Angry Planet - Why Navalny Went Back to Russia

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

After surviving a poisoning attempt, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny returned to his home country and was arrested. Now he’s been sentenced to serve a 3 and a ½ year prison sentence. After Navalny’s arrest in mid-January, people took to the streets of Russia’s cities to protest. We’ve seen this before, but there is a sense that this time is different.Is it? Here to help us answer that question is Mark Galleotti. Galeotti is a frequent guest on the show, a Russia expert, and is currently the director of the consultancy firm Mayak Intelligence. His most recent books are We Need To Talk About Putin, and A Short History of Russia.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Because we've got to realize a system like this, it does not breed loyalty. The people who rise up within the system, okay, there's a handful of people who are close to Putin, but mainly these are rough, knuckled, sharp elbowed, thoroughly pragmatic, ruthless, opportunistic, bastards. And these are the people who are great to have on your side, and will be on your side, so long as it's to their advantage, but they will have no sentimental ties to you. And if they do decide one day that you're actually more of a problem than an asset, then they're a problem.

They're also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know. One day, all of the facts, about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with infinity, and when it is near completion, people talk about intervention. You don't get freedom peacefully. Freedom has never, thank God it, people. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Golt.

And I'm Jason Fields. After surviving a poisoning attempt, Russian opposition leader, Alexei, Navalny returned to his home country and was arrested. Now he's been sentenced to serve 32 months in prison. After Navalny's arrest at mid-January, people took to the streets of Russia's cities to protest. And we've seen this before. But there is a sense that this time maybe things are different. But is it really?

And here to help us answer that question is Mark Galiati. Galiadi is a frequent guest on the show, a Russia expert, and is currently the director of the consultancy firm Mayak Intelligence. His most recent books are, we need to talk about Putin and a short history of Russia, sir. Thank you so much for joining us. Always a pleasure. All right. So we are recording this on February 4th.

What is the current state of affairs in Russia right now? Okay, one question for the next 45 minutes. No problem. What we have at the moment is that in some ways, the first scene of the drama is done. Navalny goes back, we knew that he was going to be arrested, and he clearly knew that he was going to be arrested the moment he set foot back on Russian soil. He has to absolutely no one's surprise been sentenced to this period of this suspended sentence that has now been made, an actual one. He faces actually another court appearance for the charge of slandering a World War II veteran. But in some ways, that's just an extra little kind of bonus.

The question is now, anyway, both sides have shown their, not just their teeth, but also their strategy. The state clearly plans to try and grind this protest down. It's not going to try with some sort of short, sharp shock, however vicious its response has been. It's been slowly ratcheting up the pressure in the three protests that we've seen, mainly just to make the point that, look, we're not scared of you. We have escalation dominance. Anything you can do, we can put more violence in to deal with it. So, you're just to make the point. So, you're not scared of you, we're you decide if you want to go for it. The opposition, they've shown that they can actually mobilize surprisingly large numbers at short notice, and not just in the usual hotbeds of Moscow and St. Petersburg,

but across the country. But now the question is, okay, they can't keep this tempo up. How are they going to actually turn this into a proper political challenge? And in some ways, how are they going to cope now with the one guy who had been the absolute focus of the movement? Now, now, now the one guy who had been the absolute focus of the movement, now behind bars leaving this Navalny shaped whole in the middle of their leadership. Again, it's this point where we've got a certain progress, but now we're not quite sure exactly where things are going to go. I have a question about how organized these protests are. Is this something that there's a large opposition

and they can bring a lot of people out onto the streets, or were these spontaneous protests in all of these cities? as ever, the answer is something in between. One of the things that Navalny and his people had learned from their earlier experiences is precisely that they need to have some kind of a national network. And this is something that the state absolutely has been trying to stop. Navalny keeps trying to set up a political party, and each time the state finds a different excuse to not register it.

Because in the past, very much we saw the protests, as I say, were very much sort of Moscow, St. Petersburg. they were middle class, metropolitan, muscovite, and that was relatively easy to control. So what we've now seen are this network of Navalny HQs set up around the country. Now that said, these are not massive organisations or anything like that. This is very much a sort of a narrow skeleton, shall we say. And what's really interesting about these protests is precisely that although you have the local HQs, they can't actually organize much. They can publicize and see if people will come. And a lot of the

people came not because they are hardline Navalny followers, not even necessarily, though some were, because they were horrified about the fact that the state tried to poison him and so forth. They came because they were fed up for a variety of reasons. You know, in some cases it was because of pandemic restrictions or maybe it was because of the economic contraction. real wages fell by about three and a half percent last year, or it was about environmental issues, or it was because they didn't like the local governor or whatever. And again, I think this is both the strength and a weakness of the whole Navalny movement. The strength is precisely that it becomes that little piece of grit in the oyster around which the rest of the pearl coheres. Whoever

has some grudge with the status quo can come along to a march and protest. But the risk is, of course, If they can't convert that into something more sustained, if they can't actually make people think, well, okay, yes, I'm not really so concerned about Navalny, but I am concerned about the need for change. And this is the best way of generating that. Then the point is someone else can come along and say, no, actually, come to my march instead. And you end up in a sort of competing environment of who can be the best rabble rouser. Can we talk about a little bit about what the protests are. are like what, like how many people are we seeing gather? What has police response been? Is it mass

arrests? Are they letting people fight, tire themselves out? What's going on? Okay. In terms of numbers, well, again, we now had three separate protests. So there was the first one on the Saturday after he'd been arrested. Then there was the Sunday a week later. And then there was the even, very much Moscow focused one on the evening of the day in which he was, his trial was completed. And obviously there's different sort of scales. The first one, there was over 100,000 people. It's very hard to be sure. And it was tens of thousands in Moscow and St. Petersburg and all kinds of other sizes

that are elsewhere around the country. And the interesting thing is, in some ways, it was pretty unpredictable. It's not actually as if one knows, oh, well, this city is a regular hotbed or whatever. Even the Navalny team were often quite taken aback by the... the almost random seeming distribution. And again, that speaks to the fact that it's not necessarily driven by Navalny's people, but by whether or not there are sufficient kind of local beefs with the status quo. And so that's pretty much the pattern. And the trouble is from the Navalny point of view is if they end up essentially with their success being measured just simply in terms of metrics,

they're unlikely quickly to be able to increase. In fact, they're more likely to see the numbers go down a little bit. The police response, again, there's been a shift, particularly the first day, the police allowed people to gather to a large extent. Yes, they, of course, wanted to assert themselves. In Moscow, for example, after a certain point, they decided to clear the main square that they were gathering in, and particularly as tends to be that as the sun goes down, the clubs come out. And then there was a bit, you know, more, more scuffles. But to be honest, the first day was relatively part of the course in terms of the levels of violence and repression. Second day, we could definitely see that there had been a decision to toughen the response a bit more.

Whereas on the first day, we had seen some horrific scenes, but they were probably more just because of someone overreacting in the situation, someone gets scared and whatever. Second day, no, it was clearly much more institutional. There were a lot more arrests. And the third, the evening protests, that was a moment. much, much more serious affair. There were something like more than 1,500 arrests, but mainly they had, again, it's hard to be sure, maybe three, maybe 4,000 protesters. There were 8,500 police and riot troops and interior troops deployed in Moscow. So again, what's happening is the state is actually trying, I think, very consciously, to slowly ratchet up, not just

the scale, but also the violence of its response. It doesn't want to. get into a position like Belarus, where you've almost got an open war between the state and the people. So what they really want to basically do is stop this momentum growing. And by doing so, by making a point, look, your protests on the streets are not going to change things at all. We're not going to back down. And we've got a lot more tools in the box if we really need to turn to them. So there is clearly a strategy at work. Are these protests confined to the cities, or are they spreading into Russia's, if you can use the analogy, flyover country? It's a bit of a glibance, sir, but most of the flyover country, frankly, you'd be

radicalizing trees and bears if you really wanted to get any kind of a protest. The thing about Russia is, no, this is very much urban. And that's what you'd expect to be perfectly honest, because that's where you have the concentrations of people. And you need to have a certain critical mass, otherwise a protest just looks very sad. It's basically two people in a placard in the village square. But the thing is exactly that actually, joking apart, this was really quite striking for the national scale. It's probably the biggest, not in terms of total size, but in terms of the number of different locations in which there were protests worthy of the name.

The biggest kind of demonstration we've seen, certainly since the 2011-2012, Balotnaya period, when there was actually. a whole series of, really quite serious national protests. So basically, for pretty much a decade, we haven't seen anything quite like this in terms of its spread. Is that the most recent, sorry, is 2012 the last time you saw something comparable to this? No, we have seen others, but the point is the other ones, there were things like in 2015, we saw protests, whatever, but they tended to be much more focused on issues. This is the first time we have seen what we can think of as a genuine, not anti-issue or, you know, complaints about something that the government could then fix or address. This is the

first time we've had this kind of scale of genuine anti-systemic protest since that period. And again, I think that's what's really significant, that Navalny, crucial element of his team's campaign is going to have to be precisely to continue to make the point that, look, guys, you've got all kinds of different grouses, all kinds of different concerns, the key to unlocking all of them is systemic political change. And at the moment, I think that actually this is a message that they are able to get across. It's interesting you say that. I was reading your last in Moscow Shadows, or in Moscow's Shadows blog before I hopped on about Navalny's sanctions list. And I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit more, because I do have the sense that all of this is

political theater for him to a certain extent, right? That this is part of a grander strategy that he came back to the country to force this confrontation. Do we have any sense why now and what some of his broader strategy might be? Why now? In a way, it was going to be very hard for him to hold out, stay out of the country. He had said from the first, from the first point when he regained consciousness, having been poisoned by the Russian state, that actually he wanted to return to Russia. So obviously there was a period of convalescence, and that period of convalescence, incidentally, is what gave the Russian state the opportunity to nail him because they said, aha, where you weren't in hospital, and yet, therefore, you should have been meeting your

probation requirements, of course. If that's the first thing you do when a government has just poisoned you is hop on a plane to go and check in with your probation officer. But anyway, the point is, he realized that if he is going to be a genuine national leader, he can't do so from outside Russia. There's a whole bunch of other sort of emigrate political leaders with comfortable births. They're either independently wealthy. They're at think tanks or whatever. Who are perfectly happy to encourage the Russian people to stand up and protest for their rights.

But again, they do so from a nice safe distance. I think he realized that he needed to actually put his own skin in the game to be credible. And this is a man after all who clearly has very strong convictions. but he is not a man without hubris and without ambition. You have to be a politician of any kind, but especially to be able to willing to stand up to this kind of regime. He clearly has a sense of his own destiny, and this is the way it's going to be.

Now, in that context, he knew he was going to be arrested, and I think his view is that he then becomes a kind of moral figure. At the moment, after all, he's in this transition. up to now he was a kind of opposition dissident, an anti-corruption campaigner, call him what you will. The Kremlin allows simply to refer to him as the blogger, which, okay, yes, he did blog. It's a little bit like calling Winston Churchill the painter. Yes, he did it, but that's not really what he was known for. But anyway, the point is to make that breakthrough into being a genuine national figure,

and in some ways it's worked, because now the man who up to this point, or up to recently anyway, had been basically a non-person as far as Russian state TV was concerned and Russian state newspapers. They just wouldn't cover him at all, or else it was, again, without actually using his name. He was the Voldemort in Putin's little personal drama. And Putin himself actually still won't use his name. But everyone else is. Now, okay, even if it's just to vilify him, even if it's just, you know, people on the state media calling him a particularly repressive title was political pedophile. Why? Because a lot of young people are inspired by his movement, but that somehow makes him a political pedophile. But the point is he now becomes a national

figure in a way that he never was before. And that's absolutely crucial, because otherwise, how else can he break into the wider consciousness? I think this is a mix of things. This is pride and bravado. This is, I think, anger. It's not just that the state tried to poison him, But in hindsight, tracking back, it looks clear that the state also tried to poison his wife. That arguably was even crossing a red line even more carefully. And beyond that political strategy, that this actually is his chance to establish himself as a true national figure. And it's the only way he could break through that iron wall of censorship and deliberate exclusion. Now, of course,

the whole issue. Yeah, but does he disappear now? He disappears into prison in a way. I mean, it's a big splash, and then what next? This is the interesting thing. This goes back to, you know, how does team Navalny cope without Navalny? Yes, he'll be able to every now and then send out a statement or whatever, or whatever else.

But yes, absolutely. He's now disappearing into a labor colony. And, well... A labor colony? Like a gulag or? It's worse than it is. It's basically most Russian prisons, like most Western prisons, you end up doing labor while you're there.

The description is a labor colony. But yeah, it does have a certain gulagish sound. It's not going to be fun. The irony is, though, because if anything happens to Navalny, you know, if he catches the drug-resistant TB that is still depressingly rife within the Russian prison system, or, I don't know, gets shanked by just some deranged convict, no one is going to believe that was not a Kremlin hit. So part of me wonders, and I don't know, I just hope it's true, but part of me wonders if actually the Kremlin will be making very sure that he's okay in prison for that

very kind of perverse outcome. Anyway, sorry, a slight diversion there, but to return to your question, so yes, he disappears, but what they have to do now is in some ways, They have to turn him into the kind of iconic figure that, I don't know, Che Guevara was, whatever. If I was in Team Navalny, I'd be working out how he could be printing T-shirts, how we could be precisely making him a cult figure, and how we can go beyond that. We need to keep reminding people of Navalny's existence, and in a way, speaking in his name, even though he himself won't be there. And sometimes that can be actually very powerful, because he can become all things to all men and women.

Look at what Putin's done, right? The memetic potential of Putin. is incredible, right? Can you, all right, then, if we, I want to focus on him for a little bit then, Navalny, because I'm rereading, we need to talk about Putin right now. And it occurs to me in America and in the West in general, do we also need to talk about Navalny? You just said that there, that you could see this attempt going forward where you try to make

this person all things to all people, right? What does Navalny actually believe and actually want? Or does he just stay. in opposition to the status quo. This is the interesting thing. He clearly has gone through a political transformation, as we all do over his time. He started in, remember, this is a guy who's a 44-year-old. So really, he is from that true post-Soviet generation, whereas Putin is from the last

proper Homo-Sovieticus generation. So I think there's a really sort of significant shift there. But Navalny, he started in the 19th, he started in the United States. 1990s when there was this economic free-for-all in Russia, very much as an economic liberal, verging on the kind of ultra-capitalist, let the market decide everything and a variety. And he's still, in economic terms, he's still pretty much on what we would think of as the sort of in European terms would be the sort of centre. Over time, he has shifted. And in terms of his policies, he seems to have more of a sort of social dimension. in terms of rights for the unemployed, single mothers, and you name it, all the usual sorts of things.

The big uncertainty is in terms of his nationalism. And again, this is an interesting kind of faultline issue. This is a guy who basically was supportive when Russia invaded Georgia in a short, sharp war. He absolutely has backed the annexation of Crimea. And he also, certainly in the past, and has not disowned them, made some very derogatory comments about non-ethnic Russians, particularly from the North Caucasus and Central Asia. And so for some people, that's a really serious issue. The point is, though, that, look, this is not a man who is currently standing for president. This is a man who is standing to try and bring down an authoritarian kleptocracy so that there can be,

proper elections. And incidentally, he doesn't actually want Russia to remain a hyper-presidential system. He wants it to be a parliamentary republic, which I have to say, I'm sorry, as a Brit speaking to an American, but it makes a lot more sense to me. Oh, it's working out great here. Yeah, and it's working out great here. But the thing is that, yes, in due course, he will no doubt, if he survives that long, be wanting to stand for office. And that's the point when we really need to. interrogate these aspects of his character and his program. But at the moment, I would say, it's, I wouldn't say quite an irrelevance, but not something that we should get too caught up in. Because whatever his nationalism, he is still vastly more liberal than the current Russian regime.

And secondly, one thing that one cannot take away from him is absolute commitment to the importance of the rule of law. And the thing about the rule of law is it's there to protect everyone, regardless of the views of the individual guy at the top of the system at any one time. And it's worth noting that it tends to be outsiders who are being more worried about this. One can see many non-Russians who are very much supportive of Navalny himself. So, you know, I'm not trying to whitewash him. I'm not here as part of his PR team. I'm just saying that in some ways I find it slightly strange that at a time when we support all kinds of freedom fighters, shall we say, who are often deeply unpleasant and murderous people.

Here we have someone who is committed to a non-violent transfer of power against a clearly undemocratic, exploitative and authoritarian system. And some people want to stress on, what did you say in a YouTube video 10 years ago? There's time enough to talk about that. There's a certain strain, and I don't know what it's like in Britain, but there's a strain of American leftist politics and activism that is fiercely anti-imperial to the point that it will support anybody it sees as an opposition to American Empire, Russia, Putin, and they will look at a figure like Navalny and they will dig into his past for exactly this reason. Again, not to defend things that he's said in the past, but I'm always interested to watch that. And I always think that

in America, we tend to project our own political stories onto the political machinations of another country, but that's neither here nor there. Can we talk, I want to get into a little bit more of his specific strategies. We teased the sanctions list earlier. Can you tell me about that and what that has taught you about what he, what his strategy is? It's interesting, because what happened is before he headed back to Russia, he pulled together a list of 35 names, 35 people whom he thought the West should be sanctioning. And it wasn't quite a sort of, if I, I'm arrested open this envelope kind of situation. That's more or less been how it's emerged with eight names as the first priority list. And it's an interesting mix because it's a combination of people

whom we would think of as an oligarchs, very rich Russians. And let's be perfectly honest, you don't get to be, or more to the point you don't get to stay a very rich Russian, unless certainly to an extent you play the Kremlin's games and you put money. the ways the Kremlin wants and so forth. So anyway, so there's oligarchs. Then there are people whom we could think of as who are directly involved in his own poisoning and the various cover-ups around that. So, for example, you have the Minister of Health who wouldn't usually feature on most people's list of the sort of heavy hitters of the Russian government system, but nonetheless was clearly a guy who was trying to do everything he could to cover up the fact that Navalny was poisoned, to impede

the evacuation of Navalny to a German hospital for proper recovery and such. There's an element that there are those people who are directly involved. And then there's a third class who one could think of as generally the upholders and enforcers of the authoritarianism of the regime. People who are involved in human rights abuses, who are involved in denying ordinary Russians the right to vote and protest and so forth. And in some ways, I suspect that this is intended more as a kind of a buffet menu than anything else. The lists are being projected onto, basically, they've already sent it to the White House and it's been received. They are, I understand, currently presenting it to the British government.

And likewise, even though as we speak, the European Union's foreign policy chief is currently in Moscow, in which no doubt he would express his very strong concerns. But nonetheless, they're hoping that the European Union will go beyond the usual kind of bromides. But again, the thing is what will probably happen is that they expect that each individual authority will come up with its own decisions as to who it might want to sanction. So they almost try to give them enough of a choice so that if one group says, we think it's important to go after the rich people around Putin because these are the people who can influence him, then fine, they've got a bunch of rich people. If instead they say,

we need to show that it's not okay to try and poison your political opponents, then they can go against people who are actually involved in the poisoning. And if they think to think, no, actually what's going on is that Russia is sliding towards greater authoritarianism, which I think is the case, unfortunately, we need to show that the people who are involved in that strategy, they are going to be punished. And in this respect, it's not. attempt to create some kind of broad sense of coalition. Now, the thing is, there is a big debate as to whether or not sanctions, especially personal sanctions against individuals, actually works. And I would say, ironically enough, that doesn't really matter now. With this list out,

if the West does not at least pick some of the names and slap some sanctions on them. And let's be honest, most of these people on these lists, I would suggest are distinctly dodgy in their practices attitudes. But if it doesn't launch some kind of personal sanctions, it will play absolutely into the assumptions of Putin and his inner circle that we in the West are sanctimonious hypocrites, that we talk a great talk about human values until it comes to buy our Chinese-made iPhones

or sell fighter planes to the Saudis or whatever. And in fact, actually, Moscow doesn't need to pay any attention. to what we say. We just have to say these things and fine, that's just the way the game is. So we need to show that there is meaning to that. And I think this is therefore, in some ways, the challenge that Navalny gives to the West is to say, fine, you say you think that it's not right what's being done to me and you think it's reprehensible and we've had all the fine words coming from all the national capitals. What are you going to do about it? Now, the person at the top of each of those lists, You gave us three categories.

And you have corruption. You have evil doings, political repression. And basically, Vladimir Putin, according to all repute, including Navalny's released video about the palace, which also you can tell us a little bit had an impact. How do we avoid going after the villain number one? Several reasons why. First of all, and it's going to sound ridiculous, but there's something about diplomatic etiquette. There was a point in the Battle of Waterloo when one of Wellington's artillerymen had a line of fire at Napoleon and said, look, can I fire? And Wellington roundly had at him and said, no, it is not the job of generals to wage war against other generals, or the poor bloody infantry have to kill each other first. And there is something of that still today, that there's something about the fact that you don't actually necessarily go after a head of state unless you really want to declare political, diplomatic war on them. And, you know, unfortunately, the truth of the matter is there's a whole variety of other issues in which, you know, we do need to have some kind of relationship with Russia.

Again, one can look at the current Biden administration, very keen on arms control, which is an important topic. Push up to a certain point and you're not going to get any progress on anything. So that's reason number one. Reason number two is what actual leverage have you got? There's a lot of talk about this notion of Putin as a richest man in the world with money, etc. Look, I cannot conceive of a situation in which Putin is basically going to retire and leave Russia. He's not the kind of president who thinks, oh, I think a nice villa in the Caribbean, because he knows full well that he would be facing interpol red notices, war crimes tribunals, extraordinary

rendition at this rate. Who knows? He's got all of Russia as his piggy bank. Let's look at that palace, which we're now heard. Oh, no, it's an apartment hotel. It happens to be owned by one of Putin's cronies. But if we look at that palace, how is that financed? Putin didn't pay a single ruble for this extraordinarily tacky palace built on the Black Sea. What did they do? They basically created this charitable fund to support Russian healthcare that oligarchs were expected to voluntarily contribute to. And they all understood when actually this was the godfather wanting his Vig. They all duly donated.

One third of that money was diverted into building this palace. That's how Putin gets his money. In this, as in probably almost nothing else, he's like the queen of England, in the sense of he never has to carry money himself. fine, you can try and target funds around the world, and they're going to belong to oligarchs and cronies of Putin, and this is money that if Putin wanted, he could tap into, but he doesn't need. So actually, in some ways, Putin is relatively, from this point of view, bulletproof. But the final reason why, and it's a very long answer, but hey, I'm an academic, that's what I'm expected to do. The final element is, what you really want is to influence behavior of the regime.

if actually the West decides that it's going to set out for regime change. Point one, we've proven to be pretty god-awful at managing regime change. We're good at breaking stuff. We're not so good at putting it back together. I'm not quite so sure if a nuclear-powered great, a nuclear-armed great power is something that you want to turn into sort of modern-day Iraq. Secondly, look, all that does actually is justify Putin's own legitimating narrative. His line with his own people is, look, yeah, times are hard, yeah, sure. But the problem is this,

the West hates Russians. The West hates Russia. It is trying to do everything it can to constrain and limit and maybe even break our great nation apart. We, the people who defended civilization time and again, who spent 20 million of our own souls defending civilization from the Nazis, now they're trying to basically ruin us. And effectively, we will be telling the Russian people, yeah, he's right. So that's why I think we don't go after Putin. Much better to try and go for the people who are around him, who either will be whispering in his ear and hopefully modifying his own policies, or maybe are the people who one day will be thinking, actually, this guy is getting a bit too inconvenient. Because we've got to realize a system like this,

it does not breed loyalty. The people who rise up within the system, okay, there's a hand, of people who are close to Putin, but mainly these are rough, knuckled, sharp elbowed, thoroughly pragmatic, ruthless, opportunistic, bastards. And these are the people who are great to have on your side and will be on your side so long as it's to their advantage, but they will have no sentimental ties to you. And if they do decide one day that you're actually more of a problem than an asset, then they're a problem. Does Putin enjoy palaces and expensive stuff?

He comes across as a aesthetic almost. Does he care about this stuff? Oh, yes. This is the funny thing. Again, going back to Matt's earlier point about the memetic construct, there is Putin the man and Putin the myth, or myths, rather. As I discuss in my book, we need to talk about Putin. End of commercial.

But the thing is, in fact, we don't know if that particular palace was designed to hear specifications or not. There's been suggestions that, in fact, it was more or less done, created as a sort of a gift to hear or something. Who knows? But look, this is a guy who doesn't really spend much time in the Kremlin and his office there. He doesn't really like doing so. He largely spends it in his dacha, his summer house, in other words, his palace outside Moscow. and he gets up late. He goes and has his swim and his workout before he even thinks about getting down to the job. He doesn't seem to be a workaholic, certainly not these days.

This is a guy we have seen, for example, in more than $1,000 sportswear for doing his workout and so forth. It's not that I think he is necessarily, I don't know, champion in his tastes. But I think this is a person who, he came from this period where in the 1990s, when the system had collapsed, everyone was grabbing everything they possibly could. And he started the decade, actually impoverished in an outsider. And then suddenly, because he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, he was suddenly found himself in a position in which he could start making deals and making some serious money. And on the whole, the generation that rose in that time, very nouveau rich in terms of their tastes. There's no point having wealth if you don't

display it. And although in some ways Putin has outgrown that in practical terms, because he can have anything he wants, nonetheless, I think he does still value what he wants, he wants. No, he is not, I think it's fair to say, anything like as ascetic as the kind of myth of the hardworking chief executive. Do we know if he's even ever actually set foot in that palace? We don't. Well, by all accounts, at the moment, that there's been, obviously, because the state decided to do a couple of video reports from inside, which has shown it's all in, still in Vermont, in reconstruction. Now, according to Navalny, because we have seen, there were photos at the time, which were just snapped by construction workers that showed just how gaudy and tacky it was. Apparently, though, it was done so shoddily and wasn't looked after. So they had to be. So they had a serious problem with mould and such, and therefore they basically had to strip the whole thing, and they're currently involved in refurbishing it. This is it, the days when a billion pound palace you could count on, they're long since gone, you just can't find the help these days.

It's never been, as far as we know, fully operational, shall we say. And one of the suspicions, again, as you can imagine in a system like this, rumours always run rife. But one that actually I think he's worth trailing out as a possibility is it was designed and built, or the process began rather, at a time when Putin was seriously contemplating standing down from the presidency. And therefore, this would be kind of part of his not so much golden, but platinum parachute. Now, that's changed. At the moment, he still seems firmly ensconced. I still don't think that he's going to serve out all these potentially he could stay in office for another, what, 14 years, no, 15 years. But I don't think he plans to do. But certainly, we're no longer at the point where, you know, the prospect of an imminent transfer of power is likely. So there's not quite the same pressure to get it ready. Do we, I'm really loving the back half of this conversation. Do we have any sense that we knew about the palace before these pictures came out, before this Navalny report came out. I think the first time I remember hearing about it was when the Panama Papers hit. Is it having a

different impact now, because I think there is a visceral impact of seeing the video and photo, especially as close up as we have now. It's different from the satellite and far away imagery that we saw after the Panama Papers. Yeah, and the Panama Papers, they were not really constructed for a Russian audience. The crucial thing here is, yeah, absolutely there's video. And the fact is, look, Navalny puts together, or Navalny's team, put together these sort of forensic dissections of the corruption of the rich and powerful in Russia, rich, powerful and thoroughly tasteless usually, with a very sharp eye to what's going to make for good video. And Navali himself is always a very effective, impressive, entertaining, charismatic presenter. But also,

what was really crucial, and one of the reasons why this particular video is groundbreaking in terms of Navalny's campaign is, look, up to the poisoning, there seems to have been an unspoken deal. Navalny, he may well, and he did face all kinds of pressure, and he almost lost an eye when someone splashed him with antiseptic green dye and his brother went to prison for three and a half years. Nonetheless, it was all, shall we say, sub-lethal. In return, Navalny realized or accepted that Putin and his family were off limits. Everybody else within the hierarchy was fair game, and, in fact, did get their various peccadillos and palaces demonstrated to the public, but not Putin. And I think this is Navalny's response.

The Kremlin crossed the red line when it decided to poison him. Fair enough, he's not going to observe it anymore. Because this video doesn't just excoriate Putin. It also goes after Putin's family, including an alleged, illegitimate and unrecognized daughter and mistress. Of course, we have no idea if it's true or not. But nonetheless, that's there. And so this moves beyond the usual scope of the Navalny video. So on the one hand, it's about a palace. It's got all these sort of rendering, 3D renderings of sort of tasteless scenes and the hookah bar with the dance pole and all the other sort of quirky things that obviously

catch people's attention. But also, by the fact that it goes after. to Putin. It represents a serious escalation on a proper political level, rather than just fun titivation. Is there a sense that Navalny has outlived his usefulness to the Kremlin? Was there a time when he was somewhat useful to have a central point of opposition that was powerless? Have things changed? Yeah, I think things have changed, absolutely. He was useful as a kind of a pressure vent in some ways. And also, look, remember, this is not Stalinism. I've called this in some ways a postmodern authoritarianism. In the main, it ruled not through fear, not through violence, but through controlling the narrative and through basically generating political apathy,

a sense that, look, it's really not worth going up against a regime. Life's pretty good, better than we've had for a long time. And I know that it's going to be problematic. difficult, maybe even dangerous to challenge the regime. So what's the point? Because let's face it, none of them can do anything that the main opposition parties are frauds, Navalny, well, he can't get anywhere, et cetera. So there was a sort of a value in terms of the showmanship of an authoritarianism that wanted to pretend it wasn't an authoritarianism. That seems to have changed. And this is the interesting thing, because precisely, at first, I'll be honest, when he was poisoned, my first thought was, look, I can't believe the Kremlin would have done this when they've had so many other times

in the past when they could have gone after him. And so you think, could it be that it's some kind of rogue figure? We've had other people being murdered, not by Putin's orders, but because someone either has a personal grudge or thinks Putin would have wanted it to be done. But no, it looks pretty clear that actually it was a state hit carried out by state agents, not least because one of them admitted to Navalny on the phone when he rang him up that what was going on. So this could be one of those points when the whole paradigm of how the state operates shifts. And the last one we saw was Crimea, which again seemed to be a break with the old ways in which the Russian state had operated. And it was our clue that precisely it had adopted a new, more aggressive approach.

Likewise, I think that this could represent the shift. They could have decided that in fact, Navalny was now more dangerous than he was useful, particularly because of his smart voting scheme, which is meant to try and encourage tactical voting, basically vote for whoever is most likely to beat the Kremlin's candidate. And that actually was beginning to worry the Kremlin, because not that it would really stop them from continuing to control the legislature, but it would make it a lot harder to have that kind of dominance. that they'd once had. And this narrative that Navalny is a tool of the West, above all America, because we know that no one gets to get a scholarship at Yale unless the CIA has decided it. That for a long time was really just the kind of propaganda line to try and delegitimize Navalny.

My suspicion is that actually there are powerful people within the system who had actually come to believe it. I don't believe it's true, I should stress, but number. we seem to be seeing this increasingly paranoid turn as the people whom Putin is listening to are increasingly the real hardline scary hawk types who believe their own nonsense, quite frankly. So I think this is it. I think what had happened is the regime was feeling a bit more fragile, more, more delicate, less willing to accept a charismatic opposition figure as part of the price for pretending it was a democracy. at the same time when people were saying,

and Navalny specifically, he's actually a CIA plant. And that makes him not an enemy but a traitor. And we know how this system deals with traitors. So yeah, I think things are shifting. That said, final point I would make on this point, is that it hasn't exactly gone the way the Kremlin wanted. And although we're seeing a lot of violence on the streets at the moment, I suspect, and we're seeing a few little signs of it,

there is still an internal debate going on within the inner elite about, okay, do we really crack down? Do we go proper authoritarian? Or do we find some way of pulling ourselves back from that particular brink? Because at the moment, things seem to be creating more trouble than gain. All right. Last question. What are you watching in the next weeks, days, months? What are you looking for? Where is your attention focused? I think there's going to be, again, I could come up with a list of just 15 points I would want to make, but I will try and limit myself. First of all, momentum. At the moment, although the state is showing that it has this kind of violent capacity, at the moment, the team Navalny and their supporters seem to be relatively undaunted.

Can they either keep that momentum, which probably means not having too many protests because each one is tempting fate? And that also means actually shifting the terms of success away from just simply the metrics of how many people have got out on the streets. In other words, they need to be finding ways in which they can make people aware of the protest, aware of Navalny's plight, aware of their cause, without just simply hoping that protest marches will do it. So can they do that or do they just start fizzling out? Secondly, can they genuinely create a national movement? that's going to be absolutely crucial. And that's probably where the state is going to put the real pressure. Yeah, it's going to hassle. And every now and then in prison or fine, the main sort of leaders, Navalny's wife, their press spokesman, their lawyer, or spokeswoman, and lawyer and so forth.

But actually, it's probably the much less well-known regional organisers in all these other towns and cities, you know, who aren't on Western journalists speed dials. And Western diplomats have never heard of them. they don't have much social capital. If I were a morally bankrupt colonel in the Ljubljanka, and someone said, what's your strategy? I would say, we keep the Moscow people off balance while we break the rest of the movement. And we therefore, once again, just make Navalny the leader of a movement that is basically in the coffee shops of Moscow. So that's just going of the second thing. Third thing is actually ironically, Belarus. See, up to this point, you have all these protests in Belarus. Moscow has

no love for the other Russian strongman dictator Lukashenko because he constantly had basically played them off against the West and such like. They couldn't allow him to be toppled by the street, but it looks like they were trying to engineer some kind of transition to a less toxic successor. I suspect now that they're going to become totally paranoid about anything that looks like giving the lesson that people power can lead to regime change. So what I'm expecting is we're seeing coming up in Belarus as a sort of a national convention and so forth, is that we can see the Russians swinging behind Lukashenko much more clearly and directly. And if they've done that, I think it'll really show us how worried they are about their movement at home.

They're trying to convey a lot of confidence, because again, this is part of their deterrent strategy. Protests? Oh, we didn't even seem to notice any protests. But in fact, if it starts to affect their policy, it will tell us that the Kremlin really is worried. Mark Galiati, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet once again and walking us through all of this. It's always a pleasure.