“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” – John F. Kennedy, March 13, 1962.
In Part One we looked at how, ultimately, Vladimir Putin is where the buck stops in Russia.
The deals that Putin made when he came to power were fairly simple – the oligarchs were told to keep their noses and money out of politics. The people with any access to power were given free hand to abuse it so that there were always компромат (compromising materials) handily available in order to control or blackmail someone. And the social contract was that the people would see improved living standards, but would be given a “managed democracy” rather than a proper democracy.
These trade-offs worked for a while.
The oligarchs understood what they were being presented with, they could keep their cash, and despite his short physical stature Vladimir Putin carried with him a reputation for having a mean streak from his days in St. Petersburg where he liaised between the city bosses he ostensibly worked for and the criminal underworld figures whose trades he facilitated and profited from. For more on this period of Vladimir’s Putin’s post-KGB career, read Karen Dawisha’s excellently researched book “Putin’s Kleptocracy.”
The people in positions of power, they started out small, taking a little bit here and there, eliciting the odd back hander, waiving a speeding ticket in exchange for a bribe, passing down a ruling based on who had paid the most, awarding land rights and building contracts to the mayor’s wife, lest the mayor himself be called corrupt. Then, over time, they got greedier. With so much money up for grabs in resource rich Russia, if your official nose could get in the official trough, a life of riches became an entitlement.
The Russian people at that time had little idea what real democracy was and any improvement in living standards was welcome following the implosion of the Soviet Union and the chaotic early days of Russia as a stand-alone state rather than an empire.
In a managed democracy there is no choice, although maybe the illusion of choice can be created for a period. Throughout the rule of Vladimir Putin there has been no choice. Dimitry Medvedev seemed to represent some choice at one point, in fact the relationship between these two men (as with so many relationships at the top of the Russian power tree) dates back to when Putin was in the St. Petersburg Mayor’s office, Putin was the Head of the Committee for Foreign Liaison and Medvedev was the legal advisor to that committee.
As the KGB and St. Petersburg groupings around Putin established themselves in Moscow and began to expand their power, or, realize the extent of their power, there was a push back. The first oligarch who reneged on the deal to stay out of politics was Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
His story is well known. He went from being the richest man in Russia to a Siberian prison cell. Nobody would be allowed to enter the political scene to challenge the way things were, that even a man as powerful as Khodorkovsky was so easy to take down, in 2003, just three years into the Putin era, was a message and a warning to all. The “elite” were tamed.
The imprisonment of Khodorkovbsky, on charges that alleged that his company avoided taxes assessed in an amount higher than the company’s actual revenues in the period from 2000 to 2003, is just one of the many examples of abuse of the courts and imprisonment for political purposes in Russia.
Fast Forward
Thirteen years after the jailing of Khodorsky, the almost universal result of a challenge to the rule of Vladimir Putin is imprisonment. Anyone can be jailed. Many have been, for some of those jailed after the Bolotnaya street protests against blatant election rigging in the 2012 vote that returned Putin to the presidency, their criminal records have meant that they have been unable to find work, unable to feed their families. The imprisonment of these people has meant to serve as a warning against any future high ideas about protesting in Russia.
Another high profile example of the court system delivering fact-less judgments and prisons being used as a punishment for political dissent rather than punishment for actually having committed a crime is the case of Pussy Riot. Had they been sentenced for singing a bad song in a public place (charge, disturbing the peace?) as they were indeed guilty of, maybe they’d have been given an administrative fine. The judge saw fit to find their actions “motivated by religious hatred” and so with that extension to the charge they were sent to Siberia.
There are as many as 30 Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia, all of whom should be freed according to the letter and spirit of the Minsk Agreements – Oleg Sentsov is probably the most high profile of these since the release of Nadia Savchenko. The conditions of Sentsov’s detention are abysmal. His “crime” was to be a Crimean native ready to speak out against Russia’s illegal annexation of his homeland. That Sentsov is a man of relative fame, a respected and award winning film director, makes his voice all the more challenging and the need to silence it (behind bars) more compelling.
The murder of Sergei Magnitsky inside of a Russian prison in November 2009 resulted in the passing of a law in the United States banning those who are believed to be behind the killing from travelling to or owning any assets in the United States. This case has returned to the news recently for two reasons – the first was that in Putin’s petulant strop on October 3rd of this year about the ending of a plutonium disposal pact, as well as calling for the sanctions placed against Russia for their actions in Ukraine to be dropped, he also demanded that the United States repeal the Magnitsky Law.
But that’s not the shocking reason why the Magnitsky case has recently come to light for Russia watchers.
In Russia there is a committee entrusted to oversee observance of human rights in Moscow prisons. On October 21st it was reported that the make-up of this committee had been changed, and a new person joining this team would be none other than Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Komnov, who is one of the people named in the list of those sanctioned by the Magnitsky law.
Komnov had been the Director of the facility where Magnitsky was tortured and murdered, it is alleged that he was responsible for the conditions Magnitsky was held in. Two weeks after Putin calls for the Magnitsky law to be repealed, Komnov has been appointed to investigate allegations of torture and human rights abuses in the Russian prison system. This is not some kind of cruel joke.
This is just an example of the cruelty that is not only tolerated but apparently encouraged in the heart of the system used by Vladimir Putin to silence critics. At the same time as Komnov was appointed, actual human rights activists were removed from this committee.
One high profile Russian prisoner, political prisoner, is Ildar Dadin. His prison sentence comes from a series of arrests for entirely peaceful protests. Now, behind bars, Daldin alleges he is being tortured. In a letter sent from his cell, he says that blades were planted on him to provide a basis for ordering solitary confinement from day one, he further alleges that he has been beaten, for hours on end, by 10 -12 people. He declared a hunger strike, and the response from his jailors was that if he didn’t end the hunger strike another prisoner would be brought in to rape him.
This is the Russia that Vladmir Putin is responsible for, and the kind of consequences facing ordinary Russian citizens for simply wanting the wealth of the country to be invested for the good of the people, or asking for a democratic choice in case one group of politicians fails to serve the people.
The reason for these imprisonments is – universally – criticism of the actions of the regime of Russia’s President. Hand in hand with this, of course, is the closure and/or harassment of human rights groups like Memorial or like Amnesty International.
Russia doesn’t like human rights groups; cruel regimes never do.
