The Real Russia. Today. Russia’s Remdesivir decision, plus Denis Volkov looks back and ahead, while BBC journalist Oleg Boldyrev talks to activists digging up the dead

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

• Russian authorities issue first-ever compulsory license for controversial coronavirus treatment
• Opinion and analysis: Volkov looks back at 2020 and ahead to 2021, and Boldyrev parses the Kremlin’s approach to excavating Soviet memory
• News briefs: Navalny returns on Sunday, Verzilov and Varlamov run into trouble in Africa, Putin wants more vaccinations, and Chaika’s ex-daughter-in-law is attacked

Feature stories

💊 Uncertain benefits (690 words)

For the first time ever, the Russian government has invoked compulsory licensing “in the interests of national security,” giving the domestic pharmaceutical company Pharmasyntez permission to mass-produce its generic of the antiviral drug Remdesivir. The American company that developed this coronavirus treatment — and owns the patent for it — didn’t consent to this decision. Moreover, studies of the drug’s effectiveness against COVID-19 have yielded mixed results.

Opinion and analysis

🔮 Russia’s past and future depend on how much the state and society can trust each other

Denis Volkov, Levada Center sociologist — Republic

In an interview with Oleg Sokolenko, Volkov reviews what polling and focus groups revealed about Russian public opinion in 2020 and makes a few guesses about shifting views in 2021. 

Coronavirus: The public doesn’t hold the authorities directly responsible for the pandemic, but rising pessimism nevertheless damages society’s relationship with the state. Roughly two-thirds of Russians approve of the government’s response, but specific safety measures (namely, economic lockdowns) have disproportionately harmed the less “modern layers” of the population. Conspiracy theories: Just five to 10 percent of Russians are hardcore conspiracy theorists, but a whopping quarter of the public thinks the government is inflating COVID-19 case counts to scare people into obedience. The Russian authorities need to do more to convince the public that vaccines are safe and also that COVID-19 itself is a dangerous disease. Environmentalism: Russians worry about the environment, but more in terms of waste mismanagement than the climate crisis. Protests: Russians are generally more sympathetic to domestic movements (like Moscow in 2019 or Khabarovsk in 2020) than demonstrations abroad (like Ukraine in 2014 or Belarus in 2020). 

Constitutional amendments: Roughly 60 percent of Russians supported more presidential terms for Putin because they believe it ensures social programs and state sovereignty. (Some conspiracy theorists think the reforms finally “corrected” Russia’s supposedly U.S.-imposed 1993 Constitution.) Attitudes about Putin and the government affect confidence in the vaccine and other state initiatives. Anti-Kremlin opposition is no longer a marginal viewpoint, but the opposition remains fragmented, whereas the authorities’ supporters (buoyed by state support) are better mobilized.

Alexey Navalny: About one in five Russians approves of Navalny’s activism. His growing public profile, however, doesn’t always correlate to rising public support. More and more older people are watching his YouTube videos, for example, but they generally don’t identify as his supporters. Volkov says they tune in for information about political secrets and gossip in Moscow. In the abstract, Russians accept corruption as an inescapable fact of life, but they’re capable of anger when faced with specific examples. Navalny’s anti-corruption activism is now secondary for most of his audience; the attraction has become more about what he represents as a political alternative to the Putin regime.

In 2021: Politically, much depends on how the authorities respond to future explosions of civic unrest and discontent. The state has managed to resolve protests where it agrees to concessions (like in Yekaterinburg, Shiyes, and Bashkiria), but it’s also fueled demonstrations by cracking down on the public (like in Moscow in 2019) and created crises from nothing (like in Khabarovsk in 2020). Whether the Kremlin pursues the stick or the carrot in 2021 will depend on how it addresses (1) the parliamentary elections this fall and (2) falling approval ratings that make it insufficient merely to mobilize the authorities’ supporters. If a “turning of the screws” further weakens independent journalism and sociological work, the quality of research will damage the state’s capacity to manage the country. 

⚖️ Inspecting and reaffirming the USSR’s war experience

Oleg Boldyrev — BBC Russian Service

Russia’s federal investigators launched a massive campaign to bring genocide charges against groups that slaughtered Soviet civilians during the Second World War. Last year, state officials opened nearly a dozen cases in seven different regions and made financial and archival resources available to researchers working to exhume bodies and identify perpetrators. Detectives have pursued these investigations vigorously, like in Volgograd, where the authorities were actually summoning witnesses (now very elderly people) for questioning — until the Kremlin urged them to stop. 

Elena Tsunaeva, a committee chair in Russia’s Civic Chamber and an activist in Pskov who works to raise awareness about the USSR’s losses in WWII, oversees the “No Statute of Limitations” project, which relies on presidential funding but supposedly operates independently from the Federal Investigative Committee. The organization’s research overlaps almost exactly with the recent genocide cases, however, and federal authorities (including the Investigative Committee) openly participate in the group. 

The authorities’ sudden interest in assigning responsibility for crimes committed 80 years ago has a “pronounced ideological flavor,” says Oleg Boldyrev. State officials seek moral ammunition against the Kremlin’s modern-day critics, and the government wants to protect the country against historical revisions by the West that would erase the USSR’s enormous civilian losses in the war. 

Human rights activists like Sergey Krivenko point out that the Russian government doesn’t accommodate historians and archivists trying to uncover and identify those killed in the Stalinist repressions. Many of these records remain classified and funding is limited or gone altogether. According to Anatoly Razumov, a historian in St. Petersburg, the state’s policy continues Soviet counterpropaganda, when the Kremlin pivoted from Soviet atrocities to those committed against the USSR to escape its own culpability. Elena Tsunaeva rejects this comparison, arguing that it’s wrong to frame the USSR’s wartime civilian losses in the context of political repressions, and she insists that activists investigating Stalin’s crimes face no serious obstacles. Not true! says Razumov, who stresses that the authorities interfere in such work and now even dispute some of the Soviet atrocities Russian leaders acknowledged back in the 1990s.

Other news in brief

• 🛬 Homeward bound. (310 words.) Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny says he’s returning home to Moscow on Sunday, January 17, after spending five months in Germany recovering from being poisoned. (He could be arrested when he steps off the plane for violating the terms of his parole, which technically expired last month.)
• 🛃 The Russians in Africa. (290 words.) Pussy Riot member and Mediazona publisher Pyotr Verzilov, blogger Ilya Varlamov, and others were briefly detained in South Sudan on Wednesday. The confusion involved a drone camera discovered in their luggage.
• 💉 Time to step things up. (275 words.) Russia needs to move “from large-scale to mass vaccination” of the entire population against the coronavirus, said President Vladimir Putin, who’s yet to get his own jab.
• 🚨 It’s no fun being a Chaika. (285 words.) Marina Chaika, the ex-wife of Russian businessman Artyom Chaika (who is the son of Russia’s former attorney general), was attacked and briefly abducted outside of Moscow on the evening of January 12.

🛍️ Tomorrow in history: 321 years ago tomorrow, on January 14, 1700, Peter I ordered his boyars and many others to wear clothes “in the Hungarian manner,” trading longer traditional garb for shorter European threads. Peter’s shaving decree wouldn’t come for another five years.