Year-old protests hit snag: Plagued by infighting and a seeming caste system, the opposition is at a crossroads

Moscow Protest file photo

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan – November 26, 2012)

Nearly a year after a modest opposition rally against an allegedly rigged parliamentary vote sparked the biggest demonstrations Russia has seen in two decades, anti- Kremlin groups are suffering from fatigue ­ and an identity crisis.

“If someone knew what to do in this situation, then [President Vladimir] Putin would be gone. There isn’t any know-how,” Maria Baronova, an activist leader who is facing jail time over charges of inciting mass protest, told The Moscow News.

The elation of the first protest in December 2011 is gone. The opposition took an unprecedented step in electing its leaders to a coordination council last month. But it took weeks of debates to finally agree, over the weekend, to hold the next March of Freedom on Dec. 15 ­ as disputes raged over the motive of a rally where the key challenge seemed to be getting people to show up in the first place.

Tatyana, a middle-class Moscow entrepreneur in her 30s, attended every protest held in Moscow after the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections.

Now she is willing to go only “if the rally doesn’t interfere with work and leisure,” she said.

Initially, the rallies grew in size. Up to 60,000 turned up during the first rally on Bolotnaya Ploshchad Dec. 10, and then up to 120,000 showed up at Prospekt Sakharova on Dec. 24, and as many as 160,000 at a Feb. 4 march to Bolotnaya, according to organizers (police provided considerably smaller numbers).

But an apparent crisis within the opposition movement emerged after Putin’s re-election in March.

The protests began to radicalize, turning violent.

Police clashed with demonstrators on March 5, and then on May 6, on the eve of Putin’s inauguration.

Schism

Now, oppositionist political pundit Andrei Piontkovsky is waging a blog war against it-girl-turnedprotester Ksenia Sobchak over which one of them kowtows more gracefully to the Kremlin. Radicals accuse more moderate liberals of selling out the cause, while the latter maintain that a more aggressive stance would lead to a crackdown and political marginalization.

“The moderates want reform. The radicals say the regime must be changed,” said Alexei Makarkin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies.

That split is exacerbated by the fact that many opposition leaders have close ties to the ruling elite.

“There are those who have traditionally fought against the regime, and there is a part of the nomenclature,” Oleg Kashin, a Kommersant journalist who was elected into the opposition’s coordination council, told The Moscow News. “And in word or deed, [the nomenclature] won’t do anything that’s truly against Putin.”

According to one opposition activist who spoke on conditions of anonymity, mutual suspicions and fierce loyalty within the protest movement mimic those of the ruling elite.

“The principle is, you’re friends with whomever you like, but you don’t talk about it,” the activist said, describing a caste system where everything was decided at the top.

“You can be on the Aeroflot board if you’re [popular protest leader Alexei] Navalny… But a lower-level [opposition] activist isn’t allowed to talk to a lower-level pro-Kremlin activist.”

Catch-22

Baronova concedes to one of the most oft-voiced criticism of the opposition ­ its lack of a clear-cut program.

“We’re not hungry, we’re not in poverty, and people who aren’t hungry can’t keep this up for long, [while] making philosophical demands. You can’t build a civil society on philosophical demands,” she said, referring to the fact that the bulk of the protesters is made of the educated middle-class urban residents.

And as the opposition’s elected body debates what kind of demands to make at its next rally in December, they seem locked in the same type of authoritarian model they’re trying to overthrow: their cries for free elections and reforms are still addressed to a government that they don’t recognize as legitimate.

“It’s not that they are expecting something from the government, but they have to articulate their demands whether they see the government as legitimate or not,” Makarkin said. “Since the decisions are made by the government, it’s logical that the demands are addressed to the government.”

‘Now what?’

The May clashes provoked harsh repression ­ a series of law enforcement raids on opposition leaders’ apartments and offices were followed by the arrests of at least a dozen people that were involved in the May 6 rally.

Meanwhile, the parliament, controlled by the pro-Putin United Russia party, passed a series of draconian bills targeting opposition rallies, critical media and civil rights NGOs with foreign funding.

If some 44 percent of the population supported the protest rallies in December 2011, that number dropped to 30 percent by October 2012, according to a Levada Center poll released last month.

“A lot of things did change [following the rallies], but protest leaders see [the changes] as inadequate,” Makarkin said. “We now have popular gubernatorial elections returned, for example. But selection of candidates is still controlled by the authorities. So, there is a disappointment on a lot of levels.”

Last month’s election of the opposition’s first representative body ­ the coordination council ­ has been seen widely as a promise of getting opposition demands onto a new level.

But little other than resolutions condemning recent arrests came out of it.

Still, the protest movement is far from over as the government is shaken by corruption scandals, while public demands for political liberalization remain unanswered properly by the ruling elite.

“When people once again feel themselves humiliated and insulted, we’ll see new eruptions of dissent,” Makarkin said.

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