The Russia Conundrum

What’s most worrying is that the vast majority of people thought that this was normal – that this was just how governments behave. Russians are not stupid; people knew Putin was lying, but there was no protest, no outrage. People in Russia have been conditioned to believe there is nothing we can do about it. Years of oppression by an uncaring, authoritarian state have instilled the belief that the individual is impotent in the face of the machine. Two centuries ago, Alexander Pushkin created an enduring image of the little man – the

malenky chelovek – who is nightmarishly pursued by a bronze statue of the tsar on horseback and pounded into exhaustion, submission and, eventually, death. Russian society has come to accept that the authorities will abuse and bully and deceive us, and that nothing can be done to change it. The reaction to the lies about COVID deaths, to the collapse of efforts to build a modern economy, to the crushing of civil liberties, the persecution of journalists and opposition politicians, the ingrained corruption and the trampling of free speech, is the same as it always has been – a shrug, a sigh and maybe a few jaundiced jokes about the system we live under.

This is no longer acceptable. It is time to end the mentality of acceptance. It is time for Russians to know that the individual is not powerless, that the state can be challenged. And all this needs to be done quickly. Because without it, things will never get better. If we fail to create a new cohort of confident, educated citizens, aware of their rights and responsibilities, willing to stand up for the ideal of an open, free civil society, Russia will continue to founder under the weight of oppression. A 2021 report by the Chatham House research institute explains why these changes are so urgent. ‘Any chances for a post-Putin Russia to build a viable democratic political system are lower now than they were in the 1990s,’ the report says. ‘Although nearly two generations of Russians have grown up since the collapse of the Soviet Union, they have done so largely under Putin … any remaining chances for meaningful democracy are rapidly evaporating.’ And the reason for this?

Apart from a limited number of institutions either accepted or tolerated by the Kremlin, Russia’s civil society is non- existent and therefore has no experience or track record. This begs the question of how realistic it is to expect the emergence of advanced democratic institutions after Putin leaves office, when there are currently no foundations to speak of. In the early 1990s, a hunger for democracy compensated for the absence of institutions and expertise, and there was a clarity among the general public about which democratic models were to be adopted and a willingness to see the process through. Today, that hunger has been replaced by disappointment

It is imperative, therefore, that we work to nurture the courageous, independent-minded citizens who will be capable of leading a future democracy in Russia:

the country will need a new professional cadre of elite bureaucrats and policymakers, along with the resources for their rapid mobilization. The conditions needed to achieve this are not present in today’s Russia, and it will therefore take a long time to develop and establish new elites from scratch.

The Chatham House report is sobering, albeit perhaps too pessimistic. Of course it will not be easy to build the new civil society Russia needs, but we are already hard at work doing so. Organisations such as the Open Russia Foundation are busy helping to educate our young generation in the values of free-market democracy, to create the new class of civic activists that Chatham House is calling for, willing to question and probe, ready to shape the society that many want to see.

The task is challenging. Current conditions in Putin’s Russia are very different from the reality of Western democracies. There has, for instance, been much talk in the United States about a so-called ‘deep state’ made up of covert, ill-intentioned people who wield power and influence over the running of the country while never showing their faces or revealing their identity. Speculation reached ludicrous proportions with the QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles, led – improbably – by Bill and Hillary Clinton, were pulling the nation’s strings and that only Donald Trump could be trusted to defeat them. In Russia, the ‘internal state’ is not a joke, but a reality. As I have shown, it is a network of informal power that stands above and outside the law, living off privilege and permeating the institutions of the official state. Putin and his cronies control justice and the law, dictating verdicts in key court cases, granting each other the right to control state industries, creaming off billions of dollars.