The Decibel - Who’s left to oppose Vladimir Putin?

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Russian President Vladimir Putin is one of the longest serving leaders of the country, on track to surpass the rule of Joseph Stalin. Over the years, Putin has cracked down on opposition, as seen with Alexey Navalny and many others before him, to the extent that there is little opposition left in Russia.Mark MacKinnon, The Globe’s senior international correspondent, has been speaking with members of the Russian opposition movement, both in prison and in exile. Today, he tells us their fates, how they’re making sense of this moment, and what it means for the future of Russia that Putin has such a firm grip on power.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Russian President Vladimir Putin is already one of the longest-serving leaders of the country. He's even on track to surpass the rule of Joseph Stalin. Putin's been in power since 1999 and just won yet another six-year term in a widely criticized election, partially because he ran virtually unopposed. In Russia, going against the president has become incredibly dangerous. The Globe's senior international correspondent, Mark McKinnon, has been speaking with members of Russia's opposition movement, from prison and exile. Today, Mark joins us to explain the fates of these leaders, how they make sense of this moment, and what it means for the future of Russia, that Putin has such a firm grip on power.

I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Mark, thank you so much for being here again. Thank you, Mainika. I'd like to start with the Russian election that just wrapped up on Sunday. The Kremlin claimed that Putin won 88% of the vote with a 74% voter turnout. But of course, Mark, this election was widely criticized. Can you walk us through why? I mean, from the starting point, a lot of people would question the use of the word election because of the connotations that implies of a democratic contest.

The Kremlin disqualified anyone who had a platform that questioned Mr. Putin or questioned the war on Ukraine. You know, this was in many ways a re-coronation of Mr. Putin. And on top of that, those voter turnout figures are very difficult to believe. We've seen widespread reports of millions of ballots. Putin. And then on top of that, those voter turnout figures, you know, are very difficult to believe. We've seen widespread reports of millions of ballots being stuffed. We've seen in the occupied areas of Ukraine, more registered voters than there is a population as far as we understand. So, you know, this was, you know, a Kremlin managed affair from the number of candidates to the final turnout to the percentage of the vote for Mr. Putin. Generally here, I guess, why is there so little opposition in Russia?

Well, it's a very dangerous profession to get into opposing the Kremlin. It's not something you can safely do in Russia to stand against Mr. Putin. That wasn't always true. When I lived in Russia, you know, 20 years ago, it was a very different society. People were warning about creeping authoritarianism. They were worried about the direction the country was headed in at the time. The elections were not free and fair, but you still had opposition candidates. And there was something like a debate happening about Russia's direction. But now we're, I guess, at the final product. So since that time, I guess it sounds like Putin has really cemented his power

and his control then. Yeah, absolutely. Eliminated all internal opposition, taken all television stations under Kremlin control a long time ago. There is no discussion really in Russia. You know, now at this point, there is just one person on the Russian political stage, and that's Vladimir Putin. I'm just curious. So in the Duma, which is just one person on the Russian political stage, and that's Vladimir Putin. I'm just curious. So in the Duma, which is part of the Russian parliament, is there an actual opposition there? There are three opposition parties. And so we had four candidates in this last election, and that's Mr. Putin and the candidates put forward by the three supposedly opposition parties. But in fact, all three of those other parties, the Communist Party being the biggest of those, actually support Mr. Putin and the war in Ukraine. Ten years ago, on the annexation of Crimea, the vote to conduct this giant illegal exercise had

won vote against that process. That was by a man named Ilya Ponomaryev, who now lives in Kiev and is a representative of the Free Russia Legion, which is fighting against Mr. Putin. But he was the only vote against. There were a couple of abstentions, if I recall correctly. But in a 450-seat Duma, you had one vote against. And that was 10 years ago. Today, you wouldn't have anything so daring as abstentions or one vote against. Yeah. And how does Russia, and I guess specifically Putin, how does he talk about the opposition to the Russian public? I mean, does he even talk about an opposition? No, he speaks about Russia being unified in what it wants. And, you know, this election for him, the reason why he has elections, frankly, is to give himself the sheen of legitimacy to convince the Russian people that everyone that stands on the same side of things, everybody believes in

him, everybody believes in this war. There is no discussion of opposition figures, really. I mean, and if they are, it's largely a discussion of the criminal cases against these people. You know, that's the context. There are opponents of Mr. Putin, but there's nothing like a Russian opposition that, you know, somebody, the average Russian working in a factory and living in one of the more remote regions probably hasn't even heard of most of these figures that we in the West discuss. Could you, I guess, just give me a couple of examples, Mark, of how Russia is accused of handling political opposition? The unfortunate truth is that those who are long-term, long-time opponents of Mr. Putin tend to have one of three fates befall them. There are those who have suffered early

deaths as a result or, you know, that cannot be disconnected from the fact they were Kremlin opponents. The most recent and most famous example is Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison camp where he'd been dispatched for his political activities. There's some more overt political assassinations over the years, including most famously Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead outside the Kremlin walls in 2015, and Anna Polakovskaya, who was killed in 2006 for her work, one of the early critics of the direction Mr. Putin was taking Russia in, and others who survived their attacks,

including famous incidents like Sergei Skripal, the former KGB colleague of Mr. Putin's, who was poisoned in the United Kingdom. And then there's those who've gone into exile. And that's an even longer list. People like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former political prisoner, Gary Kasparov, the former chess champion and onwards. And those who have remained and have gone to prison, which Mr. Navalny was in that category until recently, and some other prominent figures like very brave people like Vladimir Karamurza or Ilya Yashin, who are today in Russian prison. Well, let's talk about one of these opponents, Mark.

Alexei Navalny, who, of course, is no longer here, but he was one of the most prominent figures and arguably the loudest voice against Putin. Of course, he died in a prison camp in the Russian Arctic in February last month. But Mark, what did Navalny mean to the opposition movement? And why was he so important? Alexei Navalny was a truly different figure for the Russian opposition. The Russians have, there have been Russian Democrats, of course, since, you know, the time of the Soviet Union, people who struggled to bring that empire to an end, people who tried to keep Boris Yeltsin's Russia on a different course than it ended up on, people who warned very early on about the direction that Russia was heading under, a former KGB agent like Mr. Putin.

But a lot of them, frankly, spoke in a language that didn't resonate in middle Russia. They were maybe perhaps too interested in making friends in Western embassies and with Western journalists like me and not focused enough on appealing to the Russian public. And Mr. Navalny came from a different background. He sort of emerged as a YouTube blogger, a lawyer who was sort of annoyed by corruption and had a real skill for both conducting anti-corruption investigations and putting them together in funny videos that people could watch and share. He also turned out to be a very powerful public figure and someone who, at least at the beginnings,

came from a Russian nationalist background. It was the annexation of Crimea 10 years ago, where at first he seemed to be supportive of it. And then when pressed about, you know, if you were ever president, would you return Crimea? And he made a joke about, well, Crimea is not a sandwich we can pass back and forth. When the war started, he was, you know, opposed to it. He was already behind bars at this point. And he had modified his positions to sort of be more broadly legalistic. You know, Mr. Navalny saw things from sort of a Moscow-centric point of view,

which annoyed some people in places like Ukraine, but helped him resonate across Russia and made him perhaps the most genuine threat to Mr. Putin that we've seen so far. Mark, you actually saw Navalny once when you were in Russia. Can you just tell us, what was he like? Yeah, the first time I really came across Alexei Navalny was at a protest in Moscow and it was around Mr. Putin's return to the presidency in 2012. So he'd already served two terms in office, then left for four years to be prime minister and come back. And this is the moment when Alexei Navalny emerged as Putin was returning to the Kremlin after changing the constitution to allow this. The moment that sticks out in my head is it was a cold night in Moscow and some friends of mine that I'd known for a while were plotting an uprising. Frankly,

they'd been inspired by events in Ukraine and were planning to pitch tents on the square in the center of Moscow. But the Russian police intercepted them, broke up the, you know, the tents never reached the square. And though the protest went ahead, after a few hours, most people who attended went home. They had jobs. They had lives to live. This is part of what's kept Mr. Putin in power, is the economy has not let him down yet. And so most people went home. And I remember that night, Alexei Navalny sort of with a very small band of people knowing they were going to be arrested, completely surrounded by Russian police, standing in this fountain on Pushkin Square in Moscow and just sort of shouting out, we're the power here, we're the authorities here, Russia without, like just this bravery and charisma. And anyway,

he was taken away to jail and took pictures of himself and posted those online, smiling and laughing with the cops. So, you know, he just had a different level of bravery, a different level of charisma. You know, he really was something that the Russian opposition lacked, which was a potentially unifying figure. Yeah. Can we talk about the opposition movement more broadly here? Like, what does Navalny's death mean for this Russian opposition movement and for the movement against Putin? Yeah, I mean, the Russian opposition movement, even when Alexei Navalny was alive, was really fragmented into three parts, as I saw it. There was sort of Mr. Navalny and his team, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, who arguably had the, very clearly actually, had the biggest network across the country. They could mobilize supporters, they could mobilize election observers.

There was a second sort of Russian opposition movement, which coalesces around figures like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Garry Kasparov, to name two of the more famous ones, that shares a lot of the values of Mr. Navalny, but didn't like a couple of, you know, stood more clearly against Russian imperialism. Then there's this third emerging faction, which is Russian citizens who are inside Ukraine fighting on the side of the Ukrainian army. And very interestingly, we saw some members of the previously peaceful Russian opposition travel to Kiev to show that they were now standing at least symbolically on the same side as these who thought that Russia can only be changed by armed force. Okay, so there's kind of three sides to this opposition now. But from what you're saying, Mark, it sounds like there's no real unified leader for this opposition movement. No, and that was always the problem. Going back, you know, 20 years of covering Russia, you know, the Russian opposition always seemed as interested in fighting each other as they were in fighting Mr. Putin. And now, in particular, I think, with the charismatic figure of Alexei Navalny gone from the scene, you know, even if the other Russian opposition figures didn't like it, they surely

knew that he was by far the most popular and therefore had the best chance of defeating Mr. Putin if there ever was a free and fair election. Now there's Mr. Navalny's team that wants everyone to get behind his widow, Yulia Navalny, who is stepping into his shoes, but is a relatively untested political figure. But these other forces, other folks, have been saying the same thing as they've been saying all along. She's welcome. We embrace another opposition leader. None of us has to be number one. We can all have our different positions, which obviously leads to some people pointing and saying, well, if they can't even decide who they stand behind, how can they ever be a force that challenges the Kremlin?

We'll be back after this message. Mark, you recently went to Lithuania to speak with members of the Russian opposition movement, which kind of surprised me. I was a little curious about this. Like, why are so many of them ending up in Lithuania? I have the same question myself, because it's not a natural place for the Russian opposition to coalesce. There are larger centers of Russian speaking centers in places like Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and probably some more politically relevant places to be based, for instance, Brussels, where the European Union and NATO both are. What I think happened when I asked some of these leaders who ended up there,

you know, why Lithuania? And they said, basically, in this moment, right before Mr. Putin launched his invasion, when organizations were being labeled as extremists, they were being threatened with being jailed. Obviously, some members of the opposition are in jail right now. When they were all sort of in this moment of deciding whether to stay or go and those who decided to leave, it was Lithuania that sort of was fastest with visas, fastest with getting rid of the paperwork for them to set up offices abroad and continue their work in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. So Lithuania was making it easy for them to come there then?

Yeah, Lithuania has had, I think it's fair to say, since not just the start of the wider Russian invasion of Ukraine, but even going back to the annexation of Crimea, Lithuania and the Baltic states in general, but Lithuania in particular sort of had the most confrontational towards Moscow foreign policy. You know, they've really sort of centered their foreign policy on human rights and the threat they see emanating from Moscow and to a lesser extent Beijing. And they have sort of really boosted their international standing, both with the support they provided to Ukraine

and with the support they provided to the Russian opposition and the Belarusian opposition, which is all sort of one connected story, you know, the struggle for whether democracy or autocracy succeeds in Eastern Europe. This, you know, Vilnius has made itself into this, you know, sort of hub of activity, the way that maybe sort of Vienna was during the Cold War. Of course, it's not out of reach, though, right? Like often with opposition leaders who go abroad, they can still be targeted by Russia, which I think is what we've seen in Lithuania as well. Yeah, just in the last few days, right before the Russian election, Leonid Volkov, who was Mr. Navalny's chief of staff, was badly injured in a very bizarre incident where he was attacked with a meat hammer as he sat in his car outside his apartment in Vilnius. Obviously a very threatening attack. Navalny's team believes that Volkov was

a target. This is a message that we can reach you anywhere. They believe this was an attack that was carried out, if not directly by the Kremlin, but the Kremlin hired organized crime to do this. But the message is deliberate. If it wasn't clear already that the Kremlin can reach its opponents anywhere around the world. We, of course, have already seen assassinations and assassination attempts in other European capitals. But this is the first time that they've been reached in Lithuania, though.

You know, perhaps it's not surprising given its proximity to Russian and Belarusian territory. I want to ask you a little bit more, Mark, about this idea of opposition leaders being outside of Russia. From the people that you spoke with, how do they think about that, like leading an opposition movement when you're not actually in the country? And this is a very important point, I think,

because Mr. Navalny was poisoned back in the summer of 2020, this famous incident where he was attacked with Novichok, the Soviet-designed nerve agent. And as soon as he was able and well enough, he recovered in a German hospital, he decided he would go back to Russia. Knowing that he would face arrest and knowing that that might not go well for him, he returned to Russia. And so have other Russian opposition figures, Vladimir Karamurza, Ilya Yashin, someone I've been corresponding with.

You know, these they've decided the same thing, that you can't be outside Russia and ask other Russians to take risks to change the regime. So they thought the only way that I will have credibility is if I stay in Russia myself, whether that means staying in jail, I mean, staying in jail. Other Russian opposition figures have made a different choice and and it's very hard for any of us to judge i mean they i was speaking with anastasia shevchenko who spent two years under house arrest in russia when she was last there a period during which her daughter died and she wasn't able to visit her in hospital so she's sacrificed a lot and she said i just can't it. I can't do it again to my family. One of the people I met with was a human rights worker named Sergey Davidas. And he just said to

me, you know, sitting here is the failure of all of our work. And the fact that we're outside Russia on election day watching from afar is a failure. Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine that's a difficult situation to be in to try to make that call. But, you know, also if you're in prison in Russia, it can be difficult to do your work from there, too. Yeah, especially Mr. DeVitas, for instance. His job is to be, to monitor the cases of political prisoners and to lobby for their release and for their better treatment, including his boss. You know, Mr. DeVitas clearly couldn't do his job if he was sitting beside his boss in prison. Yeah. I guess, Mark, what does it say, though, about Putin's grip on power that,

you know, any real opposition to him is either in prison, in Russia, in exile or dead? I keep going back in time to my own experience covering Russia and, you know, how different a place it was when I was working there. Again, Mr. Putin was the president when I was working there, but it was a very different place where you had people that were inside the Kremlin who had worked for Boris Yeltsin and would meet with Western journalists like me. We actually had Kremlin sources back then. They would sit in apartments and cafes and talk about why Putin was doing this or why Putin might do that.

It was a different society, but it was already starting back then. It was this creeping authoritarianism. And we've been talking about the influence of, you know, this television channel has come under the control of this person who is affiliated with the Kremlin, and that's going to close political debate a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And now today we see the end result of this very slow and now it seems very deliberate process to change Russia from a semi-free society into the authoritarian state it is today. And I mean, one of those results, of course, Mark, is that you yourself cannot go back to

Russia. You have been banned. Yeah, that's coming up on the two-year anniversary of me being put on the permanent no-go list for the Russian Federation, it was, for me, a really sad moment, as we discussed previously, because it means Russian society is a little more closed off to the West, and we're closed off from them. Our understanding of them is getting weaker and weaker as time goes by. Yeah. So just lastly here, Mark, then, from the people that you've spoken with who are advocating, you know, who are working against Putin, how are they feeling about the future of Russia given Putin's last election win here just this past weekend and the death of Navalny? What are they thinking about now? Vilnius and recently with a question about, you know, say something optimistic, because these are some pretty grim conversations we're having, very downbeat, you know, about an election that was

clearly going to be won by Mr. Putin, a war in Ukraine that's clearly going to carry on. And the optimists, you know, they all talk about sort of after Putin dies, basically, which is an impossible future to look towards. We don't know when or how that will happen. He looks to be in good health, despite all the rumors to the contrary. But that's now the horizon that a lot of the opposition are focusing on is, you know, the moment when Putin is gone, however that comes to pass, how do they influence what comes next? And that's been a concern for the Russian opposition for, you know, as long as I've been covering it. I remember sitting in Boris Nemtsov's office, and he was, of course, killed nine years

ago. And Boris said to me, you know, like, we were talking about the revolution that just happened in Ukraine, not the 2014 revolution, but the 2004 revolution, which was the Orange Revolution, as it was dubbed. And I said, you don't think this could ever happen in Moscow? And he said, yeah, I think it can happen. But what worries me is I don't know if that revolution, if that change will be orange, so a democratic process like in what had happened in Ukraine, or brown, so a fascist direction. And I think that still is the question that haunts people is, okay, so some point Vladimir Putin's rule will end, but what comes next, be better or worse. Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through this today.

Thank you. Before we go today, we want to let you know that The Globe has launched The Globe Leadership Institute. These are online classes that offer insights from educators, business experts, and Globe and Mail journalists like Robin Doolittle and James Bradshaw. You can learn more at theglobeleadershipinstitute.com. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Manjot Singh. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor.

Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.