Violence and lawlessness darken Russia

Welcome back. President Vladimir Putin this week conferred a posthumous award on a bank robber turned ultranationalist blogger who was murdered in St Petersburg on Sunday. At the same time, a US journalist languishes in a Moscow prison, falsely accused of spying. What do these events tell us about Russia’s internal condition in the second year of its neo-imperialist war against Ukraine? You can reach me at tony.barber@ft.com.

The longer Putin’s reign lasts, the more obvious it becomes that political repression at home goes hand in hand with military aggression abroad. The arrest of Evan Gershkovich, a Moscow-based Wall Street Journal reporter, illustrates this combination of factors.

But the death in a bomb blast of blogger Maxim Fomin, better known by his nom de plume Vladlen Tatarsky, suggests something else — that the war in Ukraine is generating politically inspired violence in Russia itself. Meanwhile, the posthumous award to Tatarsky of Russia’s Order of Valour offers insights into how Putin’s authoritarian system operates.

As president, Putin relies on the security services, in which he launched his career and from which he has selected many of his closest collaborators, and on the armed forces, another traditional organ of Russian power (see this excellent book by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy). But Putin also makes use of unofficial groups of extreme nationalists who are outside the formal structures of state authority.

Like Tatarsky, some have criminal backgrounds. But Putin tolerates and even encourages them because they support him to the hilt and revel in advocating violence against the regime’s critics at home and abroad.

Who killed the blogger?

Russian authorities pinned the blame for Tatarsky’s murder on Ukraine and on people associated with the anti-corruption foundation of jailed opposition activist Alexei Navalny. They filed charges of terrorism against Darya Trepova, a 26-year-old St Petersburg resident who was shown on an interior ministry video admitting, possibly under duress, that she had passed Tatarsky a statuette of himself that later blew up.

The accusation against Navalny’s outlawed group is flimsy, to say the least. Though resolutely critical of Putin’s rule, the foundation has no record of terrorist activities. It denied involvement in the blast. As for Trepova, she took part in anti-war protests last year, but according to her friends she may have been only unwittingly involved in the attack on Tatarsky.

There are, however, other enemies of Tatarsky and like-minded nationalists who may have had a motive to kill him.

Prigozhin under pressure

Ukraine’s government makes it a firm policy never to claim or reject responsibility for violent incidents on Russian territory like the St Petersburg bombing. Yet Tatarsky held ferociously anti-Ukrainian views and took part in the Kremlin ceremony in September at which Putin announced Russia’s annexation of four partly occupied Ukrainian regions.

At the same time, Tatarsky was connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia’s paramilitary Wagner group, which has amplified its role in the Ukraine war by recruiting tens of thousands of prison convicts. Indeed, Prigozhin once owned the café where Tatarsky was killed.

Both Prigozhin and Tatarsky, whose blog amassed more than half a million followers, criticised the management of Russia’s war, though not the war itself. The St Petersburg bombing could therefore be interpreted as an indirect attack on Prigozhin, whose scathing comments on the mainstream Russian war effort have brought him into conflict with elements of the security services and armed forces.

Meanwhile, an obscure group calling itself the National Republican Army claimed responsibility for killing Tatarsky — as it did in August for the murder of nationalist campaigner Daria Dugina in a car-bomb attack outside Moscow.

This claim needs to be treated with considerable caution. Even the existence of the NRA, which purports to be an underground organisation of Russian partisans dedicated to overthrowing Putin, is shrouded in doubt.

Crime and punishment

Two final thoughts on Tatarsky’s murder. First, it could provide an excuse for an even harder crackdown on Putin’s domestic critics, in much the way that the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934 paved the way for Joseph Stalin’s terror. Yet I wonder if Putin and his security services really need any such excuses.

Second, the criminal backgrounds of Tatarsky and Prigozhin, and their connections to Russia’s power structures, speak volumes about how the country is governed, or misgoverned, today.

In the words of Candace Rondeaux, an Arizona State University expert on the Wagner group:

Russia’s oligarchy, its mafia class and its security class have started to fuse to the point where you cannot untangle them from each other and they need each other.

Comparing the Gershkovich and Daniloff cases

The cooked-up charge against Gershkovich is another example of lawlessness in Putin’s Russia. But we should place it in the context of the sharp deterioration in relations between Moscow and the west, specifically the US.

One way of doing this is to compare the Gershkovich case with that of Nicholas Daniloff, a US News & World Report correspondent who was arrested in 1986 in Moscow. I remember the Daniloff affair well because at that time I was based in the Soviet capital, working for Reuters news agency.

Like Gershkovich, Daniloff was accused of spying — and both journalists are Americans of Russian descent. Communist or post-communist, the authorities in Moscow tend to view western reporters with a certain suspicion. But they seem to reserve a special dislike for those who come from the US, the Kremlin’s main international rival, and who have Russian family origins to boot.

I remember thinking in 1986 that, although Daniloff’s arrest startled and disturbed us western correspondents in Moscow, it seemed less like an act of Stalinist intimidation than a piece of improvised, amateurish KGB political theatre.

The arrest took place during Mikhail Gorbachev’s second year in power, a time when the freer atmosphere of glasnost and perestroika was starting to take shape at home and US-Soviet relations were slowly emerging from the deep freeze of the early 1980s.

Unlike today, therefore, the arrest of a US journalist in 1986 seemed not to be in line with the emerging trends of Russian domestic and foreign policy, but rather to go against them.

Tit-for-tat swaps and expulsions

Yet there was a simple explanation: shortly before Daniloff’s arrest, the FBI had arrested Gennady Zakharov, a Soviet employee at the UN in New York, who was charged with espionage.

Several weeks later, Zakharov was allowed to leave the US, Daniloff was released and Yuri Orlov, a prominent Soviet dissident intellectual who had spent nine years in a labour camp and internal exile, was also set free and went to the west. It was a classic cold war exchange of prisoners.

The crisis rumbled on for a little longer, with mutual expulsions of Soviet and US diplomats. But neither Gorbachev nor Ronald Reagan’s administration let the affair derail their efforts at improving relations — efforts that delivered a dramatic reduction in east-west tensions by the end of the 1980s.

Moscow’s “exchange fund” of hostages

Will Gershkovich be set free as part of a deal like that involving Daniloff in 1986? One Russian blogger commented that Gershkovich’s arrest “replenishes [Moscow’s] exchange fund” — that is, it gives the Kremlin a hostage to swap for Russian nationals held in the US or elsewhere in the west.

Another blogger suggested that Gershkovich might be exchanged for two Russian “illegals”, or deep-cover agents, who went by the names of Ludwig Gisch and Maria Mayer and were arrested in Slovenia in December as spies.

To me, this seems a plausible outcome — and one must hope so for Gershkovich’s sake.

However, one big difference with 1986 is that conditions for foreign correspondents in Moscow, not to mention brave, independent-minded Russian journalists, are far more dangerous today.

Another difference is that Russian-western relations are on an altogether more hazardous path than in the era of Gorbachev and Reagan.

The St Petersburg bombing and the Gershkovich affair are each a reminder that a turn for the better in Russia seems a long way off.

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