In a meeting with supporters on December 10, President Vladimir Putin insisted the Kremlin's anticorruption campaign was the real deal and not just for show. Arrests would be made, he added, and punishment for crooked officials was "inevitable."

Should we believe him? There are, of course, plenty of reasons for skepticism. First among these is the fact that corruption is not a bug in Putin's operating system but a feature.

And an essential feature at that.

First and foremost, it's a feature that holds together the power vertical. As the Moscow Carnegie Center wrote in a report released last week, the unwritten contract among the ruling class can be summarized as follows: Officials pledge "fealty toward the Kremlin in exchange for a license to grow super-rich."

Put another way, loyalty buys you a license to steal. Take away that license and what else is there to compel loyalty?

The corruption feature also provides the Kremlin with an invaluable tool to control potentially wayward officials. If everybody is dirty to some degree, then everybody is vulnerable to a veiled threat -- or, if necessary, a targeted prosecution -- if they step out of line politically.
 
A true anticorruption campaign, Gazeta.ru wrote in a recent editorial, "could follow an unpredictable trajectory and overtake practically any member of the current or former political elite."

That, of course, would change the elite contract dramatically and make it increasingly difficult for Putin to remain above the fray.

"The campaign against corruption -- with or without high-profile resignations and imprisonments of high officials -- has enormous costs for the regime, despite all the popularity of anticorruption rhetoric among the masses," Gazeta.ru opined.

"After all, all these outrages did not simply take place before Putin's eyes but were carried out by his subordinates within the framework of the system created by him."

And yet despite this, something has changed. The rules of the game are suddenly different.

In a recent column in "Novaya gazeta," Yulia Latynina illustrated how different by contrasting two corruption cases that broke out back in 2007 to the situation today. (You can read the abridged English-language version from "The Moscow Times" here.)

The first involved Semyon Vainshtok, who resigned as head of Transneft after the Audit Chamber compiled a dossier on his shadowy business dealings. The report was, of course, made to order. The siloviki, the security service veterans surrounding Putin, had long wanted to remove Vainshtok and replace him with their preferred candidate, FSB General Nikolai Tokarev. But Putin insisted that this be done quietly, with no public scandal.

And it was. The Audit Chamber report wasn't made public at the time (although it was later leaked to anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny). And Putin rewarded Vainshtok for going quietly, naming him head of Olimpstroi, the state corporation in charge of building Olympic venues for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi.

First the stick, then the carrot. And the license to steal remained intact.

"Tokarev didn't go public because Putin sent a clear signal: I decide everything and anybody who goes public will lose and will be smacked down immediately," Latynina wrote.

Another 2007 case, one that resulted in the so-called siloviki war, illustrates the costs of breaking this code of "omerta." When Viktor Cherkesov, a KGB veteran and longtime Putin ally who then headed the Federal Antinarcotics Service, went public with a "kompromat war" against other siloviki -- publishing a scandalous article in the daily "Kommersant" -- it eventually cost him his high-profile job (although he later resurfaced as head of a state corporation).

In contrast to five years ago, a whole slew of corruption scandals has gone very public and has gotten very nasty in the past few months -- apparently with Putin's blessing.

The most spectacular of these have been the sacking of Anatoly Serdyukov as defense minister over defense-procurement shenanigans, the firing of Yury Urlichich as head of the Glonass Global Satellite Navigation system over embezzlement allegations, and the documentary on state-run Channel One television about financial machinations involving former Agriculture Minister Yelena Skrynnik.

"The rules of the game have not just changed quickly, but with blinding speed," Latynina wrote.

"Five years ago, each of these scandals would have been resolved behind closed doors, just as the Transneft affair was. Putin would have been the sole arbiter and no compromising information would have been released to the public. This is a major change in Putin's behavior and that of his elite."

So why is Putin changing the rules? Why would he give up both a carrot and stick to control the elite? Why would he unleash potentially debilitating chaos among his subordinates? And why would he potentially put himself at risk?

One reason could be that there simply isn't enough money for servicing the elite's corruption habit to continue to be, for all intents and purposes, a line item in the budget.

And as the Moscow Carnegie Center pointed out in its report, this puts the entire Putin system in a bind:

 
In other words, economics dictates that the rules of the game for the elite must change. But the politics of the Putin system dictate that they cannot change.

-- Brian Whitmore

It has been a year since Russia's season of dissent kicked off in earnest following the disputed State Duma elections on December 4, 2011.
 
Much has happened since, from Putin's reelection to the Pussy Riot trial to the legislative crackdown on dissent to the current campaign against corruption.
 
And as a turbulent 2012 draws to a close, it's clear that Russia is in the midst of an important transformation. What isn't yet clear: a transformation to what?
 
The new edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast" takes a look back at the past year and ahead to what we may expect in 2013, with co-hosts Mark Galeotti of New York University and Sean Guillory of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies.
 
Enjoy...

The Power Vertical Podcast -- One Year After

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to "The Power Vertical Podcast" on iTunes.

At first glance, former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin and opposition leader Aleksei Navalny make for odd allies.
 
The cerebral, urbane, and pro-Western Kudrin has long been a close friend of President Vladimir Putin. He spent most of his career in the halls of power overseeing and facilitating Russia's macroeconomic stability -- and tolerating a mindboggling amount of graft in the process.

The firebrand Navalny made his name as an anticorruption blogger with a nationalist bent who made it his mission to expose that graft. He has spent the past year as one of the Kremlin's fiercest opponents, and wears the numerous nights he has spent in police detention as a badge of honor.

But despite these differences, there have been signs in recent weeks that these two very different Alekseis may be moving toward working together to forge a link between the opposition and the technocratic wing of the elite, which is uncomfortable with the Kremlin's current hard-line posture.

This week, on the first anniversary of the disputed parliamentary elections that set off a wave of protests that made Navalny a household name, Kudrin called on the Kremlin to stop using "confrontational rhetoric" toward its opponents.

In a report posted on the website of his think tank, the Civic Initiatives Committee, Kudrin and his co-authors wrote that such actions "only increase the antigovernment attitude of the middle class, without which the country’s development isn’t possible."

The report, titled "2012: The Authorities and Our Common Risks," also criticizes Russia's rulers for engaging in what it calls "imitation politics" and says only a real dialogue between the Kremlin and the emerging civil society can prevent the country from sliding into economic and political stagnation -- or worse.

For the past year, Kudrin, who resigned as finance minister in September 2011, has been trying to position himself as the man in the middle of Russia's intractable political standoff -- the honest broker who could foster a true dialogue among the authorities, the opposition, and newly politically active segments of society.

Having seen the system work from the inside, he understands that Russia is dangerously dependent on oil and gas, that current levels of corruption are unsustainable, and that in order for the economy to diversify and modernize, the political system will need to become more pluralistic. But he has also stressed that change needs to be evolutionary.

And recently, Kudrin appears to be getting a major assist from Navalny.

The anticorruption blogger has been using his influence on the opposition's Coordinating Council to strengthen the hand of moderates who seek to negotiate with the authorities and reform the political system and weaken radical elements who want nothing short of regime change.

Navalny's chief ally in this effort has been socialite-turned-social-activist Ksenia Sobchak, with whom he has teamed up to form a powerful super faction on the council.

The Navalny-Sobchak alliance was instrumental in providing a critical link between Kudrin and the Coordinating Council. The two successfully backed a controversial move to get Dmitry Nekrasov, a close ally of the former finance minister, named the committee's executive secretary.

Nekrasov, a former Kremlin aide who unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the same council, is the coordinator of Kudrin's think tank. Navalny praised him as "sincere, sensible," and "capable." He also lauded the work of Kudrin's Civic Initiatives Committee.

After Nekrasov's appointment was approved, opposition journalist and council member Oleg Kashin fiercely criticized Navalny on Twitter.

Despite their obvious differences, Kudrin and Navalny also complement each other. Kudrin has cache with the authorities that Navalny lacks. Navalny has street cred with the opposition that Kudrin, despite his apparent democratic epiphany, will probably never have.
 
It's not clear where -- if anywhere -- this is going. But a true meeting of the minds between Aleksei and Aleksei could be a vital step toward a development that I've been watching for: an overt alliance between the technocratic wing of the elite that understands that Russia's political system needs to open up to accommodate a changing society, on the one hand, and the moderate wing of the opposition that is seeking evolutionary change on the other.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

Vladimir Putin may be about to undergo an extreme image makeover.
 
Putin the chest-thumping and siloviki-loving tough guy could be on his way out. And a kinder and gentler Vladimir the Wise might be on the way in.
 
"Putin's political advisers have decided to abandon the macho image in favor of that of a wise patriarch," the daily "Nezavisimaya gazeta" writes, citing a Kremlin strategy paper.

According to the report, Putin will also seek to "reassure the population" that has become increasingly less confident in his rule by moving closer to the liberal faction of the elite and beginning to curb the powers of the siloviki. But given the amount of power Putin has granted the security services over the years, "it will be difficult to do so without damage."
 
The impending image makeover and policy shift, along with the ongoing anticorruption campaign, were sparked by a measurable "decline of trust in the country's senior management and the almost revolutionary sentiments in the minds of Russians," the daily wrote, citing unidentified Kremlin officials.
 
The rebooted Putin, the officials say, will be launched when the president gives his annual address to parliament later this month.
 
Or maybe not.
 
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov quickly and curtly denied the report, saying it was "from the realm of falsification." But "Nezavisimaya gazeta" stood firmly by the story. Speaking to Vladimir Kara-Murza of RFE/RL's Russian Service, the paper's political editor, Aleksandra Samarina, insisted that the Kremlin report existed and that the paper's reporting was accurate.

WATCH THE INTERVIEW HERE:



So what's going on? Did "Nezavisimaya gazeta" overplay what it had? The paper has a solid track record of strong political reporting and is known to have good Kremlin sources. It identified the document in question as a report prepared by Putin's political strategists for an unidentified regional governor.
 
So is Peskov just stonewalling? Possibly. As Samarina pointed out, it would have been strange for him to come out and just verify a story based on a leaked Kremlin strategy paper and anonymous officials.
 
But documents like this don't just leak without a reason. Such instances are almost always part of a larger game in which one Kremlin faction or another is attempting to advance its agenda. Rarely do they reflect settled policy.
 
As has been widely reported, the Russian elite has long been locked in a bitter "cold war" between its siloviki and technocratic factions over how to deal with the country's rapidly changing political dynamic.

Likewise, the ranks of Kremlin political strategists are also split between those loyal to the regime's current chief ideologist, Vyacheslav Volodin, and holdovers from the team of his predecessor, Vladislav Surkov.
 
The hard-liners in this constellation -- the siloviki and Volodin -- have had the upper hand since Putin returned to power in May, as evidenced by the regime's harsh suppression of dissent. The technocrats and Surkov's people have been waiting for the crackdown to fail, which would give them a chance to push for, if not a full-fledged thaw then at least a softer and subtler alternative.
 
"As with so many strategy documents over the years, this is probably an attempt to try to influence a process, but it likely isn't a blueprint," Nikolas Gvosdev, a Russia expert and professor at the U.S. Naval War College, told me.
 
Nevertheless, there are also signs that the time might be right for the authorities to switch paradigms.
 
The leaks about Putin's impending image makeover and policy shift come amid persistent reports about the president's poor health that the Kremlin has been unable to squelch.
 
Whatever is or isn't going on with Putin's health, the unrelenting speculation about it has severely damaged the image the regime would like to project. Kremlin strategists have long used Putin's virility and vigor as a metaphor to illustrate Russia's revival during his rule. This was easy when he was in his 40s and 50s. It will only get more difficult as the now 60-year-old president continues to age.
 
"He needs to be able to construct a public narrative of success and competent authority and leadership, which is where his own physical fitness and Russia's return to economic health are in many ways overlapping," Edward Lucas, international editor of the British weekly "The Economist" and author of the book "Deception: Spies, Lies, and How Russia Dupes the West," said in a recent interview.
 
"It's very hard for him to do that now, when people laugh at you and when you seem visibly uncomfortable appearing in public. He's a fast-decaying asset, both in terms of being able to project the regime as a success and in being an internal arbiter in its many disputes."
 
Moreover, on the same day the "Nezavisimaya gazeta" story appeared, the Moscow Carnegie Center released a report titled "The Russian Awakening" that painted a bleak picture of the health of Russia's political system.

Among the report's conclusions are that the political system Putin created "has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the more dynamic, modernizing, and now politically active segments of society."
 
Moreover, Russia's economy, based on the collection and distribution of natural resource rents, "is cracking" and volatile energy prices have "put the Russian economy at risk" as "the government struggles to meet its massive social obligations."
 
And Putin's vaunted "power vertical," in which officials offer "fealty toward the Kremlin in exchange for a license to grow super rich, is crumbling as Russia’s leaders are seeking to discipline the elite in order to save the system."
 
Whether Putin's image is Vlad the Tough Guy or Vladimir the Wise -- and whether he is in good health or ill -- this is the dire reality he needs to address.
 
"There is no overlap between the image [the Kremlin is creating] and what is actually going on in the country," Samarina said.

The first hint about what, if anything, will change should come with Putin's much-awaited address to parliament in a few weeks.

 -- Brian Whitmore

The recent wave of corruption cases in Russia has been dizzying. From the Defense, Regional Development, and Agriculture ministries to the Global Satellite Navigation System, to the Chelyabinsk regional Health Ministry.
 
There have been raids and arrests and resignations and firings. It's been dizzying -- and difficult even for Kremlinology junkies to keep up with.
 
The state-controlled media is calling it a campaign against corruption. But in Russia, nothing is ever that simple.
 
So what's really going on?

In the latest edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast," I discuss this issue with co-hosts Kirill Kobrin of RFE/RL's Russian Service and NYU professor Mark Galeotti, author of the blog "In Moscow's Shadows."
 
Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast: Antigraft Campaign? Clan War? Chaos?

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to "The Power Vertical Podcast" on iTunes.

Is it an anti-graft campaign? A purge of the elite? Or the start of a clan war?
 
When police raided and searched the home of Rostelekom CEO Aleksandr Provotorov last week, it marked yet another chapter in what the Russian media has been describing as a Kremlin-backed war on corruption.

The search was part of a probe into Marshall Capital, where Provotorov was a partner before becoming head of the state-run telecommunications giant in July 2010.
 
Investigators are looking into whether Russagroprom, a now bankrupt subsidiary of Marshall Capital, fraudulently received -- and then defaulted on -- a $225 million loan from the investment bank VTB Capital in 2007.
 
The home of Konstantin Malofeyev, current head of Marshall Capital, was also searched. For the time being, prosecutors are describing Provotorov and Malofeyev as "witnesses" in the case.
 
With all the other corruption probes out there -- from the procurement scandal that brought down former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov to the probes into financial malfeasance in the Regional Development Ministry and the Global Navigation Satellite System (Glonass) -- what makes the Rostelekom case so noteworthy?
 
Well, for one thing, Provotorov is considered a close Putin ally. He served as his protocol chief, he was made head of Rostelekom with Putin's support, and in July the Kremlin leader awarded him a Medal of Honor.
 
"This is in fact an attempt to replace the manager of one of Russia's largest companies, who is under the Kremlin's political patronage," Tatyana Stanovaya, head of the analytical department for the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies wrote in Politcom.ru.
 
Moreover, Russian media has reported that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has been trying to remove Provotorov at Rostelekom and replace him with Vadim Semyonov, the head of state telecoms holding company Svyazinvest and an old law-school classmate of the premier's.
 
"The conflict is reaching the very top, splitting the vertical. The battle line is passing between the government and the Kremlin," Stanovaya wrote.
 
Additionally, the assault on Provotorov comes on the heels of the dismissal of Serdyukov, which some commentators interpreted, at least in part, as retribution against the former defense minister for cozying up to Medvedev late in his presidency.
 
"In the last two years of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency, Serdyukov increasingly sought and found support specifically in the Kremlin rather than the White House, where Putin was installed at the time," Yevgenia Albats recently wrote in "Novoye vremya."

Most notably, Albats wrote, Serdyukov used Medvedev's backing -- over Putin's objections -- to increase spending on armaments from 2011-20 from 13 trillion rubles to 20 trillion rubles ($409 billion to $630 billion).
 
So is it that neat and clean? Simple tit-for-tat?
 
I'd be very cautious of interpreting the Rostelekom case as Medvedev's answer to Serdyukov's dismissal.
 
First of all, with his political obituary being written almost daily in the Russian press Medvedev is politically very weak right now and I doubt he would be able to launch such a frontal assault on a close Putin ally.
 
Moreover, although Serdyukov did in fact use Medvedev to get his defense budget hike back in 2011, it would be a bit of a stretch to call him an ally of the prime minister. He simply played one side of the tandem against the other to get what he wanted -- and probably paid the price for it with the famously vindictive Putin. He also had many enemies within the military. (It also probably didn't help Serdyukov that he lost an important political patron when his marriage to the daughter of Putin crony and Gazprom Chairman Viktor Zubkov broke up.)

Moreover, the battle for control of Rostelekom is a complex game with numerous powerful players and many moving parts -- and not a straightforward battle between "Putin's people" and "Medvedev's people."
 
What the case does indicate, however, is that the campaign against corruption -- which Putin may have intended to be a public relations trick, a purge of the ruling elite of disloyal elements, or both -- is perilously close to spinning out of control with unpredictable consequences.
 
"What happened largely indicates the beginning of ferment within Russia's ruling class, an escalation of the fight for resources and of uncontrollable conflicts that the Kremlin is unable to regulate without damaging its own reputation," Stanovaya wrote in Politcom.ru.
 
"Wars of all against all are being waged and their causes have absolutely nothing to do with the Kremlin's intentions and are most likely developing in spite of the regime's priorities."
 
-- Brian Whitmore

NOTE TO READERS: Be sure to tune in to the Power Vertical podcast on Friday November 30, when I will discuss the issues raised in this post with co-hosts Kirill Kobrin of RFE/RL's Russian Service and NYU professor Mark Galeotti, author of the blog "In Moscow's Shadows."

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED

The Moscow punditocracy has had China on its mind lately. In fact, one leading commentator even confessed to suffering from "China envy."
 
When the Chinese Communist Party elected the country's new top leaders earlier this month, with Hu Jintao relinquishing power to Xi Jinping, many in Russia's chattering classes noted how favorably the system stacks up to their own.
 
"The Chinese have managed to do something the Russians can never pull off: to stop relying on great and irreplaceable individuals, and instead put in place a system of regular change of [its] top leaders," Mikhail Rostovsky wrote in "Moskovsky komsomolets."

Since 1992 -- when Deng Xiaoping turned power over to Jiang Zemin -- the rule has been two five-year terms and out.
 
The contrast with Russia, where the political system revolves around the indispensible Vladimir Putin, was noted everywhere from the opposition tabloid "Novaya gazeta" to the business-oriented "RBK Daily," to the official government broadsheet "Rossiiskaya gazeta" -- which, quite interestingly, called the Chinese model "an instructive model for other countries."
 
In the daily "Kommersant," Aleksandr Gabuyev wrote that the Chinese leader is "only the first among equals in a sort of 'board of directors' for the PRC, which avoids a situation in which the country is ruled for too long by a sickly and aging leader who has stayed too long atop the power vertical."

Putin, of course, had the chance to implement something akin to the Chinese model last year. All he had to do was bless Dmitry Medvedev's bid for a second term as president, as the technocratic wing of the elite was urging him to do, and maintain his decisive influence behind the scenes -- as Deng Xiaoping did in his day.
 
But that, of course, did not happen. And by opting to return to the presidency for six -- and possibly 12 -- more years, Putin is being compared not to Deng but to Leonid Brezhnev.
 
"Both looked young and attractive at the beginning of their rule and both looked sickly and comical toward the end. Both let the right historical moment for their departure slip by, ran out of steam, and survived in politics," political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky wrote in Slon.ru.

The Brezhnev comparisons, which began in earnest about a year ago and enjoyed a revival with recent rumors about the state of Putin's health, have become a bit overdone and old hat by now.
 
But one aspect is very relevant to Russia's future. It wasn't only Brezhnev who looked old and sickly by the end of his rule but the entire Soviet elite. This cadre, known as the Class of 1937, rose to power in the wake of Stalin's purges -- and remained there until their deaths.
 
And many observers are now wondering whether the same will happen with the entire Putin team. This would keep the rising generation, which came of political age after the fall of the Soviet Union, eternally frustrated and on the outside.
 
"Putin has demonstrated a willingness to keep management of the state in the hands of his trusted people, who will soon be of retirement age, until the end of the decade," analyst Viktor Averkov wrote in "RBK Daily." "In order to avoid a generational conflict, he needs to study the mechanisms of succession and the transfer of power."

There is little evidence that he is doing so. In fact, as columnist Sergei Shelin illustrated in a recent piece in Gazeta.ru, Putin's much vaunted mini-purge of the elite after a series of corruption scandals amounted to little more than shuffling around some familiar faces into new posts.

"The purges at the Defense and Regional Development ministries, as well as in other departments and regional structures, seemed to promise the desired posts to those who have grown tired waiting for them," Shelin wrote. "But the paradox of Putin's personnel purge is that the reshuffles of the establishment are in full swing without any hint of upward mobility."
 
Shelin adds that "the Kremlin is shuffling one and the same pack of cards" with "heavyweights" and their "entire close-knit clans moving from place to place."
 
There was a time when many observers, myself included, thought Putin's long-term goal was to build an enduring and stable (albeit authoritarian) system that would endure beyond his time in office.
 
What is becoming abundantly clear is that no such strategic goal exists. There are only tactical maneuvers aimed at survival -- which, paradoxically, makes for the most unstable system of all.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

One of the hallmarks of Vladimir Putin's rule has been stability of cadres.

His people, his top ministers, members of his inner circle, were untouchable. The law, to quote a popular refrain from the opposition, was only for his enemies.

But with the sacking of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov earlier this month over a defense procurement corruption scandal, that appears to have changed.

Suddenly, it looks like nobody is untouchable. The Russian media have been filled with speculation that a major government shake-up is in the works.

Is a purge on the way for Team Putin? And if so, to what ends? In this week's edition of the Power Vertical podcast, I discuss this issue with co-hosts Kirill Kobrin of RFE/RL's Russian Service and NYU Professor Mark Galeotti, author of the "In Moscow's Shadows" blog.

Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast: A Shakeup For Team Putin?

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to "The Power Vertical Podcast" on iTunes.

Vladimir Putin can't seem to decide which of his two heroes he wants to be.

The tough guy KGB veteran in him clearly wants to follow the example of the late hard-line Soviet leader Yury Andropov. But another side of Putin yearns to emulate the reforming and modernizing tsarist-era Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin.

For the first six months of his third term in the Kremlin, Putin was all Andropov all the time. From new laws cracking down on dissent, to the imprisonment of anti-Kremlin demonstrators, the shocking abduction and alleged torture of Left Front activist Leonid Razvozzhayev, the vibe oozed repression and regression.

But the sacking earlier this month of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov over a defense-procurement scandal was widely interpreted by Moscow's chattering class as an important watershed and potential turning point for Putin's presidency.

"It seems that the third presidential term is going to be quite unlike a simple continuation of the previous two. Just like the situation in the country and in the world is quite unlike the one that existed in 2000-2008," political analyst Leonid Radzikhovskiy writes in "Nezavisimaya gazeta."

But a turning point toward what?

Some Kremlin-watchers, including many not favorably inclined toward Putin, view the Serdyukov sacking as a prelude to the president discovering his inner Stolypin and pivoting in a reformist direction in the coming months -- cracking down on corruption and restructuring the economy.

Others, however, see it as an ominous sign that Putin is gearing up to double down on repression and purge the elite of disloyal elements under the guise of an anticorruption campaign. The move would be reminiscent of Andropov's cleansing of the Soviet leadership during his brief 15-month rule, in which he fired 18 ministers and 37 regional party bosses.

Which interpretation is correct has broad implications for everything from the Kremlin's ongoing struggle with the opposition, to the intramural cold war within the ruling elite, to Russia's prospects for economic modernization.

Discovering His Inner Stolypin

With a long-awaited and badly needed restructuring of Russia's creaking social-welfare system stalled, foreign and domestic investment in the private sector drying up, and a budget crunch looming, any move toward reform, analysts say, would come more out of necessity than out of conviction.

But the repressive policies Putin has followed since May, some Kremlin-watchers say, now give him the political space to commence economic reforms in earnest.

"It is the best time to start a new round of economic liberalization, given the political freeze," Nikolai Petrov of the Moscow Carnegie Center wrote in a recent article in Slon.ru.

"For Putin, this is evidently his last chance to get on top of a situation which is objectively not going his way. And if he does not take advantage of the moment now, he will not have such an opportunity again. It is also important that the (excessively) repressive policies of recent months allow Putin to act as if from a position of strength, and not one of weakness."

Petrov notes that there are persistent rumors circulating in Moscow that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's government is about to be replaced. And many eyes, he writes, are on former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, "who seems to be continually waiting for something and is in no hurry to move into opposition to Putin."

In one sense, bringing in Kudrin and pushing through social and market reforms would be shrewd. Such a move would be cheered by the urban professional wing of the opposition, which reveres Kudrin and favors economic liberalization, but staunchly opposed by the Kremlin's opponents on the left.

Splitting the opposition in this way would give the Kremlin, which has been on the defensive most of the year, some breathing space.

I have long believed this was the real motivation behind the criminal probe against Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov, who could prove dangerous in an environment of working-class and rural unrest.

But bringing back the widely respected Kudrin to save the Kremlin's economic bacon also has its risks. Kudrin has long argued that any successful economic liberalization must also be accompanied by political reform and increased pluralism -- something Putin clearly has no stomach for.

And even as his name is surfacing for the prime minister's job, Kudrin is clearly hedging his bets. As Kremlin-watcher Stanislav Belkovsky notes in "Moskovsky komsomolets," Kudrin is openly calling for early elections to the State Duma and has placed his ally, Dmitry Nekrasov, on the opposition's Coordinating Council.

Unleashing His Inner Andropov

One of the hallmarks of Putin's rule has been stability among the ruling elite. His people, his top ministers, members of his inner circle, were untouchable. The law, to quote a popular refrain from the opposition, was only for his enemies.

Serdyukov's sacking over a corruption scandal at Oboronservis, a military procurement company set up by the Defense Ministry, was seen as a sharp turn away from this "stability of cadres" approach.

"Now, nobody is untouchable," political analyst Leonid Radzikhovskiy writes in "Nezavisimaya gazeta."

"Suspicions of corruption are not being covered up and will not be covered up -- including at the highest level. The president knows the public's moods and takes them into account."

There have indeed been quite a few corruption scandals breaking out of late. In addition to the Oboronservis case that brought down Serdyukov and other top defense officials, there have been embezzlement cases involving the Global Navigation Satellite System (Glonass), financial wrongdoing connected to preparations for the APEC Summit in Vladivostok, and a financial scandal at the Health Ministry in Chelyabinsk, just to name a few.

So are we witnessing a real crackdown on official corruption?

Not quite, writes Yevgeniya Albats in "Novoye vremya." On closer scrutiny, she suggests, the Serdyukov case looks more like a settling of scores.

"Strangely, few people have drawn attention to the fact that in the last two years of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency, Serdyukov increasingly sought and found support specifically in the Kremlin rather than the White House, where Putin was installed at the time," Albats writes.

Most notably, Serdyukov relied on Medvedev's help -- over Putin's objections -- to increase the 2011 defense budget from 13 trillion rubles to 20 trillion rubles ($409 billion to $630 billion).

"It is clear why Medvedev needed an alliance with the minister of defense," Albats writes.

"While de jure he was the commander in chief, to whom all the siloviki are subordinated, de facto he controlled very few people: those same security policemen's loyalties lay exclusively in the prime minister's office. At that time Medvedev had started thinking seriously about a second term and had a vested interest in Serdyukov's support."

So now it's payback time.

"It appears obvious that Putin has started to be afraid of his own entourage.... Which means that that further high-profile cases and dismissals are in the offing," Albats writes.

If this is the case, Putin may be about to move to finally settle the intramural struggle about Russia's future that has been raging since the Medvedev presidency, and which has intensified since Putin returned to the Kremlin.

Which means that in addition to the ongoing crackdown against the opposition, we may be in for a comprehensive purge of the ruling elite under the guise of a war on corruption.

A False Choice?

So which will it be? A pivot to Stolypin-style reforms or a doubling down on Andropovism?

Politically speaking, the line between Putin's two role models is actually quite thin. Both sought to introduce measures explicitly designed to salvage an ailing autocratic system.

Serving as premier in the tumultuous period following the Russo-Japanese War, Stolypin initiated historic land reforms, expanded the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and facilitated the development of Siberia.

But his zeal for reform only went so far. Appointed by Tsar Nicholas II in the politically charged atmosphere following the revolution of 1905, Stolypin was obsessed with preventing further political upheaval. He was so ruthless in dealing with real and potential revolutionaries that the hangman's noose became known as a "Stolypin necktie."

And Andropov, when he became Soviet leader in November 1982 after Leonid Brezhnev's death, sought to introduce more effective management, stricter discipline, and very limited market mechanisms to make the stagnant Soviet economy more competitive. But his short-lived authoritarian modernization left little room for any inkling of pluralism. Instead, he kept the political system tightly controlled and the economy wedded to the state -- with the KGB taking a leading role.

So Putin may not need to choose at all. If he can achieve firm Andropov-style control over the political system and tame rebellious elements in the elite, he may feel sufficiently confident to pursue modernizing reforms a la Stolypin.

The Paradox

If Putin is indeed planning to pivot to a season of reform, Kudrin will most likely be a key figure.

When Kudrin resigned in September 2011, his stated reason was that he opposed the hike in defense spending Serdyukov had secured with Medvedev's assistance -- and over Putin's objections. Kudrin argued that the funds allocated for defense were needed to modernize the education, health-care, and social-welfare systems.

Was Serdyukov's removal the first step in a plan to dismiss Medvedev and make Kudrin prime minister?

Perhaps. But this begs a larger, more fundamental, question: Would Kudrin go along with an economic reform program without the political reforms he has repeatedly said must accompany it?

I have long argued that any true economic reform in Russia, any true diversification and decentralization of the economy, would in the long run lead to political decentralization and ultimately greater pluralism.

And this may be Kudrin's calculation -- compromising on political reform in the short run knowing full well that it will be unavoidable in the long term.

It's all speculation at this point. But the picture is bound to become clearer when Putin gives his annual address to parliament, which the Kremlin says should come by the end of the year.

-- Brian Whitmore

Since the death of Leonid Brezhnev, three decades ago this weekend, a series of Soviet and Russian leaders have struggled with the same riddle: How do you modernize without jeopardizing your grip on power? 

In the latest edition of the Power Vertical podcast, I discussed this issue with my regular co-host, Kirill Kobrin of RFE/RL's Russian Service.

Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast: 30 Years After Brezhnev

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to "The Power Vertical Podcast" on iTunes.

In many ways, the current battle for Russia's future began 30 years ago this week.
 
On November 10, 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died, sparking a generational change in the Soviet leadership and setting in motion an ongoing cycle of reform and reaction in Russia that remains incomplete and inconclusive to this day.
 
The players' names have changed as has the lexicon, but the fundamental issue remains essentially the same: how to carry out essential reforms when said reforms threaten the existing elite's continued dominance.
 
Brezhnev's death heralded the exit from the scene of the so-called "Class of 1937" -- the generation of Soviet leaders that quickly climbed the Communist Party's ranks following the Stalinist purges and ruled the country for decades thereafter.
 
By the end of Brezhnev's rule, the Soviet economy, perilously dependent on commodities exports, was stagnating and contracting as oil prices fell. The political system was ossified, corruption rampant, and public cynicism endemic. The consensus within key quarters of the rising generation of the elite was that reform was essential.
 
The two main constituencies pushing for change -- the KGB and technocratic "regime liberals" -- made for an unlikely alliance. But this odd coalition teamed up to pick two Soviet leaders: Yury Andropov (the KGB's candidate) and Mikhail Gorbachev (the technocrats' choice).
 
And it should come as no surprise that the two key meta-clans in Vladimir Putin's Kremlin are the "siloviki" and the technocrats. These bureaucratic descendants of the very same alliance that anointed Andropov and Gorbachev in the 1980s also put Putin in the Kremlin at the turn of the millennium.
 
In last week's edition of the Power Vertical podcast, Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University and author of the blog "In Moscow's Shadows," succinctly drew the parallel:
   
Andropovism and Gorbachevism represent two paths for a stagnating authoritarian system to reform itself -- and both eventually lead to a dead end.
 
The Andropov model, which the sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya has called "authoritarian modernization," is similar to the path China has followed until now -- tightly managed economic reform that introduces market mechanisms, albeit without political reform.
 
Due to Andropov's death in 1984, it never got off the ground in the Soviet Union. But it was the model for Putin's rule, which exposed its limitations. In the short term it leads to growth and prosperity. But in the long run, said growth and prosperity lead to the creation of a middle class that eventually clamors for political rights. Denying these rights saps the system's "creative capacity" and leads to instability.
 
And if pushed to its logical conclusion, the Gorbachev model, which envisions more comprehensive economic and political reform, eventually unleashes forces that lead to a level of pluralism that brings down the authoritarian system.
 
Both models also inevitably split the coalition of siloviki and technocratic liberals that spawned it.
 
In the case of the Andropov model, the technocrats rebel and team up with the emerging middle class in pushing for greater pluralism, as exiled members of Putin's team, like former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, are doing now.
 
And as the full implications of the Gorbachev model play out, the siloviki ultimately rebel -- as they did in August 1991.
 
If Putin followed Andropovism throughout his first stint in the Kremlin from 2000-04, Dmitry Medvedev's presidency had the feel of a Gorbachev redux.
 
And while September 2011, when Putin announced his return to the Kremlin, wasn't quite the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, the impulse was the same: the siloviki feared losing power and made their move to stop any more change. They famously failed in August 1991, but were more successful last autumn.
 
So three decades after Brezhnev's death, we've come full circle. The system remains deadlocked with nothing in sight to break the logjam.
 
-- Brian Whitmore
 
NOTE TO READERS: Be sure to tune in to the Power Vertical podcast on November 9 when I will discuss these issues with my co-host, Kirill Kobrin of RFE/RL's Russian Service.

This week, many in Russia and much of the former Soviet Union marked the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression.

Do past periods of repression in Russia teach us anything about the Kremlin's current crackdown on dissent?
 
In the latest edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast," I discuss this issue with two guests: historian Sean Guillory, a fellow at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies and author of Sean's Russia Blog; and New York University professor Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia's security services and author of the blog In Moscow's Shadows.
 
Enjoy...

Power Vertical podcast

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to "The Power Vertical Podcast" on iTunes.

From the abduction of Leonid Rozvozzhayev to new legislation broadening the definition of treason, the Kremlin appears to be pulling out all the stops in its efforts to stifle the opposition.
 
But will what critics call Soviet-era methods work in an increasingly postmodern society?
 
In the latest edition of the Power Vertical podcast, I discuss the trend with special guest and co-host New York University professor Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services and author of the blog "In Moscow's Shadows."
 
Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast: Shock And Awe, Kremlin-Style

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to "The Power Vertical Podcast" on iTunes.

Remember Aleksandr Bastrykin's "forest scandal"?
 
In light of the horrors Leonid Razvozzhayev says he endured, merely hauling a journalist out into the woods and threatening his life looks positively quaint.
 
Bastrykin has managed to survive -- and indeed thrive -- amid not just the forest incident, but also the revelations about his unreported properties and business dealings in Europe. And his sharp bureaucratic elbows have made him plenty of enemies inside the elite.
 
Will the mushrooming scandal around Razvozzhayev's abduction and alleged torture finally be the one that brings him down? I wouldn't count on it.
 
He enjoys President Vladimir Putin's favor and the Kremlin leader isn't one to throw his people under the bus.
 
Moreover, the case that led to Razvozzhayev's abduction -- allegations that he, Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov, and Konstantin Lebedev conspired with Georgian officials to provoke mass unrest in Russia -- was clearly green-lighted at the highest level.

But more pertinent than how the scandal will affect Bastrykin is another question: Is this one of those tipping point cases that turns a critical mass of the public against the regime?
 
We'll see in the coming weeks. But even by the standards of today's Russia, what appears to have happened to Razvozzhayev is pretty shocking.
 
According to the account he gave to human rights activists who visited him in detention, he was abducted in Kyiv outside the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which was helping him apply for political asylum. He had been directed there by the UN High Commission for Refugees.
 
Razvozzhayev says he was bundled into a van, basically hogtied (he was handcuffed and his legs were chained to his hands), had a balaclava put over his head, and driven for five hours across the Russian border. His abductors then turned him over to men who held him in a basement and kept him for three days in chains.
 
He was told he and his family would be killed if he didn't sign a confession implicating himself, Udaltsov, and Lebedev. He wasn't allowed to use the toilet. And he believes he was drugged.
 
After he finally relented and wrote the confession, he was driven to Moscow and taken to the Investigative Committee.
 
The case against Razzovzhayev, Udaltsov, and Lebedev -- which was initiated by the latest installment of NTV's "documentary" film series "Anatomy of Protest" --  looked shaky at best from the start.

But the authorities appear intent on pursuing it regardless of the circumstances. Why they so relentlessly went after Razzovzhayev -- who, until now, was a bit player in the case -- also remains a mystery.
 
Was his "confession" necessary to build a case against Udaltsov, the obvious main target of this whole drama? Were they trying to expand the case and target opposition State Duma deputy Ilya Ponomaryov, for whom Razvozzhayev works as an aide? Who knows?
 
But what is clear is that the scandal is changing Russia's national conversation in a way that could be devastating for the authorities.
 
“Clearly now everybody will be talking about torture. This is a poison pill for Putin,” Gleb Pavlovsky, editor of the Russ.ru website and a former Kremlin adviser, told "The Moscow Times."

And this comes at a time when the ruling elite's standing with the public is at its Putin-era nadir.
 
A report released October 24 by the Committee of Civic Initiatives, a think tank associated with former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, said Putin is supported by just 44 percent of the population.
 
But even that number -- an all-time low for the president -- paled in comparison to the way survey respondents characterized their government. Asked to compare their rulers to an animal, 88 percent named some sort of predator -- either a wolf, lion, or wild boar.
 
And Razvozzhayev's ordeal will only serve to harden those attitudes.
 
-- Brian Whitmore
 
NOTE TO READERS: Be sure to tune into the Power Vertical podcast on October 26 when I'll discuss the Razvozzhayev scandal and its implications with New York University's Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia's security services and author of the blog "In Moscow's Shadows."

How badly did Russian authorities want to nab Leonid Razvozzhayev? To answer that question, you will need to separate the Kremlin's virtual reality from, well, actual reality.

First the virtual, I mean official, version  -- courtesy of the Investigative Committee.

Razvozzhayev, an aide to opposition State Duma Deputy Ilya Ponomaryov, surrendered to authorities and voluntarily wrote a 10-page, handwritten statement admitting that he, Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov, and Udaltsov aide Konstantin Lebedev conspired to provoke mass unrest in Russia.

The operation, according to Razvozzhayev's alleged confession, was financed by former Georgian lawmaker Givi Targamadze.

The allegations are based on a report, "Anatomy of a Protest-2," that was broadcast on October 5 on the Kremlin-friendly NTV television station. (As I blogged last week, NTV is quickly becoming Siloviki TV, the security services' media outlet of choice to smear opposition figures before prosecuting them.)

This official version was already in doubt even before the Investigative Committee made its announcement on October 22. Earlier in the day, reports surfaced in Kyiv that Razvozzhayev, who had earlier fled to the Ukrainian capital, had been snatched off the street days earlier and had disappeared.

The same day, a video appeared on the website LifeNews.ru showing Razvozzhayev being led to a car by police officers. "They promised to kill me. I was abducted in Ukraine and tortured for two days," he shouted at the camera.

And then, in the evening, the Kremlin's alternative version of reality truly crashed and burned.

Here is a full statement from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees:

 
A report in Gazeta.ru quoted Yevgeny Golishkin, a leader of the leftist Ukrainian organization Borotba, as saying that Razvozzhayev arrived in Kyiv two days earlier and had decided to seek refugee status.

Razvozzhayev fled Russia and went into hiding after he, Udaltsov, and Lebedev were questioned on October 17 by agents from the Investigative Committee, which opened a criminal case against them in connection with the May 6 demonstrations.

Lebedev was kept in custody. Razvozzhayev and Udaltsov, who remains in Moscow, were released and ordered not to leave the capital.

One has to wonder why the authorities went to such lengths -- and took such risks -- to seize Razvozzhayev on foreign territory. Until now, he appeared to be a bit player in a case that, at least until now, seemed aimed primarily at Udaltsov.
 
The Investigative Committee could be seeking to broaden its list of targets in the case and considered Razvozzhayev key to that effort. If that is the case, Razvozzhayev's boss, Ilya Ponomaryov of the opposition A Just Russia party, could be in for a rough ride.
 
On October 23, Vladimir Burmatov, a Duma deputy from the ruling United Russia party, called on Ponomaryov to surrender his parliamentary mandate -- and thus his immunity from prosecution -- due to his affiliation with Razvozzhayev and the May 6 demonstrations.

(Thanks to Pavel Butorin of RusPoliceWatch for help compiling materials for this post.)

-- Brian Whitmore

Gennady Timchenko has long been the invisible man in Russia's ruling elite -- the Keyser Soze of the "collective Putin."
 
He's a Finnish citizen. He lives in Switzerland. And he denies that he even knows President Vladimir Putin all that well.
 
But Timchenko, who left Russia two decades ago, owns Gunvor, the world's fourth largest oil trading company. At its peak, Gunvor handled approximately a third of Russia's seaborne oil exports, making Timchenko a key player in the country's political-energy complex.
 
And despite his protestations to the contrary, Timchenko is widely rumored to have a KGB past and a long association with Putin. His name shows up on virtually every list of the top officials believed to be part of Putin's informal "politburo."
 
And now, according to Russian media reports, he's coming home. And this has led to a lot of speculation about why, and why now. Explanations from Russian officials, to say the least, were unconvincing.
 
Aleksandr Ryazanov, a former deputy chief executive of Gazprom, told the daily "Vedomosti" that since his "kids are grown up," Timchenko decided to return to Russia and "invest in manufacturing."
 
Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin, who is close to Timchenko, offered a similarly opaque explanation. "Sometimes in business, to maximize legal convenience you find that people even change their citizenship, but they keep their roots," he said. "For those like him, a time comes when it's necessary to determine what's more important. He made his decision to return to Russia, and I support that decision."
 
In an interview in the upcoming Russian-language edition of "Forbes" -- the first he's ever given to the Russian media -- Timchenko said he planned to form a construction holding company.

But this being Russia, there is a much more interesting backstory.
 
As John Helmer has meticulously chronicled on his blog "Dancing With Bears," reports that Swiss authorities were targeting Gunvor began surfacing back in July. The latest reports say Swiss investigators are looking into whether Gunvor paid bribes to win Congolese oil contracts and laundered the money through Swiss banks (read Helmer's exhaustive account here).

And it isn't only Swiss law enforcement that is reportedly causing headaches for Timchenko.
 
According to the "Vedomosti" report, a number of energy insiders say the U.S. Justice Department is investigating Timchenko and Gunvor for manipulating the price of oil. The case investigation is reportedly looking into allegations of price manipulation made in an article by the British weekly "The Economist" in May.

Gunvor officials deny this and, when contacted by "Vedomosti," the Justice Department would neither confirm nor deny the rumors.
 
But if the United States is indeed going after Timchenko -- admittedly a very big if at this point -- it would not be the first time U.S. law enforcement targeted Russian interests in a strategic sector.
 
Just weeks ago, on October 3, the Justice Department announced that it had indicted 11 alleged Russian agents on charges of illegally exporting sensitive microelectronics for use by military and intelligence agencies through a Texas-based company.

In a recent commentary, defense analyst Aleksandr Golts argued that spy networks like this -- as well as the sleeper network the U.S. broke up back in 2010, making Anna Chapman a household name -- are as much about acquiring intelligence and technology as they are about helping top Russian officials line their pockets (read the whole piece in Russian here and in English here):

 
It is, of course, much too early to say whether the United States is targeting Russia's shadowy networks -- be they in intelligence or energy. We don't even know for sure whether there is even an investigation into Timchenko and Gunvor yet. But the trend is, nevertheless, worth watching.
 
Whatever Timchenko's reasons for returning to Russia, his presence will likely be felt soon enough on the body politic.
 
He reportedly recently met with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin to try to resolve a simmering dispute.  And news of his return comes as Sechin, a partner and rival of Timchenko in the energy sphere, scored a major victory with Rosneft acquiring 100 percent of the shares in BP-TNK.

It's going to take a little while to unpack all this. But while Timchenko is no longer the invisible man of the Russian elite (his picture is on the cover of "Forbes" this week, after all), he will certainly be a player.
 
"Timchenko has been investing in Russian companies. He has resources here, and it's clear to him how decisions are made, that competitors will think five times before crossing an acquaintance of Putin," an unidentified former Russian official with close ties to Timchenko told "Vedomosti,"
 
"There is a line forming in front of Timchenko, like in front of the mausoleum, of entrepreneurs ready to do business with him."
 
-- Brian Whitmore

What to make of the criminal case against Sergei Udaltsov? Is it a harbinger of a broader crackdown against the opposition? A tactical move to neutralize the leftist leader as the Kremlin prepares to enact painful reforms of the social welfare system?  
 
Tune in to the latest edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast," where I discuss these issues with my regular co-host, Kirill Kobrin of RFE/RL's Russian Service.
 
Also on the podcast, Kirill and I take a look at President Vladimir Putin's increasingly strained relations with the family of a onetime political patron.

 Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast: Russia's Big Chill

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to "The Power Vertical Podcast" on iTunes.

If you happen to find yourself featured in an NTV documentary, then you'd best watch your back.

On October 5, the state-controlled television station broadcast the second installment of its "Anatomy of a Protest" series, in which it accused Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov of plotting with senior Georgian officials to stage a coup in Russia.

Five days later, on October 10, Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko instructed the upper chamber of parliament's Defense and Security Committee to investigate the allegations.

And on the morning of October 17, agents from the Investigative Committee -- which has gleefully taken on the role of Russia's "politics police" -- raided the apartments of Udaltsov and two associates, took them in for questioning, and announced they had opened a criminal case based on the NTV documentary.

If you end up being the subject of discussion on an NTV talk show, trouble could be on the way.

On October 13, the host and guests on the program "Metla" spent a good portion of their time smearing the upcoming primary elections to the opposition's Coordinating Council. Among the allegations were that opposition leaders like anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny intended to falsify the online vote, scheduled for October 20-21. The program also suggested that organizers had committed financial improprieties involving candidate-registration fees.

Four days later, prosecutors announced that they were launching a criminal investigation into potential fraud and embezzlement by the organizers of the primaries.

NTV, which is owned by the state-run natural-gas monopoly Gazprom, appears to have become the stalking horse of Russia's security services.

It has long been derisively dubbed "Mentovskoye televideniye," or Cop TV, due to its tendency to air police shows and true-crime dramas. But it is increasingly looking more like Siloviki TV, the place where opposition leaders are smeared with material "leaked" by the security services in slickly produced programs -- complete with dramatic lighting and ominous background music.

The effort has two obvious goals: to discredit key opposition figures in the eyes of the public and to lay the groundwork for potential prosecutions.

And the two most recent targets -- Udaltsov and the primaries for the Coordinating Council -- are particularly telling about what threats the authorities see on the horizon.

Udaltsov is a threat because as the authorities implement what promise to be painful reforms of the social-welfare sector, he will increasingly become a key -- if not the key -- player in the protest movement.

"He is an atypical leftwing politician who could potentially put together competition for the Communists and create a leftist opposition," Igor Bunin of the Center for Political Technologies told "Nezavisimaya gazeta."

"We are now approaching a period of strong social protest that is inevitable in light of the impending crisis and the reforms that the regime is being forced to implement."

And if the opposition manages to elect a Coordinating Council with real democratic legitimacy -- admittedly a big "if" given the splits in its ranks -- it could become, at least in moral terms, a shadow parliament that represents what I have come to call "The Other Russia."

"The key to [President Vladimir] Putin's black PR campaign is to portray the opposition as radicals, anarchists, or ultranationalists who lack both a cogent political program and leadership experience," opposition figure Vladimir Ryzhkov wrote in a recent op-ed in "The Moscow Times."

"They are portrayed by the Kremlin's propaganda machine as self-serving puppets of Western powers who hang out by foreign embassies in Moscow begging for financial support. The other message Putin is trying to send is that opposition leaders based in Moscow are out of touch with the common people in the regions and don't understand their problems and needs."

But the smears could also backfire and lead to greater solidarity among the opposition's ideologically diverse ranks.

Soon after the smear against Udaltsov was launched, much of the opposition -- from social democrats like Gennady Gudkov to rightists like Navalny to socialite-turned-activist Ksenia Sobchak -- rushed to offer moral support.

"The little nips at the opposition by the regime are consolidating this community and this entire subculture because they feel they are in a besieged fortress and they're sticking by one another. They are forgetting about their political differences," Bunin told "Nezavisimaya gazeta."

-- Brian Whitmore

It's been a pretty rough year for Aleksandr Bastrykin.

From his humiliating public apology for the infamous “forest incident,” in which he reportedly threatening a journalist's life, to the "Foreign Agent Bastrykin" hashtags that followed the exposure of his business dealings in Europe, the Investigative Committee chief has become the butt of jokes and the subject of numerous Internet memes.

He's reviled by the opposition for spearheading President Vladimir Putin's crackdown on dissent. And his sharp bureaucratic elbows and aggressive style have earned him plenty of enemies in the ruling elite.

But despite all this, Bastrykin appears on the verge of a major victory: achieving his long-held dream of expanding the Investigative Committee and turning it into a super-duper souped-up agency that would police the police and swallow up many of the responsibilities of other law-enforcement bodies.

A Kremlin-authored bill is on its way to the State Duma that would merge the investigative arms of the Interior Ministry and the Federal Antinarcotics Service into the Investigative Committee. Interior is slated to move 37,000 investigators over and the Antinarcotics Service will send 2,000.

The move, which Bastrykin has long lobbied for, illustrates Putin's desire to shore up his base of support in the bureaucracy amid protests in society and schisms in his ruling elite.

"The clan struggle is intensifying with the wave of protest, attacks on the regime, and the crisis of its legitimacy. The cracks in society, which existed before, are deepening," Moscow-based sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya, who studies the Russian elite, told "Nezavisimaya gazeta" recently.

"The president is faced with the task of strengthening his position. Putin has many different mainstays within the bureaucracy, but he will single out certain fragments of it. These are the so-called firm nuclei -- people and departments that are totally loyal to him."

Bastrykin's Investigative Committee certainly falls into that category. Since Putin's return to the Kremlin, it has been the president's own personal politics police.

It has conducted intimidating early morning apartment searches of troublesome figures like socialite-turned-social activist Ksenia Sobchak and others. It has spearheaded cases against opposition figures like Aleksei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov. And in has investigated and harassed regime defectors like former State Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov.

With the opposition resurgent and the elite splitting, Putin needs someone reliable to keep the street in check and potentially wayward officials in line.

And while Bastrykin appears eager to play that role, his apparent victory could come with a caveat.

According to a recent report in "Kommersant," the impending expansion of the Investigative Committee is accompanied by a renewed push to put it back under the control of the Prosecutor-General's Office.
When the Investigative Committee was established in 2007, it was formally under the control of the Prosecutor-General’s Office. Bastrykin, however, treated Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika with disdain and eventually managed to formally change the arrangement so he reports directly to the president.

The recent reports that the Investigative Committee may be placed back under the Prosecutor-General’s Office have been accompanied by persistent rumors that Chaika is on the way out. A bureaucratic lightweight who is considered an ally of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Chaika has been largely seen as a lame duck since Putin returned to the Kremlin.

Medvedev would like his old law-school classmate Aleksandr Konovalov in the post, but that seems unlikely. The name mentioned most has been Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, a longtime associate of Putin’s dating back to when both served in the St. Petersburg government in the 1990s.

Kozak makes sense for a number of reasons. His reputation as a skilled administrator has made him Putin’s Mr. Fix-It, the go-to guy the Kremlin leader turns to to address intractable problems. Putin also sees Kozak as absolutely loyal and reliable. And he is widely rumored to have long coveted the prosecutor-general’s post.

And for Putin, Kozak appears the perfect choice to keep an eye on a newly empowered Bastrykin -- who, while loyal, has been a bit of a loose cannon and an embarrassment for the Kremlin. Moreover, unchecked, a revved-up Investigative Committee could at some point turn into a threat to Putin.

So while Bastrykin seems on the verge of getting his long-standing wish, he may also be getting an unwelcome chaperone.

“The Kremlin gives with one hand and takes away with the other” because “kingmakers can easily become king breakers,” New York University professor Mark Galeotti, author of the blog “In Moscow’s Shadows,” said on the latest "Power Vertical Podcast."

-- Brian Whitmore

An indictment in the United States this week of 11 alleged Russian agents on charges of illegally exporting sensitive microelectronics through a Texas-based company has refocused attention on the Kremlin's espionage activities, which some analysts say have risen to Cold War levels.
 
But this isn't your father's looking-glass war. In the age of the Internet and social media, international espionage has entered a whole new dimension.
 
In the latest edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast," I discuss the new spy games with my regular co-host, Kirill Kobrin, and special guest Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University who is an expert on Russia's security services and author of the blog "In Moscow's Shadows."
 
Also on the podcast, Kirill, Mark, and I talk about Russian President Vladimir Putin's upcoming birthday celebrations.

The Power Vertical -- Spy Vs. Spy: Russia's Espionage Games

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to The Power Vertical Podcast on iTunes.
 
Enjoy...

December 14, 1989 has been on my mind lately. That's the day Andrei Sakharov died more than two decades ago.

Russians, of course, lost an intellectual giant and a moral compass on that day. But additionally, the democratic opposition, and the segment of society that sympathized with it, lost its undisputed leader.

That mantle, for better or worse, fell to Boris Yeltsin -- who proved adept at bringing down the tottering Soviet system but who was, to put it charitably, far less skilled at building a functional political system in its wake. Sakharov's death, and the change in the opposition's leadership, was highly consequential for Russia's subsequent post-Soviet political development.

Who leads the opposition, especially in a time of rapid political change, really matters.

And this is one of the main reasons why I consider the October 21-22 online primary elections to the current Russian opposition's new Coordinating Council to be potentially very important.

"We are watching a very interesting, intriguing, and optimistic procedure of a real democratic election," Kirill Kobrin of RFE/RL's Russian Service said on last week's edition of the Power Vertical podcast.

As I blogged last week in a post ahead of that podcast, an electoral commission is in place, candidates are being registered, and the online Dozhd TV station begins broadcasting debates among candidates for seats on the council this week.

In many ways, this whole process will be something of a coming-out party for what I have called "The Other Russia."

It will be the time when activists, hipsters, and members of the urban middle class will attempt to turn the slogans they have been chanting on the streets and the values they have been writing about on their blogs into real action -- by holding a truly democratic election among themselves.

Over the past nine months since protests began in earnest, commentators have noted that today's Russian opposition lacks a clear leader. There is certainly nobody with the moral cache of Sakharov out there. There isn't a clear Yeltsin waiting in the wings. There are, instead, several niche figures who appeal to specific constituencies.

But perhaps this isn't such a bad thing.

As virtually everybody commenting on Russian affairs has noted, the current opposition is a diverse lot spanning the spectrum from nationalists to liberals to leftists and everything in between. This, in turn, reflects the fact that Russian society as a whole has become increasingly diverse politically and increasingly differentiated socially.

A 45-member council with an ideologically diverse composition -- the Other Russia's shadow parliament, if you will -- is probably the most effective way to reflect that diversity.

Of course, media chatter about the elections has largely zeroed in on the infighting and intrigues surrounding the vote. The latest involved the latest salvo in an ongoing spat between socialite-turned-activist Ksenia Sobchak and opposition State Duma deputy Ilya Ponomaryov. (The lawmaker accused Sobchak of turning the campaign into a version of the racy Dom-2 reality show she once hosted.)

Given this cynicism, one of the most important numbers I will be watching on October 21-22 is the turnout figure. How many people care enough to cast a ballot will give at least some indication of how large this Other Russia really is? Turnout is also important, because the new council's legitimacy will be linked to how representative the election is.

And then, of course, comes the hard part.

The council's responsibilities will include things like deciding when, where, and why to hold protests and which causes to champion. But they will also involve things like picking candidates for future Russian elections and negotiating with the Kremlin authorities. In theory at least, when the fledgling Power Horizontal talks to the Power Vertical, it will be through the council.

And this will all inevitably get tricky for a body comprising nationalists, liberals, and leftists.

In a comment on my post last week about this issue, the always insightful Sean Guillory of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies noted that reserving seats for the three ideological blocs (five each) "kicks the problem down the road" rather than solving it "democratically through the election."

I would argue, however, that the issue will be resolved -- to a degree -- with the result of the elections for the 30 at-large seats, which make up two-thirds of the council.

I do agree with Sean, however, that the true test of the movement's maturity will come after the election, when the council meets and begins to hammer out its positions.

Sure, it will be messy. But something tells me Andrei Sakharov would have been proud.

-- Brian Whitmore

For more than nine months now it's been a regular feature of the Russian landscape. Tens of thousands of people gather in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities. 
 
They carry signs with clever -- and often hilarious -- antigovernment slogans. They chant things like "Russia Without Putin" and "Free Pussy Riot." They listen to fiery speeches by Aleksei Navalny, Sergei Udaltsov, and other opposition figures.
 
And then everybody goes home until the next protest is called.

Now, there is a growing sentiment among the Russian opposition that street protests like the September 15 March of Millions have reached the point of diminishing returns. Can the opposition move beyond street protests?

A key test will come next month when it will hold online primaries to elect a new Coordinating Council to organize its future activities. 

In the latest edition of the Power Vertical podcast, I discussed the primaries and what they mean with my co-host Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service.

Also on the podcast, Kirill and I discussed the ongoing "cold war" in the Russian elite and the possibility of a government shake-up.

Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast -- September 28, 2012

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to The Power Vertical Podcast on iTunes.

Russia will have free and fair elections in October.
 
There will be real choice with multiple, viable candidates. There will be vigorous televised debates. The vote will be open and transparent, with clear rules of the game.
 
No, I'm not delusional. And no, I am not talking about the local elections scheduled for 73 Russian regions on October 14. Those, I expect, will be as fraudulent as ever.
 
What I'm talking about are the online primary elections the Russian opposition movement is holding a week later, on October 21-22, to choose a 45-member Coordinating Council.
 
The council will decide things like which candidates the opposition will back in future elections and when, where, and why to hold protests. In a nod to the diversity of the opposition movement, it will have five seats each reserved for liberals, nationalists, and leftists -- while 30 will go to at-large candidates.
 
An opposition Electoral Commission is already in place to register candidates and monitor the vote. The online television station Dozhd TV is hosting live debates among any candidates who want to participate. 
 
Some predictable names -- Boris Nemtsov, Garry Kasparov, and Dmitry Gudkov -- are running for seats on the council. So are some relatively fresher opposition figures like anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny, socialite-turned-activist Ksenia Sobchak, writers Dmitry Bykov and Lyudmila Ulitskaya, journalist Filipp Dzyadko, comedians Mikhail Shatz and Tatyana Lazareva, and the popular blogger Rustem Agadamov.
 
So why do we care about elections to a council that will be essentially powerless?
 
I think the opposition primaries are important, and merit attention, for a number of reasons.
 
Opposition figures themselves say they will be a dress rehearsal for free and fair elections in a post-Putin Russia. Along those lines, they are also setting an example by creating an alternative civil society where decisions are arrived at democratically.

The primaries are also important because the opposition clearly needs to move on from its street-protests stage.
 
The early demonstrations after December's disputed State Duma elections were widely interpreted as a show of strength by the rejuvenated opposition -- proof that true dissent was real and blossoming in Russian society and that the Kremlin's foes could consistently put people on the streets in large numbers.
 
But after the latest rally earlier this month -- which had a bit of a pro forma feel to it -- many in the media, including outlets sympathetic to the opposition, began to question the utility of street protests as a vehicle for change.
 
Successfully holding primaries to elect its leaders will be a powerful sign that the opposition is serious and maturing.
 
In a video recently posted on his blog, Navalny said the elections will be important in establishing the legitimacy of the opposition.

"The problem of the opposition's legitimacy needs to be decided through elections, [especially] if we are going to accuse the authorities of lacking legitimacy," he said.
 
But the new Coordinating Council will also present an important test for the opposition. Can figures as diverse as Navalny, Nemtsov, and Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov, as well as their supporters, agree to abide by common rules of the game, even when they don't like the results? Will liberals support a nationalist or leftist candidate the Coordinating Council decides to back in some future election, or vice versa?
 
If the answer to these questions is yes, then next month's primaries will send an important message and represent something of a milestone for Russia's famously fractured opposition.  

-- Brian Whitmore

NOTE TO READERS: Tune in to the next edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast" on September 28, when my co-host Kirill Kobrin and I will discuss the issues raised in this blog post.

A year ago, the mask came off. A year ago, a spark was lit. A year ago, one political era in Russia ended and another began.
 
On September 24, 2011, Dmitry Medvedev took the stage at United Russia's party congress and suggested it nominate Vladimir Putin to run for president. Putin followed suit by saying he would like Medvedev to serve as his prime minister.
 
The tightly choreographed maneuver finally settled years of speculation about which member of the tandem would be president after 2012.

But more importantly, it also answered a deeper question that had lingered throughout the Medvedev presidency: Was this strange little four-year interregnum a transition period to a more pluralistic system? Or was it just a mechanism to keep Putin in the Kremlin for the foreseeable future without violating the letter of the constitution?
 
The answer deeply disappointed -- and in some cases outraged -- those in the elite and broader society whose expectations had been raised during Medvedev's term that a more open political system was in the offing.

The fallout was visible almost immediately, and continues to this day. Longtime Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin's resignation days after the announcement signaled that all wasn't well in Russia's ruling class.
 
Kudrin is a close personal friend of Putin's and his defection clearly came as a shock. "How could you let me down in this way?" Putin reportedly asked him at the time.

And weeks later, when fans at a martial arts boxing match booed Putin when he entered the ring to address them, it was a sign that the self-styled national leader was wearing out his welcome with the general public as well.

Putin, it appeared, had lost his aura of invincibility. His mojo clearly wasn't what it once was. And there was a rebellion brewing below the decks that would soon be visible on the streets of Moscow and other cities.
 
But September 24, 2011 also did something more subtle, but perhaps more important. It exposed something that had been hidden. Or more accurately, it made it impossible to ignore something that everybody had previously pretended wasn't there.
 
Most attentive Russia-watchers eventually come to an understanding that the country's formal institutions of governance -- the presidency, the State Duma, the courts -- are, to a large degree, a facade. Real decisions are made by a small cabal of a few dozen people informally known as everything from "Putin's politburo" to "the collective Putin" to "The Team." The formal institutions merely execute these decisions.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I prefer to call this "Russia's Deep State." And a year ago, this "deep state" stopped being deep and thus lost a degree of its effectiveness.

"The deep state worked when everyone was aware that it existed...but it was willing to operate behind a carapace, a facade of politicians," longtime Kremlin-watcher and New York University professor Mark Galeotti said in a recent Power Vertical podcast.
 
"Putin made the presence of the deep state so clear. He rubbed it in Russians' noses, and that was a big mistake."
 
In a recent interview with CNN, socialite-turned-activist Ksenia Sobchak said this was the moment that drove her into the opposition.
 
"They decided to change Medvedev for Putin and Putin for Medvedev and then they gave us the result. This is not how it should work and people were offended," Sobchak said.

In addition to inflaming public opinion, especially among the fledgling urban middle class, the announcement also ignited a debilitating cold war inside the deep state itself -- where there was apparently little consensus on Putin's return to the Kremlin.

So September 24, 2011 was one of those inflection points, one of those explosive before-and-after moments that foreshadows political change. And one year later we are still waiting for the dust to settle.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

One front in the struggle for Russia was visible in Moscow last weekend as tens of thousands of protesters marched through the capital carrying balloons and placards as thousands of riot police armed with batons and assault weapons looked on.
 
The ratio of police to protesters, longtime Russia-watcher Mark Galeotti wrote on his blog "In Moscow's Shadows," was "distinctly higher than in other, recent protests" and appears to be indicative of "a nervous Kremlin."
 
But it's more than just the ongoing clash with opposition forces that is making the ruling elite jittery these days. What is truly causing sleepless nights is the "second front," the one where Russia's future will likely be decided -- the elite's war with itself.
 
And with reports of an impending government shake-up and of deep, enduring, and hardening splits in the Kremlin administration, signals abound that this longstanding intra-elite "cold war" could go hot at any time.
 
One aspect of this intramural struggle is simply a naked battle for power and a clash of political ambitions. Another is a heated debate over which tactics -- sticks or carrots -- would best tame the Russian Street and keep the current elite safely in power.
 
But part of the schism is also ideological, with part of the elite believing that increased pluralism -- albeit managed -- is necessary in a rapidly changing society and another faction seeking to revive the tough authoritarianism that marked President Vladimir Putin's first stint in the Kremlin.
 
For the time being, those seeking to turn the clock back to 2007 appear to be winning. A series of tough laws cracking down on dissent have been passed. Dissidents like Pussy Riot and defectors like Gennady Gudkov are being dealt with. And the tepid reforms Dmitry Medvedev ushered in during his presidency are being rolled back.
 
But what is also becoming clear is the model of governance Putin constructed over the past decade, in which he controlled the elite by playing the role of the indispensible arbiter of its warring clans, has -- to say the least -- lost its effectiveness.

"It is this model of statecraft that has now entered a crisis...[Putin's] system of rule, if the not the system itself, shows sign of exhaustion," Richard Sakwa, a professor of Russian politics at the University of Kent, wrote in Opendemocracy.net.
 
"Putin's return has destabilized the system that he so assiduously created, although in formal terms matters continue much as before."
 
The Artist And The Bureaucrat
 
One focal point of the struggle within the elite is the fierce rivalry between Putin's former chief ideologist and political manager, Vladislav Surkov, and the man who succeeded him, Vyacheslav Volodin.
 
In the most recent edition of the Power Vertical podcast, my co-host Kirill Kobrin of RFE/RL's Russian Service astutely noted that Surkov approached the job like an "artist" while Volodin behaves more like a "post-Soviet bureaucrat."
 
In practice this means that Surkov's approach to the regime's opponents was to charm, cajole, hoodwink, and -- wherever possible -- to co-opt them. Volodin's is to run them over and whack them over the head with a baseball bat.
 
Surkov also stayed very tuned in to prevailing social forces and understood that as Russian society became more complex, differentiated, and affluent, the political system needed to create outlets to accommodate the emerging pluralism. Failure to do so would lead to political unrest of the sort we are seeing now.
 
He reportedly was pushing for Medvedev to remain president for a second term to complete his program of political and economic modernization, with Putin of course remaining firmly in control behind the scenes.
 
Surkov was also pushing for a form of "managed pluralism" in the State Duma, with United Russia sharing power with a broader constellation of obedient and housebroken "opposition" parties.
 
With the announcement a year ago that Putin was returning to the presidency and Medvedev would become prime minister, it, of course, became clear that Surkov had lost that argument. Months later, after the December 2011 parliamentary elections, he also lost his Kremlin job and was ultimately replaced by his archrival, Volodin.
 
Down but not out, Surkov ended up as chief of staff of Medvedev's government. He's no longer running the political show, but he still has numerous loyalists in the Kremlin (despite Volodin's efforts to purge them), in the media, and throughout the bureaucracy. 
 
The conventional wisdom is that he is gathering his forces, biding his time, and waiting for Volodin's strategy to fail
 
"Slava has taken a break, but this game is not over. They are waiting for the [Kremlin] staff's chosen strategy to lead it into an impasse," an unidentified Kremlin official told Gazeta.ru.

Shareholders And Managers
 
Surkov was one of the key architects of Putin's authoritarian system and his push for greater pluralism was driven by pragmatism more than by principle.
 
As I have blogged in the past, the upper echelons of the Russian elite are largely comprised of shareholders who control resources and are collecting rents from the system, and managers who owe their position in the elite to their specific technical skills.

Surkov and former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin are managers. And as specialists, respectively, in political and economic management they understood the system had to change, modernize, and become more pluralistic. Their goal was not democracy, but rather to preserve the system by reforming it.
 
Political managers like Surkov understood that the fledgling middle class would rebel in the face of continued authoritarian rule. And economic stewards like Kudrin understood that economic modernization required a degree of political liberalization.
 
Shareholders like Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and Putin cronies Gennady Timchenko and Yury Kovalchuk, on the other hand, opposed opening the system up because they feared that any change would threaten their continued access to rents, their position in the elite, and -- possibly -- their freedom.
 
The shareholders won this argument, which engulfed the elite during the latter stages of the Medvedev presidency, and their victory was evident at the September 24, 2011, United Russia congress when Putin's return to the Kremlin was announced.
 
But their victory has turned out to be pyrrhic. The rebellion Surkov and other political managers like former Kremlin spinmeister Gleb Pavlovsky expected has come to pass. And with Putin's return, economic modernization appears to be off the agenda, which could have dire consequences as it leaves Russia dangerously dependent on commodities exports.
 
And now, Pavlovsky says, they are in a bind. "They have no follow-up step," he told Gazeta.ru. "They cannot endlessly adopt ever-new emergency laws and they cannot suppress all liberal media."
 
Siloviki And Civiliki
 
Meanwhile, it is quickly becoming conventional wisdom that a government shake-up is coming this fall and that Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika will be one of the top officials to lose his job.
 
The leading candidate to replace Chaika, according to a recent report in "Nezavisimaya gazeta," is Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak. But a second name being floated is Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov, who is Medvedev's old law-school classmate -- an association that many officials believe will ultimately disqualify him.
 
"Konovalov's position is weaker because he is perceived by many people as a member of Medvedev's team," an unidentified Kremlin source told the daily.
 
Konovalov was the most high-profile of the so-called "civiliki," or officials with backgrounds in civil law, that Medvedev either appointed or promoted during his presidency. Many of them studied or taught alongside him at the law faculty of St. Petersburg State University in the 1990s.
 
Other high-level figures include Konstantin Chuichenko, who heads the Kremlin's Central Control Directorate; Nikolai Vinnichenko, the presidential envoy to the Urals Federal District; Deputy Prosecutor-General Nikolai Gutsan; and Moscow Arbitration Court Chairwoman Valeria Adamova.
 
During his presidency, Medvedev was using the civiliki as a counterweight to the siloviki, the security-service veterans like Sechin and Sergei Ivanov who surround Putin.
 
As Medvedev's star faded after Putin's return to the Kremlin, the civiliki's influence of course faded. But they are still present throughout the bureaucracy.
 
"Real fragmentation is taking place by age because Medvedev rejuvenated the system of administration," prominent Moscow-based sociologist and expert on the Russian elite Olga Kryshtanovskaya told "Nezavisimaya gazeta."
 
"The more conservative older part of the elite was irritated by this and moved toward Putin. And those who were younger moved toward Medvedev in hopes of a quick career if Medvedev remained for a second term."
 
They are also ideologically inclined toward greater pluralism. "Many observers are convinced that these leaders are giving financial support to the opposition," Kryshtanovskaya said
 
The Decider
 
And what about the man in the middle of it all?
 
Writing in Opendemocracy.net, Kent University's Richard Sakwa notes that while on one hand "Putin is back," on the other "the country and the political system have evolved."
 
A continued "tightening of the screws would cause the system to lose " whatever remains of the inner resources of dynamism and renewal" and "play into the hands of those many voices now predicting the decline and fall of the regime," he writes.
 
Sakwa argues, however, that there is still time to change course. "The third Putin term may yet see a new synthesis emerge. A positive reinvention of Russian political order requires an act of unprecedented leadership and political imagination," he writes.
 
Color me skeptical on that, at least for the time being.
 
In a recent interview with Gazeta.ru, political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky succinctly contextualized the hard-line Kremlin attitude that has prevailed since Putin's third term began in May.
 
"This is a series of measures aimed at bringing reality into line with Vladimir Putin's psychological state," Belkovsky said.
 
"Putin wants everything around him to be stable. He is also hurt and offended that he is being accused of all sorts of crimes and that the opposition does not appreciate the concessions he made on things like the election of mayors and governors and easing the rules on party registration."
 
If real political change comes at this point, it will likely be despite Putin, not because of him. it will result from a combination of pressure from the Russian Street and the resolution of the "cold war" within the elite in favor of those advocating greater pluralism.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

A new season of protests kicks off on September 15 with mass rallies planned for Moscow and other cities.

But in addition to the opposition's longstanding demands for early elections and a more competitive and pluralistic political system, a new element will be added to the protest mix in what promises to be a very hot autumn -- social issues.

In the coming months, the Russian authorities are due to implement a series of reforms of the country's creaking social welfare infrastructure, including its pension and health-care system. Utilities prices are expected to rise.

Additionally, Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization earlier this summer has sparked increasing anxiety among labor unions and rank-and-file workers.

The prevailing protest mood and the addition of social issues to the equation appears to present an opportunity for Russia's left wing political forces -- if they can seize it.

In this week's edition of the Power Vertical podcast, I discuss the state of the Russian left with my regular co-host Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service.

Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast - 14 September, 2012

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to The Power Vertical Podcast on iTunes.

It's the last day of August. Summer is over. And there are storm clouds on the horizon.

Russia's political season is set to resume after a summer recess that was anything but quiet. And with local elections, opposition primaries, antigovernment demonstrations, and social reforms in the offing, the autumn promises to be even more turbulent.

In the latest edition of the Power Vertical podcast, I speak with special guest host Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University and author of the blog "In Moscow's Shadows"  about the upcoming political season.

Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast -- August 31, 2012

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to The Power Vertical Podcast on iTunes.

Earlier this week, Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Orthodox Church's social affairs department, issued a dire warning in response to vandals chopping down crosses in Arkhangelsk and in Chelyabinsk Oblast.
 
"People who are currently cutting down crosses in the future may turn to violence and murder," Chaplin said on August 26.

The vandalism took place shortly after three members of the feminist punk rock collective Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for an anti-Kremlin protest performance in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral in February.
 
Despite the lack of any real evidence suggesting a connection, the state-controlled media quickly linked the incidents to the group's supporters.

Then, four days after Chaplin's comments, on August 30, the Investigative Committee announced that two women were brutally stabbed to death in their apartment in Kazan. Investigators said  the inscription "Free Pussy Riot," written "presumably" in blood, was found in the apartment.
 
It didn't take the pro-Kremlin Russian media long to run with the meme.
 
A headline on the website of the state-run "Vesti" television news program began: "They've Started To Kill For Pussy Riot."

Kristina Potupchik, the former spokeswoman for the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, also wasted no time in drawing conclusions.
 
On her blog, she juxtaposed a photograph of the "Free Pussy Riot" inscription in Kazan with one from the 1969 murders committed by followers of Charles Manson in California, in which they wrote "Death To Pigs" on the walls of their victims' homes. Potupchik wrote that Pussy Riot's supporters "will not get away" with the crime.

And Dimitry Smirnov, head of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for Relations with the Police and Armed Forces, said that "blood is on the conscience" of those who supported Pussy Riot members during their trial. Smirnov also called on Paul McCartney, Amnesty International, and others to renounce the group.

It was a full-court press. But as the day progressed, holes began to appear in the initial version of events.
 
First, Andrei Sheptitsky, a Kazan-based spokesman for the Investigative Committee, said the evidence suggested the crime was committed by either a psychopath or a drug addict and that the inscription appeared to be an attempt to cover up the crime and mislead police.
 
Then, the online Dozhd TV noted that the initial reports of the crime in the Kazan media, which appeared in the evening on August 29 when the bodies were discovered, made no mention of the "Free Pussy Riot" inscription.

WATCH THE DOZHD TV REPORT HERE:
 

 
And Petr Verzilov, husband of jailed Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, later tweeted a link to a report on the killings in the daily "Komsomolskaya pravda" that said police worked on the crime scene "all night." The report also made no mention of the inscription.

The fact that reports of the inscription first appeared on LifeNews, a website with ties to the security services, also raised suspicions that the official story might not be entirely accurate.

Nikolai Polozov, an attorney for the three jailed members of the group, called the crime in Kazan "horrible," adding that either it was committed by a psychopath or was a "horrendous provocation."
 
In an interview with Dozhd TV,  Geidar Dzhemal, chairman of the Kazan-based Islamic Committee of Russia, said he had no doubt that the attempts to link the killings in Kazan -- and the vandalism against the crosses in Arkhangelsk and Chelyabinsk -- to Pussy Riot supporters was orchestrated by the authorities:
   
This story is developing very quickly and I am reluctant to draw any firm conclusions just yet. But there is a lot here that raises serious questions. I'll leave it at that for now.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

UPDATE: Police in Kazan say they have detained a man who confessed to killing the two women. The man, identified as 38-year-old university professor Igro Danilevsky, knew one of the victims and denied any connection to Pussy Riot. Interfax reported that he also confessed to trying to "fake a ritual killing" and mislead police by writing "Free Pussy Riot" on the wall.

(A big thanks to my colleague Pavel Butorin of @RusPoliceWatch for help in compiling material for this post.)

The authorities couldn't have scripted it better. The first high-profile test of a new law imposing stiff fines for unsanctioned public gatherings would involve none other than Garry Kasparov.
 
The former world chess champion turned opposition figure was detained outside a Moscow courthouse on August 17, the last day of the trial of three members of the feminist punk rock collective Pussy Riot. Kasparov said he was just speaking to journalists. Police said he was chanting "Down with the police state," "Russia without Putin," and other antigovernment slogans.
 
So they caught a pretty big fish. And few doubted, given Russia's servile courts, that Kasparov would be given a show trial. And few doubted that the show trial would result in a fine of up to $1,000 in accordance with the new law.
 
Enter Judge Yekaterina Veklich.
 
In the August 24 Power Vertical podcast, my co-host Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service, said the following:
   
Timely words indeed. Hours later, Veklich found Kasparov not guilty.
 
“The facts recorded in the police report do not correspond to reality,” she said in acquitting him.

Kasparov is now seeking to have the police who detained him brought up on criminal charges. 
 
In preparing his defense, Kasparov gathered photographic and video evidence of the run-up to his detention to prove he wasn't shouting antigovernment slogans as police had alleged. He also used time stamps on photographs of his arrest to show that it took place more than an hour before the time listed in the police report -- bolstering his case that the police report was fabricated.
 
Moreover, journalists interviewing Kasparov when he was detained (including RFE/RL's Danila Galperovich) testified in his defense.
 
But none of that would have mattered if Veklich had acted according to the expected script. If she had not decided to issue her ruling based on the facts, rather than the political needs of the Kremlin.
 
As I have blogged here and the Russian media has covered extensively, there has long been a deep division in the elite between those who want to govern like it's 2007 and those who see a need to move on -- albeit slowly -- towards a more pluralistic approach. Most of this -- conflicts between shareholders and managers and between siloviki and technocrats -- has focused on the upper echelons.
 
Just last week, Gazeta.ru had a piece on a schism inside the Kremlin administration over the crackdown that followed Vladimir Putin's return to power. "Not everyone likes the harsh suppression of opposition and crude propaganda," the author, Yekaterina Vinokurova, wrote.
 
And the longer this split at the top persists, the more likely it will be reflected throughout the bureaucracy, in the law-enforcement community, and yes, in the courts.
 
"Those in Russian state bodies have a choice," Kobrin said during the podcast.
 
I suspect we will be seeing more and more officials like Judge Veklich surprising us in the future.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

A global pop star sued for spreading "gay propaganda" in St. Petersburg. A "zombies" march in Siberia banned after being condemned by the church. A call by a militialike group to deploy brigades of Christian vigilantes to patrol holy sites and defend them against enemies of the faith endorsed by a leading Orthodox Church official.

Russia's culture wars are heating up.

An emboldened Orthodox Church has become markedly more assertive in defending what it considers traditional values. Meanwhile, much of Russian society has become more cosmopolitan, more tolerant, and bolder in its own right.

In this week's edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast," I discussed the deepening schism in Russian society with my regular co-host, Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service.

Also on the podcast, Kirill and I explore a much-discussed new report on the clans and personalities that make up the current Russian political elite.

The Power Vertical -- August 24, 2012

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to The Power Vertical Podcast on iTunes.

Enjoy...

Six months after their controversial performance at Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral, three members of the feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot -- Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova -- received two-year prison sentences.
 
The verdict and sentence came just after the 100-day mark of President Vladimir Putin's third term in the Kremlin and highlights the fact that the Kremlin leader is in no mood to tolerate dissent, despite mounting discontent in society. A new poll, meanwhile, shows Putin's approval rating falling to the lowest level of his presidency.
 
In this edition of the Power Vertical Podcast, I discussed the Pussy Riot verdict and its political implications with my regular co-host, Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service.

Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast: The Politics Of The Pussy Riot Verdict

• Playlist
• Download

Remember when something called "the Family" dominated Russian politics and Boris Berezovsky looked invincible?

It wasn't that long ago. Just over a decade back.
 
In late 1999, I was having dinner in a Moscow restaurant with some colleagues and we noticed Berezovsky and some hangers-on a few tables away.
 
One colleague gestured to the uber-oligarch's entourage, which was flanked by the usual phalanx of bodyguards, and said: "Wouldn't you love to just approach him and ask: 'Boris Abramovich, what exact scheme are you working on right now?'"
 
It was conventional wisdom at the time that Berezovsky was the master of Russia's political universe. As the informal leader of the so-called "Family," the shadowy collection of tycoons, cronies, and bureaucrats surrounding the ailing President Boris Yeltsin, he had the Kremlin wired and was orchestrating the rise of Vladimir Putin -- who the media called "the Family's candidate." We assumed Berezovsky would keep Putin on a tight leash, too.

We, of course, were dead wrong.

As the new millennium approached, Berezovsky and "the Family" may have looked omnipotent, but the tectonic plates supporting the political order were shifting. A new political era was on the way -- and "the Family" was on the way out (although some of its members, Roman Abramovich for example, found a place in the new order).

Inflection points like the one at the end of the 1990s can sneak up on you and there is often an analytical bias in favor of expecting the status quo to continue indefinitely. One of the tricks for Russia watchers is to know when the paradigm is about to shift, when the meta-narrative is truly changing.
 
Are we at such an inflection point again? I don't know for sure, of course, but I do suspect we are approaching one.
 
Putin still has the full weight of the Russian state at his disposal. He can use obedient courts to imprison his opponents and deploy administrative methods to rig elections. His cronies control the traditional media, the energy sector, and much of the country's heavy industry.
 
But regimes like Putin's don't survive on repression alone. To be stable and successful, they also need, for lack of a better term, soft power.
 
And on this score, 100 days into Putin's third term, it has become clear that the Kremlin has lost much of its mojo on this score. Team Putin isn't controlling the national conversation anymore. They've lost the support -- and even the passive acquiescence -- of important segments of the population. They are bickering among themselves and deeply divided. And a savvy new generation of opposition figures is on the rise.
 
Swindlers, Thieves, And Foreign Agents
 
There was a time when Putin could say something -- Мочить в сортире, or "wipe 'em out in the latrine," for example -- and it would be repeated endlessly and become part of the political lexicon.
 
It was entertaining for much of the public and burnished the president's pop culture image as an action-hero tough guy. But more importantly, Putin's colorful use of the Russian language helped establish a powerful national narrative: Russia has a strong, cool, and decisive leader and is rising up from its knees; Putin's opponents are feckless and doomed; the troubled '90s are over; we won't be pushed around anymore.
 
Putin's Kremlin once excelled at this kind of thing. They don't anymore. The narratives they try to push -- like blaming mass demonstrations on foreign agitators -- appear worn and dated, and Putin's scatological slang just isn't that funny anymore.
 
Now it is the opposition that is succeeding in getting its one-liners into the country's collective consciousness. With message discipline and tech-savvy that would make a political consultant proud, anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny has managed to turn phrases like партия жуликов и воров (Party of Swindlers and Thieves) and Иностранный агент Бастрыкин (Foreign Agent Bastrykin) into powerful cultural markers.
 
This may seem trivial, but it's not. It is helping to establish a new counternarrative that the current ruling elite is corrupt and incompetent -- and have overstayed its welcome. According to the Levada Center, some 42 percent of Russians now agree with the statement that United Russia is a "party of swindlers and thieves."
 
We Exist
 
For an opposition narrative to take hold, it needs a receptive audience. Does anybody remember the chants of "We Need Another Russia!" from anti-Kremlin rallies, attended by a dozen or so brave souls, back in 2006 or 2007? I didn't think so.
 
In those days, most people didn't want another Russia. Most were fine with the one they had and it was easier for the Kremlin to marginalize, trivialize, and ridicule its opponents. It's not so easy today.
 
Never mind the tens of thousands who can be counted on to regularly show up at opposition protests in Moscow. The broader public opinion poll numbers tell an even starker story.
 
Putin's raw approval rating is somewhere between the mid-50s and low 60s, depending on the poll. But as political analyst Kirill Rogov pointed out in a much-discussed article last month, it isn't as solid as it appears at first glance. 
 
"This would be an excellent result for the president of any democratic country, but it is unacceptable for a ‘tsar’ – an unassailable and all-powerful leader with an unshakeable mandate. Putin has, in effect, lost his mandate," Rogov wrote.

According to the Levada Center data that Rogov cites, Putin's hardcore supporters number between 15-20 percent, while his soft and conditional support is between 40-45 percent. But most of these people, the data show, do not want him to rule in the same manner he did between 2000-08. These soft-core supporters want another Putin, and they aren't getting one -- which means they can flip to the other side at any time.
 
Putin's hard-core opponents, meanwhile, number about 15 percent, while another 15-20 percent "share the anti-Putin mood to some extent."
 
One of the most powerful slogans to emerge over the past eight months actually wasn't produced by Navalny. I'm not sure where it came from, but It showed up on numerous placards at protests and was part of the refrain in one of Pussy Riot's (pre-Christ the Savior Cathedral) performances.
 
It was simply: "We Exist."
 
A powerful constituency for change does, indeed, exist now. It grew out of the increasingly confident middle class that emerged during Putin's rule. It is powered and networked by increased Internet penetration and the explosion of social networks. And it's not going away anytime soon.
 
The Next Generation
 
Yeah, but there isn't any real alternative to Putin and his team. The opposition is a hodgepodge of nationalists, leftists, and liberals and has no viable leaders.
 
These are common refrains, repeated by Kremlin-friendly spinmeisters since mass antigovernment demonstrations broke out in December.
 
And there is a degree of truth to this. At each period of change in recent Russian history, there has been a leader-in-waiting ready to take charge.
 
As the Soviet Union imploded, it was, of course, Yeltsin. And as Yeltsin's chaotic, turbulent, and corruption-tainted presidency wound down, there was the anointed successor Putin, whose style of rule reminded no one of Yeltsin.
 
Now there is...nobody.
 
But the flaw with this line of thinking is the assumption that just because change is in the air, the regime's fall is imminent. I don't think it is.
 
What I think is happening is that Team Putin has lost the initiative and lost it decisively. They have no rationale for their continued rule other than, well, they want their rule to continue. They could still be in power for awhile. But the hyperconfident Kremlin we saw during Putin's first two terms is a thing of the past.
 
And meanwhile, the opposition -- that hodgepodge of liberals, leftists, and nationalists -- is gearing up for a long endgame.
 
In the autumn, they will hold online primaries to choose a 45-member council that will be tasked with making key decisions, like which candidates will run in local elections, which initiatives to support, and when to hold demonstrations.

"The problem of the opposition's legitimacy needs to be decided through elections, [especially] if we are going to accuse the authorities of lacking legitimacy," Navalny said in a video explaining the primaries on his blog this week. 
 
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE:

 

The primaries won't quite produce a shadow government. But they'll be a start.
 
The Deep State Deep-Sixed?
 
When the history of this period is written, one date will likely loom large as the beginning of the end for the current ruling elite: September 24, 2011.
 
That was the day when it was announced at the United Russia congress that Putin would return to the presidency and Dmitry Medvedev would become prime minister.
 
It was also the day when what I like to call Russia's "deep state," a permanent super-elite that rules outside the confines of constitutional law, came to the surface -- and in the process lost a large degree of its legitimacy.
 
As New York University's Mark Galeotti pointed out in an earlier edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast," for a deep state to work, "it has to remain deep."

In other words, everyone knows it is there but everyone pretends that it's not.
 
As Mark explained, Putin made the mistake of "dragging the deep state into public view" -- a move that broke the spell, inflamed public opinion, and created crippling divisions within the elite itself.
 
"The deep state worked when everyone was aware that it existed...but it was willing to operate behind a carapace, a facade of politicians," he said. "Putin made the presence of the deep state so clear. He rubbed it in Russians' noses, and that was a big mistake."
 
-- Brian Whitmore

Three members of the feminist punk rock collective Pussy Riot stole the show in the last day of their trial in Moscow this week.
 
Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were contrite when appropriate, issuing a heartfelt apology for offending Orthodox Christians' religious sensibilities with their controversial protest in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
 
But the three women were also poised, articulate, and forceful in defending their actions in a blistering critique of Putin's authoritarian rule and what they call his abuse of religion for political purposes.
 
In many ways, they managed to turn their own trial into an opportunity to indict Russia's political system and create a public-relations disaster for the Kremlin.
 
On this week's edition of the Power Vertical podcast, I discussed the Pussy Riot case and its broader significance with my regular co-host, Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service.
 
Regardless of what verdict comes down next week, has Pussy Riot already won?

Power Vertical Podcat: Has Pussy Riot Already Won?

• Playlist
• Download

Whatever you think about Aleksei Navalny's politics, it's hard not to be impressed by his ingenuity.
 
This week, he was at it again, releasing an application called a "Truth Browser" on Google Chrome that translates Russian-language web pages into Navalny-speak.  
 
With a simple mouse click, United Russia magically changes -- of course -- into "партия жуликов и воров" or, "The Party of Swindlers and Thieves."
 
And Navalny's nemesis, Investigative Committee chief Aleksandr Bastrykin? That of course morphs into "Иностранный агент Бастрыкин" (Foreign Agent Bastrykin).
 
Detractors may dismiss it as a childish prank, except for the fact that Navalny's antics have a tendency to seep into Russia's political bloodstream and affect the zeitgeist. This is, after all, the guy who coined the phrase "Swindlers and Thieves" that has become part of the country's lexicon. He clearly understands the PR value of monotonous repetition and has clearly gotten under the ruling elite's collective skin.
 
Which is why Bastrykin is now trying to silence, sideline, or at least discredit Navalny with the criminal charges which were announced last week.
 
The writer Anna Fedorova opined in "Izvestia" recently that the way the charges were formulated suggests that Bastrykin's goal is to damage Navalny's brand -- just as he has successfully damaged the brand of the ruling elite with his "swindlers and thieves" campaign.
 
The battle between Navalny and Bastrykin, she wrote, increasingly resembles "a war in looking-glass land [where] we see two crooked mirrors directed toward each other. The authorities and the opposition are doing one and the same thing: trying to use the other side's own arguments against them."
 
And she suggested that the effort to taint Navalny as corrupt could prove effective.
   
In an interview on Dozhd TV on the day he was charged with organizing a criminal conspiracy to steal 16 million rubles ($506, 448) worth of timber products from the state-owned KirovLes company, Navalny made a similar point.

"They just want people to hear over and over on television that Navalny stole 16 million," he said.
 
WATCH THE WHOLE INTERVIEW HERE:
 

 
Mindful of this, Navalny has made it clear that he doesn't plan to allow Bastrykin to define him as a crook in the public consciousness. In remarks reported by RIA-Novosti, he said he will soon release specific documents proving his innocence and that the case against him has been fabricated.
 
The case, which dates back to 2009 when Navalny was an unpaid adviser to Kirov Governor Nikita Belykh, has been indeed gone through so many bizarre twists and turns that it is easy even for somebody unfavorably disposed toward Navalny to have suspicions about the allegations' veracity.
 
Since the investigation was first launched in December 2011, it has been closed for lack of evidence and then reopened and closed so many times that it is easy to lose track.
 
It was reopened most recently in April at Bastrykin's very public insistence, with the charges changed and with individuals who previously testified against Navalny suddenly being named as his coconspirators. (A detailed analysis of the charges themselves is the subject of a separate post. But for now I would recommend this piece in "Novoye vremya" which does a good job of chronicling the case.)

But before the case ever gets to court -- if it ever gets to court -- this odd little "looking-glass war" over public perceptions is bound to continue. As are incidents like Navalny's claim to have found a sophisticated listening device in his office this week. 
 
And the case could have implications far beyond Navalny's fate. As I have blogged in the past, Bastrykin clearly wants to play hardball with the opposition and wants to put Navalny away badly. But as Kremlin-watcher and siloviki expert Mark Galeotti pointed out in the latest Power Vertical podcast, his enthusiasm is not shared by many in the ruling elite -- or even in the law-enforcement community.
 
How this case winds up, therefore, could end up being one barometer of Russia's future political direction.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

It's long been clear that Investigative Committee chief Aleksandr Bastrykin wants to play hardball with Russia's opposition.
 
And the announcement this week that anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny will be facing criminal charges that could land him in prison for a decade marked the biggest and most brazen escalation to date in his war on dissent.
 
But apparently, not all of the Russian elite shares Bastrykin's zeal for a crackdown.
 
Moreover, in Navalny, the Investigative Committee head has chosen a shrewd, savvy target who is capable of mobilizing public opinion and who has indicated he won't go down without a fight.
 
In this week's edition of the Power Vertical podcast, I spoke to my regular co-host Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service and veteran Kremlin-watcher Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University, about the looming struggle between Bastrykin and Navalny -- and what it portends. 
 
Also on the podcast, Kirill, Mark, and I discussed why the month of August is so prone to dramatic events in Russia.
 
Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast: Navalny No Pushover For Bastrykin

• Playlist
• Download

As anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny entered the Investigative Committee today for questioning, a police "avtozak," or paddy wagon, conspicuously entered the building's courtyard in plain view of journalists and the opposition leader's supporters.

The message seemed to be clear: Navalny was about to be arrested.
 
But about an hour later, he emerged from his interrogation as a free man -- at least for the moment. Prosecutors quickly announced that Navalny had been charged with stealing 10,000 cubic meters of timber products from the state-owned KirovLes company between May and September 2009, and was ordered not to leave Moscow.

On the surface, the formal charges against Navalny marked a clear escalation in the ongoing battle between the Kremlin and Russia's highest-profile opposition figure. This isn't about spending 15 days in jail for attending an unauthorized demonstration. These charges could result in a decade-long prison sentence.
 
And the paddy wagon that just happened to show up -- and lit up the Russian Internet with rumors that Navalny's arrest was imminent? What was that all about?
 
It could have been just a head game. Navalny and Investigative Committee chief Alekksandr Bastrykin have, after all, been playing plenty of those with each other lately.
 
Navalny spent much of the day on July 28 needling Bastrykin on Twitter over documents detailing his ownership -- in violation of Russian law -- of a real estate company in the Czech Republic. He went so far as to playfully suggest that the country's top law enforcement official was a "foreign agent" and told Dozhd TV that it was suspicious that he owned a business and had long-term residence in "a NATO country."
 
But there seems to be more than just head games going on here.
 
The whole scene -- the arrival of the "avtozak" coupled with Navalny leaving the Investigative Committee sans handcuffs, albeit charged with a crime that carries a stiff prison sentence -- provides a metaphor for the ambiguity among the ruling elite about how to deal with this man whom the Kremlin clearly views as a threat.
 
Bastrykin obviously wants to play hardball -- but others apparently don't.
 
The KirovLes case, first opened in 2010, stems from a period when Navalny served as an unpaid adviser to Kirov Governor Nikita Belykh.
 
Prosecutors initially alleged that Navalny used his position to inflict material damage on the timber company through fraud or abuse of trust.
 
Belykh himself forcefully dismissed the charges. "Aleksei, when working for the Kirov region, was a member of a working group to reorganize KirovLes and was dealing with the issue of increasing transparency in the timber industry," Belykh said in December 2010. "Neither the Kirov regional office of the state unitary enterprise KirovLes, nor its founder -- the government -- has any issue with Aleksei."

The investigation was closed several times for lack of evidence -- only to be reopened again.
 
It was most recently closed in April of this year, sparking a sharp rebuke from Bastrykin himself in June. "There is this man called Navalny," Bastrykin said at a meeting of regional Investigative Committee officials in St. Petersburg. "Why did you close the criminal case against him without informing your superiors?"

Late last week, reports surfaced that the case had been reopened yet again -- and this time would be handled in Moscow, not Kirov. And when formal charges were announced today, they were more serious than the original allegations.
 
Prosecutors now allege that Navalny colluded with the head of a state timber company and trader to steal the products, which carries a sentence of five to 10 years in prison.
 
In a post on his blog, Navalny offered a detailed rebuttal of the charges.

As I blogged earlier, much of the elite -- and some in the security and law enforcement community -- are deeply uncomfortable with the way Bastrykin has gone after the opposition following Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin.
 
And this case encapsulates those divisions.
 
Prosecuting Navalny would temporarily sideline the man who rebranded United Russia as the "party of swindlers and thieves." But it would also inflame an already restless society and create another martyr for the opposition -- and in that capacity, Navalny might  prove even more dangerous inside prison than as a free man.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

Aleksandr Bastrykin must be having a horrible summer.
 
Last week, the Investigations Committee chief was forced to deal with his second scandal in just over a month when anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny relentlessly tweeted documents detailing his ownership -- in violation of Russian law -- of a real estate company in the Czech Republic.
 
The story isn't actually new. It was broken by investigative journalist and State Duma deputy Aleksandr Khinshtein back in 2008, shortly after Bastrykin became a bona fide political heavyweight when he was named head of the newly formed Investigative Committee.
 
Bastrykin denied the story back then, but was unable to do so anymore once Navalny began circulating Czech Justice Ministry documents proving it on his blog and on Twitter, with delightfully mischievous hashtags like #АгентБастрыкин (AgentBastrykin).

Last week's embarrassment for Russia's top cop, of course, came on the heels of last month's infamous incident in the woods, when Bastrykin reportedly had "Novaya gazeta's" deputy editor, Sergei Sokolov, whose unflattering coverage displeased him, hauled out to a forest near Moscow where he threatened the journalist's life.

But at this point, the most interesting aspect of Bastrykin's scandal-ridden summer is less the details of the cases and more why these things are being aired and who is behind them.
 
In Russia, such indignities don't normally happen to somebody so powerful by accident. And when they do, it usually means that somebody is in the crosshairs of somebody just as powerful.
 
So, who is out to get Bastrykin? And why?
 
A common denominator in the two scandals has been Khinshtein's role in promoting them. When the Sokolov forest incident came to light, Khinshtein tweeted it feverishly and even called for an investigation in the Duma.
 
And, of course, Khinshtein first broke the Czech real estate story and pushed it anew on Twitter last week.
 
Khinshtein is no ordinary investigative journalist. According to media reports he is closely tied to the security services -- particularly to elements within the Federal Security Service (FSB) -- and his articles are often used to spark broader attacks on targets of choice and opportunity.
 
Over the years he has gone after officials ranging from former Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo to ex-Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
 
So despite the fact that Bastrykin has some very powerful friends -- he was a law school classmate of Vladimir Putin's and is reportedly close to Rosneft CEO and uber-silovik Igor Sechin -- he has clearly made powerful enemies as well.
 
According to New York University professor Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia's security services and author of the blog "In Moscow's Shadows," Bastrykin's expansion of the Investigative Committee's competence and his success in gaining independence from any supervision, save Putin's, has raised alarm bells in silovikiland.
 
"Bastrykin overreached when he got the Investigative Committee to become an independent agency and hyped its role policing the siloviki, overtly the Interior Ministry and military but implicitly also [the] FSB and Federal Antinarcotics Service," Galeotti told me in an e-mail conversation.

Bastrykin also reportedly has very poor relations with Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika.
 
Moreover, Bastrykin and the Investigative Committee have clearly taken the lead in the Kremlin’s crackdown against the opposition, while the Interior Ministry and FSB have kept a much lower profile. And Bastrykin's methods appear to have other parts of the elite -- including some siloviki -- recoiling.

"The more he pushed the antidissent line for his own purposes, the more he seemed not only dangerous to the others but also to be moving into their turf," Galeotti wrote.
 
Of course politics often makes strange bedfellows, as was illustrated by the insider Khinshtein and the opposition figure Navalny briefly reading from the same script last week.

But in comments to Russian media on July 30, Khinshtein insisted that he was not in cahoots with the anticorruption blogger.
 
"The enemy of my enemy is still not my friend," Khinshtein said.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

NOTE TO READERS: Mark Galeotti will appear on the Power Vertical podcast on Friday, August 3 to discuss the ins and outs of Bastrykin's troubles and what they may mean for the ruling elite. So stay tuned!

Just over two years ago, in March 2010, veteran Russian rocker Yury Shevchuk raised eyebrows -- and earned enthusiastic applause -- at a concert in Moscow when he took fellow musicians to task for cozying up to the Kremlin, participating in corporate-sponsored concerts, and performing frivolous songs at a time when the country was in crisis.
 
He called on musicians to lead what he called a "revolution of the soul." 
 
Today, many of Russia's musicians look much less servile and obedient than they did at the time of Shevchuk's comments. Is the revolution of the soul he called for under way?
 
In the latest edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast," I talk with regular co-host Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service, about music and politics in today's Russia -- with some clips of our favorite bands mixed in for your enjoyment.
 
Also on the podcast, Kirill and I discuss yet another scandal surrounding Investigative Committee head Aleksandr Bastrykin, who was in the news this week for all the wrong reasons.

Fighting The Power -- Russia's Musical Uprising

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to The Power Vertical Podcast on iTunes.
 
Enjoy...

Six months or so ago, few people in Russia -- and even fewer abroad -- had even heard of Pussy Riot. Now they're not only an international cause celebre, but well on their way to becoming a global brand.
 
And all it took was a little Kremlin-sponsored repression.
 
Sting is the latest artist to publicly express support for three members of the band -- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich -- who are languishing in pretrial detention and face stiff prison terms for their infamous unauthorized performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. 
   
Sting's comments, made prior to his July 25 concert at Moscow's Olympic Stadium, follow onstage gestures in support of the imprisoned punk rockers by Faith No More, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Franz Ferdinand during shows in the Russian capital.
 
And "The Moscow Times" reports that Red Hot Chili Peppers lead singer Anthony Kiedis is trying to enlist Madonna and Bono into the ranks of artists supporting the women, who have already been declared prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International.

Back in 1964, when a Soviet court in Leningrad sentenced the writer and future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky to five years of hard labor for "social parasitism," the poet Anna Akhmatova was among the first to see the upside.
 
“What a biography they've created for our little redhead," Akhmatova said. "You’d think he'd hired them.”

And while comparing Pussy Riot to Brodsky, one of world's great writers, is more than a stretch, it is fair to say that the Kremlin has indeed created a quite a biography for these women.
 
Once an obscure performance art act, they are now global stars with the dignity that comes with being oppressed.
 
Their trademark bright pastel ski masks have become a fashion statement as well as a political statement. A popular website (in English, French, German, Spanish, and Russian), a Twitter feed, and a Facebook page chronicles every development in their case.
 
On any given day -- from Miami to Prague to Helsinki -- you can find events like house parties, concerts, and social media events in their support.

And then there are the charges against them, the crime they are accused of committing, and the reasons for their controversial action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
 
The group's performance in the cathedral on February 21 -- shortly before Vladimir Putin's reelection as president -- was an attempt to draw attention to the close ties between the Kremlin leader and the Russian Orthodox Church and to protest what they consider Russian Patriarch Kirill's inappropriate support for Putin in the election.
 
Contrary to most reports, the women apparently didn't actually play a concert in the church. According to a video released by their lawyers...

WATCH: Pussy Riot mime their performance in the church


...they stood in front of the altar and mimed their performance there and later spliced in the music and lyrics of their anti-Putin "punk prayer" -- "Mother of God, Banish Putin" -- to produce the now-famous final clip.

In the days after the clip was posted on YouTube it was only watched by several hundred people. After they were detained and charged following an outcry by Orthodox officials, it shot up to over a million (and counting). It went viral, in other words, thanks largely to the authorities.
 
Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina, and Samutsevich have been formally charged with hooliganism. But the indictment also levies a series of other allegations against them including "debasing the feelings and beliefs" of Orthodox Christians, "diminishing the spiritual foundations of the state," and "blasphemy."
 
The language of the indictment, which reflected statements by Orthodox officials -- including Patriarch Kirill -- before the three were charged, starkly illustrated the issue the women were protesting to begin with.
 
The issue of the church's undue influence over the Putin regime is now front and center in Russian politics.
 
What a biography indeed.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

Lev Ponomaryov has decided to just say no -- and he's not alone.
 
The head of the advocacy group For Human Rights announced this weekend that it would refuse to comply with a new law signed by President Vladimir Putin requiring NGOs receiving funds from abroad to register as "foreign agents" and subject themselves to extensive state scrutiny.
 
"We are declaring a campaign of civil disobedience to laws that have been passed in violation of the Russian Constitution, the European Convention on Human Rights, and other conventions that Russia has signed," Ponomaryov told Interfax.
 
"We will never be [foreign] agents and will not obey this law. We are agents of Russian citizens. We will continue to receive foreign grants and will speak about this openly."
 
And Ponomaryov indicated that he has no illusions about what such defiance might mean.
 
"The government will take measures against us, and we will oppose this by using legal methods, like going to courts, including the Constitutional Court. Then the government will somehow close us down, but this will be the government's decision," he said.
 
Speaking to "Nezavisimaya gazeta," Ponomaryov said he was undeterred by the stiff fines and potential prison time that noncompliance could mean.
 
"We are continuing in the tradition of the Soviet dissident movement, whose members were not afraid of much harsher punishments," he said.
 
And the civil disobedience campaign appears to be gaining momentum.
 
Svetlana Gannushkina, head of the group Civil Assistance, also said it would defy the law.

"We will take to court each attempt to force us to voluntarily go to the guillotine, and we hope to win. If we lose at our courts, we will appeal to the Constitutional Court, and then we will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights," she told Interfax.

Arseny Roginsky, a former prisoner in the Soviet gulag and the founder of Russia's largest human rights group, Memorial, says it will decide at a meeting in the autumn whether or not to comply with the law, which goes into effect in November. "But Memorial consists of many structures, and each has the right to make its own decision," he said.
 
Speaking to the RIA-Novosti news agency, Memorial Chairman Oleg Orlov suggested that he was leaning toward civil disobedience.

"It's humiliating and it would be foolish to go and register yourself as a foreign agent,"  Orlov said, adding that Memorial will "take all possible legal steps against discriminatory practices" established by the new law.
 
Thus far, Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alekseyeva is the biggest name to resist the civil disobedience tactic. She told Interfax that she would stop taking foreign funding, seek Russian financing, cut back on programs, and auction off some of her belongings -- including her collection of Gzhel ceramics -- to keep the group afloat.

Ponomaryov said he still hoped to persuade Alekseyeva to continue taking foreign funding.

The civil disobedience campaign comes at a time when the opposition has been openly mocking and ridiculing the authorities' attempts to crack down on them.
 
It is still unclear how far the rights groups will take this campaign of disobedience. And it won't be clear how much the Kremlin will crack down on them until the law actually comes into effect in November.
 
But if they stick to their guns until then, they will add to what is already shaping up to be a very difficult autumn for Putin and his ruling circle.
 
The Kremlin already has to deal with what looks to be tough and complicated regional elections in October. The authorities have long planned, after the summer recess, to enact painful reforms of Russia's creaking social-welfare bureaucracy, which are bound to be unpopular.

Moreover, economic uncertainty remains high amid fears of contagion from the eurozone and volatile energy prices.
 
If you throw in the prospect of an open civil disobedience campaign, it may not add up to a perfect storm -- but it is certainly a recipe for a very hot autumn.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

The opposition appears to have settled on at least one tactic to deal with the Kremlin's efforts to crack down on dissent. They're making fun of it. And, aided by social media, they're doing so in very public ways -- employing everything from hi-tech public pranks to viral videos to mischievous hashtags.
 
Once the domain of kitchen table discussions, Russian political humor has gone viral. And the trend is clearly getting under the regime's skin.
 
There is no doubt that this has all been amusing for journalists, bloggers, and for opposition figures themselves.
 
But what effect -- if any -- does this new wave of political humor have? In this week's edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast," I discussed the new wave of Russian political humor and what it signifies with my regular co-host, Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service.
 
Also on the podcast, Kirill and I are joined by Sean Guillory, a historian and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and East European Studies, for a discussion of the decline of ideology. Do the terms "left" and "right" have any meaning in today's Russia?
 

Power Vertical Podcast: Jokes, Pranks And Videotape -- Russia's New Political Humor

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to The Power Vertical Podcast on iTunes.

Enjoy...

Igor Chestin appears to be on to something.
 
In a recent interview with RFE/RL's Russian Service, the director of the World Wildlife Fund in Russia said he and his organization plan to use to their advantage soon-to-be-enacted legal requirements that require NGOs receiving funds from abroad to register as "foreign agents."
 
"We've decided to turn the phrase 'foreign agent' into a kind of mark of quality," he said. From now on, he explained, WWF's materials will be published with the disclaimer, "We're not swindlers and thieves. We're foreign agents."

It's a clever bit of political jujitsu. And the idea of reviving the "swindlers and thieves" moniker the opposition has so effectively used to re-brand the ruling United Russia party -- and deploying it to take the edge off a series of controversial bills they recently rammed through the State Duma -- is clearly catching on.
 
In a post on July 16, anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny, who first coined the phrase, dusted it off again to take on a recently passed bill making slander and libel criminal offenses.

"Congratulations to United Russia for working so well to protest yourselves," Navalny wrote.

The post, titled "Let's Fight Slander Together," linked to a PDF document on mock United Russia letterhead that Navalny encouraged his supporters to post on their apartment buildings:
   
As I have blogged recently, the asymmetrical warfare tactic of using humor and mockery as political weapons against the authorities has been in vogue of late.

Some opposition figures are even using it as a business opportunity. Socialite turned social activist Ksenia Sobchak, for example, recently starred in a video advertisement (below) for Tinkoff Bank that mocked a search of her apartment by agents from the Investigative Committee.


 
This could all be quite successful in moving public opinion.

Putin's approval rating (somewhere between the mid-50s and low 60s depending on the poll), after all, is not nearly as solid as it looks at first glance. As political analyst Kirill Rogov pointed out in a much-discussed article last week, just 15-20 percent of this support is firm, while 40-45 percent is soft and conditional.

And more mockery will surely soften it more.

UPDATE: The first sign that humor is working as a political weapon is when it elicits a reaction from its target. Viktor Kidyayev, a leading official in United Russia, has complained to the Prosecutor-General's Office and the Interior Ministry about Navalny's "illegal" leaflets mocking the party, the daily "Moskovsky komsomolets" reports. That ought to keep the story alive for a litttle longer.

UPDATE-2: Who would have ever thought that Navalny's face would be featured on the homepage of United Russia's official website? But it's true. United Russia's website now has a story up accusing Navalny of illegal agitation.


 -- Brian Whitmore

It's been a week on steroids for the State Duma as the lower house sprinted through legislation establishing tighter regulation of the Internet, placing tough new restrictions on NGOs, and reinstating criminal penalties for libel.
 
All three bills appear designed to stifle a resurgent opposition and restore the unrestricted and uncontested dominance of President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin after more than six months of noisy street protests and open dissent.
 
And lawmakers clearly wanted to get the controversial Kremlin-backed bills off their docket before the summer recess kicks in.
 
But while what Russians call "cucumber season" may be upon us, Kremlin watchers say this year the traditional July-August lull in the political season is but a brief pause before the political maelstrom that is expected to engulf the political class in the autumn.
 
At the root of the looming crisis, political analyst Kirill Rogov wrote this week in the daily "Vedomosti," is that while a clear majority of Russians accept Putin as the country's legitimate ruler, an equally clear majority -- as well as a sizeable chunk of the elite -- does not want him to rule in the heavy-handed and unaccountable way he did during his first stint in the Kremlin. But Putin seems determined to do so anyway.
 
"Putin is officially back in the Kremlin, but he has not received the mandate of his previous presidency's strength," Rogov wrote. "Meanwhile, Putin intends to rule as if he has received it. This is what is driving Russia's unfolding political crisis, which has not yet entered its acute phase."
 
In a thorough and thoughtful piece, Rogov catalogues the "signs and symptoms" of confrontation on the horizon.
 
At the top of his list is Putin's standing among the public. True, he remains relatively popular, Rogov argues, but he no longer has the reservoir of public support to be the omnipotent figure who lorded over Russia from 2000-08.
 
"Putin's approval-to-disapproval ratio is approximately 65:35 or slightly below," Rogov wrote. "This might be considered as an excellent result for any president of a democratic country. But it is not acceptable for 'the king.'... Actually, Putin has lost this."
 
Likewise, Rogov notes the precipitous decline in United Russia's standing. This is hardly news, but the figures are striking. The ruling party, whose dominance was not so long ago compared to that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, is now polling less than 40 percent in 32 regions -- and is less than 35 percent in 16 of them. In Moscow, United Russia is languishing below 30 percent.
 
The gap between Putin's inner circle and Moscow itself -- both the city's residents and the local political elite -- is also widening. Rogov writes that while about half of 1 percent of the capital's population regularly attends opposition rallies, more than half of them support the protesters and two-thirds oppose recent legislation cracking down on unsanctioned rallies.
 
And while the series of repressive laws that have followed Putin's return have clearly been an attempt by the Kremlin to reassert control and bring the rebellious part of the elite and society into line, in the current environment, Rogov argues, they will likely have the opposite effect.
 
"Functionally, a 'reaction' is the logical stage of a political crisis caused by the ruling regime's gradual loss of legitimacy," he wrote. "Clear signs have emerged of the regime's weakening and have set the stage for a split in the elite. Supporting the regime no longer looks like a win-win proposition. This 'reaction' is the regime's response."
 
And this reaction, Rogov adds, will cost Putin support among the public and the elite. He notes that Putin's firm supporters (as opposed to his overall approval rating) now number between 15 and 20 percent of the population. Between 40 and 45 percent conditionally support the president. His hardcore opponents number about 15 percent, with an additional 15 to 20 percent "sharing the anti-Putin mood to some extent."
 
"The current hard-line policy may, in the short run, have the positive effect of disciplining the elite," Rogov wrote. "But at the same time it may lead to the reduction of the zone of conditional support for Putin among the public and expand the proportion of those who sympathize with demands for his resignation."
 
Rogov predicts that this trend in public opinion should become clear in the autumn and will have the effect of turning a decisive portion of the elite against Putin and the ruling circle.
 
I found Rogov's argument persuasive, particularly considering the political calendar.
 
Local elections are scheduled across Russia in October and, given United Russia's weak standing, they will most likely further expose the regime's unpopularity.
 
Moreover, sometime in the autumn, the authorities are also scheduled to tackle a series of reforms of Russia's creaky social welfare architecture that are bound to be unpopular.
 
And looming over everything, of course, is the ever-present threat of an economic crisis from either volatile energy prices or contagion from the eurozone -- or both.
 
-- Brian Whitmore
 
(NOTE: Tune in to the July 13 edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast" for a discussion of the issues raised in this post.)

It's a scenario we've seen play out time and time again. A humanitarian disaster strikes. The Kremlin is caught flat-footed. Relief efforts founder. Weaknesses in infrastructure, inspection procedures, and oversight are exposed. Promises of reform are made -- and not kept. Public anger mounts and then subsides. Until the next disaster hits.
 
From the explosion at the Sayano-Shushenskaya power plant in 2009, to the raging forest fires in the summer of 2010, to the sinking of the "Bulgaria" cruise ship almost exactly a year ago, as well as in many other cases, the script has been almost identical.
 
And so it was with last weekend's floods in southern Russia. But Russia's latest disaster has exposed something more than just official ineptitude; it starkly illustrates the extent to which public trust between the state and society has all but evaporated.

In the latest edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast," I discuss Russia's trust deficit and its implications with Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service.

Also on the podcast, Kirill and I take stock of the political landscape as Russia enters its traditional summer lull and speculate about what looms in the autumn.

Power Vertical Podcast: Russia's Trust Deficit

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to The Power Vertical Podcast on iTunes.

Enjoy...

How many divisions does Pussy Riot have?
 
It was a question that arose last week when five members of the feminist punk group appeared on stage in Moscow during a concert by the U.S. band Faith No More.

Three of their members were languishing in pre-trial detention facing seven years in prison for their infamous Cathedral of Christ the Savior concert. And the rest were in hiding, purportedly living in fear of a similar fate. But yet, there they were, on stage, in public, in the capital, chanting "Putin wet his pants!" and "Riot in Russia!"
 
And then they disappeared without a trace.
 
"Membership in Pussy Riot is completely interchangeable," Petr Verzilov, a member of the underground art collective "Voina" and husband of jailed Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, told RFE/RL's Russian Service.
 
"This anonymous status is part of the band's ideological core. A few dozen girls have participated in their five performances."
 
Pussy Riot is everywhere, he seemed to be saying. They could be anybody. The girl next door. Or the one standing beside you on the Metro. Without the masks and the bright pastel dresses, who can tell for sure? And who can tell when they will pop up again with another stunt to embarrass the Kremlin.
 
A Moscow court on July 9 denied an appeal to release the band's three incarcerated members -- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich -- despite reports that they might be freed.

But the Pussy Riot phenomenon appears to have become a semipermanent feature of the political landscape. And Pussy Riot-ism -- outrageous and attention-grabbing public stunts designed to shame and ridicule the authorities -- appears to have become one of the chosen tactics of the growing part of society inclined toward dissent.
 
The most obvious example is Voina itself, whose antiregime antics predated and foreshadowed those of the rebel punks. The rogue artists also operate in stealth and most members of the collective keep a low profile. That is, of course, until they pull a high-profile stunt like painting a giant 65-meter phallus on a St. Petersburg drawbridge facing the Federal Security Service's local headquarters.

WATCH: Voina' s"phallic" performance-art protest stunt

 
There was also socialite-turned-social activist Ksenia Sobchak's viral video back in February parodying celebrities being pressured into public displays of fealty to Vladimir Putin.
 
WATCH: Ksenia's satirical display of "support" for Vladimir Putin

 
But latent and stealth dissent that suddenly becomes manifest is also becoming more common among ordinary Russians who aren't famous socialites, members of punk bands or in art collectives. 
 
Back in January, for example, a group of paratroopers recorded an anti-Putin anthem that quickly went viral.

WATCH: Paratroopers sing a song critical of Putin

 
And the most recent case was Rostislav Zhuravlyov's decision to mock the recently passed law imposing stiff fines for unsanctioned demonstrations by complying with it to the point of absurdity.
 
Zhuravlyov managed to secure official permission , and a police escort, for a solitary stroll through Yekaterinburg -- and then posted a video of the entire episode on LiveJournal and YouTube.

WATCH: Rostislav Zhuravlyov's soiltary protest in Yekaterinberg

 
The tactic was pioneered, albeit with less success, by a group in Nizhny Novgorod called "Zhizn po zakonu," or "Living by the law."

The list goes on, but you get the picture. Pussy Riot has become a metaphor for all the pent up dissent buried deep in Russian society that is just waiting for the opportune time to surface.
 
And the thing about this kind of dissent is that it is very difficult for the authorities to contain, let alone suppress. They can lock up three members of Pussy Riot, but who knows when the some of the (at least) dozens of other members will pop up in their bright ski masks singing anti-Kremlin slogans.

And regardless of what restrictive law the State Duma passes, nobody can be sure when or where the next Rostislav Zhuravlyov or group of paratroopers will surface with some clever public stunt to ridicule it. Like the videos that promote these actions, such behavior itself tends to go viral.
 
This fledgling Deep Society is still no match for the power of Russia's Deep State. But its existence is a sign that no matter how badly Putin wants to, he can't turn the clock back to 2007.

How many divisions does Pussy Riot have? Quite a few, it appears.
 
-- Brian Whitmore

If President Vladimir Putin's legislative intentions toward Russia's fledgling civil society are not clear by now, it's not for lack of trying on his part.

New legislation is reportedly in the works that would create a register of websites with illegal content -- and require providers to block such sites. The legislation's original stated purpose was to combat child pornography and pedophilia. But as Gazeta.ru reports, quoting members of the ruling United Russia party, it will also be used to battle "extremism" -- the Kremlin's favorite euphemism for any opposition activity.

The legislation, currently being considered by the State Duma, comes as lawmakers are also set to debate a bill requiring any NGO receiving funding from abroad to register as a "foreign agent." And, of course, it comes on the heels of a recently passed law imposing draconian fines on participants in unsanctioned demonstrations.

Likewise, it is also becoming clear that Putin doesn't plan to show much mercy for disloyal former friends and allies.

Just ask Federation Council deputy Lyudmila Narusova, the mother of socialite-turned-social activist Ksenia Sobchak and widow of the man who launched Putin's political career -- the late former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.

Prosecutors are reportedly poring over a television interview Narusova gave, looking for evidence of extremism. Additionally, the ruling United Russia party is seeking to expel Narusova from the upper chamber of parliament.

Part of the assault on Narusova can surely be traced to the Kremlin's increased irritation with her daughter's opposition activities. And part of it was likely sparked by her vocal opposition to the law imposing harsh penalties on anti-regime demonstrations.

Narusova would not be the first Putin ally to fall from grace. Sergei Mironov lost his perch as Federation Council speaker when he was too vocal in his support for a second term for Dmitry Medvedev and too critical of United Russia. State Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov saw his taxes investigated and his security company eviscerated when he became a vocal critic of the regime.

The ramping up of the pressure on civil society and the retribution against perceived turncoats suggest that the ruling elite -- or at least the part of the elite that currently has Putin's ear -- is spooked by the longevity and intensity of the opposition to the Kremlin since December.

In a thoughtful piece published on opendemocracy.net, Maxim Trudolyubov, the opinion-page editor at the daily "Vedomosti" wrote that ever since popular uprisings in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, "Putin's main concern has been to avoid revolution," but his actions might paradoxically lead to one:

 
Trudolyubov isn't the first respectable commentator to suggest that Russia is on the brink of serious upheaval. Olga Kryshtanovskaya, one of the country's leading sociologists; the Center for Strategic Research, a top think tank; and former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin have come to the same conclusion.

It is not just that Putin is creating a powder keg. With his pressure on civil society and his moves against former supporters, he is also isolating himself and his increasingly shrinking inner circle.

And with potential economic storm clouds on the horizon -- either from volatile commodities prices, or contagion from Europe, or both -- isolated is not where he needs to be. If the crisis comes, Putin will own it -- and he'll be mostly all alone.

-- Brian Whitmore

NOTE TO READERS: The Power Vertical blog and podcast will take a small break due to the extended July 4 holiday weekend. The blog will be back on July 9 and the next podcast will come out on July 13

What do State Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov, anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny, former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, and billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov have in common?
 
They've all, to varying degrees, recently had their feet in both the establishment and the opposition camps.
 
Until recently, Gudkov, a KGB veteran, was a Kremlin-loyal Duma deputy. He's now one of the regime's most outspoken critics.
 
Navalny is known for his fiery speeches at opposition rallies and his exposes of official corruption. But this week, he accepted a seat on the board of directors of the state-controlled airline Aeroflot.
 
Kudrin, a personal friend of Vladimir Putin, long served as finance minister. But since resigning last autumn, he's been scathing in his assessment of Kremlin policy.
 
And Prokhorov, who made and kept his billions by being loyal to Putin's Kremlin, is now flirting with the opposition and has formed his own political party.
 
When Russia enters times of political change, and its future direction is in doubt, much of the elite, and even some of the opposition, is forced to become political entrepreneurs -- hedging their bets in an effort to stay ahead of the curve of whatever new order eventually emerges.
 
But being a political entrepreneur also carries risks and costs.

In this week's edition of the Power Vertical podcast, I discussed the implications of this "politcal entrepreneurship" with special guest host Mark Galeotti, a longtime Russia-watcher and professor of global affairs at New York University.

Also on the podcast, Mark and I discussed the state of the "reset" between Moscow and Washington amid rising Russian-American tensions.

Power Vertical Podcast: Russia's Entrepreneurs Hedge Their Bets

• Playlist
• Download

Listen to or download the podcast above, or subscribe to The Power Vertical Podcast on iTunes.

Enjoy...

One of the questions I had when Russia's new protest law went into effect was how would opposition-minded citizens respond.
 
In the months prior to the legislation's passage, the opposition had been showing remarkable creativity to find loopholes in existing law -- holding "walks," setting up "encampments," and holding "festivals" instead of formal "demonstrations" or "marches."

But as soon as President Vladimir Putin signed the new restrictive bill into law, participants in those actions too could be fined -- if the authorities determined that they were political protests.
 
Was a new wave of Belarus-style actions, with people simultaneously clapping or setting off their mobile-phone alarms at specific times in public places, in the offing? Would toy protests make a comeback?
 
Well, a man named Rostislav Zhuravlyov from Yekaterinburg has provided one answer: compliance to the point of absurdity.
 
"I would like to inform you of my intention to organize a onetime mass event on June 24, 2012, in which people will walk through public places in Yekaterinburg in order to view the city's attractions and meet with friends," Zhuravlyov wrote in a letter to city authorities that was received on June 9.
 
Zhuravlyov's march, the officially worded letter informed the authorities, would begin at his apartment (Ulitsa Belinskovo 143) at 9 a.m. and finish at the Grinvich shopping center at 12:30 p.m.
 
"In order to ensure safety for the participants of this mass onetime event and movement of people, I ask for a police escort," he wrote.
 
To Zhuravlyov's surprise, the police called him at 8 a.m. on the morning of June 24 to inform him that they would meet him outside his apartment building at the appointed time.
 
He met the police alone, went on his walk through the city with an escort, videotaped the highlights, and posted it on LiveJournal.
 
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE:


 
 
"My friends, the law on demonstrations is working well. The police have met me. I'm impressed. I'm honestly impressed," he said.
 
The police appeared a bit befuddled, but went along.
 
Zhuravlyov's little stunt is now making the rounds on the Russian Internet (it has over 100,000 views on YouTube), and has attracted the attention of anticorruption blogger and opposition figure Aleksei Navalny (you can read his post on it in Russian here and in English here).
 
"This is a good idea," Navalny wrote. "We need to maintain public order in Moscow, too. Why don't we have a couple of hundred similar authorized marches for cigarettes or ice cream, as well as officially sanctioned meetings while queuing at the bank?"
 
This could get interesting, not to mention amusing.

(h/t to @PicoBee for flagging this on Twitter)
 
-- Brian Whitmore

For more than a decade, he's been dominating the airwaves. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said this. President Vladimir Putin did that. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin criticized this. President Vladimir Putin signed that.
 
And for months now, we've been hearing his name chanted derisively on the streets of Moscow and other cities: "Putin must go!" "Russia without Putin!" "Putin is a thief!"
 
From his splashy debut on the scene more than 12 years ago, when he famously vowed to rub out the Chechen rebels in the outhouse, Putin has been the alpha male at the epicenter of Russian politics. So it's not surprising that as opposition to the current regime spreads, the focus has largely been on Putin personally. His leaving the scene is seen as a necessary precondition for any change.
 
But how central is Putin really? And how centralized and vertically integrated is the Russian political system? Is Putin's departure necessary for change? Or can Russia change with him?
 
On this week's edition of "The Power Vertical Podcast," I discuss the nature of the Russian regime -- and Putin's role in it -- with my regular co-host, Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of RFE/RL's Russian Service.
 
Also on the podcast, Kirill and I talk about media reports that socialite-turned-activist Ksenia Sobchak may be facing an investigation into her taxes and what that might mean.

Listen to or download the podcast below, or subscribe to The Power Vertical Podcast on iTunes.

Enjoy...

Power Vertical Podcast: The Putin Illusion

• Playlist
• Download

History often rhymes in very odd ways.
 
On June 12, 1999, Anatoly Sobchak returned home after 1 1/2 years in self-imposed exile in Paris.
 
The former St. Petersburg mayor, and principal author of the Russian Constitution, left the country in November 1997 in the midst of a corruption investigation that he and his allies insisted was -- and according to most impartial accounts appeared to be -- politically motivated.
 
Sobchak's return from exile coincided with the meteoric rise of his former deputy and close political ally, Vladimir Putin. A year earlier, Putin became director of the Federal Security Service (FSB). A few months before Sobchak's homecoming, his friend and former deputy was named secretary of the Security Council. Two months later, Putin would be named prime minister, serving for just several months before succeeding Boris Yeltsin as president.
 
The conventional wisdom at the time was that Sobchak, who died in February 2000, was able to safely return to Russia because he enjoyed the ascendant Putin's protection.
 
As a reporter in St. Petersburg at the time, I covered Sobchak's flamboyant and emotional arrival at the city's Pulkovo Airport. One of the enduring memories I have of that day was of Sobchak's 17-year-old daughter Ksenia impatiently pulling on his arm in a vain attempt to get her famously talkative father to stop engaging journalists and get in the car already.
 
Fast forward to June 12, 2012, exactly 13 years later.
 
That impatient 17-year-old girl is now a confident 30-year-old who has seamlessly transformed herself from a socialite reality-show star into one of Russia's most visible social activists. And she is being questioned by agents from the Investigative Committee over her opposition political activities.  A day earlier, her apartment was searched by Investigative Committee agents, who confiscated large sums of cash.
 
Due to her family's ties to Putin, it was always assumed that, unlike other opposition figures -- but like her father -- Ksenia Sobchak enjoyed a degree of protection. Now everybody is reassessing that assumption.
 
Writing in the daily "Moskovsky komsomolets" last week, political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky suggested it was Sobchak -- and not Aleksei Navalny, Ilya Yashin, or Sergei Udaltsov, whose flats were also searched -- who was the operation's real target:

 
And today, Putin upped the ante against his old friend's daughter (and make no mistake, none of this would be happening without Putin giving the green light).
 
A June 18 article in the pro-Kremlin daily "Izvestia" quoted anonymous law enforcement sources as saying that Sobchak could be prosecuted for tax evasion over the estimated 1 million euros and $500,000 in cash agents seized from her apartment during last week's raid.

The report quoted unidentified Interior Ministry officials as saying that Sobchak's 2011 tax declaration reported 6.7 million rubles ($210,000) in income. Her 2010 declaration, according to the daily, reported 4.53 million rubles.
 
The authorities are clearly trying to drive a wedge between Sobchak and the rest of the opposition by stirring up resentment of her wealth. And there is some evidence it is working. On June 15, Ilya Ponomaryov, an opposition State Duma deputy from the center-left A Just Russia, asked her to distance herself from the protest movement.

Sobchak, however, is showing no signs of lowering her profile. Writing on her Twitter feed, Sobchak responded to the allegations. "For many years my tax returns have reported not less than $1 million in income," she wrote in one tweet, calling the report "lies and slander designed to provoke me."

In another, she wrote that after consulting her lawyer, Henry Reznik, she has decided to sue "Izvestia" over the article.
 
And in an article published later in the day on June 18 on "Komsomolskaya pravda's" website, she reiterated that she has paid taxes on all her income. She also noted that the smears against her were reminiscent of those against her father in the 1990s.

Sobchak also attacked the Kremlin's apparent strategy against her at its core:
   
Ksenia Sobchak has again passed into new territory. In the months after the disputed State Duma elections in December, she turned herself into a serious political player with the opposition -- albeit one who everybody assumed enjoyed protected status. Now she will need to play that role without a "krysha."

-- Brian Whitmore