Draconian is the new normal

A political scientist explains how Russia’s flagrant injustice protects the political status quo that might well outlive Putin

At the conclusion of Alexey Navalny’s trial (arranged to take place right at the penal colony where Russia’s most popular opposition figure is currently imprisoned), the politician was sentenced to what many call a “Stalinesque” and draconian prison term: 19 years. Yet no one seems to be surprised by the harshness of the sentence, since it fits neatly into a pattern of similarly inhumane sentences for other opposition figures, like Ilya Yashin or Vladimir Kara-Murza. Meduza’s special correspondent Margaria Liutova spoke with a Russian political scientist specializing in the study of post-Soviet authoritarianism, who agreed to share his thoughts about political persecution in today’s Russia on condition of anonymity. In our condensed translation, his remarks have been edited lightly for clarity.

The problem with ‘monopoly on violence’

The judges’ increasing severity towards Russia’s opposition leaders (not just Navalny, but also Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and others) is part of an accelerating trend of persecuting the opposition, evident in the longer sentences and increasingly harsh prison conditions.

What drives this tendency isn’t so much any social cost-benefit logic as the fundamental problem of the political leadership’s control over the country’s repressive apparatus. If the repressive branch gains too much power compared to other parts of the government, there’s a risk that it might decide it’s better off without the meddling of other branches, and start acting unilaterally. But if the government is firmly in control of its repressive apparatus, it could continue to empower it and pursue a harshly repressive course for a long time.

We have no means of peering into the Kremlin’s policy “kitchen” to find out how the country’s leadership makes decisions about political repression. What we can say is that there isn’t, so far, any clear-cut evidence of the repressive apparatus acting independently or showing political initiative of its own. Nor do we yet have any evidence of the secret services getting out of control. So, I don’t see much potential for abrupt change in the current situation, since what all the major players really want is, generally, to preserve the status quo.

Some particular officials are, of course, sometimes interested in this or that specific criminal case, for the sake of their own career advancement. The numerous examples of persecution at the everyday level, when ordinary people are sentenced to prison terms for posting a comment in a community group, typically spring from local initiatives. But when it comes to the persecution of the free media or a particularly visible political figure, I do think those cases are sanctioned, directly or indirectly, by the country’s top leadership.

Can the repressive machine go berserk?

Events like Yevgeny Prigozhin’s insurrection that we witnessed last June can, in principle, trigger unforeseeable developments. Anything that undermines the status quo can lead to completely unpredictable consequences, including the government’s loss of control over its military, security, and law-enforcement complex, or even the refusal of that complex to act as expected, when expected. We already saw this kind of situation during Prigozhin’s march on Moscow, when no one really took any measures, and things could have taken a really dangerous turn. What we cannot foresee in advance, though, is how exactly the structures of security and law enforcement will behave, and whether they’ll respond by being hyperactive — or hyperpassive.

Still, the very reason those structures exist is to effect repressions within the state. If they don’t pursue this function vigorously enough, it might raise some questions about the necessity of such a huge repressive apparatus and why it should get funded if it isn’t being “productive.”

Consider the state regulators like Rospotrebnadzor (a consumer goods and services regulator) and Rosobrnadzor (which regulates the science and education sphere). Both of them have an annual plan for a certain volume of inquiries they must conduct and report on. Their real goal is to detect at least as many violations as they did in the prior year, but without getting too much ahead of that number, since, if they suddenly uncovered a lot more violations than they did a year ago, the following year their assigned quota would be increased, and they’d have to work a lot harder.

Other government organs work in roughly the same manner, including, I think, law enforcement. They have to show that they’re effective, but if they display too much enthusiasm, they’ll have to work even harder in the future. Finally, they don’t want to raise any suspicions about their own possible abuses and violations (which surface from time to time).

Like other parts of the government, the repressive apparatus is interested in routine and stable operations that don’t increase the burden of the work it must do. In other words, they don’t want the number of cases they prosecute to double or triple. They have a huge paperwork burden anyway, and paperwork isn’t their forte.

What can destabilize a repressive regime?

A recent article by Kirill Titaev, a research fellow at the Cornell Law School, talks about how political persecution works from the perspective of the Russian law enforcement. Just like any other bureaucracy, the law-enforcement bureaucracy has its own interests, subordinate to top-level political decisions. Of course, someone in the Kremlin could simply order “tightening the screws” yet again, but this scenario would be more plausible in the event of serious destabilization. But even a mere risk of destabilization would be experienced by the political leadership as a real, rather than merely potential, factor.

A serious health problem with Putin could be one of the factors capable of triggering significant instability. And if, instead of crashing into the Moscow City office towers, fighter drones caused real damage to the Kremlin or even to Putin’s Valday residence, that would also be taken seriously.

Compared to economic calamities that develop over time, and take time for the leadership to even notice, a physical threat to one of the country’s leaders is much more immediate. But predicting the consequences of such a shock is complicated by the fact that, although generally risk-averse in their majority, people don’t always act rationally, and we cannot expect them to act consistently to minimize their risks. When some calamity happens, we don’t always make decisions on the basis of some cost-benefit analysis. We can be irrational, and the country’s political leadership can be irrational too.

During the pandemic (a different kind of external shock for the country), we all saw Putin act with maximal, even conspicuous caution. But this doesn’t mean that he’d act in the same way if confronted with a different kind of threat.

Christian Davenport at the University of Michigan has written а great deal about the factors that influence the scale of persecution in a country. Of the two key factors, the first, he writes, is a given regime’s perception of threats to itself. The more serious these threats, the more sweeping and severe the persecutions. The second factor is learning from past experience: the more successful repressive practices proved to be in the past, the more likely the regime is to resort to them again in the future.

The danger to the regime in the event of excessive repressions comes not so much from popular protest (which is almost impossible to organize on a large scale in today’s Russia) as from the overly powerful repressive apparatus itself, particularly if some external shock rocks the country, weakening the ruling elites. Putin recently met with some African political leaders. I think some of them could have shared with him some very helpful insights in this regard.

Draconian sentences and denial

When people talk about the sentences given to Russia’s opposition politicians and say that Putin’s regime cannot possibly last 20–25 years, I don’t find it at all convincing. To be honest, it’s quite surprising to me how many people expect the regime to crumble at any moment, be it by a violent coup or by “snuffbox blow” to Putin’s temple.

I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of such a development, but all the evidence so far points to a conservative effort to preserve, for decades to come, the same internal political status quo in which nothing changes on its own, unless triggered into change by some external shock. The current regime in Russia is working steadfastly in this direction, and so far it’s been able to have its way.

Interview by Margarita Liutova. Adapted for Meduza in English by Anna Razumnaya.