Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 29 – The Russian
government machine is becoming ever more repressive, Sergey Shelin says; “but
the voices of those who protest, including some who had been in the
nomenklatura have also become louder,” exactly the reverse of what the Kremlin
hopes for and an indication that Russia is moving into an entirely new period.
The willingness of ever more people
to protest at show trials and Kafkaesque behavior has the effect of “destroying
the illusion of the legality of what is going one” and thus undermining its
power to intimidate the population, a power the authorities have long relied
upon (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2017/08/25/1641358.html).
Shelin says that he will not venture
“to predict how this contradiction will be resolved, but a new page in the
history of repression in the fatherland is already being written.” And he
inventories some of the most prominent cases of repression and the way these
are now being opposed to make his case.
Although he does not make a
prediction, there are precedents in Russian history and more generally for what
this development is likely to presage. Either the authorities will be compelled
to try to suppress opposition by even more authoritarian means or they will
face a situation in which each new act of repression will weaken rather than
strengthen them.
At the end of Soviet times, it was
often remarked that Mikhail Gorbachev was someone who was fighting a grease
fire with small amounts of water. Instead of dousing opposition, he was simply
causing it to spread and thus intensify.
Shelin’s analysis suggests that Russia is again at the same point, but
Putin isn’t Gorbachev.
And that in turn raises some more
serious questions: Is Putin about to intensify repression still further? Could
he do so without wrecking the country? Or is he going to have to change course,
cutting back on at least some kinds of repression in the hopes of reducing opposition
as well?
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