Sunday, September 9 in Russia was marked by three large political events: the Moscow mayoral election, regional elections, and opposition rallies across the country. The day ended with a sky-high victory for Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin, the worst results for the ruling United Russia party since 2007, and a harsh police crackdown on protestors.
Sergey Sobyanin was elected Moscow’s mayor for the third time, an outcome all but guaranteed by the lack of any credible alternative, the exclusion of all serious opposition candidates from the race, and the deployment of massive administrative resources, including billions of rubles from the city budget, to promote his campaign. Sobyanin earned a rock-solid 69.54 percent of the vote, with the closest runner-up, a Communist Party candidate, getting 11.65 percent. The turnout, however, was slightly lower than in 2013, when the opposition leader Alexey Navalny was allowed to run—even though this time the polls stayed open two hours longer and Muscovites were allowed to vote from their out-of-town dachas.
However, the communists did much better in other Russian regions, shockingly bringing the ruling United Russia party to its lowest levels since Vladimir Putin became its leader. Four acting governors failed to win in the first round. In the Primorye and Khakasia regions, the United Russia candidates lost to the communists—in the latter case by double digits—and in the Khabarovsk region and Vladimirskaya Oblast the governors won less than 50 percent, running neck-and-neck with candidates from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, another in-system opposition party present in the Duma.
In three regions United Russia lost elections for the state houses of representatives: In Ulyanovskaya and Irkutskaya Oblasts and Khakasia, the communists are now the ruling party. In Zabaikalie United Russia is close to losing.
No less shocking was a brutal crackdown on protesters across the country, with the most brutal behavior shown by the police and National Guard in Saint Petersburg. Although significantly fewer people showed up at these protests against pension reform than at the May anti-Putin rallies (also organized by Alexey Navalny), the numbers of those arrested were close.
On Sunday 1,018 people were detained, among them over 400 in Saint Petersburg, almost 200 in Ekaterinburg, and 43 people in Moscow. The photos and videos of the police brutally beating up men (sometimes four on one), harassing a retired woman, and arresting (among others) a retired man who needed an ambulance, a young man without an arm, and a 10-year-old boy have spread rapidly across the Internet.
In some cities the rallies were approved by local authorities, but in Russia’s three largest cities they were not. This is not the first time that Alexey Navalny has used public holidays or major events to bring his supporters to the streets. Last year the oppositioner held a rally in the capital on Moscow City Day when big crowds were out to celebrate, the idea being to prevent the police from cracking down and arresting people who could be bystanders. The police were confused, but nevertheless made some arrests. This year, September 9 marked both Moscow City Day and election day, and the arrests in the capital were few but brutal. A more vicious situation unfolded in Saint Petersburg, where the authorities had initially approved the rally request but two days prior had retracted the permit. Navalny’s headquarters called for gathering anyway, generating some fair criticism that many rally-goers may have been confused and not realized the consequences of attending: criminal prosecution with imprisonment.
While both Moscow and Saint Petersburg have become used to massive arrests and police brutality at rallies, Ekaterinburg was caught by surprise. The major independent media outlet in the Urals, znak.com, writes that “in one day the local police lost citizens’ trust.” The author notes that the city’s citizens had previously seen massive arrests only on television, but on Sunday they saw them with their own eyes. “A very thin but important fabric has broken. . . .I’m talking about respectful relations between the public and the police that we’d had before. […] Not a single Ekaterinburg citizen can still say, ‘This doesn’t happen here, our police don’t do crackdowns,’” the article argues.
An unexpected pivot took place two days after the rallies, when the National Guard head Viktor Zolotov published a video address to Alexey Navalny in which he challenged the oppositioner to a duel. General Zolotov, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Vladimir Putin, used lowbrow slang to attack Navalny, calling him “an oppositional pug-dog” and “an item manufactured in American labs” (along with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko). “Nobody has given you a quality kick in the ass. . . I simply challenge you to a duel, in the ring, on the judo mat, anywhere, and I promise to make mincemeat of you,” said Zolotov. He also mentioned former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the late Boris Berezovsky, calling them all “clones and puppets.” Referring to Khodorkovsky, who was pardoned by Putin in 2013 after a 10-year imprisonment and who now resides in London, the general falsely claimed that Khodorkovsky “wrote tearful and repentant letters to the President in order to get released,” and that after he was pardoned, he “fled and started his destabilization policies.”
The stated reason for Zolotov’s stunning video address was Navalny’s investigation into corruption within the food-supply procurement process for the National Guard. (The contractor was chosen by Medvedev’s government without a tender and the groceries are supplied at double the price they would cost at an average store in Moscow.) But whatever his intention, Zolotov did exactly what Vladimir Putin has been refusing to: He recognized Alexey Navalny as a politician with presidential ambitions. Putin prefers to not even use Navalny’s name; as his spokesman once explained, Russia’s President doesn’t want “to share his popularity with Navanly.”
Viktor Zolotov was not the first one to address Alexey Navalny in a video clip. Before him Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov did the same, forever becoming an Internet meme. Zolotov now faces the same fate: Since the video was released, everyone from champion swimmers to Russia’s leading arts luminaries have mockingly issued their own challenges to Zolotov on social media. Even BBC Russia has taken to mocking the video. For all the jokes, though, Zolotov’s video could constitute a serious threat: National Guard officers are often the ones beating up protesters at Navalny’s rallies, and it is unclear why their leader would dedicate his time to taunting a “pug-dog” like Navalny unless he meant it.
Navalny, in any case, cannot respond to the challenge even if he wanted to, as he is now in jail. On August 27 he was arrested and put in a detention center for 30 days, in order to prevent him from attending the Moscow rally.
But even with Navalny isolated, the Russian people seem to be growing disillusioned with the Kremlin, and increasingly vocal about voicing their discontent. As I’ve written before, the pension reform has already sent Putin’s approval ratings tumbling to their lowest levels since 2011-2012, leaving the Kremlin with only two options: to back down or crack down. The former hasn’t happened, notwithstanding Putin’s prepared-in-advance softening of the retirement age raise. In a rare national address in late August, Vladimir Putin announced that Russian women could retire at 60 years instead of the initial proposal of 63 years. For men, the proposal was unchanged: They would retire at 65 years old, which is one year less than the average man’s life expectancy.
The trick failed to cement public trust in Putin; polls showed that his approval ratings remained at the same level after the address. Nor did new U.S. sanctions help consolidate Russians around their leader, as the regional elections proved. Whatever rally-round-the-flag effect was once created by sanctions seems to have dissipated.
On top of that, the Russian ruble has continued to fall, reaching a new low of 70 rubles per dollar. Investors seem to finally believe that a second round of sanctions under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 is inevitable, in retaliation for the Skripal poisoning in the United Kingdom. After Theresa May presented evidence in parliament, it is now firmly established that two officers of the Russian military intelligence service GRU tried to murder ex-Russian spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia in a nerve-agent attack. And the New York Times may have uncovered a motive: According to a Times report, Skripal had cooperated with Spanish authorities in a major money-laundering case involving the Russian mafia, a Senator and several others with personal connections to Vladimir Putin. The revelation about Skripal recalls the saga of another ex-spy from Russia, Alexander Litvinenko, who also cooperated with the Spanish and was poisoned to death with radioactive polonium in London in 2006. The current international scandal, combined with the effect of existing sanctions, has already spooked foreign investors: The Economic Development Ministry recently updated its prognosis on capital flight in 2018 from $18 billion to $41 billion.
Although political experts predict that United Russia’s governor candidates will regain control in the second round of elections, this weekend’s events show that a page has turned, and increasing numbers of Russians are souring on the Kremlin. In the short term, this will not do any good for the Russian people: The reaction from the authorities will only worsen, leading to more political prosecutions. But in a long-term perspective, the Kremlin has started losing—and its famous PR skills can only disguise that truth for so long.
