Reports today about at least 99 different protests “spontaneously” — because you know, 99 protests just spontaneously happen every day — in the Russian Federation, resulting in the sort of arrests and brinkmanship one might see out of BLM, Occupy, or Antifa protesters back home and in Europe.
From the New York Times:
In a statement on Sunday that reflected widespread wariness of the Russian leader in Washington, Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said: “Putin’s thugocracy is on full display. The United States government cannot be silent about Russia’s crackdown on peaceful protesters. Free speech is what we’re all about and Americans expect our leaders to call out thugs who trample the basic human rights of speech, press, assembly and protest.”
The protests in Russia on Sunday — nominally against corruption but also a rare show of public defiance against Mr. Putin, who has found a fierce and enduring critic in Mr. Navalny — were the largest coordinated display of public dissatisfaction since anti-Kremlin demonstrations in 2011 and 2012, after an election that was tainted by fraud.
Protesters tried to prevent a police van from taking Mr. Navalny away and chanted: “This is our city. This is our city.” Others shouted, “Russia without Putin,” and held up pieces of paper denouncing the Russian president and his allies as thieves.
How large are these protests? Not considerable — the largest of them numbering in the few hundreds (organizers claiming 1,000 in certain areas). Moscow was able to aggregate a grand total of 7,000 according to police.
So interesting, but not exactly enough to swing policy.
Of course, Senator Ben Sasse issued what admittedly has to be viewed as a disproportionate response to the rallies themselves, calling the arrests evidence of a “thugocracy on display” and so forth:
“The United States government cannot be silent about Russia’s crackdown on peaceful protesters. Free speech is what we’re all about, and Americans expect our leaders to call out thugs who trample the basic human rights of speech, press, assembly, and protest,” Sasse said in the statement.
Opposition rallies against the Russian government took place on Sunday in more than 80 towns and cities across Russia. In Moscow, reports indicate more than 650 people have been detained, including Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most-prominent critic in Russia. The protests spurred from allegations that Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev accepted more than $1 billion in bribes from state banks and wealthy businessmen.
…and there’s where this gets weird.
Are the protests about Medvedev? Are the protests about opposition to Putin? Are they in reaction to the death of Voronenkov? In this, it seems tragically unclear as to why we’re going through the motions in Russia.
For all but one reason, of course. We’re seeing a dry run for a “democratic uprising” in the Russian Federation, is all through the same string of memetics and social media apparatus that worked so well in 2011 before it spiraled out of control.
The problem for the United States and the European Union is that the Russian Federation is not a Western-style democracy… but rather a Russian-style democracy.
For the Russians, there is no pretense that a free press is an objective social good, no notion that liberalizing ideas (freedom of press, religion, expression, etc) are net positives. In fact, should such things undermine the totalizing aspect of the state? They are most decidedly net negatives — not in the sense of an intolerance of dissent, but rather that such dissent should seek to reform institutions and not sweep them away — power preserving power as a means to ordering a polity.
In this sense, Russia borrows a great deal from Byzantium. The polity is layered upon power, with power relations leaning back into power relations — a threat against one becoming a threat not against that specific power relation per se, but the entire apparatus of power.
The social advantages of such a concept are clear to be seen. Unlike social media in the Arab world where the governments could not control the tidal wave once it had crested, the Russian Federation will be able to not only break the wave before it even gets started, but counter with a campaign of active measures and disinformation all of its own — and already has an ecosystem built that inoculates its interests against outside actors.
Western media outlets simply do not operate in a similar manner. Arab media outlets do not operate likewise. Sure there are microclimates — Breitbart, Media Matters and the Soros-led outfits, Daily Kos vs. Red State/Resurgent — but FOX and CNN and MSNBC still drive the narratives of competing parties… parties that can be pitted against one another by outside actors and have been for decades.
It would seem odd for 99 spontaneous protests to occur all at once on such short notice. Reminds one of the Soros-led operations back in the United States, or the abortive “Snow Revolution” in 2011 that produced anywhere from 28,000 to 50,000 protesters in Moscow. Or the so-called “Women’s Marches” across the United States earlier this year.
…but hardly a spontaneous event.
Until Western policy makers embrace certain truths about the Russian mindset and the inherent weaknesses our sense of inalienable rights creates within our own, shortsighted approaches that work well in Cairo are doomed to fail in Moscow. More to the point, when they fail, they are sure to generate a proportionate response that only further encourages Russian disinformation campaigns in the United States and European Federation.