One day of solidarity: Protest crackdown provokes feud and splits among Russia’s opposition

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Russia witnessed two very unusual things this week. First, it saw the Kremlin bowing to pressure and releasing Ivan Golunov, an investigative journalist jailed on bogus drugs charges. Second, it saw its journalistic community acting in such solidarity that it forced a U-turn on the authorities.

But it has not taken long for things to return to type.

On Wednesday, the authorities gave a grisly reminder of their natural attributes. Faced with a peaceful protest against police corruption, they clamped down hard. Many of the 500-plus arrests were demonstrably violent. One man had his head rammed into a metal post. A teenager was hospitalised after being beaten in custody. (He reportedly refused to hand over his camera.)

Journalists, meanwhile, regressed back to their natural state: from solidarity to feuding and splits.

By Wednesday afternoon, as the scale of the arrests became clear, much of the opposition had also turned on itself. Many were angry at Mr Golunov’s colleagues at the Riga-based Meduza outlet, who had proposed cancelling the protest following his release. Many were angry that Meduza had done so without seeking the agreement of protest’s organisers.

“Thank you for making these arrests possible,” wrote Grigory Okhotin, a prominent activist and founder of OVD-Info, the NGO traditionally monitors the numbers of arrests.

Online forums have been dominated by talk of a conspiracy, a deal with the devil. Had the Kremlin had offered to release Mr Golunov in return for his bosses dropping support for an embarrassing march, some wondered? Many drew attention to the sudden appearance of new lawyers in Mr Golunov’s team, at least one of whom has been accused of links with Russian security services.

Speaking to The Independent, Meduza’s editor-in-chief Ivan Kolpakov denied that there had been any agreement, written or otherwise, with the authorities. Instead, he said, his collective had taken the decision not to support the protest on safety grounds: “It was obvious that things would turn nasty from the way that authorities conducted the negotiations. We couldn’t sign our names under that.”

It had been a “mistake” not to warn organisers about their statement, he added.

Journalist Ilya Azar, the initiator of the protest march, said Mr Golunov’s supporters may have fallen into a trap specially prepared for them by the Kremlin.

“We know the authorities wanted desperately to sabotage our protest,” he said. “They made this clear by granting permission for an alternative protest for Sunday at the same time that they released Mr Golunov.”

If there was a trap, it worked. By the time the unsanctioned march began at noon on Wednesday, the protest camp had split into two clear camps. On one side were the radicals, idealists committed to pushing for full-scale reform of drugs laws, and for those who ordered Mr Golunov’s arrest to be brought to justice. On another were those who urged for compromise, pause and a quiet life, and who largely boycotted the march.

The broad conflict between idealism and compromise, of course, is hardly a new one for Russia. From tsarist times on, the opposition has regularly cut two ways: between martyrs and collaborators. But the historical parallel with more obvious relevance is the late Soviet period: where dissidents often saw themselves recruited or imprisoned; signing agreements or being destroyed in psychiatric wards.

Former Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky, whose own biography has flickered between such poles – he was a dissident before being co-opted by the Soviet Kremlin – said liberal Russia may look back on this week as a lost opportunity.

Mr Golunov’s arrest and release have upended Kremlin politics, he told The Independent. It was ”almost unprecedented” for the Kremlin to buckle in response to public pressure (the last time it happened was 2013, when it reversed a jail term it handed to Aleksey Navalny). That on its own had moved the political culture to a new level.

But the decision to press ahead with Wednesday’s march had been determined by “Leninist” politics and the “easy moralisation” of “people far from politics”.

“The moment of solidarity has been lost and the authorities have essentially levelled the scores,” he said.