The Russia Conundrum

In the spring and summer of 2021, there was a very public display of the Kremlin’s despairing struggle to hold back the tide of change. The wall of an electrical substation in St Petersburg’s Pushkarsky Park became the setting for an exploration of memory, truth and freedom that summed up the dynamic of a regime gripped by panic. Overnight on 14 July, a banner appeared on the substation wall. In the style of the Beatles’ Revolver album, it depicted a series of faces that most Russians would recognise, including the murdered investigative journalists, Anna Politkovskaya and Anastasia Baburova, the murdered opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, the slain human rights activist, Natalya Estemirova, and other victims of the struggle for freedom of expression.

The inscription on the banner, ‘Heroes of recent times’, was a homage to those who had been brave enough to ask questions of Vladimir Putin’s regime and have lost their lives as a consequence. It was also a reference to a mural that previously, briefly, had adorned the substation wall, a smiling image of Alexei Navalny, titled ‘A hero of the new era’.

The people in the banners and the murals are the folk the Kremlin fears most, men and women that Putin’s government would like society to forget. The Navalny image was discovered at 6am on 28 April and had been painted over by 10.30am. The banner, too, was swiftly removed by the authorities and its creators were tracked down and fined.

The short-lived banner honouring ‘Heroes of Recent Times’ in St Petersburg’s Pushkarsky Park

An official removes Alexei Navalny’s likeness from the same St Petersburg wall

But almost immediately, a new image appeared in the park; this time not a victim, but an enforcer. The anonymous serviceman, dressed in camouflage gear, equipped for battle, with his face hidden behind a balaclava, could have come from any one of the Kremlin’s tools of repression: the OMON riot police who bludgeon and arrest those who dare to voice their opinions on the streets, the masked FSB agents who raid the apartments of journalists and businessmen, or the ‘little green men’ sent undercover to invade foreign countries. The inscription now read, ‘A hero of our time’, the title of Mikhail Lermontov’s famous novel of 1840 whose main character, Pechorin, is recognised by Russians as the symbol of the superfluous man who can find no place in a stagnating, backward-looking society.

In the weeks that followed Navalny’s return to Russia, the state’s masked and camouflaged enforcers had been deployed in cities throughout the country, making over 13,000 arrests in response to the nationwide protests against the corruption and theft that Navalny had exposed. The hulking riot police in their thick body armour and visored helmets, universally known as ‘cosmonauts’, remain anonymous, unworried by personal responsibility, dispensing violence with impunity. But for Putin, there is a dilemma. His modus operandi has been to allow his cronies to pilfer from public funds as a reward for keeping him in power. If they go too far and their greed is embarrassingly publicised, he would normally dispense discreet punishments to curb their appetites. To do so now, however, would be to admit that Navalny and his fellow corruption-busters were in the right, to risk appearing weak in the face of the opposition. With his back against the wall, Putin chose instead to abandon restraint. He sent Navalny to jail on trumped up charges, then set about destroying his movement and his followers. Using the pretext of the COVID crisis to outlaw demonstrations, the Kremlin ruled that any public gathering would henceforth require an official permit and then routinely refused to grant these permits for opposition protests, allowing the cosmonauts a free hand to intimidate, beat and arrest.