Why a Community Protest Over a Church Should Worry Russia's Kremlin

As a member of the KGB, Putin was deeply affected by populist uprisings in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many of his actions appear to be specifically aimed at preventing such a thing from happening in Russia. And yet, on local levels it happens very suddenly. Putin does not like it when he has no control, and yet, he dare not clamp down too much or the uprisings will become more than local.

Unrest in Russian city points to deeper discontent with authoritarian government

Chris Brown · CBC News 

Protestors pull down a police fence in October Square park in Yekaterinburg. (E1.ru)

When residents of the Russian city of Yekaterinburg got wind of a plan by a pair of billionaire oligarchs to rip up a downtown park and build a giant golden-top cathedral in its place, opposition was perhaps predictable.

After all, the October Square park offers pretty views of the Iset River and is a rare bit of relaxing green space in the busy centre of Russia's fourth largest city, 1,400 kilometres east of Moscow.

But the intensity of the protests this week, in a country where mass political rallies are all but banned, appeared to catch municipal administrators off guard.

Riot Police hold their positions against protestors in Yekaterinburg. (E1.ru)

Night after night, several thousand people ripped down fences designed to keep them away from the park and confronted rows of heavily armed riot police.  

More than 70 people were arrested before the local mayor — at Vladimir Putin's urging — stepped in and offered a truce, of sorts, by promising more consultation.

New activism

Russia watchers say it speaks to a new type of grassroots political activism that should worry the Kremlin.

"The events in Yekaterinburg have once again shown that a new civil society is emerging in Russia and that it's not afraid to defend its rights," wrote Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Institute in the Moscow Times.

If local authorities continue to use force to suppress it, he continued, "the degree of social ... and political tension ... will only increase."

A drone shot of the thousands of protestors at Yekaterinburg's October Square park. (E1.ru)

Ham-fisted attempts by the developers of the church project, which also includes a massive commercial complex nearby, to thwart the demonstrators have only added to the local outrage. 

The firms hired teams of private security personnel, including members of a local mixed martial arts club owned by one of the oligarchs, to rough up the protestors.

All of it helped fuel the sense that Yekaterinburg's civic leaders and their ultra-rich patrons are tone deaf to the wishes of the community they are supposed to represent.

Growing discontent 

The confrontations in Yekaterinburg come on the heels of similarly violent encounters between police and protestors over a smelly garbage dump just outside of Moscow that was sickening scores of school children.

Law enforcement officers gather during a protest against the new land swap deal, agreed by the heads of the Russian

regions of Ingushetia and Chechnya, in Ingushetia's capital Magas, Russia, on Oct. 8, 2018. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

When a proposal was announced to divert the waste to a new dumpsite thousands of kilometres away in the Arctic, near Arkhangelsk, it sparked more fury there.

In Russia's Caucasus region of Ingushetia, a plan to alter its geographic border with neighbouring Chechnya triggered a similar uproar.

And in communities across Russia, seniors have staged angry demonstrations over new legislation that will make them wait longer to collect meagre pensions.

In a post on his Facebook page, political scientist Valery Solovei suggested all these events share a common theme — that Russians feel cut off from unaccountable leaders.

"The occupation of a public garden, loved by citizens, is just an excuse and pretext for the manifestation of accumulated discontent," he wrote.

A protester shouts during a rally against planned increases to the nationwide pension age in Moscow on Sept. 9, 2018.

(Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)

Feeling ignored

Simply put, he said, people are feeling ignored.

"People see that this is the only thing left for them. Go to the square. Protest. Demolish fences."

The Kremlin has slowly, but measurably, been tightening its grip on political freedoms in the country. Many mayors and governors are now appointed by the Kremlin and don't ever have to stand for election.

The former mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Roizman, was a rare example of an elected official aligned with Russia's most prominent opposition figure, Alexei Navalny.

When his term expired last year, the Kremlin refused to hold elections and instead appointed his replacement.

Policemen, affected by tear gas, attempt to detain a protester during a rally against pension reforms, which envisage

raising the retirement age of Russian citizens, in St. Petersburg on Sept. 16, 2018. (Anton Vaganov/Reuters)

The Kremlin has also put practically all of the nation's major TV networks under state control and just last month passed a series of bills aimed at restricting criticism of the government on the internet.

Prominent Russian sociologist Ekaterina Shulman says, while protests such as the ones in Yekaterinburg pose no immediate threat to the stability of the regime in Moscow, she said they are indicative of a broader discontent.  

She says people feel they should be better off than they are, on many fronts.

Demanding accountability

"It's a problem for the regime because these protests are not just isolated episodes," Shulman said in a Moscow Times podcast this week.

"They are the product of the general dissatisfaction that we have seen in every poll that we have taken since the middle of 2017."

Russian orthodox priest Father Maxim Minyailo speaks to protestors at the park in Yekaterinburg. (Reuters)

One of the challenges for the government is that, unlike most political movements with identifiable leaders and structures that can be targeted by police, these grassroots revolts are effectively leaderless.

"There are no public bodies. No political parties involved. No mediation of any sort. I don't even seen any NGOs (non-governmental organizations), I just see mass protest which can turn violent," said Shulman.

In his comments Thursday, before he offered up the solution of a city-wide poll on whether people want the church, Vladimir Putin appeared to infer that much of the anger was not genuine, suggesting "activists from Moscow who come to make a fuss" may be behind it.

Andrei Kolesnikov, from Carnegie, notes the opposition isn't aimed specifically at Putin. Rather, he sees it as a push toward demanding accountability from the system.

"The authorities will try to buy civil society in order to suppress it," he wrote, "But there are parts of civil society that cannot be bought or sold."

And with social media, can be activated in a matter of minutes. Putin appears to be in denial, somewhat, looking for a bogeyman to blame. But the blame lies in the spectacular corruption that resonates through every level of government, including the police, and business. 

I think Putin grasps this to some degree as there have been a number of high profile corruption cases in the past year or so. This is all very good but, so far, is mere tokenism - a drop in the ocean. Until it actually makes a difference and stops the flow of the people's money to oligarchs and corrupt officials, it will get worse, much worse, before it gets better.

Is it possible to get corruption under control in Russia? How many revolutions have resulted from failure, or lack of interest in getting it under control? How many millions of deaths? How many millions starved to death while oligarchs grew fat? 

Oligarchs wealth needs to be redistributed to the masses, but even Putin would likely be shot for trying.

Putin’s View of Power was Formed Watching East Germany Collapse

25 years ago Russia’s president was a KGB officer in the chaos of Dresden. This explains the hardliner he is today

An East German waves a West German flag in front of a group of East German
soldiers in Dresden in 1989. Photograph: Owen Franken/CORBIS

Mary Elise Sarotte - The Guardian

Twenty-five years ago this week tumultuous scenes were unfolding in the East German city of Dresden: inside the central station, tens of thousands of people clashed violently with police, army and Stasi forces. And the chances are high that a 36-year-old KGB officer named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would have followed the chaos with his own eyes.

The story of what happened in Dresden on 4 October was soon overshadowed by the peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall a month later. Yet understanding what Putin the KGB officer may have seen that day could hold the key to understanding how the Russian president sees the crisis in eastern Europe today. For someone who believed deeply in the cold war order, it was most likely an excruciating experience. It is clear that he returned home soon afterwards in disgust, full of bitterness that lingers to this day, with dramatic consequences. Thanks to surviving evidence from police, Stasi, and party files, as well as interviews, it is possible to trace Dresden’s descent into chaos over the course of 1989.

The Berlin Wall
By late summer in 1989 it was apparent that East Germany’s regime of hardliners, headed by Erich Honecker, was never going to follow the example of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and reform. As far as Honecker was concerned, the iron curtain should stay closed. But over the course of that summer the Hungarians had eased their border controls, and a massive wave of East Germans had rushed southwards to the border between Hungary and Austria to try to escape to the west: by mid-August, more than 200,000 East Germans were making their way through Hungary.

Berlin Wall, Brandenburg Gate

When Honecker forbade East Germans from travelling to Hungary, agitated refugees flooded the grounds of the West German embassies in Warsaw and Prague. About 5,000 crowded on to embassy grounds, huddling in the mud as cold, damp autumn weather arrived.

The situation rapidly became so desperate that East and West Germany brokered a deal: the refugees could go west, but on Honecker’s insistence they could do so only on sealed trains (a means of transport with tragic historical significance in Germany) that passed through East Germany first.

After recording their names, Honecker would then prove that he was boss by “expelling” them to West Germany – all the while they stayed on the same trains. On the night of 30 September about 5,500 East Germans made it to West Germany via this bizarre route. Honecker then closed the East German borders entirely, thus putting an end to the refugee problem once and for all – or so he thought.

Berlin Wall from the west. If the girl had done that on the
other side of the wall, she would have been shot and killed

Inside East Germany, just south of Dresden, more would-be refugees were stuck on the southern borders of their unloved state. Instead of going home, they started protesting in large numbers. And more East Germans managed to reach the Prague embassy before the borders were fully sealed. As a result Honecker had to allow more trains from what was then Czechoslovakia to West Germany, scheduled to roll through the centre of Dresden on 4 October.

With the borders now closed, this second set of overflowing trains became known as the “last trains to freedom”, and everyone wanted a ticket: 2,500 people flooded Dresden’s main railway station, blocking the tracks in the hope of getting on board; another 20,000 packed the area outside. For hours, the blockage forced the trains to wait south of the city centre. Panicked, the East German leaders contacted their Czech comrades, asking them to take the trains back, but Prague refused.

So the Dresden police and Stasi decided to fight through the night to clear the station. More than 400 East German soldiers, armed with machine guns, were sent to the city as well. Stasi files record that 45 members of the East German security forces were injured and at least one police car was turned over and set on fire. Protesters later recounted multiple incidents of police brutality, both on the streets and at hastily organised detention centres. It took until the early hours of 5 October to get at least three of the trains through. The rest had to be re-routed through other cities.

Dresden helped to set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the fall of the wall. One of Gorbachev’s senior aides, Anatoly Chernyaev, lamented the spread of “terrible scenes” of violence, damaging to the East German and Soviet regimes alike. The images worsened the split between Gorbachev and East Berlin, rendering them less capable of coordinated action in the face of protests.

Government and Wall toppled
Opposition leaders, for their part, made heroic efforts to guarantee that future protests would be nonviolent. They succeeded: when, on 9 October, dissidents squared off against state security forces in Leipzig, the sheer numbers cowed the state’s security apparatus without violence. The resistance movement then rolled northward over the entire country, eventually toppling the East German regime and the Wall.

Vladimir Putin

It is impossible to say with any certainty where Putin was during these events. He made sure he covered the tracks of his German posting by burning documents, partly to prevent them from falling into the hands of protesters.

But it is clear that he spent much of the late 1980s in East Germany as a member of the Soviet secret police, and there is no reason to think he was absent that October. Putin himself has recalled to interviewers in vague terms how he watched events unfold: it is a reasonable assumption that he saw crowds seize control in Dresden first hand.

Greatest tragedy
This event was a catastrophe from the point of view of Soviet loyalists, and few were more loyal than Putin. He would later call the collapse of the Soviet Union and its authority in eastern Europe the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Since he witnessed it with his own eyes, he has presumably never forgotten the experience.

Operational Code
The Dresden disaster must have had an enormous impact on him – and understanding that may help us to understand his actions today. Political scientists such as Alexander George have long theorised that world leaders function according to an internal “operational code” acquired during younger, formative years, which they then rely on to guide them years later when in power.

The events of 4-5 October 1989 may very well have helped to shape Putin’s operational code. His swift and aggressive responses both to the popular uprising in Kiev earlier this year and to the earlier demonstrations in Moscow suggest that they did. He saw the crowds seize control – and is not, to put it mildly, comfortable with that precedent.

Hardline
This analysis does not bode well for the future of the Ukraine crisis. The conflict in Ukraine, and the resulting wounds to relations between the west and Moscow, will fester as long as Putin remains in power, for operational codes rarely change once set. Having witnessed protesters first get the better of local authorities and then distant rulers, he will do whatever he deems necessary to prevent the same scenario from repeating itself.