When Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny returned to Russia in January, he threw a glove at the authority of President Vladimir Putin.
It was a challenge observed by the world when Navalny – having survived an intoxicated nervous agent months before – flew to Moscow.
The Kremlin’s response has been resounding. Navalny was quickly sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison in an internationally convicted trial for political motivation. The unusually large protests in Russia that followed Navalny’s imprisonment were quickly and robustly suppressed, as authorities deployed police on an unprecedented scale. Thousands of people were arrested and then hundreds were fined or given short prison sentences. Police attacked Navalny’s allies with a raid and new criminal proceedings, which put most of them in custody.
After two weekends of protests, which saw so many detainees that Moscow prisons and courts made a brief backup, Navalny’s team called off any other street protests until the summer.
Two months after Navalny’s return, the Kremlin has successfully stifled protests and reaffirmed its control. Navalny himself is now out of sight in a prison 60 miles east of Moscow. As the dust settles, the scope of the Navalny challenge itself is clear, but the last few weeks also contain long-term signs that the Kremlin will not like it.
This result has asserted Putin’s ability to maintain control, but it also points to an unattractive future for the Kremlin, where he must increasingly rely on crude authoritarianism.
For the past two decades, Putin’s Kremlin has tried to maintain its power without resorting to naked repression, capable of relying on growing prosperity and securing its control over Russia’s media and political institutions. But with polls showing support for Putin’s weakening among Russians and that there is no obvious way to revive a stagnant economy, it is clear that the period is over.
“I think both sides are probably disappointed with the outcome,” said Sam Greene, a policy professor at Kings College London. “There is more opposition than the Kremlin wants to see and less opposition than Navalny and his team want to see.”
In many ways, the protests reaffirmed the strength of Putin’s control. Although they are unusually large for Russia, with tens of thousands of people, they were still not huge. The day Navalny was sentenced, only a couple of thousand people came out to protest. Authorities must impose unprecedented pressure on protesters, but it has effects.
“What we don’t see is that there are enough people coming out to change the nature of politics in Russia. There is nothing to send any signal to the Kremlin or the elite that they cannot control the streets, ”Greene said.
Independent polls have shown that, despite the drama, there has been little impact on Russians’ attitudes towards Navalny and Putin. According to the independent poll, the Levada Center, about 19% of Russians approve of Navalny’s actions, while 56% reject it.
That is, 6% more disapproving than before Navalny returned. Levada’s own polls show that Navalny’s confidence among Russians in general has increased slightly, from 3% to 4%.
Polls suggest the government has managed to control the narrative around Navalny, said the center’s deputy director, Denis Volkov.
State media have portrayed the protests as violent riots attended mostly by teenagers. Immediately after his imprisonment, authorities also tried Navalny for allegedly defaming a World War II veteran. The sometimes bizarre trial, criticized by politically motivated rights groups, allowed state television to paint Navalny as unpatriotic.
Much of Navalny’s success has been the use of social media to avoid the Kremlin’s control of the media. The best example is his recent film that reveals a luxurious palace supposedly secretly built by Putin in the Black Sea. The film has now been viewed on YouTube more than 100 million times. But polls at the Levada Center showed that the film did not change most people’s view of Putin, but reinforced those he already had.
Most Russians remain apathetic and deeply cynical about political change, attitudes also cultivated by Kremlin propaganda, according to experts, which poses a huge challenge to Navalny’s efforts to mobilize them.
“Navalny paid an incredibly high price for raising his confidence rating by just 1 percent,” Andrey Kolesnikov, a senior member of the Moscow Carnegie Center, recently wrote.
But the protests have also highlighted a much broader problem for the Kremlin.
In recent years, the approval of Putin and the authorities in general has been eroded. Putin’s approval last year fell to its lowest level in a decade, reaching 59% last April, according to a survey by the Levada Center. “If we look at the situation objectively, I think the much more serious problem than Navalny is the growth of social discontent,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, who heads political consultancy R.Politik.
Many who joined the recent protests said they were not there because of Navalny, but because of dissatisfaction with Russia’s leadership.
Aware of its approval, and alarmed by the example of the protests in Belarus, the Kremlin is no longer willing to tolerate the risk posed by the opposition, experts said. At the same time, he cares much less about his reputation among Western countries. The result is that Russia is becoming increasingly authoritarian. In the last year, Russia’s parliament has passed a dredge of new draconian laws that could punish criticism and further clog civil society groups.
“They’re moving in a lot more direction, I would say, Chinese,” Greene said.
Navalny’s team is trying to exploit the growing discontent with a tactical voting campaign aimed at undermining Putin’s ruling party, United Russia, far less popular than Putin himself. Named the “smart vote,” the campaign calls for people to vote for any candidate who has the best chance of beating the United Russia candidate, regardless of their party. Navalny’s team publishes election guides that identify candidates, who are often from the Communist Party of Russia.
Leonid Volkov, one of Navalny’s closest collaborators, has said elections are now the main focus of activists.
“We never said that there could be an event to overthrow Putin. That was never our plan, “Volkov told ABC News last month. “We have always said that we have a long-term strategy to build our organization. To attract more followers. But this is a long road that can take many years.
While Navalny’s team faces a strong challenge to affect election results, several experts said. In addition to cracking down on opposition and manipulating the field around elections, the Kremlin can also offer spending carrots before the election with promises of social benefits, they said.
“Gradual erosion to support the regime is underway, but it is very slow,” said Alexander Gabuev, senior member of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “It can be slowed down by a smart deployment of money to gain loyalty before landmark political events. And again, the regime knows all too well that most of the population is too passive to do anything meaningful to deal with. – to the regime ”.