Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Victor Shamanovsky victor.shamanovsky@gmail.com via meetup.com
April 13, 2013 10:39 AM
to newtech-1

The body language gave Vladimir Putin away. In a German television interview he was not at all his composed self. Everything irritated him: the calm, smiling interviewer questioning him about a crackdown on civil society, the headsets, his own staff for not finding a document fast enough. He has reasons to fret. Germany, Russia’s largest European trading partner and once a firm political ally, has turned into a big critic.

Mr Putin may have made light of the half-naked protesters that disturbed his visit to Germany this week, but he must have been shocked by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s attack on the Kremlin’s raids on non-governmental organisations, including two German foundations. “Putin has no real allies left in Europe,” says Mikhail Dmitriev, president of the Centre for Strategic Research, a think-tank.

The Kremlin had hoped that its anti-American policy would have no effect on Europe, where politicians and businessmen were too wet, greedy or desperate for gas to confront Mr Putin. But as Mrs Merkel has shown, European patience has limits. Moreover, the value of Russia as a source of natural gas for Europe has been undermined by the proliferation of shale gas.

The recent Cypriot bail-out highlighted Russia’s inability to influence decisions touching its financial interests. Russians not only hold some €20 billion in Cypriot banks but often use Cyprus as a hub for merger activity (a quarter of inward investment in Russia nominally comes from the island). “Russian firms cannot comply with the tight regulations in mainland Europe and in America and it would be hard to replace Cyprus as an offshore centre,” says Mr Dmitriev. The problems caused to Russian business by Mr Putin’s anti-Western rants are becoming more obvious.

So is infighting within the elite, demonstrated by the downfall of Anatoly Serdyukov, a former defence minister involved in a procurement scandal. Television reports about second-tier officials being arrested are seen by the public not as part of Mr Putin’s anti-corruption campaign but as confirmation that corruption is ubiquitous. The economy is starting to stall, and trust in Mr Putin is falling.

A recent opinion poll shows that only 25% of the country is satisfied with the status quo. Most want more democracy, but Mr Putin is responding with more crackdowns. Golos (Voice or Vote), an NGO that monitors elections and blew the whistle on vote-rigging in 2011 and 2012 is being prosecuted for not registering as a “foreign agent” engaged in political activity.

This is not about “closures and bans”, Mr Putin insisted in Germany. “All that we are asking them to do is to register.” But Arseny Roginsky, a founder of Memorial, one of Russia’s first human-rights groups, notes that the purpose of the new law is not to extract information, as Mr Putin claims, but to humiliate and isolate the NGOs by labelling them as “foreign agents”, a label with echoes of Stalin’s “enemies of the people”. For Memorial, dedicated to the memory of Stalinism, such a badge is intolerable, says Mr Roginsky. “It is a matter of principle.”

What drives Mr Putin’s attack of Golos and other NGOs is not mere vindictiveness but also a belief that his troubles are the result of conspiracy by foreign governments and their agents. In the Kremlin’s picture of the universe, nothing happens without a plan. This bodes ill not so much for the NGOs, which are used to working under pressure, but for Russia as a whole. Cracking down on NGOs will not deal with the causes of growing dissatisfaction with Mr Putin, but rather push him further into the corner.

“The next year or two will be tough for us,” says Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger with presidential ambitions. A court trial of Mr Navalny on highly dubious charges starts on April 17th. It will almost certainly end with a conviction and perhaps with a sentence that bars him from running in any election. Yet the biggest threat to Mr Putin’s power is not Mr Navalny or his ilk, but his own actions.

Thanks,