Putin’s NEP Over, Pavlova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 3 – Aleksey Navalny may have begun as a Kremlin project, but in his recent actions, he has overstepped the limits of the permissible as far as Vladimir Putin is concerned, although even now, Navalny’s actions have served the ruler’s interests but showing how relatively few Russians support the opposition, Irina Pavlova says.

            For his past “services,” Navalny has not been killed as were Boris Nemtsov and others who more unambiguously fought the Kremlin throughout their careers but given a relatively short prison sentence. But Navalny’s failure to get more popular support means that the Kremlin’s hands are untied (ivpavlova.blogspot.com/2021/02/blog-post.html#more).

            And that in turn means, the US-based Russian historian who views the playing out of the Putin drama in terms of the Soviet past argues, that from there is not going to be any “weakening” of the Kremlin’s repressive course and that everyone must recognize that “the Putin NEP has ended” for good and all.

            One can only regret what is happening to Navalny, Pavlova says; but she adds that it reflects his own mistake that it was possible to take part in Russian politics as if he were free. “But in Russia there is no free politics; there is not only systemic but also the so-called non-systemic opposition,” one that also “plays by Kremlin rules and exists under its conditions.”

            It is of course “understandable that not only representatives of this very opposition but also ordinary citizens do not want to think that way. They want to think that Navalny was a free politician and in no way ‘a project of the Kremlin,’” the historian says. But in fact, when he ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013, he did so only within the rules the Kremlin laid down.

            Without the approval of the powers that be, Pavlova continues, “no one would have permitted him such powerful PR in the liberal media. No one would ever have freed him the day after a court brought charges against him. No one would ever have registered him as a candidate for the position of Moscow mayor.”

            Moreover, “no one would have so generously sponsored his anything but cheap election campaign. These are ABC truths which for understandable reasons his passionate supporters refuse to see.” They don’t want to acknowledge that the Kremlin has used Navalny as “’a cleaner’” against potential opponents of the regime within the halls of power themselves.

            “I do not know whether it will ever become known where Navalny crossed the line and violated the conditions of his agreement with the Kremlin, but this has in fact happened.” He clearly did not recognize this violation, and one can see the Kremlin’s moderate in its terms response as evidence that it did exist.

            Unlike unalloyed enemies of the regime, Pavlova continues, Navalny remained alive after the poisoning attempt rather that dead as many others have been left; and he is only being sent to prison for two years plus rather than subject to even more draconian consequences, at least for the time being.

            But because Navalny violated the rules but could not get enough Russians to back him – the protests were large in one sense but quite small relative to the total population, Pavlova observes – Putin and his entourage now believe that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by becoming even more repressive and ending whatever NEP they had allowed earlier.