The Real Russia. Today.

Putin’s 100, plus Navalny’s vision for the future, and Russia’s five latest foreign agents

Wednesday, December 30, 2020 (Meduza’s daily newsletter will return on Monday, January 4, 2021. Happy New Year, everyone!)

• Putin has signed approximately 100 laws ahead of 2021. Here are the main ones, in a nutshell.
• The Kremlin’s spokesman comments on the fraud charges against Navalny
• Opinion and analysis: Kolesnikov parses Putin’s 2024 plans, and Navalny lays out his vision
• Feature stories from other outlets: Mediazona talks to Russia’s five newest foreign agents and meets up with an Internet star after five years behind bars
• News briefs: Oksana Pushkina speaks up, and Mishustin kicks a few million to Katerina Tikhonova’s MGU project

Feature stories

⚖️ New year, new rules

Heading into the new year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been busying signing a flurry of new legislation into law. As a result, in 2021, there will be updated rules governing everything from NGOs and protests, to the Russian Internet and more. Meduza sums up the most important pieces of legislation.

🧠 ‘Putin isn’t hysterical’

On the heels of the Russian prison authorities accusing Alexey Navalny of violating his probation, the country’s Investigative Committee launched a criminal case against the opposition figure for large-scale fraud. Meanwhile, Navalny remains in Germany, where has been since he was evacuated to Berlin for treatment after he was poisoned back in August. During a press conference on Wednesday, December 30, journalists asked Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to comment on the latest charges against Navalny. Here’s what he said.

Opinion and analysis (summaries by Meduza)

⌛ Sometimes, you’ve got to leave to keep your place

Andrey Kolesnikov, journalist — *Kommersant*

In mid-December, during his annual marathon press conference, Vladimir Putin justified a new constitutional amendment that allows him to seek another two presidential terms, arguing that the legal disruption was necessary to safeguard Russia’s “stable development.” Kolesnikov says the president’s response indicates that the constitutional reforms were always meant to resolve the uncertainty surrounding the end of Putin’s current term, which would have left him a “lame duck,” risking political bedlam.

While he praises the president’s “honest,” “largely exhaustive” answer, Kolesnikov says he doesn’t expect Putin to exercise his right to run for re-election, explaining that he wouldn’t have described popular support for the constitutional amendment as a “formality” if he intends to act on it. Kolesnikov also seems to be pleading with President Putin, saying that he doubts he would enjoy a replay of past presidential elections and warns Putin that “this is one of those cases when you have to leave to keep your place — in history, of course.”

Navalny’s vision for the ‘beautiful future’

Economist Sergey Guriev and oppositionist Alexey Navalny — VTimes and *Dozhd*

In this interview, Navalny lays out his broad platform for “the beautiful Russia of the future” he intends to help build. He stresses the importance of education, both as an economic approach (human capital!) and as a pipeline for a generation of impartial, well-trained, and well-paid (1 million rubles — almost $13,450 — a month!) judges to preside over an independent judiciary. Navalny says Russians must agree to create a court system that could rule against some of them tomorrow. “There’s no escaping it,” he says. The same goes for the country’s politics in general: maintaining office can’t be the only means of avoiding prosecution and persecution. To advance this agenda, Navalny says he’s ready to work with any political party, except United Russia.

Russia needs true federalism, as well — how else to accommodate a country with regions as different as St. Petersburg and Chechnya? More independence and more money for local government will also protect against separatism.

Navalny clarified his vision for “revising the results of privatization” — a sweeping phrase that he dislikes because it’s often deployed to frighten entrepreneurs and property owners. Navalny says a parliamentary-government commission should designate a small list of major privatizations, including the infamous “loans-for-shares auctions” of the Yeltsin era, where he says beneficiaries should be charged “large taxes” for their role in fleecing Russia’s Soviet infrastructure. He points out that many of Russia’s questionable privatizations occurred during the Putin era.

Guriev also raised Navalny’s well-documented embrace of Russian nationalism, asking how ethnic minorities should feel about his rejection of Russian civic identity. Navalny says “the nationality issue” will be with Russia forever, and that’s fine with him. The country’s diversity depends on different groups maintaining their distinct identities, he argues.

How long will it take to build this new Russia? Ten years, says Navalny: a brief transition followed by two election cycles. (He wants to revert Russia’s presidential terms to four years.)

Feature stories from other outlets (summaries by Meduza)

🕵️ Russia’s unlucky chosen ones

Oleg Zurman, Alla Konstantinova, and Anastasia Yasenitskaya — *Mediazona*

On Monday, for the first time ever, Russia’s Justice Ministry utilized a year-old law to designate five individuals as “foreign media outlets acting as foreign agents.” Officials targeted three journalists, one human rights activist, and a feminist artist. Mediazona spoke to all five people, who unanimously say they were unaware that the authorities were even auditing their writings or earnings.

Daria Apahonchich, a performance artist in St. Petersburg, says she plans to challenge the designation. In a longer interview, she explained to Meduza that her only media content exists on Facebook and Instagram, where she has personal accounts “like almost every adult in the world.” Apahonchich says she has received some “artistic awards” from abroad, but she insists that this money is “purely symbolic support” — not a salary. After being arrested this summer for unpermitted rallies in support of feminist causes, Apahonchich lost her job as a Russian language tutor at the Red Cross (the organization declined to renew her contract because she “violated the group’s political neutrality”).

Seventy-nine-year-old Lev Ponomaryov, the founder of the (technically dissolved) “For Human Rights” movement, says he doesn’t expect the “foreign agent” label to hurt his reputation with the people his group helps (the victims of human rights violations), though he acknowledges that average Russians who get their news from network television will likely be more suspicious of him. He says he intends to comply with the foreign-agent law, which requires him and the other four designees to create legal entities, report regularly to the Justice Ministry, and mark all their publications as the work of a foreign agent.

Journalist Sergey Markelov has reported for the U.S.-government-funded outlet Sever.Realii and says he’s won foreign grants to support his work, including a recent documentary film about a transgender person from Petrozavodsk. He told Mediazona that he wasn’t even sure what the designation requires of him. “Now I can’t publish anything without signing it as a ‘foreign agent’? Is that all?” he said, explaining that he would bother to learn more about it after the holidays.

Nationwide, two of the Russian Justice Ministry’s first five “media foreign agents” are journalists based in Pskov. Lyudmila Savitskaya’s designation is fairly straightforward: like Markelov, she writes for Sever.Realii, as well as Radio Svoboda itself. Denis Kamalyagin, on the other hand, serves as the editor-in-chief of Gubernia Media, a respected local news outlet. While he received a single honorarium for an article commissioned by Sever.Realii, he says the money was sent before the “media foreign agents” law took effect. He plans to organize a class-action lawsuit to challenge the designation.

By the way, don’t confuse this law with the one now on Putin’s desk awaiting a presidential signature. That newer legislation, which has nothing to do with the media, will create a separate “foreign agent” registry for individuals who perform supposedly political activity and get money from abroad.

😷 Lady Lada’s last five years, and now COVID

Nikita Sologub — *Mediazona*

Lada Malova became an Internet celebrity at the age of 17 by winning over audiences in VKontakte communities and online forums like Dvach by broadcasting her illegal drug use. To build her popularity, she escalated her bad behavior, deliberately sharing needles and revealing how her mother convinced police to drop a drug case against her. In June 2015, at the age of 19, her luck ran out and she was arrested for offering to manufacture and sell amphetamines to what turned out to be an undercover cop. Malova and her mother say she was the victim of police entrapment, but a court sentenced her to eight years in prison (which an appellate court later mercifully reduced by two months).

In July 2020, during a routine medical exam, Malova was diagnosed with a lung condition “after suffering a coronavirus infection.” Her mother, Lyudmila, says prison officials refused to treat her illness with anything beyond painkillers, which quickly lost any effect. Lada’s situation in prison became worse after she tried to contest a report filed by one of her guards. As punishment, she was transferred to punitive confinement, where she grew sicker. In late October, she was moved to a hospital to get treatment for her lungs.

Out of work, Lyudmila Malova has managed roughly a dozen trips to St. Petersburg, where her daughter is incarcerated, thanks to crowdfunding organized by the same online communities that fed on Lada’s self-destructive teenage drug use. Dvach administrator Nariman Namazov told Mediazona that Lyudmila’s efforts have moved him on a personal level. Alexey Khikkan, a popular YouTuber, says he doesn’t consider Malova to be a political prisoner, but he insists that nothing she did warrants a death sentence. Lyudmila is fighting to get her daughter freed on a special medical dispensation, but prison officials have declined to move forward with the process for the past two months. Lada Malova is now 24 years old.

Other news in brief

• 💪 You got some power in your corner now. Lawmaker Oksana Pushkina, the deputy chair of the State Duma’s Committee on Family, Women, and Children, has criticized the Justice Ministry’s decision to designate the anti-domestic violence advocacy group “Nasiliu.net” (No to Violence) as a foreign agent. Pushkina is one of the few deputies in Russia who regularly push back against culturally conservative initiatives.
• 💰 Move over, Palo Alto. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has signed a decree allocating 487 million rubles ($6.5 million) to Moscow State University’s “Technological Valley.” Katerina Tikhonova, allegedly one of President Putin’s daughters, handles the development project.

👋 Tomorrow in history: 21 years ago tomorrow, on December 31, 1999, in a televised address where he struggled to speak clearly, Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation, passing Russia’s presidency to a young Vladimir Putin. With Yeltsin’s approval rating in the single digits, most Russians welcomed his exit.

Yours, Meduza