No sign yet of a true Russian Spring but Vladimir Putin faces his trickiest moment

 
Popular by default: Vladimir Putin
Shaun Walker30 April 2012

After a winter that dragged on interminably, warm weather has finally come to Moscow. But as Muscovites say goodbye to the winter that saw the first serious anti-government protests since Vladimir Putin entered the Kremlin in 2000, the political weather ahead is hard to fathom.

A Russian Spring is still out of the question. The people who came out to protest, largely a wealthy, urban middle class that has made money from the oil boom over which Putin presided, still have far more to lose than to gain from radical change. But Putin now has to decide whether recent events prompt him into a political thaw, or whether he carries on with business as usual.

Next Monday, amid the pomp and circumstance of a Kremlin inauguration ceremony, Putin will return to the presidency and will be in the job until 2018 or even 2024, if he stands again and wins. But Russia has changed a lot since he announced his plan to return last autumn. The mass rallies in Moscow and other major cities have shown that the cultural and intellectual elites will no longer tolerate such a closed political system. Already concessions have been made, with some opposition figures getting airtime on state television for the first time in a decade.

Russia’s action-man leader has a difficult balancing act to manage. For the first time since he came to power, there is a politically engaged class in Russia. “Everyone suddenly seemed to develop a political consciousness,” says Katya, a 37-year-old Muscovite who works for an international company. “People in the office started talking about politics overnight, and it feels like something has changed.”

Travelling around Russia and talking to ordinary people, it becomes clear that Putin remains a popular politician. But this popularity is largely passive: time and again, the refrain comes that Putin is the only option and that without Putin there would be chaos. While the chattering class in Moscow gets its news from the internet, most Russians still rely on state-controlled television. If the Kremlin began to give people with alternative programmes airtime, the idea of Putin as the “best possible option” might start to erode.

Nevertheless, one man, Alexei Navalny, has emerged as the unofficial leader of the protest movement. An anti-corruption blogger, Navalny has the charisma and political nous that other opposition leaders lack. He also appeals across the political spectrum, thanks to his aggressive Russian nationalism.

Navalny has called for a major protest on Sunday, the day before Putin’s inauguration. The euphoria of the December protests has died down but there is no doubt that Putin is entering the trickiest stage of his political career.

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