“The revolt that began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt”, writes Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books, “is a struggle against what Algerians call hogra, ‘contempt’, a struggle fed by anger over authoritarian rule, torture, corruption, unemployment and inequality, and – a lightning rod everywhere in the Arab world – deference to the US strategic agenda”.
How does Russia stack up on this criteria?
Authoritarian rule – check
Corruption – check
Torture – in Chechnya, police custody, and through anonymous violence against journalists and activists – check
Unemployment – check
Inequality – check
However, if one starts to unpack these claims, then both the Egyptian revolt and the Russian situation appear far less clear. For example, Egyptian poverty, unemployment and inequality are nothing special. Going by the Gini coefficient, the country is far more equal than England, Italy, Spain, Russia and the US in terms of income distribution. It has the same unemployment rate as the US, and double the GDP growth.
In fact, the figures are largely comparable to Russia’s, and not in a bad way.
In terms of authoritarianism, Egypt fared worse than Russia (30 years of martial law), but neither country is particularly exceptional in terms of its abuses – situations of torture, gagging, intimidation, unlawful detentions and restrictions on assembly and media repeated in even more dramatic forms in many undemocratic countries, from Iran to Cuba to Pakistan.
In material terms, both countries have let their people travel abroad, participate and get rich in the commercial economy, and, although the official media is widely censored, access to the internet is fairly unrestricted (with the exception of the recent shut downs in Egypt in January) – though limited to a small elite of urbanised, rich and educated users.
Both countries feature stratospheric levels of official corruption, but according to Transparency International, corruption is the rule, rather than the exception: in 2010, fewer than a quarter of the world’s countries scored above 5 out of 10 in its index (Denmark scored a 9, the US a 7, and Somalia a 1). Venality then is hardly a sufficient condition for a popular revolt.
The biggest difference between Russia and Egypt – and the reason Putin will not go the way of Mubarak anytime soon – is Shatz’s final point: “Deference to the US security agenda”.
The Egyptian revolt was less about material poverty, economic crisis, political strangulation, corruption and inequality than it was about indignation over being America’s pawn and having to defer meekly to Israel. The crowds were protesting their humiliation, not their destitution.
Putin understood this early, and well. By sharply re-orientating Russia away from its Yeltsin-era pro-Western meekness to an assertive and independent international position, he has been able to get away with leaving most of the really substantive Yeltsin-era problems – corruption, inequality, oligarchic excesses, police brutality and Chechnya – unresolved.
While Mubarak thought that he could bribe his people into quiescence with US money, Putin caught on that an improvement in the public’s “sense” of empowerment and national pride can bolster his power cheaply and effectively without having to bother with fixing the “objective” situation within the country.
And while Egyptians have punished Mubarak’s complacent miscalculation with a revolution, the Russian people continue to reward Putin’s ingenuity with sky-high ratings.
