Heya, folks — just thought I’d provide a quick intro to some news stories about what’s happening in Russia nowadays. Worth knowing what’s going on over there, all things considered.
Presidential elections
Russia’s next round of presidential elections will be held in March, 2018, and the question is less whether Putin will win another term (he will) and more what his margin and circumstances of victory will be. This sounds like an arbitrary thing to discuss, but Putin was apparently shaken by the protests that greeted his last election, which he won with “only” 63% (versus more than 70% in 2004 and for Medvedev in 2008). The protests managed to unite mutually hostile elements, both left and right, into one area of agreement: the corruption and mismanagement of United Russia’s government and its impact on the economic lives of ordinary Russians.
So why is this election still a foregone conclusion? For one thing, as I’ve discussed on this site before, United Russia sits at the political middle of Russia’s superficially sprawling political landscape (many of the parties are actually just satellites of the main parties, which number only a handful). What we consider the left opposition is small, mostly urban, and often swamped in internecine squabbles. This makes it very difficult to mount an effective opposition, since it would require a candidate and platform that would unite the left (already a challenge) and at least some of the right in something other than mutual opposition to Putinism, something the 2011-2 protests only briefly managed to accomplish. Moreover, in recent years Putin has gambled on reclaiming some of his lost sheen by making overtures to the far right, risking a Pandora’s box they might wish they hadn’t opened, as in recent violence against filmmaker Alexei Uchitel. Even politically, this is a major gamble: the economic situation in Russia has only grown worse in recent years (especially for ordinary Russians) and Putin’s attempts to blame this on sanctions has been a mixed bag.
Still, it remains for the opposition to find a candidate who can actually overcome the built-in difficulties to challenging United Russia’s stranglehold on government. The candidate most likely to do so, Alexei Navalny, has been banned from the election outright due to a felony fraud conviction, one that happened to fall on his head during the last election’s protests. Oppositional support of Navalny has always been a complicated issue: on the one hand, he’s been able to galvanize voters, and particularly young voters, more successfully than anyone else, which has made him a frequent and public target of violence. On the other hand, Navalny’s own history of xenophobia makes him a dispiriting sort of banner to rally behind: though he’s claimed to disavow some of his former statements… I mean, so has Marine Le Pen. This has led to a tricky marriage of convenience among the left, who have very few prominent figures in Russian politics they can rally behind.
Either way, though, the Navalny candidacy is a non-starter since the courts have confirmed his conviction makes him ineligible to run. Currently the most prominent “opposition” candidate is socialite Ksenia Sobchak, who on the one hand, has been a frequent target for shallow, sexist criticism, and on the other hand, seems to invite shallow criticism by being an all-around shallow person. Even worse, there’s more than a whisper that her campaign is Kremlin-approved, with the announcement published in state media with a print date weeks in advance (i.e. the publicity was organized before the candidacy was announced). I can’t exactly peer into Sobchak’s heart — she’s not someone I follow regularly, for good reason — but discussions like these expose just how scattered, unorganized, and powerless the Russia opposition really is. Putin doesn’t need to rig this election to win it, though without any independent monitors and a whole political infrastructure built on grift, we can expect some of the usual shenanigans anyway.
Journalist stabbed
Russian journalism is a high-risk activity. Early this morning, a man rushed into the offices of radio station Ekho Moskvy and stabbed his intended target, reporter and deputy editor Tatiana Felgenhauer, in the neck. The good news is that she’s expected to live. In a story that’s all too familiar on this side of the ocean, the focus has been mostly on the attacker’s alleged mental illness — he’s claimed to have a “telepathic connection” with Felgenhauer — and less on the very public hostility to Felgenhauer and other journalists at Ekho Moskvy, one of the most prominent sources for independent, critical journalism in Russia.
I get a little antsy in discussions about stochastic terrorism because of how easy it is to mistake a correlation for a causation, but there’s absolutely no doubt that state media has been gunning for Felgenhauer in recent weeks. She was a focus of a recent segment on Rossiya-24 about Western money influencing Russian media, a threat “more dangerous than ISIS.”
Russia’s problems with threats to journalists are well-documented, and a number of media professionals have been lashing out at Rossiya-24 for upping the threat level with reckless segments like these. It’s a difficult country to be a journalist in, but there are still great people doing great work, and attacks like these have a chilling effect (another popular Ekho Moskvy journalist, Yulia Latynina, left Russia earlier this year to protect her family after her car was set on fire.)
Singer vanished
By far the strangest and least well-sourced bit of recent news has to do with the disappearance of 25-year-old singer Zelim Bakaev, who his friends believe was arrested (if not tortured and murdered) during a brief trip back home to Chechnya, which he’d avoided for years, to attend his sister’s wedding. The website CrimeRussia has a detailed (English-language) timeline about what happened next. To summarize, Bakaev hasn’t “really” been seen since August 8th, when, as two of his friends anonymously told media sources, he was picked up off the street by military officials. Since then, there have been stray social media posts, an SMS to his mother claiming he had to make an urgent trip to Canada, and a truly strange video, in which Bakaev claims he’s hanging out in Germany, tho journalists have been quick to point out that the room’s decor (including its electrical sockets) are Russian, and an EU diplomat has confirmed that Bakaev did not pass through any of their border points.
In the meantime, Chechen police spent a month refusing to do any investigations, claiming they had “no grounds” to open a case, and promised Bakaev would “turn up” eventually. Their handling of Bakaev’s disappearance has been so bad that the republic’s procurator’s office has gone on the record criticizing their response as unprofessional.
Most of this story has remained unchanged since late September, but now news of Bakaev’s death has been spreading around English-speaking media. This detail comes from an unnamed source to Dan Avery at LogoTV’s blog NewNowNext, and I wouldn’t presume to know — or want to know, given what’s at stake — who his source is. That being said... While I wouldn’t expect to see this story on NTV or Rossiya-Segodnya, the lack of confirmation from Novaya Gazeta, to whom we owe most of what we know about the anti-gay pogroms in Chechnya, nor from Kavkazsky uzel, who have been following this story in great detail, gives me pause. Information is still muddy. Bakaev may yet turn up, but his disappearance and the timeline of police action/inaction coincides with events in Novaya Gazeta’s investigation into the larger problem of extrajudicial torture and murder in Chechnya, so if Bakaev was one of their victims, he would, sadly enough, be one of many.