16 BriefingBelarus and Russia The EconomistAugust 29th 2020
2 banmiddleclass,despite having done well
under his rule, was protesting.
These protests marked the beginning of
Mr Navalny’s career as a front-rank politi-
cian. Previously mostly known as an anti-
corruption blogger and activist, they made
him a leading figure in the opposition. His
vision of Russia as a modern nation state
offered an alternative both to the excesses
of the 1990s and to Mr Putin’s increasingly
imperial autocracy.
In Belarus, Mr Navalny would have mys-
teriously disappeared. But Russia was an
autocracy, not a dictatorship. To keep the
country’s elites, regional leaders and priv-
ate sector on-side Mr Putin needed some
sort of pseudo-democratic legitimacy. So
when Mr Navalny announced he would
stand in Moscow’s mayoral election of
2013, the Kremlin permitted it—while at
the same time seeking to undermine his ef-
forts with trumped-up embezzlement
charges. The ruse backfired when an over-
zealous court sentenced Mr Navalny to five
years in prison shortly before the election.
Tens of thousands of Muscovites took to
the streets to demand his release. In the
end he won 27% of the vote, according to
the official count.
Things changed in February 2014, when
Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt president,
was overthrown by the Ukrainian people.
Mr Putin encouraged pro-Russian thugs in
the east of the country who rose up against
the new regime—portrayed in the Russian
media as fascists—and made use of the
conflict to annex Crimea. This massively
boosted his popularity, sidelining the op-
position for years. In 2018 Mr Putin was re-
elected president; Mr Navalny was not al-
lowed on the ballot.
At that point, though, Mr Putin faced a
problem. The constitution barred himfrom a fifth presidential term. But without
the possibility of one he was a lame duck.
He considered reviving Mr Lukashenko’s
1990s notion in reverse—amalgamating
Russia and Belarus, and becoming the first
president of a new country that would ben-
efit from a retailored Putin-friendly consti-
tution. Mr Lukashenko was not keen on the
idea and sought, by resisting it, to rally his
people round the flag (the green and red
one he had introduced in 1995, rather than
the white and red one now flying above ev-
ery protest).
Stymied on the whole-new-country
front, Mr Putin was eventually forced to
change the constitution under the cover of
a plebiscite in which the abolition of presi-
dential term limits was bundled up with all
sorts of other changes, most of them
crowd-pleasing but inconsequential. It
was, as it happens, a stratagem Mr Lukash-
enko had employed to bestow new powers
on himself after he was impeached by par-
liament in 1996.A rising tide
Through all this Mr Navalny continued to
organise. In 2017, when the post-Crimea
euphoria had largely dissipated and the
economy was sagging, he sensed a new op-
portunity. The country’s growing reliance
on the internet, as opposed to state-con-
trolled television, for information helped
him to seize it. A YouTube video which de-
tailed Mr Medvedev’s yachts and palaces
sparked a protest that rolled from Vladivos-
tok in the east to St Petersburg and Moscow
in the west, engulfing some 90 cities.
Mr Navalny himself was taken by sur-
prise. You can never predict how many
people will turn up, he said at the time;
they won’t come out just because they are
asked to. The protesters of 2017 were angri-er and poorer than those of 2011-12, and half
of them were under 30. What brought them
on to the streets, Mr Navalny noted, was
their lack of prospects.
Mr Navalny looked to fill that emptiness
with the optimism and confidence of an
American-style politician. He shunned
ideological issues that might divide peo-
ple, concentrating instead on what brought
them together: incomes, health, education
and a desire for the rule of law. The most
important thing, he said, was to battle
“learned helplessness”.
Unable to register a party and disquali-
fied from standing in the 2018 presidential
elections, he nevertheless built up a formi-
dable campaigning machine, mobilising
120,000 volunteers. He came up with a
strategy of “smart” voting in regional elec-
tions: his followers were to vote for whoev-
er was best placed to defeat the Kremlin’s
candidate regardless of party and however
uninspiring or unpalatable that choice
might be. At a rally in Khabarovsk he said
his job was to create as many stresses for
the Kremlin as possible.
The stress was seen in the summer of- The Kremlin, afraid of smart voting,
disqualified all of the independent candi-
dates from seemingly insignificant local-
council elections in Moscow. Protests
broke out; the Kremlin responded with vio-
lence. Across the country, though, most
sympathy was on the side of the protesters.
The level of brutality being applied was
counterproductive. This probably explains
why there has been very little police vio-
lence in Khabarovsk over the past month.
That success, coupled with evidence
that Mr Putin’s popularity was in long term
decline, led Mr Navalny to concentrate
even more effort on the regional elections
to be held on September 13th as a rehearsal
for the parliamentary elections in 2021.
The increasing appeal and sophistica-
tion of his operation, coupled with the
protests in Belarus, may have changed Mr
Putin’s calculations about the safety of
leaving an opposition leader in place as a
signal that such opposition did not worry
him. And events in Minsk have shown
again the limits of police violence. Even
when applied with bestial enthusiasm it
could not make up for Mr Lukashenko’s
cataclysmic loss of legitimacy; instead it
accelerated it. Better act savagely against a
leader now than take on the people later.
The irony is that this could lead to the
regime’s eventual downfall being more tu-
multuous than it would have been. Mr Na-
valny may be the last Russian opposition
leader who can control street protest while
also engaging in negotiations with the
Kremlin. His absence does not make future
protests a lot less likely, but it makes them a
lot less predictable. Mr Putin may feel that
he has the situation under control. So did
Mr Lukashenko. 7
Holding out hope