‘Utopia is not on the agenda’

Political scientist Graeme Robertson on the Russian opposition, why it attracts ‘disagreeable’ people, and how to turn them into a coalition

Russia has succumbed to authoritarianism: the existing regime has effectively outlawed the country’s political opposition. Its key figures are now in prison or else looking for ways to continue their work from abroad. Meanwhile, the debate about whether Russia’s disparate opposition forces should sacrifice their differences for the sake of building a coalition has become a central question of Russian political life in exile. Graeme Robertson has studied the dynamics of protest and opposition activity in Russia for the past two decades. His most recent book is “Putin v. The People,” published by Yale University Press in 2019. In conversation with Meduza’s special correspondent Margarita Liutova, Robertson spoke about what can and cannot be achieved by an exiled opposition, why opposition is comprised of “disagreeable people,” and what it takes to unite them in a coalition. His remarks have been condensed and edited for clarity.

How would you assess the achievements and failures of the Russian opposition over the past two decades? And what would be a fair way to assess them, in the context of a country where the opposition is barred from the elections?

If you think about what opposition movements generally try to achieve, it comes down to two things. One is to overthrow the incumbents; the other is to replace them with a better alternative, which involves expanding the range of democratic alternatives as such.

In regimes with somewhat competitive but still less than fair elections, this can be achieved in two different ways. (We can think of examples like Ukraine before the Euromaidan, or Russia before the annexation of Crimea as a basic setting, where the opposition had some access to the elections.) So, the first thing that can happen is that there’s a fair election, you get the votes you needed to win, and therefore you win. One example would be the referendum in Chile at the end of the Pinochet regime. Another one could be Mexico’s protracted transition to democracy, when the opposition pushed the regime towards fairer and fairer elections over time, until it finally won, and the regime gave up.

An alternative scenario is to force the regime to cheat in the elections so much that it triggers massive street protest. This was obviously the case with the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan in Ukraine.

Neither of these alternatives is possible in a place like today’s Russia. They can only be realized in a much more competitive, much fairer setting than Russia today. In a place like Russia, though, to expect the opposition to achieve these goals would mean to hold it to the wrong standard. Even if you were able to get millions of people on the streets in a place like Russia, the likely outcome would be total suppression. The regime itself wouldn’t fall. (We have the examples of Belarus and Iran for comparison.) In conditions like these, even if the regime does fall (as in the case of the revolution in Egypt), what happens is that it gets replaced by something even worse, since there’s no infrastructure for a transition to democracy.

And so, we need a different standard for thinking about what’s possible for today’s Russia. A color revolution might have been a reasonable expectation for Russia back in 2011, but it’s not a fair expectation by which to judge today’s opposition. A better standard would be based on the things that Alexey Navalny’s team and other segments of the opposition have been doing: fighting corruption, contesting injustices locally, standing up to environmental degradation, defending the vulnerable, and curbing the excesses of power. And also exposing the vicious nature of the government and building up capacity for the long haul, for the unlikely event that you might get lucky, and the tables might turn in your favor.

Now, has the Russian opposition been a success by this reasonable standard? Have they succeeded in building a broad and deep infrastructure for putting pressure on corruption, or in establishing a potentially viable political party? If you’d asked me this question in 2019, I would have said yes. But it’s all proven to have been very fragile. I’m not sure it’s the opposition’s fault that the regime has now clamped down so hard on them. It’s a measure of how vicious and aggressive this regime is. So, what the opposition has been able to achieve under the circumstances seems to me pretty decent. It’s at least a B+.

There’s a widespread view that the Russian opposition (chiefly Navalny and his team) merely helped legitimize Putin, by creating an impression of democratic competition in Russia.

This is a classic dilemma faced by opposition the world over: to participate or to boycott. But the truth is that no one cares about a boycott. It’s very, very hard to draw the regime’s feet to the fire by boycotting the elections. If you think back to 2011 and the beginnings of Russia’s Bolotnaya movement, what got that movement started was an election, in which the Communists’ votes had been stolen by United Russia party and Gennady Zyuganov called on people to go into the streets. Had the Communists not participated, no one would have been bothered by the outcome in favor of United Russia, and there wouldn’t have been a protest in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square.

People don’t take to the streets in their millions because someone who didn’t run failed to do well in the election. That would be a bit absurd. And this is why the current regime has you trapped in this dilemma: if you participate, you make the regime look good; but refusing to participate also doesn’t help things. Still, participating in elections beats boycotting them almost every time. The one exception to this is the kind of boycott that turns into a real problem for the regime (as in the United States during the Civil Rights era).

All of Russia’s opposition leaders are now in jail, or else exiled abroad, where they’re often seen as mere talking heads instead of politicians. What do you think about public commentary as a political activity, and what else can politicians do in exile?

I’ve been trying to think of some example of an opposition that sat down in another country, wrote a platform, and then somehow came to power and implemented that platform at home. One example that I can think of is Vladimir Lenin in Switzerland, at a time when all of the Russian opposition gathered in Europe debated which version of utopia would be the best. Then the state collapsed, due to an imperial war, and they came to power. Germany then sent Lenin by train to Petrograd to facilitate the overthrow of the provisional government and to get Russia out of the war. That’s a pretty unusual set of circumstances, all told. Besides, when the Bolsheviks did seize power, they did this as a minority. Next, they had to eliminate all the democratic elements from the Soviets, and that’s an ugly tale.

I think I agree with Leonid Volkov that the big task is not organizing the opposition abroad but doing the hard work of building a movement inside Russia itself. Now, running a YouTube channel or being a commentator in Latvia is part of it, and I wouldn’t dismiss the people who do this work as mere commentators. But what it all comes down to is building an organization on the ground, in Russia: clandestine or not, that’s the work that needs to be done.

There’s no substitute for this work since a regime like Putin’s won’t fall by being toppled from the outside. If it falls, it’ll be because of its own internal contradictions and problems, like, for instance, a big split over succession after Putin dies. Events like that open up windows of opportunity. And to seize that opportunity you have to get the people organized and enthusiastic and motivated on the ground, in Russia itself.

If you think about the collapse of communism in Poland, it wasn’t the Polish government exiled in London that did it. It was organizers in Poland itself, who worked for years, clandestinely, building the workers’ movement and gradually coming into the open by the 1980s. It hadn’t been a coup. It wasn’t done by the foreigners. And it was all about building an organization. I can’t imagine a harder thing to organize, meaning that things are really bad in Russia, but not as bad as they had been in communist Poland in the 1950–1960s.

In Putin v. The People, you argued that the dividing lines in Russian politics are very different compared to Western democracies, the only real dividing line being loyalty to the president. This, you said, lends the opposition a kind of deviant quality.

This is a classic mark of an autocracy. If you’re against me, you’re against the state. Think Venezuela and Nicolas Maduro, whose strategy was to present his opponents as American tools, essentially as foreign agents. This is Authoritarianism 101, but, on the other hand, it’s also a classic tool of democratic politics. During the Cold War, American conservatives tried to smear liberals as Russian spies and communist “foreign agents.” I grew up in Britain in the 1980s, and Margaret Thatcher’s strategy against the British Labor Party was to present them as stooges for somebody else. This is a classic conservative “patriotic” move, even when it’s totally absurd.

What’s really interesting is the particular choice of issues that Putin picks to help in consolidating the vote, by driving in wedge issues that will divide the population not 50-50, but 80-20. He’s managed to expand the coalition of people who feel that something isn’t right, isn’t Russian, isn’t authentic about what Putin himself finds undesirable — like LGBTQ people, for example. This is what makes Putin resonate so much better with the broader public, and this is what’s clever about him. Every society has conservatives in it, but it takes political creativity and skill to maximize a coalition and make your opponents appear weak. That’s where the politics comes in.

You’ve argued that support for Putin isn’t based on his accomplishments or even his promises, but instead on the human need to fit in.

I would’ve given a different answer to this question in 2019, but the war has changed things dramatically. This regime has become the war, and war has become the regime. It’s become the central principle of the state’s operation, and the issue of loyalty and of casting the opposition as disloyal has become much more serious in the context of the war, where it’s all about “us” against “them,” “patriots” against “traitors,” etc.

In this context, fitting in and acting agreeable has become more important than ever. The why and the wherefore of the war have receded to the background; you’re either a patriot who supports the war, or a traitor who opposes it. That’s where the regime has had quite a lot of success, in terms of public opinion.

Most Russians take their cues about good citizenship from the propaganda. Can the opposition take charge of this discourse and reframe the public’s understanding of what good citizenship means?

It’s important to create a narrative about good citizenship, but it’s hard to get that kind of message out and to get people to buy into it, when the social pressure is to simply to follow one particular vision. But things can change, and so can narratives. During the Afghan war, when Russian soldiers started coming home in sealed coffins, this quickly rendered the war very unpopular, and that became the dominant narrative. But we’re not in that situation now, despite much greater casualties. This time, casualties had almost the opposite effect than what we might have expected: they seem to have encouraged people to double down on the war effort.

There’s a fairly well-known psychological theory about why this kind of thing happens. System justification theory, or SJT, was developed in the U.S. to try and understand why people who are made poorer by the system, who are worse off because of the system, will nonetheless support it and make sacrifices for its sake. This is the question of the rural U.S. regions and their poor, super-patriotic, conservative populations who oppose the very same programs that could make their own lives better. SJT says that when people see an oppressive system as unchangeable or inevitable, they identify with it. Supporting the system then becomes a matter of pride, which makes people embrace further costs in order to defend it, even if they don’t get any benefit from it.

But there’s another kind of people in Russia, who may support the war but don’t want to assume its extra costs. They are the highly agreeable people that I look at in Putin v. The People. And when we talk about agreeableness, this isn’t the same thing as conformism. Agreeableness is a mixture of wanting to fit in and to get along with the people around you, but it’s more of an active position than conformism. Denouncing someone whose conversation you overheard in a restaurant or on a bus isn’t something a conformist does. This is causing trouble, calling attention to yourself, which is more than a conformist would do.

Another side of agreeableness is that highly agreeable people tend to be quite empathetic. When they see another person suffer, they care about this: they care about Mother Russia and society at home, and they also care about the victims of the war, which makes their support of the war more fragile.

When you look at Western attitudes towards LGBTQ people, one of the best predictors of being open and accepting of those identities is agreeableness. Highly agreeable people in the West tend to be less racist. They tend to be more broad-minded because they don’t want others to suffer. They care about others being happy. That’s not a conformist thing, and it’s the very same thing that gets coded in a completely different way in Russia, where society is told to be aggressive and homophobic, and where agreeableness is weaponized to this effect. And so, where intolerance is socially acceptable instead of tolerance, agreeable people, the same people who might display tolerance elsewhere, will be intolerant instead.

Getting back to the opposition, what do you think about its internal debate about whether to unite or not to?

If you think about big, million-strong coalitions in the street, there’s actually some interesting social science work on this. Mark Basinger at Princeton did some really interesting work on the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. He shows some good evidence that what unites people in their fight is their dislike of the incumbent. That’s it. There’s no positive program that everyone would get behind and take to the streets. When this happens, it’s because everyone wants a regime change.

With regard to Russia, when did we see lots of people mobilize in a way that got the regime worried? How about monetization protests back in 2005, led by a broad coalition, ranging from the liberals to National Bolsheviks, across the whole political spectrum. All of them cared about pensioners, social benefits, and the sense that the reform being proposed was wrong. They weren’t trying to hash out the right policy, because that would have been much harder and immediately divisive.

I don’t know if there’s much value in the Russian opposition getting together and agreeing to some kind of platform at this point. I think it may even hurt things. Having a million people with a million different reasons why the current regime is intolerable is kind of what you’d want. Everybody should just sing their song, have their own critique, and identify their supporters. Then the opposition can unite at the right moment, to take action in the streets or at the ballot box. But I don’t see much value in generating a common platform among the opposition. That just gives you something to argue about.

Clearly, utopia is not on the agenda, so arguments about the best form of utopia are a bit silly and only make the opposition on the whole look small and petty.

Thinking about what it would look like to be an active, patriotic Russian citizen under these circumstances — to be against the war and yet for Russia — is a much more interesting, challenging, and important question than getting personal or even than policy debates. Still, this is a bit of a second-order problem. The main problem isn’t that the opposition is divided and this keeps it out of power: The Russian opposition is out of power because power itself is so very strong, unified, and organized. That is the problem that dominates the narrative, and countering that problem is the most important task.

Beyond this, each opposition group needs to have an image of the future. But this needn’t be a vision that everyone shares. It’s more effective if there are multiple clusters of organizations sharing the same primary goal, which is getting rid of this regime and replacing it with something better. But their visions of what exactly would be better than the present arrangement can range from the far left to liberal. And that’s perfectly legitimate. I’m not going to get into a fight with Navalny if I disagree with him over taxation policy. At this point, that would be absurd.

What do you think about opposition leaders trying to call people in Russia to the streets, the way Navalny’s team just tried to do?

I’m a foreigner. I’m Scottish, I live in the United States, and here I am in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, having a nice conversation about Russian politics, which is something I really care about and have studied for a very long time. It’s very hard for me to say what people in Russia should do, in terms of taking real risks with their lives and freedom, on the ground in Russia. It’s not for me to say, and I don’t have the moral standing this would take.

Public protest in Russia is very dangerous, and if Navalny has the moral standing to call people to protest, it’s because he has earned it through his extraordinary courage. But it’s predictable: if people go out to protest, they’ll get arrested and repressed. What is the likely political consequence of that, then? Would people just convince themselves of the regime’s effectiveness, efficiency, and brutality? Or would they be outraged and angry?

There’s some evidence that members of the opposition feel some fear of repressions, but what they feel for the most part is anger. And this is why they’re the ones who protest and support one another.

Interview by Margarita Liutova. Edited by Anna Razumnaya.