Watching election protests in Russia now reminds me of a bygone era

Watching the Communists protesting election results this week has brought back memories of my first taste of Russian demonstrations in the late 1990s

Moscow back then was dominated by mass strikes and red banner demonstrations against the president, Boris Yeltsin.

A few months later came serious protests against the March 1999 Nato airstrikes on Kosovo. I missed being caught up in an incident where men with rocket-propelled grenades tried to attack the US embassy by a matter of a few hours.

Saturday’s protest revealed familiar, if aged, faces; the red banners were back too. But almost everything else about it was different. It felt something like the reunion concert of an ageing rock group, where the band continues singing to the converted, but hasn’t realised that almost everything around them has changed.

The political context of Russia has, of course, shifted unrecognisably over the 21 years that Vladimir Putin has held power as president and prime minister.

Some of the changes have been positive. On the whole, the country is richer and more advanced, with its citizens able to enjoy a modern economy: wages paid on time, food in fridges, foreign holidays, and credit.

On civil rights, though, it’s been a pretty miserable story, with the Kremlin set on a path to repress civil society and the opposition. Draconian laws first limited rights of assembly without notifying authorities in 2004, then introduced fines for attending unsanctioned protests in 2012.

This year, authorities went further still, intimidating and outlawing the work of its most critical organisations, including structures set up by the jailed critic Alexei Navalny.

By the time elections came around last week, voters didn’t have much to choose from. And it was in that context, the Communists emerged as a de facto vehicle for protest sentiment. They likely did very well indeed, and I believe much more than the 19 per cent officially assigned to it.

Yet the votes the Communists received appeared less an endorsement of their redistribution politics – though perhaps that too – as they were a displaced side effect of something else: anger.

The disconnect between widely perceived election fraud, and the pitiful numbers at Saturday’s rally does suggest most Russians have given up on the idea of serious public protest. But the sense of anger will have gone nowhere.

How they, and the Kremlin, process it will determine how rocky the next few years will become.

Yours,

Oliver Carroll

Moscow correspondent