Neither Powers nor Protesters Now Staying within the Law, Shaburov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 1 – The new protests in Russia provide no basis for optimism, Aleksey Shaburov says, in the first instance because for both the government and the demonstrators, there has been “practically the complete disappearance of law as a regulator of ‘street politics.’”

            The protest organizers no longer make any pretense of seeking official authorization for their actions, the editor of Yekaterinburg’s Politsovet portal says. The government’s law on meetings, has become ever harsher and now has reached the point “when it has simply ceased to work” (politsovet.ru/69276-protesty-v-rossii-poshli-po-spirali-nasiliya.html).

            At the same time, the powers that be “have begun to act more arbitrarily with regard to the law.” They still talk about keeping everything “’in a legal framework.’” But they act in ways that undercut that claim and even make a nonsense of it. As a result, both sides now operate not on the basis of the law but rather on the will of those behind each.

            “Law is ceasing to be a guide for both sides, and this is a bad sign,” Shaburov argues. “When law doesn’t work, this vacuum is gradually filled with force and arbitrariness in the most varied forms.”

            Related to this, he continues, is the fact that the powers that be seem to have given up on everything except the use of force to control the situation. Earlier, they tried to use various propagandistic methods. They even talked about how wrong it is to involve children in politics. But that effort has been if not stillborn so ineffective as to have little future.

            As a tactic, it may have won the powers a little time; but as a strategy, it means that the contest between powers and protesters has been reduced to one between two forces.  And that makes a spiraling of violence upward almost a certainty especially since the population now has so many grievances and the powers aren’t willing to talk to people about them.

            Moreover, there is no a very real danger that the failure of mass protests to prompt the regime to do anything but respond with more repression will lead some in the population to the conclusion that they should try other methods, possibly including violence, to try to achieve their ends.

            But there is another lesson from the protests that is also worrying, Shaburov says. Among those who see that mass protests are leading nowhere and won’t even have an impact on the upcoming Duma elections, there are likely to be many who will again sink into apathetic inaction.

            This might seem to be exactly what the regime would like to happen. Russia would be quiet once again, and those in power could continue as they have. But if protests are suppressed without any political response, from among some of the apathetic will emerge those who decide to take matters into their own hands.  

Such people could soon become a bigger threat to the authorities than any mass meetings Navalny and his team may assemble. And consequently, neither side is likely to win a complete victory. Instead, as Sergey Smirnov of Mediazon has said, things are likely with time only “to get worse.”