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The Real Russia. Today. Navalny gets another 20 days in jail, United Russia blows gubernatorial races, and the GRU has some funny passport policies

Source: Meduza

Monday, September 24, 2018

This day in history. On September 24, 1990, the USSR Supreme Soviet voted by a large margin to expand Mikhail Gorbachev's presidential powers to “accelerate the formation of an all-Union market.”
  • Alexey Navalny gets another 20 days behind bars (immediately after serving 30 days in jail), and it could pave the way to new felony charges
  • Russia's ruling political party blows another two gubernatorial runoff elections, prompting a wave of new speculation about what it all means
  • Meduza summarizes opinion texts on the elections by Oleg Kashin, Maxim Trudolyobov, and Leonid Bershidsky
  • Funny passport numbers link a whole web of suspected Russian intelligence operatives
  • The New York Times looks at a new book it says ‘makes a strong case that ‘Russian masterminds’ pulled off a technological and political coup in 2016’
  • David Klion questions Hollywood's portrayal of Russians over the decades
  • Mark Galeotti says there's more than one reason to poison somebody in Russia
  • Alexander Gabuev warns that U.S. pressure on Russia and China is driving the two adversaries closer together
  • Natalia Poklonskaya lays out her alternative pension reform plan (which doesn't raise retirement ages)
  • Amid major divorce dispute, ‘Moskovsky Komsomolets’ chief editor's ex-wife is detained by police
  • Meduza interviews Oleg Sentsov's cousin to learn more about his ongoing hunger strike
  • Don't forget to take our newsletter survey!

Navalny goes from the pot to the frying pan ⚖️

Just as he was leaving jail after serving 30 days for staging an unpermitted protest in January, Alexey Navalny was detained again and dragged to another courtroom on September 24, to face charges for promoting a rally on September 9 against pension reform that lead to injury or property damage (a violation of Administrative Code 20.2). Hours later, he was convicted and sentenced to 20 more days in jail.

Graphs from Deutsche Welle’s Russian-language service show how many days Navalny has spent under arrest over the past seven years, up until September 24, 2018:

Deutsche Welle’s Russian-language service / Twitter

This could lead to a new felony case against Navalny

Alexey Glukhov, a lawyer at the Golos-sponsored “Protest Apology” project, told the newsletter The Bell that Alexey Navalny was charged with the “exotic” Administrative Code 20.2 misdemeanor possibly in order to pave the way for felony charges under Criminal Code Article 212.1 against repeated violations of laws on public assemblies. Activist Ildar Dadin previously challenged this criminal code in Russia’s Supreme Court, where judges ruled that Article 212.1 could only be applied against individuals responsible for rallies that directly caused or threatened physical injuries. Now that Navalny has been convicted of violating 212.1, prosecutors have grounds to try him for the felony, which carries a maximum five-year prison sentence, Glukhov argues.

The system is dead, long live the system! 🗳️

Over the weekend, LDPR candidates routed the incumbent governors in two runoff elections. In Vladimir, Governor Svetlana Orlova lost to Vladimir Sipyagin, 37.46 percent to 57.03 percent, and in Khabarovsk, acting Governor Vyacheslav Shport lost to Sergey Furgal by a whopping 27.97 percent to 69.57 percent. The newsletter The Bell argues that LDPR’s candidates won these races in spite of themselves, riding the protest vote. Sipyagin, for example, didn’t even campaign in the second route, political expert Alexander Pozhalov told Vedomosti. Before winning, Sergey Furgal even said he’d accept a role in Shport’s government (though he now denies this).

While LDPR buried its head in the sand, the Kremlin dispatched its spin doctors to Vladimir and Khabarovsk, making deals with local elites and calling out political celebrities to try to keep Orlova and Shport in office. Moscow sent Alexander Kharichev, the Putin administration’s deputy head of internal policy, to Khabarovsk, and sent Andrey Yarin, Kharichev’s boss, to Vladimir.

Experts like Abbas Galyamov and Alexander Kynev have pointed out that United Russia failed in this year’s gubernatorial races where it promoted the reelection of acting regional leaders, avoiding problems where the party renewed its cadres. The establishment also came up against the historical “protest spirit” of the Far East and the poverty of the Vladimir region, aggravated by United Russia’s support for unpopular pension reform.

Citing Alexander Kynev’s analysis, The Bell argues that LDPR’s victories over the weekend could actually weaken Russia’s “systemic opposition” in the future, as the Kremlin likely responds by lifting restrictions on party registration (maybe even eliminating the hated “municipal filter”), in order to splinter the vote against United Russia, “so that, in the next gubernatorial contests, it’s not three but 23 candidates competing.” The new strategy could also be a public relations coup for the Russian authorities, as they make a show of “loosening the screws,” The Bell writes.

Opinions about the meaning of these elections 💭

💉 Kashin on the “vaccination” cycle

In an op-ed for Republic, columnist Oleg Kashin argues that United Russia’s election troubles in a few runoff votes are all part of the cycle that has emerged in the Putin regime, where a “democratic vaccination” occurs every so often, followed by another round of “screw-tightening.” Kashin also highlights that United Russia only encountered problems where it fielded “old-fashioned” candidates, and recalls comments by “loyalist Telegram channels” (citing Russianfuture) that United Russia opened the door for Sergey Furgal when it didn’t oppose his candidacy for local office in 2016. (Kashin also says State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin “produced” the 2016 elections and speculates that he might be blamed for the upset in Khabarovsk.)

Kashin’s main argument is that the recent gubernatorial runoff races aren’t evidence that “the system is out of control.” So what happens next? Kashin expects the recent elections to be a “holiday” boon for political spin doctors, who can now count on more money, more Kremlin support, and more administrative resources.

👓 Trudolyubov on “naked politics”

In an op-ed for the newspaper Vedomosti, columnist Maxim Trudolyobov argues that the upset gubernatorial runoff elections expose the Kremlin political machine to doubts about its efficacy. “Why do we need supposedly controlled elections, if they’re apparently not controlled, and why do we need political parties that are supposedly controlled, if they’re not actually controlled?” Trudolyubov says Russians (not just state officials, but also ordinary citizens) are now asking.

Additionally, the system’s failure will worry the Kremlin’s latest gubernatorial “recruits” (Trudolyubov says the younger generation of regional leaders enlisted to spread Moscow’s domestic “civilizing mission”), while the “Kremlin towers” and regime-loyal political parties compete for the chance to “repair” the system. This rivalry “disrobes” the Kremlin’s management of Russian electoral democracy, Trudolyubov argues, making politics more accessible to ordinary people, who in turn question the benefits of Kremlin control.

💸 Bershidsky on Putin’s Far East problem

In an opinion piece for Bloomberg, columnist Leonid Bershidsky writes that Putin’s “customary methods” (unfair elections and federal investment programs) failed in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk because of the “gap” that has emerged between the Kremlin’s usual managed politics and “the way people lead their daily lives.” While most Russians respond to this inconsistency with apathy, Bershidsky says attitudes in the Far East are different because of “a lively sense of being on the empire’s edge.” To “solve” his Far East problem, Vladimir Putin will need to overcome his “centralizing impulses” and find a way to reduce the gap that’s alienated voters.

Funny passport numbers 🛂

On September 20, the open-source investigative team Bellingcat and the news website The Insider published the second part of their report on Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, the suspected Russian intelligence officers accused by Great Britain of trying to assassinate former double agent Sergey Skripal with a nerve agent in Salisbury. Both Petrov and Boshirov say they were in Salisbury at the time of the poisoning merely as tourists. According to data released by Bellingcat and The Insider, the two men’s passport numbers differ only slightly from each other and from other suspected GRU agents, suggesting that the documents were issued in a special series. Now a news outlet in St. Petersburg has published evidence that the passport numbers tie the Salisbury suspects to a wider web of suspected GRU agents.

Must-read reporting and analysis from other outlets 📰

👾 The trolls stole it?

“A meticulous analysis of online activity during the 2016 campaign makes a powerful case that targeted cyber-attacks by hackers and trolls were decisive,” claims Jane Mayer for The New Yorker in an article on communications professor and public intellectual Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s new book “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President — What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know.” “Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers — whom she terms ‘discourse saboteurs’ — and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances,” writes Mayer.

In her book, Jamieson also argues that “James Comey’s decision to issue a series of damaging public pronouncements on Clinton’s handling of classified emails can plausibly be attributed to Russian disinformation,” saying the then FBI director was trying to counter the “optics” of “junk” intelligence received from Russia that then Attorney General Loretta Lynch had promised in emails to go easy on Clinton.

Here’s the core of the article, judging by The New Yorker’s tweets about it: “The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because some 80,000 votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In two 224 pages of extremely dry prose, with four appendices of charts and graphs and 54 pages of footnotes, Jamieson makes a strong case that, in 2016, ‘Russian masterminds’ pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover, she concludes, the American media ‘inadvertently helped them achieve their goals.’”

  • Read the whole article here, where you can also listen to it being read professionally (which takes 50 minutes).

🎥 “Russia, Hollywood’s Mirror”

“Since the 2016 election, Russia has been a staple of cable news and social media in the U.S. But Americans aren’t really talking about Russia as much as we’re talking about ourselves, about what frightens us and where we perceive our greatest vulnerabilities as a society. In doing so, we find ourselves drawing on half a century of our own evolving cultural depictions of Russians, casting about for a simple answer as to how we left ourselves open to foreign manipulation,” writes David Klion for Coda.

😷 Explaining Russia's poison fetish

In a column for Raam op Rusland, scholar Mark Galeotti argues that the Kremlin’s apparent “perverse fascination for poison” could actually be a “macabre index” of the mood of the country’s elite, who become “more vicious,” the “less secure” they feel. While Galeotti believes the state’s involvement in high-profile attacks like those on Alexander Litvinenko and Sergey Skripal is obvious, he proposes that “less politically sensitive operations” might take place without the authorities’ permission or orchestration, as acts of “poison as self-defense” by Russia’s rich and powerful.

Galeotti also acknowledges that boundaries between political and private murders are “often unclear, permeable, and mobile,” citing the example of Pyotr Verzilov, whose alleged poisoning is better explained (at least in theory) as a reprisal for his involvement in an investigation that might harm Evgeny Prigozhin, rather than his Pussy Riot protest during the World Cup final.

🤝 America makes BBFs of two major adversaries

Commenting on the culmination of the Vostok-2018 military exercise, Carnegie Moscow Center senior fellow Alexander Gabuev warns that Washington’s dismissive attitude about deepening Sino-Russian military ties threatens to “upend a half century of U.S. military planning and strategy.” “The massive Chinese-Russian exercise last week is a clear message to the United States and Europe: if you continue to pressure us with sanctions, tariffs, and military deployments, we will join hands and push back,” Gabuev writes in Foreign Affairs, advising policy makers to “rethink” policies that “antagonize — at times needlessly — both of the United States’ principal geopolitical rivals.” The U.S. needs to “think more creatively about how to manage a new era of increased competition among great powers,” Gabuev says.

So here's Poklonskaya's plan to save pensions 🧓

Natalia Poklonskaya, the only United Russia State Duma deputy to vote against unpopular legislation that would raise the country’s retirement age, has introduced her own amendments to the bill, proposing monetary incentives to get Russians to retire later. According to Poklonskaya’s plan, the retirement age would not rise (from 55 to 60 for women and from 60 to 65 for men), but individuals could claim three-percent bonuses for every year that they defer pension payments. To receive these benefits, however, people would need to leave the labor force entirely. Crimea’s former attorney general also proposes granting the “unconditional right” of retirement to anyone who’s worked for at least 37 years, regardless of their age.

When is this headed for a vote?

The State Duma is expected to vote on the pension-reform bill’s second reading on Wednesday, September 26. A day later, lawmakers will likely pass the legislation’s third and final reading, sending it to the Federation Council and then President Putin.

The War of the Roses 🌹

On Monday, Moscow police detained Evgeniya Efimova, the ex-wife of Pavel Gusev, the owner and long-time chief editor of the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets. Efimova is reportedly being charged with “organized swindling” either on a large scale or resulting in the deprivation of someone’s housing. No further details are known about the case, but “Kolchuga” arms wholesaler owner Mikhail Khubutiya told the magazine RBC that Efimova has reached out to him for help, claiming that her ex-husband is trying to “pressure her,” apparently into dropping her civil suit against Gusev for a division of their property.

How much money are we talking about?

Efimova is currently suing Gusev in Moscow’s Presnensky District Court for a division of the property they acquired jointly while married. A source told the news agency RIA Novosti that the property’s estimated value is roughly 27 billion rubles ($410.3 million). Efimova is also reportedly suing for shares in the equity capital of Moskovsky Komsomolets and its publishing house. Gusev and Efimova have three children together.

Interviewing Sentsov's favorite cousin 🍽️

In a new interview with Meduza, Natalia Kaplan, the cousin of imprisoned Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, explained the role she’s taken on as Sentsov’s representative to the world. Kaplan’s conversation with special correspondent Sasha Sulim touches on many subjects (and you can read the whole thing in Russian), but here are some of the main takeaways:

  • Sentsov hasn’t met with Kaplan since July 5, 2018, about two months after he launched his hunger strike (which is still ongoing), and he refuses to meet with his mother or children (his daughter is 15 and his autistic son is 14) because he “prefers to live in emotional isolation” while in prison.
  • Kaplan and Sentsov generally limit their interactions to written correspondence, which she says is still largely “technical” (focusing mostly on his children).
  • Kaplan says there was some hope that Putin would pardon Sentsov (following his mother’s request), and she believes the Russian president missed his chance to appear “good natured.” Kaplan rejects the Kremlin’s insistence that inmates must ask to be pardoned.
  • Two of Sentsov’s friends are now helping Kaplan screen media inquiries, and she says she once gave 17 interviews in a single day.
  • Despite his famously indefatigable optimism, Sentsov now says he’s lost hope that he’ll ever be reunited with his family in Kyiv, Kaplan says. He’s also apparently told her that he’s suffering from hypoxia, which is apparently “damaging his brain and heart.”

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