Kremlin No Longer Using Force to Intimidate Population but to Reassure Itself, Luzin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 3 – The Kremlin does not face any massive protest that could threaten its power, apparently having succeeded by its use of force in the past, Pavel Luzin says. But it continues to use force against relatively small protest actions, fearful that they may grow into something and in order to reassure its denizens that they are in control.

            The Perm political analyst says that in many ways the Kremlin was alarmed when police in Ingushetia refused to obey orders to disperse protesters, just as it was frightened in 2008 when police in Vladivostok also refused and Moscow dispatched troops from the center to deal with the problem (afterempire.info/2019/05/03/dybinka-kak-lekarstvo/).

            The center thus wants to deploy force against demonstrators no matter how few and no matter how non-threatening they may be in order to test the loyalty and the reliability of the police and allied agencies to itself. As long as such forces are ready to do what they are told against the population, the Kremlin is reassured. 

            But the main weaknesses of the center revealed by the events in Ingushetia are intellectual and organizational, Luzin continues. Moscow allowed the border accord to happen without even the kind of preliminary analysis Russian law requires timber companies to perform and didn’t involve its nationality agency until eight months after the protests began.

            Exactly the same problems are on view in Moscow’s handling of the trash protests in the North. There is no evidence the Russian government calculated how much it would cost to ship the trash there, and it certainly made no effort to find out how local people would react.  What it could and did do was to deploy force against any protesters.

            And a third case which is “icing on the cake,” Luzin says, occurred in St. Petersburg, when the governor there seemed to want to display his loyalty to Putin by using force against people who were behaving reasonably and not making demands that threatened anyone, let alone the system as a whole.

            There, “Russian citizens showed that they are citizens and not plebes or wild men as people in the Kremlin view them.” The same is true in Ingushetia and in the Russian North. In all three places, Russian citizens are opposed by “a Kremlin full of barbarians, who think only about their loot, profess various cargo cults and practice household magic.”

            That and their police won’t be enough to save them for long.