A COUNTRY ’S TR A JECTORY
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Every country’s history has turning points that mark the end of one period and the beginning of another. In recent Russian history, there were three events that stand out as turning points in the country’s post-com-munist development.
The first turning point was the shelling of the Russian parliament in October 1993, which led to the establishment of the personalized power system, reflected in the adoption of a Constitution that legitimized top down rule. In fact, Putin’s one-man regime was born not when Yeltsin gave him power but in October 1993, when the grounds for political struggle and political pluralism were liquidated.
The second turning point came in the autumn of 2003 with the arrest and imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. This event signaled Russia’s turn toward state capitalism and the merger of government and owner-ship rules, this time under the security agencies’ control.
Finally, in May 2012, the arrest of ordinary demonstrators who took part in the peaceful Bolotnaya Square protest, and the subsequent riot
charges pursued against them, signaled the authorities’ shift to a new stage. Observers underestimated the importance of this event: it signaled the reemergence in Russia of the phenomenon of political prisoners. It was also a benchmark signaling the shift from a soft authoritarianism that tolerated limited dissent to a much more repressive style of government with a tendency to grow even more repressive over time.
In the “Bolotnaya” case, the authorities grabbed a handful of people out of the crowd, or apprehended them afterward, and have been holding them in prison for nearly a year and a half without succeeding in proving any case against them. The public investigation of their cases, initiated by the opposition Party RPR-PARNAS with the participation of civil so-ciety organizations, proved that the prisoners are innocent and that they neither provoked a riot nor took part in clashes with the police. In fact, the independent investigation proved that there were not riots at all, but brutal attacks by the police on demonstrators. The majority of the ar-restees in fact received severe beatings at the hands of the riot police.
In the end, even the police refused to support charges against the pris-oners. None of this, however, had any influence on the court’s decision to keep the accused in detention.
The authorities have made it clear that these people are their hostages and will stay in prison, as if doing so were a way to tell the public that “any of you could be in their place.” The case is further confirmation of the Rus-sian court system’s degradation, as well as proof that the courts, together with the Investigative Committee, have become a key tool of repression in the state’s hands. By taking ordinary people (not even political activists) hostage, the authorities have shown that they are ready to use state terror against their own people in order to keep their grip on power secure.
Over the past twenty years, Russia has gone from being a country thinking about democracy and law to a country in which the government puts people in prison for attempting to assert their constitutional rights.
Russian society understands the fact that, twenty years after collapse of communism, there are once again political prisoners in Russia. In Oc-tober 2013, 45 percent of Russians polled agreed that there are political prisoners. Only 28 percent refused to admit their existence. To be sure, while society recognizes the problem of political prisoners, it is not ready to demand their release—yet.
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The low level of public protest against the reemergence of political prisoners in Russia has led the authorities to conclude that this tactic works. No doubt, they will continue down this road. Once a regime be-gins to follow the Law of Repression, it can’t stop. The hope that Putin’s regime might change course and pursue an open society is a chimera.
Why should it, if society does not protest?
What the authorities did after the Bolotnaya case proved that there are no limits to the degree of repression to which they will subject soci-ety, if necessary, and that no one should feel absolutely safe. The court system and law enforcement organs could distort the formal rules any way they wish, so there are in effect no rules at all. This has in turn cre-ated a new atmosphere in Russia. The authorities’ refusal to acknowledge even the basic rule of law has taught society to follow the same logic and to use aggression unchecked by any legal or moral limits. The authori-ties are teaching society the law of the jungle—that one must use force to survive.
True, after imprisoning innocents from the summer of 2012 through December 2013, the authorities let some (but only some!) of the political prisoners out of jail under an amnesty declared by Putin. The Kremlin, apparently, decided that Russians had learned their lesson, and that even angry people would think twice before taking to the streets in future.
Society returned to its previous passivity.
Thus Putin restored control over the country without having to esca-late the degree of coercion, at least for the moment. The whip was placed in a corner—until it’s needed next time. The Soviet Kremlin would also declare amnesties and free people from prison, but these moves never signaled a change in the nature of the Soviet regime.
For this reason, one should not be deceived by the Kremlin’s tactics, which include imitation of a political “softening.” The system of person-alized power can’t stop the Law of Repression. To do so would cause it to be perceived as weak, and the “weak are beaten,” as President Putin likes to remind everyone.
Besides the Law of Repression, we may soon see another law at work:
the Law of Vicious Circles. Violence from the top may be answered with violence from the bottom. Russia is entering a period when the authori-ties themselves are pushing the country toward a much more aggressive,
confrontational style of behavior—not just on the part of the authori-ties but also within society. The authoriof the authori-ties succeeded in turning many of the cultivated and intelligent young people at Bolotnaya into pris-oners. But will they also succeed in dealing with the angry mob that is the inevitable result of the way of life and survival strategy they are cultivating in Russia? Unjustified repression always creates a desire for revenge; this vicious circle is a long-standing Russian political tradition, and it continues today. That is why the Kremlin is trying to restrain this repressive machine, but the machine may acquire a logic of its own…
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