Russia's Alternative to Putin

Does Russia have a viable alternative to Putin? The more than a thousand protesters, who were detained when they marched with Alexey Navalny in Moscow, and the nearly 100 other Russian cities on Sunday, March 26, 2017, think so.

     Unlike the Chinese leaders who, realizing personal gain and other appearances of corruption undermine public support, adopted the Supervision Law that places everyone in the country's public sector under anti-corruption supervision (Under the guise of searching for corruption, Chinese authorities, of course, also position themselves to uncover other prosecutable violations), Putin and the oligarchs he enabled to accumulate their wealth continue to present their soft underbelly for Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation to document on his blog. Someone's $15 million worth of gold bars even fell out of a cargo plane leaving Yakutsk, Russia, according to TIME magazine (April 2, 2018). A Chinese spokesperson said China is willing to lend a hand to other countries that need help fighting corruption. Neighboring Russia is yet to take up the offer.

     Moscow's cyberpropaganda concerns U.S. and European democracies, and Putin's adviser, Andrey Krutskikh, brags that Russia is "at the verge of having something in the information arena which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals"(TIME magazine, May 29, 2017). But these so-called "triumphs" do nothing to prevent government corruption and a failing economy, based on falling oil prices, from motivating protests in Russian streets.

     While Vladimir Putin basked in his March 18, 2018 sham election victory, ordinary Russian citizens continued to see their disposable income and standard of living deteriorate. By 2018. senior citizens protested Putin's plan to raise the age when they could retire and claim pensions. Although Putin promises to make Russia a great power again, he, like little North Korea's leader, stakes Russia's claim to world respect for its spheres of influence on new nuclear weapons (In December, 2018, he showed a new missile reaching Florida.) rather than the thriving economies and nuclear weapons that support the powerful positions of the United States and China. Where are Russia's wind farms, medical advances, and hybrid seeds to end world hunger?

    Putin has problems: volatile oil revenues far below a once per barrel high near $150; failure to engineer relief from sanctions from the Trump administration; a younger generation getting its news from social media rather than official, state-owned radio and TV stations; corruption favoring oligarchs; a war dragging on in Syria; and a revolt by the Orthodox church in Ukraine. Just as China fears the competing influence of international religions and locks up Uighur Muslims in re-education camps and caused Buddhism's Dalai Lama to flee Tibet, Russia fears the independence of the Orthodox church in Ukraine, supported by Patriarch Bartholomen in Constantinople and Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko. Russia's President Putin, who considers the allegiance of the Russian Orthodox church, including in Ukraine, critical to his authority, threatened to punish those who worshiped in churches affiliated with Constantinople and raised concern that Russia would take over Orthodox cathedrals and monasteries not affiliated with Moscow. The West needs to be prepared to respond to any excuse Putin can use to further strengthen Russia's grip on Ukraine or former Soviet satellites.

     The Kremlin has employed various strategies to silence Navalny and prevent him from running for President against Putin. After he was charged with stealing timber from a state-run forestry in 2013, he was sentenced to five years in prison, despite a lack of evidence. In protest, 10,000 took to Moscow's streets and failed to leave. The next morning Navalny was released. Following his release he ran for Mayor of Moscow and won 27% of the vote to come in second to Putin's candidate in a six-candidate field.

     Later Alexey Navalny and his brother, Oleg, were charged with shipping company fraud. Again a conviction was rendered with no evidence. Oleg was sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony, where he has been punished repeatedly for minor infractions and his requests for parole were refused twice. Alexey received a suspended three and a half year sentence and house arrest. Russia was using a traditional method of silencing one family member by imprisoning others. But Alexey cut the tracking bracelet off his ankle, announced what he had done on his blog, and started leaving his family's apartment at will. However, his fraud case is used to keep his name off the ballot in  presidential elections, and, for staging protest rallies, he served 30 days in jail in 2018 and was re-arrested again two minutes after his release.

     In the later blog, "29 Countries Influence 7 Billion People," see what the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, wrote about Vladimir Putin and democracy.