Grigory Yavlinsky on why his article “No to Putinism and Populism” was published on time

Grigory Yavlinsky’s web-site, 12.02.2021

Photo: Moscow, January 31, 2021. Photo by RIA Novosti / Yevgeny Odinokov

The article “No to Putinism and Populism. On the Implications of Current Politics” sparked a discussion. One of the most frequent objections is that the article was published “at the wrong time”, that “the moment was not chosen right”. I do not think so.

This article is a discussion of what is happening, about the growing threats, and about the future of our country, about what to do to make Russia free, democratic and modern. Such a discussion cannot avoid touching upon Alexei Navalny, who has been in the centre of public attention since August last year [when he was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent] and who strives to be not just a politician, but a leader. Consequently, his political position, obviously, should be the subject of analysis and discussion. Fortunately, he is healthy and has fully recovered from severe poisoning. Indeed, he was sentenced to two years and eight months in a penal colony. But one shouldn’t hope that Navalny will be released as a result of an appeal or for some other reason – this will not happen.

Well, for how long should such a conversation be postponed in this situation? When will it be timely to talk about the vitally urgent things? In a week, a month, a year? Before or after the elections? When he will it be released [after serving his sentence]?

So, point by point:

1.From the point of view of Alexei Navalny’s current situation and his relations with the punitive system, a publication criticising his political views, like any other opinion about him, does not change anything. Navalny knew that if he came to Russia, he would be jailed. And he decided to come and get imprisoned. This is his political tactics. Alexei Navalny wanted people to come out to protest so that to draw maximum attention to his arrest and trial. This, quite expectedly, led to the fact that thousands of people were arrested, hundreds ended up in isolation wards, dozens of criminal cases were initiated (90 cases, as of 11 February, and there is more to come).

2. Alexei Navalny is not just in jail. His associates, on his behalf and through his social media accounts, direct people to take to the streets to protest and, accordingly, clash with the security forces (see the plan announced by Navalny’s headquarters on 4 February).

3. First, a plan is published on behalf of Navalny, which states that such actions will continue in the spring. Then plans change and people are suddenly called to take to the streets next Sunday. Obviously, Navalny will further go beyond such appeals from prison. And his hands weren’t exactly bound. He leads protests from a prison that is used to generate support and try to silence any critics who oppose the government. Indeed, that’s his strategy. Why should we follow it? People will go out, they will be beaten and imprisoned, and their destinies will be ruined. This is a despicable and pointless tactics leading, among other things, to the deepest disappointment.

4. Since the Yabloko party has always been helping in every way to the detained at such actions, we know that the situation on this issue has become more complicated in late January – early February: there are even fewer opportunities to protect people, get them out of special detention centers, and seek observance of their rights. So when to express the point of view that it is necessary to stop provoking people go out to face police batons and criminal cases? In months or years? And in the meantime, sit and be silent? Is this what is called politics?

5. From Navalny’s strategy, voiced by the head of his headquarters network in an address to his supporters: “I took a huge moral burden” when I gave the “order” to organise these rallies. “But I understood that now we needed to attract maximum public attention… to the Navalny case… to get maximum support… Then we had to throw everything into this furnace. But there was no other way out, we had to do this, because we could achieve great public consolidation before the court decision… And we achieved this at a terribly expensive price – … 12,000 detainees.” It turns out that all this was organised not for the sake of “for your and our freedom”, not for the release of political prisoners, but specifically in order to draw attention to Navalny. For the sake of this purpose, people are further encouraged to go out and get into jail. People must pay with their freedom, their health, and the country must pay with its future for sake of “drawing attention” to Navalny. And should we sit and watch this and be silent? No, a politician is obliged to speak up when an action is taking place, rather than analyse what has already happened sometime later.

6. And does being imprisoned exclude a person from current politics? Colonel Budanov [the one who abdicated, raped and killed 18-year-old Chechen girl during the war in Chechnya in 2000] in prison remained the bearer of a very definite ideology, which was discussed in society. And the National Bolshevik Eduard Limonov was imprisoned: did someone come up with the idea to abandon the discussion about National Bolshevism then? And what about the members of the Emergency Committee [GKChP – the leaders of the failed coup d’etat aimed at overthroughing Mikhail Gorbachev as President of the USSR, putting an end to perestroika and returning the country to the old course]? Mikhail Khodorkovsky is another matter, he was a businessman, so his political views should not have been discussed.

7. In the fall of 1999, I was also told that it would be better to postpone criticism of Putin and [his launching of] the Second Chechen War until the end of the [parliamentary] elections, otherwise the moment, they say, was not the right one. And they also shouted about “a knife in the back of the Russian army which is reviving in Chechnya”. And also they shouted about the loss of the electorate, and about the threat of totalitarianism in the person of [then Moscow Mayor] Yury Luzhkov and Yevgeny Primakov [Prime Minister of Russia in 1998 – 1999], and about the dislike for Russia… And during the 2000 [presidential] elections they tried to arrange a demonstrative reprisal for me by the entire “liberal community” on television. But to postpone a statement about the inadmissibility and the crime of war [in Chechnya] until the end of the elections would have been useless and absolutely dishonest in relation to the people who continued to be killed in Chechnya, in relation to all citizens of Russia in general. However, a year later, a few people with a queasy conscience who had flirted and defamed me on television, those who simply had not understood about the explosions of houses [explosions of blocks of flats in Moscow, Buinaksk and Vlgodonsk in September 1999, on the verge of the war in Chechnya, after which then Prime Minister Putin began a war in Chechnya], about the terrible war, those who had underestimated the catastrophe for which we have been still paying reparations, they came to me and apologised… But that was later. And, by the way, there was a mini-split in the party after these my statements: some people left and even tried to create a competing party, but nothing came of it.

8. Now about what is more important: the opinion of a group of exalted comrades, most of whom are sitting at home (and many are even abroad), when people are beaten in the streets, criminal cases are opened and people are imprisoned, or the fate of these victims because of their participation in the street actions? The fate of people is dearer to me. For me it is absolutely unacceptable to “throw them into the furnace”. I bear responsibility for politics in my country, which means for the life and fate of these people. Certainly, now we need to help all the victims in every possible way, but not be proud of collecting money and sending packages for political prisoners, we have to strive to the situation when we do not have to do this.

9. Yabloko is not a Gapon’s party [priest Gapon was a police provocateur who, on the order of the police created a network of workers’ organisations and on 9 January 1905, instigated people to go to the Tzar’s palace to hand a petition to the Tzar, but peaceful demonstrators were shot by the military and the police], we are not going to set people up. We are against provocations, and we need to talk about it when there is a threat, and not when it sounds good and proper to someone. The Gapons are ready to shed blood to make it easier to finish off the current government. This price does not suit us. It is a matter of principle.

10. Politics is a serious profession. One must learn it. The philosophy of these social protests is Nietzscheanism and National Socialism. There is not goal for us which would excuse opening the way for this ideology.

11. Without mentioning Alexei Navalny, it would be strange to talk about the political vector that he designates, and argue with this direction as extremely dangerous for Russia. Just not mentioning his name? Make him an “omission”, as Putin have been doing for a long time? Why so? No one would understand anything and would not justly pay attention to the essence of this text and the key warnings.

12. A false message, very dangerous for the whole society, has emerged: Navalny went to jail – it means that he is right, the discussion is closed. No, the discussion is not closed. This is without exaggeration about life in our country. The question is in choosing the way – where to go, what to do, how to assess the situation in the country.

13. The activists who call themselves opposition like to say that the government believes its own propaganda and that this is its weak point. But now the same is happening in the protest movement. People are beginning to believe that Putin is trembling with fear after Navalny’s films [about corruption and Putin’s palace], Putin who got afraid of the return of his opponent from Berlin. Well, this is complete nonsense! But now many people will pay dearly for this fantasy. A politician in such a situation should not be silent for the sake of psychological comfort, delicacy or tactics.

14. About something very important. There is no understanding in society about the failed end of the era of post-Soviet construction of democratic Russia. The significance of the 1st of July constitutional coup [plebiscite for Putin’s amendments into the Constitution masked as ‘voting’] is not understood. There is a lot of amased indignation at the unprecedented use of force, blocking of the cities’ centres, and the “cosmonaut” [riot police detachments called so due to their uniform] detachments. Against this background, there arises expectation that at some point this haze will disappear, Alexei Navalny will be released again, as in 2013, and even he will be allowed to run in the elections, as it was then. Hence, in fact, there comes a claim about the “untimely” criticism. But there will be none of this now. Nothing will disappear. Because all this is our new reality, which, in fact, could have been imagined a year ago, when Putin delivered his “constitutional” message. This is how we live now – with a repressive state that is qualitatively different for the worse even from what it was after 2014. The change of tactics of actions of the authorities is not a toy, but a Leviathan, very dangerous, aggressive and possessing a huge power potential. To hope that the beast is somehow stupid is completely unwise. The beast’s stupidity can turn into suffering and blood for people. And the main thing here is to understand that the following perspective is real:

– absorption of Belarus by Putin’s Russia;

– escalation of the war in Ukraine;

– new adventures – both international and domestic.

What moment should we wait for to discuss the policies that, in my opinion, do not hamper these prospects in any way?

15. The world trends. The activists’ protest has not reached its goals anywhere. The “yellow jackets” in France, the Arab Spring in the Middle East, “Occupy Wall Street” actions in the USA, the protests in Hong Kong… There have been accumulated a many years of experience, clearly showing that hopes for horizontal network self-organisation after the destruction of the “old” institutions are not justified. People in the West started thinking about this increasingly more often. The attack on the Capitol greatly frightened the American elite and became a powerful stimulus for reflection and action. Not thinking about it in Russia, believing that populist protest will by itself give birth to a new quality, means treating our country and our people as something second-rate. And we need to talk about this now, when people hear, and not in two years and eight months [after Alexei Navalny is released].

16. The political edge of Navalny’s plan is another “smart vote” [voting for anyone, even communists and Stalin supporters, but for the ruling United Russia], this time in the parliamentary elections that are due this Fall. How long can one ignore that there is nothing clever in this strategy, that this is a very stupid and harmful invention? Since 2011, also thanks to Alexei Navalny’s idea of “voting for anyone except United Russia”, we have a Duma that unanimously supports Putin’s foreign policy adventures and an insult of the Constitution [by means of Putin’s amendments], stamping out repressive laws without delay, inciting hysteria of the search for internal enemies and foreign agents. So what now? Navalny’s team will continue to promote this nonsense, and we will “delicately” keep silent, because Alexei Navalny is in the penal colony? No, this will not work: in a rapidly impoverishing country, the danger of National Socialism is growing, and support for the Mironov-Prilepin [“Just Russia”] party and [Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s] LDPR is the path right there, towards fascism.

P.S. The wave of claims to the article “No to Putinism and Populism” is very reminiscent of Putin’s propaganda: “a paid agent of the Kremlin”, “getting something from the Presidential Administration”… That is why the activist protest collapses, because it has been sliding down from its initial aimlessness to the path of least resistance and has been copying the Putin system: hatred, suspicion and defamation. But one should not be like the power system, one must respond to it in a completely different plane, where it has almost no resources: in the field of [political] programmes, in intellectual and creative way. We must offer a way out, show the way to freedom. Otherwise, we will lose entire generations, rather than just voters, mandates in municipal councils and organisational structures.

P. P. S. As for the accusation of Navalny’s team of involving minors in the protests. Let’s get a look. The article says: “They deliberately advocated the use of minors for political goals.” Leonid Volkov [head of Navalny’s electoral headquarters], the same ally of Navalny who spoke about the “furnaces”, said literally the following in one of his January YouTube streams: “Does Navalny’s team involve minors in protest activity? So what?! We are glad to all those who came out to protest today: adults, students and teenagers.” And here is Alexei Navalny himself publishing his gratitude to the children on his Instagram on the eve of the actions on 23 January: “A separate respect for the schoolchildren who, according to the lawyer, arranged chaos in TikTok. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds cool.” So? Are they not for the use of schoolchildren in the protest? They do not support it?

* from “The Prospectors’ Little Waltz” by Alexander Galich, a Soviet poet, playwright and film scenarist

Grigory Yavlinsky

is Chairman of the Federal Political Committee of the Russian United Democratic Party YABLOKO, Vice President of Liberal International, PhD in Economics, Professor of the National Research University Higher School of Economics.