people out all over the country,
especially in regions not normally considered to be hotbeds of protest
activity.
But the protests also emerged from — and revealed — the impotence of the
government. To its discontented citizens it fails to offer anything but crude
force and conspiracy theories. (Mr. Navalny is often depicted as a foreign
agent, and protests as financed by “the West.”) There’s no vision of the future
and little effort in the present to improve people’s lives, now worsened by the
pandemic.

Tellingly, state propaganda is failing on platforms where it’s attempting to

compete with independent voices. On Saturday, 10 times more
people watched coverage of the protests on TV Rain, a small independent
channel, than the live-streamed show on RT, the government-controlled
network.

More protests may be coming, as Leonid Volkov, a close ally of Mr.

Navalny, has promised. It would be foolish, however, to think they are going
to lead to significant political changes or concessions from the state. If
anything, as with the mass protests nearly a decade ago, they will probably
just lead to more criminal cases and more repressive laws.

Yet what happened on Saturday matters. Crackdown and coercion are no

longer enough to discourage Russians from protesting: According to
sociologists who studied Saturday’s demonstrations, at least 42 percent of
all participants were first-time protesters. Mr. Navalny has clearly struck a
chord well outside his regular circle of supporters. The Kremlin, its room for
compromise limited, is likely to respond with further escalation.

What that might lead to, no one can say. But one thing’s certain: It doesn’t
bode well for anyone.
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