05.06.2021 – 08:29
Russia’s parliamentary election campaign officially begins in mid-June.
Yet the Kremlin made its first move this week by arresting two prominent opposition candidates who were expected to pose a significant challenge to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party.
On Monday evening, security operatives captured a Polish Warsaw-bound passenger plane as it was about to take off from the runway at St Petersburg International Airport.
After boarding, they approached a passenger, told him he was being detained on a “search warrant” (he even thought he had just cleared customs and border control) and drove him away. The operation echoed the recent scandal in Belarus, when Alexander Lukashenko’s security services effectively hijacked a passenger plane to arrest an opposition journalist.
The last two dictators of Europe really have a lot in common.
The St. Petersburg passenger was Andrei Pivovarov, the former director of Open Russia, an opposition group founded by exiled Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The movement has come under intense attack by Russian authorities in recent years, with arrests and prosecutions of its members. In March, an entire conference room full of lawmakers and opposition activists (including the author of this piece) was arrested by Moscow police on charges of supporting an “undesirable organization.”
To protect its supporters from further attacks, it was officially disbanded last month – but that did not stop authorities from arresting Pivovarov anyway.
After being questioned, he was accused of sharing a Facebook post in August 2020 in support of a candidate for local elections in Krasnodar. The indictment – again on charges of “undesirable organization” for alleged links to Open Russia – carries up to six years in prison.
The next morning – after a overnight search of his apartment, with his wife and 4-year-old son in sight – Pivovarov was taken, in handcuffs and under police escort, to Krasnodar, over 1,000 miles away, where the court put him in custody pending trial.
While Pivovarov was traveling to Krasnodar, officers with firearms in Moscow carried out dawn raids on the apartment, dacha and offices of Dmitry Gudkov, a prominent opposition politician and former member of the Russian parliament.
Gudkov was detained and held in custody; two of his assistants were questioned.
I spent this week in Yekaterinburg for a film screening at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center. The exhibitions here go back to another era in Russia – our short period of democracy when elections were fought for real, parliament was a place for debate and television networks were free to criticize the government. It was like traveling back to the 1990s. Elsewhere in Russia, things look a lot more like the 1970s – and maybe they’re fast approaching the 1930s.
This new wave of oppression comes from uncertainty.
Putin’s United Russia party is at 27 percent in nationwide polls – and with a weak 15 percent in Moscow, where Pivovarov and Gudkov were planning to run in the September election.
Polls commissioned by the presidential administration show that Gudkov has consistently high support in his district and is likely to win – a particularly undesirable prospect for the Kremlin, as the next parliament will be sitting during the crucial 2024 transition year, when Putin is likely to try an unconstitutional seizure of power in violation of mandate boundaries.
Kremlin sources tell reporters that Putin has made it clear that the next parliament – like the current one – must be without opposition.
It is becoming more difficult for the Kremlin to achieve this.
After Putin’s 21 years in power, even once loyal supporters are tired of him.
As the 2019 Moscow legislative elections have shown, the removal of opposition candidates no longer protects Putin’s party from humiliating losses.
After all, no amount of effort can stop political change once public sentiment grows strong enough.
Needless to say, it is up to the Russians to change Russia.
But politically motivated imprisonment is a violation of Moscow’s international commitments – and this week the number of political prisoners (already higher than in the late Soviet era) has risen again. The European Union has demanded that the Kremlin “immediately and unconditionally” release Pivovarov and others unjustly detained.
On June 16, during his meeting with Putin in Geneva, President Biden will have a good chance of doing the same.
Translated and adapted by The Washington Post / konica.al