The Russia Conundrum

The news I was hoping to hear was from the Open Russia movement, which was taking part in a conference of municipal representatives called to discuss the activities of independent council deputies and their plans for the next round of elections. It was a run-of-the-mill event that in normal countries would attract little attention, a fleeting mention in the media – think, a Lib Dem discussion forum in the UK, or a Democratic strategy group in the US. But Russia in 2021 was not a normal country; things are different there. At 10am Moscow time, the conference began its proceedings and a few minutes later, armed police burst in, yelling, ‘Don’t move! You are all detained!’

Two hundred men and women, young and old, delegates and journalists, were dragged away and bundled into police buses. They were respectable folk – people like Ilya Yashin, Council Leader of Moscow’s Krasnoselsky District; the ex-mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Roizman; the executive director of Open Russia, Andrei Pivovarov; the publicist, Vladimir Kara-Murza; and municipal deputy, Yulia Galyamina – but that didn’t save them. No one was given the chance to object. Yulia tried to ask the police what she had done wrong – ‘I didn’t break any law; I’m a municipal deputy, an elected representative’ – but she got no answer. Only after they had been booked and cautioned in a Moscow police station were the arrestees told that their crime was ‘associating with an undesirable organisation’.

Russian police arrested 200 opposition politicians and municipal deputies for taking part in a forum with an ‘undesirable’ organisation, Open Russia

The concept of ‘undesirable’ is a complicated issue that Vladimir Putin has made simple: in Putin’s Russia, the Kremlin decides who is desirable and who is not. Independent political parties, institutes and think tanks fall unsurprisingly into the latter category. My own affiliated organisations, the Open Russia Civic Movement and the Institute of Modern Russia, are allowed to work freely abroad, but in Russia they are proscribed. Cooperating with either of them makes you liable to detention under Article 20.33 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation; you get a 15,000-rouble fine for your first ‘offence’ followed by escalating penalties if you don’t learn the error of your ways.

In the days that followed the attack on the municipal forum, the police forcibly entered the apartment of Open Russia’s Moscow coordinator, Maria Kuznetsova. On the pretext of looking for ‘materials relating to undesirable organisations’, they took away her laptop and memory sticks. They raided the offices of my news organisation, MBK Media, seizing documents and computers. On 17 March, the Kremlin wrote to Twitter, demanding they ban MBK Media from using their services. When Twitter declined to comply with this and other similar demands, the communications censor, Roskomnadzor, used jamming technology to ‘throttle’ the speed of its tweets in the territory of the Russian Federation.

Vladimir Putin has come to believe he can tell the Russian people whatever he wants. He can tell us that black is white and he expects us to believe it – or, at least, to pretend that we believe it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Kremlin did what all other European countries were doing – it released regular updates on the number of deaths caused by the virus. But even the most cursory analysis revealed that deaths in Russia were being grossly underreported. On 13 March 2021, for example – the day of the police raid on Open Russia – Putin’s state media told the Russian people that a total of 91,695 of their fellow citizens had perished so far. But at the same time, a simple glance at the record of excess deaths – that is, the number by which the current year’s deaths exceed those of previous years – showed that the real figure was more than 400,000. When Alexei Raksha, the (now former) senior statistician at the state statistics agency, Rosstat, pointed out the discrepancy, he was removed from his job.