Is the Kremlin’s hold on power ‘cracking?’

Masha Lipman darkly suggests as much in her new Washington Post column.

She writes (emphasis added):

Street protests are not uncommon in Russia, but with very few exceptions they are small and focused on local, socioeconomic issues. In the past month, however, calls for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to resign were heard at rallies in different parts of Russia. These events — one organized in late January in Kaliningrad, on Russia’s western border; the other last week in the Siberian city of Irkutsk — were not related and are not likely to evolve into a national political movement. But such gatherings underscore the cracks in the Kremlin political system of centralized power, opaque decision-making and unaccountability…

Controlling the developments across Russia’s 11 time zones is an increasing challenge for the centralized government. (President Dmitry Medvedev is adamant about retaining the system of unelected governors, but one of his recent proposals was to reduce the number of Russian time zones.) It was easy for the Kremlin to gloss over governance flaws when it could throw money at problems. But those days are over. The organizers of the Kaliningrad protests have announced plans for another rally in March.

Lipman’s piece is not a particularly bad one, and I don’t want to make it appear as if it is. It’s rather reasonable, doubly so when one considers the utter crap that the Washington Post’s op-ed page churns out these days. But I think that it is nonetheless somewhat myopic and unduly alarmist. In fact, considering the severe economic turmoil that Russia has endured since the bursting of the finance bubble what is shocking is not the intensity and prevalence of protest marches and other disturbances, but their almost total absence. In fact, the current crop of demonstrations catalogued by Lipman is significantly less impressive than the protests which accompanied the “monetization of benefits” reform in January/February 2005. I’m not trying to steal Glenn Greenwald’s shtick, but let’s take a look at some of the overheated reporting which accompanied the (ultimately rather meaningless) dissent against the Kremlin’s reform of the pension system:

From the New York Times on January 16, 2005:

Mikhail I. Yermakov, a retired engineer, has never before taken to the streets to protest – not when the Soviet Union collapsed, the wars in Chechnya began, the ruble plummeted in 1998 or President Vladimir V. Putin last year ended his right to choose his governor. On Saturday, however, he joined hundreds of others in the central square of this gritty industrial city on the edge of Moscow in the latest of a week long wave of protests across Russia against a new law abolishing a wide range of social benefits for the country’s 32 million pensioners, veterans and people with disabilities.

Demonstrations were held in at least three other cities in the Moscow region, in the capital of Tatarstan and, for the fourth straight day, in Samara in central Russia. In St. Petersburg, several thousand demonstrators blocked the city’s main boulevard, with some calling for Mr. Putin’s resignation. Taken together, the protests are the largest and most passionate since Mr. Putin came to power in 2000. They appear to have tapped into latent discontent with Mr. Putin’s government and the party that dominates Parliament, United Russia.

From the New York Times on February 12, 2005:

A month ago a small crowd of elderly men and women briefly blocked the highway to Moscow’s main international airport to protest changes in pension benefits. It was only the start. What has followed has revived something long considered dead, or at least dormant, in Russia: the public protest.In Beslan, relatives of those killed in the siege of Middle School No. 1 last September blocked the main highway across the North Caucasus for three days in late January to protest the pace of the government’s official investigation into the terrorist attack. On the island of Sakhalin in the Far East, ecologists joined and local villagers in blocking roads leading to new oil and gas projects to protest their effect on the environment and local tribal cultures.

In the last week alone, protesters representing liberal parties assembled near the Kremlin to protest the end of direct gubernatorial elections and in St. Petersburg to protest the exclusion of political opponents from the city’s official television station. On Thursday transportation workers took to the street in both cities, as well as a dozen others, to rail against the rising cost of gasoline, among other issues…Opposition leaders claim that in the last month 500,000 people have taken to the streets.

Or from the late and unlamented New York Sun on January 20, 2005:

“I don’t understand how this can be happening,” Mrs. Tunikov, 65, said. “Pensioners like us worked all of our lives to build this country and now we’ve been completely betrayed.” As a result, the Tunikovs, once ardent supporters of President Putin, joined more than 3,000 other protesters here yesterday in the latest in a wave of antigovernment rallies sweeping across Russia.

In what some are already calling “the Babushka Revolution,” after the Russian word for grandmother, Mr. Putin is facing an onslaught of public anger unprecedented in his five years in office. Carrying signs reading “Down with Putin” and “Give us back our benefits,” yesterday’s protesters cheered as opposition politicians called on the president and government to resign.

Or one could take a look at the “reporting” of our loyal propaganda outfit Radio Free Europe on February 1, 2005:

Analysis: Is the Russian Government on the verge of a breakdown?

Hard on the heels of a humiliating political defeat in the presidential election in Ukraine, the Kremlin is now facing another serious crisis, this one even closer to home. For weeks now, the country has been wracked by growing social unrest in opposition to the government’s reform to convert most in-kind social benefits to cash payments, which has been widely criticized as ill considered and poorly implemented.

According to media reports, more than two-thirds of the subjects of the federation have seen protests and demonstrations by pensioners, the disabled, public-sector workers, and other benefits recipients. In some cases, protestors blocked highways and rail lines or took over regional-administration buildings. In many cases, the protests were apparently spontaneous, but the Communist Party has claimed to be organizing the demonstrations…Demonstrators have already been seen carrying signs calling for Putin to resign and even bearing slogans such as “Putin Is Worse Than Hitler.”

Whatever you think about the desirability of political change in Russia it is simply impossible to argue that the recent unrest in Irkutsk and Kaliningrad is even close to the size, scope, and intensity of the protests which took place in winter 2005. Hundreds of thousands of people protested and central, and vital, parts of St. Petersburg and Moscow were occupied by large crowds of visibly enraged pensioners. What was the result of those protests, was the Kremlin’s hold on power fatally weakened? Was there a “babushka revolution?” Of course not. In fact, the Kremlin eventually responded to the concerns of the protesters, largely by addressing bread-and-butter issues through increased social and healthcare spending, and actually consolidated its position. Opinions differ greatly on whether this outcome (a rejuvenated and strengthened Kremlin with an increased focus on social provision) was desirable, but it is impossible to deny.

Let me be very clear – the reports of Putin’s demise are very greatly exaggerated. Unless there is some totally unforeseen and positively catastrophic decline in the Russian economy (the sort of crash that would result from oil dropping to $20-25 a barrel, which seems possible only if there is some sort of worldwide economic Armageddon) the Kremlin will easily ride out the current unrest which, in great contrast to the 2005 protests, is largely confined to the periphery. Despite what Lipman says, Putin and his government have plenty of cash on hand to co-opt and otherwise bribe potential opponents (the amounts of money which quieted the pensioners in 2005 are, in the grand scheme of things, rather pitiful). And if the unlikely happens and all of the myriad “soft” measures of repression fail,  Russia still has a perfectly functional and obedient security apparatus. Iran’s regime, which is much poorer and much less competent than Russia’s, has been able to survive a far more comprehensive challenge to its authority by, in the last resort, simply bashing heads. If it ever comes to that, the Russian government will do the same.

I’d also like to note that the idea that any public displeasure with Putin equates to a “cracking” of the regime is pretty silly, and gives far too much credit to the Kremlin’s own propaganda efforts to paint itself as an omnipresent and all-powerful force. One of the most important things I have learned in studying Russia is that its society is never as passive and its state never as powerful as they appear at first blush. Authoritarian governments such as Russia’s can, and often do, coexist with boisterous and even chaotic societies: a few modest and haphazard protest marches don’t show that the regime is “cracking” because its hold on power was never that tight to begin with.

Finally, and it shouldn’t  need to be stated, but none of the above is to suggest that I am pleased with the Putin government or that I agree with its policy decisions. I, like any decent person, would like to see a much more democratic and prosperous Russia. But indulging in pleasant-sounding fantasies (“The people are revolting! Putin is doomed!”) doesn’t help anyone, least of all the Russians.