More and More Russians

According to organizers, at least 1.7 million people attended a pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong today, August 18, 2019. Photo courtesy of HKFP

More and more Russians seem to be breaking free of the old habit of trying to guess the party line. Increasingly, they just do what they deem important, and the authorities deal with the consequences. We are all much more used to the reverse relationship, which is why Russia’s new situation is hard to grasp. People in Russia are only now learning to peer into themselves, not into their television sets, searching for clues to what will happen next.

This does not mean that the Kremlin has suddenly become more transparent or less authoritarian. It only means that Russian society has started to realize that it may, in fact, be an originator of political and societal change, not just on the receiving end.

For how long this new situation—or an impression of it—will last is unclear. The Kremlin is at war and wants everyone in Russia to be at war too. Russians seem to be drifting away from this belligerence. The question is whose pull, the Kremlin’s or Russian society’s, is stronger. I am afraid the Kremlin’s is stronger but will be happy to be mistaken.
—Maxim Trudolyubov, “Ask Not What Will the Kremlin Do Next,” The Russia File, 16 August 2019

_____________________________________

What does the phrase “more and more Russians” mean, in the essay quoted above? How does Maxim Trudolyubov know they are doing anything at all, much more “breaking free of the old habit of trying to guess the party line” and doing “what they deem important” (whatever that means)?

If its organizers are to be believed, a pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong was attended by 1.7 million people today, August 18. According to Worldometers, Hong Kong’s population, as of today, was almost 7.5 million people, meaning that nearly 23% of Hong Kong’s residents marched today in support of the city’s autonomy and democratic rights.

In Moscow, “up to 60,000 people” attended an “authorized” pro-democracy rally on August 10. It was, apparently, the biggest opposition rally in Russia since the fair election protests of 2011–2012.

World Population Review estimates Moscow’s population as slightly over 12 million people.

If the figures for the August 10 rally and Moscow’s population are to be credited, then, 0.005% of the city’s populace came out for an “authorized” rally—meaning an event where they had much less reason to fear a police crackdown than at the “unauthorized” rallies at which riot police and Russian National Guardsmen detained thousands of protests over the last month or so.

When you are trying to get your collective point across to an authoritarian government, the numbers do matter, just as they matter in non-authoritarian countries.

As I have argued in many different ways many different times, the Russian opposition, especially its self-declared leaders in Moscow, is woefully bad at two things: mobilizing ordinary pro-democratic Russians to make their numbers known to the regime, and meaningfully allying itself with the grassroots pro-democracy movement beyond Moscow.

In fact, at the very same time as a tiny minority of brave, smart Muscovites have been doing battle with the Moscow City Elections Commission and the security forces to defend their constitutional right to vote and run for office, an even tinier and, perhaps, braver minority of Petersburgers has been fighting to get a small slate of independent candidates onto the ballot for elections to the city’s municipal district councils, chronically underfunded entities with almost no power to do anything more than making cosmetic improvements to the neighborhoods they represent. Just as in Moscow, the would-be candidates themselves have been harassed, beaten, and arrested, along with some of their supporters.

Typically, when the Petersburg pro-democratic opposition held an authorized rally on August 3, only two thousand people showed up. Sadly and hilariously, Deutsche Welle described it as an “event in support of candidates not allowed to run in the elections to the Moscow City Duma.” In reality, Petersburgers rallied in support of their own beleaguered opposition candidates, in solidarity with Muscovites, and against the upcoming pro forma election of acting Governor Alexander Beglov, the Kremlin’s third satrap in the city, on September 8.

But the real story was too complicated for Deutsche Welle. It was, apparently, too gnarly for the vast majority of Petersburgers as well. World Population Review estimates Petersburg’s population as nearly 5.5 million. (I suspect it is actually much higher than this, but that is another conversation.) So, proportionately, even fewer people in Russia’s “cultural capital” are worried about their rapidly vanishing constitutionally guaranteed rights than their comrades in Moscow and their Chinese frenemies in Hong Kong: 0.0003%, to be exact.

In the face of these real numbers, which he signally fails to mention, Trudolyubov cites public opinion polls, notoriously unreliable indicators in a highly manipulated authoritarian society like Russia, and his own vague “impressions.”

He also makes an assertion that is debatable and a promise he probably has no intention of keeping, to wit:

“Russian society is turning into a much more active player in Russia’s public life. Importantly, it is not limited to the political protests that have been taking place in Moscow for the past several weeks. The protests are just the most visible part of the change. There is exciting new art, there is a new wave of independent journalism, there is an entire universe of YouTube and other social media channels that are completely free of both pro-Kremlin and strictly oppositional politics (all of those trends deserve a special take, which we will provide).”

I will have been reporting on these “other Russias,” as I have dubbed them, for twelve years come this October. I know them as well as any “outsider” can know them. I will keep writing about them and translating dispatches from these other Russias as long as I am able.

Despite my interest in the other Russias and Russians, however, and my endless admiration for the sheer courage, tenacity, and intelligence of many of the real-life heroines and heroes who have made appearances on this website over the years, I knew the fair elections movement of 2011–2012 was a non-starter almost as soon as it kicked off, even though it was a nationwide grassroots movement, unlike the 2019 fair elections movement, which has been practically limited to Moscow.

I knew that for two reasons. First, the numbers of anti-Putinists showing their faces in public at protest rallies, “authorized” and “unauthorized,” were also minuscule as percentages of the general populace. Second, the “movement” was managed lackadaisically, with indecently long pauses between “authorized” rallies.

In Moscow, at least, there does seem to be a greater sense of urgency and intensity this time around, but the numbers of people showing up for rallies have been halved. Paradoxically, however, those people have been more willing to face police crackdowns, but I am not sure this is necessarily a good thing, politically and strategically.

Like Trudolyubov, I am happy to be mistaken. Unlike Trudolyubov, I have no sense that Russian society has become a bigger player than it was seven years ago. There was also a lot of new art, independent journalism, and social media savvy on the margins then as now.

The sad truth is that, unlike countries and territories populated by people of color, such as Hong Kong and Puerto Rico, Russia gets way more credit for every tiny gesture towards democracy, autonomy, and independence made by its supposedly “white” people, even though Russian society punches way below its weight when it comes to every possible measure of official and popular support for democracy, minorities, civil and human rights, progressive environmental policies, engaged art, cutting-edge education, grassroots-driven urban planning, you name it.

What Russia does have a lot of is flag twirlers who have ensconced themselves in plum jobs at western news outlets and think tanks, places where, correspondingly, you will not find a lot of people of color and people from the formerly colonized parts of the world. So, even though the Kremlin has made xenophobia, anti-Americanism, rampant homophobia, Islamophobic, anti-westernism, anti-liberalism, Russian Orthodox obscurantism, and aggressive covert and overt interventions into the affairs of other countries planks in its unwritten ideological platform, and Russia’s opposition has said almost nothing about any of it, much less organized protests against, say, the Kremlin’s criminal military involvement in the brutal ongoing murder of Syria’s pro-democracy movement, the so-called west, at least as represented by places like the Kennan Institute and media organizations like the BBC, has way more time and sympathy for all things Russian than it has for anything happening in countries and places dominated by people of color.

It would be strange of me, of all people, to argue for less interest in grassroots politics and culture in Russia, but a genuine curiosity should also involve being able to tell the fibbers and crypto-nationalists from the truth-tellers and democrats. // TRR

Thanks to the fabulous Mark Teeter for the heads-up. I am nearly certain he would have a different take on Trudolyubov’s essay, but in my Facebook newsfeed it ended up cheek by jowl with an article about today’s truly massive protests in Hong Kong.

All Roads Lead to Moscow?

674 versts from moscow.jpg “22 versts to Tsarskoye Selo. 673 versts to Moscow.” An 18th-century milepost in Petersburg. Photo by the Russian Reader

Moscow Trumps Russia: How Urban Renewal Has Thrown Society Backwards
Combating Russia’s “Maidan” Has Shaped the Moscow Style of Governance
Maxim Trudolyubov
Republic
November 29, 2018

The events of 2011–2014—protests against rigged elections in Russia, revolutions and civil wars in the Arab world, and the EuroMaidan in Kyiv—have had a profound effect on the discussion of what constitutes desirable social change, politicizing the debate. Society and state in Russia have each reached their own conclusions.

The attitude to the steps needed to change state and society for the better has taken different shapes in the grassroots and within the elite. The grassroots have been disillusioned and disenchanted, while the elite has identified a threat. The liberal community’s heightened interest in institutional reforms in Georgia in the noughties and the prospects for similar reforms in post-revolutionary Ukraine in the aftermath of 2014 has turned the Kremlin’s attitude towards them from mistrust to outright rejection.

Talk about how make the state work for society rather than for the elite, about what a state that would be focused on ordinary citizens might be like, quietly came to naught, yielding to talk of Russian political spinning techniques, China’s big data state, urbanism, and comfortable urban environments. In other words, the talk turned to the tools the state had at its disposal rather than to the meaningful questions asked by the general public.

Sidelining Institutions
Russia is still a place where the rules for elections change from one election to the next, laws are written as if they were political lampoons, the conditions of doing business are as unpredictable as the weather, and no one can quickly tell you what the right of private property means. You cannot say the right does not exist, but nor can you say it does exist. In 2018, the Kremlin is even personally involved in permitting and banning pop music concerts.

It is hard to say how the Kremlin measures stability in Russia, but apparently it believes the level of stability is still high. Nearly all the regional elections went as planned. Putin’s approval rating is still above fifty percent. The oligarchs are obedient. Everything is cool. But stability of the rule of law, and the rules of the game generally, are much more important in the long run than approval ratings and managed elections. As it has pursued official so-called stability, the Kremlin has in recent years continued its demolition of institutions and the rules of the game, the things that make long-term relations in society possible, meaning that the Kremlin has tried to score short-term victories by sacrificing a stable, certain future.

Stable institutions, such as protection of property rights, enforceability of contracts, and the rules of the game, would seemingly benefit the Russian elite itself. The Kremlin publicly calls for the repatriation of Russian capital, but it is hard to believe in its sincerty. How can money be repatriated when the rulers themselves (who also often double as capitalist moguls) are always busy redrafting the laws and regulations? It is simply impossible to make plans under this regime, and this applies to the people running the regime.

Fortifying the regime in the face of a possible homegrown “Maidan” has, in fact, sidelined and archaized institutions. This is not entirely accurate, however. Simply holding identical “elections” and tightening the screws would be too negative a program. Moscow also has a positive program. It does not involve internal structural transformations, but the top-down imposition of a new “civilizational” lifestyle. In reality, this new lifestyle is rife with restrictions on movement, freedom of speech, and even freedom of music. The city of Moscow is a successful example of the new approach, which is simultaneously an old approach because it is a traditional Muscovite approach.

The Politics of Municipal Improvement
In Moscow, municipal improvement is a rejoinder in the debate about institutional change. By repairing roads, constructing a new transit system, and achieving significant improvements in municipal beautification projects and the provision of amenities, which are often regarded positively by their users, the inhabitants of Moscow, the city has ultimately been tackling several problems at the same time. On the one hand, it tackled economic problems by employing Moscow’s huge construction sector at a time when the market was saturated and property values (a considerable source of the Russian elite’s wealth) threatened to collapse. It tackled political problems: the regime had to be strengthened. Recalling its experiment with the 2013 mayoral election, Moscow rejected even competition for show when the 2018 mayoral election rolled around. Candidates who could compete with Mayor Sergei Sobyanin in terms of media interest, if not in political terms, were kept off the ballot.

The city also tackled civic problems. Moscow has built new public spaces, whose architecture and landscaping encourages people to spend more time outside and in each other’s company. Meanwhile, the federal government has passed laws and regulations that have restricted the ways these beautiful spaces can be used by the public. It was once enough to notify the authorities of a protest rally, but now they must issue permits for such events. The powers of law enforcement agencies have been beefed up. Consequently, using these public spaces for their intended purpose, as venues for spontaneous discussions of politics and life, has been rendered nearly impossible. Whether this was the plan or not, the upshot has been that one arm of the state has emancipated and complicated public space while another arm of the state has restricted people’s ability to move freely around in public space, thus institutionally archaizing public life.

Zaryadye14 Zaryadye Park in Moscow, opened in 2017. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Most people get their information about Moscow from the municipal government. One has to look long and hard for independent perspectives. Moscow city hall has the Active Citizen social network and numerous local news media outlets in its pocket, which mirror each other, generating a constant atmosphere of approval. The Moscow press operates like the laugh track on TV sitcoms. Viewers realize it is a sound effect, but they laugh and applaud anyway. While urban renewal proceeds apace, the news media are impoverished.

Muscovites enjoy high-quality municipal services. Sometimes, the services are of such a high quality that they anticipate people’s needs, demonstrating city hall’s technocratic sophistication. Muscovites, who used to be dissatisfied subjects, have been transformed into happy clients while bypassing the stage of citizenship and grassroots civic involvement. The effect is the same. Urban renewal simplifies and archaizes civic behavior.

Moscow’s urban renewal program was meant not only to improve municipal services and show foreign tourists the beauty of the Russian capital but also to supply an alternative to grassroots activism aimed at the changing the rules of the game. The idea was to prove everything could also be done from the top down, and everyone would be happy. New public spaces could be fashioned, but so too could new laws that would make certain uses of them illegal, and everyone would be happy. While pursuing a program of urban renewal, you could also produce a rigidly authoritarian political regime, and everyone would be happy.

The conversation about social transformation in Russia has been conducted not only with word but also with physical actions as incarnated in bricks, stones, and tiles. Moscow’s parks, streets, and squares have been used as venues for modernizing urban space while strengthening the authoritarian civic order.

Two Poles: Moscow and the Maritime Territory
Providing friendly, efficient services and amenities for the people of Moscow is a considerable, genuine achievement, but it establishes a clear decision-making hierarchy in which ordinary people occupy the bottom rungs. Now the city has been giving them gifts that would be stupid and practically impossible to refuse, but later people will have to swallow something less desirable than wide sidewalks and convenient bus service.

Moscow has made a point of the putting social rights of its residents above their individual rights. The beautification of the city and the housing renovation program (i.e., the wholesale demolition of five-storey Soviet blocks of flats and the construction of new residential buildings) have proven that individual property rights are insignificant. The vast majority (around ninety percent) of the residents of the old five-storey houses predictably and understandably decided to exercise their right to more modern living space rather than their right to private property. The proprietors of the kiosks and shopping pavilions, demolished by the Sobyanin administration, tried to defend their rights in different ways. They challenged the city’s demolition order in the courts. They agreed to demolish their pavilions themselves in exchange for minimal compensation. They filed complaints with the European Court of Human Rights. Moscow, however, fully implemented its plan to rid its streets of the ugly, “uncivilized” shops on schedule.

Sobyanin’s Moscow is the Kremlin’s most successful political project, and it would be odd not to try and transfer this know-how to the whole of Russia. The Comfortable Urban Environment program is already underway. Federal authorities have allocated 85 billion rubles [approx. $1.3 billion] over three years (less than was spent on Moscow alone), and the regions have to match these funds.

But these efforts will be mere window dressing if each of the regional capitals fails to turn itself into “Moscow” in the civic sense, into a city of satisfied consumers who never think hard about where their “comfortable environment” comes from, a place where the trains run on time, but the lives and property of its people are administered by officials guided by constantly changing rules, rules only they know.

From the Kremlin’s perspective, it would be ideal to turn every major Russian city into a “Moscow.” But how do you reproduce Moscow? Moscow attracts over half the total flow of migration within Russia. Moscow is a region that grows due to an overabundance of people, resources, and tax revenues. Obviously, officials are betting on the fact that the capital of each economic macro-region will become a miniature Moscow, i.e., it will transform the dissatisfied residents of the outlands into satisfied users of what the new, improved capitals will have to offer. This, by the way, wholly jibes with Alexei Kudrin’s idea that Russia should focus on developing twenty urban agglomerations, and with the notion that there are millions of “superfluous” people scattered around the country.

This plan for concentrating Russia’s population in particular metropolitan areas, implemented naturally and spurred by the authorities, could be described as the desire to replace Russia with Moscow, meaning with a certain number of cities that reprise Moscow’s civic functions and could superficially come to resemble Moscow as well. The city halls of the selected major cities renovate their public spaces while the federal authorities draft laws on how to use these spaces in a civilized way.

The question of the plan’s effectiveness boils down to the independence and individual “modernization” of Russians. Everyone has their own individual, professional, and social benchmarks, just as they have their own means of communication. Moscow can continue seeing itself as the sole source of enlightenment and progress, but Russia is home to many economically and civically dynamic people capable of thinking for themselves.

A recent reminder of this has been the unwillingness of people in the Maritime Territory, Khabarovsk Territory, and other regions to behave at the polls according to the schemes imposed by Moscow. The Maritime Territory, where the rigged elections model will be tested again, symbolizes a different political realm, a place that is not Moscow, an independent region with a propensity for grassroots economic activity. On one pole is Moscow with its civilizational approach to the rest of the country; on the other is the country itself, with its own spontaneous rules. Top-down Moscow-style modernization still has competitors nowadays.

Maxim Trudolyubov is a columnist for Vedomosti and The New York Times International Edition and an editor at InLiberty. Translated by the Russian Reader

Russia Year Zero

Cat eating scraps from pizza box. May 24, 2016, Petersburg. Photo by the Russian Reader — Cat eating scraps from pizza box on May 24, 2016, in Petersburg. Photo by the Russian Reader

Zero Sum
When nothing is produced, all power belongs to the man who divides and distributes
Maxim Trudolyubov
Vedomosti
May 27, 2016

It is probably already clear to everyone that the implicit “social contract,” about whose existence it was customary to natter in the fat years, was a hoax. Rejecting political subjectivity, ordinary folks and not-so-ordinary folks, big business, and regional elites were able to enrich themselves and, in the consumerist sense, converge with Europe.

It was not, however, a one-off deal with a perpetually fixed rate of profit, but a protracted process. We voluntarily became political zeroes. We gave up free speech, the right to elect and be elected, and the right to demand accountability from our politicians, and part of the population gave up the right to funded pensions. But the unit of prosperity we got in return was given to us not as property but was lent to us. Now the government has collected the debt. The zeroes remain, but the unit will soon run out. The government has no other sources for funding projects, but unpredictable and expensive projects—military campaigns as in Syria, for example, and infrastructural projects like the Kerch Strait Bridge—are the whole point of Russian politics.

The authorities supported the population during the crisis of 2008, but by 2011, dissatisfaction with government policy and the Putin-Medvedev castling move had sparked protests. The Kremlin learned its lesson, and it is ordinary people who are now primarily bearing the burden of the crisis, not the state. Having surrendered their rights to the Kremlin, people will now have to surrender not only their pension savings but also their savings accounts and, so to speak, the fat they have saved up on their bodies if they do not decide to take back their political rights. People’s well-being is, in fact, the “source of growth” that President Putin has asked his economic advisers to find. Actually, he was kidding: the source has never been lost.

When the president, in May 2016, summons his economic council, having forgotten about its existence for two years or so, and says the country needs new sources of growth, how are we to understand this? How were we supposed to understand his proposal to reduce economic dependence on the oil price, which he voiced in the autumn of 2015? It is like offering to grow oneself a new liver after sixteen years of binge drinking.

The Kremlin has created the current situation by consistently rejecting any measures that could have, long ago, reduced dependence on oil and generated stable sources of growth beyond the extractive and defense industries. It is impossible to fix in a month what has been done over sixteen years. Moreover, the very same people have been summoned to do the fixing, people still divided by irreconcilable contradictions. What joint effort at seeking ways out of the crisis are Alexei Kudrin and Sergei Glazyev capable of mounting? The sum of their efforts will inevitably be zero.

It would appear this zero quite suits the Kremlin, as economist Konstantin Sonin argued in a recent interview with Slon.ru. Incidentally, efforts are also needed to maintain zero growth, and those efforts are being made. Certain malcontents might not like the “zero” economy, but the Kremlin really likes it, because it strengthens the power of the front office, where decisions about redistribution are made. When nothing is produced, all power belongs to the man who divides and distributes.

Translated by the Russian Reader