Vladimir Putin's Russia: West can't rely on internal opposition to oust regime and must prepare for expansion of war – Dr Yuri Felshtinsky

Moscow and St Petersburg are like the capital and the subservient districts ruled by the tyrannical Coriolanus Snow in the Hunger Games films, writes Dr Yuri Felshtinsky, author of From Red Terror to Terrorist State: The Infamous History of the Cheka

With the burial of Alexei Navalny in Moscow on Friday, is there any opposition left in Russia? Unfortunately, that question is the wrong one. The correct question is whether Navalny was the voice of real opposition. It sounds heartless, given his undoubted courage when he returned to Russia in 2021 to face charges. But what did Navalny have to offer?

In August 2008, Russia invaded Georgia when Putin’s righthand man Dmitri Medvedev, as nominal president, gave the order to attack. Navalny simply supported this naked act of aggression. In 2014, when Putin invaded Crimea, Navalny had little to say apart from cracking jokes.

In itself, there was nothing surprising in Navalny’s endorsements of the Kremlin. In 2014, 86 per cent of the Russian population supported the capture of Crimea in public opinion polls. Navalny was chasing the popular mood inflated by the overwhelmingly one-sided coverage on Crimea. In later years, you wouldn’t have guessed from him that places such as Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Baltic States, and Poland existed.

Navalny’s narrow political programme was anti-corruption. After all, who is in favour of corruption? Though it raised his popularity, it was also ambiguous. In China, Xi Jinping uses anti-corruption to subdue underlings. But in Russia, the Kremlin’s kleptocracy is understandably reluctant to reach for this device. Navalny merely picked it up to remove excesses.

Moscow and St Petersburg excluded from draft

It was a fateful mistake. From 1999, Putin’s rule over Russia was founded on a single keystone. There would be room for one popular politician only – the diminutive, bare-chested, horse-riding president. There was no room for a second most popular politician. For such a man, the day of reckoning would come quickly: Mikhail Khodorkovsky (arrested in 2003), Boris Nemtsov (killed in 2015), and now Navalny.

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Members of nationalist youth movement Yunarmiya attend a concert in Moscow's Red Square celebrating Russia's claimed annexation of four regions of Ukraine (Picture: Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)

What does this tell us about 21st-century Russia? More than one would think. Russia is much like the capital and the subservient districts in the fictional Panem run by Coriolanus Snow in the Hunger Games films. A small population of 12.5 million in Moscow, and a 5.5 million adjunct in St Petersburg, dominate the remainder of 125 million Russians.

If you speak today to anyone living in Moscow or St Petersburg, you wouldn’t think there was a war going on or international sanctions. The military excludes the two cities from the military draft for Ukraine to which every Russian is subject from the age of 18 to 30. If one looks more closely, this carefully crafted bubble is in fact also Putin’s kryptonite.

Putin flees capital

During 2022 and 2023, the Kremlin pushed into the media spotlight a shadowy figure called Yevgeny Prigozhin. He was cast as the entrepreneurial hero of the Ukraine ‘military operation’ who outsmarted Russia’s conventional army. It orchestrated pressure on both his private and state army to force results.

Two unforeseen things happened. On June 24 last year, Prigozhin announced to everyone’s consternation that he would attack Moscow, and reached halfway in a matter of hours. It got little attention, but Putin’s reaction too was illuminating. He left Moscow almost immediately with Medvedev and went into hiding in a place unknown.

He didn’t fear Prigozhin’s army, but he did grasp that an opportunity had been created for his power-hungry associates to exploit. It was more important that no one in the Kremlin’s inner circle could get to him personally than to be seen in Moscow.

Prigozhin’s column of troops turned back within a day, while he announced that he never meant to seize power. But, for the obvious reason of defying Moscow, he was now more popular than Navalny in Russia at large and became Russia’s second-most popular politician. It couldn’t last and it didn’t.

Prigozhin was found dead in his private airplane on August 23 after it fell out of the sky. In excruciatingly tortuous press conferences, Putin himself explained over several months to the Russian people what might or might not have happened.

Hope springs eternal

Is there any opposition to Putin? Yes and no must be the answer. No, in the sense that, with Navalny gone, Putin has removed even the slightest twinkle of insubordination among Moscow colleagues. The question ‘if the president were to die tomorrow, is there an alternative?’ has become academic.

Navalny can no longer be released by a prison or court official for some obscure reason to control the vacuum. After almost a quarter of a century, there’s no alternative to Putin, nor will there be.

Hope springs eternal, certainly in the democratic countries that surround Russia. But there can only be a ray of hope if the bubble of permanence and hubris that keeps Muscovites afloat is pierced. However, as it is so alien, this realisation will take a long time to gain acceptance.

Alexander Litvinenko and I wrote the book Blowing up Russia about Putin’s explosive ascent to power in 1999. We were not believed. It began to change somewhat when Litvinenko was fatally poisoned with polonium 210 in 2006, with the book crossing a red line for Putin, according to MI6.

Poland on Kremlin’s list

Putin’s accusation that the US had “overstepped its national borders in every way” at the 2007 Munich Security Conference was dismissed as tasteless sabre-rattling, as was the 2008 invasion of Georgia and the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Even the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is still seen as an unfortunate inconvenience rather than as part of Russia’s long-term plan to which there exists no Russian counterforce.

Putin makes relatively few public announcements. But Medvedev, his supposedly mild-mannered technocratic henchman, makes them constantly. After Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltics, Poland is also on his list of Russian violent expansionism, even though Poland was never part of the USSR.

Instead of focusing on instances of infinitesimal opposition in Russia, we ought to digest carefully what disruption the Kremlin is planning. Rather than hope that a Russian will deliver us, we should take preventative action.

© Yuri Felshtinsky, author of From Red Terror to Terrorist State: The Infamous History of the Cheka