This is your life in Russia

Demonstrators against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Copyright ZUMApress/Forum

The Polish weekly Polityka writes this week about political opposition in Putin's Russia and what will come next for Russia. (Sadly for non-polonophones Google Translate cannot for some reason deal with Polityka's webpage. So you'll just have to learn Polish, I guess.) Interestingly, the article reports on a sense among Russia experts that there could be major Egypt-style public protests in 2012 if the Presidential election is rigged, a suggestion which I have seen repeatedly dismissed in the Anglophone press:

[The director of the Institute of Contemporary Development] Igor Jurgens even warns the Kremlin against a repeat of the Belarusian scenario after 2012: "If the extra-parliamentary opposition is not allowed to participate in the elections, the stage of street democracy awaits Russia." [...] The majority of observers of the Russian political scene consider that the Egyptian option will be repeated in Russia if the economic situation turns radically worse.

And judging from this article, there are definitely signs that the political and economic pressure is causing people to crack. But don't get your hopes up that it will be change for the better.

It is nothing strange that Russians want change, and the political scientist Alexei Malashenko compares Russia to a "tank of hot water" coming to a boil, like in 1917 and 1991. Already last year in Kaliningrad 20,000 people protested against increased municipal fees and a road tax - a number unheard of in Russia for some time. On the wave of protests the then-governor was recalled. Young generations are also becoming radicalized, which was shown all too clearly by the December pogrom of immigrants in Moscow, when thousands of fanatical soccer fans hunted down immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia.

There's a certain parallel, perhaps, between this kind of militant Nationalism and militant Islam in the Middle East - and when it comes to Russia, I definitely fear that free and fair elections would produce a, frankly, Fascist government. But as the article points out, Nationalism is on the one hand encouraged by the regime itself as a way of undermining the liberal opposition, and on the other is a response to the very conditions that the regime has created. So in the long term, Russia would be better off. In the meantime it's pretty scary, though.