The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 22

A BRIGHTER FUTURE

I firmly believe that Russia is not doomed to remain in thrall to the repressive personalised model of autocracy that has been imposed on her by Vladimir Putin. I am convinced that my homeland can become a normal country, blessed by the benefits of market- oriented liberal democracy. There are some who claim such a transformation is impossible, that it is precluded by history, geography and the mentality of the Russian people. When I was in New York many years ago, I met with a prominent correspondent from the New York Times, whose ancestors had emigrated from Russia at the start of the twentieth century. He told me that Russians are ‘genetically unfit for democracy’, that Russians need a father figure in the form of a strong, autocratic ruler who will both punish them and protect them. But it is not only Americans who have sacrificed themselves in defence of the universal rights proclaimed by the US Declaration of Independence; Russians, too, have fought and died for ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. And sooner or later, the Russian people will build a true democracy for themselves and for their children.

It has been traditional in Russian historiography to equate democracy with the European ‘West’ and autocratic despotism with the Asiatic ‘East’. It is not that we believe these stereotypes to be accurate descriptions of today’s geopolitical reality, simply that they have become shorthand in our history for the two models of governance we feel we have been torn between. Russia sits geographically at the intersection of East and West but, for 500 years, the West has been the more important influence on her. There is every likelihood, even in today’s difficult times, that Russia will cement her enduring cultural and ideological union with the Euro-Atlantic civilisation she belongs to.

Shortly before my arrest in October 2003, I reflected on the weight of Russia’s history that makes our challenge so much greater than that of Western nations. ‘Our country has a history of serfdom and slavery. A very brief exception to this ended recently,’ I wrote, referring to the democratic experiment of the 1990s. ‘And, unfortunately, the psychology of society is the psychology of serfdom. In this situation, the responsibility of a successful businessman is to support the democratic process, regardless of its potential problems. This is the moral duty of people – a duty to our own children to take part in this process.’ Despite my optimism for the future, I did not disguise or play down the damaging impact of centuries of autocratic rule in Russia, both on the political and judicial structures of the state and on the minds of the Russian people.

Regrettably, we still do not have the institutions of civil society, which would allow us to hand this function over to political parties and public organizations. For a society like ours, with a history like Russia’s, this is normal. We have to understand this, but we also have to struggle to change it. First of all, through education – preparing the future generation. We must say that we have a choice … a real choice: between people in military uniforms and a civil society. Our strength is pretty much equal. And the problem is not that one side has military uniforms and weapons while the other side has nothing. The problem is the mentality.

I set up Open Russia, to help create the missing institutions of a strong civil society and – even more importantly – to change the ‘mentality of slavery’ that I identified as holding back the nation’s progress. This is what the New York Times correspondent was referring to when he told me that Russia could never be a democracy. He was expressing a point of view known as historical determinism, or path determinism, which states that Russia’s destiny is fixed and can never be changed – that Russia’s history and the Russian mentality mean it must forever remain a despotic, centralised autocracy.

Let’s look at the historical evidence for this. It is a fact that up until the middle of the thirteenth century, the city states of Novgorod, Kiev, Pskov and elsewhere had been developing a participatory form of governance in which citizens were allowed to have their say, laws were respected and the princes who ruled them could be removed from power by the people. It wasn’t democracy as we know it today, but it was similar to what was happening in the rest of Europe. Then, in 1237, disaster struck. The Mongol hordes, highly militarised warriors from East Asia, stormed into Russian lands, capturing and enslaving the population. The Mongol Yoke would last for 240 years, disrupting Russia’s economy and setting back her development as a European state.

It is a long-accepted shibboleth of our thinking that Russia needs to be governed by the iron fist; that her vast size and ethnic, linguistic and national diversity make her unsuitable to freedom and democracy. For these reasons, even Catherine the Great, who began her reign as a champion of liberal ideas, ended up endorsing the old system of autocracy.

The possessions of the Russian Empire extend upon the globe to 32 degrees of latitude, and to 165 of longitude. The Sovereign is absolute, for no authority but the power centred in his single person can act with the vigour proportionate to the extent of such a vast dominion. The extent of the dominion requires that absolute power be vested in the one person who rules over it … All other forms of government whatsoever would not only be prejudicial to Russia, but would provoke its entire ruin.

What could be clearer? Russia, Catherine asserted, is too big and too unruly ever to be suited to democracy; only the strong hand of centralised autocracy can keep such a disparate, centripetal empire together and maintain order among her people.

For their part, the Bolsheviks were little different. They, too, imposed a despotic centralised rule that enslaved the very workers and peasants they had claimed to liberate. Writing in the 1960s, the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman compared Russia to a ‘slave girl’ held captive by Lenin’s tyrannical zealots:

Lenin’s intolerance, his contempt for freedom, the fanaticism of his faith, his cruelty towards his enemies, were the qualities that brought victory to his cause … and Russia followed him – willingly at first, trustfully – along a merry intoxicating path lit by the burning estates of the landowners. Then she began to stumble, to look back, ever more terrified of the path stretching before her. But the grip of his iron hand leading her onwards grew tighter and tighter … While the West was fertilised with freedom, Russia’s evolution was fertilised by the growth of slavery.

Vladimir Putin has inherited and exploited the form of governance established by his tsarist and socialist predecessors. Like the Mongols, like Catherine and like Lenin, he too wields autocratic power, arguing that the Yeltsin years of botched democracy are proof that Russia needs strong rule from above. But our nation’s centuries of autocracy have been paralleled by another current of thought. Russia’s so-called Westernisers have argued for the rejection of despotism and a decisive turn towards Western values – European-style constitutionalism and social justice. It was a view that has found plenty of support among the Russian intelligentsia and is a tradition to which I count myself an adherent today.

It is true that the model of governance in Russia for almost a millennium has been autocracy, albeit with fairly powerful local self-government that was not destroyed until the time of Stalin. But this does not mean Russia cannot change; she is not condemned to remain forever outside the community of free, democratic nations.

Putin is the latest in the line of Russian autocrats and there are indications that he will be the last. The world is changing; no country – not even North Korea – can hide its archaic practices from the eyes of the world. Where Soviet leaders once retreated behind a wall of secrecy, keeping their abuses hidden and their people in ignorance, Russia today has been swept by the winds of transparency. The outside world can see in, and the Russian people have more chance to see out. Putin’s response has been to increase internal repression, crack down on opposition, and crush individuals and businesses that don’t toe the line. It is the behaviour of a leader who knows he is surrounded by inimical forces, retreating deeper into his bunker, ordering his timorous generals to go out and beat back the unstoppable enemy advance.

Putin uses the myth that the Yeltsin years are proof that a liberal economic order and democracy are not feasible for Russia and that only he and his hardline model of centralised autocracy can keep Russia safe. But justice is the basic moral imperative for successful government and independent polls have shown that most Russians believe the Kremlin leadership is corrupt, motivated not by love for Russia but by self-enrichment. On a moral level, the regime is disowned even by its usual supporters, a significant indicator that real political change is imminent. It is no longer ‘stability and continuity at all costs’ that the Russian people crave; our country yearns for reform.

According to human rights experts, as many as one in six of Russia’s entrepreneurs have been put on trial; prisons hold thousands of them, many of them victims of fabricated legal suits, facilitated by a corrupt criminal justice system. The Levada Center think tank calculates that, in any given year, more than 15 per cent of Russians are forced to bribe bureaucrats and other agents of the state. The country is ruled by Putin’s personal clique, elected by no one and devoid of any legal authority; parliament is run by one party, the United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin, which anyone who wants to be properly assured of their business’s future has to support in some way or other. Such constraints have discouraged the most enterprising members of society, depressed economic activity and filled a vital cohort of the population with resentment for the regime.

The Russian Federation needs new areas of development; it needs modern infrastructure, cheap and fast transport links, and modern industry. None of this is possible unless Russia emerges from the isolation it has been pushed into by the current regime. The resources to achieve all this exist; they simply need to be utilised in a rational manner, rather than bartered for the loyalty of the crooks and cronies of the Kremlin.

In March 2021, I was in London, exiled from my country and waiting by the telephone. It had been a couple of hours since I had last heard from Moscow and I was getting anxious. When the fate of your homeland is at stake, living in exile is an ordeal.

The news I was hoping to hear was from the Open Russia movement, which was taking part in a conference of municipal representatives called to discuss the activities of independent council deputies and their plans for the next round of elections. It was a run-of-the-mill event that in normal countries would attract little attention, a fleeting mention in the media – think, a Lib Dem discussion forum in the UK, or a Democratic strategy group in the US. But Russia in 2021 was not a normal country; things are different there. At 10am Moscow time, the conference began its proceedings and a few minutes later, armed police burst in, yelling, ‘Don’t move! You are all detained!’

Two hundred men and women, young and old, delegates and journalists, were dragged away and bundled into police buses. They were respectable folk – people like Ilya Yashin, Council Leader of Moscow’s Krasnoselsky District; the ex-mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Roizman; the executive director of Open Russia, Andrei Pivovarov; the publicist, Vladimir Kara-Murza; and municipal deputy, Yulia Galyamina – but that didn’t save them. No one was given the chance to object. Yulia tried to ask the police what she had done wrong – ‘I didn’t break any law; I’m a municipal deputy, an elected representative’ – but she got no answer. Only after they had been booked and cautioned in a Moscow police station were the arrestees told that their crime was ‘associating with an undesirable organisation’.

Russian police arrested 200 opposition politicians and municipal deputies for taking part in a forum with an ‘undesirable’ organisation, Open Russia

The concept of ‘undesirable’ is a complicated issue that Vladimir Putin has made simple: in Putin’s Russia, the Kremlin decides who is desirable and who is not. Independent political parties, institutes and think tanks fall unsurprisingly into the latter category. My own affiliated organisations, the Open Russia Civic Movement and the Institute of Modern Russia, are allowed to work freely abroad, but in Russia they are proscribed. Cooperating with either of them makes you liable to detention under Article 20.33 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation; you get a 15,000-rouble fine for your first ‘offence’ followed by escalating penalties if you don’t learn the error of your ways.

In the days that followed the attack on the municipal forum, the police forcibly entered the apartment of Open Russia’s Moscow coordinator, Maria Kuznetsova. On the pretext of looking for ‘materials relating to undesirable organisations’, they took away her laptop and memory sticks. They raided the offices of my news organisation, MBK Media, seizing documents and computers. On 17 March, the Kremlin wrote to Twitter, demanding they ban MBK Media from using their services. When Twitter declined to comply with this and other similar demands, the communications censor, Roskomnadzor, used jamming technology to ‘throttle’ the speed of its tweets in the territory of the Russian Federation.

Vladimir Putin has come to believe he can tell the Russian people whatever he wants. He can tell us that black is white and he expects us to believe it – or, at least, to pretend that we believe it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Kremlin did what all other European countries were doing – it released regular updates on the number of deaths caused by the virus. But even the most cursory analysis revealed that deaths in Russia were being grossly underreported. On 13 March 2021, for example – the day of the police raid on Open Russia – Putin’s state media told the Russian people that a total of 91,695 of their fellow citizens had perished so far. But at the same time, a simple glance at the record of excess deaths – that is, the number by which the current year’s deaths exceed those of previous years – showed that the real figure was more than 400,000. When Alexei Raksha, the (now former) senior statistician at the state statistics agency, Rosstat, pointed out the discrepancy, he was removed from his job.

What’s most worrying is that the vast majority of people thought that this was normal – that this was just how governments behave. Russians are not stupid; people knew Putin was lying, but there was no protest, no outrage. People in Russia have been conditioned to believe there is nothing we can do about it. Years of oppression by an uncaring, authoritarian state have instilled the belief that the individual is impotent in the face of the machine. Two centuries ago, Alexander Pushkin created an enduring image of the little man – the malenky chelovek – who is nightmarishly pursued by a bronze statue of the tsar on horseback and pounded into exhaustion, submission and, eventually, death. Russian society has come to accept that the authorities will abuse and bully and deceive us, and that nothing can be done to change it. The reaction to the lies about COVID deaths, to the collapse of efforts to build a modern economy, to the crushing of civil liberties, the persecution of journalists and opposition politicians, the ingrained corruption and the trampling of free speech, is the same as it always has been – a shrug, a sigh and maybe a few jaundiced jokes about the system we live under.

This is no longer acceptable. It is time to end the mentality of acceptance. It is time for Russians to know that the individual is not powerless, that the state can be challenged. And all this needs to be done quickly. Because without it, things will never get better. If we fail to create a new cohort of confident, educated citizens, aware of their rights and responsibilities, willing to stand up for the ideal of an open, free civil society, Russia will continue to founder under the weight of oppression. A 2021 report by the Chatham House research institute explains why these changes are so urgent. ‘Any chances for a post-Putin Russia to build a viable democratic political system are lower now than they were in the 1990s,’ the report says. ‘Although nearly two generations of Russians have grown up since the collapse of the Soviet Union, they have done so largely under Putin … any remaining chances for meaningful democracy are rapidly evaporating.’ And the reason for this?

Apart from a limited number of institutions either accepted or tolerated by the Kremlin, Russia’s civil society is non- existent and therefore has no experience or track record. This begs the question of how realistic it is to expect the emergence of advanced democratic institutions after Putin leaves office, when there are currently no foundations to speak of. In the early 1990s, a hunger for democracy compensated for the absence of institutions and expertise, and there was a clarity among the general public about which democratic models were to be adopted and a willingness to see the process through. Today, that hunger has been replaced by disappointment

It is imperative, therefore, that we work to nurture the courageous, independent-minded citizens who will be capable of leading a future democracy in Russia:

the country will need a new professional cadre of elite bureaucrats and policymakers, along with the resources for their rapid mobilization. The conditions needed to achieve this are not present in today’s Russia, and it will therefore take a long time to develop and establish new elites from scratch.

The Chatham House report is sobering, albeit perhaps too pessimistic. Of course it will not be easy to build the new civil society Russia needs, but we are already hard at work doing so. Organisations such as the Open Russia Foundation are busy helping to educate our young generation in the values of free-market democracy, to create the new class of civic activists that Chatham House is calling for, willing to question and probe, ready to shape the society that many want to see.

The task is challenging. Current conditions in Putin’s Russia are very different from the reality of Western democracies. There has, for instance, been much talk in the United States about a so-called ‘deep state’ made up of covert, ill-intentioned people who wield power and influence over the running of the country while never showing their faces or revealing their identity. Speculation reached ludicrous proportions with the QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles, led – improbably – by Bill and Hillary Clinton, were pulling the nation’s strings and that only Donald Trump could be trusted to defeat them. In Russia, the ‘internal state’ is not a joke, but a reality. As I have shown, it is a network of informal power that stands above and outside the law, living off privilege and permeating the institutions of the official state. Putin and his cronies control justice and the law, dictating verdicts in key court cases, granting each other the right to control state industries, creaming off billions of dollars.

Only by ditching the unaccountable autocracy of the few – the ‘inner state’ clique in the Kremlin – in favour of democratic institutions reflecting the will of the many can Russia hope to realise its full potential. Our previous attempts at democracy – the short period between the February and Bolshevik revolutions, the 1990s – were built on shaky foundations and were not a success. To succeed, a future Russia must build a firm democratic base, of the kind that has long been established in the West, with proper weight given to the voices of all electors and an effective separation of powers to bind the leadership into a system of checks and balances.

When I reflect on the years I have spent in the West since December 2013, when the Kremlin loaded me on to a German plane and sent me off into the unknown, I am struck by how much has changed in Russia. Back then, there was a move to restore relations with the West in advance of the Sochi Olympics. My release along with my friend and business partner, Platon Lebedev, as well as the women from Pussy Riot, was a gesture in this direction. When I first arrived in London, I felt there was a chance for gradual democratisation in my homeland; at that time, I didn’t see any pressing need for me to get involved in international politics.

But things started to change. First there was Ukraine’s Maidan revolution in February 2014, followed by the annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin’s intervention in Donbas, backing for Assad in Syria and finally the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Putin doesn’t understand that people everywhere are motivated by a desire for liberty. That’s why he continues to parrot the old refrains, fulminating about ‘the machinations of the West’, ‘Russia surrounded by foreign enemies’ and ‘whoever is not with us is against us’.

I could no longer stand aside. In March 2014 I flew to Kiev and addressed the crowds on Maidan Square. I told them there is a different Russia from Putin’s Russia, a Russia that wishes you well, a Russia that sees its future together with yours, a common, European path of democracy. I took a plane to Donbas three days before the war broke out to bring the same message of hope. And I took the decision to intensify the work of my socio-political organisation, Open Russia.

Back then, it was still possible to engage openly in political activity, so I supported young candidates for the State Duma and municipal councils; I established several popular online publications; and I organised the ‘Enough!’ campaign against Putin’s cynical manoeuvring to extend his time in the presidency. We knew Putin wasn’t going to just throw in the towel, but there was still hope of managed change. This hope took a major blow in 2020, when Putin’s shameless rewriting of the constitution to perpetuate his own grip on power proved beyond doubt that Soviet totalitarianism was back. Now people started to be arbitrarily imprisoned simply for expressing their opinions, with the clear message to everyone else that they should think twice whether it was worth the risk. Those who didn’t get the message started to be labelled ‘foreign agents’, which means a de facto ban on working in many professions, or ‘members of undesirable organisations’, which means prison sentences, or – worst of all – ‘extremists’, for which the prison sentences are numbered in many years. As I mentioned, our own journalists and almost all our publications were declared ‘foreign agents’ and all our funds labelled ‘undesirable’.

Addressing the crowd on the Maidan in Kyiv, March 2014

The closure of our organisations and publications in Russia under the threat of Kremlin repression does not mean the end of the fight. We have found new ways of working, with editorial boards based abroad, journalists in Russia writing under pseudonyms, young political activists learning their trade via the internet and even some in-person training. We get much valuable help and information from democratically minded supporters who work in government jobs; human rights lawyers provide assistance to activists, journalists and bloggers seeking to defend themselves against state-sponsored persecution. Such methods alone will not lead to a change of power in Russia, but we have another much more ambitious target: when the current regime reaches its final, inevitable collapse – inevitable because of the weight of its own mistakes and the vulnerability of its ageing leader – we must ensure that Russia is not allowed to stumble into yet another era of authoritarian rule.

To do this, we are redoubling our work on educating the young generation, providing support for civil rights, training hundreds of independent journalists and grassroots activists. We are increasing our output of opposition publications and seeking alliances with other political forces that are committed to a law-based future for the new Russia. In the current global climate, it isn’t easy: the world has seen a rising tide of authoritarianism; people have become wary of changes associated with globalisation; political leaders have lost the trust of society, and society itself has failed to respond to the new challenges in constructive ways. Populist politicians promising simple, easy solutions have found unwarranted support: in some countries, especially the young democracies of Eastern Europe, social institutions have crumbled and autocracy has returned.

Our overriding concern is that when change comes in Russia, the country does not follow the same path. Despite all the problems, I have faith in my nation. I would be delighted if Vladimir Putin were gradually to share the autocratic presidential power he now wields with an honestly elected parliament, an independent judiciary and a coalition government. I would rejoice if a new president were to be a man or woman of compromise, a conciliator, a guarantor of citizens’ rights, eschewing the authoritarianism that has done so much damage to my country in the past 20 years, ready to work with a coalition of opposition forces and other branches of political power. The likelihood that events will develop that way is, sadly, not high. Rejecting the template of ‘strongman’ rule is not easy and Russians have become increasingly seduced by the nostrums of simplistic populism. Unlimited presidential powers, the cult of personality and authoritarianism all militate against change, but the system is under strain. The repression of political opposition, the curtailing of social mobility, the ageing of Putin and his entourage, Putin’s extrajudicial arbitration of constant conflicts between competing factions of his inner circle, and the refusal to engage in dialogue with society have created fertile ground for politicians from outside the current structures. After Putin leaves, there is likely to be a brief period of rule by his appointed ‘heir’, followed by an inevitable political crisis and a relaunch of how the country is run, perhaps involving a shift away from presidential autocracy via a constituent assembly towards a parliamentary, genuinely federal republic. We, the democratic opposition and our friends in the West, must encourage and be ready for this future.

A future democratic Russia will arise because her people now recognise that freedom is better than unfreedom, and that a society of free people is best equipped to deal with the challenges that humanity faces. But we recognise that before we can demand changes from others, we too must be willing to change ourselves. Each of us has flaws. While denouncing and condemning the current regime – a necessary process for reforming the state and healing society – we must remember that forgiveness is dearer than punishment. A new society cannot be built through anger and revenge. The true, lasting solution is not the settling of scores, but the introduction of genuine institutional reforms to the benefit of all.

My task, the task of the democratic opposition and the task of our friends in the West, involves the preservation of a viable alternative to the current reality in Russia; it involves helping people who are prepared to become the personnel of this alternative to gain experience of political struggle. We have created, and will continue to create, platforms for free discussion of the country’s future. We have told, and shall continue to tell, the truth in writing and in film. We are fighting, and shall continue to fight, for the rights of political prisoners, and against repressive, anti-constitutional laws. I envisage Russia as a law-governed state with an independent judiciary and an independent parliament exerting broad budgetary and executive powers. If these conditions are met, there is no reason that a future Russia cannot be welcomed into the global community of nations, to her deep and lasting benefit and to the equal benefit of the West.