Surveillance, despotism and dystopia: a message of hope from Putin’s gulag

It’s hard work being a dictator. The job requires constant vigilance. Enemies are everywhere and even your most loyal supporters must be ruthlessly and regularly reminded who’s boss.

The two most powerful autocrats in today’s world are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. They are, needless to say, very different— as different as Russia and China, or Europe and Asia. Yet they and the societies they rule do have one thing in common: neither has ever lived under the rule of law, let alone a functioning liberal democracy. Neither has any concept of a loyal opposition. The politics of tyranny is a zero-sum game: the tyrant cannot allow even the safety valve of token criticism, still less the emergence of potential competitors.

In Russia, the only source either of criticism or of competition for Putin has for some time been Alexei Navalny. Having survived attempted assassination and refused to remain in exile, he is now languishing in Pokrov, a remote penal colony east of Moscow. Reports have described him as emaciated and physically frail. His organisation has been thoroughly penetrated, dismembered and seemingly crushed. New charges are being trumped up against him, designed to keep him incarcerated at least until the next elections in 2024. Such treatment implies both that Putin still sees Navalny as a threat but that he no longer feels the need to do away with him.

Yet somehow Navalny smuggles his message out. This week the New York Times carries an interview with the great dissident. In it he explains that we should modify what we know from the writings of Solzhenitsyn and others who survived the Gulag Archipelago. “You might imagine tattooed muscle men with steel teeth carrying on with knife fights to get the best cot by the window,” he says. But no: “You need to imagine something like a Chinese labour camp, where everybody marches in a line and where video cameras are hung everywhere. There is constant control and a culture of snitching.”

Instead of the backbreaking physical labour of Soviet camps, prisoners are subjected to psychological indoctrination. They are forced to sit through eight hours of propaganda videos a day, watched over by guards who ensure that they pay attention and wake them if they fall asleep.

Navalny is probably correct that these methods have been borrowed from Beijing. They have been developed in the laogai, the network of forced labour camps originally established by Mao on the model of Stalin’s Gulag. But in the sophistication of coercion and control, the Chinese imitation long ago surpassed the Russian original. We now know that these methods are in use at camps in Xinjiang province, where a large proportion of the Uighur minority are processed in unimaginably cruel ways. The same fate awaits Hong Kongers who defy the notorious “security law”. Indeed, all 1.4 billion Chinese live in what has been called a surveillance society, where there is no right to privacy at all and even family members are expected to denounce their relatives for deviations from the party line. The crude brutality and self-flagellation of the Cultural Revolution era is, for the most part, no longer seen as necessary. The China of Xi Jinping has perfected the art of creating a population of zombies.

Yet even this surveillance society still, apparently, requires scapegoats. Zhou Jiangyong, the party chief of Hangzhou, has been placed under investigation for “disciplinary violations” — in other words, corruption. The fall of the most powerful man in Zhejiang province, the Chinese Silicon Valley, sends a blunt message to the increasingly plutocratic ruling class: don’t draw attention to your achievements or stand out from the crowd in any way.

Zhou had been conspicuous mainly by his loyalty, but he made the mistake of aspiring to turn the success of his city into a beacon for Xi’s economic ideology, known as “common prosperity”. He told party officials: “We must play the role of the lead goose.” Big mistake. It turns out that too much sauce for the goose is not to the taste of the lead gander, Xi Jinping himself.

Communism “with Chinese characteristics” undoubtedly allows individuals to amass vast fortunes, not least the owners and executives of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, which is based in Hangzhou. But such tycoons are still expected to conform to the collectivist mentality of a one-party state. Tall poppies are always at risk if they neglect their comrades in the party. And precisely because conflicts of interest are thereby institutionalised, both the plutocrats and their party cronies can always be accused of corruption. In this respect, Xi has perhaps learned something from Putin, whose use of quasi-judicial methods to keep his oligarchs under control has been highly successful. Once in a while, Voltaire wrote in Candide, the English think it good to shoot an admiral pour encourager les autres. The Russians and Chinese do the same with their billionaires and bureaucrats.

Can we then expect Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China to become ever more alike? The crushing of resistance or indeed any form of independent thought in both implies as much: mutual admiration leads to mutual approximation. Yet there is a glimmer of hope, for Russia at least, in Navalny’s defiance and faith in the future of his motherland. He has always argued that Putin’s system cannot outlive its creator. “Sooner or later…Russia will move onto a democratic, European path of development — simply because that is what the people want.”

This reminder that Russia is a European country is salutary for other Europeans, who tend to write it off as a hopeless case, just as they did in the Stalinist era. Putin may avail himself of increasingly despotic, “Asiatic” methods. The authentic oriental despotism, though, is China. To Russians, like others, the West can only hope to demonstrate its superiority as a model by its actions. What is striking, however, is that Russians still vote with their feet. Given the choice, they prefer to live in London, Paris or New York — not Beijing, Shanghai or Hangzhou. In time, the free world will prevail over the surveillance societies, as the latter are revealed as ever more dystopian.

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