Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 8 – Vladimir Putin
during his first two terms in office sought to unify Russians around him; but
in his third, he divided them by attacking what he calls “the fifth column,”
thus unwittingly creating two communities within Russia, opening up the country’s
political space, and making competition for power possible, Gleb Pavlovsky
says.
While Putin still has the resources
to dominate Russian political life, the Russian commentator says, he is no
reacting to developments rather than structuring them in order to make sure
that no one either within the elite or beyond its limits will become the leader
of this opposition waiting to be born (fontanka.ru/2018/01/05/032/).
Until 2012,
Pavlovsky argues, “politics in Russia was the politics of consensus: he who is
not against us is with us.” But that consensus
was broken down by the Kremlin’s “war with certain forces of evil” – “first
Pussy Riot, then liberals and then ‘the fifth column’ [and] beyond that
pedophiles, homosexuals, and color revolutionaries.”
All this led to the rise of “a new
politics, a politics of division.” And because there was a real division, there
was the danger that someone could harness the opposition as small as it may
have been and thus challenge the powers that be.
The politics of consensus was based
on the Putin-Medvedev tandem; the new politics arose, Pavlovsky continues, when
Putin decided to take all power into his own hands. “And what happened was what
happened.” Conflicts became possible, and there was thus the danger of unification
of the opposition, “public mobilization.”
“But social structures had been
destroyed,” and most potential leaders of it had been forced aside. Only a few
remained, most prominently Boris Nemtsov.
And that is why he had to be eliminated and was. His murder – and Pavlovsky insists it wasn’t
ordered by the Kremlin – did quiet things for a time -- but only for a time.
“Recall,” the commentator says, “that
after Nemtsov’s murder, the president did not appear in public for two weeks.
And then he spoke about how we in the future will heroically overcome the
difficulties which we ourselves have created.
This was a public rebuke [to those who had killed Nemtsov]: you perhaps
had state goals but you didn’t please me.”
Right then, Pavlovsky argues, “it
became clear that the system was not completely under control.” And the number
of such indications has only grown since that time. The activities of Aleksey
Navalny this past year to call attention to the problems of corruption are only
the latest indication of the same thing.
Many think that the Kremlin has successfully
dealt with his challenge but blocking him from running for president. But they
are wrong: there has not been a decline in his influence but a broadening of
it. Navalny’s ideas are the ones people are talking about, and “the Kremlin in
general has dropped out of the game.”
“The system has begun to thaw and
this is already an irreversible process. In 2017, Navalny represented the
driver; but others have emerged as well – and despite what many assume, these
multiple candidacies do not work for the powers that be but rather over time
against them.
That is because it has become
obvious to all that the Kremlin is not acting but reacting to others, and
reaction to others, Pavlovsky says, is “for a leader a losing position.” It
means that other actors are attracting support, however small it may be, and
the Kremlin is only playing against them rather than playing for itself.
That doesn’t mean that the Kremlin
will lose to the current crowd of challenges, he says. Instead, it means that the
Kremlin be won’t be able to stop the emergence of other challengers however
hard it works and however repressive it is prepared to be. Others will see an
opening in the Kremlin’s reactive approach.
Pavlovsky cites with approval the
argument of Moscow political analystYekaterina Schulmann who says that Russians
are now dealing with “a frozen constitutional state: all the institutions exist
but they simply do not work. Why don’t they work?” Because around a president
who can’t be replaced is a narrow elite that benefits from his not being
replaced.
They tell Putin what he wants to
hear thus isolating him further from society because he does not know what is
going on, but within this group of people perhaps 50 in number are some who are
already looking beyond Putin’s next term and making plans for themselves, possibly
involving harnessing the power of those opposed to the incumbent president.
Because of the nature of the system,
Putin can’t choose a successor. It was hard for Yeltsin in 1999; it is
infinitely harder now because the Kremlin does not have as many allies now as
it did then and because the possibilities of the successor are much narrow than
they were for the man Yeltsin chose.
Putin might have been able to
designate Medvedev as his successor in 2007, but he can’t do so now. Members of
the elite around him doesn’t have their own reputations; not one of them can go
out and say: trust me with your money. They need Putin’s reputation … [but] the
country isn’t being run governed” and that’s needed to protect their money.
As a result, in a halting and
indirect way, “the politicization” of Russia over the last year has led the
country to “the bring of normal politics,” one in which there will be real
competition among people not afraid to mobilize groups within the population
and really attempt to govern rather than just rule.
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