To Crack Down, Or to Crack Down with Leniency

Julia Ioffe’s scenes from last night’s protests rejecting the outcomes of Vladimir Putin’s massaged victory margin offer a harrowing look into the next six years (broken arms, trampled journalists, and a breakdown in chain of authority), and points out that it was completely unnecessary from a strategic perspective for the Kremlin.

On the eve of the presidential election, I wrote that, when faced with two options in a tense political atmosphere, Putin tends to pick the absolute worst option. The days since — from his paranoiacally armored, tear-filled victory speech when only a third of the votes were counted, to Monday’s crackdown– seem to continue to bear that theory out. Instead of letting the stragglers shout in Pushkin Square until they could no longer stand in ankle-deep snow, to let the protest fizzle away into the very insignificance that Putin claims they represent, the command come down to arrest the sons of bitches — and mint some new martyrs. (One lesson they did seem to learn from Dec. 5, when they jailed Navalny for 15 days: This time, they released him after charging him with a petty offense — organizing a protest, maximum fine $70.)

“It’s not clear what to do with the protests,” Masha Lipman, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center, told me a couple days before the election. “On one hand, they’re probably thinking, ‘enough leniency, let’s crack down.’ But if they do crack down, then the press is filled with images of contorted faces and police batons, and it’s a very unpleasant picture of Putin’s first day after the election.”