9/17/19
Who knew the Kremlin's defenders were so fragile? Actor Pavel Ustinov has just been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for allegedly dislocating a National Guard officer's shoulder and chanting abuse, while being arrested at an unauthorized protest on 3 Aug., despite the video footage of him standing silently. Earlier, Kirill Zhukov was sentenced for three years for tapping a riot policeman's helmet at a protest on 27 July, something that somehow became transmuted into a fully-fledged assault. Rosgvardiya officers appear to be as delicate in spirit as body. Vladislav Sinitsa was sentenced to five years in a labor camp for a tweet in which he speculated that someday people may target officers acting abusively and their children would find out about it. This was characterized as a call for violence against those children. Public prosecutors, though, suggest that such talk is not just “inciting hatred and enmity” but also traumatizing the armored riot police who demonstrated such enthusiasm for violence at the earlier protests. In many ways, this is an extension of its internet policy. Russia, unlike China, cannot lock itself permanently behind a virtual wall, and it has a lively, vibrant and irreverent online information space. It tries to block particularly problematic materials such as Alexei Navalny's video exposés of elite corruption, and drown out critical comments with torrents of rebuttal and misdirection. After all, it is worth remembering that the infamous “troll farms” were initially established for domestic and not international purposes, and still largely operate in Russia. None of this is enough, though, and so the authorities also rely on deliberately capricious prosecutions.
A similar calculation appears to be at work in the punishment of protesters. Of course, there are the deliberate and directed prosecutions of particular targets. The current round of investigations against Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, for example, reflects a long-anticipated effort to break his bid to create a national political machine. Otherwise, though, the arbitrariness is a result of a combustible compound of ambition and intent. Some judges and prosecutors are eager to use the opportunity to make their names. In the main, though, the aim is simply to make even being close to an unauthorized protest dangerous. After all, peaceful protesters can still find themselves labeled as violent rioters and even passers-by are at risk of being swept up into the police trucks. The message is simple. If you want to protest, we may let you, but we might also beat you and arrest you, regardless of how you behave. In this way, the authorities hope to prevent protests from becoming normalized and limit them to a hardcore who are willing to take that risk — no matter what it may mean for them, their job, their family. But it also reflects genuine fear. To be sure, there is no doubt that at present, the state has all the coercive resources it needs and faces no serious challenge on the streets. But uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, or a riot helmet. the lesson of the Gorbachev years is that the state must not only be strong and ruthless, but it must also show itself strong and ruthless.
