The Russia Conundrum

Foreign journalists in Russia have also been targeted. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was hit with a $2.4 million fine, which it challenged in the European Court of Human Rights; but before the court could consider the case, the Kremlin had frozen RFE/RL’s bank account and sent bailiffs to seize property from its Moscow bureau. In August 2021, the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford was expelled with no explanation after more than two decades covering the country. Rainsford believes that her detailed knowledge of Russia, her fluent Russian and her ability to speak directly to ordinary Russians were perceived as unwelcome by the Kremlin:

The reality is that they don’t want people like that here. It’s much easier to have fewer people here who understand and who can talk directly to people and hear their stories … to have people who don’t speak the language, don’t know the country so deeply. [I]t is indicative of an increasingly difficult and repressive environment. [They’re] coming for the press, [for] Russian journalists, the few who are left that have been trying to report independently, freely, in extremely difficult circumstances, about Russia to their own people.’

OVD-Info, a Russian non-profit organisation that keeps track of legal data, reported that the ‘scale of detentions, administrative and criminal prosecution in connection with the protests of January–February 2021 is by far the largest in the entire history of modern Russia; it demonstrates the complete lack of readiness on the part of the authorities to respect the rights of citizens to freedom of peaceful assembly and, conversely, their readiness to resist protests by any means, including illegal ones.’ According to Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center, Putin has ‘decided to lock in the results of his first 20 years in power by rolling back liberalism in domestic and foreign policy. The state is now very sincere in its brutality and is not prepared for any more efforts of normalisation.’

The Kremlin’s dependence on force to maintain its grip on society doesn’t come cheap. The state’s need for a loyal and ruthless security apparatus to enforce the application of arbitrary, unpopular laws is reflected in the greatly increased budgets for the security services. A 2020 investigation by Proekt revealed the exponentially growing numbers of Russian citizens employed to control their fellow citizens’ behaviour and being paid higher than average wages to do so. The FSB has seen its budget increase year on year, increasing by 70 per cent since 2012, as more and more heavily equipped riot police are despatched on to the streets. The men in the balaclavas may currently have the upper hand in Russia, but the fact that they are needed reveals the weakness at the heart of the Kremlin. Bereft of ideas and ideals, with an open-minded and determined young generation rising up against them, Putin and his cronies will continue to live in fear.

The reason for the crackdown on free speech and the media is not hard to discern. Independent journalists pose no threat to the Russian people; quite the contrary – by creating a culture of accountability they work in society’s interest. They do, however, scare those in high places who have secrets to hide. Vitaly Borodin, the Kremlin ‘expert’ who likened reporters to terrorists, has done his utmost to discredit the journalists at Open Media by accusing them of being a vehicle for my political revenge. ‘[They] are financed by Khodorkovsky, a fugitive oligarch, who’s currently trying to pull off some kind of political coup with Navalny’s help. How come Khodorkovsky suddenly decided to become a journalist? He’s certainly not a journalist by trade – he’s a crook and a villain.’

Putin uses people like me and Navalny to scare those Russian citizens who have swallowed the Kremlin’s indoctrination. But there is a new generation emerging, young Russians who were born after the end of the Soviet Union, who have known only the rule of Putin and his cronies. Opinion polls show that these young people have low levels of trust in the current regime; for them, it is not enough for Putin to boast that he is the man who ‘ended the chaos of the 1990s’. The new generation came of age after that; they grew up during the oil boom of the early 2000s and have suffered the subsequent collapse in living standards, the degradation in civil freedoms, and the increasing reliance on base nationalism and international aggression. Such posturing may work with older Russians, but not with the young generation. The award of the 2021 Nobel Prize to the independent Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, editor of the courageous investigative newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, was a boost from the international community to the cause of freedom of expression in Russia.