Pandemic protests test Putin’s influence in ex-Soviet space

When mobs stormed government buildings and hounded the president from office in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan after disputed elections last month, Vladimir Putin seemed unimpressed.

“Every time they have an election, they practically have a coup,” Putin told the Valdai discussion club, a gathering of Russian experts, by video conference from his residence. “This is not funny.”

The observation may be valid: Kyrgyzstan, a parliamentary democracy on paper, has experienced three revolutions in the past two decades. But this latest revolution, as the stories of Kyrgyz people like Ulan Kudaiberdiyev reveal, was different.

In March, at the start of a coronavirus lockdown, Kudaiberdiyev lost his job driving taxis in the capital Bishkek. That left his family of eight with zero income for the seven-week period.

By the time the taxi-driver’s mother Rakya got sick with COVID-19, state hospitals in the former Soviet republic were full. In a gold-rich country where the official wage is less than $250 a month, the family had to borrow money to pay for someone to come in to give her drugs via intravenous drips.

“We just scraped by,” Rakya, 75, told Reuters.

Lockdown has been harsh for millions worldwide, and protests are mounting as restrictions multiply. Kyrgyzstan, a state of 6.5 million, is not the only former Soviet republic where they recently caught fire, underlining the fragility of Moscow’s grasp in a region it once controlled.

The Kyrgyz outbreak also shows how quickly economic shock and political frustration in the pandemic can escalate into chaos – and how swiftly Moscow can act to reassert control.

 

DIFFICULTIES

Putin was already facing a COVID-fuelled political crisis some 4,500 km to the west in Belarus, another ex-Soviet state, where truculent ally and veteran leader Alexander Lukashenko had dismissed the disease, telling people to drink vodka to ward it off.

That attitude angered Belarusian voters, who first mobilised in March to protect themselves from the virus, then challenged his election victory with rolling street protests that have continued.

Putin’s grip on the ex-Soviet space has also been shaken by a flare-up in the decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. The fighting – the most violent since bloody ethnic unrest in the 1990s – does not seem linked to the pandemic, but has seen regional rival Turkey trying to muscle into an area Moscow has long regarded as its own domain.

In Kyrgyzstan, voters including Kudaiberdiyev voted for the opposition. When the official count showed no opposition party had won more than 10% of the vote, their frustration boiled over.

Putin, who visited Bishkek last year to agree the expansion of a Russian airbase, called events in Kyrgyzstan a disaster, referencing Russian-financed projects worth half a billion dollars Moscow had recently implemented, and tens of millions of dollars in annual grants.

A week of widely televised chaos, riots and street brawls were brought to a close with the appointment of a new prime minister after the Kremlin put its military airbase on high alert and suspended foreign aid. At least one plane used by Russia’s Federal Security Service made a discreet landing in Bishkek.

For Russia, Kyrgyzstan – which borders China and is one of the stops on Beijing’s One Belt, One Road trade corridor across Asia to Europe – is of crucial military and geopolitical importance.

It also has a naval centre to communicate with nuclear submarines and surface ships, and a seismic monitoring station which it uses to track earthquakes and nuclear weapons tests around the world.

In 2014, under what some analysts saw as pressure from Moscow, Kyrgyzstan shut down a U.S. airbase which had served U.S. operations in Afghanistan since 2001.

Russia boasts strong ties with China, but it is also in competition with Beijing in Kyrgyzstan. Like Putin, President Xi Jinping was also in Bishkek last year, and China has positioned itself as a major creditor to the authorities.

Both Moscow and Beijing have pledged COVID help to the republic.

 

PAIN

With no savings, Kudaiberdiyev’s family was forced into debt to survive during the lockdown. A bank loan of around $630 helped the family buy food and medicine and, along with handouts from charities and neighbours and a modest food package from the state, kept them going until May.

When the election came around, they backed the Mekenchil (Patriotic) party, which focused on the injustice of pandemic-related economic hardship and promised ordinary people a greater share of income from natural resources – such as gold – extracted by foreign-owned companies.

Many others felt the squeeze. About one quarter of the Kyrgyz population lives on less than US$ 1.3 a day, according to the World Food Programme. More than half of the poorer households surveyed by the country’s Economic Policy Research Institute in May and June said their financial situation had dete