NOT A MONOLITH
Russian Opposition Beset by Infighting as Country Expects More Turmoil
By Jamie DettmerVOA
Updated February 11, 2021
FILE - Opposition activists participate in a rally against Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Saint Petersburg, Russia, May 5, 2018.
A storied Russian liberal politician has sparked an outbreak of infighting among the country’s opposition groups after mounting a scathing attack on Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny, arguing the path he would take the country down wouldn’t lead to a life free of repression.
“Everyone must decide whether to support Navalny or not,” Grigory Yavlinsky wrote this week. “But you need to understand. A democratic Russia, respect for people, and a life without fear and repression are incompatible with Navalny’s policies,” he added.
Yavlinsky, who ran twice for the Russia's presidency, in 1996 against Boris Yeltsin and in 2000 against Vladimir Putin, founded the Yabloko party, which favors free-market economics and social liberalism. He’s been critical of Navalny in the past and this week repeated his accusation that Navalny, Russia’s most high-profile opposition politician, is xenophobic and an authoritarian nationalist.
The attack by Yavlinsky has split the party he founded and triggered broader opposition infighting. It comes amid signs the recent protests against the Kremlin, and demands for Navalny to be freed from jail, are not resonating with most Russians, and that the paramilitary style crackdown on the dissenters is deterring others from considering protesting or enlisting in any future political action.
A poll conducted by the independent Levada Center carried out between January 29 and February 2 suggests there is little public appetite for agitation. Navalny survived a near-fatal poisoning, which he blames on the Kremlin and was arrested last month in Moscow on his return following life-saving treatment in Germany.
In the past two weeks, pro-Navalny supporters were on the streets in more than a hundred cities across Russia’s 11 time zones, with the largest protests mounted in the Russian capital and St. Petersburg. More than 11,000 people have been arrested at rallies opposing the jailing of Navalny, who started out as a blogger and became known as an anti-corruption campaigner. 
FILE - Liberal politician Grigory Yavlinsky participates in a march in memory of murdered Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, in central Moscow, Russia, Feb. 24, 2019.
The poll found that just 15% of Russians would be prepared to participate in future pro-Navalny protests, four percent less than the pollster found in November 2020. The percentage rose to 17% when asked if they would join rallies to protest economic conditions. Those figures represent Russians’ lowest willingness to protest since March 2018, according to the pollster.
The pollster also found that only 22% viewed the recent political protests positively. Younger respondents, who tend to get their news from the Internet and non-government media sources, viewed the protests slightly more favorably than older Russians, who generally receive their news and views from government-owned or controlled channels.
Government-sponsored channels have mounted unrelenting scorching attacks on Navalny and his allies, accusing them of being agents of foreign powers.
Among all respondents, two out of five said they view the protesters negatively. Another 37% expressed indifference to the political protests. Nonetheless, Russians do expect more political agitation in the future with 45% of people expecting more trouble, a jump from 23% last November, the highest it has been since 1998.
The poll findings are dismaying for Navalny supporters, who are in the process of taking stock and reorganizing to adjust for the high number of dedicated activists currently in detention. Navalny’s team last week said it intends to shift tactics and mount neighborhood flash mobs this Sunday instead of urging large numbers of supporters to take to the streets, risking more detentions and giving the security services an easy target to hit.
Neighborhood flash mobs is a tactic pro-democracy activists have been using in recent weeks in neighboring Belarus.
Navalny’s key aides are urging Russians to gather near their homes on February 14, Valentine’s Day, to shine torches and light candles in heart shapes. Navalny made multiple heart gestures to his wife Yulia in the courtroom where he was sentenced to two years and eight months on February 2.
FILE - A still image taken from video footage shows Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny making a hand gesture forming a heart during the announcement of his court verdict in Moscow, Russia, Feb. 2, 2021.
He was convicted of violating the terms of his parole from a 2014 sentence for fraud in a case his supporters, international rights groups and Western governments say is spurious and politically motivated.
Opposition infighting is par for the course. President Vladimir Putin’s foes are drawn from across the political spectrum, from right-wing ultra-nationalists to old-school Communists, and with a variety of liberal groups in the middle. In 2016, an effort to stitch together a broad alliance of opposition groups, called the Democratic Coalition, was short-lived.
It fell apart when the leaders, who were meant to be working together to try to gain political influence, resumed their competition and tried to elbow each other out of the way.
The Kremlin gave it the coup de grace when it leaked to the government-sponsored NTV channel a video of former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, a key liberal opposition politician, and one of the founders of the Democratic Coalition, in which he was heard disparaging his political partners.
Different coalition configurations were tried before and have been since, too, but keeping opposition groups marching, agitating and campaigning as one also has always been difficult and temporary. Yavlinsky’s public criticism of Navalny this week has exposed once again the splits and political animosities.
Navalny’s allies have urged Yabloko to expel Yavlinsky, and opposition social media forums have seen acrimonious exchanges, raising the prospect that opposition groups once again will end up squabbling and taking off in disparate directions in the run-up campaign to parliamentary elections in September.
Navalny was himself a member of Yabloko, but he was expelled in 2007 over what other members saw as unacceptable “nationalist” views. In the past, the Kremlin critic has participated in ultranationalist rallies and has been critical of migrants, using language his critics say make him unsuitable to be the figurehead of the opposition to Putin.
Navalny denies he is a xenophobe, and says he was expelled from Yabloko because he made little secret he wanted to replace Yavlinsky.
But some Yabloko leaders are infuriated with Yavlinsky’s attack, which they say is ill-timed and will put off voters. Other opposition figures say Yavlinsky shouldn’t criticize someone now in jail as a political prisoner and unable to defend himself.
Last week, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled former oil tycoon who emerged as a prominent critic of Putin after a 10-year spell in a Russian jail, said he disagrees with Navalny on some issues, “But when a person becomes a political prisoner he must be supported.”
In an interview on Echo of Moscow, an independent radio station, Yavlinsky noted he had also participated in the past in prohibited rallies. He added: “I support everyone who is in prison.”
But on Navalny’s Twitter account, which is handled currently by his team, Yavlinsky’s criticism was put down to “envy.”
Russian opposition party flourishes amid doubts over its reform credentials
Critics say New People is encouraged by the Kremlin as a spoiler for Navalny’s movement
Wed, Feb 24, 2021,
Andrew E Kramer in Moscow
THE TEAL PARTY
Registration of attendees at the congress of the New People party in Moscow in August 2020. Photograph: Sergei Karpukhin\TASS via Getty ImagesRussian president Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he doesn’t tolerate dissent, but one new opposition party has flourished. And that party, curiously, has been speaking out on the same themes of fighting corruption and repression that have made opposition leader Alexei Navalny enemy No 1 of the Kremlin, with the government about to ship him off to a penal colony.The new party thrives even as Navalny’s own party has been banned. The reasons, Russian analysts say, are to undermine Navalny, distract from his movement and divide the liberal opposition – all while providing a veneer of multiparty politics in a country where there is little meaningful electoral choice.The new party, called New People, seems designed to appeal to Navalny’s followers. “For two decades, we lived in a situation of a false choice: either freedom or order,” its platform proclaims. The government, it says, “should stop seeing enemies and traitors in those who have other points of view”.The Kremlin has worked on many fronts to destroy Navalny’s movement – arresting his supporters at protests and, according to Navalny and western governments, trying to assassinate him last year. Government officials have smeared him as a stooge of western intelligence agencies, and government-backed flash mobs have sprung up to support Putin.But Navalny has also faced a steady stream of competing anti-corruption reformers who seem to operate with the government’s blessing – most recently New People, which has been revving up its campaign for parliamentary elections in September, when Navalny will be in a penal colony.The founder of a cosmetics company, Alexei Nechayev, established the party last year to channel what he described as opposition sentiment in society, much as Navalny has been doing. But Nechayev refrains from direct criticism of Putin and is not calling for his ousting.
New People party founder Alexei Nechayev at last August’s congress.
Photograph: Sergei Karpukhin\TASS via Getty Images
Navalny and his allies greeted the arrival of New People with disdain, identifying Nechayev as the latest in a long line of political doubles conjured up by the Kremlin to try to unseat Navalny from his leadership of discontented young professionals.“They are trying to feed us the line these New People will now be the real competition for United Russia, ” Lyubov Sobol, a Navalny ally, said of the governing pro-Putin party in a YouTube analysis after the new party’s appearance last year.“It’s kind of funny,” she added. “They say the right things, more or less, but obviously won’t ever do anything. They are simply spoilers.” ‘Managed democracy’Russia’s political system is sometimes called “managed democracy”, for the practice of Kremlin political advisers creating, mentoring or funding supposed opposition figures and parties – and tolerating some others as long as they don’t criticise Putin directly.These parties are allowed to compete among themselves, venting some steam in the population, while providing the necessary losers to create an illusion of choice in elections that the governing party mostly wins. Variants of such fig-leaf democratic systems exist around the world in autocratic countries.Outside a few monarchies in the Middle East and remaining communist dictatorships like North Korea, elections, even if they are rigged, are the only accepted means of legitimising power today.This gloss on Russia’s iron-fisted rule emerged in the early 2000s under a former domestic political adviser to Putin, Vladislav Surkov, though Surkov has since been elbowed aside. In the last presidential election in 2018, Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite who is reputed to be a goddaughter of Putin, filled the ersatz opposition role while Navalny was banned from running.Similarly, New People allows Russians who support Navalny’s modernising agenda to vote for a legal alternative, without the headache of arrests and repression.Nechayev denied he consulted with the Kremlin before forming the party, which now has 72 regional offices, having added two just in the last week, and actually won a smattering of seats last autumn in regional elections.Still, political analysts have dismissed the idea that the party emerged without the Kremlin’s blessing. In Russia, “the real opposition is the unregistered parties”, Andrei Kolesnikov, a political scientist at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said in a telephone interview.
‘Red lines’In an interview in the party’s spacious headquarters in an upscale office tower in Moscow, Nechayev listed the three conditions for registering a political party: refraining from criticism of Putin or his family, avoiding foreign financing and abstaining from unsanctioned street protests.“We don’t violate these three red lines,” he said. “Often, and especially in the West, Russia is presented as just Putin and Navalny”, but many Russians want a moderate opposition, he said. “Most people understand the world is not black and white.”However useful in blunting movements like Navalny’s, managed democracy hasn’t always gone smoothly. On rare occasions, politicians derided as Kremlin puppets have pivoted to real opposition.Members of Just Russia, a party Surkov helped form in 2006 to fill the fake centre-left opposition slot in Russian politics, did just that in 2011 with an endorsement of a previous street protest movement led by Navalny.One of those politicians, Gennady Gudkov, has since fled Russia and speaks openly of the Kremlin’s hand in faux opposition parties, a threat the real opposition faces in parallel with police crackdowns.Of Surkov’s pivotal role in creating Just Russia, “there were no secrets”, Gudkov said in a telephone interview from Bulgaria.In a macabre twist, one political figure believed to have arisen as a fake, or managed, copy of Navalny has even died in what Bellingcat, the open-source research organisation, has documented as a likely assassination with poison.As an anti-corruption blogger, Nikita Isayev and his group New Russia had mimicked many of Navalny’s tactics, uncovering corruption among low-level officials. He was called “the New Navalny”. He refrained, though, from criticising Putin.Isayev died suddenly at age 41 on an overnight train ride in 2019. Among the potential motives Bellingcat identified was palace intrigue. Isayev was seen as affiliated with Surkov, so when Surkov fell from favour, according to this theory, his Kremlin rivals arranged to eliminate his fake Navalny, too.
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