What does the introduction of digital draft notices say about Russia’s emerging digital authoritarianism? And what do and should we – in the West – expect of the Russian opposition? In a look-back on some of the significant developments and debates of the past weeks in Russian politics, I am trying to answer these questions, and comment briefly on others.
Draft notices go digital
Over the past week, the Russian authorities announced the test launch of a website serving digital draft notices. The project, which will be piloted in three regions (the Republic of Mari El, Ryazan and Sakhalin), had been in the making for almost two years, since the chaos and exodus of young men triggered by the September 2022 military mobilization. Shortly after the launch, experts that talked to Novaya Gazeta discovered a vulnerability on the website allowing attackers to exfiltrate various personally identifiable information on individuals. Albeit this was later fixed, the site also compels users to download a digital certificate issued by the Ministry of Digital Development, which, according to experts from the Roskomsvoboda digital rights NGO, can be used to tap into user traffic.
In a way, the digital draft notice website is a perfect encapsulation of both the direction, in which Russia’s security services and technocrats would like to develop governance in the country, as well as of the pitfalls of this project.
The digital authoritarianism that the authorities have attempted to create in Russia, rests on two main pillars: increasingly extensive and increasingly automated data collection and aggregation on the one hand (that is, bypassing human aggregators such as regional governments); and privileged access to key information on the other. The federal government’s “Coordination Center”, the so-called “Centers of Regional Management” collecting complaints, or the monitoring of online community spaces through Roskomnadzor, Russia’s communications authority, are as important parts of this as increasing restrictions on data access introduced by the government. (I wrote about the former for CEPA three years ago, and I discussed the other with Aaron Schwartzbaum and Chris Miller on the Bear Market Brief podcast last year). These goals have been elusive, owing to missing technological and analytical capacities, a lack of coordination between competing agencies that collect and hold data, as well as the main inherent weakness of Russian governance: corruption.
The trust in digitization is based on the digitization reforms undertaken by prime minister Mikhail Mishustin at Russia’s Federal Tax Service, which led to a significant rise in tax collection by making under-the-counter transactions visible to the authorities. This required difficult and focused, but relatively straightforward reforms, which panned out over time. The rollout of electronic voting, similarly, resulted in the authorities’ being able to exert a much tighter (and cheaper) control over voting, essentially because digitization allows them to use the same means of manipulation and fraud as they would offline, more efficiently. When it comes to digital draft notices, however, the challenge is on a different scale. Digitizing military databases is only part of the endeavor; in order to enforce the draft notices effectively, myriads of existing databases, belonging to various agencies, had to be harmonized. And there is reason to believe that the risk of illegally accessing and/or tampering with personal data will not eliminated by simply digitizing it; ask data brokers who, for years, have been leaking sensitive police and security services databases (including, recently, an FSB database containing information on border crossings between 2014 and 2023). Such databases appear on illicit forums regularly, and over the past two years, partly as a consequence of Russia facing a higher number of cyber attacks involving data exfiltration from state as well as private entities (2023 saw an uptick of 60% over the previous year). Crackdown on brokers has been patchy and ineffective, partly because Russia’s own elite sometimes benefits from these leaks.
The system of digital draft notices is perhaps the most ambitious, but certainly not the first effort to combine diffuse databases on Russian citizens or ways in which they use the internet. For instance, the acquisition of the VK social network and the idea to combine it with the government services portal Gosuslugi, were all part of this endeavor. Unable to stop data leaks, the Russian authorities have also tried to use lax data security practices to their own advantage: databases containing the names and PII of opposition supporters were leaked several times over the past years by anonymous internet users, likely connected to the authorities, and used to intimidate people by suggesting that they are on the radar of the authorities and they can face various other inconveniences, such as losing their job.
This may have worked, but data leaks have also raised awareness of the potential real-life consequences of massive data collection and aggregation. Resistance to QR codes and digital vaccination certificates during the COVID pandemic was at least partly a consequence of citizens’ concern that the state will build a system that can automatically limit their rights and privileges based on their vaccination status – today, but perhaps something else tomorrow. The system of digital draft notices is exactly this kind of system.
When military mobilization was announced in September 2022, a whole boutique industry of fake documents, employment contracts, as well as offers to erase a person from military databases, sprung up on the Russian internet. Many of these were total scams, but some reportedly actually provided the services that they promised. I find it likely that we are going to see something similar following the launch of digital draft notices. Awareness of the potential misuse of data by the authorities and eager to find ways out, many will put their trust in the attribute of the system that they know best: corruption.
Russian opposition strife – again
I do not want to comment on the minutiae of the latest scandal of the Russian opposition, the investigation of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) into the beating of the foundation’s former director, Leonid Volkov and others, of which the FBK accused Russian-Israeli businessman Leonid Nevzlin, an associate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. This is a developing story, which deserves to be investigated and verified by competent authorities, as it can have serious repercussions for the Russian opposition in emigration.
However, the past months have also seen other debates about how the, to a large extent, but not fully, emigrant Russian opposition could or should behave. Recently freed political prisoners Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, both prominent opposition politicians, were criticized for saying that sanctions affecting the wider Russian population should be eased. Yulia Navalnaya was later widely criticized for her speech at the Bled Security Forum, in which she took position against calls to “decolonize” Russia.
In her speech, Navalnaya made two basic points. The first, according to which decolonization would tear apart “people of shared backgrounds”, is undoubtedly the weaker one for its glib disregard of the history of assimilatory policies. The second, in which she questions advocates’ understanding of “how the process should take place”, however, merits discussion.
Many have, I believe rightly, pointed out that those rejecting the idea of decolonization outright risk implying that decolonization will necessarily equal supporting territorial separatism, which is a favorite talking point of the Russian government. In spite of the very limited influence of actual territorial separatist groups, “separatism” has become a catch-all term for the Russian regime over the past years, the meaning gradually extended to areas such as culture or environmental protectionism, in an attempt to aid the march of a growing security state. Crackdowns on conservationist movements have in turn been an integral part of maintaining and expanding the extraction-based economy that provides rent and income for the Russian budget.
However – and this may be a controversial idea, but – I also think it is difficult to talk about “decolonization” on the terms of Western academia in a society with a very recent memory of experiencing a sudden, sharp influx of a dominant foreign culture and ideas: the memory of Western consultants and policymakers, along with Western cultural products, providing the backdrop to the economic crash and the diplomatic fallbacks of the 1990s and 2000s. Putin knows and exploits this trauma, not the least to fight against civil organizations, just as Viktor Orban does in Hungary when his allies carry billboards declaring that Hungary will not be a “colony” of the European Union, an idea that looks wholly preposterous from Western capitals providing the EU funds that Orban’s system relies on, but one that resonates with many Hungarians.
Navalnaya is right, however, in pointing out that current political debates about the decolonization of Russia often fail to give sufficient thought to complex questions (even though, I must add, the academic debate on the subject is much more nuanced). Proposals for territorial decomposition, for instance don’t seem to take into consideration that apart from the North Caucasus, Tuva and Tatarstan none of the regions “with an ethnic character” have a strong non-Russian majority; North Caucasian republics and Tuva in turn, have a weak economic base and depend strongly on transfers from the federal budget; while Tatarstan’s economic base is much stronger, Tatars also have a very well-developed and influential elite network at the federal level. Even some of the more sophisticated suggestions fail to consider questions of political economy. Take e.g. the lack of infrastructure and sparse population in the Far East, where the question of who and how would provide the funds to build a viable economy (alas, who does this now), and what China’s role in these regions is going to be, often goes unanswered. A draft constitutional reform put forward by Russian academics and journalists in July deals with a reform of representative institutions, but leaves open a lot of questions of political economy.
But this is not a reason to abandon decolonization as an idea; rather, an incentive to fill the term with practical detail. Alexei Navalny’s most important skill was that he and especially his regional network were able to work with activists of (nearly) all sorts, and turn diffuse grassroots initiatives and general frustration with the state of affairs into political power and influence. This historically included Russian nationalists, cosmopolitan liberals, but also activists demanding more power and financial resources to be devolved to Russia’s regions. In 2017, when, as the result of a bank panic the tension between the Kremlin and the residents of Tatarstan seemed to be bubbling up, Navalny went to Kazan to stress that “under President Navalny, agreements [between Moscow and the regions] will not be needed at all, because I will in any case ask for more money and more autonomy to be given to the regions.”
I am in no position to advise the Russian opposition, but I think it is this kind of practical questions on the nature of fiscal, political and economic federalism that can start a productive “decolonization” debate in and about Russia. From this starting point, these eventually will inevitably have to touch on issues such as control over land use, ownership, taxation, fiscal redistribution and what budgets are spent on. Over the past decades Russian public administration has moved towards a system of extreme centralization, which, although it does redistribute funds from wealthier to poorer regions, at the same time usurps all forms of localized power, often for the benefit of political and business actors in or connected to Moscow (see e.g. the example of the VIS Group in Novosibirsk). Untangling these political and fiscal links is going to be more tedious than drawing lines on a map to designate new regions or independent states, or to invent new representative institutions, but would probably do more to solve the underlying problem; and it will require Russian liberals working together with activists working against several diverse forms of colonialism.
It appears to me that frustration with the current Russian opposition in Western capitals comes mainly from two sources. First, Ukrainians and their backers believe – often correctly – that they are competing for the limited resources and attention span of Western decision-makers with the Russian opposition. Hence the expectation that the Russian opposition should simply support Ukraine’s calls for more financial and military aid. Second, there is growing frustration with the internecine strife of various Russian opposition groups, with the conventional wisdom being that they would be better off banding together and designate a strategy (and perhaps a leader) to fight Putin instead of each other.
Neither of these are irresolvable issues, if we come to an agreement on a couple of basic principles. I believe that it is true that Russia will need to lose the war for the Russian opposition to have any chance to participate in building a better governed and less dangerous country. This does not necessarily mean an army marching on Moscow (indeed this is unlikely to happen) – however, the current Russian government needs to be in a significantly worse position at the end of the war than before it, with less to offer in terms of vision, resources and repressive capacity, than an alternative. Sanctions are part of this effort. Some of them will have negative effects on “ordinary Russians”, but unless sanctions were specifically engineered to cause humanitarian crises – and none of the current ones have – these negative effects are the consequence of policy choices made the Russian government. At the same time, the Russian opposition, indeed every Russian who is interested in changing course fundamentally, should be understood as a potential part of the solution. For this, Russian opposition politicians, in their quarrelsome variety, should (and should be encouraged to) talk to Russians, about the issues that concern them, in a way that is most likely to turn frustration and resentment into actual, substantial change. This is a shared interest of Ukrainians, many Russians, and us in the West.
Also-happeneds
- Far-Eastern development: I intend to write more extensively on the problems and limits of Russia’s Far Eastern development in a coming blog, as the issue was raised by Putin and other officials in the Eastern Economic Forum last month. However, several news from the past weeks highlighted the limits of the Kremlin’s lofty plans to turn the Far East into a much more important trade hub and an area of prosperity. Two weeks ago, the power firm InterRAO warned that electricity exports to China would be significantly lower this year than a year prior, owing to a growing energy deficit in Russia’s easternmost regions. This deficit will likely grow as the Russian government pours money into infrastructure projects to support the country’s trade pivot to Asian markets, including the electrification of Far Eastern railway lines, and expanding the regions’ power generation capacity will take time. Then this week, Russian Railways announced that in order to finance its investment program, it would likely have to raise tariffs by between 17 and 22% in 2025. Exporters may grumble (as they did before), but they will likely have to swallow the tariffs, which however will lead to a further drop in profit margins, already squeezed by the state of the labor market.
- Coal industry profitability drops: Meanwhile, according to industry analytics quoted by Kommersant, the profitability of coal exports has significantly dropped. Via Far Eastern ports coal could be, on average, exported with zero profits, while through Northwestern ports, at a significant cost. Apart from lower global prices, this is also a consequence of a loss of markets due to the war and a lack of transit infrastructure that drives up transportation costs. Coal companies were riding a tide of high windfall earnings in 2022, but the situation has since turned to much worse.
- Police shortages and rental prices: over the past week I happened upon two data series that I believe say something interesting about how the war is changing Russia from the inside. The investigative outlet IStories published a breakdown of shortages of police officers in the regions – a problem that I have also touched upon both here and for the Bear Market Brief. According to interior minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev there is currently a shortage of 152 thousand police officers country-wide, up from 90 thousand two years ago. This is likely the consequence of the fact that police departments and already overstretched regional budgets are increasingly unable to compete with much higher salaries in the defense industrial complex or the army’s hiring bonuses. The situation is especially dire in some of Russia’s most remote regions. Another interesting data series, on short-term rental prices, was published by the Cian real estate listing aggregator. According to this Tynda, an important junction on the Baikal-Amur Mainline in Russia’s Far East, saw short-term rental prices double in the past 2 years – no doubt a consequence of Russia’s Asian pivot. The Maritime Territory has also been affected.
- Nationalizations: After a decision of the federal government, the state defense conglomerate Rostec will get 75% of the shares in the Goreltekh factory, which produces explosion-proof electrical equipment, the latest in the series of defense industry nationalizations (25% belongs to the German R.Stahl). Apart from Goreltekh, Rostec also wants the government to nationalize the Ivanovo Heavy Machine Tool Plant, which, according to the Prosecution, was illegally privatized in the 1990s (the authorities have used this explanation to re-nationalize several industrial establishments over the past year). The twist in this story is that while the first-instance court supported the Prosecution’s case, the second-instance decision overturned this. So now Rostec is arguing that the plant “needs to be saved” from the interference of its owners in its operation. The conglomerate will likely have the upper hand eventually, but the story highlights that the nationalization drive has its discontents.
- War participant senators: The September regional and municipal elections did not produce a large number of elected war participants, in spite of Putin’s having marked them out as a “new elite”. Across the country only a couple of hundred – most of them nominated by United Russia – were elected to positions on various levels in elections where more than 35,000 mandates were up for grabs. Only about 5% of mandates in regional legislatures were filled by war participants – a sign that old elites are not particularly keen on sharing the pie with new faces. However, two war participants, from the Kursk Region & the occupied Crimea, have now been appointed to the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Russia’s parliament, which is traditionally a refuge for ex-governors. It remains to be seen whether this is a sign of changing times – it could simply be a political signal from two regions directly affected by the war – especially as there have been signals in the recent past that the Kremlin was eyeing the Federation Council as a sinecure for retiring security elites.
- Magadan transit crisis: Magadan became the latest in a long series of cities suffering from public service disruptions after labor market restrictions regarding migrants went into effect in several regions (albeit in Magadan, unlike most other regions, these restrictions were introduced before the Crocus City Hall terrorist attacks in March). According to the city’s mayor, Yury Grishan, the restrictions have led to a shortage of bus drivers affecting lines both inside the city and in the suburbs. Previously, other Russian cities experienced similar public service disruptions, e.g. in sanitation, highlighting the degree to which certain areas on the domestic job market are dependent on migrant labor.