Navalnyi’s mixture of chauvinism and entrepreneurial frustration with the way Russia is governed makes him a peculiar synthesis of post-Soviet trends: an Orthodox Christian, he professes his love for the fatherland while admiring the corporate governance of Western blue chip companies. In the run-up to the 2018 election, many argued that Navalnyi’s status as the opposition’s de facto leader was so incontestable that any alternative to Putin had to be built around him, whether one liked it or not.{19} But in December 2017, having been convicted of fraud for a third time a few months earlier, Navalnyi was barred by the courts from taking part in the following year’s presidential contest. How well he would have done is open to debate – would he have improved on his 25 per cent–plus in the Moscow mayoral race, or performed in line with the polls, which by late 2017 were putting his rating in the miserable single digits? But either way, he has remained an established feature of the political landscape, and a gathering point for various kinds of discontents.
For the Russian left in particular, Navalnyi has presented an especially acute dilemma. On the one hand, the left could refuse to join forces with the pro-Navalnyi sections of the opposition in protest at his chauvinism. But this would mean forfeiting any chance of influencing the movement in future, and of harnessing its real popular energies for progressive ends. On the other hand, it could ally itself with Navalnyi – with whatever caveats and critical distance. But this would bring the risk of being tainted by association with his reactionary views. The question is at once a tactical and a strategic one – both a matter of manoeuvring to shape the political agenda in the short run, and of framing clearly what kind of country they want to create in the longer run. Given the sheer numerical weakness of the Russian left, it might make sense to forge provisional, temporary alliances in the service of certain goals – in this case, assembling a serious political challenge to Putin. In the meantime, the left could still go about the slow, patient work of building a broader social base for a genuinely progressive movement. This, indeed, seems to be the approach many activists in Russia have taken, including those on the left and in the range of social movements evoked earlier. Given the scale of the tasks confronting these groups, and the very real threats of physical violence and incarceration they face, they could be forgiven for seeing flexibility as a precondition not so much for success as for survival.
Yet the distinction between short-run tactical compromises and long-run perspectives may not be so clear-cut. What one does in the now is interlinked with what kind of future one imagines, current commitments and ideals mutually inflecting and reshaping each other. For the Russian opposition, the problem has been that certain key commitments are already implied by the very fact of Navalnyi’s prominence. The anti-Putin movement hasn’t worked out a programme through a process of negotiation; rather, it has often had to respond to an agenda defined to a large degree by and through Navalnyi. This in turn raises another critical problem: what kind of alternative would Navalnyi represent for Russia?
Throughout his career as a public figure – from LiveJournal entries in the 2000s to his spearheading of the 2017 protests – the core of Navalnyi’s popular appeal has been his relentless opposition to corruption. But this does not in itself amount to a political philosophy, let alone a programme. For that, we need to look beyond Navalnyi’s activism. We can get a good idea of the policies he might put forward from the platform agreed by his Party of Progress in 2014.{20} Some of its recommendations are aimed at undoing the most autocratic features of Putinism: reductions in the power of the presidency; shortening of presidential terms back to four years; introduction of stricter term limits; lowering of the threshold for parliamentary representation, and easing of restrictions on registering parties.
Elsewhere the document calls for basic political and civil rights – freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, religion and expression – that have been curtailed under Putin. Legal reforms would seek to protect the independence of the judiciary, and to make the police more accountable to the citizenry. Authority should be decentralized, devolving more power to the regional and municipal levels. The current ‘bias’ in federal funding for the North Caucasus should be brought to an end, though the means for doing this remain unspecified. On migration, the document calls for a visa regime and quotas to be introduced, first and foremost for the Central Asian republics, in order to moderate the currently ‘uncontrolled’ flow of migrants.
In the realm of foreign policy, the document calls for a rapprochement with the West, which it sees as sharing basic strategic interests with Russia: a reduction in global tensions, the struggle with terrorism, freedom of trade. Behind these overlapping interests lies a deeper commonality of values: the text describes Russia as ‘part of European civilization, where ever greater significance is given to the freedom, self-respect and responsibility of the individual, and the interference of the state in various spheres of human interaction is less and less necessary’. This is, of course, a highly tendentious reading of what would constitute ‘European’ civilization, if such a thing existed: it refers at most to the dominant ideological tendency of the past thirty years, derived from the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and put into practice by Thatcher, Reagan and their many heirs.
Indeed, the Party of Progress platform firmly places it in this neoliberal lineage in the social and economic spheres, with prescriptions drawn from the standard repertoire of the US and European centre-right. Russia’s ills are held to stem from the overweening power and reach of the state, and should be remedied by deregulation, cutbacks in the number of government functionaries, and privatizations to reduce the weight of the state in the economy. The current flat income tax rate should be supplemented with wealth and property taxes, but there should be no shift to progressive taxation, since this would penalize the middle class. Welfare should be targeted and recipients rigorously means-tested, and whatever social guarantees the state provides should not interfere with economic growth and competitiveness. Pensions should be switched to a defined-contribution basis rather than the current defined-benefit system, and the pension age gradually raised. Private–public partnerships should be encouraged in health care, education and infrastructure.
This is, of course, a familiar set of recipes. In some ways, the Party of Progress platform is a digest of the last three decades of conventional Western social and economic policy. The only real surprise here is seeing these ideas being actively recommended almost a decade after they led the world into a pervasive crisis from which no exit is in sight. If put into practice in Russia, they would likely worsen the situation for millions. As the experience of the West has shown, means-tested benefits and ‘targeted’ welfare have functioned as a way of withdrawing social guarantees, pulling the rug out from under a whole swathe of society while subjecting them to onerous and humiliating bureaucratic burdens. Public–private partnerships would saddle the public with colossal debt while pouring revenues into the pockets of private companies. More privatizations would amplify the already tremendous imbalances in wealth and power. And raising the pension age in Russia without first drastically improving health indicators would stretch most people’s working lives beyond their life expectancy.