Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, recently wrote an op-ed to the Washington Post from a prison in Siberia. He describes what a post-Putin Russia needs to look like. His goal is to interrupt the pattern of aggression that he says is endemic to Russian politics.
In the piece, Navalny identifies a small, but politically powerful social group that causes many of the problems in Russian society: the imperialist elites. This group finds war useful and even profitable. They have hated Ukraine for a generation—ever since 2004 when Ukraine started siding with the West over Russia. Putin needs their support. Navalny predicts that if Putin loses the war, he will pacify the imperialist elites by declaring that he lost not to Ukraine, but to the collective West and NATO, and then he will vow to build a military so strong that the West will rue the day it defied the honor of the great Russian people. He will then begin a new cycle of provocations and hybrid warfare. To break the cycle of aggression, Navalny advocates that Russia shift from a strong-president form of government to a parliamentary republic government, once Putin is out of office.
Distributing power among representatives, an independent judiciary, and local authorities would help prevent the centralized power that leads to aggression. However, Russia has never had a government without strong central authority. From the Czar to the Soviet era to Putin, authoritarianism has been a part of their existence. The protests that Navalny has led suggest that at least a portion of the population is ready for change. This would be a natural progression, but to be effective, it has to be embraced by a majority of the people, and it is unclear how the population will handle such change.
Navalny cites that the West had the opportunity guide Russia into a parliamentary republic when Boris Yeltsin came to power in the early-1990s, but it did not. He hopes this time around, the West will be more vocal about the need for structural change inside Russia—so the cycle doesn’t continue with its next leader.
Source:
Alexei Navalny, “This is What a Post-Putin Russia Should Look Like,” Washington Post, 2 October 2022, A25; also https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/30/alexei-navalny-parliamentary-republic-russia-ukraine/
Photo: Denis Kaminev/AP