Since the beginning of February, prosecutors, the ministry of justice, and the tax authority have paid visits to Russian non-governmental organisations, demanding comprehensive access to financial documents, personnel files, and program documents. All over Russia, reportedly close to a hundred of these revisions have taken place. During the second half of March, inspectors also paid visits to Amnesty International and the highly renowned Russian human rights organization, Memorial. Memorial has earned great international respect due to its humanitarian engagement, charitable works, and great efforts to account for Russia’s Stalinist past, improving the country’s reputation in the world. Two big German foundations – the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation in Moscow and the office of the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation in St. Petersburg – were also inspected by the prosecution, tax authorities and the ministry of justice. One has to assume that this happened at the order of the political leadership.
The Campaign Against Non-governmental Organizations
The campaign to intimidate non-governmental organizations – these actions cannot be interpreted in a different way – is part of a national policy, implemented by the Putin administration since May 2012, which promotes patriotism and is directed against Western influence.
Before the summer hiatus in 2012, the faction United Russia introduced several laws in the Duma which were directed against the so-called non-systemic opposition, and thus against the protagonists of the mass demonstrations in winter 2011/2012 who define themselves, in contrast to the oppositional parties in the Duma, as not being a part of the political system. The right to protest has been made more restrictive and potential violations lead to high fines. Under the framework of the child protection law, regulations have been created that allow the authorities to put dangerous websites on an index and delete them. Libel has been made a criminal offense once again. Calling United Russia a "party of crooks and thieves," which became common in autumn 2011, has now become expensive. Another law requires non-governmental organisations which are politically active and receive funds from abroad to register as "foreign agents." These laws, hastily and poorly done, are only applied in individual cases at the moment, but they do create a law framework aimed at criminalising criticism of the regime and simultaneously portraying it as initiated by the West, and thus defaming it as being controlled by the enemy.
The vlast ("power" – the common name for state authorities) also took action against opposition leaders, striving to muzzle them. The authorities initiated legal procedures regarding fraud and embezzlement against Alexei Navalny, a blogger with nationalist tendencies who is seen as a leading figure of the non-systemic opposition. Gennady Gudkov, a deputy of the Just Russia party and an opposition activist, lost his parliamentary mandate; additionally, he was excluded from his own party. His son Dimitry, also a deputy of Just Russia, is facing difficulties due to a trip to the US, during which he searched for non-registered real estate owned by Russian deputies. Many other people who participated in the big demonstrations on Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012 are facing lawsuits due to their participation in "mass unrest" and violent acts against state officials. The protesters – like the Pussy-Riot activists – have been in pretrial detention for months, but this time without the attention of the international media.
The actions of the judiciary and the police are part of a patriotic national policy, which is being widely propagated in the meantime. Putin himself adopted a patriotic tone in his State of the Nation Address in which he propagated "Great Russia" as a model, instead of addressing concrete social and economic problems. In Russia, "patriots" are now dominating the discourse. They invoke the national greatness of the Soviet Union and the Tsarist Empire and condemn the West and its political and cultural influences as corrupt and dangerous. It is obvious that under these circumstances, a continuation of the policy of "modernisation", as proclaimed by the former president Dmitri Medvedev, is off the table.
Putin’s Bureaucrats
Shocked by the mass demonstrations and irritated by the president’s declining popularity, Putin’s entourage is trying to mobilize society’s support through national and xenophobic slogans. This presents a danger to the regime itself, as Russia’s right wing is turning against its own elites. An ideologue like Sergei Kurginyan, who is currently courted by the president’s administration and who sees entrepreneurs and bureaucrats with properties abroad equally as enemies like the West, is propagating a national revolution in order to save "the people" from destruction and "the country" from decay.
"The people" – which is the way spokespersons of right wing ideologues stylise themselves – demand that state officials are not allowed to own foreign bank accounts and foreign property, and that the oligarchs repatriate their capital to the homeland. The president took up both ideas: a law he introduced in the Duma prohibits foreign bank accounts for state officials. Furthermore, he declared a policy of deoffshorisaziya which puts an end to the off-shore dealings of oligarchs in tax havens. He did not make the elite groups in his environment – the finance magnates, business managers and the political apparatus – very happy. These measures run contrary to the practices the elites have employed during the last twenty years. A Russia which retreats into itself and its own past, and which embraces national patriotic and xenophobic ideas, is not only a problem for its neighbors but also for its own ruling class.
This »Point of View« has been translated and republished by the Fair Observer. Its original German version was published by SWP on 26 March 2013.
Translated into English by Manuel Langendorf.
