MOSCOW – President Vladimir V. Putin has made it clear that he does not tolerate dissent, but a new opposition party has flourished.
And this party, interestingly, has been talking about the same issues of fighting corruption and repression that made opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny the Kremlin’s number one enemy, with the government about to dispatch him to a penal colony.
The new party thrives, although Navalny’s own party has been banned. The reasons, say Russian analysts, are to undermine Navalny, divert attention from his movement and divide the liberal opposition – all while providing a veneer of multiparty politics in a country where there are few significant electoral options.
The new party, called New People, seems designed to attract Navalny’s followers.
“For two decades we have been living in a situation of false choice: freedom or order,” proclaims his platform. The government, he says, “should stop seeing enemies and traitors in those who have other points of view.”
The Kremlin worked on many fronts to destroy Navalny’s movement – trapping its supporters in protests and, according to Navalny and Western governments, trying to assassinate him last year. Government officials have classified him as a puppet of Western intelligence agencies, and government-backed flash mobs have emerged to support Putin.
But Navalny also faced a steady stream of competing anti-corruption reformers who appear to operate with government approval – most recently New People, which accelerated its campaign for parliamentary elections in September, when Navalny will be on a colony penalty.
The founder of a cosmetics company, Aleksei Nechayev, founded the party last year to channel what he described as a feeling of opposition in society, just as Navalny has done. But Nechayev refrains from directly criticizing Putin and does not ask for his resignation.
Navalny and his allies hailed the arrival of New People with disdain, identifying Nechayev as the last in a long line of political doubles plotted by the Kremlin to try to oust Navalny from his leadership of disaffected young professionals.
“They are trying to feed us the line that the New People will now be the real competition for United Russia,” said Lyubov Sobol, a Navalny ally, of the pro-Putin ruling party in a YouTube analysis after the appearance of the new party last year.
“It’s kind of funny,” she added. “They say the right things, more or less, but obviously they will never do anything. They are simply spoilers. “
Russia’s political system is sometimes called “administered democracy”, due to the practice of the Kremlin’s political advisors to create, guide or finance alleged opposition figures and parties – and to tolerate some others, as long as they do not directly criticize Putin.
These parties can compete with each other, allowing the population to flow, while providing the losers needed to create an illusion of choice in elections in which the governing party mostly wins.
Variants of such democratic fig leaf systems exist worldwide, in autocratic countries. Apart from some monarchies in the Middle East and remaining communist dictatorships like North Korea, elections, even if rigged, are the only accepted means of legitimizing power today.
This criticism of Russia’s iron-fisted government came in the early 2000s under the command of Putin’s former domestic political adviser, Vladislav Y. Surkov, although Surkov has since been sidelined. In the last presidential election in 2018, Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite who is reputed to be Putin’s goddaughter, took the role of the opposition while Navalny was banned from running.
Likewise, New People allows Russians who support Navalny’s modernization agenda to vote for a legal alternative, without the headache of arrests and repression.
Nechayev denied having consulted the Kremlin before forming the party, which now has 72 regional offices, having added two just last week, and which actually won some seats last fall in the regional elections.
Even so, political analysts rejected the idea that the party emerged without the Kremlin’s approval. In Russia, “the real opposition is unregistered parties,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a political scientist at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said in a telephone interview.
In an interview at the party’s spacious headquarters in a luxury Moscow office tower, Nechayev listed the three conditions for registering a political party: refrain from criticism of Putin or his family, avoid foreign funding, and refrain from protests by street not sanctioned.
“We don’t violate those three red lines,” he said.
“Often, and especially in the West, Russia is presented only as Putin and Navalny,” but many Russians want moderate opposition, he said. “Most people understand that the world is not black and white.”
As useful as it is in blunt movements like Navalny’s, administered democracy has not always gone well. On rare occasions, politicians ridiculed as Kremlin puppets have turned to real opposition.
Members of Just Russia, a party that Surkov helped form in 2006 to fill the false center-left opposition wave in Russian politics, did just that in 2011 with the endorsement of a previous street protest movement led by Navalny.
One of those politicians, Gennady Gudkov, has since fled Russia and speaks openly of the Kremlin’s hand in false opposition parties, a threat that the real opposition faces in parallel with police repressions.
Regarding Surkov’s central role in the creation of Just Russia, “there were no secrets,” Gudkov said in a telephone interview from Bulgaria.
In a macabre twist, a political figure believed to have emerged as a fake or managed copy of Navalny died in what Bellingcat, the open source research organization, documented as a likely poisonous murder.
As an anti-corruption blogger, Nikita Isayev and his group New Russia imitated many of Navalny’s tactics, revealing corruption among low-level officials. He was called “the New Navalny”. However, he refrained from criticizing Putin.
Isayev died suddenly at the age of 41 on an overnight train ride in 2019. Among the potential reasons identified by Bellingcat was palace intrigue. Isayev was seen as an affiliate of Surkov, so when Surkov fell from grace, according to this theory, his Kremlin rivals provided for the elimination of his fake Mr. Navalny as well.