The People vs. Vladimir Putin

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Response

Which Way Is History Marching?

Azar Gat, Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, and Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel

Postscript

Russia's Activists Regroup

Joshua Yaffa

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's electoral victory last Sunday has left his opposition in a tough spot. Its next logical move is to step up the fight against Putin, since the Kremlin is unlikely to make any concessions now. But that strategy risks alienating the very group that gives the movement its strength: middle-class Russians.

Letter From

How the Anti-Putin Movement Missed the Point

Angus Roxburgh

The speeches at the protests last weekend were uninspiring and off-message. By focusing on vote-rigging, which was not nearly as prevalent as in other recent elections, organizers sidelined themselves.

(Tatyana Makeyeva / Courtesy Reuters)

This past Sunday, a few minutes before two o’clock in the afternoon, the Garden Ring road in Moscow, a ten-mile-long, multilane circle that wraps around the city center, was covered in a light, wet snowfall. The organizers of Russia’s opposition protests had hoped to organize a human chain that would stretch across the entire ring, which at an average width of a foot and a half per person, they estimated would take 34,000 people.

At exactly two o’clock, the hour the demonstration was supposed to start, the patch of sidewalk where I was standing near the Sukharevskaya metro station was thick with people standing arm in arm, chatting and joking, white ribbons pinned to their winter coats. A young couple, Alexei and Nina, had just arrived. “We wanted to be with all these people,” Alexei told me. The crowd around us was buoyant and cheerful; meanwhile, cars with ribbons hanging out of the passenger windows were making laps around the ring road, their drivers honking their horns in solidarity. “They can’t decide for us,” he said, referring to Putin and his allies in the Kremlin. “We’re here to show that we can decide for ourselves.”

A few steps down, a group of young men were waving at the passing cars and taking pictures. “We want to say that we exist, we’re also here,” said Georgy Avilov, a 26-year-old information technology specialist. He was with two friends: Nikita Ananin, an engineer, and Denis Vavayev, a lawyer. “The government has to consider our opinion,” Ananin said. “After all, we’re not a small group,” he explained, pointing toward what had now grown to be a solid line of people that disappeared around the bend of the ring road.

As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin looks toward this Sunday’s presidential election, a contest he is all but assured of winning, he will have to confront a difficult question that will linger long after his likely victory: Why have so many of these people, members of Russia’s burgeoning urban professional class, turned against the very system responsible for their status?

Under Putin’s tenure -- first as president, then as prime minister, and now as aspiring president again -- the country has undergone a profound economic and social transformation, with one of the more palpable effects being the creation of a true Russian middle class, made up largely of educated urban professionals in Moscow and Russia’s other millioniki, cities of more than one million people. The fact that this very group is the driving force behind the anti-Putin mood that has taken root in Moscow and many of Russia’s other cities is a testament to both the successes and the disappointments of the Putin era: A large segment of Russia’s population is now materially secure enough to worry about its civic voice and believe that it would be better off under a more equitable system than the one over which Putin presides.

In this particular way, Russia does not resemble the countries of the Arab Spring, where revolutionary fervor was stirred up by idle young people who were frustrated with their countries’ unpromising economic futures and felt they had nothing to lose. The situation in Russia is essentially the opposite: It has an aging population and a relatively stable, if not positive, macroeconomic outlook, and its proto-revolutionaries would have much to lose if the country’s political order were destabilized.

But that does not mean their desires will be easy for the Kremlin to sate. Those agitating for political change in Russia speak in the vocabulary of “dignity,” of wanting to have a representative voice in what I have heard many here call a “normal” or “civilized” system -- the world they see online and during their increasingly frequent travels to the West. And it is hard to imagine Putin bringing about such a political and social order, given that it would require him to go against his own political instincts and loosen his hold on power.

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Russia, unlike most developing economies, has long had a sizable intelligentsia, which functioned as a sort of middle-class-in-waiting. These were Soviet-born people -- doctors, professors, and so on -- who had many of the trappings of middle-class status, such as high education, professional careers, and ownership of their apartments (thanks to the post-Soviet privatization of real estate) but earned little. “Russia always had a proto-middle class,” said Kingsmill Bond, the chief Russia strategist at Citigroup who has been traveling among the country’s provincial cities for 20 years. “Income and information turned them into a proper middle class.”

Between 1999, the year Putin became prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, and 2008, when the global economy crashed, Russia’s GDP grew at seven percent a year, even faster than it did during Stalin’s rapid industrialization in the 1920s and ’30s. The effects were dramatic: Real wages tripled and the poverty rate fell by half. The markets for real estate, cars, mobile phones, and other consumer goods exploded; today, more automobiles are bought every year in Russia than in Germany, and nearly 45 million Russians use the Internet regularly.