Russian President Vladimir Putin’s greatest asset isn’t the pool of oil he’s sitting on, his spycraft skills, or security services. His biggest asset is a general sense of apathy within the Russian public — many of whom are too busy trying to get by to worry about what the Kremlin is up to.
However, that apathy was cracked open last weekend.
Mass demonstrations against the Russian government have jolted the Kremlin. The daily malaise and depression in Russian society has broken forth onto the streets. And unlike the first stretch of Putin’s reign in the early 2000s, the Kremlin can no longer take advantage of high oil prices to pay off the masses.
Previous demonstrations followed a familiar pattern. A section of the population, usually in one of the country’s big cities such as Moscow or St. Petersburg, is unnerved by the government’s behavior and responds by holding a large rally — grinding the city to a halt. The Russian law enforcement and intelligence establishment snuff it out with batons, arrests, and fines, hoping the punitive action will deter anyone else who may be thinking about protesting. Gradually, Putin rebuilds his popularity, the protesters are discredited by the Russian state media as traitors and saboteurs, and everybody goes back to their normal lives.
This round of protests is different. Young and old, urban and rural, are participating. Places as far-flung as Yakutsk and Novosibirsk are centers of protest activity. Regular Russians tired of living hand-to-mouth, not just the so-called enlightened intellectuals, are joining in. While Alexei Navalny’s arrest may have been the trigger for the tens of thousands of people storming the streets (over 5,000 were arrested yesterday), the opposition leader is not necessarily the sole cause. Many are marching out of a general frustration about the government’s corruption, ineptitude, and total lack of accountability for anyone who happens to be a billionaire with close personal relations with Putin’s circle. One demonstrator told the Associated Press that, “All of us feel pinched financially, so people who take to the streets today feel angry.” With the exception of arrests, threats, street closures, barricades, and shutdown orders, there is little the police can do other than hope the protesters eventually tire of the cold and go home.
The Navalny-inspired protests are exposing the weaknesses that have long been embedded in Russia but are often ignored by the West. The Western media have a tendency to portray Putin’s Russia as a near-peer rival to the United States. They suggest Russia’s hackers, disinformation artists, and supposed svengali-like intelligence operatives are threatening the American way of life. It turns out that Russia isn’t that mighty after all. Putin is no master strategist, but an opportunist. The Russian government is better at hacking than it is at providing basic necessities for its people. Russia has a smaller economy than Italy despite boasting more than twice the population. About 20 million Russians are below the poverty line. Access to healthcare is atrocious across much of the nation. Russia’s long-term structural problems are deep and growing. Calling Russia a peer to the U.S. would be giving Putin far too much credit.
The Biden administration may or may not take action against Moscow for its arrest of thousands of protesters and for Navalny’s continued detention. As usual, Washington is talking about more sanctions on Russian oligarchs. (The fact that sanctions are highly unlikely to force the Kremlin to embrace internal reform is almost a second-order question.) But whatever President Biden decides to do, he needs to approach Russia as it is — not as some overpowering, pseudo-Eurasian empire, but as a paranoid country with limited capacity and a big chip on its shoulder.
