Russia witnessed the largest anti-government protests in
more than five years on March 26, 2017. At the urging of Aleksei Navalny, “tens
of thousands of Russians—many of them in their teens and 20s—poured into the
streets in scores of cities . . . to protest endemic corruption among the
governing elite.”[1]
The police responded by beating protesters—a barbaric and psychologically
pathological response to peaceful protest—and arresting more than a thousand. As
the protests were not directed against Putin, but, rather, corruption, the
Kremlin should have been a cheerleader rather than antagonist to the protests.
Aleksei A. Navalny at a court in Moscow on the day after the protests. He told reporters that
he was “amazed” by the number of cities and by how many people had taken part
in demonstrations. (Source: Denis Tyrin/Associated Press)
Yet personal ties among the elite are by nature enduring. Prompting
the protests, Navalny had released a video detailing “a web of dubious
charitable organizations that funneled bribes from prominent oligarchs to Prime
Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, allowing him to maintain a series of luxurious
estates, vineyards and yachts in Russia and abroad.”[2]
The allure of such easy money at the highest level of a government can easily
dwarf any desire to reduce systemic corruption inside the system. This can be
viewed as private advantage trumping the public good.
Fortunately, young people are sufficiently idealistic to
hope for a better, fairer world. “I am glad and happy that a new generation
grew up in the country that will not accept such [pro-corruption] atttitudes
from the government and wants to feel that they are citizens,” Mavalny told
reporters in court after the protests. Middle-aged people can easily slip into
the self-fulfilling prophesy that the world cannot be improved much unless the
change is in the interest of the political and financial elites. How to hold
the most powerful in check is an especially vexing problem for any people, even
in a healthy democracy. It is no accident that the elite typically control the
media, such as Channel One in Russia. That station ignored the protests—a glaring
editorial decision given the station’s duty to report the news.
Had the insiders in the Kremlin been strategizing in an
enlightened self-interest, they would have realized that being on the side of
the young in opposing corruption would pay off even just in good public
relations. Stronger still, rooting out corruption can enhance a government’s
stature, and thus the chances of genuine re-electability. Sadly, the old
grooves of power tend to lead to clamping down on popular protest regardless of
the cause. Rather than aligning, the instinctive reaction is to grasp at the
levels of power available to any government: the police power of the state. I
submit that a corrupt police state is the downside of politics and even
democracy.
1. Neil MacFarquhar and Ivan Nechepurenko, “Aleksei
Navalny, Russian Opposition Leader, Receives 15-Day Sentence,” The New York Times, March 27, 2017.
2. Ibid.
