MOSCOW – President Vladimir V. Putin has made it clear that he does not tolerate dissent, but that one new opposition party has flourished.
And the party expressed itself in strange ways on the same themes of corruption and oppression that made the opposition leader, Alexei A. Navalny, as the number one enemy of the Kremlin, and the government would send him to a penal colony.
The new party is thriving even though Mr. Navalny’s own party banned. The reasons, according to Russian analysts, are because Mr. To undermine Navalny, distract from his movement and divide the liberal opposition, while being a veneer of multiparty politics in a country where there is little sensible choice.
The new party, called New People, seems to be designed to appeal to Mr. Navalny’s followers to do.
“For two decades we have been living in a situation of false choice: either freedom or order,” the platform proclaims. The government says, “must stop seeing enemies and traitors in those who have different views.”
The Kremlin has worked on many fronts to stop the movement of Mr. To destroy Navalny – he arrested his supporters during protests and according to Mr. Navalny and Western governments tried to assassinate him last year. Government officials smeared him as a disdain for Western intelligence agencies, and government-backed flash mobs came up to kill Mr. To support Putin.
But Mr. Navalny has also faced a steady stream of rival anti-corruption reformers who seem to be working with the government’s blessing – recently New People, who was campaigning for parliamentary elections in September, when Mr. Navalny will be in a criminal position, recovered. colony.
The founder of a cosmetics company, Aleksei Nechayev, founded the party last year to channel what he described as opposition sentiment in society, just like Mr. Navalny did. But Mr. Nechayev refrains from direct criticism of Mr. Putin and does not ask that he be expelled.
Mr. Navalny and his allies greeted the arrival of New People with contempt and Mr. Nechayev identified as the latest in a long series of political doubles conjured up by the Kremlin to kill Mr. Navalny of his leadership of dissatisfied young professionals trying to unseat.
“They are trying to give us the line that these new people will now be the real competition for United Russia,” Lyubov Sobol, an ally of Navalny, said in a YouTube analysis of the ruling pro-Putin party after the new party’s appearance last year.
“It’s quite funny,” she added. ‘They say more or less the right things, but of course will do nothing. They are simply spoiled. ”
Russia’s political system is sometimes referred to as ‘managed democracy’, for the practice of political advisers in the Kremlin creating, mentoring or funding suspected opposition figures and parties – and some others tolerate as long as they obey. Putin does not directly criticize.
These parties are allowed to compete with each other and give some steam to the population, while providing the necessary losers to create an illusion of choice in elections that the ruling party mostly wins.
There are variants of such democratic systems worldwide in autocratic countries. Apart from a few monarchies in the Middle East and the remaining communist dictatorships such as North Korea, elections, even if awkward, are the only accepted way to legitimize power today.
This luster on Russia’s iron fist rule appeared in the early 2000s under a former domestic political adviser to Mr. Putin, Vladislav Y. Surkov, although Mr. Surkov has since been set aside. In the last presidential election in 2018, Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite who allegedly married a goddaughter of Mr. Putin is fulfilling the opposition role of ersatz while Mr. Navalny was banned from presenting.
Similarly, New People let Russians who have the modernizing agenda of Mr. Navalny supports, for a legitimate alternative vote without the headache of arrests and repression.
Mr. Nechayev denied that he consulted with the Kremlin before founding the party, which now has 72 regional offices, after adding two just last week, and that he won a few seats in the local elections last year.
Yet political analysts have rejected the idea that the party came forward without the blessing of the Kremlin. In Russia, “the real opposition is the unregistered parties,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a political scientist at the Carnegie Center in Moscow, said in a telephone interview.
In an interview in the spacious headquarters of the party in a luxury office tower in Moscow, Mr. Nechayev listed the three conditions for the registration of a political party: to avoid criticism of Mr. Putin or his family to refrain, to avoid foreign funding and to refrain from unsolicited street protests.
“We are not violating these three red lines,” he said.
“Often, and especially in the West, Russia is only represented by Putin and Navalny,” but many Russians want moderate opposition, he said. “Most people understand that the world is not black and white.”
No matter how useful it is to make movements like Mr. Navalny to enforce, but managed democracy did not always go smoothly. In rare cases, politicians mocked because the Kremlin’s puppets had turned into real opposition.
Members of Just Russia, a party that Mr. Surkov helped fill the false center-left opposition in Russian politics in 2006, doing so in 2011 with an endorsement of a previous street protest movement led by Mr. Navalny.
One of the politicians, Gennady Gudkov, has since fled Russia and openly speaks of the Kremlin’s hand in false opposition parties, a threat facing the real opposition, in parallel with police action.
Of the most important role of mr. Surkov in the creation of Just Russia, “there were no secrets,” said Mr. Gudkov said in a telephone interview from Bulgaria.
In a macabre twist is one political figure that presumably originated as a fake or managed copy of Mr. Navalny, even dead in what Bellingcat, the open source research organization, has documented as a probable assassination with poison.
As a blogger against corruption, Nikita Isayev and his group New Russia have a lot of the tactics of Mr. Navalny imitated and discovered corruption among low officials. He was called “the New Navalny”. However, he refrained from asking Mr. To criticize Putin.
Mr. Isayev died suddenly at the age of 41 during a train ride in 2019. Among the potential motives that Bellingcat identified was the intrigue of the palace. Mr. Isayev was considered attached to Mr. Surkov, and then Mr. Surkov falls according to this theory, his rivals in the Kremlin arranged to also kill his fake mr. Navalny to eliminate.