{"id":295,"date":"2024-03-14T15:27:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-14T12:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/?p=295"},"modified":"2024-07-16T15:29:17","modified_gmt":"2024-07-16T12:29:17","slug":"russian-election-rigging-a-portrait-in-terror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/new-nobility\/russian-election-rigging-a-portrait-in-terror\/","title":{"rendered":"Russian Election Rigging: A Portrait in Terror"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might think that a regime led by a despot and surrounded by forests of armed men with an absolute indifference to the rule of law would shrug off a mere election as a tiresome piece of risk-free theater where the people do as they\u2019re told, and return their ruler to the Kremlin. You\u2019d be wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The presidential vote of March 15-17<\/a> will certainly deliver the result that Vladimir Putin desires \u2014 not hard when you remove all serious contenders to prison camps, cemeteries, or irrelevance \u2014 but that does not mean the Kremlin is relaxed about the outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All presidential elections, however heavily rigged, dramatically increase the Kremlin\u2019s paranoia. This explains the security services\u2019 decision to raid the homes of contemporary artists in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Samara, and other Russian cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The FSB campaign began with the targeting of Petr Verzilov, a member of Pussy Riot art group, who was reportedly accused of high treason. Several months ago, Verzilov was sentenced to eight years in prison in absentia for spreading \u201cfake news\u201d about the Russian military in his posts on Instagram. He was convicted for referring to the 2022 massacre in Bucha<\/a>, the Kyiv suburb, but the verdict was overturned by a Moscow court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Putin\u2019s Russia, such setbacks for the regime merely spur another case, and so it proved. According to Russian human rights activists, the FSB opened a new criminal case against Verzilov on suspicion of high treason, based on an interview where he stated he had joined the Ukrainian army to fight Russian troops in the East Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Verzilov left Russia in 2020, and there is no direct connection between his fight in Ukraine and artists working in Russia, most of whom don\u2019t know him and have no contact with him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only explanation for the crackdown is that the FSB is organizing a Stalinist-style campaign against contemporary artists who did not support Putin\u2019s war. And in truly Stalinist fashion, Putin\u2019s security service is building a case by uniting the artists in an imaginary, non-existent treacherous organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The accusations may be transparently absurd but the consequences are not. The aim is to instigate fear among artists, musicians, and the rest of the politically minded intelligentsia to prevent them from causing trouble during the election, according to our sources in the Russian security services. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That the Kremlin and the FSB could seriously believe that a group of artists could cause a problem for Putin\u2019s re-election in a heavily policed and tightly controlled country shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise, given Putin\u2019s obsession with Russia\u2019s tumultuous history, an obsession shared by his cronies on the Security Council and the security services.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what explains the Kremlin\u2019s attitude to Ukraine and the Soviet Union\u2019s legacy, but it also has a dark core of paranoia fueled by a belief that the state is inherently fragile, whether it is the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or Putin\u2019s Russia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This concept was born out of two historical traumas \u2014 the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In both cases, the country had the largest secret police force in the world at its disposal to suppress dissent, and yet on both occasions, it failed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The KGB and its successor organizations explained those failures by blaming interference by the omni-powerful and ominous outside force \u2014 the West. The West stood accused of helping Lenin, and the same West helped Gorbachev to destroy the Soviet Union. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quite why the KGB stood by and did nothing during this epoch-defining moment, apart from a 1991 coup attempt so ill-conceived that it failed to secure support from its own rank and file, was never discussed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Putin is adamant that there can be no repetition of those disasters, thus his obsession with history. But a problem arises here \u2014 the only means he and his elite have to understand the historical events is the Marxist-Leninist theory drilled into them in Soviet schools and universities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus it is engraved on their hearts that a combination of war and political crisis is an elemental and explosive combination \u2014 just look at how the Russo-Japanese War sparked the revolution of 1905, and World War I caused the February revolution of 1917 that toppled the tsar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first component \u2014 the war \u2014 is already there, and the second \u2014 potential political crisis \u2014 is the election since secret service officials treat every election as a political crisis. This, they believe, is when an ever-deceitful West, always plotting against Russia, might seek to undermine political stability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The continuing incursions<\/a> of three Ukrainian military intelligence-sponsored units \u2014 The Freedom of Russia Legion, the Siberian Battalion, and the Russian Volunteer Corps or RDK \u2014 in the Belgorod and Kursk regions in March, while irrelevant from the military point of view, play right into this paranoia, fueling Kremlin\u2019s fears on the eve of the election. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once accepted, this dark picture of the imminent political crisis allows believers to justify anything to protect the status quo \u2014 the killing of the regime\u2019s main political opponent in jail, the March 12 attack<\/a> on his chief of staff (\u201ca gangster greeting from Putin,\u201d as the victim put it), removing anti-war candidates<\/a> from the ballot and of course further repression. In this way, the security elite believes is averts another revolution and national collapse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Security officials believe in their revelation of the true way the world works, and so feel it\u2019s natural to narrow down the room for political change to as small a space as possible. Ultimately they have reduced this to nothing and thus ensure the leader\u2019s irreplaceability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what Putin aims for in these elections. It makes him the keystone to the present Russian state; without him, it collapses. But of course, that also means that when the regime tumbles into rubble, as all regimes do, his legacy will fall with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any reader of history books, good or bad, should know that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published in CEPA<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agentura.ru 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside the minds of Russia\u2019s guard dogs, the regime\u2019s enemies are busy and innumerable. A lot of people are getting bitten as a result. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-nobility"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":297,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions\/297"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}