Opinion: Kazakhstan reminds Putin what he really needs to fear
By Evgeny Finkel, Janetta Azarieva and Yitzhak Brudny
Today at 4:07 p.m. EST
Evgeny Finkel is an associate professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Janetta Azarieva is a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Yitzhak Brudny is the Jay and Leonie Darwin chair in Russian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Russia is deploying troops to Kazakhstan, where a sharp increase in fuel prices and the rising costs of food and other necessities have triggered mass protests. So far, dozens of people have died. Government buildings have been torched, statues of former president Nursultan Nazarbayev toppled. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s position is shaky. Unable to quell the protests on its own, the Kazakh leadership asked for assistance from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russia-led regional security alliance.
Yet Kazakhstan’s problems are not unique to itself. Ominously, prices of staple foods and other vital goods are rapidly rising in Russia as well. Over the past year and a half, the Kremlin has introduced price caps, export quotas and other restrictions, all to little apparent effect. Unlike their southern neighbors, Russians have not yet taken to the streets. But the potential for protest is high.
The deployment of CSTO troops to Kazakhstan has invited comparisons to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Yet a more relevant historical analogy is the largely forgotten 1962 Soviet massacre of protesters in the city of Novocherkassk, a tragedy that Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as a turning point in Soviet history.
On June 1, 1962, the Soviet government raised the price of milk by 25 percent and of meat by 35 percent. In Novocherkassk, workers at the city’s locomotive factory went on strike, chanting: “Meat, milk, pay raise!” Administration buildings were vandalized, portraits of Soviet leaders torn apart. The local police forces were too small to disperse the crowds.
The Kremlin sent in the troops. On June 2, the striking workers began marching toward the city center. Troops opened fire at a peaceful crowd assembled on the city’s main square. At least 26 civilians were killed that day and many more wounded. In a series of trials that followed the massacre, seven Novocherkassk residents received death sentences, and more than 100 were sent to jail.
The bloodshed stunned Soviet leaders (even though they themselves almost certainly ordered the use of force). Raising prices became unthinkable for the Kremlin for the next 30 years, even when food subsidies became an unsustainable burden on the state budget — contributing significantly to economic decline and the ultimate collapse of the U.S.S.R.
Until the late 1980s, Soviet authorities also suppressed the memory of the Novocherkassk tragedy. In 1989, several pro-democracy politicians set out to restore the memory of Bloody Saturday and rehabilitate its victims. A key member of this group was Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg. In June 1991, Sobchak went to Novocherkassk — along with his recently appointed aide, Vladimir Putin.
What do Novocherkassk and the violence in Kazakhstan teach us about the fate of Eurasian autocrats? The key lesson is that the main danger to post-Soviet autocracy comes not from the opposition or pro-democracy activists, but from anger at rising prices. The opposition struggle against Putin, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko and other dictators is heroic and deserves our full and unqualified support. Still, if we really want to understand what might bring Putin down, we need to focus on citizens’ pockets.
Putin knows the lessons of Novocherkassk and is visibly concerned. He has good reasons to be. According to a poll taken in March 2021 by the independent Levada Center, 58 percent of Russians considered rising prices the most acute social problem.
Ironically, Putin himself is largely responsible for soaring food prices. When in 2014 the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions on Russia for the annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin responded by banning food imports from the West. The measure shielded Russian agribusiness from competition and served Putin’s goal of achieving self-sufficiency in food. Other industries soon followed, and import substitution became a cornerstone of the Kremlin’s policies. But import bans also made ordinary Russians hostages of domestic big businesses, which, shielded from competition, had no incentives to increase efficiency or reduce prices.
Geopolitical considerations prevent Putin from revoking the ban on Western food imports, and thus prices will keep rising despite all the Kremlin’s efforts to rein them in. A new Novocherkassk could erupt at any moment. Putin will accordingly stop at nothing to prevent protesters at another post-Soviet dictatorship from toppling their leader because of high prices. At stake is not just Kazakhstan’s regime survival but Putin’s own. Moscow’s decision-makers should watch Kazakhstan, remember Novocherkassk and shudder.
In the long term, however, the Kremlin’s strategy is destined to fail. As long as Russia is engaged in conflict with the West and limits imports, prices will not go down. Large-scale subsidies aimed at keeping prices low are likely to drain the state budget, just as happened to the U.S.S.R. Price hikes will eventually lead to mass mobilization and violence. Unlike in Kazakhstan, however, there will be no neighboring friendly autocrat to send in the troops.
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