A week is a long time in protests

It’s good to see that Russians remain quick learners. One can see that, compared to a week ago, both sides have honed their skills.

Yesterday’s protesters showed even better coordination, using social media to great effect. They have also learned to stay on the move, rapidly shifting the action from one part of town to another.

When attacked by the police and the National Guard, they resisted even more strongly than a week ago. This time they didn’t just rely on bare fists – there were instances of paint being thrown in the cops’ visors. That shows both courage and planning.

Also, the old Scythian tactics of hit and run saw the light of day. Faced with an overwhelming force, the protesters would quickly disperse, hiding in doorways and courtyards – only to come back when the cops moved on.

Still, Putin’s stormtroopers have much better resources and they weren’t bashful about using them. Both tear gas and tasers came into play, with some protesters tasered multiple times. If a week ago it was mostly cops who saw action, this time they were reinforced by the National Guard, a military force created strictly for internal use.

This may explain a much greater number of both arrests (5,000 compared to 4,000 a week ago) and injuries inflicted on the protesters. This time around 82 reporters also got arrested for reporting, which activity is becoming ever more dangerous in Russia. Some detainees were beaten up after being arrested.

In another interesting development, cops in Petersburg and elsewhere were brandishing firearms. This bodes well for the future: following Chekhov’s dictum, if a gun appears in Act 1, it must fire in Act 3. It’s possible, nay likely, that the next act will see the stormtroopers opening up not with tear gas and tasers but with live rounds.

Russian history shows that, when an army stains its uniforms with the blood of its own people, the regime totters. Whether or when it falls depends on a confluence of factors. Here we must learn from the best, and, while history knows many theoreticians of revolutions, one mechanic stands above the rest: Vladimir Lenin.

In my classification, Vlad Putin’s namesake narrowly beats Stalin, Hitler and Mao to the title of the most diabolical monster of modernity. But credit where it’s due: Lenin knew how to foment havoc.

As a precondition for a successful power-grab, he identified what he called “a revolutionary situation”, when the rulers no longer can, and the ruled no longer will, live the old way. A successful subversive must work tirelessly to create a revolutionary situation, spot its arrival unerringly and then act decisively.

To that end, Lenin eschewed all attempts to create a large revolutionary party uniting all and sundry in a common cause. In his 1902 book What Is to Be Done, he opted instead for a small cadre of “professional revolutionaries” coalescing around a strong leader.

I can’t predict how things will develop in Russia, nor whether, how and in what direction the protests will escalate. However, applying Lenin’s lessons to current events, I’m not sure the preconditions for an impending regime change are in evidence.

The first sign of a “revolutionary situation”, the rulers no longer able to rule the old way, isn’t immediately discernible. Putin remains in control of the siloviki (muscle men): the army, police and internal troops. All successful revolts in Russia have involved large swathes of siloviki switching sides, which so far hasn’t happened.

I don’t know if Putin continues to enjoy the loyalty of his political power base, the coterie of KGB/FSB types (about 85 per cent of the ruling elite) fused with the godfathers of organised crime. If he doesn’t, they may use the protests to depose him, but that would mean replacing Putin Mark I with Putin Mark II – a distinction without a difference.

The second requirement stipulated by the currently mummified expert was the people’s refusal to live the old way. That too lacks any compelling evidence.

So far the protests have featured somewhere between 150,000 to 250,000 participants, most of them under 35. How many have fundamental problems with the government and how many simply come out for the ride remains to be seen.

Young people’s gonads produce an inordinate amount of bubbling hormones demanding an outlet for pent-up energy. By confining so many youngsters to quarters, the Covid pandemic has reduced their options, making a chance to grapple with the cops while screaming bien pensant slogans seem like a welcome diversion.

This is a factor, though I don’t know how significant. Perhaps more important is the huge economic downturn caused by the pandemic. This isn’t unique to Russia, but there the slide started from a lower plateau than in the West.

The Russian economy lives in a permanent twilight, sporadically punctuated by false dawns caused by spikes in oil prices. Since young people can’t see a reasonable future for themselves in Russia, many of them seek it elsewhere.

Over two million of them have left since Putin’s ascent to power in 2000. Moreover, some 20 per cent of all Russians, and a higher percentage of young ones, say they’d like to leave.

However, the remaining 80 per cent still haven’t abandoned hope, and their discontent could perhaps be channelled into the conduit of a “revolutionary situation”. This brings me to Lenin’s third sine qua non: the existence of a disciplined, dedicated core of “professional revolutionaries” led by a charismatic, skilful and ruthless figure.

Now, if the existence of the other preconditions is open to debate, this one isn’t: neither such a cadre nor such a leader exists. At the moment, Navalny provides the focal point of mass opposition, but – and I may live to regret making hasty predictions – a Lenin he isn’t.

His quiver of anti-Putin weapons holds one arrow only: a drive against corruption. Now, as any reader of Gogol, Chekhov or Saltykov-Shchedrin will confirm, the Russians regard thieving officials not as a correctable outrage, but as a permanent, if undesirable feature: a bit like a blizzard or a hurricane. The tsars also showed remarkable equanimity in that respect.

Under Catherine II, government officials in the provinces were often unsalaried: it was assumed they could live off the fat of the land, a bit like the Mongol invaders of old.

Alexander I and Nicholas I extended that principle to the army, anticipating by a century Brecht’s line: “You only have to feed a soldier without a gun. A soldier with a gun will feed himself.”

The two brothers created so-called military settlements, where soldiers combined service with small-scale agriculture and large-scale looting. Effectively, the Russian army was an army of occupation in its own land. “I don’t think even the Mongols behaved worse,” wrote the great historian Vasily Klyuchevsky.

This fine tradition has largely immunised the broad Russian masses to government corruption. In any case, thieving officials are symptoms, not the disease – and certainly not the aetiology of the disease.

A revolution, as opposed to a series of jacqueries, requires an opposition that can first whip up systemic, rather than merely symptomatic, resentment and then use it as an irresistible battering ram. I can discern no signs of such a group in Russia.

The so-called liberal opposition is frankly pathetic. Far from being capable of leading a successful revolt, the liberals don’t even understand the roots of Western polity, the saplings of which they wish to transplant into their native soil.

All they can do is mouth wokish slogans borrowed uncritically from what they call THE WEST, meaning publications like The Guardian, Le Monde and The New York Times. They don’t realise that these represent only one strain of Western opinion, and it took some six centuries for such ideas to germinate to the detriment of Western society.

History shows exactly what happens in Russia when Western ideas are forced down the people’s throats. The first liberal republic lasted some eight months in 1917. The second, about as many years in the ‘90s.

The first one proved impotent to keep Lenin’s gang from plunging the country into decades of blood-stained despotism. The second one quickly converted freedom into anarchy, free enterprise into organised crime and democracy into a kleptofascist dictatorship.

Yet, as Paul Valéry remarked, “history teaches precisely nothing”. Russian liberals are still guided by The Guardian ideals and by their own apophatic self-identification from the negative: they are a resounding ‘no’ to every ‘yes’ of Putin. If Vlad said tomorrow that Bach was a genius (admittedly a slim chance), they’d start screaming “Down with Bach!”

To sum up, I doubt that, if Lenin’s mummy came alive, it would diagnose a revolutionary situation. At best, it might express a slight worry.

Hence, even if Putin may be on the way out, I suspect Putinism isn’t. But this is one instance where I’d be ecstatic to be proved wrong.