The Other Russia, Part II: The Coming Storm

Kara-Murza was late to our interview because he was at the hospital, receiving treatment for being poisoned, for the second time. He is a journalist and political activist who recently produced a documentary about his friend Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician who was murdered in 2015.

I sat down with Kara-Murza in northwest Washington, D.C., where he lived from 2004 to 2012 while working as a TV news bureau chief, before returning to Russia. To read his blog, go here.

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Ben Parker: You’ve been involved in the democratic opposition for a long time.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Eighteen years now, it’s scary. Basically for the time that Putin’s been in power. I came into politics to work with Boris Nemtsov in 1999. Putin came to power in 1999.

BP: This year has been big. There were huge protests in February and March, and again in June. Do you think, broadly speaking, that the opposition to the Putin regime is changing, and how?

VKM: I think the protest movement that has begun to develop this year is a turning point.It’s very good news for Russia and very bad news for the Putin regime.

In many ways, this protest movement is very different from what happened five years ago in 2011 to 2012. Those protests were amazing, but they were tied to a specific issue. They were the result of a rigged election. People came out in anger that they were humiliated in such a way, that their votes were stolen so blatantly. When you have protests linked to specific sets of demands, you can manage them with concessions, which the regime originally issued back in 2011: They returned regional elections of regional governors, they registered a couple opposition parties, they released a couple of political prisoners.

But mostly they went into a crackdown. They began arresting and prosecuting people, and there are still people in prison today for the protests of May 2012, more than five years on. The regime managed to put that protest wave down, as we know, and they regained the initiative.

These protests that we’re seeing now, they’re completely different in nature. First of all, they’re not tied to anything the regime has done. The agenda is being set by the opposition, not by the Kremlin.

Second, look at the geographic scope of these protests. The protests five years ago were confined to a few large cities. This one is all across Russia. These protests on June 12, Russian National Day, took place in over 200 cities and towns across Russia from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. Some of these places had not seen any political protests since the breakup of the Soviet Union, since 1991—large cities and small towns alike.

The third thing, and I think the most important thing, is the composition of the protests. It’s the young generation. It’s university students, high school students in many cases, teenagers, people in their early and mid-20s. This is the future of Russia. This is the Russia of tomorrow.

Also, ironically, it’s the Putin generation. It’s the people who were raised—and in many cases born—under Vladimir Putin. He’s been in power for 18 years this year, so the people who turn 18 and come to vote for the first time in next year’s so-called presidential election will have been born under Vladimir Putin.

It’s that generation that’s increasingly saying, “No. Enough. We’re fed up with your corruption, with your nepotism, with your kleptocracy, with your arrogance, with the lack of the rule of law, with the disregard for basic rights and freedoms, with the lack of opportunities, with the lack of a future under this regime.” Increasingly, the young generation in Russia is starting to realize that this regime is a dead end. That it’s robbing them, not just literally in terms of the egregious corruption it’s engaging in (those were the immediate reasons, of course, for the protests), but also this regime is robbing Russia of a future.

When you have a protest movement that’s tied to a specific set of demands like those five years ago, you can deal with it. When you have basically the entire new generation coming out and saying, “We’re fed up with you,” there’s not that much they’ll be able to do. For now they can still send riot police and the national guard to beat people up and arrest them and jail them as they have been doing. But when this stream turns into a river, when this becomes hundreds of thousands across the country, there’s nothing they’ll be able to do.

This protest movement is a turning point. It’s not going to stop. It’s going to continue growing over the next months and years. And I think this protest movement will see the end of the Putin regime, whenever that comes.

One thing we can never predict in Russia are specific dates. This is a good year to talk about this, the centennial year of the Russian revolution. That came as a surprise to a lot of people. More recently, in my memory, in August 1991, the Soviet regime that had existed for 74 years went down in three days. If someone had said at the beginning of August 1991 that at the end of that month there would not be a Soviet government, people would have considered that person crazy. But that’s exactly what happened. Dates are impossible to predict in Russia, but there is no doubt in my mind that this protest movement is the one that will see the end of this regime.

BP: Most oppositions in most countries, and the Russian opposition in many ways, are very fragmented. People are criticizing Putin on all different accounts, but is it now becoming more unified with a more coherent message?

VKM: At our movement, Open Russia, our main goal is to build a coalition as wide as possible, to unify different strands of the opposition; those who are committed to rule of law, to free and fair elections, to moving to a constitutional democratic system of government. This is what we’ve been doing for the past three years.

We’re in the process of creating a truly nation-wide, grassroots movement. We have more than 20 regional chapters across the country with people of different political persuasions from the point of view of a Western political system: people on the right, people on the left, socialists, liberals, conservatives, nationalists. They’re different people, but united by one set of very basic values: that the government should change in free elections, that people should be able to elect their own government, that the judiciary should be independent, that the media should be independent, that parliament should be a powerful body and a place for discussion, chosen by voters and not by officials in the Kremlin. As some of my colleagues have said, we’re not fighting to win elections in Russia; we’re fighting to have elections.

The goal of our movement, the Open Russia movement, is to create this broad platform for consolidation of different opposition forces across Russia. And I hope that we’re successful in that.

But this doesn’t mean we need everyone to unite under a single organization. What’s important is for people to be able to work together, and to work alongside each other to achieve the goals that we want to achieve.

We just talked about these protests across the country. If you look at these protests, the composition of the protests, you have people from all across the political spectrum in the Russian opposition taking part shoulder to shoulder: supporters of Aleksei Navalny, supporters and activists of Open Russia, members of Yabloko (the liberal party), members of various left-wing democratic groups, people who are non-partisan and aren’t affiliated with any political group or party, who are just fed up with the corruption and the nepotism and the lack of accountability and the lack of free and fair elections in our country, and frankly who are fed up with the same person sitting in power for 18 years.

BP: Speaking of him, why do people support Putin?

VKM: I think one of the biggest myths of the Putin regime—one that they create intentionally and disseminate with their propaganda, but unfortunately one that’s too often uncritically taken and repeated by Western commentators—is exactly what you just asked, that Putin is popular.

Really? If you’re popular, why would you rig elections successively, one after another after another? Surely you’d just win them if you were popular. If you’re popular, why do you have to muzzle journalists and media outlets and independent publications and TV channels? If you’re popular, why do you need to put your opponents in prison just for their political beliefs? We have more than 120 political prisoners in Russia today according to Memorial, the human rights center.

You don’t do that if you’re popular and strong. You do that if you’re unsure of your own position, if you’re scared. I think a better way of judging Putin’s popularity is not by the bogus opinion polls that they announce, but by their own actions. So when they try to eliminate and suppress any manifestation of independent political activity, that’s not the behavior of a popular government.

I’m still really astonished that people in the West actually discuss Russian poll numbers seriously. I think it’s absolutely meaningless to talk about opinion polls in a dictatorship. First of all, you need access to information to form your own opinion.

But beyond that, imagine you’re sitting in your kitchen, knowing everything that’s going on in the country: that people are in prison for their political views; that if you’re in the opposition, you risk being driven into exile, imprisoned, or killed; that opponents of Mr. Putin are regularly, daily denounced on state television as traitors and enemies of Russia. You get a phone call or a knock on your door from somebody saying they’re from a polling agency and asking, “What do you think of Vladimir Putin?”

What are you going to say? It’s absolutely and utterly meaningless. I think a much better way, again, to judge the position of this regime is to look at their actions.

Almost every time we, Open Russia, try to hold events around the regions—lectures, seminars, film screenings, whatever it is—they try to break us up. They try to prevent the events from going ahead. They switch off the electricity, the put sirens on, they use fake bomb threats so the police arrive and try to evacuate everybody from the building. They’re afraid of a lecture by a history professor in Kazan. Really, is that what a popular government would do? People in the West should once and for all forget about this notion of “popular” Putin.

BP: No doubt some people support him. Those people, why do they support him?

VKM: A lot of it is down to propaganda. George W. Bush was once asked after he was president to comment on the popularity of Vladimir Putin, and he responded, “You know what? If I owned NBC, I’d be popular, too.”

The first thing that Putin did when he came to power was to go after and destroy nationwide, independent television networks that could present alternative opinions and offer critical coverage of his government. He took over NTV, he shut down TV6, he shut down TVS — this is all in the first three years of his rule. Since 2003, all the national airwaves in Russia have been under direct Kremlin control, with news and television serving as tools of government propaganda, of uncritical and laudatory coverage of the authorities, presenting Putin’s opponents as enemies and traitors. This relentless propaganda is one reason why people still support Vladimir Putin.

Maybe some people just generally think it’s a good idea to have a corrupt dictatorship that represses people with different views. I have to say, I’ve yet to meet such a person, but I guess there must be.

Read part three of the interview here.