The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 21

MAKING MARTYRS

When Alexei Navalny flew back to Russia on 17 January 2021, I’m sure he knew he would be arrested and sent to jail. He had been poisoned five months earlier by the Russian secret police, the FSB, on the orders of Vladimir Putin. His crime was to reveal the corruption and self- enrichment of the president at the expense of the Russian nation.

I had myself travelled exactly the same path 18 years earlier, so I understood better than most why Navalny took the deliberate step of being imprisoned, possibly for a long time. As I explained earlier, I knew that when I confronted Putin in 2003, I was likely to be arrested.

I had pointed out the corruption in Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and Alexei Navalny had done the same. After he was poisoned, he had been flown for treatment to Germany and could easily have stayed in relative safety abroad. He chose to return because he had wanted to make a difference to the future of Russia, but he was arrested at the gates of Moscow airport. Like me, he was tried on nonsensical charges of embezzlement. A court in February 2021 sentenced him to three-and-a-half years in a labour camp; and in February 2022 he was put on trial again, facing charges that carried a maximum penalty of 15 years.

Will Navalny’s sacrifice change things? I hope so. I can say with certainty that my denunciation of corruption in the Kremlin, followed by my ten years as a political prisoner, made many more Russians aware of the big questions facing our country today. It gave me the opportunity to continue promoting the values of freedom and democracy. Putting Alexei Navalny in jail and keeping him there may seem like a solution for Putin, but it creates a very public martyr that the world will find hard to ignore.

For the Russian people, even those who dislike figures such as Navalny, there is a recognition that the willingness to suffer persecution and imprisonment is a token of integrity in the pursuit of a moral cause. Memories remain strong of Soviet-era dissidents such as Sergei Kovalev, Anatoly Shcharansky, Lyudmila Alekseeva and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov. Navalny in jail is a rallying point. For much of the Russian intelligentsia it makes the situation black and white – you can either support Putin and the continuation of the status quo in Russia, or you can support the fight for democracy, through Navalny.

There have been calls for me to take a more central role in opposition politics, which is something I have considered doing in the past. But I do not wish to repeat the example of Boris Berezovsky, who came to London and railed against Putin without achieving much, before ultimately asking the Kremlin to allow him to return to Russia and dying before he could do so. Instead, I am committed to working with all the representatives of the progressive opposition, including Navalny, Garry Kasparov, Andrei Pivovarov, Dmitry Gudkov and others. I want to contribute something constructive, taking an objective view of East–West relations, to propose solutions that will benefit the people of Russia, America and the world. Now, with history hastening its march, I am convinced more than ever that the future lies with us. There is ample and growing evidence that the Putin regime is becoming desperate, resorting to ever greater violence and repression to thwart the aspirations of the Russian people. The decision to invade Ukraine was an irresponsible gamble with genuine potential to rebound on Putin and his cronies. This is the moment to find hope and to take action.

Alexei Navalny at a court hearing in Moscow, February 2021

In the spring and summer of 2021, there was a very public display of the Kremlin’s despairing struggle to hold back the tide of change. The wall of an electrical substation in St Petersburg’s Pushkarsky Park became the setting for an exploration of memory, truth and freedom that summed up the dynamic of a regime gripped by panic. Overnight on 14 July, a banner appeared on the substation wall. In the style of the Beatles’ Revolver album, it depicted a series of faces that most Russians would recognise, including the murdered investigative journalists, Anna Politkovskaya and Anastasia Baburova, the murdered opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, the slain human rights activist, Natalya Estemirova, and other victims of the struggle for freedom of expression.

The inscription on the banner, ‘Heroes of recent times’, was a homage to those who had been brave enough to ask questions of Vladimir Putin’s regime and have lost their lives as a consequence. It was also a reference to a mural that previously, briefly, had adorned the substation wall, a smiling image of Alexei Navalny, titled ‘A hero of the new era’.

The people in the banners and the murals are the folk the Kremlin fears most, men and women that Putin’s government would like society to forget. The Navalny image was discovered at 6am on 28 April and had been painted over by 10.30am. The banner, too, was swiftly removed by the authorities and its creators were tracked down and fined.

The short-lived banner honouring ‘Heroes of Recent Times’ in St Petersburg’s Pushkarsky Park

An official removes Alexei Navalny’s likeness from the same St Petersburg wall

But almost immediately, a new image appeared in the park; this time not a victim, but an enforcer. The anonymous serviceman, dressed in camouflage gear, equipped for battle, with his face hidden behind a balaclava, could have come from any one of the Kremlin’s tools of repression: the OMON riot police who bludgeon and arrest those who dare to voice their opinions on the streets, the masked FSB agents who raid the apartments of journalists and businessmen, or the ‘little green men’ sent undercover to invade foreign countries. The inscription now read, ‘A hero of our time’, the title of Mikhail Lermontov’s famous novel of 1840 whose main character, Pechorin, is recognised by Russians as the symbol of the superfluous man who can find no place in a stagnating, backward-looking society.

In the weeks that followed Navalny’s return to Russia, the state’s masked and camouflaged enforcers had been deployed in cities throughout the country, making over 13,000 arrests in response to the nationwide protests against the corruption and theft that Navalny had exposed. The hulking riot police in their thick body armour and visored helmets, universally known as ‘cosmonauts’, remain anonymous, unworried by personal responsibility, dispensing violence with impunity. But for Putin, there is a dilemma. His modus operandi has been to allow his cronies to pilfer from public funds as a reward for keeping him in power. If they go too far and their greed is embarrassingly publicised, he would normally dispense discreet punishments to curb their appetites. To do so now, however, would be to admit that Navalny and his fellow corruption-busters were in the right, to risk appearing weak in the face of the opposition. With his back against the wall, Putin chose instead to abandon restraint. He sent Navalny to jail on trumped up charges, then set about destroying his movement and his followers. Using the pretext of the COVID crisis to outlaw demonstrations, the Kremlin ruled that any public gathering would henceforth require an official permit and then routinely refused to grant these permits for opposition protests, allowing the cosmonauts a free hand to intimidate, beat and arrest.

Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, the FBK, was singled out for denunciation. ‘Under the guise of liberal slogans,’ declared the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office, ‘[it] is engaged in creating conditions for destabilising the social and the socio-political situation … with the intent to overthrow the foundations of the constitutional order.’ Driven by the fear of a ‘colour revolution’ like the ones that so terrified Putin when they occurred in Georgia and Ukraine, the Kremlin declared Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation an ‘extremist group’, a designation previously reserved for terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda. Anyone deemed to have been associated with FBK or its leaders in the 12 months leading up to the designation was subject to retrospective prosecution and a ban on standing for public office. ‘Association’ was defined as anything from attending a then-legal demonstration, to posting a supportive message online or merely ‘liking’ a message by someone else. Sharing FBK’s investigative reports was now considered ‘disseminating extremist material’.

The catch-all nature of the legislation gave the Kremlin an alarmingly free rein to extend its crackdown. Two of my own media organisations, MBK Media and Open Media, were promptly targeted. These were independent news sources, providing uncensored information to a Russian public that is otherwise deprived of non-state-sponsored reporting. When their online presence was again blocked in August 2021, there was no official announcement and no explanation, other than an indication that it was part of a wider move to target websites which ‘incite unrest, extremist activities, or participation in unauthorised rallies’. Vitaly Borodin, whose Kremlin-backed organisation’s denunciations provided the pretext for the crackdown, declared publicly that investigative journalists are worse than terrorists. Under such circumstances, Russia under Putin has become a killing field. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international NGO that tracks attacks on the press across the globe, at least 58 reporters have been murdered in connection with their work in Russia since 1992. Against a background of such violence, I decided it was no longer possible to continue operating; to do so would put the editorial staff of MBK Media and Open Media at too great a risk. In my statement at the time, I warned that ‘these political repressions, including the silencing of journalists and human-rights defenders, demonstrate the regression of Putin’s regime and of Putin personally towards the archaic Soviet model, with the added factor of his own personal greed and that of his ruling circle.’

A very different ‘Hero of Our Time’ is revealed

Even before the Navalny ruling, the Russian Prosecutor’s Office had declared my political movement Open Russia and my philanthropic organisations – the Future of Russia Foundation, the Khodorkovsky Foundation, the Oxford Russia Fund and European Choice – to be ‘undesirable organisations’. The Khodorkovsky Foundation has for over 20 years helped thousands of children from disadvantaged families to get a good education in Russia and in top European universities. The Oxford Russia Fund, which provides scholarships for Russian students to study at Oxford University, has helped hundreds of young Russian men and women by covering their fees, accommodation and travel costs. Closing down these schemes only increased Russia’s isolation, depriving her citizens of engagement and dialogue with Europe. They have forced many hopeful and active young people to leave their own country. Unfortunately, the trend of intimidation and political repression is growing ever greater.

After the initial onslaught on Navalny, myself and my associates, an increasing number of independent media platforms has been targeted. Meduza and the Dossier Center had their websites blocked. The investigative media outlet, Proekt, was banned in retaliation for its embarrassing revelations about Putin and other officials. Proekt had carried exposés of Putin’s brutal placeman in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the interior minister, Vladimir Kolokoltsev; it had reported on the Kremlin’s bungled response to the COVID crisis and had run a carefully sourced story in 2020 revealing that Putin has an unacknowledged daughter by a secret mistress. Eight Proekt journalists, including its editor, Roman Badanin, were added to a register of ‘foreign agents’, along with the staff of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The ruling made it illegal for other news organisations to link to or quote from their reports, on pain of criminal charges.

As long ago as 2001, the threat to free speech in Russia had prompted me to set up a training scheme for young journalists, in which promising reporters from regional newspapers, television and radio could learn from prominent figures in the industry. Guest lecturers from independent journals such as Novaya Gazeta, Kommersant and the online gazeta.ru tried to develop a spirit of questioning curiosity in our young journalists, but found the task harder than they had expected. One lecturer said he struggled to convince the trainees that they should always distrust the official version of stories promulgated by the central or local authorities. He said they had lost the journalist’s natural reflex to question the motives of politicians and PR men, so he had to make them promise always to ask themselves, ‘Who benefits from this story?’

In the years since then, independent-minded TV channels and newspapers have been targeted, threatened or taken over by Putin-friendly billionaires. Their editors are now made to attend regular ‘discussions’ with the Kremlin’s media-oversight team, at which their editorial lines are dictated to them. The editors are instructed to avoid reporting issues of economic and social shortcomings and are pointed instead towards puff pieces about the government. They are instructed to adopt a critical approach to the West, promoting the perception that the Western democracies are in social and moral decline, while Russians should be thankful to Putin that they live in a stable, morally upright nation. Konstantin Ernst, the chief executive of the main state TV channel, Perviy Kanal, and the man who orchestrated the grandiose patriotism of the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, explained the media’s role in terms redolent of Bolshevik ideology. ‘The main task of television today,’ Ernst declared, ‘is to mobilise the country’,’ adding that ‘informing the country’ is merely ‘task number two’.

The result of the Kremlin’s new media-propaganda nexus is a caricatural representation of an America riven by racial injustice, where rampant Russophobia is surpassed only by identity politics so out of control they risk triggering a full-blown ethnic war. As for Western Europe, the picture painted by the Russian media is of societies dominated by LGBTQ+ activists, which they depict as a degenerate ‘Gayropa’. The influential, pro-Kremlin TV presenter Dmitry Kiselev, known as ‘Putin’s mouthpiece’, announced on air that gays ‘should be prohibited from donating blood and sperm, and in the case of a road accident, their hearts should be either buried or cremated as unsuitable for the prolongation of life’. During the Tokyo Olympics, Olga Skabeyeva, the main presenter of Rossiya 1’s primetime talk show, Sixty Minutes, delivered a startlingly homophobic commentary over images of Tom Daley, Britain’s gay, gold-medal winning diver, while Alexei Zhuravlyov, a member of the Russian parliament, explained that the Russian competitor came only third because he was ‘constantly forced to puke at the sight of those queers’.

Putin’s increasing reliance on stoking chauvinistic Russian nationalism to maintain his support base in difficult economic times has led him to depend on ever-more extreme expressions of xenophobia. America and Europe are now depicted as spoiling for a fight with Russia, inciting anti-Russian unrest in former Soviet republics considered part of Russia’s ‘near-abroad’. In recent years, Putin has sought to propagate a simplistic narrative of jealous foreign rivals, desperate to hurt Russia. ‘It has always been thus,’ he wrote in 2021:

from times of ancient folklore through to our modern history. Our opponents or potential opponents have always used very ambitious, power-hungry people to attack Russia. People, including Russians, are growing tired. In all countries of the world, people’s irritation has grown, and there is displeasure, including about living conditions and income levels. When a person’s living standards decline, he starts blaming the authorities … And, of course, people in Europe, in the US and in other countries are trying to take advantage of that.

As always, truth is the first casualty of war. Nuanced and balanced reporting has no place in the new polarised media landscape. Investigative journalism in Russia, seeking to correct the Kremlin’s narratives and hold the powerful to account, is a dangerous business; but a small group of courageous men and women continue to do so, upholding the honourable tradition of Politkovskaya, Baburova, Estemirova and others. When the leading business newspaper, Vedomosti, was taken over by a Putin crony in 2020, many of the editorial staff resigned in protest to found their own journal, VTimes. Articles on corruption and economic mismanagement by the Kremlin brought swift retaliation. In 2021, the Kremlin placed VTimes on its list of ‘foreign agents’, with a consequent, disastrous withdrawal of advertisers. Announcing that the journal could no longer continue to function, the editors acknowledged defeat in the unequal struggle against state control.

When we launched VTimes last year, we announced that we were creating not a propaganda tool, but a high-quality independent media outlet and a platform for the free exchange of constructive opinions. We are proud to say that we achieved that aim. But we have now seen for ourselves that the authorities have no time for professional, non-government-controlled media … The ‘foreign agent’ label has destroyed our business model. Advertisers are unwilling to cooperate with a ‘foreign agent’ and we cannot blame them for that.

The ‘foreign agent’ law, which I mentioned earlier, allows the authorities to penalise any media outlet, NGO or independent organisation that receives funds, including even nominal grants and advertising, from non-Russian sources. It requires them to label anything they publish – from lengthy articles and reports to one-line tweets – with a lengthy, sinister-sounding description of their ‘foreign agent’ status, making their material virtually untouchable. Distributing or quoting from it without appending the 22-word ‘foreign agent’ label in typeface twice as big as normal could entail serious legal consequences, with heavy penalties, including prison sentences for repeat offenders.

Ministers and senior Kremlin officials reinforced the hysteria surrounding independent journalism by alleging that Russian non-state media sites are tools of the West. The director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, accused Proekt, Insider and iStories of working for Western spy agencies, claiming that the Navalny poisoning was the work of Western agents, carried out so that troublemaking journalists could make Russia look bad, and warning of further such ‘attacks’ in the future. ‘We expect new provocations ahead of the [2021] parliamentary elections. We have information about which points will be hit, but we will not say anything publicly yet. The United States is looking for an external enemy, so they point the finger at us.’

Naryshkin alleged that the source of much independent journalism, the Netherlands-based investigative and fact-checking organisation, Bellingcat, was a front for Western intelligence. ‘Bellingcat is needed to exert pressure,’ Naryshkin wrote. ‘They use dishonest methods. The information they use in their investigations is false and unverified. This group includes a number of former intelligence agents. They’re prepared to carry out any task for money. Bellingcat, Navalny’s organisations, Proekt, iStories, the Insider — they’re all interconnected. It’s a complex [intelligence] operation that involves great skill and effort.’

When journalists and activists have tried to defend themselves against the Kremlin’s legal intimidation, they have found their advisers subjected to threats and violence, further darkening the outlook for civil society in Russia. The human rights lawyers, Team 29, which represented defendants in several politically motivated cases, including that of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, were forced into liquidation following harassment by the authorities. Team 29’s website was blocked by the Russian censor, Roskomnadzor, allegedly for linking to material from the Prague-based NGO ‘Freedom of Information Society’, a designated ‘undesirable organisation’. In an interview with the Meduza website, Team 29 lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov spoke of the Kremlin campaign against them. ‘[We] received threats. They said we were a bone in the throat not only of investigators, but also of other people, people in government agencies. Therefore, the decision was made to bomb us with all their might.’ Meduza itself has remained operational only by having its headquarters in Latvia, reducing staff salaries and appealing for readers’ donations.

Foreign journalists in Russia have also been targeted. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was hit with a $2.4 million fine, which it challenged in the European Court of Human Rights; but before the court could consider the case, the Kremlin had frozen RFE/RL’s bank account and sent bailiffs to seize property from its Moscow bureau. In August 2021, the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford was expelled with no explanation after more than two decades covering the country. Rainsford believes that her detailed knowledge of Russia, her fluent Russian and her ability to speak directly to ordinary Russians were perceived as unwelcome by the Kremlin:

The reality is that they don’t want people like that here. It’s much easier to have fewer people here who understand and who can talk directly to people and hear their stories … to have people who don’t speak the language, don’t know the country so deeply. [I]t is indicative of an increasingly difficult and repressive environment. [They’re] coming for the press, [for] Russian journalists, the few who are left that have been trying to report independently, freely, in extremely difficult circumstances, about Russia to their own people.’

OVD-Info, a Russian non-profit organisation that keeps track of legal data, reported that the ‘scale of detentions, administrative and criminal prosecution in connection with the protests of January–February 2021 is by far the largest in the entire history of modern Russia; it demonstrates the complete lack of readiness on the part of the authorities to respect the rights of citizens to freedom of peaceful assembly and, conversely, their readiness to resist protests by any means, including illegal ones.’ According to Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center, Putin has ‘decided to lock in the results of his first 20 years in power by rolling back liberalism in domestic and foreign policy. The state is now very sincere in its brutality and is not prepared for any more efforts of normalisation.’

The Kremlin’s dependence on force to maintain its grip on society doesn’t come cheap. The state’s need for a loyal and ruthless security apparatus to enforce the application of arbitrary, unpopular laws is reflected in the greatly increased budgets for the security services. A 2020 investigation by Proekt revealed the exponentially growing numbers of Russian citizens employed to control their fellow citizens’ behaviour and being paid higher than average wages to do so. The FSB has seen its budget increase year on year, increasing by 70 per cent since 2012, as more and more heavily equipped riot police are despatched on to the streets. The men in the balaclavas may currently have the upper hand in Russia, but the fact that they are needed reveals the weakness at the heart of the Kremlin. Bereft of ideas and ideals, with an open-minded and determined young generation rising up against them, Putin and his cronies will continue to live in fear.

The reason for the crackdown on free speech and the media is not hard to discern. Independent journalists pose no threat to the Russian people; quite the contrary – by creating a culture of accountability they work in society’s interest. They do, however, scare those in high places who have secrets to hide. Vitaly Borodin, the Kremlin ‘expert’ who likened reporters to terrorists, has done his utmost to discredit the journalists at Open Media by accusing them of being a vehicle for my political revenge. ‘[They] are financed by Khodorkovsky, a fugitive oligarch, who’s currently trying to pull off some kind of political coup with Navalny’s help. How come Khodorkovsky suddenly decided to become a journalist? He’s certainly not a journalist by trade – he’s a crook and a villain.’

Putin uses people like me and Navalny to scare those Russian citizens who have swallowed the Kremlin’s indoctrination. But there is a new generation emerging, young Russians who were born after the end of the Soviet Union, who have known only the rule of Putin and his cronies. Opinion polls show that these young people have low levels of trust in the current regime; for them, it is not enough for Putin to boast that he is the man who ‘ended the chaos of the 1990s’. The new generation came of age after that; they grew up during the oil boom of the early 2000s and have suffered the subsequent collapse in living standards, the degradation in civil freedoms, and the increasing reliance on base nationalism and international aggression. Such posturing may work with older Russians, but not with the young generation. The award of the 2021 Nobel Prize to the independent Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, editor of the courageous investigative newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, was a boost from the international community to the cause of freedom of expression in Russia.

Putin has become trapped by the extremist element of his support base, people he had previously been able to play off against more moderate voices. The extremists are now dictating policy and the Kremlin is terrified that it has lost touch with young Russians who have no truck with scare stories about the West or warnings about the supposed moral degradation of society. A July 2021 poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre, VTsIOM, showed clearly that the under-30s reject the Kremlin’s demonisation of personal freedoms, including the right to same-sex marriage.

The Kremlin’s panicked response has been to try to prevent people accessing ‘undesirable’ news from outside Russia. The vaunted ‘sovereign internet’ project is a Russian version of China’s ‘Great Firewall’, isolating the country from the outside world, scouring social networks for unwelcome material. But it is an unwinnable battle. Putin has neutralised the print media and terrestrial broadcasters, but he is struggling to control information online. He has restricted Facebook and Twitter; he has closed down news websites operating in Russia; but he has not been able completely to block overseas sources and independent Russian sites have continued to operate by moving their operations to Latvia and Lithuania. For those Russians willing to seek out alternatives to the Kremlin’s lies – mostly the young, educated, urban generation – there is information available. They can see for themselves the atrocities that Putin has committed in Ukraine, and the intermingling of Russian and Ukrainian families – tens of millions have relatives over the border – has resulted in an unstoppable wave of damning mobile-phone images flowing into the country.

The result has been the emergence of two populations in Russia – the ‘TV population’, the compliant majority who consume and believe Putin’s propaganda; and the ‘internet population’, a growing minority, who want to make their own minds up. These are the people who staged the public demonstrations against the war in Ukraine, risking arrest and a record that will restrict their future access to employment. Families have been split by arguments between older, pro-Putin parents and independent-minded children. It has caused acrimony, but the subject is at least being discussed and, as more information emerges about the crimes and failures of Putin’s war, the debate will widen.

The experience of Chechnya, where Putin spent years struggling to subdue a defiant nation, demonstrated the impact on public opinion of growing Russian casualties. Mothers of soldiers who perished in the fighting formed pressure groups that the Kremlin found hard to silence, and something similar is happening again now. The Russian constitution states that only professional soldiers will be sent into war zones – conscripts are specifically exempted. But on social media, there are numbers of mothers testifying that their sons have been sent into battle, having been falsely told they were taking part in an exercise. Unlike the geographically and ethnically remote Chechnya, Ukraine is a next-door country populated by fellow Slavs, so the emotional impact will be even more powerful.