Unbelievable! Coronavirus Behaves Differently Toward Opponents of Vladimir Putin

Ilya Klishin is a Russian journalist and media consultant and the former editor-in-chief of TV Rain, Russia's only independent TV station. He has contributed to Russia's most prominent independent press outlets, including Vedomosti, Snob, OpenSpace and others, and to the English-language Moscow Times, and had a central role in anti-electoral fraud campaigns after Russia's December 2011 parliamentary elections. 

In a guest post for IranWire's ongoing series about disinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, Ilya Klishin observes how Covid-19 was recently used as an excuse for brutal treatment of protesters in Russia.

While the rest of the world is trying to beat the coronavirus pandemic with varying degrees of success, to conduct mass vaccinations and open borders to return at last to normal life, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia a real miracle has occurred, possibly worthy of a Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Local authorities have established through experience that the dangerous virus threatens opponents and supporters of the government, which has been in power for 20-something years now, in completely different ways.

By the way, if we are to award this prize, it will have to be shared with Belarus. Wedged between Russia and Poland, the authorities in little Belarus preferred to ignore coronavirus throughout last year – they didn’t impose restrictions, they had hardly any sanitary regulations, and they hid the data on mortality rates.

It was all because their irreplaceable leader Alexander Lukashenko didn’t believe in the danger of the new virus. But then the presidential elections were held, and mass protests began. Hundreds of thousands of people participated in them: a colossal event for a small and previously calm country like Belarus.

Without much hesitation the Belarusian government deployed batons and water cannons, and started forcing people into improvised concentration camps where they were tortured. And then, of course, they remembered the existence of coronavirus. It became a highly convenient explanation for the impossibility of holding “mass events” and – and for anything else that was favorable to the government and unfavorable to local protesters.

In Russia, all this was observed with interest – especially, incidentally, in the Kremlin. Due to the pandemic, the political arena was quiet in Russia for almost the whole of 2020 was politically quiet in Russia. Very quiet, unusually quiet. During that time Vladimir Putin managed to pass amendments to the constitution that basically allowed him to rule forever. The vote on these amendments – which, by the way, no one was even bothered about holding at the height of coronavirus restrictions – was the first sign that the virus was nothing to fear for supporters of the Kremlin.

But then other events unfolded. First Alexei Navalny, the leader of the unapproved Russian opposition, was poisoned in August 2020 on a flight over Siberia. After a few days of impediments he was evacuated to Germany in a coma, where not only was he cured, but it was also established that he had been poisoned with a military-grade chemical weapon. Later Navalny, together with investigators from Bellingcat and journalists from various countries, pieced together the circumstances of his own poisoning – and accused the Kremlin itself and Russian security services of attempting to assassinate him, naming several specific names.

After that, ahead of the New Year, the Russian government let people know that if Navalny came back, prison would await him. Nevertheless, in January he came back anyway – and indeed was put behind bars straight from the airport.

His team was ready for this. It uploaded a film about the Russian president’s corruption which in the space of a few days got more than 100 million views. Within a couple of weeks Navalny’s supporters had come out onto the streets in dozens of cities around Russia, and more than 12,000 people were detained.

In that time, we all became witnesses to terrible police brutality: the beating of people with their hands up, the detention of children and teenagers, torture in police stations with bags being put on people’s heads, and monstrous conditions for detained people in the jails.

We’ll come back to that.

Unlike the usual measures – dispersing protesters with batons, handing out fines and jailing people for 15 or 30 days – this time Russian authorities also added a criminal case. Not just any criminal case, but a criminal case on sanitary regulations (!). It’s all true: Navalny’s team and his supporters, who called for protests during a pandemic, threatened people’s lives, they say, so now they all have to be placed under house arrest, and potentially in future be sent to prison for several years.

Coronavirus is convenient. It has allowed both the Belarusian and Russian authorities to deal with their opponents while provoking an outcry in the media they control – what swine they are, they want our old people to die.

A large number of people were detained in Russia in the past week, especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The police infrastructure wasn’t ready for this. People were kept in police vans for hours in the freezing cold, not allowed to use the toilet. They were held at police stations for days without food and water, and some were tortured. And now they’ve started taking them to centres where undocumented migrants were previously held. The photographs from there are shocking: 30 people have been placed in cells designed for four or eight.

How is this logically connected with the criminal case on sanitary regulations against Russian opposition activists? It’s not. They just talk about the criminal case on TV, while they won’t show 30 people in a jail cell. It’s very convenient. And there’s no need to even invent any fake news.