More mad than Vlad: Russia’s ultra-nationalist threat

‘Russia without Putin!’ was the cry of Muscovites who turned out to protest against Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency for a third term in December 2011. Crowds 100,000 strong chanted their opposition on Moscow’s Academician Sakharov Prospect – as symbolically named a venue as you could wish for – as riot police stood calmly by. There was anger in the crowd. But there was hope, too, not least because the massive protest was officially sanctioned. One after another, prominent opposition politicians such as Ilya Yashin, Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny denounced Putin from a stage provided by the city authorities.

Today the memory of those protests seems to belong to a different age of Russia. Yashin and Navalny are in jail. Nemtsov was shot dead. Since the beginning of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, street protests by a single person, let alone 100,000, have become illegal. Since 24 February, some 16,000 people have been arrested for protesting – including one woman near Red Square who was detained for holding up a piece of paper reading ‘Two Words’ (implying Net Voine – No War), and another for brandishing a paper that was completely blank.

Russia’s liberal opposition has been completely crushed. But in the country’s new wartime reality the liberals’ main slogan has also come to raise more questions than answers. What would ‘Russia without Putin’ actually look like? If not Putin, then who?

The grim reality is that Putin’s most dangerous potential opposition today comes not from the pro-western liberals but from the nationalist right. Before the annexation of Crimea in 2014, ultra-nationalist ideologues such as Alexander Dugin (whose daughter Dasha was killed by a car bomb in Moscow last month), Christian-fundamentalist TV station-owning billionaire Konstantin Malofeev and paramilitary imperialist and former FSB officer Igor Strelkov were on the fringes of Russian politics.