Russia held parliamentary and several local elections on December 4, with crowds gathering across the country to protest against alleged rigging next day after the preliminary results for Moscow and St. Petersburg were announced.Needless to say, the federal media reports setting voter turnouts in the Rostov and Voronezh provinces at 146% and 130% simply had to prompt a public outcry, but the incidents should not overshadow a wider picture. As the pressure on Iran is mounting and the imminent military campaign against Syria is drawing closer, the West immediately put to work the complete arsenal of its manipulative techniques with the aim of destabilizing Russia. It is well-known that chaos can be successfully exported only to countries where the conditions making them receptive to such external influences exist, and in Russia we are witnessing at the moment barely disguised efforts to create the conditions…
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US Senator John McCain was quick to address Russian premier V. Putin on the occasion with a tweet saying: “Dear Vlad, The Arab Spring is coming to a neighborhood near you”. “In terms of signaling, we've stood up, as we have elsewhere in the world, and continue to stand for the right for people to peacefully express their views and their democratic aspirations. We're going to continue to do so”1, stated US State Department spokesman Mark Toner who also mentioned that hundreds of people in Russia including blogosphere's anti-corruption icon A. Navalny remained under arrest in Russia in connection with the protest. US Secretary of State H. Clinton contributed to the debate by unveiling the US Administration's plan to additionally spend some $9m with the stated goal of supporting democracy in Russia. In a stark contrast, neither of the above seems to worry about the thousands of people held in custody in the US over the Occupy Wall Street protests, which is a theme I intend to revisit below.
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Similarities between the organizational aspects of the protests in Russia and of those that earlier shattered the Arab world were momentarily pinpointed by watchers in a number of influential media. Russia's Expert magazine, for example, featured a comment stressing that the same network marketing strategies as in Egypt, Syria, etc. had been employed to convene the recent rallies in Russia2. Conducting his own express survey, my colleague Alexander Rogers found over 2.1 million links to calls for public protest on Russia's Yandex search engine in the morning of December 7, in many cases with entries recurring on hundreds of web pages within a fraction of a second. It therefore became absolutely clear that the job had been done by a team of professionals with serious planning, coordination, and financial resources. The widespread suggestion that Russian protesters wear white ribbons evokes similarities with the cases of Ukraine and Libya where, accordingly, the ribbons used to be orange and green.
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It is symbolic that this time the white color is offered as the symbol of a color revolution. The idea hardly originated within Russia, though the authorship is unconvincingly claimed by IMHO VI chair Arsen Revazov who wrote on Facebook: “When (and if) millions of people in Moscow start wearing white ribbons on their sleeves, attach them to their purses, or put them on their cars, falsifications would become impossible as the situation would be completely lucid. It will snow, and the city will turn white. There will be ten per cent, then thirty, then fifty or seventy. Already at thirty per cent, all fear is going to dwindle. A white revolution, snowy and clean – that is poetic. The campaign should last till March, and then we will see. I believe that if millions of Muscovites wear the ribbons – or even white napkins – things will surely change the right way without any violence”.
Whoever chose the white color for the purpose either was a bad student who failed to absorb anything from Russia's history, classic literature and lore or never went to a Russian school in the first place. The evil Snow Queen in Andersen's fairy tale was defeated, imaginative crook Ostap Bender that dreamed to dress in white in Ilf's and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf ended badly, and the anti-Bolshevist White Movement was routed (despite the West's support, by the way). The unlucky choice of white therefore seems to have been made in the West – in line with the entrenched tradition.
A revival of the White Movement in Russia is out of question, nor is there a pro-Western figure in the country to stake a viable bid for the Russian throne. As for a non-violent revolution under the “then we will see” slogan – the idea sounds utterly naïve even for a bunch of anarchists. Still, since Russia faces the threat to come under external control if the campaign successfully unravels, there must be some kind of logic behind the calls.
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Russian premier V. Putin said when chairing a meeting of the Russian Popular Front's Coordinating Council: "I looked at the first reaction of our American partners. The first thing that the secretary of state did was giving her opinion about elections, she said they were unfair and unjust, even before she got ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights) monitors' materials. She set the tone for some of the activists inside our country, gave them a signal, they heard this signal and started active work with support from US State Department”. He added: “If people act within the framework of the law, they must be given the right to express their opinion, and we must not restrict anyone in exercising these civic rights. However, if someone breaks the law, the authorities and the law enforcement agencies must urge compliance with the law by all legal means”.
Actually, the reaction could combine perfectly with an asymmetric response which the US Administration would have been unprepared to face. Russia could pledge at the nearest summit or other high-profile international forum tens of millions of dollars to support democracy in the US, in particular to help the Occupy Wall Street activists. The strengths of the approach are self-evident. First, Moscow would establish by making the pledge that supporting democracy in the US counts among Russia's domestic affairs. Secondly, the official status of the initiative would block any US counter-measures like freezing the Russian accounts in foreign banks from which money would be poured into the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The above initiative could switch the international community's attention to a new sphere of the Russia-US relations where both countries would automatically act as equal players. In the settings, the political standoff would not be dominated by the outdated legacy in the relations between Moscow and Washington or any entrenched political stereotypes.
In any case, Russia should not give in to the West's rather predictable provocations or get drawn into a new information war in which it would – as it routinely happened in the past – have to play by the opponent's rules. The moment is opportune for Moscow to overturn the paradigm, to refresh Russia's elites, and to update its policies with an eye to today's challenges.
These days, Russia's history is inching towards a new bifurcation point. It is completely untrue that the country is locked in a per-revolutionary situation – simply the time has come to chart a course for the future. With the countdown running, Russia needs unconventional approaches to move ahead of the curve and to coerce its opponents into playing a game in which they at least have no advantages over Moscow. The whole world is watching Russia.
