A series of violent street clashes across Russia in the past few
weeks may be mere thunderclouds destined to dissipate, but one
leading historian, Anatoly Bernshtein, wonders in print this week
whether something more grim is happening to his country. I think he
has a point.
“It’s like modifications in the weather — I can feel it,”
he writes in a recent edition of the newspaper Ezhednevny
Zhurnal. “Change is hanging in the air.”
Bernshtein cites three major clashes with authorities in
the month of December, most prominently the Manezh Square riots of
some 5,000 nationalists and religious groups. City center and
access roads were blocked off by police as sporadic violence broke
out and participants chanted “Russia for the Russians.” Similar
clashes erupted in St. Petersburg.
Other incidents:
— In the far eastern city of Vladivostok, the “Primorsky
Partisans” have armed themselves and conducted urban guerrilla
warfare against the police for the past few months, killing and
injuring several officers. A video of their leaders, shirtless in
the forest, was a popular Internet download in recent months. Their
complaint is police brutality and they have gained quiet support
across Russia. Such slogans as “Glory to the Partisans” has
appeared on walls across Vladivostok.
— And an ecological protest group clashed with police
after demonstrating in the town of Khimki, near Moscow, to attempt
to halt destruction of a historic woodland where a new Moscow-St.
Petersburg highway is planned. The project was given a final
go-ahead in December and a wave of protests led to the arrest of
leader Yevgenia Chirikova.
Finally, the recent draconian sentences of oil tycoons
Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev were also cited as
prompting concerns of a tighter authoritarianism in the making and
an end to President Dmitry Medvedev’s reform plans.
Abroad, the implications are clear. Russia’s economy is
now considered an “extreme risk” by the UK risk-assessment group
Maplecroft. Criteria include terrorist threats, the rule of law,
and the regulatory and business environment.
Street violence was virtually unknown in Russia prior to
the 1990s but occasional riots have erupted as Russians feel their
way in the evolving political atmosphere. Conciliatory words but
harsh reprisals have been the official responses, leading to fears
that another period of oppression is imminent in the long history
of Russian freezes and thaws.
Bernshtein addresses this eventuality with speculation
that order could be restored by “extraordinary measures.”
Bernshtein half-apologizes for his “neurotic expectations” but says
the “polarization of society is too great” to ignore any longer.
Today in Russia, he wrote, some people live a life of luxury, like
foreigners, and the only reality is “each man for
himself.”
Also contributing to the dissatisfaction, he wrote, is the
failure of much-advertised Kremlin foreign policy initiatives to
bear fruit — the “reset” of U.S.-Russia relations and the efforts
to obtain visa-free travel into the countries of the European
Union.
Bernshtein sees the new decade as a turning point, “not
only on the calendar but symbolically, ending an era of stable
stagnation.”
Mr. Johnson
was a Moscow correspondent of Associated Press
from 1967 to 1971.
