After Alexei Navalny the opposition to Vladimir Putin has no single leader – Prospect

Vladimir Putin, who famously complained that the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the greatest political disaster of the 20thcentury has, in the fourth term of his Presidency of Russia, significantly reversed thattragedy, as if rewinding a film. The grip of the state, the power of the Kremlin and the suppression of civil society all increase, it seems almost daily. And much of the society is pliant: half or more of the population say they miss the Soviet times, even if many hardly knew them.

Lev Gudkov, director of the independent Levada polling organisation (designated as a Foreign Agent, but still working) told a Russian interviewer that the country was still moving towards totalitarianism, and thatthe space of freedom, culture, enlightenment, religion, morality, science is shrinking, not to mention the complete disappearance of politics as an institutional realmthe masses continue to liveby the idea of state greatness.

Expressions of hatred of the west are part of this reversionironic, thinks Gudkov, since Russian society perceives the west as a utopia, the embodiment of ideas and values. This is doublethink: the cultural historian Irina Prokhorova told the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung that you meet someone on the street and they talk about the damned West: then they spend their last savings on sending their child abroad for an education.

The return of Soviet values has seen the return of the most necessary: public hypocrisy. This is what the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz called ketman (a term borrowed from the 19thcentury French writer Arthur de Gobineau), meaning a state ofbeing in which public embrace of a prevailing ideology was shadowed by private revulsion and hidden dissidence.

In a landmark essay for the Medusa websitenow based in one of the Baltic states like much of Russian contemporary dissidenceMaxim Trudolyubov, finest of the oppositionist commentators, writes that the Kremlin leaders must cultivate a constant state of crisis caused by the threat of war, natural disasters, or the activities of saboteurs and other domestic enemies. The nation must be in peril, and its leaders must act in accordance with the logic of national salvation. Its no coincidence that Russian political rhetoric is riddled with talk of threats.

Moscows political analysts echo Lev Gudkovs pessimism. Tatyana Stanova, head of the consulting firm R Politik, says that it seems that today the political advantagein the fight with the opposition is now completely on the side of the ruling power. Epithets like Foreign Agents, Undesirable Organisations, Extremists an NGO infringing theprivacy and rights of a citizen are used, says Stanova,to suppress both individuals and civil society institutions, rendering them unable to take part in politics at any level. This would include the Duma, the national legislature, which goes to the polls on or before 19th September this year.

The Kremlin has succeeded in one large task: it has largely silenced Alexei Navalny. Having failed to poison its most prominent political opponent last August, it took advantage of his extraordinary courage in returning to Russia,after recovering in Germany, by sentencing him to two and a half years in Pokrov, one of its most severe prison camps, and by closing down his national network of offices. He is, says Andrei Kolesnikov,Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre (one of the very few western institutes still open) now receding from public view.

In the first of a series of essays published earlier this year on contemporary Russian politics, Kolesnikov writes that Navalnys return and imprisonment appears to have increased the Russian publics distrust and disapproval of him. Why? Couldnt be more banal. Its a case of shooting the messenger the passive majority would prefer to block out unfavourable andcompromising information about their country.

Navalnys call for Russia-wide demonstrations, his tireless revelations of corruption (including drone videos of a vast, newly-built palace on the Black Sea, presumed to have been ordered by Putin), his endless skewering of Putins United Russia party (the majority in the present Duma) have beenabruptlyterminated. But protest, Kolesnikov tells me, is notexcised. We must see what is happening in the regions. Navalny concentrates on central power: reasonably, since historically all change has taken place in the Kremlin. But in the regions, people care about their local rights.

Even if most Russians prefer to shoot the rebel messenger than acquaint themselves with his message, protest now has a larger ground on which to spread itself than in Soviet days

Last year, in the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, the arrest of a popular governor got thousands out in the streetswith, at first,little resistance from the police. In the province of Bashkortostan, ecological protests also attracted crowds of supporters: ashad, in 2019, thousands protesting the building of a church in the middle of a much-walked park in Yekaterinburg (church attendance in Russia, quite free, indeed encouraged, is low. Though the beauty of Russian Orthodox services, their hymns and chants, remains, the church hierarchy is in an embrace with political power which recalls the days of Tsarism).

The crackdown on dissent, new rules which creep closer to defining thought crime and the flight from Moscow of the regimes opponents, are all sharply increasing. Dmitri Gudkov (no relation to Lev Gudkov),a prominent opposition member of the Duma, left Russia in June, saying he had been warned of arrest on trumped up charges if he stayed.

Andrei Soldatov, who with his partner Irina Borogan, has written penetrating books on Russian securitythe latest of which is The Compatriots, on the lethalforeign travels of secret police assassins since the 1917 revolutionsays that the regime strives to bringthe younger generations, most likely to rebel, into the shelter of the state. Propaganda in education has intensified, loyalists placed in leadership positions: Lev Gudkov notes that 92of theheads of the top100universities are associatedwith United Russia. The army has sponsored the Army of Youth in schools.

Everyone can get swept up, even the apolitical people get taken in, says Soldatov, whose own father, a scientist and a pioneer of the Internet in Russia, was briefly arrested. The pact between Putin and the middle class is broken, the government is so oppressive. People distrust everyone. People dont trust the Covid vaccine: in the regions, people just refuse it. The figures for vaccinations are greatly exaggerated.

In his last essay, Kolesnikov quotes Levada polling evidence which shows that where 59 per centof the over 55s wish Putin to remain President after 2024when he should face re-election57 per cent of the 18-24-year olds want him to go. More than a third of the young believe the poisoning of Navalny was an attempt to rid the state of this turbulent rebel, while only 9 per cent of the 55+ cohorts do. Far more of the former have watched the video of Putins Palace, and generally believe it to be the presidents folly.

Arkady Ostrovsky, born into the Soviet intelligentsia, now Russia Editor of The Economist, believes Navalny, whatever his fate in the notoriously violent Pokrov penal colony 60 miles east of Moscow,has forced the regimeinto its hard line stance, because hes made it hard to say youre neutral. His message was simple: lets live for ourselves in a free state.

He will be in the camp for more than two years: a Reuters report based on the testimonies of former prisoners pointed to severe, prolonged abuse, mainly at the hands of other prisoners,and to withdrawal into silence on the part of many after only a year, with long physical and psychological effects after release. Ahunger strike, now over, has weakened Navalny: the last images were of a gaunt figure. However he bears it, the state murder attempt and the two and a half year sentence (for violating bail conditions while he was recovering) have deprived the regime of what remnants of justice and morality it possessed.

Protest and dissidence now have no single leader. But even if most Russians prefer to shoot the rebel messenger than acquaint themselves with his message, protest now has a larger ground on which to spread itself than in Soviet days. That may be because, as Ostrovsky believes, Navalny has seeded that ground over the past decade. It is visibly the case that young Russians will be the tinder for any future blaze: even Gudkov, wary of optimism, says that the youth of today is markedly different from previous generations (with) new communications practices, new behavioural models, a more pronounced orientation towards the west, a more noticeable intolerance of violence. The shuttering of Navalny is not the end of dissent: it may indeed encourage a broader base of protest, an intolerance not just of violence, but of an entire society bound together only by its threat.

Yet however tempting is the parallel with Brezhnevs USSR (1964-1982), Russia is no longer Soviet. Travel, relatively free speech, a so-far unsuppressed web are now past being novelties: they are seen as birth rights by the 18-25s. Confining them, the countrys future, would, in the absence of the gulag and nightly executions in the bowels of the Lubyanka, hurry the destabilisation of the state itself.

Despair co-exists with a stubborn sense that this authoritarianism, too, will pass. Kolesnikov rejects an easy likening of Russia with China: it was a democracy. Soldatov points to young pupils in school using their smart phones to record abusive teachers, and sees a rising generation with a different, much less constrained mentality than those who had years of Soviet schooling. Just as Winston Smith, in1984,believed that If there is hope it lies in the proles, so those who seek change in Russia see hope as lying in the youth.

Trudolyubov writes Of course, arrests, prison sentences, fines, and being labeled agents are thoroughly real, and it would be both impossible and wrong to dismiss this as a mere hassle. The authorities can take things far, but they will never go all the way. There are too many interactions and processes in Russian society today to make total control possible. Achieving a complete administrative singularity is impossible simply because the state would need to manage everything all at onceThe theological logic of power relies on the publics willingness to accept it on faith, but society isnt a congregation and the authorities arent the only ones active in Russias complex, highly organized public life. The passivity needed for managed administrative utopia just isnt there.

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After Alexei Navalny the opposition to Vladimir Putin has no single leader - Prospect