Situation in Russia

Situation in Russia
A Country Report by YABLOKO leader Dr. Sergei Mitrokhin

Dear friends and colleagues,
At present Russia has been going through a period of utter reaction.

This is Putin’s response to the mass protests taking place after the parliamentary elections of December 2011. We see reprisals and persecutions against the opposition, civil society and non-governmental organisations (NGO) and all the dissenting. This period of reprisals is also characterized by the growth of clericalisation of the state and increase of provocations and violent actions.

Obviously, Putin has been very concerned of the fate of his colleagues from the Arab world, and this makes him take up preventive measures against the Arab Spring scenario in Russia.

YABLOKO has had to face snowballing provocations and physical violence against our activists. During recent elections in March we witnessed not only the usual fraud, but also had to confront provocations from criminal groups. Our observers were beaten, I was physically attacked several times. And police even staged a traffic accident blocking the road for our observers when they drove to the polling stations.

The regime has launched a large-scale campaign targeted at prosecutions and discrediting of NGOs. The authorities accuse Russian NGOs of receiving aid from abroad. And this serves as a pretext for liquidation of 9,000 Russian NGOs, issuing of 45,000 notes of warning and filing of 5,610 administrative violation cases.
But I should note that the reaction of Vladimir Putin’s regime to the mass protests was not only intensification of reprisals. Putin responded to the challenge with a specific state ideology based on aggressive clericalism and complete denial of the liberal values. This is a significant difference from the policies of ex President Medvedev who often appealed to the liberal values.

Orthodoxy has been exploited by the regime in a very specific way. The emphasis is laid on its contraposition to the Western values and way of life. This “sacred resource” provides the authorities an ideological basis for criticism of the human rights concept, as well as political systems based on respect for civil liberties.
Such obscurant interpretation of Orthodoxy together with anti-Western “theories” by Putin’s intellectual wrigglers create a specific ideological mixture. It has begun playing the same role for Vladimir Putin’s regime as the interpretation of Marxism by Soviet communists, or racial theories by Adolph Hitler or Catholicism by dictators Franco and Salazar. This ideological mixture makes it much easier to blame any oppositional movement in “undermining the foundations” of the state or accusing representatives of the civil society in servicing the interests of hostile outside forces.

In practice such ideological evolution resulted in a demonstratively cruel sentence to the participants of the Pussy Riot punk band, inspired anti-liberal “Orthodox leanings” or aggressive patrols by the Orthodox Banner Bearers and establishment of theology faculties in technological universities.
The Orthodox Church gets the function of a political truncheon against the dissenting.

You all might have heard about burning of YABLOKO’s books by orthodox extremists this March. This was reminiscent of Nazis’ burnings of books in Germany in 1930s.

A group of young people burst into YABLOKO’s Moscow headquarters, took all our books and booklets and burned them near our office in the centre of Moscow. Police did not even appear at the site.

In burning of the books the orthodox extremists cursed the party and me as the party leader. They urged the government to deprive all YABLOKO members of the Russian citizenship crying that YABLOKO was “molesting the nation, fighting against the Russian Orthodox Church, and undermining the spiritual basis of the Russian society”. They also incriminated us the support of radical feminism, the Pussy Riot band, and protection of LGBT rights.

The video entitled “The Orthodox Inquisition Against the YABLOKO Party. Confiscation and Burning of Waste Paper by the Party Satanists and Perverts YABLOKO” was loaded by the young people in the Internet. The law enforcement, President Putin and the Orthodox Church preferred to neglect this accident.

New evidence of the growth of aggressive clericalism has been emerging every day. The Russian parliament adopted a law envisaging five years of imprisonment for the injury of religious beliefs and feelings. However, the law protects only “traditional confessions” and Russian Orthodoxy in the first place. It is obvious that opponents of clericalisation of the state will become the first victims of this vague norm based on subjective estimates.

A few days ago the Patriarch of Russia made a statement on feminism. “I think the phenomenon called feminism is very dangerous, because feminist organisations proclaim pseudo-freedom for women which has to manifest itself, first of all, out of wedlock and out of family,” he said.

An obvious stake at anti-Western and anti-liberal policies has rapidly changed the political situation in Russia. A conflict with the West has become more apparent and even demonstrative. Cultivation of xenophobia and hostility to the outside world allows the regime to feel more secure.

Nevertheless, in such a situation YABLOKO will go on fighting for the liberal democratic values in Russia’s politics.