Current Protests Will Look Like Child’s Play if Pandemic Continues for Long, Moscow Analyst Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 5 – The pandemic has triggered protests around the world, including in Russia, because it has deprived people of former certainties about the ability of their governments to take care of them and given them time to reflect about the shortcomings and failures of their rulers, Gleb Kuznetsov says.

            But if the pandemic continues for months into the future as the WHO and some others predict, the current protests be they Black Lives Matter in the US or the regionalist demonstrations in Khabarovsk will look like child’s play compared to what is ahead, the researcher at the Moscow Expert Institute for Social Research says.

            People will be even more angry at their rulers and even more inclined to take things into their own hands than they are now, undermining the political foundations of current leaders and leading to turmoil in many places (znak.com/2020-08-05/politolog_gleb_kuznecov_kak_pandemiya_vyzvala_protestnuyu_volnu_v_mire_i_kuda_eta_volna_vyneset_ross).

            That is all the more so because the pandemic has split society into those who fear the coronavirus and those who think it is fake news, a division that deprives the people in power of maintaining a large political base and thus having enough power to respond more seriously to the crisis. 

            And those divisions in turn will be exacerbated as political groups organize investigations into how the authorities have dealt with the crisis. (Germany has already begun what is likely to be a near universal phenomenon in that regard, Kuznetsov says.) These will be politicized and thus divisive as well. 

            Russia because of its size and diversity will suffer in particular from these trends, he says. “The harsher quarantine measures were in one region, the most difficult it will be for regional powers to recover authority and popularity; and conversely, the more active the powers agree to any relaxation of quarantine restrictions, the more popular they will come out of the pandemic.”

            That will create a new competition within the political elite that will feed off of and make deeper the divisions in society at large. Some of that will be visible in the elections in September, although the party of power will likely win in most places albeit with significantly reduced majorities.

            The issue of reopening schools is likely to divide Russians more than the elections because the question of in class instruction or distance learning touches so many more people directly, Kuznetsov argues. As September approaches, choices about how to organize education are likely to drive more people into the streets.