Kremlin to tighten screws in wake of Kiev unrest

Kremlin and Saint Basil's

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan – February 24, 2014) A Moscow court sentenced seven people on Monday to prison terms ranging from one to four years for their roles in protest riots on the city’s Bolotnaya Ploshchad in May 2012, in a ruling seen as an indicator of whether government pressure would increase on the opposition in the wake of unrest in neighboring Ukraine.

The ruling came just a day after the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games, amid fears of a post-Sochi crackdown by Russian authorities as the international spotlight on the country dimmed.

Speculation that government pressure would tighten was also fueled by recent protests in Kiev, where bloody clashes claiming some 100 lives have lead to the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the establishment of an interim government.

Experts said that while the events on Kiev’s Independence Square could not repeat themselves in Moscow, the Kremlin was certainly taking notes and hedging its bets lest protest activity increase back home.

‘Could have been worse’

While the terms were harsher than the suspended sentences one oppositionist leader identified as a “realistic hope,” they fell short of the five- to six-year terms that prosecutors had demanded.

“It could have been worse,” Dmitry Agranovsky, a lawyer for several of the defendants, told The Moscow News minutes after the judge read out the sentence.

The harshest term was handed down to Sergei Krivov, a political activist who was given four years on charges that he had hit a police officer with a baton and pushed another. Alexandra Dukhanina, a student who had recently joined the protest movement, got a suspended term on accusations that she threw bricks at riot police.

The rest of the defendants whose cases were being heard on Monday got terms ranging from one year to three years.  In December and January, 11 protesters received amnesties; three were sentenced earlier to terms ranging up to four years, while the rest are awaiting verdicts.

The so-called Bolotnaya case – in which 28 protesters were put on trial over their roles in an opposition rally on the eve of President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration that turned violent – was the culmination of the Kremlin’s response to a popular protest movement that broke out in the winter of 2011-2012, but which has since waned.

Looming pressure

Opposition leaders and experts fear that an increasingly stringent, patriotic line recently taken by the Kremlin is only the foreshadowing of looming pressure as the government considers its options following three months of protests in Kiev that toppled Ukraine’s government.

“We will see only harsher control measures on the part of the police toward any public protest action,” Ilya Ponomaryov, a parliamentarian from the A Just Russia party who played a vocal role in the protest movement of 2011-2012, said.

The fears come amid a number of recent moves widely seen as part of a Kremlin clampdown on the media.

In December, it announced the replacement of the country’s biggest news agency, RIA Novosti, with Rossiya Segodnya, appointing conservative commentator Dmitry Kiselyov – best known for his anti-gay remarks and his diatribes against Ukrainian protesters – as its head.

In January, the independent Dozhd television channel was taken off the air by several cable providers after a controversial survey asking viewers whether the Soviet Union should have surrendered Leningrad to the Nazis, instead of facing an 872-day siege that killed up to 1.5 million people.

Last week, the CEO of the liberal Ekho Moskvy radio station was replaced with Yekaterina Pavlova, formerly a manager at the state-controlled Golos Rossii radio station. The reshuffle was orchestrated by state-owned Gazprom-Media, which controls Ekho Moskvy, and was seen as a direct threat to editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov, who said on his blog that the decision was aimed at changing the station’s editorial policy.

“The trend toward reaction was already there, but the events in Kiev are fueling it,” Alexei Makarkin, vice president of the Center for Political Technologies, told The Moscow News.

“Russian authorities are certainly going to be drawing conclusions from the events in Kiev,” he added. “The government [believes it] must be strong, decisive and ready to act. We could see increased pressure on the media. We could see a more regulated Internet. We could see further pressure on the liberal intelligentsia, which will be accused of betrayal and being unpatriotic. We are already seeing this.”

Lawmakers introduced a bill last week proposing that bloggers whose web pages get 10,000 views a day must get official journalist accreditation from the government and be subject to the same restrictions imposed on the media by law.

“After all the times when they cried wolf, right now we’re seeing a real media crackdown,” said Mark Galeotti, a professor of global affairs at New York University and an expert on Russian security. “It’s not that they think that the protests in Kiev will lead to a massive galvanization of protesters back home. If you look at how Ukrainian television reported on the events moderately, it was one of the marshaling factors that encouraged protesters in cities outside Kiev. I think there’s definitely a sense of making damn sure that if a crisis like this emerges in Russia, then that’s not going to happen.”

While legislative measures like new regulations for bloggers are unlikely to be passed, Galeotti said, “what [these proposals do] is create this dead weight of self-censorship.”

The Putin playbook

While a few hundred protesters gathered outside of the Zamoskvoretsky District Court on Friday and Monday to support the Bolotnaya defendants, and hundreds were detained by police, experts said nothing coming close to the street protests Kiev has witnessed since November could unfold in Moscow.

There are few lessons to be drawn from the events in Kiev because the government’s power is stronger in Russia and a similar uprising simply could not happen, according to Sergei Goncharov, president of the Alfa Veterans’ Association, a union of former security officers.

“I just don’t see Yanukovych as having the political will to issue a [decisive] order, whether it was to clear Maidan [Kiev’s Independence Square] or to surrender it to the opposition,” he told The Moscow News.  “So I can’t even fathom something similar happening in Russia because the authority of the president is very strong within law enforcement, and any order to clear [a city square] would have been carried out. There would have been minimal casualties, if any.”

Nor is Russia’s opposition comparable to those who took to the streets in Kiev, Goncharov said. “They were armed bandits [in Kiev].”

By contrast, the protest movement that took to the streets in Russia in 2011-2012 was peaceful and did not spread beyond Moscow’s Garden Ring, he said, adding that the opposition was leaderless and the authorities had nothing to fear from them.

The conclusion that the government will draw from the events in Kiev is that “we cannot allow the kind of bacchanalia that Yanukovych allowed” with regard to the oligarchs, Goncharov said.

But tactics for dealing with street protests will remain the same, he added.

“I don’t think the government will really change its approach toward the opposition as long as we have the kind of opposition that we have,” he said.

One thing the Kremlin has learned from the events in Kiev is that it has largely been right all along, according to NYU’s Galeotti.

“The events in Kiev validate the Kremlin’s strategy,” he said. “One of the reasons why things went so badly for Yanukovych is that he didn’t follow the Putin playbook. He didn’t have the public support base, the undivided support of the oligarchs, and when it came to using violence, he did so too late, and too often it was a bit of violence and a bit of attempt at negotiation.”

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