Growing Anger in Population and Increasing Repression by Regime Radicalizing ‘Systemic’ Opposition, Kynyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 3 – The three “opposition” systemic parties are increasingly being radicalized because society is becoming ever more angry and they want to win votes and because the repressive actions of the regime during the pandemic are pushing them in the same direction, according to Moscow political analyst Aleksandr Kynyev.

            The loyalty of these groups “could not but fall” as a result, he argues. The population finds itself in a crisis, and these parties, “part of society, “understand popular attitudes” and want to gain support in the upcoming elections. But the regime by its “primitive” response to the pandemic has accelerated this process (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2020/12/03/1876152.html).

            Instead of reaffirming the special status of the systemic opposition, Kynyev continues, the Kremlin has increasingly attacked these three parties and even moved against their political standing. This year alone, the Kremlin set a record by removing five KPRF governors and replacing them with United Russia officials.

            Because of such things, the powers that be are unwittingly working to create a situation in which “the systemic opposition in the next Duma will be much more radical than now,” however large a United Russia contingent the regime’s political technologists orchestrate for United Russia. The leaders of these systemic opposition groups will be pushed into radicalism by their own members.

            Kynyev points out that the lower ranking members of the KPRF are “much more radical” than the party’s leaders, putting the latter at risk of being attacked as collaborators of the regime even as they use the loyalty of Gennady Zyuganov as a kind of umbrella that protects them from more far-reaching attacks by the regime.

            But however that may be, generational change is coming in all three systemic opposition parties. “Perhaps not now but certainly in the near future. And obviously, the new leadership will be more energetic” than those it replaces and “much more radical,” not out of ideological conviction but simply “pragmatic” calculations.