Russia’s stage-managed parliamentary (Duma) and regional elections on Sept. 17-19 demonstrate that the Kremlin views democracy and decentralization as a threat to the survival of the Putin regime.
The Kremlin has applied repressive measures, including banning independent candidates, blocking websites, outlawing civic initiatives, and prohibiting public rallies. These steps indicate Vladimir Putin’s growing fears over the fragility of the system. Fears that sustain even though officials control the entire election process.
The misnamed Russian Federation is a centralized entity in which state institutions serve the interests of the presidential administration and its oligarchic allies. It’s also a political entity in which bureaucrats do not defend the rights of ordinary citizens. To protect the ruling clique from concerted opposition, Russian courts manipulate the concept of “extremism” to include almost any activity critical of the regime.
The law on “Countering Extremist Activities” asserts the vague notion of “undermining the security of the Russian Federation” or violating its territorial integrity. It is used to persecute independent activists, journalists, and scholars and bans all Putin critics from the mass media. The regime uses “anti-extremism” measures to disguise its violation of civil liberties and punish dissent. State Duma deputies also introduced a bill in May 2021 to retroactively ban employees, volunteers, and donors of “extremist” organizations from running as candidates in elections.
At the regional level, all local political parties are banned even though almost every federal region resents Putin’s “power vertical.” The growing list of grievances now includes incompetence in handling the pandemic, environmental devastation, economic decline, and the unfair appropriation of natural resources by Moscow. Protest movements have already been visible in several federal units from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Coast. Unaccountable government amid the deepening economic depression will fuel more widespread demands for devolution and self-determination.
Although comparisons have been made between Putin and Stalin, Putin seems incapable of applying the extensive repression characteristic of communism. The Kremlin calculates that mass murders, expulsions, and imprisonment will imperil its survival. Soviet methods could significantly increase Moscow’s isolation on the international arena through more stringent sanctions, economic collapse, and violent clashes in cities. As a result, the Kremlin tries to impose a sufficient measure of repression with the threat of escalation to terrorize the population into submission. However, the continuous ratcheting up of repressive measures indicates that the administration is failing in its ability to pacify all citizens.
The Kremlin has organized the murders or imprisonment of the most prominent opposition organizers and investigative journalists. However, political murders and the confinement of popular figures such as Alexei Navalny, or the trials of protest organizers in Ingushetia and other republics, betray the Kremlin’s weakness. If Putin has to resort to assassinations and imprisonment to eliminate viable alternatives to his rule, he must have concluded that his political survival is indeed under threat.
Officials display their paranoia about state disintegration and are trying to avoid repeating Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts at reforming the Soviet system in the late 1980s. Paradoxically, such fears will continue to preclude the economic and political reforms that are necessary to prevent a systemic collapse. Putin and his security services and the privileged class of civil servants are not prepared to endanger their power and purses by pursuing reforms that would give citizens a choice through democratic elections. But without economic modernization and market diversification, in combination with political democratization, decentralization, and genuine federalism, Russia will not only stagnate and decline, above all it will slide toward an existential crisis.
Some state officials appear to be cognizant of the oncoming dangers. In a recent speech at the All-Russia Youth Education Forum, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu compared Russia to the former Yugoslavia, warning about external pressures in combination with internal threats that could divide the country along nationality, class, and religious lines and result in disintegration. What he failed to point out is that it is precisely Moscow’s policies of hyper-centralization and manipulation of Russian ethnonationalism that can drive the country toward a violent implosion instead of the relatively peaceful rupture witnessed during the dismantling of the Soviet Union.
Janusz Bugajski is a Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C. His recent book, Eurasian Disunion: Russia’s Vulnerable Flanks, is co-authored with Margarita Assenova. His upcoming book is Failed State: Planning for Russia’s Rupture.
