Putin and the opposition

ONE: The 90s, the country Putin inherited, and the changes he made

To understand Vladimir Putin's reign, his initial popularity, and his later repressive turn, it pays to look briefly at the country he inherited from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. This article aims to briefly draw out the elements of Russia's politics and economy in the 1990s that are necessary to understand the changes Putin later brought in.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Boris Yeltsin took power as Russia's President. Yeltsin was widely regarded as a poor leader, and these days he is primarily remembered as a drunk. Yeltsin oversaw the transition to capitalism and the creation of Russia's oligarchs. He brought in a policy that was heavily encouraged — and partially designed — by Western capitalists, now usually referred to as "shock therapy": a swift transition to a capitalist economy that included removing price caps on goods (food prices tripled overnight) and encouraging speculative trading on the rouble. The old Soviet state enterprises were privatised en masse; many productive industries (oil, mining, metalworks) were taken over by those who had been in senior roles before the collapse of the USSR. Others founded banks and profited from of the sudden flurry of speculative investment. The "loans for shares" scheme, arranged by Yeltsin in 1995 with the help of oligarch Anatoly Chubais, used a series of backroom deals and shady business practices to allow companies to auction state industries back to themselves at incredibly low prices.

In terms of political power, there was an uneasy alliance between Yeltsin and the oligarchs, who rallied around him to prevent the potential resurgence of the old Soviet Communist Party. The CP had now been rebranded by some of its old leadership as the CPRF, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In one famous incident, at the Davos conference in 1995 oligarch Boris Berezovsky, scared by the growing popularity of CPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov, gathered the Russian multi-millionaires with control of all major industries and media platforms and convinced them to put aside their interpersonal differences to campaign for Yeltsin's re-election. The result was a resounding victory.

Wages fell 68% in real terms over the decade of the 1990s. Across the country, especially outside of the major cities, people went hungry, lost their jobs, and had no access to proper healthcare, insurance or government support. Many who still had jobs received either appalling wages or none at all, and were kept alive by the non-monetary welfare support that their workplaces could still administer — a hangover from the Soviet era. By the end of the decade, there were attempts to replace even these meagre forms of welfare with soon-worthless monetary compensation.

The first Chechen war began in 1995 and quickly became drawn-out and expensive, destroying Chechnya and killing thousands of Russian and Chechen soldiers, causing mass waves of psychological trauma that both countries still suffer from.

Onto the scene steps Vladimir Putin. Initially a middle-ranking, unsuccessful KGB officer stationed in Dresden, over the course of the 90s Putin got himself swiftly into politics, at first through various roles under mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak. Putin leaned on his former KGB contacts repeatedly for personal and political gain, a practice that came to define his career — siloviki, ex-KGB men installed in major political positions, have always been a large part of Putin's entourage. In 1999 he was chosen as the next Prime Minister and Yeltsin's eventual successor. The succession itself would happen after less than six months, when Yeltsin resigned on New Year's Eve 1999.

The Second Chechen War had begun back in August. In September, a series of apartments across major Russian cities were bombed, killing around 300. There is debate as to whether or not this was on Putin's orders, but there was at the very least secret service involvement — FSB officers were found planting explosives in a block of flats in another city and tried to play it off as a "training exercise". Regardless of who gave the order, Putin's resulting hard-line "anti-terrorist" messaging made him immediately popular across Russia. He presented himself as the sober, calculating alternative to Yeltsin, and used that image to garner public support for his policies.

There is a common-sense reading of Putin's actions between 2000-2005 which argues that he "renationalised" many branches of Russian industry, and in doing so "returned" the country to its "Soviet past". Modern Russia is evidently not a socialist state, and Putin's "nationalisation" was a far cry from any form of socialism. The state did in fact gain control of a number of key corporations — most famously the oil company Yukos, which was broken up and sold to Rosneft, the state-owned oil company. But this was nationalisation strictly for the growth of the state's own coffers, with almost no redistribution or investment in public services whatsoever.

The result was a much more centralised and strict hierarchy between business and government: while movement between executive boards and government positions is common, and corruption is omnipresent, there was no mistaking who was now in charge. Putin also made sure that the tax system — which had been decimated in the 1990s — was firmly in place and strictly enforced, meaning any large business transactions would now have to pay their fair share to the government.

The state's control of oil and gas was secured just in time for an oil boom — at the end of 2001 oil cost around $32 per barrel, while in mid-2008 it was around $180. Russia was one of the only countries in the world ramping up its oil production at the time, and profited enormously. To give an incredibly simplified version of events: with exports high and prices rising, money was coming into the country like never before. A sovereign fund was set up in 2004; at the time it was the second largest in the world, and even today it is still in the top ten. Ramping up military investment from these gains also laid the infrastructure and groundwork for his later military escapades.

This influx of oil money led to more speculative investment on the rouble, and this in turn brought more investment from the West and greater interest in exporting commercial goods to Russia. A good example of how Putin leveraged the oil boom to bring business into the country is the car industry: in the mid-2000s, he told foreign car manufacturers that he would be willing to remove the exorbitantly high import tariff on foreign vehicles, but only if the companies were willing to move their manufacturing to Russia. The majority of the largest European and Asian car manufacturers soon had Russian factories, and the country saw foreign cars line the streets. The upper and middle classes of the country will have seen this as a period of great economic success, with the creature comforts of twenty-first century capitalism, like foreign cars and clothes, appearing for the first time. The working class will have seen comparatively very little; key infrastructure and services remained poorly run and underfunded. 50% of the population had a household "wealth" of $870 or less; by 2014 23 million people lived below the poverty line.

The 2000s also saw the Russian government take control of public media channels. The majority of the television networks and newspapers that had been set up by oligarchs were now either taken under direct state control, or the oligarchs that owned them were made to toe the line. Russia Today, perhaps the most prominent of the state news channels, was founded in 2005 by the state media corporation, RIA Novosti. Independent news in the country has been made largely unpopular for most of the twenty-first century, and Putin's people were in control of most Russian television stations by the end of 2004. It is a fact worth mentioning that since the year 2000, 87 journalists have been murdered on the job in Russia — although the circumstances of each death and those responsible for ordering them are matters for debate.

In 2008, the economy took a pretty extreme hit. As a primarily export-based economy, Russia was not well-positioned to deal with the impact of the financial crash, and as Putin “left” power in 2008 — switching places with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to reset the counter on his two terms as president — there were growing signs of unrest in the country due to how little of Russia's newfound wealth had ever made it to the general population.

TWO: The "conservative turn" in Putin's Russia

After regaining power from the more moderate Medvedev in 2012, Putin undertook a pretty clear "conservative turn" over the course of the 2010s. His rhetoric became more strongly Christian, more morally rigid, and more explicitly xenophobic. The economic and political course for Russia had been seemingly set by the oil boom (making Russia a "peripheral", export-based economy), and by Putin's party, United Russia, ensuring a complete grip on parliament. This was partly due to a genuine stock of national support for Putin, who was seen as a "strong" leader even while only Prime Minister, and partly due to varying levels of election falsification and manipulation. Putin was clearly intent on not going anywhere.

The 2008 Georgian war lasted only 12 days, but very much set the tone for the coming period. Putin announced a "peace keeping operation" which in fact involved taking not only disputed territories but also entirely undisputed ones — the comparison to the current invasion of Ukraine is striking. This also marked the beginning of a new period of tensions between Russia and the West. Georgia was seen as a "buffer zone" along with the rest of the Transcaucasus region, and any suggestion of it losing that "neutrality" was deemed a dangerous threat. This was a pattern that would show up time and again throughout the 2010s.

In 2011, with Medvedev's four-year term as president coming to an end, Putin revealed that he would be running for president once more. The largest mass demonstrations of the 21st century in Russia so far took place in multiple cities, often referred to now as the "Bolotnaya" protests, after the square in Moscow where the largest protests took place. The Bolotnaya protests were an uneasy alliance of left and liberal, and a formative moment that would come to redefine the relationship between people and power in the country. The two most common chants were "Russia Without Putin" and "For Honest Elections", a simple but powerful political demand, and some informal "protest infrastructure" like hotlines and legal aid began to appear in the country. Seemingly genuinely scared of a Russian "colour revolution" building out of the Bolotnaya movement, for the next few years Putin focused on ensuring that his voter base was on his side, and his opponents were clearly demarcated and vilified.

A famous example of vilification came in 2013 with the Gay Propaganda bill, not dissimilar from Section 28 in the UK. The bill outlawed "propaganda of non-traditional lifestyles" to anyone under the age of 18, and was used as a pretext for a mass homophobic media campaign and rising homophobic attacks across the country. This was a two-pronged political maneouvre in Putin's eyes: it painted Russia's queer community and those who supported it as dangerous and consolidated a Christian, conservative voter base, but it also acted as a cultural fuck-you to the West, a proud statement that Russia would not be subsumed into any notion of a liberal world order. The irony here is that the bill was largely advocated for, and partially drafted by, American lobbyists, in particular evangelical Christian group the World Congress of Families.

It is a topic far too large to cover in any detail, but Russia in the 2010s doesn't make sense without some mention of the annexation of Crimea. After the 2013 Maidan protests and the ousting of pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014 Russian troops invaded the Crimean Peninsula and claimed it as Russian territory, followed by a protracted 8-year conflict in the East of Ukraine, still very much ongoing. The annexation brought in the first major wave of economic and trade sanctions on the country. Putin's logic was once again steadfast: Crimea (and Ukraine as a whole) is historically Russian, the West is encroaching via territories surrounding Russia, Russia must retaliate to ensure its "buffer zones". The seeming Ukrainian stalemate was a constant source of nationalist sentiment for Putin, an excuse to generate anti-Western narratives via the daily comforts that sanctions had taken away. Putin also blamed the general economic hardships of the Russian working class — which in fact were the result of an oligarchy that hoarded the country's money and a complete lack of social infrastructure — on the persecution of Russia by Americans.

We"ll touch on popular opposition leaders in the following article, but briefly: another important event in this period was the assassination of Boris Nemtsov. In 2015 Nemtsov, then the most popular opposition candidate to Putin, was shot by an unknown assassin on the bridge leading over the Moscow River to the Kremlin. The death led to mass marches of tens of thousands in the streets of major cities, a return of the public protest sensation of the 2011 Bolotnaya movement, and most importantly, an increasingly violent police response to political protest. In April 2016 Putin founded Rosgvardiya, essentially a private military unit that responded to him alone, created partially to help with border control and gun control, but more importantly as a means of "preventing unrest". Rosgvardiya are brought in for any major "unsanctioned" protest, and generally act as a more heavily-armed and rough-handed deterrent to any protester who wishes to put their head above the parapet.

In 2018, Putin raised the pension age from 60 to 65. This was a catastrophic policy for many: in some regions of Russia, the age at which you received pensions was now higher than the average life expectancy of the region — not only a barbaric policy, but a conscious economic decision to have members of the Russian working class die before receiving their pension pot, to "subsidise" those who actually make it to the pension age. This caused a wave of protests that began what many consider to be the "modern period" of Russian politics, with protests getting rowdier and police more violent, while Putin has gone all-out on a strongly conservative and vicious domestic policy.

In 2019, a member of Aleksey Navalny's opposition party, Lyubov Sobol, tried to stand for election as Moscow Mayor. She was banned from standing, and that summer saw tens of thousands protest in the streets. In January 2020, Putin announced that he was "nullifying" the presidential term limits, amending the constitution to allow himself to serve as president for another 12 years.

Over the last four years, but particularly over the course of 2021, almost all of Russia's independent media and any anti-government NGO were labelled "foreign agents", many as a result chased out of the country for fear of prosecution.

In January 2021, after a failed assassination attempt Aleksey Navalny returned to Russia and was arrested and imprisoned, leading to an enormous wave of protests and the arrest of prominent young activists like the editors of the student newspaper DOXA, and the feminist activist Yulia Tsvetkova.

Finally, we have 2022. I have been covering the anti-war movement in weekly articles for Solidarity since the invasion began, and I recommend readers see those articles for far more detail on the current situation; what follows is a brief summary.

Immediate protests in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine were enormous, with 1800 arrested on just the first day, and over 15,000 overall. After the government brought in stricter measures allowing long prison sentences and crippling fines for so much as holding an empty sign in a public space, protests died down, but other organisations and strategies for protest have grown. One key organisation to have appeared is the Feminist Antiwar Resistance, a group of young feminist activists who have taken something of a leading role in the anti-war movement. Students have become one of the last bastions of public protest, campaigning for their universities to oppose the war and acting as hubs for organising within student accommodations and across campuses.

With sanctions ruining the economy and removing any opportunity for either import of materials or export of products, labour disputes are beginning to take centre stage. Factory workers are refusing to work without wages, and standing down their oligarch owners. Doctors and nurses are striking over insufficient pay, and to keep the country functional their bosses have no choice but to agree. Russia is in an economically untenable situation currently, and Putin will have to find some way to stabilise the current collapse of multiple industries if he wants to keep power, but what form that will take is entirely unclear.

THREE: The state of political opposition and the labour movement in Russia

Opposition to Putin takes many forms, some considerably more successful than others. This article will briefly explore the failures of the "traditional" routes for opposition, before exploring some of the newer and more well-organised trade unions, political parties and opposition leaders that have taken up the struggle over the course of the 21st century.

"Official" opposition

The Duma, the lower branch of the Russian governmental system somewhat equivalent to the British House of Commons, is in theory a democratic body in which elected deputies can discuss political issues and bring forward new bills. In practice, its influence is minimal. The Russian election procedure (a form of "parallel voting") allows for very large majorities despite having elements of proportional representation, and United Russia, the party of Vladimir Putin, has rarely faced great opposition in the Duma. The second largest party is the CPRF, still led by Gennady Zyuganov, who voiced some serious opposition in the 1990s but have since transformed their nationalistic communism into a bizarre, full-fledged pro-Putin line. In 2006, when there was still a possibility of a majority-CPRF Duma, the government brazenly created a vote-splitting alternative party, "A Just Russia". This party still exists, and some members likely joined it for good reasons, but it exists purely to function as a manufactured "second party" next to United Russia, with very little difference in its politics from Putin's own. Its vote share is now exceedingly small. Similar in size to the CPRF is the Liberal Democratic Party, perhaps the most misnamed political party in recent memory. Led for many years by the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the party is, if anything, to Putin's right, and rarely taken seriously by other politicians or the general public.

Especially in recent years, the Duma has voiced little other than rapturous support for Putin, especially since the invasion of Ukraine. The majority of left-wing activists who argue for electoral organising within Russia do so on a grassroots or municipal level, and rarely see much point in pushing for a Duma representative.

An article in Solidarity 631 by Dale Street very efficiently and sharply analyses the history of the FNPR, Russia's largest trade union federation. I will only provide a brief discussion of their role here, and recommend readers return to the former article for more detail.

The FNPR ("Federation of Independent Trade Unions") formed itself from the shell of ACCTU, the old Soviet trade union council, whose function was not militant organising or fuelling class struggle, but mediating between workers and the Soviet government, and managing the distribution of welfare and privileges. Although it helped organise some disputes in the 1990s, since Putin came to power it has focused solely on what it terms "social partnership", a cosy relationship between workers and government that involves an absolute minimum of strike actions. Between 2008 and 2014 there were an average of four strikes per year. The FNPR agreed to the 2001 labour code, which greatly restricted the ability to strike, because through various measures it essentially cemented them as the country's primary union. It has an awful track record of supporting Putin's policies — most notably cheerleading excessively for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, even going so far as to publish an article by Ramzan Kadyrov himself on the topic.

"Real" opposition

There are three movements that have posed any sort of "real" threat to Putin's leadership during his reign. The first, a protest movement known as "the Other Russia", was a haphazard alliance in 2008, primarily organised by chess legend Garry Kasparov and Eduard Limonov. Limonov was the original Russian "Nazbol", he co-founded the Russian National Bolshevik Party (NBP) with Eurasianist Alexander Dugin in the late 90s. The NBP was always a critique of Putin from the right — it thought he should be going further and committing more to a violent irredentist politics, in as far as they ever had a coherent party ideology in the first place, not focused solely on violent street protest. Kasparov had rebranded from chess player to generic liberal democrat, a role he still plays to this day. Kasparov has tried to call himself the leader of the international anti-war movement from abroad, to little effect. The Other Russia was doomed to failure from the start, and despite lots of media attention, it failed to ever pose a real threat to Putin's leadership.

Boris Nemtsov was the second opposition leader. From around 2011 to his assassination in 2015, he was presented as the "sensible" alternative to Putin's wild authoritarianism. While he did seem to have a strong groundswell of popular support, Nemtsov was by no means the ideal politician: he had been a governor under Yeltsin, and despite being vocal about government corruption he was no stranger to oligarchs and unlikely to take any action to reduce their grip on the country if he had ever made it to the Russian White House.

Then we have Navalny. There have been several articles in Solidarity covering the pros and cons of Navalny's politics, so we don't need to dwell on him for too long here. In short, Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has played a huge role in exposing government corruption and the enormous personal wealth of any number of high-ranking officials, including Medvedev and Putin themselves. Navalny is a charismatic speaker and an efficient mobiliser. For many years he kept the anti-Putin movement alive through seeming sheer willpower. But his politics are a vague form of liberal-ish nationalism, which in the late noughties veered into some dangerous and overtly racist territory. He has never had an issue allying with the far right as a way of building popular support, and his economic and political plans for the country are far from promising. Socialists should absolutely advocate for Navalny's release from prison as a point of political freedom, but they should not be advocating for him to become Russia's next leader.

The left and the labour movement

There is a small web of trade unions in Russia that are much more militant than the FNPR. Most of them are affiliated to the Confederation of Labour of Russia (KTR). Some, such as the MPRA, a union for auto-industry workers, were founded back in the 2000s out of individual workplace disputes in factories and splits with larger unions, while others, like the Courier Trade Union, formed much more recently and with almost no prior unionisation in the industry. These unions operate across a number of different fields: couriers, auto workers, doctors, and school and university teachers are just a few. These unions all share vocal anti-Putin politics, a steadfast focus on the grassroots, and a constant willingness to escalate and strike if they can muster the power to do so.

Russia also has a proud history of wildcat strikes or un-unionised strikes. Sometimes, even workers in an FNPR union or another "yellow" union that refuses to condone strike action will take it anyway, with varying degrees of success. With labour conditions and wages in Russia so poor, this is an inevitable outcome. However, we shouldn't be rosy-eyed here: the Russian labour movement is in a weak place, and faces great risks whenever it takes any action whatsoever.

Finally, the left. Russia's organised left is not particularly large, but has been around for a while now and is growing slowly. Unlike some post-"Soviet" countries, even amongst the more recent left-wing groups there are still a fair number of Stalinists, or Stalinist-adjacent organisations. The largest group is probably the Russian Socialist Movement or RSD, an amalgam of several prior groups that formed in 2012 and is vaguely linked to the Mandelite Fourth International. There is also Left Front, an even broader coalition of all kinds of tendencies which played a significant role in the Bolotnaya protests of 2011-12. Left Front are much more sympathetic to Stalinist politics and not only supported the annexation of Crimea, but refused to say anything negative about the 2022 invasion, leading to the resignation of one of their founding members. Beyond that the numbers get very small, but comrades may recognise the names of some international groups with Russian branches, most notably very active branches of the ISA and the IMT.

There are also a handful of small but relatively well-organised anarchist or anarcho-communist organisations and networks, which have become particularly prevalent since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine for helping to coordinate railway sabotage and disruption, to prevent the Russian army from restocking itself.