Putin’s Repression Counterproductive and Uniting Russians, Gudkov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 30 – The extent of Vladimir Putin’s repression and its randomness in terms of its victims have not had the intended effect of intimidating the Russian people but rather the opposite one of further infuriating them about the situation and leading them to display solidarity with the victims of the powers that be, Dmitry Gudkov says.

            The opposition politician and commentator says the main result of the last year has not been the fact that there are now more than 600 political prisoners in Russia but rather the creation of a situation in which “any individual at any moment” may be swept up into their number and in which others will support them (theins.ru/opinions/194418).

            Gudkov says that he won’t use the term “civil society.” That has been invoked so often that it has lost most of its meaning. But “there are people who are not indifferent” to what the authorities are doing in this regard “and there are a very large number of them.” As a result, “help for the repressed has become the norm,” something not true for more than a century.

            “It is impossible to imagine money being collected for those dispatched to the GULAG under Stalin. Even under Brezhnev and Andropov, such actions never were massive. But now, the situation is just the opposite.”  Large numbers of people are acting in support and even more are aware of what is going on.

            Putin’s repressive actions have thus proved counterproductive, Gudkov says. “When a taxi drive passing by the Meshchansky court, where Samariddin was victimized knows precisely who he was, this is a failure of the entire repressive policy.” The driver also born in Dushanbe understands what this means for him and for everyone else too.

            “How did he find out? From the news? From picketers? From conversations with acquaintances? Information spreads like water,” whatever the backers of the regime think.

            Today’s solidarity is the product of suffering, but it exists and is political because “in contrast to helping the victims of natural disasters … here it is fully understood that the issue is not just ‘what to do’ but ‘who is guilty,’” Gudkov says.  And thus help to political prisoners is close to becoming a political struggle because ending repression requires a change of regime.

            According to the opposition figure, “a third force has in fact appeared in Russia, not the authorities with all their imitation structures of parliamentary parties and not the political opposition successfully mastering again and again their hopeless struggle for this power.”  But the people and the mothers of victims of repression in the first instance.

            That has occurred, he says, because such people have an immediate and simple agenda: they want the release of all political prisoners. They aren’t bogged down on questions they can’t answer like whether Crimea is Russian or whether a president should be allowed to serve more than two terms in a row.

            A few days ago, Gudkov says, he “met with the mothers of political prisoners: they have now united and are conducting a hunger strike with the demand of freedom for all.” But they have been largely ignored because they don’t fit into either the powers that be or the opposition as it has been constituted in Russia.

            “We for so long have struggled for them that we have almost forgotten them. It is time to remember them. Otherwise why are we involved at all?” And the prisoners’ mothers have another lesson to teach the opposition: all who have been imprisoned as a result of repression regardless of charges must be released.

            As they see, but opposition parties don’t, “there is no difference what sauce they plan to eat you with if you are already lying on the plate.” That means that Russians must be concerned about repression everywhere in the country because regardless of the region, all are experiencing Putin’s repression with only minor variations.

            The prisoners’ mothers understand what the opposition must learn: If we are to be successful, we must act on the slogan, “one for all and all for one,” rather than allow “the cannibals” who rule over us to set one group of Russians off against another in order to make it easier for them to continue to feast on all.