Short diary, but I wanted to call people’s attention to a really unusual (for Russia) moment of solidarity with victims of sexual harassment that’s currently in progress.
First, some quick background to explain why this is so unusual. Western commenters have a kind of mistaken view of how day-to-day transactions — social, political, economic — occur in Russia, which are less about Putin or some other representative of the Kremlin sending down orders. Rather, Russia generally operates according to a patronage system, even if one that is largely passive and informal.
Here’s what I mean: it’s evident from watching any state-owned media in Russia that their coverage is directly in line with Kremlin policy. But unlike with FOX news, where Murdoch is known to call producers and make demands about what to cover and how, Russian media largely operates “independently” (in quotes), making these decisions on the basis of what they expect the Kremlin to prefer. Good choices are rewarded, bad choices are punished. No one has to send orders because subordinates are expected to anticipate and implement policy even without its formalization.
(For a large-scale sense of how this process operates in the economic sphere, check out this huge report from Meduza (in English) that discusses the near-impossibility of running any kind of business in Russia without a keen sense of unofficial lobbying, connections, and coercion. It doesn’t address the word “patronage” directly, but it’s implicit in how/why these deeply rooted systems continue to operate outside the law, and without official or consistent guidance from above.)
It’s the reason why journalists not in line with Kremlin policies so frequently find themselves targets of censure or even violence: not by orders of the Kremlin per se, but by the expectation among certain underlings that doing so will please the people above.
It’s the reason Putin can so smugly argue that he has no hand in the kinds of events that he never needed to order in the first place.
It’s this kind of thing that Masha Gessen meant when she said that United States had stronger “institutions” than Russia, weak as ours may seem at the moment. Russian institutions (press, judiciary, electoral) have atrophied under a system where pleasing-the-boss takes precedence over institutionalism itself. The system can feel, at times, arbitrary and overwhelming, and it’s one of the reasons that Russia observers are curious about what will happen once Putin steps down from office.
With all this in mind, you can see why change in Russia is a very difficult process, often driving people to pessimism over the futility. Change makes the people above unhappy. So few people are willing to make the people above unhappy, because the implications can be vast.
Anyway… this is all just background to give you some sense of why the events below are so unusual, and so welcome.
Over the last month, half a dozen reporters, all women, have accused a deputy of the Russian Duma, Leonid Slutsky, of sexual harassment. Slutsky issued a limp apology on International Women’s Day, saying he had no bad intentions toward the women who were “consciously or unconsciously” offended. In response to continued outrage, the Duma Ethics Committee held a closed-door meeting which was, to put it mildly, a farce. Read the transcript if you have the stomach for it: the women are accused of not coming forward soon enough, not having any “facts” (after being asked not to present any!), not being pretty enough to be harassed, and agitating against national security. It’s somehow even worse than that brief summary.
(This is, by the way, not unlike the general sense of the #MeToo movement in Russia, which has often been greeted with condescension or worse.)
Still — and this is the part that’s worthy of highlighting - Russian journalists have stood by their own, and what’s happening now is somewhat unprecedented. Disgusted by the Ethics Committee’s inaction (or rather worse-than-inaction), a number of prominent outlets are refusing to cover the Duma at all. Russian newspapers and websites are boycotting their own Legislature in protest.
On the one hand, they’re not missing much, given how little formal lawmaking actually happens there. But what’s astounding about this boycott is that it’s stretched past the kinds of outlets we usually associate with “critics of the Kremlin” (TVRain, EkhoMoskvy, Novaya Gazeta) and has expanded to a much broader slate of old media, new media, social media, etc. Kommersant, RBC, Lenta.ru … even Classmates.com (?!), which is one of the largest and most popular of Russia’s social media networks, has voiced their support.
Maybe there is, among some of the outlets more directly beholden to the state, a sense that Slutsky’s behavior was so internationally embarrassing that the folks above him, above the Duma itself, might prefer a more principled stance against them. Maybe they cynically felt that the politically weak Duma had less to offer them than a broader journalistic solidarity. But I don’t think so. What we’re seeing here isn’t just outside the patronage system: it’s in direct opposition to it. It’s both risky and praiseworthy.
I don’t know how this ends, but this is inspiring to see. I mentioned above that the prospects for change in Russia sometimes seem so dark that people feel pessimistic. The system, as it currently is, feels like an overwhelming sludge of influence-peddling and toadying. There are good journalists in almost every outlet, trying to do good work, but many are heavily constrained by forces not-on-paper.
I don’t think anyone would have predicted what’s happening right now in Russian media. This is good. Shine a light on these things. They give us something to look forward to in the darkness.