Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 10 – The relative
paucity of detentions in Moscow during the anti-Putin Navalny demonstrations
last weekend, despite the much larger and more brutal actions of the
authorities beyond the ring road, has generated a lively discussion as to why the
Kremlin didn’t come down harder.
Two commentators, Yekatarina
Vinokurova of Znak (znak.com/2017-10-09/myagkaya_reakciya_na_mitingi_novaya_taktika_ili_situativnaya_reakciya)
and Dmitry Travin of St. Petersburg’s European University (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2017/10/08/1651541.html),
provide some interesting suggestions.
Vinokurova suggests that the answer
may have been as simple as timing: the Kremlin didn’t want to spoil Putin’s
birthday – the foreign media undoubtedly would have linked those two events
together -- or appear repressive when it was criticizing the Spanish police for
their crackdown in Catalonia.
She then queries five Moscow
analysts for their reaction. Political scientist Abbas Gallyamov says that the
authorities may have reacted as they did because they saw that the latest demonstrations
attracted far fewer people than earlier and thus felt that they were “winners”
and could afford to be generous.
Aleksey Chesnyakov of the Center for
Political Conjuncture agrees. This wasn’t a change in tactics. Rather it was
specific to this day. What is disturbing, he continues, is that the authorities
have such a limited number of instruments for reacting to any public
manifestation, repression or non-repression.
Yevgeny Minchenko, head of the
International Institute for Political Expertise, agrees that the Kremlin’s
response reflected the smaller number of protests as well as problems within
Navalny’s own command.
Aleksey Makarkin of the center for
Political Technologies suggests that it was all a game: first the authorities threatened
to come down hard and then they didn’t, leaving their opponents off
balance. The fact that there was so much
variance in the ways officials reacted shows that no common approach was
planned in the Kremlin.
And Konstantin Kalachev of the Political
Expertise Group said that the softer approach reflected an appreciation within
the Kremlin that harsh measures would only lead to further radicalization and
the growth of the opposition. Moreover,
the calm response of the center reflected its “strength and confidence.”
Dmitry Travin puts the absence of a
crackdown into a broader context. He says
that if the authorities were really afraid of a challenge, they would have
acted exactly the opposite to the way that they did, taking a hard line in
Moscow and a softer one elsewhere. But
the Kremlin showed its confidence that everything is under control.
Clearly, Putin doesn’t see Navalny
as a competitor or a threat, Travin continues.
One cannot understand what happened,
he suggests, unless one recognizes that the Kremlin is not a single thing but a
collection of competing groups who make use of whatever they can to advance
their interests. Navalny can be used by some because he threatens others or at
least can be made to look that way, the economist says.
The Kremlin population is united in
only one way: “the problem of personal enrichment is primary, and the problem
of support for the regime is secondary.” Given that Navalny has only minimal
impact on that goal, he can be allowed to function especially since he has
proven incapable of mobilizing the population for something rather than just
against corruption.
If it were otherwise, he would not
have been sentenced to 20 days but perhaps to 20 years. But in the absence of
specific goals, his protest will peter out just as others have over the last
two decades. And one can conclude, Travin says, that Navalny’s position has
been weakened by what occurred last Saturday.
“This doesn’t mean,” Travin says, “that
meetings are senseless,” but they are meaningful more in an ethical than a
political sense, as an affirmation of one’s right to take a position and to
act. At some point that may grow into a
political movement but not immediately, the commentator suggests.
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