Will the Real Russian Dissident Please Stand Up

21 May 2010

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Coal miners and their families clashing with riot police in Mezhdurechensk. (Moscow Times)

Mikhail Khodorkovsky — Russia’s “most famous political prisoner,” the “billionaire dissident,” and the target of a “political fatwah from the top of the Russian state” — has been making quite a few headlines in the last week. This comes as no surprise, given that the man employs fourteen full-time lawyers (plus an unknown number of consultants) and an army of PR firms. His son, Pavel, lives in “self-imposed exile” in New York City, has parties at French châteaus, and vacations in the Greek isles. Khodorkovsky was stripped of his wealth, the narrative goes, but the Kremlin clearly didn’t get all of it. “The family is not in trouble,” Pavel Mikhailovich told Foreign Policy.

The most recent excuse to talk about Mikhail Khodorkovsky was his 24-hour stomach bug symbolic hunger strike carried out to accent Russian legal nihilism. In sync with the West as he’s always been, Khodorkovsky decided to circumvent Vladimir Putin and appeal directly to President Medvedev in the terms of his protest. What he wanted, he explained in an open letter, was simply to be assured that Dmitri Medvedev was “informed about the problem” of pretrial detention abuses in Russia. There are two ways to understand this tactic: either (a) Khodorkovsky is trying, like the Obama administration, to marginalize Putin by framing Medvedev as the sole arbiter of Kremlin power, or (b) he is trying to disabuse the West of the idea that Medvedev is a Gorbachevian reformer, by demonstrating that the president, too, is complicit in the trial against YUKOS.

In all this hubbub about Mr. Khodorkovsky, I found myself realizing how terribly boring it’s all become. The raging questions are “is he a dissident?” and, if so, “what does it mean to be a billionaire dissident?” There are some raised eyebrows about his past, but Mikhail Borisovich is basically celebrated now as a man-turned-hero, a victim of Vladimir Putin’s personal vendetta. Whether or not he deserves this title, Mr. Khodorkovsky has certainly spent enough cash to have it. The only thing more unfair that being imprisoned for political behavior would be getting imprisoned for that and then spending millions of stashed-away money for nothing. So Khodorkovsky keeps the channels buttered, and a few months never go by without a news story, a documentary, or an op-ed highlighting his plight.

When I heard about his hunger strike, I got to thinking about the state of public demonstrations in Russia. A hunger strike is something different from a mass rally: it’s personal and it’s quiet, and for those reasons it can serve as an extremely targeted symbolic act. But as suddenly as it was announced, Khodorkovsky called off the shtick, all before I’d even begun to outline any thoughts on what it is to ‘publicly not eat.’

Enter the Novosibirsk wing of RDDDO, “Российским детям – доступное дошкольное образование!” (Access to Preschool Education for Russia’s Children!). Horribly named but unambiguously purposed, the RDDDO is dedicated to assisting the thousands of families across Russia whose children lack access to preschooling due to insufficient capacity. On May 5, 2010, RDDDO-member Vasily Bubov declared a hunger strike, demanding that 30,000 locals attend a rally on May 15th in Novosibirsk’s May Day Square, to lobby for reforms to the local government’s budget. Only 350 people showed up. The next morning, eleven days after declaring the fast, Mr. Bubov went back to eating. Soon thereafter, RDDDO released a press statement declaring that the organization would begin “concentrating on other methods” of protest. Fellow RDDDO member Andrey Zakovriashin clearly didn’t get this memo, however, as he announced his own hunger strike on May 18th, calling on state officials to sell their cars in order to finance compensation subsidies to families whose children are wait-listed at preschools and kindergartens. He also suggested that children receive the right to vote and that their parents be allowed to vote on their behalf. (Yes, seriously.)

After Bubov’s miserable failure, he told Московский Комсомолец that “society had demonstrated its position — a position of indifference.” Semen Gul’kin, another RDDDO leader, told Ведомости, “The reason for such relations with the authorities isn’t the authorities’ fault — it’s the citizens’. They allow themselves to be treated this way, and the authorities go ahead and do it.” Having succeeded in rallying roughly 1% of the requested crowd, it’s no surprise that Mr. Zakovriashin didn’t peg his activism to so precise a metric. Additionally, his campaign, however far-fetched and unrealistic, is mostly simple and fundamentally materialist in its aims: a monthly stipend of 4,800 rubles (about $150) for parents of children denied preschooling.

Far more than any PR stunt by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, RDDDO’s struggles embody the state of dissidence in Russia today. What you find on the ground are masses of poor people who for some reason take no interest in their own collective self-interests. Efforts to mobilize the public even for apolitical, local initiatives — such as improving access to kindergarten — fall completely flat. And in response to this defeat, activists and liberal newspapers (I’m looking at you, Ведомости) clearly become annoyed with the general public. The debate turns from talk of strict economic interests to a general discussion of “dignity” as a catalyst for social outbursts. “These shameless rulers,” writes Maria Eismont at Ведомости, “they deprive their own people not just of means and rights, but also take away the most elementary level of respect.”

Ms. Eismont has a point. Consider the unrest last year in Pikalevo or this year in Mezhdurechensk. While there were undoubtedly economic factors involved in these incidents, conditions somehow reached a boiling point and previously passive crowds of people exploded into group anger. “Dignity” is very clearly a part of this phenomenon. And yet, of great frustration to professional activists, these events have been spontaneous and unassisted by their ranks. That perennially useless class, the intelligentsia, never manages to predict the next political anomaly, and Sheriff Putin always shows up first to dazzle the rabble back into submission.

Russian liberals and American necons try to make the situation reflect their own ideology. ‘If it’s not a matter of wages and utilities,’ goes the conventional wisdom, ‘then clearly we’re dealing with the agency of moral liberty and the indomitable human spirit!’ Yet, economic concerns are indisputably the core concern of Russians today. Sometimes, this mobilizes protests against protectionism (think of the infamous Vladivostok rally) and sometimes this brings people together in favor of protectionism (think of the AvtoVAZ factory in Tolyatti that desperately relies on subsidies and tariffs). The poor sods that they are, Russians generally worry about a paycheck — not “liberty” or “freedom.” It’s in basic material conditions — wages, utilities, and benefits — that they understand their dignity. And Christ knows when ‘enough is enough’ for these people.

It would seem that no amount of hunger striking or public relations strategizing can change this.

By: A Good Treaty Category: Personal Observations, Russian Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,