Victims of the “New” Russian State

It is no surprise that the three members of the feminist and post-modernist punk band Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, have been found guilty of “hooliganism”. After all, 99% of all trials in Russian courts end in guilty verdicts. In highlighting the blatant authoritarianism of the Putin regime the three defendants have not only shown immense courage and dignity but have given the world another insight into the gangster regime that rules in the Kremlin. The murder of journalists like Anna Politkovskya in 2006, or the former KGB agent, Alexander Litvichenko in 2003 who both wrote about Putin’s crimes bear witness to the insouciant brutality of the current Russian state. Both revealed not only Putin’s crimes in Chechenya but also that the FSB (successor of the KGB) was behind the bombing of two Russian blocks of flats which were blamed on Chechen terrorists in order to justify a war of unbelievable ferocity on the Chechen people.

Blowing the whistle on the regime’s activities is a dangerous act. When the financier Bill Browder of Heritage Management tried to expose corruption he was forbidden entry to the country and his firm’s details were handed over to gangsters so that the firm could be accused of high level fraud. Sergei Magnitsky, a 37 year old lawyer who worked on behalf of Browder tried to get the case investigated. He was arrested in 2008 and tortured but refused to turn against his client. The result was that he suffered a slow agonising death from cholecystitis which the authorities refused to treat. He died in prison on 16 November 2009.

Magnitisky was not the only lawyer to die at the hands of the state. On 19 January, 2009 the lawyer and human rights activist, Stanislav Markelov, was killed in the centre of Moscow. He was the lawyer for a Chechen family, which filed a lawsuit against the Russian General Yuri Budanov, who had committed war crimes against the local population in Chechnya. One of these crimes was the rape and murder of an 18-year old girl. The state was very concerned that the Budanov case would put the whole Russian Federation on trial. So on 19 January, 2009 Putin’s State killed Stanislav Markelov and the anarchist journalist Anastasia Baburova (who just happened to be with Markelov when the crime took place) with the help of fascist activists. Although less well-known in the West this murder caused a sensation in Russia. It certainly reinforced the message the state wanted to ram home – that Russia is no place to protest.

And these murders are only the most notorious of the new Russian state’s reign of terror. According to human rights organisations 200 journalists have been murdered since the old Soviet Union collapsed.

See en.wikipedia.org

It does not stop at journalists. Many will remember the show trial and imprisonment of Mikhail Khordokovsky after he criticised Putin’s authoritarianism. This allowed Putin to strip him of control of Yukos and he remains in prison. Obviously this did not arouse much sympathy at the time as Khordokovsky was seen as coming from the same set of oligarchs promoted by Yeltsin like Putin himself. It looked just like a falling out of gangsters.

Other less famous victims of state terror since 1998 (the year Putin became head of the FSB) have been politicians who tried to resist corruption, starting with the pro-democracy campaigner Galina Starovoitova shot in her flat that very year. This was followed by others such as Sergei Yushenkov, co-chairman of the Liberal Russia political party in 2003. In the same year Yuri Shchekochikhin, a vocal opposition journalist and member of the Russian Duma and the Kovalev Commission (into corruption) also died mysteriously. Despite the regime’s refusal of an autopsy his family managed to smuggle out a piece of his skin which confirmed he was poisoned by thalium. Nikolai Girenko, a prominent human rights defender, Professor of Ethnology and expert on racism and discrimination in the Russian Federation was also shot dead in his home in St Petersburg in 2006. The list runs to hundreds. It is well-known that Russia has one of the highest murder rates in the world. What is less well-known is just how many of them are a result of the regime’s policy of liquidating awkward opposition.

Pussy Riot’s Case

Given this background Pussy Riot’s 30 second gig in the Cathedral last February was no trivial protest. The band is no stranger to prosecution. Although only formed a year ago when they were outraged at Putin’s return to the Presidency, they were earlier dragged before the courts for an impromptu concert in Red Square in Moscow in which they sang about “Putin pissing his pants” over the opposition to the rigged elections which brought Putin’s supporters a majority in Parliament. On that occasion they were fined (which is the actual supposed legal punishment for “hooliganism” in Russia) but there can be little doubt though that the earlier concert was more galling to the macho image of Putin. However the regime was smart enough not to make an issue of it. In pogoing before the altar of the Church of Christ Our Saviour in Moscow, one of the Orthodox Church’s holiest shrines, singing their so-called punk prayer calling on the “Mother of God” to kick Putin out, Pussy Riot gave the regime a chance to prosecute them for more than the crime of taking the piss out of Putin.

In their statements at the end of the trial the group were quite clear about what they were doing and that their protest was not aimed at “believers” as the state tried to maintain but at the state. In stating that

Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyayev took over as leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be openly used as a flashy backdrop for the politics of the security forces, which are the main source of political power in Russia.

From the statement of Yekaterina Samutsevich

They identified two of the pillars on which the new Russian state has sought to build since the fall of the USSR. These are the Orthodox Church and the security apparatus. And for them Putin, by his manipulation of the electoral system to retain power, has become like the new Tsar. With Patriarch Kirill calling on true believers to avoid all anti-Putin demonstrations he made the Orthodox Church the mouthpiece of the state just as it was under the Tsars. Indeed many have made the comparison that the “new” Russia is very like the Old Russia of the Tsars. Then the Tsar was not only an autocrat but also Head of the Orthodox Church through which his decrees were transmitted. And if mystification failed then there was the back up of the secret police (the Okhrana). Then too the masses (of serfs) were not heard and the only dissident voices came from the intelligentsia who peopled the plays and novels of the period, as well as the first Populist organisations against authoritarian Tsarism.

The New Russian Police State

Superficially this comparison has some attraction but the Tsar never has such an efficient state apparatus as Putin wields today. What is different is that the ruling elite are the “siloviki” (men of power) all of whom have a background in the KGB or the military. Nearly all the richest oligarchs were one-time KGB officers (an exception was Khordokovsky who came up through the Communist Party apparatus and look what happened to him when he criticised the corruption of the regime!). Some are well known names like Oleg Deripaska (host the Mandelson and Osborne before the last election), Alexander Lebedev (now owner of the Evening Standard), and Andrei Lugovoi (wanted by the British police for the murder of Litvichenko in London where he left a trail of polonium wherever he went). These siloviki have occasionally, like any other set of gangsters, fallen out. Boris Berezovsky had to flee to London to escape the same fate as Khordokovsky where he last year sued Roman Abramovich for not giving him a bigger cut in their business deals.

The making of the siloviki goes back to the early 1980s when certain KGB intelligence chiefs like Yuri Andropov concluded that the USSR not only incapable of beating the USA in a war but also that the attempt to keep up in the arms race was destroying the Soviet Union. Andropov’s untimely death meant that the KGB lost time and it took until 1984 before another Andropov protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev took over and instituted “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness). Gorbachev frequently quoted Lenin but made it clear that the economy would have to respond to market forces and financial needs rather than the command targets of Stalinist state capitalism. It did not impress the vast Communist Party apparatchniks nor the bureaucracy. They sabotaged reform at every turn and the USSR’s economy worsened. Food queues got longer rather than shorter. The various nationalities of the USSR began to demand autonomy and independence, and when Gorbachev attempted to turn the USSR into a voluntary union in 1991, it triggered a coup led by half the Politburo and some sections of the KGB who had now lost confidence in Gorbachev, including its head General Kruychkov. The conspirators achieved in three days what they were trying to avoid – the collapse of the USSR.

Yeltsin was already Russian President and in 1990 had set up his own KGB. With the fall of the USSR in 1991 20,000 former Soviet KGB officers came into the Russian service. The KGB thus did not vanish but actually became more significant in the transition to the new order. This was not a smooth process. Yeltsin recognised their role but purged them of ultra-nationalists and old style Stalinists in 1993 and promoted only those whom he considered loyal to posts of authority. These are today’s siloviki. Amongst these was Putin who became head of the FSB in 1998. This contains not only in the old KGB but many of the forces of the Ministry of the Interior. As many commented at the time the FSB now had the power of the Stalinist NKVD in the 1930s. In fact they have more as they also took on economic assets as highlighted by one US security think tank

The key assets of the siloviki are those that have commercial value. Army officers hire out conscripts as labor; the police and the FSB provide “roofs,” or physical and legal protection, for everyone from small traders to major corporations; electronic eavesdropping departments are used to collect compromising information on politicians and businesspeople; and the prosecutor general’s office opens and closes criminal cases on a commercial basis. Obviously, this is not the only thing that power ministry officials do; there are certainly many committed and (relatively) honest officials dedicated to serving the state. However, the failure to make serious inroads into fighting corruption and promoting the rule of law has to count as one of the greatest failures of Putin’s presidency …

csis.org

The case of Pussy Riot has clearly demonstrated that there is absolutely no rule of law in Russia. Putin became head of the FSB in 1998 and eventually came to be Yeltsin’s anointed successor in 2000. The number of murders useful to the Russian state roughly doubled during his first term as President.

Protest and Powerlessness

Naturally Pussy Riot’s protest against the police state has gained them international fame. They have become the darlings of democracy amongst the politicians and press of the West. Western politicians like Cameron and Merkel have not been slow to use their case to highlight the civilised values of the West, and a whole gamut of pop stars, headed by Madonna have taken up their cause. Articulate, intelligent and photogenic they have captured Western media attention more dramatically than all the hundreds of thousands who braved police violence and freezing temperatures to demonstrate against electoral fraud.

Pussy Riot seems to be part of that middle class protest which erupted in Russia after last May’s demonstrations against electoral fraud. However their apparent attack on religion seems to have alienated the more nationalist amongst the middle class and support for them is lukewarm. They initially underestimated just how successfully the regime has manipulated the religious card to ensure a populist base amongst the mass of Russians, 80% of whom claim to be Orthodox Church members. Pussy Riot saw the danger at their trial and toed the religious line (quoting the Bible more than any other source in their final statements). Two of them claimed to be believers. This might have helped reduce their sentences but even as the verdict was announced more Russians were apparently in favour of the gaol sentence than were against. And the statements of Pussy Riot, for all their cleverness and their references to Foucault, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, Pythagoras, Kafka, the anti-stalinist poets, Berdayev, Brodsky and Vvedensky and even Guy Debord are not a critique of the system, but a plea to rid it of its authoritarian aspects. To quote Tolokonnikova

We categorically oppose the following, which forces us to act and live politically:
* the use of coercive and forceful methods for regulating social processes; a situation when the most important political institutions are the disciplinary structures of the state: the security agencies (the army, police, and secret services), and their corresponding means of ensuring political “stability” (prisons, pre-emptive detention, all the mechanisms of strict control over the citizenry);
* imposed civic passivity among the majority of the population,
* the complete dominance of the executive branch over the legislative and judicial.
Moreover, we are deeply frustrated by the scandalous dearth of political culture, which comes as the result of fear and that is kept down through the conscious efforts of the government and its servants (Patriarch Kirill: “Orthodox Christians do not attend rallies”); the scandalous weakness of the horizontal ties within society.

It is a lucid picture of the political situation inside Putin’s Russia but it does not mention that the power of the siloviki comes not through fear alone but equally through their ownership of the means of production. There is not one word about wealth or who owns it in any of the statements of the condemned three. In many ways it is a bit like the protests of the Occupy Movement around the world. They don’t like some aspects of the system but cannot see the big picture. They don’t see that the real root of our problems lies in the continued existence of the crisis-ridden capitalist system of exploitation. This is perhaps not surprising in Russia (and not just in Russia!) where the alternative to capitalism is seen as the fake communism of Stalinism. Ideologically the nightmare of Stalinism has done much to disarm the Russian working class who throughout all the protests have been noticeable by their absence.

The Working Class in Russia

This is not necessarily a bad thing if it means workers are remaining on their own terrain. Recent information suggests that the level of opposition to the derisory, and often unpaid, wages in Russia is increasing. It is though difficult to find out exactly how extensive worker resistance to capital is. Go to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the usual starting point for such research, and you find that since 2003 strikes (excluding a big teachers struggle) have been recorded in single figures, and only 4 in 2008, the last year for which records are available. The reason for this impeccable record however soon becomes clear. All figures used by the ILO are supplied by the Russian Statistical Agency! However even Euronews earlier this year recorded a programme which pointed to renewed labour unrest (they called it “the revival of the unions”) particularly in the car industry. It seems that there were 35 strikes in April this year alone and the majority were in the car industry. Here the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR) which is effectively the state trades union (being the continuation of the old Stalinist organisation) is less dominant and the supposedly more militant car workers union the MPRA but it is led by an MP for the Fair Russia party so is hardly any more independent than state union it split from. The record of the MPRA is not great and has called off strikes even though the employers have not conceded anything.

Striking is not easy in Russia as the former Soviet Labour Code of 1970 is still in operation. Formally there is a right to strike but as in the USSR this is only theoretical and striking workers are regularly faced by attacks from the OMON state security apparatus who act as storm troopers for the employers. In 2002 laws were passed (apparently in consultation with the unions) which made it harder for workers to take strike action. Most strikes are declared illegal by the courts for not complying with the new laws. With wages only slowly recovering from the drastic lows of the 1990s and a Russia which is also reeling from the international crisis (the Kremlin needs $120 a barrel for oil to balance its budget), with the USSR having to pay a short time price of a loss of 13% in GDP for entering the WTO, Putin has promised even greater austerity. The Russian working class may have been reduced in numbers (down by 15%) but it is still a sizeable part of society. It produces the wealth that the siloviki and their opponents dispose of. There is still a political debate at the grassroots in Russia with new organisations appearing with revolutionary ideas and programmes. It may yet be proletarian revival rather than punk rockers that we will be talking about in the years to come.