TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

6 October 2024: Up, up and away, plus texts and tunes

“Ascension éxecutée par Charles dans La Prairie de Nesles, le 1 Decémbre 1783”, Gaston Tissandier 1887-1890 | Smithsonian Institution

Mea culpa.

In last week’s edition of this newsletter, I wrote that Georgian Dream, Georgia’s ruling party ahead of eleections later this month, had indicated that it would consider apologizing for Georgia’s role in the 2008 war with Russia. Careful readers reminded me that GD offered to apologize to the Ossetians, rather than to Russia, as I had suggested. This is absolutely true, though the political effect within Georgia is probably likely more or less the same. Whether this was a distinction without a difference, however, was not my call to make. Sorry!

What I’m thinking about

In an essay published shortly before the collapse of the USSR, the exiled Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky compared the life of a political exile to being the navigator of a hot air balloon. He wrote,

Traveling by balloon is precipitous and, above all, unpredictable: too easily one becomes a plaything of the winds, in this case, political winds. Small wonder then that our navigator keenly listens to all the forecasts, and on occasion ventures to predict the weather himself. That is, not the weather of wherever he starts or finds himself en route, but the weather at his destination, for our balloonist is invariably homeward bound.

I was reminded of this passage this week, as I watched the latest episode in the ongoing drama of Russia’s opposition-in-exile. In Brodsky’s metaphor, the exile is driven by two core conceits: that of control, and that of significance. Both of these, of course, are largely illusory. Once airborne, so to speak, they have precious little control over the trajectory and velocity of their travel, and the longer the journey lasts, they more they lose contact with the soil they left behind. That’s not to say that Russia’s political exiles, whether of Brodsky’s era or ours, entirely lack agency or importance. They have purpose and resources and a voice, and some number of their compatriots look to them for leadership. But, as ever, there are reasons for the things people do that run deeper than the mundane frailties of men and women. And it’s those reasons I’ve been thinking about this week.

To recap, recent readers of this newsletter will recall my comments of two weeks ago regarding the investigation by FBK — the late Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, by its Russian acronym — alleging that ex-Yukos executive and sometime comrade of Mikhail Khodorkovsky Leonid Nevzlin had ordered an attack and attempted kidnapping of Navalny’s aide Leonid Volkov and other FBK activists. Subsequently, Nevzlin denied the allegations, Khodorkovsky backed him up, various people hypothesized that this was all organized by the Kremlin to weaken the opposition, and Latvian officials opened an investigation into whether Nevzlin bribed law enforcement officials there. And that was more or less that.

But then this past week, the opposition activist Maxim Kats — who has always had it in for Navalny and his team — published a video accusing FBK of accepting support from, and possibly being beholden to, Alexander Zheleznyak and Sergei Leontiev, two ex-bankers now living in the US who may or may not have stolen money from Probiznesbank before it became defunct. FBK and their supporters, while acknowledging the support they received from Zheleznyak and Leontiev (which had never been secret), denied being beholden in any way to them or anyone else, and questioned the motives of Kats. Khodorkovsky wondered aloud why FBK weren’t being more vociferous, turning the tables in a way on the Nevzlin conversation. And again, various people hypothesized that this was all organized by the Kremlin to weaken the opposition.

A fuller history of this process would have begun earlier this year, when FBK published a documentary series titled “Traitors”, exploring the roots of Russia’s present authoritarianism in the compromises made in the name of power — including by liberals — in the 1990s. One way of interpreting the series, which is well worth watching, is as the latest in a series of attempts to reevaluate Russia’s post-Soviet history, to think hard and clearly about past mistakes, and to keep those mistakes in mind when considering an eventual post-Putin future. Some of these lessons, such as the need to pursue at least some degree of lustration of the security establishment, are now more or less firmly entrenched across Russia’s oppositional spectrum.

Another way of interpreting “Traitors”, however, is as an attack on the older of the Russian opposition, and really anyone who had, at one point or another, been part of any part of the political, economic or media establishment in the 1990s and early 2000s, including (but my no means limited to) Khodorkovsky. In that sense, it was an attempt to say that it’s time to move on, and all elements of the past need to be left behind.

An even fuller history, however, would go back to the late 2010s, when new crops of liberal parties and proto-parties sought to differentiate themselves from the legacy liberal parties by attacking the latter’s association with the 1990s. An even fuller history than that, meanwhile, would go back to the mid-2000s, when liberal parties, habitually unable to form a coalition, failed to make it into parliament for the first time. But maybe the fullest history goes all the way back to the mid-1990s, when majorities of Russians started voting against pro-democracy, pro-market parties, which even then were reluctant to band together.

The liberal infighting of the 1990s and 2000s — counter-productive as it may have been — followed a certain logic. Back when there was at least some genuine choice on the ballot, when parties could determine their own strategies, and candidates from the full spectrum could find their way to television studios, seeking votes by distinguishing yourself from your nearest competitors made at least some sense. A better strategy, I think, would have been to focus on expanding the liberal electorate, in stead of divvying them up, but no one asked me.

By the time Putin’s second presidency came to an end in 2008, however, none of this should have made much sense anymore. There was no real political competition, no media pluralism. It shortly became clear that competing for increasingly marginal liberal votes was a fool’s errand. Indeed, Navalny’s team, with their Smart Voting approach to tactical voting in favor of whoever had the greatest chance of defeating Putin’s United Russia party, recognized this. Many in other parts of the opposition, though, saw the resulting moral and political compromises as sacrilegious and balked.

As elections themselves became increasingly less relevant, some parts of the opposition began to transition from being a political party to being a semi-insurgent movement. By the time it was forced to disband, FBK (and its associated organizations) had become less attuned to fighting elections, and more attuned to getting people into the streets whenever there was an opportunity to make the regime uncomfortable. Even so, FBK and other opposition parties saw street mobilization as, at best, a way to build constituencies for the next electoral opportunity, and no one in the opposition made the transition to movement activism fully. They remained, and remain, parties at heart.

Come the war and, with it, exile, the category mistake of the Russian opposition should, by now, be blindingly obvious. Continuing to behave like a political party — say, by claiming more legitimacy than your competitors — is pointless if there aren’t elections to fight and voters to win over. The problem is, however, there aren’t many better options available. Form a coalition to support activism within Russia? Maybe, but that risks putting people inside Russia in increased peril. Find ways to represent the interests of the new Russian diaspora vis-a-vis their new host governments? That, if anything, distracts from the core mission of trying to create political change in Russia itself. Marshal support for Ukraine? Absolutely, but that can ever only be part of the mission.

Part of this predicament is certainly within the opposition’s control. They can, entirely of their own volition, come to the realization that internecine attacks that might (emphasize might) once have been justified by the cut and thrust of electoral competition are counter-productive when the aim is insurgency. But let’s say they did decide to set aside their grievances and band together. Could it be done?

This is where Brodsky’s balloon comes in, because I’m afraid the answer is no. History is littered with political exile organizations that have spent decades doing exactly — and almost only — what the Russian opposition is doing now. Why? There appear to be a number of answers to that question, but I would focus on four here:

1. Old habits die hard. Anti-authoritarian politics pushes opposition parties in lots of countries, not just Russia, to compete against each other for scarce anti-regime votes. Once you’ve built that strategy into the core of your operation and your ideation, it can be incredibly hard to pivot.

2. There’s no place like home. Try as they might, opposition organizations will never represent the interests of émigrés writ large in their new countries than ‘native’ parties and support groups. The only way for opposition groups to appeal to their exiled compatriots, then, is to offer a vision of a new future for their country of origin. This, in turn, engenders competition over who has the most compelling vision.

3. Big brother is watching. As authoritarianism forces more and more people into exile, diaspora communities rightly worry about transnational repression by the regime they fled. This, unsurprisingly, evokes a degree of paranoia, which is heightened by legacies of internecine conflict.

4. And so is the other big brother. Having sought support for their flight and then their re-institutionalization in exile, groups have little choice but to form strong relationships with host-country governments. Those governments, too, see the new exiles as a resource for reconnaissance and policymaking. Exiled opposition groups, then, tend to compete for the attentions and affections of host governments.

Taken together, this creates powerful incentives for exile groups to do exactly what Russian political exiles are doing right now: pursue internecine conflict as a rational, if eventually self-destructive, response to all of the circumstances they face. It would be wonderful, of course, if the leaders of Russia’s pro-democracy and anti-war groups could solve this problem on their own. History, however, suggests that no real improvement will be made unless and until their international friends and supporters can begin to engineer a different set of incentives. I’m not holding my breath, though.

What I’m reading

Two pieces of reporting on the politics of the war in Ukraine caught my eye this week. The first was a piece by Farida Rustamova and Maxim Tovkaylo on the hardening of hearts in the Kremlin. Russian policymakers, they write, are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the West will continue to support Ukraine in its resistance, and thus that the only way for Russia to achieve an acceptable outcome is the complete subjugation of Ukraine and its elimination as a sovereign state. As with all insider reporting coming out of Russia, I’d take it with a grain of salt. But it’s a particularly interesting grain, given that it cuts across so much of what else has been reported this week, namely an allegedly growing preparedness in the West (and particularly in Washington) to ask Ukraine to give up territory (de facto and temporarily, but not de jure) in return for at least a pause in the fighting.

In truth, what is being discussed in Washington and elsewhere is not what some are calling a “land for peace” deal, but rather an arrangement in which Ukraine could be given durable security arrangements, including potentially NATO and EU integration, even before regaining full control of its territory. But more than the truth, what matters is how the story is seen, and this has contributed to a growing Ukrainian anxiety that the West is preparing to abandon it to an increasingly belligerent Russia, despite (or maybe precisely because) of the fact that Russia is becoming even more belligerent.

Elsewhere:

• On Wednesday, Temur Umanov had a medium-read in Meduza on Russia’s mounting government campaign to make life miserable for the country’s many — and badly needed — labor migrants. “The changes to migration policy,” he writes, “are an important example of just how quickly and radically the Russian authorities can change their principles to ones that are much more aggressive and cruel.”

• Also on Wednesday, the Berlin-based think tank ZOiS published a policy paper by Diana Bogishvili on Georgian Dream’s use of division and fear as a mobilization strategy ahead of that country’s elections later this month.

• Volha Biziukova, a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Brown University, published an article in Dialectical Anthropology on Russia’s middle classes, focusing on what she calls their “strategic autonomy.” This is similar in many respects to the “aggressive immobility” I’ve tried to describe elsewhere, and to Jeremy Morris’s work on informality among urban workers. The key common thread running through all three, I think, is the rejection of the notion of Russians as passive.

• Anja Neundorf, Aykut Ozturk, Ksenia Northmore-Ball, Katerina Tertytchnaya and Johannes Gerschewski (of the University of Glasgow, Queen Mary University of London, Oxford, and Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin) published an article over the weekend in Comparative Political Studies, using data from Turkey to show that not only can authoritarian regimes enjoy high levels of support specifically for their authoritarian characteristics, but that this support can help them overcome a downturn in the quality of government performance during a crisis.

What I’m listening to

There was more than enough tragedy and heartbreak around the world this week, but the scenes of devastation from western North Carolina — one of my favorite places on earth, where I spent many of my childhood summers — hit especially close to home. I’d like to think that, as the flood waters from Hurricane Helène recede, things will return to normal, but I’ve been around long enough to know that’s far from guaranteed.

With that thought in mind, I thought I’d share a particularly poignant meditation on the importance of togetherness from Asheville-based stephaniesǐd. Hang in there, friends.