Moscow protests

Moscow protests pose problem for Putin

Police crack down on pro-democracy activists ahead of September’s vote for the Moscow city assembly.

By MARC BENNETTS

Bloodied protesters, a hunger strike, police raids, more than a thousand arrests, a mysterious “illness” afflicting the Kremlin’s most prominent critic — a long-simmering dispute over a local Moscow election boiled over this weekend into a major political crisis for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

After a weekend of demonstrations, featuring thousands of anti-government protestors and sometimes violent clashes with police, Alexei Navalny, the opposition’s best-known figure, was hospitalized Sunday after suffering what health officials said was an “allergic reaction” while in police custody.

One of his doctors, Anastasia Vasilieva, said it was possible that he had been poisoned. “We cannot exclude toxic damage to the skin by chemicals induced by a ‘third person,’” she wrote in a Facebook post.

Navalny was jailed for 30 days on Wednesday for calling on Russians to demonstrate. His did not appear to be in any immediate danger, but reports of his illness has caused concern.

A number of other government critics have been poisoned since Putin came to power in 2000, and Boris Nemtsov, a well-known opposition politician, was shot dead outside the Kremlin in 2015. At least 20 of Navalny’s supporters who arrived at the hospital on Sunday evening were detained by police before they could enter the clinic.

The weekend protest came just days after election officials refused to allow opposition candidates onto the ballot for a September 8 election for the Moscow legislature, the City Duma. Groups of protesters chanting “Russia without Putin!” and “Russia will be free!” spread out across Moscow, at one point blocking traffic on the city’s ring road. Estimates of the number of people who took part in the unsanctioned rally ranged from 3,500 to 20,000.

Riot police and National Guard officers used batons and, reportedly, electroshock devices to disperse pro-democracy demonstrators. The violence was the worst at a protest in Moscow since 2012, when police and demonstrators clashed on the eve of Putin’s inauguration for a fourth presidential term.

At least 1,373 people were detained, as thousands of opposition supporters attempted to rally outside Moscow City Hall, just a short walk from Red Square, according to OVD info, a website that monitors protest-related arrests. Around 80 people were injured.

“The authorities are panicking, because they don’t know how to get out of the political crisis that they themselves have created,” said Lyubov Sobol, an opposition politician who has been barred from standing for the City Duma. “They are trying to intimidate people, but this isn’t working.”

Sobol, a lawyer with Navalny’s anti-corruption organization, is on the 16th day of a hunger strike in a bid to force her way onto the City Duma ballot. She spoke to POLITICO after being released from police custody following Saturday’s protest, which followed a series of other opposition rallies in Moscow this month.

No one expected the City Duma vote to turn into such a headache for the Kremlin. The legislature has few significant political powers, and elections to the 45-seat body are traditionally low-key: Turnout at the last polls in 2014 was just over 20 percent.

But political analysts say that the Kremlin is determined not to allow genuine opposition candidates to gain a foothold on the electoral ladder because it believes this would trigger the beginning of the end for Putin’s carefully managed political system.

Real incomes in Russia have fallen for a fifth year in a row as the economy flounders under the weight of Western economic sanctions and lower global prices for oil, the main export. Putin’s trust ratings fell to 31 percent earlier this year, according to Vtsiom, although they then more than doubled after the Kremlin criticized the state pollster’s methods of canvassing public opinion.

Pro-democracy opposition candidates secured eye-catching victories at local council elections in 2017, including in the Kremlin’s own backyard, after being allowed onto the ballot.

Although pro-Kremlin media often dismisses opposition politicians as fringe figures with little popular support, an opinion poll by the Moscow-based Levada Center showed that Ilya Yashin, a would-be opposition candidate, was 28 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival in his electoral district. A number of other opposition figures, including Sobol, also had good chances of victory. In contrast, Putin’s ruling party, United Russia, is backed by just 13 percent of registered voters in Moscow, according to a recently published opinion poll.

United Russia’s own candidates have sought to distance themselves from the party’s increasingly toxic brand, and are all running as “independents” at the City Duma polls. Vtsiom, the state pollster, said 29 percent of voters support what it described as “pro-authority candidates.” It did not provide a figure for United Russia’s level of support.

“The Kremlin has a choice between bad and extremely bad options,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter-turned-political consultant. “Not allowing opposition figures to run means triggering massive protests that will delegitimize the political system throughout the entire country. But if strong opposition candidates … are allowed to stand at the City Duma elections they will win, without doubt … and Putin’s political order will start to crumble.”

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As of Monday morning, the majority of would-be opposition candidates remained behind bars. "The last illusion that we are able to participate legally in politics has disappeared,” said Dmitry Gudkov, another longtime Putin foe who has also been barred from the City Duma elections.

Under Russian law, people who want to be City Duma candidates are required to collect thousands of signatures in their support before they are allowed on the ballot. Election officials ruled, however, that many of the signatures collected by the anti-Kremlin politicians were fakes.

Opposition figures said the decision was politically motivated. There appears to be strong grounds for this claim: The signatures classified as invalid by officials included those of Yashin, the aspiring opposition candidate, and Viktor Sheinis, a co-author of Russia’s post-Soviet constitution. Enraged Muscovites whose signatures were invalidated also came forward to state publicly that they had lent their support to the opposition.

Russia’s official opposition parties — the Communists, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and A Just Russia — are all widely believed to be controlled by presidential administration officials to varying degrees.

“The Kremlin has decided that no one from the non-systemic opposition, and especially those candidates associated with Navalny, should be allowed to take part in the elections,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, head of the political analysis firm R.Politik. “The Kremlin doesn’t consider them to be politicians. It believes they are acting against Russia’s national interests. The authorities are simply not capable of dialogue with a genuine opposition.”

Government investigators have launched a probe into what they allege are attempts to obstruct the work of election officials. The homes of a number of opposition figures and their families were searched last week by law enforcement officers. Russia’s RBC newspaper, citing its sources, said investigators were searching for links between opposition figures and Western intelligence services. RBC also reported that the operation to crack down on the protests is being orchestrated by the FSB, the state security service.

Apparently unconcerned by the optics, Putin spent Saturday afternoon in a mini-submarine on the bottom of the Gulf of Finland, where he told state media there are “fewer” problems than on the surface. He has not commented on the protests. Channel One, state media’s flagship television station, made no mention of the unrest.

Navalny was discharged from hospital on Monday afternoon and returned to jail to continue serving his sentence, after his condition reportedly improved. Vasilieva, his doctor, protested the decision, and warned that he could be poisoned once more in police custody.

Moscow’s opposition movement has called for a new protest rally on August 3, on the eve of its appeal against the decision to bar its candidates from the City Duma polls.

“We don’t care if the authorities approve this rally or not,” said a defiant Sobol. “We will go out and protest again anyway.”