The uproar over the beating of Leonid Volkov brought the contradictions to the surface. For Putin, the opposition may be better in exile than in prisons, writes Russia correspondent Heikki Heiskanen.
Heikki HeiskanenRussia correspondent
MOSCOW A man armed with a hammer assaulted a Russian opposition activist Leonid Volkov in March in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.
Suspicions were immediately directed at the Kremlin. Only less than a month earlier, Volkov’s close ally, opposition leader Alexei Navalny had died under suspicious circumstances in a prison in Siberia.
Volkov himself thought it obvious that the hammer blow was greetings from the Russian president From Vladimir Putinin the old St. Petersburg gangster style.
Polish authorities arrested two Polish men suspected of a hammer attack in April.
Then the story took a surprising turn. The FBK or Anti-Corruption Foundation, run by Navalny’s old allies, accused in his video from the attack on a businessman who is also among the opponents of the Kremlin, Leonid Nevzlin.
FBK linked Nevzlin to two other abuses. According to the video, Navalny’s people said they got to see Nevzlin’s call recordings and message exchanges, in which he gave orders for the beatings.
Nevzlin, who lives in Israel, is a well-known opponent of the Putin regime, as he is the founder of the oil company Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky an old ally. Currently living in exile in Switzerland, Khodorkovsky has financed Russian opposition projects and opposition-minded media.
Polish authorities announced on Friday that they had arrested a Russian lawyer suspected of planning the attack against Volkov.
The accusation made a new rift to the ranks of Russia’s already fragmented opposition.
Nevzlin has denied the claims. Khodorkovsky has also suspected them of being disinformation planted by the Russian security service. The call recordings were presented to FBK by a person with connections to Russian security agencies.
– If FBK wants to accuse me of something with evidence, they can take it to court instead of scheming and smearing me, Khodorovski comment.
The beating of Navalny’s ally with a hammer is a blatant incident, but there are also deeper divisions behind it.
Part of the rest of the opposition has accused Navalny’s allies as too stubborn and radical.
Navalny’s people have irritated many by peddling the history of the 1990s, which contains embarrassing features for many opponents of the current Kremlin. Published by FBK in April video Traitors aroused strong reactions in opposition circles.
For example, Mikhail Khodorkovsky hardly wants to be remembered very precisely how he, like other oligarchs, grabbed huge masses of assets in Russia’s murky privatization processes.
Whatever the truth about the Vilna attack wasthe Russian authorities will surely like the case. The opposition forces quarrel with each other, and suspicions about the use of violence tarnish the reputation of the entire opposition.
In any case, the influence of opposition activists in exile is very limited.
That’s why the large prisoner exchange made in August was favorable for Putin. He got rid of the most famous opposition figures sitting in prison, who could have grown into martyrs like Navalny.
The exchange was a good way to paint opposition influencers and human rights activists sent abroad as “foreign agents” in the eyes of Russians, after all they were exchanged for Russian agents.
In the West, opposition activists are losing inevitably some of its prestige in the eyes of the Russians.
That’s exactly why, for example, an opposition politician Ilya Yashin had originally decided to stay in Russia, even though he was threatened with imprisonment there. Jašin called the exchange of prisoners deportation.
Russian opposition activists abroad are caught between a rock and a hard place. Russian rulers portray them as traitors.
In the West, on the other hand, gestures of remorse and humility are required from them because of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Missteps in communication soon lead to accusations of Russian imperialism.
They have to prove that they are “good Russians”, the existence of which many in the West are still suspicious of.
Once the leaders of the revolution as Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotsky operated for long periods in exile and then managed to take power in Russia after returning.
However, they had networks in the country that distributed subversive literature and agitated among the workers.
The current Russian opposition does not have similar traditions of underground activity, although it has had to operate under pressure from the security services. The opposition has acted according to the model of an open society: tried to get to the elections, organized demonstrations, exposed cases of corruption.
In the age of social media, the opposition no longer needs to print flyers in secret printing presses. The rulers are not able to completely block the flow of information on the internet.
On the other hand, those in power are able to control communication in an unprecedented way.