What’s behind the Moscow demonstrations?

Demonstrators will take to Moscow’s streets for the fifth weekend in a row on Saturday, and the Kremlin is likely to continue its policy of harsh repercussions, as the city’s summer of discontent continues.

Mass protests took place on 27 July and 3 August, and more than 2,000 forcible detentions, over the barring of government critics from standing in city council elections scheduled for 8 September. Yesterday it was announced that 10 people would be charged with inciting mass public unrest - a charge that could earn them up to 15 years in prison.

On the same days as the protests, mobile internet service in Moscow suffered outages and weak performance. Normal service, which is integral to the organisation of marches, was faulty because of “overcrowding”, claimed service providers.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

On Tuesday, BBC Russia obtained a letter sent internally to the call centres of the big three Russian telecom companies in Moscow. “Colleagues,” the letter read, “in the Presnensky and Basmanny districts and in the centre of Moscow, a number of base stations are disabled at the request of law enforcement agencies.”

This coming weekend, with another protest planned, Moscow authorities have announced an impromptu free barbecue and music festival, dubbed Meat&Beat, which will take place on August 10-11 at Gorky Park - a gathering point for demonstrations - serving “meat dishes by Moscow's best restaurants”.

Bands announced in the lineup knew nothing of their involvement, reports Radio Free Europe.

On Tuesday night, two parents stood to lose custody of their baby for bringing the child to the 27 July rally. The Daily Telegraph reports that, “Yevgeny Bunimovich, the children's rights ombudsman for Moscow, said it was unacceptable to use children for political blackmail.”

Clearly, demonstrators’ attempts at organisation and expression have faced obstacles - from underhand tricks to old-fashioned violence - so why do they keep turning out, and what are their prospects?

What do the protesters want?

These are the biggest marches in Russia since the Bolotnaya protests of 2011-13. Those were in response to purported vote rigging around Vladimir Putin’s reelection to the presidency. In the same way, electoral fraud is the catalyst behind the current discontent.

However, as is the case in the current Hong Kong unrest, behind the initial rallying cry lies a host of grievances. To start, the Russian economy has flatlined for years: this supposed global superpower has a GDP lower than Italy, about equivalent to New York City, but lower than the state of New York.

This lack of economic output is largely caused by the inefficiencies of mismanagement and corruption, and young, educated, urban Russians - the predominant cohort currently on the streets of Moscow - know it.

“Portrayed in foreign capitals as a powerful and belligerent geopolitical actor whose military interventions have given him increased global clout, Mr Putin’s domestic support is foundering — down a third since 2017 — after years of economic malaise that have left average Russians feeling poorer and less confident about their future,” write Henry Foy and Max Seddon in the Financial Times. “Real incomes have fallen for five of the past six years, and are about 10 per cent lower than in 2013.”

Beyond economic underperformance, people despair over the Kremlin’s draconian habits. Political crackdowns of the kind favoured by Putin are difficult to balance. On the one hand they quell dissent through intimidation, but at the same time they energise opponents by angering them.

For example, as the Guardian reports, “the sizable protests earlier this year over the detention of journalist Ivan Golunov on obviously fabricated drugs charges were a sign of broader irritation at what might once have been a niche issue troubling only rights activists and fellow journalists.”

Here, the authorities got the balance wrong, and “stepped back and freed Golunov… they have also made concessions in a number of other recent cases of single-issue protests.”

Likewise, it is no coincidence that at this time of unrest, the most prominent of Putin’s critics, Alexei Navalny, finds himself under arrest. Yesterday, authorities froze his bank accounts, and those of his opposition organisation, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).

“Russia’s Investigative Committee announced during protests in Moscow last weekend that it had opened a criminal case into the laundering of 1 billion rubles ($15.3 million) by Navalny’s FBK. Authorities raided the FBK’s office in Moscow as part of the investigation,” the Moscow Times reports.

Navalny was also jailed during the Bolotnaya protests in 2011. This time, however, he suffered a “severe allergic reaction” while in custody. “What happened to Alexei was a toxic reaction to an unknown chemical agent,” Navalny’s doctor, Anastasia Vasilyeva said. “Alexei has had negative allergy tests for his whole life. He is in principle not allergic. At all.”

Why the crackdown from the Kremlin?

Given the struggling economy, “Putin and his circle of security advisers have long feared the potential for a 'colour revolution' of the kind that twice toppled governments in neighboring Ukraine,” writes Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times. “These KGB alumni treat even small movements and civil society organizations as if they might generate a wave that could swamp the Putin administration for good.”

MacFarquhar continues: “The protests and the harsh reaction can be seen as the opening salvo in an expected showdown over what happens in 2024, when Mr. Putin is not allowed to seek a fifth term as president.”

The pregnant question of Putin's succession hangs over events, raising the stakes for all concerned. Times of change are necessarily perilous for power-holders in Russia, and it is expected that he will try over the next five years to amend the constitution to allow him to stay on. But that manoeuvre will surely spark further protests, just as it did in the 2011 Bolotnaya marches.