Kremlin’s Efforts to Suppress All Social Self-Organization Breeding Hatred for Itself, Malgin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 12 -- The Putin regime’s efforts to suppress all opposition political activity are easy to understand, Andrey Malgin says; that is how all authoritarian systems operate because “the existence of alternative political structures is incompatible with authoritarianism.”  But the Kremlin now seeks to block all efforts at self-organization no matter how unpolitical.

            That raises the question as to why that is the case, and the answer to that question says much about how Vladimir Putin and his entourage view society and the threats it supposedly can present them with. On the one hand, the Kremlin leadership does not believe that people can organize on their own and thus assumes there is some force domestic or foreign behind it.

            And on the other, the Russian journalist says, the current powers that be are deeply convinced that if these forces can organize non-political meetings today, tomorrow they can organize opposition political actions tomorrow – and thus the regime must act preemptively to prevent that from happening (svoboda.org/a/29878587.html).

            But what the regime does not understand is that by treating all acts of self-organization as a threat to itself, the Kremlin makes itself a victim of a self-fulfilling prophecy because its suppression of such groups has the effect of making those who only wanted to achieve limited goals to think more politically and view the regime behind repressions as their enemy.

            This set of views was clearly on display in December 2011 when the powers that be responded to protests by going after what it perceived to be “the infrastructure” behind them – that is foreign funders. Then the Putin regime adopted its law on foreign agents to try to isolate any self-organization from the rest of the Russian population.

            But it has applied these same tactics to groups like the Soldiers’ Mothers Committees and even to those who volunteered to help at the time of the flooding in Krymsk. Instead of viewing such people as heroes for their assistance, the Putin regime and its local representatives treated them “almost as enemies” because the people acted on their own.

            Now the Kremlin is responding to protests about trash disposal in many parts of Russia not by entering into talks with those upset by the appearance of new dumps but rather by dispersing the meetings, detaining and fining the leaders, and even opening criminal cases against them.

            And in the latest expansion of this repressive approach, the authorities have even fined journalists for reporting about the anti-trash meetings, perhaps assuming that such reporting represents “a call to society to organize on its own,” something the Kremlin  views as anathema and a threat to itself.

            “The drive to unite with those who feel as one does is a natural human quality. To fight against this is not simply foolish but without good prospects. By trying to divide up society with such methods, the powers that be in the end” achieve what they cannot possibly want – a society whose single common basis is “the idea of hatred to the authorities as a whole.”

            That will be a real threat as opposed to the imaginary ones that now guide Kremlin thinking, Malgin suggests.