The Real Russia. Today. The Russian authorities’ new case against Navalny, plus water shortages in Kurgan and a nationwide childcare deficit

Monday, January 4, 2021

• Bellingcat lead investigator publishes database on travel history of FSB operatives implicated in Navalny poisoning
• Meduza breaks down the evidence, or lack thereof, presented by federal investigators against Russia’s top oppositionist
• Leaked recording implicates Belarusian KGB in plotting murders abroad on Lukashenko’s orders
• New podcast episode: How Russia is ruled (featuring Yuval Weber)
• Opinion and analysis: Gallyamov says another 90s-era is coming for Russia, and Troitsky ponders expats and emigres
• Feature stories from other outlets: Novaya Gazeta investigates water shortages in Kurgan, and Proekt tracks Russia’s childcare deficit
• News briefs: Petersburg’s COVID numbers and the Moscow subway welcomes back ladies

Feature stories

👮 The latest case against Mr. Navalny

In the late evening hours of Tuesday, December 29, Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee announced felony fraud charges against Anti-Corruption Foundation founder Alexey Navalny and “other individuals.” The opposition figure and his colleagues are suspected of embezzling hundreds of millions of rubles in donations to their organizations “to buy property and valuables” for themselves. Pro-Kremlin bloggers have circulated these same allegations for years without ever presenting convincing evidence. Meduza examines the biggest questions about the Russian authorities’ new case against Navalny, which comes just weeks after he accused President Putin of personally ordering his assassination. 

💣 ‘The president is waiting’

An alleged recording of Belarus’s former KGB chairman has revealed that the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko (Alyaksandr Lukashenka), authorized political assassination operations abroad as recently as in 2012. The recording was published by the Brussels-based online newspaper EUObserver on Monday, January 4. Though it has yet to be authenticated, the tape notably includes a discussion of plans to murder journalist Pavel Sheremet, who was killed when a bomb exploded under his car in downtown Kyiv in 2016.

💾 Bellingcat’s data

Just weeks after the release of his team’s bombshell joint investigation linking Alexey Navalny’s poisoning to Russian intelligence operatives, Bellingcat lead researcher Christo Grozev has published a database of information on the travel history of the FSB agents implicated in the assassination attempt. In the hours after the database was made public, journalists began identifying possible leads. Grozev also noted that two trips have been redacted from the database, so as not to affect already ongoing investigations.

“The Naked Pravda”: Debt and vertical control across towns and industries 🎧

Thanks to Russia’s recent constitutional amendments, local self-government has effectively lost its independence. State officials at all levels are now accountable, one way or another, to the president. Dramatic as these changes seem on paper, the reforms, in fact, formally recognize what has long been true in reality: appointed “city managers” have largely replaced the country’s elected mayors. But Russia’s “power vertical” relies on more than just political appointments.

To learn about the other levers at the Kremlin’s disposal, Meduza turned to Yuval Weber, the Bren Chair of Russian Military and Political Strategy at Marine Corps University’s Krulak Center and a Research Assistant Professor at Texas A&M’s Bush School in Washington, DC. Dr. Weber is the author of a forthcoming book, titled “The Russian Economy,” about how economic reform efforts in Russia follow similar trajectories even among different types of government.

Opinion and analysis (summaries by Meduza)

🌪️ The Putin era ensures another turbulent decade to come

Abbas Gallyamov, political analyst — VTimes

The Putin administration’s growing authoritarianism has shaped current Russian politics into a struggle between the authorities and the opposition, but the country’s critical political battles will shift elsewhere, once the regime (inevitably?) weakens, opening the door to other nation-defining clashes between the center and the regions, capital and labor, and more. If this breakdown sounds familiar, it’s because the post-Putin chaos will largely resemble the turbulent 1990s, fueled by anti-Moscow sentiment, separatism, gaping wealth disparities, and more. The catastrophe ahead is the result of Putin’s evisceration of Russia’s institutions, and the technocrats implementing Kremlin policies today will have to prove tomorrow, one by one, if they can navigate the new landscape on their own.

🌐 The sprawling, enduring Outer Russia

Artemy Troitsky, music critic — Novaya Gazeta

Welcome to “Outer Russia,” the community of Russian expatriates and emigres scattered across Europe, America, and elsewhere, either deliberately jettisoning or stubbornly clinging to their Russian heritage. Politically diverse (with members ranging from oppositionists in exile to the relatives of Putin’s oligarchs), Outer Russia’s population remains stable, thanks to a steady stream of Russians willing to take their chances or enjoy the spoils of their wealth in other countries. Living abroad, Troitsky is still firmly committed to his Russian identity, remaining remotely immersed in the Russian mainland’s culture, language, and media. (And he’s not alone: Proekt recently estimated that more than 10 million people left Russia over the past 30 years.)

Feature stories from other outlets (summaries by Meduza)

🚰 Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink

Yulia Batalova — Novaya Gazeta

In late December, with temperatures peaking in the low teens (Farhenheit), Novaya Gazeta correspondent Yulia Batalova walked the streets of Kurgan, home to roughly 300,000 people and located about 1,280 miles east of Moscow. Though Kurgan hosts the region’s administrative center, many pockets of the city still rely on outdoor communal pumps as their only source of water. To make matters worse, many of these pumps freeze and become inoperable during the winter. Batalova says half the pumps she found while roaming the city were offline.

Residents have devised various approaches to survive. Many people simply flock to the still functioning pumps, trekking through the snow, carrying bottles and jugs on carts to drag back home. The local water-supply company says the pumps stop working due to frozen soil and improper operation. Repairs are laborious and time-consuming, sometimes requiring special steam-generating equipment. One resident told Batalova that she has to keep her nearest pump running constantly to prevent it from freezing in the coldest weather. Ice isn’t the only reason many of Kurgan’s communal water pumps no longer work: Some locals with more money have installed their own water pumps, drawing on and diminishing the same underground wells that feed the communal supply.

Monthly access to Kurgan’s communal water pumps runs almost 30 rubles ($0.41) — a pittance, though many locals, like a school teacher who spoke to Batalova, earn as little as 12,000 rubles ($165) a month. Despite these hardships, most people in Kurgan told Batalova that they are generally happy with their lives. The authorities have benefitted from this sentiment, moreover. For example, though water is scarce in many parts of the city, there are more than enough polling stations. Last September, the country’s ruling political party, United Russia, won 80 percent of the seats in the regional parliament.

Many people living in Kurgan do enjoy centralized indoor plumbing, though the entire city nearly lost access to this water system last fall after the municipality fell 230 million rubles ($3.1 million) in debt to the company that manages the supply. 

👶 Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

Alexey Parfenov, Evgeny Bogdanov, Yulia Apukhtina, and Andrey Dorozhny — Proekt

One of Vladimir Putin’s signature domestic policy initiatives in the last decade was a massive expansion of childcare for preschoolers. The president has argued that families ought to have at least three children, but he recognizes that childcare shortages force many women to choose between multiple children and having careers. According to government reports, the authorities have implemented Putin’s childcare plan surprisingly well, but Proekt found that officials managed this feat largely by overcrowding facilities in urban centers and averaging statistics from more rural areas, where depopulation has created a surplus of available childcare. 

Also, despite these accounting tricks, more than 1.3 million children across Russia were waitlisted for guaranteed childcare in 2018. Some of the worst deficits were in Russia’s North Caucasus and in cities like Kursk and Lipetsk, where between 15 and 30 percent of children couldn’t get childcare. 

The Kremlin’s childcare push was supposed to entice women to return to or remain in the workforce, but only 66.5 percent of women with preschool-age children said they earned a salary in 2019. Which mothers go back to a job also depends heavily on where they live inside Russia: for example, it’s just 40 percent of women with children in North Ossetia but 85 percent in Chukotka.

In Russia’s metropolises, rapid population growth and mostly uncontrolled high-rise residential developments have exploded the need for new childcare without creating the supply. According to Proekt, local officials lack the financial resources to begin constructing new daycare centers before these apartments are built, which leads some city administrators to negotiate informally with developers, where state officials warn of regulatory obstacles and property owners threaten to take their business elsewhere.

Other news in brief

• 📈 Three’s company. St. Petersburg Deputy Governor Evgeny Yelin says city authorities expect three new waves of COVID-19 after the end of the New Year’s holidays. (Locals have been avoiding hospitals this week to stay at home.)
• 💪 She can do it! After decades, Moscow’s subway system has welcomed back women train drivers. Thanks to recent reforms to labor laws, women are also now able to work as skippers, long-haul truckers, and more.

🔍 Tomorrow in history: 44 years ago tomorrow, on January 5, 1977, the Moscow Helsinki Group launched a commission to investigate the USSR’s systemic political abuse of psychiatry, based on the authorities’ interpretation of political opposition as a psychiatric problem. The human rights group also started organizing assistance for victims of psychiatric abuse.