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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Navalny. Lenin. Pugachev. The Russian rebel – in his epic battle against the Leviathan of the Russian state – has enthralled readers and writers for decades. The rebel’s story is almost always a sad one that ends in exile, imprisonment, or martyrdom, leaving but a seed for the future reform of the Leviathan which he or she had taken on.
Why do revolts – from the Decembrist uprising to the Snow Revolution that brought Alexei Navalny to the forefront of contemporary Russian politics – seem to end up failing or producing an even worse form of despotism? In reality, the brave words and deeds of dissidents have shaped the course of Russian history more often than we might think. Through the stories of prominent rebels from the time of Ivan the Terrible to the present day, as well as her own experiences reporting on her country’s decent into authoritarianism, Russian-American journalist Anna Arutunyan explores how the rebel and the Tsar defined each other through a centuries-long dance of dissent and repression. These characters and their lives not only reveal the true nature of the Russian state, they also offer hope for a future Russian democracy.
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Seitenzahl: 408
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Note on Spelling
Preface
1 The Optimists
To confront Putin – and walk away
What is a dissident? What is a rebel?
The twilight of democracy
The man who would not be named
Notes
2 The Traitor and the Tsar
The fragile autocrat
The autocrat stands alone
The escape of the rebel
Notes
3 The Rebel and the Tsar
March of Justice
The soldier’s revolt
Wronged
The lesser evil
Notes
4 The Revolt of the Elites
“The best part of society”
Liberalization betrayed
“They can’t even hang us properly”
The predictable reaction
Notes
5 The Will of the People
The haves and the have-nots
“Like a saddle on a cow”
In the wild
Only connect
Notes
6 The Rebel as Tsar
The “peasants” and their muscle
Power lies in the gutter
“Why are you rioting?”
“Everything is possible!”
By coup, not consensus
Notes
7 The Dissidents
“I must say what I think – and the results do not concern me”
A thaw from above
The backlash
The silenced dissidents
Emigration vs. “staying useful”
Notes
8 The Democrats
“You are Other, but not Russia”
The dissident and the rebel
The rebel as leader
The time of the “seven bankers”
Ready for democracy
Notes
9 The Russian Spring
The “banality” of Putin
Revanchists for democracy
The nationalist revolution
Novorossiya betrayed
Notes
10 The Russian Winter
Making politics real again
“We’re the adults now”
The dissidents abroad
A new civil society
The Russia of the future
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Note on Spelling
Preface
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Masha
Rebel Russia
Dissent and Protest from the Tsars to Navalny
ANNA ARUTUNYAN
polity
Copyright © Anna Arutunyan 2025
The right of Anna Arutunyan to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5230-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024948524
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Note on Spelling
Historically, Ukraine’s capital was commonly spelled Kiev, not Kyiv, as it is today. When referencing events that took place before 1991, the original spelling of Kiev will be retained. For events that took place after 1991, the modern Ukrainian spelling of Kyiv will be used.
Preface
This project began in a different time, and in a different Russia. In 2021, when I was still based in Moscow, I undertook to write a history of Russian dissenters. My initial, unquestionably ambitious, project hoped to meld field research with a history tracing Russian dissent from the earliest days to the modern dissident Alexei Navalny, at that time still alive, albeit in a prison camp. But the war and the changing political climate made it practically impossible to continue working in Russia and I left in March 2022. More to the point, however, the transformations that occurred in the country blindsided not just me, but a whole generation of Russian writers and observers.
Russia, it has been said, is a country with an unpredictable past. As I tried to make sense of why things happened the way they did – why, from a period of unprecedented pluralism, the country returned to some of its most autocratic traditions – my concept of this book project changed as well. Rather than a history, it turned into a way of reckoning with the present, with the events of the last decade as a prism through which to examine the past – the things that have brought us to the present.
Rebel Russia became, in many ways, a personal voyage to find answers to painful questions Russians and Russia watchers have been asking themselves since February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine. Why have dissenters fighting to resist state tyranny so rarely succeeded? In the process of researching and writing this book, I discovered answers that surprised me and questioned my own assumptions, and that I hope will challenge some of the prevailing stereotypes of the day – namely, that Russia’s story is one of descending darkness set on repeat, or that Russia is somehow abnormal, even cursed, or that “good” dissenters struggle and usually lose against a “bad” government. In fact, history shows that Russian dissenters have repeatedly defeated tyrannical governments, as they did in February 1917 and, again, in August 1991. The rebel has often put a crown upon his own head, but remains only as strong as the civil society that he governs. His repeating oppression is a function of his weakness, and the cycle repeats.
This book interrogates that cycle and traces how it has evolved and shows promises of transforming. It rejects the popular bigotry masquerading as analysis: the notion that Russians are somehow civically backwards, predestined either to lawlessness and submission to tyranny, or to brutality and imperialism – a notion that is, perversely, shared by some members of an older generation of Russian dissidents, by Ukrainian nationalists and some of their most ardent Western supporters, and, in a telling irony, by Vladimir Putin himself.
Ultimately, this is a book about the choices and agency of the human beings at the heart of history, describing the capacity of people to make hard decisions about resisting (or not resisting) in a constrained environment. It shows how those constraints have changed, sometimes thanks to the efforts of both the Russian people and their government combined. It challenges the lazy analysis of Russia as a mystery and its people as being predisposed to their “learned helplessness” before state power. (There is, after all, little mystery to learned helplessness, if only those who apply the concept to Russians bothered to read the psychiatric literature on it.) It traces, instead, not just how the constraints of this environment shaped and continue to shape the choices of those who oppose, rebel against, or try to change the Russian government (and these are entirely different objectives, with entirely different outcomes, as this book explores), but also how those constraints – including the very decisions of those who resist – shape the choices of Russian rulers who, by turn, decide to oppress, reform, or tolerate, so long as they retain their power. It shows how the choices of a variety of dissenters – from pro-Western liberals to Communists to xenophobic nationalists – end up shaping their environment.
The roles of the dissident, the insurgent, and the opposition activist are all inherently different. The dissident, as it came to be defined during the Soviet period, was one morally opposed to the governing regime, whether or not he or she actively resisted (at which point they could also be considered activists), and usually opposed violent means. The insurgencies throughout history – from the Pugachev rebellion to the Decembrist uprising to the Bolshevik Revolution and even the Russian Spring that sparked the conflict in Eastern Ukraine – ultimately turned to organized violence either to defeat the state or to compel it to change course. Others would turn instead to non-violent activism, writing, publishing, protesting, or even campaigning for political office. In Putin’s Russia, until the start of the war, there was a whole assortment of such groups and individuals, working at a time when political activity was, indeed, made possible by the government. By focusing on the rebel, this book explores the things they all have in common: the different ways in which they try to resist or change state power, and the different ways in which they fail and succeed.
This book is by no means a comprehensive history or analysis of Russia’s various types of dissenters, rebels, insurgents, or dissidents, nor will it pretend to name-check every brave man or woman who stood up to state power. There are omissions. The resistance of seventeenth-century Archpriest Avvakum against the church reforms of Patriarch Nikon and the birth of the Old Believers are only briefly addressed, though even a chapter would not do justice to the profound implications of the great schism – the Raskol – for Russia’s religious and political trajectory. There is, also, certainly a limit to what can be said about one of the biggest rebellions in world history – the Bolshevik Revolution – in one chapter. Rather, this book explores, through examples of each, some of the fundamental questions about the nature of the Russian government and those who have opposed it.
Underpinning this relationship between the rebel and the tsar was a strong alienation between society and the government and also between estates or classes within society – an alienation that ensured each perennially feared or mistrusted the other. It was this distance that made rule over Russia so precarious for any leader, and, thus, made repression and abuse all the more common. But it was also this distance that, strangely enough, made the rebel and the tsar so close: rarely has a Russian ruler felt secure enough to be able to afford not to respond to criticism, to ignore challenges, or to ally with one kind of rebel against another.
Finally, at a time when it is popular to view Russia’s future as bleak, I believe it imperative to try to envisage a constructive, progressive trajectory, and to think beyond the patterns of revolt and repression that have comprised its history. History, as I hope this book will demonstrate, is not destiny. Although these days, paradoxically enough, it can seem heretical to think and say certain things, even in the freedom of Western democracies, I will say this: I love Russia, and, most of all, I believe in it, even in its current darkness.
I am indebted to Louise Knight and the team at Polity for undertaking this project and for their continual encouragement. There are too many people without whom this book would not have been possible to name them (and some for whom it might be dangerous to do so), but I hope they know who they are. The Kennan Institute, its library, and the Russian scholars there who informed and supported this project with their invaluable insight, Russian opposition journalists who have worked tirelessly to document the struggle against the state, and a great deal more people all have my gratitude. Finally, I want to thank my husband, Mark Galeotti, for sharing in the blood, sweat, and tears that were shed over this book, and my daughter, Masha, for her insights.
Anna Arutunyan, Kent, 2024
1The Optimists
To confront Putin – and walk away
“My name is Alena Popova. Vladimir Vladimirovich, you are a colossus standing on feet of clay. We all despise you. And we want you to leave.”
It is a truism that to understand the present, you need to understand the past. In the case of Russia’s malleable history, to understand the past, sometimes you first need to understand the present.
To this day, Alena Popova, an entrepreneurial Russian politician who is now – like many independent activists – in exile, is at a loss to pinpoint what exactly made her do it. But that day in 2013, when the Russian opposition still had hope, before half of them were jailed and the other half had emigrated, before their most prominent leader, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison cell, something had accumulated in the pit of her stomach – a potent, dark nausea – and she stood there, less than a meter away, and called out Vladimir Putin to his face.
“At first, I had no desire to talk to him,” she recalls. Part of a delegation of oppositionist voices invited to Putin’s annual Valdai conference, back when the Kremlin was still trying to look vaguely democratic and inclusive, she found herself in a banquet hall following his official speech, where she and her colleagues were discussing Russia’s future. Suddenly Putin emerged into their midst. “It was just making me nauseous. I didn’t want to be a part of this. I thought, this man is absolute evil.”
Popova went instead to the bathroom. But as she tried to get out, the door was jammed. When she heaved at it, she found herself catapulted through, right into the arms of one of the president’s bodyguards. In the commotion, she somehow got thrown at the president himself.
“I turned to him, and he turned to me. I told him my name. He asked, ‘who?’ and I repeated. Then something just clicked, all these things I didn’t even know I wanted to say burst forth.” Suddenly, she knew she had to say them. “I spoke calmly and firmly. I told him that I was disgusted to stand next to him, that he was weak, that he needed to leave power, that he was so afraid of his own people that he had to find ways to prevent critics from running even for local elections.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, started pointing to his wrist, signaling to the president that it was time to leave. Peskov, a former diplomat, knew the drill and was making sure Putin had an out. To Alena, and to anyone who has observed such interactions, the subtle gesture was a tell-tale sign of the autocrat’s fragility – of a ruler afraid of his people, in spite of his efforts to seem close to them, willing to appear among crowds, chat with his subjects unscripted, and take their side against oligarchs and governors alike. It was a precarious dance that Putin had tried to maintain throughout his rule: be apparently open to spontaneity and criticism, but withdraw at the first sign of danger. This time, Putin hesitated and turned back to Popova. “Can you say that again?” he asked.
“And I told him everything again. He has to leave.”
Nearly a decade had passed when Popova told me this story. By that point, she, like so many Russians who opposed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, had left Russia, knowing that she could go to prison simply for voicing the thoughts she held in her head. But back then, in a different Russia, nothing happened after that encounter. No arrests, no raids. Alena continued to do the work she thought necessary. “This story didn’t really mean anything. Not to him, not to me. It was a tragicomedy more than anything else.”1
When she told me about her encounter with Putin, I already had a sense of her spirit – her belief that, with her determination alone, she could effect change. She was part of a new generation of Russians – savvy enough to understand how their world worked, they also believed they were entitled to their rights and to their voice, and they were not afraid to speak out. A lawyer, journalist, and successful entrepreneur by her mid-twenties, Alena Popova became a part of a fledgling institutional democracy when she began volunteering in 2010. That summer, a massive heatwave sparked wildfires all over Russia, exposing a government that, however much it was awash with oil revenue, was catastrophically unprepared for what had been a predictable emergency. Ordinary Russians began organizing volunteer brigades to fight the fires, and Alena joined one of them, traveling to the Moscow region and as far as Siberia. Those experiences inspired her to found the Civil Corps, one of a number of volunteer groups that started cropping up at the time, focused on anything from finding missing children to helping domestic abuse victims. In 2016, she launched a network of support for domestic abuse survivors called “You Are Not Alone,” and began to lobby hard to change legislation to protect women. She would go on to set up a group that would engage lawyers to draft domestic violence legislation. Even though this was not passed, her network proceeded to help women win lawsuits against harassment. As late as 2021 – a time far more politically repressive than a decade earlier, but not quite yet the quasi-totalitarianism in which Russians would find themselves just a year later – Alena was stuffing parliamentarians’ mailboxes with pictures of abused women. By then, she had already acquired a great deal of access to the halls of Russia’s State Duma – first as an assistant to parliamentarian Ilya Ponomaryov, then as a parliamentary candidate in her own right. “When they see me coming, they turn the other way,” she told an American journalist.2
It was hard for me to imagine that, even in those relatively liberal times, knowing what she knew about the Kremlin then, she could have so brazenly told Putin to his face how much he disgusted her.
It was so hard for me to imagine, almost impossible, because I myself am not a dissident. About a year before the events she described, I too had stood in front of Vladimir Putin, less than a meter away, called out his name … and walked away.
It was 2012, and I was a reporter at Russia’s oldest English-language weekly, The Moscow News. Putin’s Russia was still relatively pluralistic and even a government-funded news outlet was free to criticize Kremlin policies. As editor of the news desk and chief political correspondent, I had been covering corruption and human rights abuses for several years. We had minimal interference from the Presidential Administration: I remember only one phone call from its offices on Staraya Ploschad, Old Square, inquiring about my reporting on a whistleblower cop who was exposing police corruption. Even the head of our news agency encouraged us to resist self-censorship. There was only one red line, really. “Criticize the Kremlin and its policies as much as you want. But attacking Putin personally is off limits.” That was the unwritten rule in those days, and I stuck to it.
But the story I had been working on when I got accredited to Putin’s yearly press conference was testing even my own impartiality. A vindictive piece of legislation had banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American foster parents. It was passed quickly by Putin’s party in direct retaliation for the US Magnitsky Law, which sanctioned Russian officials over the death in custody of jailed tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Officially the authors of the so-called Dima Yakovlev Law claimed that they were defending Russian orphans, after four adoptees, including one Dima Yakovlev, had died over several years while in the care of American families. But given that thousands of children died each year from abuse or neglect at the hands of Russia’s own neglected foster care system, the only people Putin’s government was hurting were Russian orphans themselves. I had meant to confront Putin about this paradox: had he done the math, and did he know that by banning adoptions, he was sentencing thousands of Russian orphans to death?
With the press conference over, a crowd of reporters surrounded the president, and as I tried to get close, I found myself buoyed by the throng, but feeling curiously pressurized. It was as though the air within a two-meter radius of the Russian leader was charged, warping the very thoughts and words of those in the vicinity.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich!” I called out. At that moment, he was in an apparent argument with another journalist about corruption: “Look at me, I am talking to you,” he was telling her, and I clearly needed to wait. My question, formulated at the start of the conference, softened: surely I wouldn’t accuse Putin of sentencing children to death? Maybe I should actually ask if he knew that the deaths would increase by the thousands? Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps it was my job to be useful and helpful, and point it out to him. Perhaps that way I could get him to change his mind and turn more lenient. But at the same time, as I struggled for the appropriate words, my desperation grew: a journalist’s question was transforming into a subject’s plea.
I didn’t like what was going on around me and what was going on in my head. If Alena felt nauseous, I felt ashamed. If I was going to be honest with myself, what I felt most of all was fear.
Scared, ashamed, embarrassed, before he turned to face me, I stepped back and walked away.
* * *
In my book The Putin Mystique, in which I examined the relationship between the Russian people and Vladimir Putin, and how he himself was a product of that relationship, I described the incident as an outsider, with the purpose of conveying how people behaved in the presence of the Russian autocrat.3 What I omitted – in part because I didn’t understand it fully at the time – was my own deep sense of fear and confusion about what exactly I was expecting from a rare interaction with the virtual monarch of a country of which I was a citizen. As a journalist, what I had wanted to do was to ask a simple question: did Putin know that, statistically speaking, this law would lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths? And yet, standing in front of the man, the simplicity of the question, to me, began to sound insulting: how could a person, a statesman of even average intelligence, not know this? And if he knew he was enacting a law condemning thousands of Russian orphans to death for the sake of retaliating against the United States, and if I knew that he knew this, then what I was about to say was not a question at all. It was a condemnation, a protest, a provocation – anything to expose the callous, petty maliciousness of the law, and, quite possibly, of Putin himself. To me, in the context we were all in, to ask the question meant to cease being a journalist and to become a dissenter – to defy the president to his face, to enter into a polemic and to call him out for his short-sighted malice. That I was not prepared to do.
Was it because I chickened out, intimidated by the array of bigwigs and black-suited bodyguards flanking the little gray man? Maybe. What effect would my words really have? Would they get me fired? Would they spell trouble for my colleagues? Would I be able to continue to put food on the table and give my own child the lifestyle I had never had? Given that I worked for state media, Putin’s government might see me not just as an oppositionist, but as a traitor – and the stakes were much higher for domestic journalists than for those who worked for foreign media. Would we have to flee the country? Would my daughter have to pack a suitcase and say goodbye to her grandmother and her friends? As I began to see it, the bell jar surrounding the Russian autocrat warped and extinguished any normal outcomes from a simple human interaction. As my mind raced to calculate the risk, I realized I could see nothing good that could come out of what I was about to say to him, and only a hundred bad things.
I certainly would have been setting myself against the Russian state personified, and going beyond simply voicing my disagreement about a law. Depending on how Putin responded, it is possible I would have been sacked, although these were days in which one could still voice a degree of qualified dissent, even to his face. However, one way or the other, my fate (and that of my family) would no longer be in my own hands. Would my bosses or my bosses’ bosses be mortified, and angrily want me gone? Just as dangerously, would some more outspoken dissidents publicly hail my “protest,” which would likely make the authorities feel they had to retaliate and treat me as such?
And for what? The law’s moral and practical shortcomings had already been exposed and critiqued; it was not as if Putin was going to change his mind. Was the question really worth asking? Was it that of a journalist hoping for copy, or just that of an outraged citizen speaking her mind? Because that was the point: I was not a rebel, not a dissident, not an oppositionist, I was merely a citizen who sometimes approved of what her government was doing and sometimes did not. One who neither broke laws, nor felt the need to. At that moment, I did not want to protest, challenge, or defy. And I wanted to retain the right of a citizen rather than a subject, to have an independent opinion about what the monarch was doing, rather than unthinkingly internalize the increasingly paranoid, nationalist, and intolerant line of the times. But, in these narcissistic days in the West when all it seems to take is a social media account to claim a crusade of some sort, this is worth stressing: it takes a lot more than having a dissenting opinion to be a dissident. To be one is to set yourself directly against the state, to issue a challenge and accept the worst it can do in response. Whether covertly, as a matter of one’s internal conscience, or overtly, as an active protester and organizer, it means taking on a consistent pledge to dissent, condemn, or defy. To fight, in other words, a battle you yourself are unlikely to win. It was a fight that I was not prepared then – and if I am honest, have not intended since – to take on.
What is a dissident? What is a rebel?
During Putin’s tenure, virtually anyone who has criticized him or his policies has been branded a dissident by Western reporters, with all sorts of implications, and this was one of the reasons I was so adamant to hold on to my own impartiality. Take, for example, the journalist Oleg Kashin, who in 2012 was elected a member of the Opposition Coordination Council, which was trying to build a unified front against Putin’s third term in office. Yet, as for a lot of Russian oppositionists and dissenters, the word dissident is a very specific concept that he believed did not apply to him. “In my opinion, a dissident is someone who devotes all of himself to confronting the authorities,” he told me by text in 2017, from Geneva, not quite exile, not quite emigration – something temporary, in between. “We have much fewer such heroes than representatives of the moderate front, who in one way or another work for the state, succeed, but at the same time consider themselves bearers of absolute moral righteousness.”4
Kashin had every reason to call out the holier-than-thou pseudo-dissidents with a disproportionate sense of their own importance. In 2010, he was a journalist for the newspaper Kommersant, writing about the slew of political protest movements that had sprouted, from the young Communists to the National Bolshevik Party. He was an acerbic reporter, and minced no words when blogging about his detractors. In one of his blog posts, he called the governor of the Pskov region, Andrei Turchak, “shitty.” It nearly cost him his life. That year, two assailants, whom Kashin believes were hired by Turchak, confronted him in the dark near the entrance to his apartment, bearing a bouquet of flowers as a distraction. Then they beat him with metal rods and left him to die. He survived with a broken jaw, a fractured skull, and a partially amputated pinkie. He was a writer, after all, and so they went after his hands.
But even so, he maintained that Putin’s Russia, at that time at least, was a place where criticism remained possible. It was personally offending someone that put you in danger. “If you offend a person, well, in the prison worldview, that person has to get revenge or else his friends won’t understand. It is like gangsters in power.”5 This was not so much about going against the system, but about the system being unable to protect those who found themselves at the mercy of such personalized power. And that was one reason why the kind of dissident movement that the Soviet Union saw in the 1960s didn’t really apply anymore.
“The reality of Putinism,” Kashin told me years later after his attack, “meant that you didn’t necessarily have to put yourself against the whole system to disagree with things that the Kremlin or your local officials were doing.” Did he consider himself a dissident? “The word ‘dissident’ is tied up with a specific time and specific people, and using it seriously now is tactless, especially when you talk about yourself – it sounds like ‘Sakharov and I,’” he added, name-checking one of the greats of the dissident movement, who spent most of the 1980s in internal exile, even though he had won a Nobel Prize for physics and was considered one of the fathers of the Soviet atom bomb.6
That reality was the main reason why I, standing in front of Putin, found myself resisting two polar opposites: either the need to submit as a subject, or the need to defy as a rebel. It was not black and white. There was a new category: a citizen who could simply disagree. The state was still dangerous, still repressive, but for the first time in Russian history, there was a whole variety of ways that citizens or subjects or oppositionists could interact with the autocrat – and with each other. It was a world in which both what Alena and I had done were equally possible: neither was she denounced for her confrontation, nor was I ostracized by dissenters for my timidity.
In 2012 and 2013, tens of thousands of young people, raised on two decades of relative affluence and political stability, were actively defying their autocratic government. In the process, they were defying a depressingly Russophobic notion: that Russians were somehow prone to submission and “learned helplessness,” that they lacked agency and the will to change. Never mind that all of Russian history is a story of dissent and rebellion. Yet what was happening in those years was something different: they weren’t just protesting, or confronting Putin – that, as Alena rightly insisted, was by far not the most important part – they were also building legal initiatives around local interests, and using the laws of their country to reclaim agency. The new, independent TV channel Dozhd, which launched in 2010 and became the first to cover the protest rallies in real time both on television and online, became a reflection of that agency, and its possibility. Its slogan, “the optimistic channel,” implied that the actions and voices of this new generation mattered, that Russia had a future, and that they were claiming it. Step by little step, they were assembling the tiny bricks that eventually, generations down the line, could use to build an institutional democracy. Even as many braced for the looming autocratic revanche that would descend a few years later, an unheard-of pluralism coexisted with Putin’s autocracy.
In December 2012, it often baffled me to think that I lived in Moscow and worked for a Kremlin-funded English-language newspaper, even as I wrote articles describing the Kremlin as an oppressive, corrupt authoritarian government. I covered protest rallies, held two citizenships, and traveled abroad freely. Nothing was taboo. Liberals, nationalists, Putin’s fans, and his vehement foes would break bread together and share alcohol over the same table, despite vicious spats online: a kind of intellectual tolerance and inclusivity that didn’t seem to fit with the ominous stories of state repression that I found myself writing. The dissidents and rebels of earlier times had faced often more conventionally repressive regimes, where the stakes were higher and more immediate: the hangman’s noose, the Gulag, the Soviet psychiatric hospital. At the time, Putin was relying on more subtle forms of repression, maintaining a manipulative illusion of democracy. The result was that we could still believe we had choices and reasons for hope. The line between rebel and conformist became increasingly blurred as people suddenly found themselves with a whole slew of options: running for local council, opposing a highway through a forest, or something as simple as creating an apartment cooperative to ensure that local authorities renovated their plumbing on time.
The twilight of democracy
Alena had become politically active during a pivotal time in Russia. Until 2008, the independent, non-systemic political opposition – in other words, the opposition not represented in Russia’s parliament – largely consisted of pro-Western, pro-business liberal politicians, such as the Yabloko party or the Union of Right Forces. Their main agenda centered on democratic reform, and, thus, on Putin’s backtracking and his efforts to stifle it. While these were serious issues, it meant these parties had little support outside of the educated, relatively wealthier cosmopolitan centers. The majority of the population, still recovering from the shocks of the 1990s, a time of widespread economic hardship and political chaos, were more concerned with survival than they were with human rights and democratic reforms as such. According to opinion polls at the time, issues such as poverty and corruption ranked highest among their concerns, but these were not the issues on which the liberal oppositionists as yet chose to focus. When Putin turned up the pressure on oligarch-funded independent media after becoming president in 2000, these movements further lost touch with potential supporters in the regions and among the less wealthy. By 2003, they were being pushed out of parliament entirely thanks not only to the Kremlin’s manipulation of the media and the electoral system, but also to their simple lack of connection with popular Russian concerns.
Meanwhile, opposition parties that did have powerful regional networks and support – notably the Communist Party and the nationalist far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia – managed to retain a significant parliamentary presence, but the Kremlin tamed them through a combination of electoral, political, and media manipulation. By 2008, when Putin was due to step down as president, they essentially represented a token opposition, a facsimile of democratic politics engineered by his deputy chief of staff, the theatrical gray cardinal Vladislav Surkov. They might get headlines for some carefully calibrated rhetorical stands on populist causes, but in practice most of these parties drafted and voted on legislation as instructed by the Presidential Administration.
Thus, with no true democratic alternatives or checks and balances, it was widely expected that Putin would amend the constitutional ban on more than two consecutive presidential terms and remain in power. Instead, he did something that was as unusual for a democratically elected leader as an authoritarian one: he threw his endorsement and his administrative resource behind his prime minister, then a pro-Western liberal Dmitry Medvedev, and himself switched places with him. Medvedev, under Putin’s watchful eye, was given relatively free rein to launch a limited liberalization campaign to improve the economy and tackle corruption.
This began to create a new paradox. On the one hand, the Kremlin was now vocally engaged with a core issue at the heart of Russia’s democratic challenges: corruption and lack of rule of law. Much effort and publicity was being devoted to innovation and modernization. On the other hand, Medvedev was constrained in his reforms. Real power was ultimately still in Putin’s hands, and his injunction to Medvedev was clear: tackle corruption all you want, as long as it doesn’t infringe upon my interests or those of my vast circle of vassals. The new liberalization campaign exposed deep economic inequalities, a byproduct of corruption itself. The World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform, for example, measures the disparity between rich and poor households in a country using something called the Gini Index. It had been 37.1 when Putin came to power in 2000, well below the United States, or even the United Kingdom.7 By 2008, it was 41.6, higher than either of them, or, indeed, any other European country.
The more corruption was talked about on central television channels, the more this encouraged independent politicians to take up the issue, normalizing a new form of activism at the grass-roots level: that of economic and infrastructural interests. Politics, in other words, was becoming no longer just about grand narratives of democracy or Communism, or necessarily fighting the leviathan of state power and oppression. Activism and independent politics still remained difficult and deeply dangerous, but new possibilities emerged for interest groups and human rights campaigners – environmentalists, feminists, trade unionists – to effect change on the local level and create meaningful networks. This fledgling work was still difficult and precarious enough that many activists eventually turned against the Kremlin as they recognized that it was Putin himself who was standing in the way of true reform. For instance, police officer Alexei Dymovsky, fired in 2010 for blowing the whistle on corruption in his precinct, gained a nationwide following after addressing his concerns to Putin directly in videos he then posted on the internet.8 His cause was even taken up in parliament, and such cases began to normalize what in the past had been something only a handful of dissenters willing to risk their lives would do: standing up for their interests, even if it meant standing up to the Kremlin. It no longer seemed quite so futile, quite so inevitably leading to prison or worse. The fact that such abuses continued to happen only galvanized this fledgling civil society, and a growing proportion of the population with it. More options and fewer consequences meant that pockets of civic action emerged in which activists robustly espoused various causes that were neither opposed to, nor supporting, the regime. Issues from school curricula to the siting of municipal waste dumps could and did spark passionate activism as independent political movements advocated and fought for their interests, sometimes clashing with the Kremlin when it tried to constrain them, and sometimes clashing with each other.
When Putin and Medvedev jointly announced they would be switching places again in September 2011, they wound up both dashing hopes for true democratic reform while simultaneously exposing Putin as the architect of a phenomenally potent lie. The parliamentary elections that December were hardly more rigged than recent ballots that preceded them, but Russians had come to expect more from their government and such lies were no longer acceptable. Tens of thousands took to the streets, first in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then in cities across the country, in protests on a scale unseen since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Demonstrators turning up at Bolotnaya – the Moscow square just across the bridge from the Kremlin where people spontaneously gathered – came from a plethora of political movements. Nationalist war re-enactors marched under the same banner as monarchists, Communists, and liberals; officers of the airborne troops sang ditties decrying corruption and the stolen vote; junior civil servants chanted slogans against the very government for which they worked. These were no longer just the marginalized pro-Western (and usually relatively affluent) liberals who criticized the government for its shoddy human rights record. The Kremlin cracked down hard, brutally breaking up protest rallies and handing down jail sentences of several years to some of the activists. However, it surprisingly let the protests continue and avoided jailing its most outspoken leaders, such as Alexei Navalny, Ilya Yashin, and Boris Nemtsov (who, incidentally, would die in jail in 2024, be imprisoned in 2022, and murdered in 2015, respectively). This bait-and-switch approach was designed to split the opposition, but also to avoid the kind of repressive overreaction that could backfire and lead to revolt within the elites themselves. In the process, paradoxically, it normalized dissent yet further. Even parliamentarians such as Gennady Gudkov and Ilya Ponomaryov openly joined the anti-Kremlin protests and used their voices in the State Duma to challenge the government.
And so, a curious situation arose: precision repressions and electoral manipulation persisted and gradually increased, trying to prevent civil society from growing further. Yet there still remained a narrow space in which political activism could flourish, and those who pursued it gained invaluable legal and political experience. Putin, re-elected president in March 2012, continued having meetings with various members of the opposition as part of the Valdai discussion club to try to demonstrate that Russia remained a pluralistic society, even as his parliament passed ever more restrictive laws and the unspoken “red lines” over what was politically acceptable and what was not continued to be tightened.9
Political activists, intimidated by the mounting repressions from challenging the Kremlin wholesale, turned their activism towards local work, beginning to bridge the gap between the population and local, regional, and even federal government. In 2019, for example, when authorities in Yekaterinburg decided to build a church on a central city square, residents petitioned and demonstrated to have a park instead. It was just one of such successful demonstrations across the country that year.10
For roughly a decade, this twilight persisted between unprecedented pluralism and civic activism, on the one hand, and duplicitous government manipulation and repression, on the other. It was not until 2022 that the accumulation of foreign agent laws and a new spate of draconian restrictions targeting anti-war activists plunged Russia into full authoritarianism.
But it was in that environment of relative freedom that Alena Popova confronted Vladimir Putin, while I walked away – and each of us continued our work.
That was then. I am now writing this in a time so grim that even contacting Russian activists back home gives me pause lest I inadvertently put them in danger. In hindsight, I can’t help but question my own recollections of a period not more than a decade ago. How was any of it possible? Was it a mirage? And why did it end? Why did the cycle of thaw and repression that we had thought we were breaking out of descend upon us again? The liberalism the autocrat had unleashed had awoken something that threatened him personally – but why?
The man who would not be named
Everything was angular about him: his brilliant Hollywood smile, the choppy movements of his hands as he spoke, the Western mannerisms he had picked up abroad at Yale. But it was the smile that really stood out in that sleepy southern Russian town.
Alexei Navalny didn’t know me, probably didn’t trust me as a representative of the state media, but his smile was a signal of intentional trust, if not sincerity. It was the intentional trust that came from the confidence of his own rational agency, the belief that his country’s laws were for him and for the people, and not for those in power, and, most of all, the belief in solutions. The belief that tomorrow did not have to be like yesterday, and that all Russians, of every race and class, could work together to build a “beautiful Russia of the future.”11
* * *
It was spring 2012, just a month after Putin had been re-elected president, despite the biggest anti-Kremlin demonstrations Russia had seen in two decades. Restarting his presidency on such a shaky footing, Putin turned to a primitive form of patriotism to bolster his power: the hatred of all that was foreign, new, and uncustomary. During the protests against Putin’s re-election, Navalny had emerged as one of the most charismatic leaders of the opposition, not least because he had something new to offer. Unlike many of the previous liberal activists, Navalny’s criticism of the Kremlin wasn’t just about democratic values, but instead predominantly about the rule of law, without which democratic values cannot thrive. A lawyer who had studied at Yale, he had gained notoriety as an anti-corruption blogger and vocally began exposing a disease that had plagued Russian administrations for centuries, a disease that many pro-Western liberals argued was the very essence of Russia: graft. But in doing so, Navalny – who had early in his political career flirted with nationalism – accomplished something revolutionary: instead of simply opposing the government and its repressive laws, he weaponized the legal system against the Kremlin. If Putin had campaigned with promises to impose a “dictatorship of the law” in 2000, then Navalny subverted the Kremlin’s own promise against itself. He exposed how Putin was breaking his own laws. In doing so, he enabled a fledgling opposition movement to do something it had arguably never had a chance to do in all of Russian history: to reclaim the country’s laws from its corrupt and tyrannical government officials, at least to a degree, and for a while.
The protests against the Kremlin in the winter and spring of 2011–12 posed an unprecedented threat to the regime’s legitimacy and so, too, did the emergence of such a charismatic figure as Navalny, someone who, like Putin a decade earlier, seemed to speak to ordinary Russians outside the cosmopolitan bubble. Demonstrators turning up for his rallies were no longer distinctly pro-Western: hearing me and a colleague speaking in English in front of a camera, a demonstrator called us “American pigs.” And if in the past Russian flags were virtually unseen in opposition protests, suddenly they were everywhere. Instead, these protests hit the Kremlin’s greatest vulnerability: corruption. This was, after all, an issue that united all strata of society. From the truck driver forced to pay off a traffic cop after an imaginary speeding infraction, to the army officer expected to “thank” his superior officer for a positive annual report, or simply the citizen seeing his or her taxes going on padded vanity projects that never actually got built, everyone had their own experiences.
Putin responded with vigor – but also calculation. He pronounced the protests a provocation by the US Department of State, and claimed the activists lacked genuine public support but were rather whipped up by foreign powers.12 (Alas, he was helped in this by the well-meaning but politically inept efforts of US Ambassador Michael McFaul, who sought to “help” Russian civil society by holding highly publicized meetings with them.) He fired his first deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov and replaced him with the heavier-handed Vyacheslav Volodin. Surkov, who trained to be a theater director in his youth, had been the man behind the earlier style of political control, creating a democratic façade to make people think their views mattered. Volodin was more interested in building
