TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

5 November 2023: Fault lines, plus texts and tunes

Rioters at Uitash Airport near Makhachkala | © BBC Russian Service / TASS

There are few sources of happiness that can compare with seeing a student succeed. And so it was with tremendous pride and satisfaction that I watched this week as Katherine Crofts-Gibbons successfully defended her PhD. Katherine persevered through war, uprisings and a global pandemic to develop and test a novel theory of how and why authoritarian regimes concede to protest, focusing on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Look out for her name!

What I’m thinking about

The news out of Russia this week — or, at least, the news that got me thinking — was what most commentators are referring to as the Makhachkala pogrom.

If you missed it, on 29 October, somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand people descended on the airport outside of Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, in Russia’s Northern Caucasus, to “greet” a regularly scheduled flight arriving from Tel Aviv. Their purpose, they said, was to find Israelis and/or Jews more broadly, and to make clear that they weren’t welcome in the republic. They succeeded in occupying and shutting down the airport for the better part of a day, before they were eventually persuaded to disperse; part of that “persuasion” reportedly involved allowing representatives of the mob to inspect the passports of at least some of the arriving passengers, although there were also reports that the mob “greeted” the wrong flight.

Further reporting, including an excellent piece in Kholod by Iulia Balakhonova and Vladimir Korshakov, made clear by Monday at least two things that hadn’t been clear on Sunday. First, this had been a long time in the making: Dagestani and other North Caucasus Telegram channels had been bubbling with warnings of “Israeli refugees” arriving in the region since the early days after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, along with calls for murderous reprisal. Second, the Makhachkala airport pogrom was not an isolated incident: similar mobs attacked hotels where Israelis and Jews were presumed to be hiding, as well as at least one local Jewish community center, in cities across the North Caucasus, motivated by the same sentiments that had driven the attack on the airport.

Despite the fact that authorities should have seen this coming, they were apparently caught by surprise, and they reacted only hesitantly. Police at the airport and elsewhere got out of the mobs’ way and in some cases seem to have assisted them; their eventual dispersal was careful, bordering on sympathetic. The Kremlin itself was clearly caught off guard. As Andrei Pertsev reported in Meduza, senior officials were seized by a combination of panic and shock. Vladimir Putin eventually convened an emergency meeting, but in his public statements blamed the events on Ukraine and the West, who were, in his words, trying to use the situation in the Middle East to destabilize Russia.

The mainline analysis of these events was ably summed up on Tuesday by Tatyana Stanovaya, who likened the pogroms to Evgeny Prigozhin’s summer mutiny and argued that both phenomena — and the authorities’ initial impotent responses — served as evidence of political decay. She wrote:

The regional leaders’ fear of using force stems not from an inability to quash unrest, but from a lack of political will to take decisive action. … This paralysis of the authorities when making a decision that should have been blindingly obvious is also caused by the state apparatus’s desire to constantly emphasize complete and universal support for Putin. All the decisions made at the regional level are built around this desire to prove the loyalty of the local elites and population, which in terms of political survival is now far more important than preventing something as serious as an anti-Semitic pogrom. The third and final problem is Putin himself. When there is no system of coordinates for decision-making, and regional authorities are paralyzed by a crisis of responsibility, everyone is waiting for a reaction from one person: the president.

I’m not so sure. For one thing, for all of their ostensible loyalty to the Kremlin, mobs in the North Caucasus are not part and parcel of the political system the way Prigozhin and his Wagner group were. But more broadly, I’m not convinced that the challenge here is, as Tatyana suggests, exclusively or even primarily one of political will. Rather, my sense is that this presents a challenge unlike most of those Putin has seen in the last decade or so. Here’s why.

The initial spark of mobilization begins with a combination of grievance and opportunity: people need to feel that something unjust is happening, to themselves or to someone else, and that by acting out, they have at least some chance of correcting that injustice. But mobilization requires more than a spark. To continue the incendiary metaphor, the spark to turn into genuine mobilization it needs fuel, in the form of socialization, and oxygen, in the form of emotion. Because mobilization is a group endeavor, socialization is key: people need to come together, arrive at a common understanding of the problem and the solution, and give one another enough of a sense of security and solidarity that going out into the streets seems like a risk worth taking. And because mobilization is a contingent process, the trajectory of which depends on the relative strength of belief that each side has in their own victory, emotion is also key.

Now, before I go any further with this line of reasoning, I should clarify one thing: What happened in Makhachkala (and elsewhere) was not a protest. Nor would I characterize it as a social movement. It was not grounded in an appeal by aggrieved citizens for their government to rectify an injustice. As an episode in wanton collective violence, it had some of the characteristics of a riot, but whereas riots don’t generally seek to achieve anything in particular, these events did have a clear goal: to find and harm Israelis and Jews. In that respect, it is indeed more reminiscent of a pogrom, as most observers have termed it, but also of a lynching, an act of vigilantism born out of a belief that the state itself cannot be trusted to do what the lynch mob thinks is right. And it is because of that similarity to a lynching that I am not sure that the critical issue here is the authorities’ evident unwillingness to act decisively in suppressing the uprising.

In my first book, I argued that the system of power that emerged in Putin’s Russia successfully stymied the emergence and development of social movements by depriving them of both fuel and oxygen. Life in Russia, to be sure, gave (and continues to give) people plenty of ground for grievance, and so the spark was and always has been there. But the ability of people to arrive at a common understanding and strategy (the fuel) was undercut by the deinstitutionalization of the Russian state itself: by allowing people individualized ways out of injustice, the state made it very difficult for people to devise and pursue collective solutions to their shared problems. And the ability of nascent movements to generate and maintain emotional fervor (the oxygen) was similarly stifled by the Russian state’s depoliticization: by avoiding cycles of contention, of action and reaction, the regime prevented the friction that generates heat.

The mobilizational dynamics we’ve observed this past week in the North Caucasus appear to avoid both of these problems — and are thus much harder for the state to suppress. This is, I think, for two reasons. First, as Kholod and others reported, the pogroms had their roots in long-standing local communities and networks, which already had well established senses of grievance, purpose and solidarity, as well as strong emotional undercurrents. As a result, the fuel was already there and smoldering. And second, the mobilization was not oriented towards the state. Quite the opposite, it was designed to replace the state, to do what the state could not or would not, and so the interactions that stoked emotion and commitment did not require the state’s participation.

Uprisings like what we saw last week, then, may not be so easy to stamp out. Movements that require an interaction with the state can be effectively defused by targeted concessions or by targeted repressions, altering participants’ cost-benefit analysis and persuading them to revert back to individualism and abandon the group. Were group solidarities and structures are stronger, larger-scale and more violent repression may be required. But in this kind of case, there is nothing for the state to concede (unless, of course, it wants to start rounding up Jews). And repression would only insert the state into a fight to which it was not party — with unpredictable consequences.

As a result, I don’t think it’s correct to suggest that the Dagestani authorities — or even the Kremlin — could have suppressed the pogroms as easily as the conventional wisdom would have it. The machinery of social control in Russia is designed to put down attempts to alter or control the utilization of state power. Last week’s mobs, however, were after something different. They had no interest in the state and indeed no beef with the state. Instead, they sought to fill the vacuum left by the state’s purposeful decision to withdraw from the regulation of social conflict between and among the people(s) living in Russia.

This is, in truth, not an entirely new challenge. It is, albeit in a different place and with different protagonists, a replay of the ethnic riots that struck the Karelian city of Kondopoga in 2006, the rolling nationalist violence of 2010, and the riots in the Moscow neighborhood of Biryulevo in 2013. And as in those cases, the Kremlin’s clear instinct is to steer clear of anything that might be construed as intervention. Intervention, after all, invites people who had been perfectly happy to take their anger out on one another to take their anger out on the state. And who needs that?

What I’m reading

It’s a short list this week, but a rich one.

The most thoughtful and thought-provoking thing I read this week, outside of the reporting from the North Caucasus, was Andrei Kolesnikov’s essay in Carnegie Politika on Wednesday. Andrei has for years now been among the clearest voices on the changing role of ideology in Russia, and this week’s essay — which is long and dense, but very much worth reading, and probably at least twice — is striking in its precision. His argument is deceptively simple:

As the mechanisms of political permanence and the personalization of power take shape, the legitimacy of the elites who came to power in the early aughties exhausts itself. This “petrocracy”, consumed by keeping hold of the highly lucrative (thus far) extractive mono-product and the étatization of the economy, can claim no significant successes of its own. As a result, it seeks its legitimacy in the past. The establishment imagines itself the direct heir of an abstract Great Russia, frivolously arranged across an historical landscape stretching from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin and their successor, Putin.

The complexity, however, comes in the implications of this seemingly mundane decision by a group of pseudo-historicist dilettantes to claim a patrimony of which they have no real concept, Andrei suggests. Most ideologies are built around either a utopian ideal of the past to which they seek to return (‘Make America Great Again!’) or a utopian ideal of a future they seek to obtain (‘Communism in our lifetime!’). Putin, by contrast, argues that Russia’s present, troubled as it may be, is as good as it has ever been and as good as it will ever get. By usurping the past in order to avoid the future, Russia’s rulers seek an everlasting tyranny of the present.

In iStories on Thursday, Irina Dolinina reported on leaked documents from authorities in Russia’s Central Federal District (which includes Moscow) on how to recruit volunteers for the war, focusing on the most vulnerable: migrant workers, the unemployed, and debtors. Recruiters are instructed to focus on a military contract as a quick and easy way out of material difficulty — while eliding the fact of the current prohibition on withdrawing from service at the end of your contract.

Finally, iStories also published an excerpt from Elena Kostyuchenko’s new book, My Beloved Country, recounting the rise of what she characterizes as fascism. The excerpt, which focuses on her relationship with her mother against the backdrop of war, is heart-rending. It’s as though Hannah Arendt were re-written by Hemingway, but in Russian. (You can buy the full book from Meduza.)

What I’m listening to

In honor of Katherine and all the other students persevering out there: