“With this opposition, Vladimir Putin would rule between two wings of the people, even if he were a sincere democrat.” The speaker is one of the people quoted in this article, who wishes to remain anonymous in this specific case. Because there is an illusion that needs to be saved and is directed at us towards the Western world, which continues to cultivate the illusion of a political resistance against the Tsar that is as solid as a monolith.
Never has a mistake been more sensational. Given that resistance to current power in Russia and abroad remains one of the most dangerous professions in the world, there is talk in Moscow’s dissident circles these days of nothing more than another internal feud. The Free Russia Forum was founded in 2016 by chess master and die-hard Putin opponent Garry Kasparov. The Standing Committee also includes, among others, the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the former Duma deputy Ilya Ponomariov, who now lives in Kiev. The organization meets twice a year in Lithuania to update the so-called “Putin list,” which signals possible sanctions against Western governments, oligarchs, officials and propagandists who work with the Kremlin.
In the new list, in addition to ultra-nationalist bloggers and ultra-national Bolsheviks, the name of Nikolai Rybakov, the young president of the Yabloko party, who presented himself in the recent local elections with the slogan “For Peace” was also mentioned, with unexpected results. The leading liberal opposition figure, who is close to dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was recently sent to Siberia, is accused of taking part in “various propaganda talk shows” as if there were impartial television platforms in Russia. Even between Khodorkovsky and Kasparov, both of whom have lived in the West for some time, there is not much understanding. Through the Telegram channels that support him, one accuses the other of vaguely nationalistic theories about the Russian world and the protection of the Russian language as values to be preserved, which he only expresses when he addresses his compatriots. The social networks close to the former chess player instead respond with obscure allusions to Khodorkovsky’s past and his future ambitions, “which are not justified by a non-existent following in his home country.”
The main, and not the only, fault line runs between the liberal opposition, which includes Kasparov and Rybakov, although they are in conflict with each other, and the more progressive opposition, which in our country is often seen as tough and pure of another faction of extremism accused. Ten days ago, the newspaper Vedomosti published an article in which, citing sources close to the Kremlin, it said that Alexei Venediktov, the former director of the glorious, defunct Moscow radio station “Radio Eco”, could present himself as the only candidate of the liberal forces in the presidential elections in the Russian Federation next March last year. A figure who was labeled a foreign agent, i.e. an undesirable person, in April 2022, but who at the same time does not deny but claims to have had constant contact with Putin up to that point. Open the sky.
The sharpest reaction came from Alexei Navalny. Last March, the FBK, its anti-corruption foundation, accused Venediktov and the daughter of the former mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin’s mentor Ksenia Sobchak, the liberal candidate in the 2018 elections, of pocketing money to improve their image of Mayor Sergey Sobianin of Moscow, recently re-elected with 76 percent of the vote. But now Navalny, public enemy number one, to whom the rest of the group, which in reality considers him a populist if not a nationalist, has a hairy solidarity, has released an analysis of the prospects of a fight in which he is released from prison There is not only “burnt” Venediktov, who was defined as a “puppet of the regime”, but also any other form of dissent, including abroad. Except one, his. “The opposition’s electoral alliances are an empty waste of time. Screw your coalitions. I’m a fake. Our fund must not waste any time. Only when the picture of the candidates and our options is clear do we determine the strategy for our actions. We are not interested in meetings in Paris and coffee breaks with croissants in the company of idlers.”
In short: it’s everyone against everyone. And everyone for themselves. This is also shown by the limited success of the “Congress of People’s Deputies” based in Poland, which was headed by Ilya Ponomariow and widely publicized. Each of his calls serves, not least, to highlight the heterogeneous, not to say disintegrated, character of the opposition to Putin. Because none of the main dissidents ever responded. The former Duma deputy is judged by all sides, liberal and progressive, as a false radical who claims to be behind the actions of pro-Ukrainian militias and is only interested in publicity. Without exception, the Western media often asks these opponents, who cannot even agree on a coffee, to come up with a recipe for a deputinized Russia. They laugh in the Kremlin.