A lot of things happened yesterday but I was touched by one (not the most horrible but very illustrative) story.
From time to time, I visit some weird Instagram profiles, and a couple of times I ran into the profile of the cat Stepan.
It’s a usual cute Instagram profile — the girl is taking her cat’s photos.
The cat became a meme — it usually represents some sad cocktail parties.
It’s quite a big profile — a million subscribers, perhaps they lived for the funds it provided.
It’s a standard Soviet multi-store building, with usual life and business based on creativity.
Some media came and interviewed her. They were doing well.
But they were unlucky to live in Kharkiv — the most Russian city of Ukraine.
Putin came there with his war.
That’s how this house — where Anna and her cat lived — looks like now.
It was hit not by some fascists but by the army of Russia.
Anna was lucky and managed to save herself. That’s what she writes:
“On February 24 early in the morning we were at home and sleeping.
At 5 in the morning, we heard an explosion, I wasn’t fully awake and I couldn’t even understand what it was.
Half an hour later we heard more explosions, window glass started to tremble,
I got up and realized that something terrible was going on!
It was a military offense and attack of Kharkiv.
We realized that the war came.
On the first day there was the most severe destruction.
The houses nearby were consistently hit every day, they burnt in front of my eyes.
Our house was fine for a week but on the 8th day our house was also hit — a missile hit our neighbor’s balcony.
There was no fire.
All the window glass shattered in 20 or 30 apartments.
2 or 3 missiles also hit the yard in front of the house.
For 2 nights we sat in the basement. A week without any light.
We went to the other house’s basement to charge the phone.
Then we managed to leave.
The volunteers in Kharkiv helped us and took us to the railway station.
We took the train from Kharkiv to Lviv (20 hours later we were in Lviv).
Then we went to the border with Poland. There we stood in a pedestrians’ queue.
There were so many people (4 or 5 thousand).
We crossed the border 9 hours later and made it to Poland.”
I’d like to remind you it’s a woman who was taking photos of her cat.
Her house was denazified by Putin who attacked it with artillery or missiles.
The house next to hers was hit — in the yard.
By some miracle she could escape and even managed to save her cat.
Millions of people had to leave their houses and run away from Putin’s army — with kids and elderly relatives.
All those refugees are like that. Ordinary people, just like us, our parents, neighbors.
But at least they managed to leave.
Thousands (perhaps even dozens of thousand) couldn’t escape and were killed.
Under Russian shootings.
Why is it happening?
Here is Marina Met and her son Ivan from the suburbs of Kyiv.
They lived alone, not so long ago they took photos from Kyiv, spent their time quite well.
Marina worked as an HR and everything was good.
I found her photos on Facebook — a single mom with her son, if you scroll her profile — just a usual woman.
If you go on the street, you’ll meet a lot of people like her.
Just a normal person who lived well in the suburbs of the European capital.
She wrote on Facebook in Russian, with the Ukrainian flag, of course, as she was from Ukraine.
A common Russian-speaking woman from Ukraine.
The Russian artillery attacked her town Irpen.
A mother... with her 12-year old child — a boy.
Marina and her son died in front of their house.
People couldn’t even bury them properly because of the shootings — they are buried in the yard
near the bench where Marina, probably, sat and watched her son playing on the playground.
Why is it happening? How could it happen?
How could the Russian army kill Marina and Ivan, destroy Anna’s house, and make her leave the country?
This war is the most insane thing that could happen to our country.
Many people are befuddled by the propaganda. Many of them just don’t want to believe that it’s us.
But it’s us.
Our army. Our soldiers, our artillery. It’s not the banderites or the fascists.
Well, it is a question if we could call these events fascism but coming from the Russian army.
If our army didn’t come there (for no reason at all), Marina would have lived and taken photos of her son and the sights,
Anna’s house wouldn’t have been destroyed and she would have lived there happily and taken photos of her cat.
This war has no reasons. We do not defend or save anyone.
Our army brings death and destruction to the peaceful Ukrainian towns.
And our politicians and propagandists are lying that this is a special operation and denazification.
They are lying and to those who aren’t they are threatening imprisonment.
There are no half-lights now.
It good or evil, and the evil is the Russian army.
And the good is the people like Marina and Ivan, like Anna who loose (if they are lucky) just their home and property, if they are not – their lives or their kids’ lives.
This war has no excuse.
Now I’d like to tell you how and why a plot could brew up among the Russian elites.
That’s what my channel is about. I’m a politician and it’s about politics.
It’s not easy for me to record these videos and talk calmly when the army of the country
which issued my passport is killing people in the neighboring country for no reason at all.
But I think it is necessary so let’s proceed with the video.
Yesterday Putin had an economic meeting with the members of the government.
And he made quite a threatening speech.
This speech is not his usual verbiage which makes unclear what the author meant
and even not the speech of a Soviet Secretary General in his latest years who was repeating the same text on peace in the world and disarmament.
In fact, what we’ve heard can’t be attributed to one of these genres.
Because the text reminds strongly of the 30s of the previous century – totalism as it is.
It divides the country into “patriots” — that’s to say, Putin’s fervent supporters, and into some second-sort people —
the insects, who should be destroyed because the nation should get rid of them to become stronger.
Things like that a person should say in front of the applauding audience
using the voice and the language to make people’s blood run cold and hot at the same time so that they couldn’t distinguish horror and delight.
The speech about the clean-up of the nation and the danger to its existence muttered in a sterile room without windows looks, at least, peculiar.
It's a strange mix of sophisticated and ignorant, of national socialism and a soviet district committee session.
And now there’s no excuse for this ringing silence — the coronavirus was officially canceled in Russia.
Putin’s speech — as terrifying as it is — changes almost nothing for the common citizens.
The forces don’t need any permission or invitation — they already have a bunch of laws to steamroll anybody whose opinion is different from the general line.
The forces don’t listen to the speeches — they read the laws.
Of course, Putin addressed his own selectorate — from his closest people to the whole Russian political elite,
to the most powerful businessmen, public officials, and top managers.
Those extremely rich and powerful people lost everything in 3 weeks.
And it’s not about the hypothetic billions in the exchange value of their assets, or the frozen accounts abroad, and even not about the manors and the yachts.
It’s about losing 2 things — their status and their safety.
As recently as on February 23 those people were a part of a global establishment.
They played golf with princes, dined with the most respectable people in the world,
bought the most popular stars for their celebrations, sat in supervisory boards of charity funds,
gave interviews to some business media about new approachesin management, sat on the tribune of their own football club near to the Oscar-winners.
Of course, inside they dealt with some questionable issues and had to accept some hideous compromises.
But during charity dinners in London, they were respectable — just like the world’s elite.
But three weeks ago, they became pariahs.
Their names are in the same list as the names of hired guns and field commanders.
The founders of Alpha group, the managing director of Yandex — as smart and celebrated as they are —
are in the same line with the manager of Rosgvardia (Federal national guard troops) Zolotov.
It’s not about some formal restrictions.
The thing is that after these 3 weeks everybody will run away from them like from the plague.
Nobody would care who is a real “Putin’s oligarch” and who is just a next-door neighbor.
Everybody saw that bombed maternity clinic and drama theatre in Mariupol.
Everybody understands that their money — this or that way — were in that bomb.
They could forget not only about the presidency of the fund they would be denied even in a car rental.
From the cremes of global society they became pariahs in several weeks.
And most of those people are not stupid.
They’ve seen what was going on for those 20 years and they didn’t build up the infrastructure for their life far away from their beloved motherland for no reason.
Everybody wanted to be smarter than Khodorkovsky, Ulyukayev, Kalvi or Abyzov.
Everybody understood that with that domination of the forces there would be black days for everyone who had something to take away.
And everybody wanted to face it in the safety of Tuscany.
To earn money in Russia and live in the West is not about an SMM-specialist from Izhevsk
who would end up in prison for treason for a post in social media.
He could end up like that anyway, without Putin’s speeches.
No, this was meant for the political and business elites supporting Putin’s regime.
But in 3 weeks they’ve become Putin’s hostages.
They’ve lost everything and buzz with indignation without even hiding.
This warning is for them — that the nation would easily get rid of the mosquitos in its mouth.
Even though it’s not the nation — it’s one person and those mosquitos are the foundation for his power.
The united West is trying to split our society speculating with our combat losses,
or social and economic consequences of sanctions, and to provoke the internal conflict in Russia. It is trying to achieve its goal using the 5th column. And this goal is to destroy Russia.
But any nation, especially the Russian nation, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from the scum and traitors,
and will just spit it out as a mosquito which randomly flew into the mouth.
I’m sure that this natural and necessary self-cleaning in society will only strengthen our country.
And now it’s natural to ask the question which has been discussed since the beginning of the war — is the coup likely to happen?
What’s the chance that Putin’s pals would relieve the country and themselves from the burden which is drowning them?
Let’s discuss it after the ad.
Let’s proceed.
Palace coup is not an easy business. Let’s turn to the history — to the gold standard
of destructive regimes which was dangerous for the country, the whole world and for its own elites — the Nazi Germany.
By the end of December 1942 everybody who understood anything in war
(and Hitler was surrounded by such people — the real generals and not some PR people)
couldn’t help but realize that Germany had lost.
Blitzkrieg in the USSR failed and most importantly — that the USA joined the war.
The main direction of your offense failed, you must hold most of Europe with the occupation troops,
and now you are fighting against the overwhelming economic potential.
You can’t win a war against the most developed countries and the whole world.
It would end with Germany’s defeat sooner or later.
You can’t defeat someone who has 5 soldiers against 1 yours, or 100 bullets and 10 tanks against 1 yours.
Human, financial, and industrial resources of anti-Hitler coalition in many times exceeded the aggressor’s resources.
Hitler’s friends could avoid horrible repercussions for themselves just by throwing away the crazy fuehrer.
Moreover, it’s not just difficult to avoid the repercussions but to stay in a political elite of the country which is not yet totally destroyed.
But they did nothing. They just watched this war being lost, and the country going downhill. They watched it until the end.
Hitler’s Germany is an example of a regime which didn’t fail even when all of its power was confined in one bunker.
It’s a regime where everybody understood everything but did nothing.
Let’s talk about one more historic episode — Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster from the post of the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee in 1964.
Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union soon after Stalin’s death.
That-time elites were tired waiting for a knock at their doors and a prison van which would take them to the eternity.
They understood what they wanted very clearly — joint management and safety.
Massive repressions were finished and just one high-level leaderended up with a bullet in his head.
It was Lavrentiy Beria — the only one who wanted to proceed with Stalin’s regime.
There were no big Soviet chiefs killed after that.
At first everything went according to the plan.
The “thaw” started, the 20th Communist Party Congress was over where Stalin’s personality cult was revealed, and his crimes were criticized.
The Gulag (Main Directorate of Camps) was reorganized.
Political prisoners started being released and even the censure was milder than ever.
Some time passed and this small system of constraints and counterbalance got demolished by Khrushchev,
and he started reigning alone.
He was uneducated and exuberant, liked making inflammatory statements and became famous when he banged over the tribune with his boot during the UN session (it’s a myth though).
By the early 1960s the USSR under Khrushchev’s power found itself in a self-created turbulence in terms of internal and external politics.
Khrushchev’s experiments with the virgin lands resulted in the shortage of bread — they had to buy it abroad.
The shortage of meat resulted in the workers’ rebellion in Novocherkassk in 1962 which was cruelly strangled by the army.
If we talk about the foreign policy, Khrushchev put the USSR on the edge of nuclear war with the US twice —
in 1961 during the Berlin crisis and in 1962 during the Caribbean crisis.
It was a miracle that everything ended well.
Besides, he had a quarrel with China and lost an important ally in the East.
Being aware of his character the Soviet elites realized that new problems were about to come after the Berlin
and Caribbean crises, and soon enough somebody would break down and a new war would start.
We should say that those chiefs in the USSR knew perfectly well what a world war was.
All of them survived it and didn’t want to repeat it.
Ultimately, a plot against Khrushchev brewed up among the party elites.
In 1964 Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev.
And for many years up to the end of the 1970s (up to the war in Afghanistan) the relationship between the USSR and the West were stable.
The danger of mutual destruction was left behind for some time.
Here we have two examples — both from totalitarian countries. It’s an appropriate comparison.
And we can see that a conflict between the dictator and the elites could be very different (if we don’t consider the real scale of problems).
Let’s discuss the arguments which could unite very different forces within Putin’s regime and make them end this war in the most natural way — by eliminating its cause.
In particular, Vladimir Putin’s being on the post of a President of Russia.
If anyone had doubts at the end of February, now it’s obvious that the war with Ukraine is impossible to win.
The seizure and occupation of Kyiv can’t be achieved. They had a tiny chance for a couple of days in the beginning.
If the Ukrainian chiefs gave in and ran away, probably, they could have achieved Crimea No.2 (not for sure though).
But the opposite happened.
The huge country is as united as ever, the power rating is really high everywhere — in Kharkiv or Lviv.
The army is supported and with the help of common citizens holds the defense.
There’s no need to be a military expert to see that this idea is unsuccessful.
The idea to seize million-people cities who hate you can’t be fulfilled.
But — and there’s a but — while Putin is in the Kremlin, the war won’t end.
Yes, they could sign a ceasefire with Ukraine but there’s no way back to the life we had before.
No propaganda could hide such a failure.
All the myths created for the last years — about Putin’s strategic genius, the unbeatable army,
the Supermen from Chechnya and defective Ukraine – would turn to ashes.
People would become poor, and not for a great and dazzling win, but for nothing at all.
Meanwhile, each and every day brings damage we would have to deal with in the years to come.
Many people don’t fully understand how the sanctions work.
The direct impact from the sanctions is not even a half of the damage.
The sanctions create a vast toxic ambience.
In 2014 they didn’t introduce any sanctions against Russia as a country.
They concerned several individuals and two banks no one heard about.
There were some restrictions in terms of the military.
But it wasn’t serious, so the government decided to add some problems as well.
Russia monopolized the food market and made everyone much poorer.
But even then, common Russian citizens and Russian companies leading business
and living in Europe and the US encountered some real problems.
The banks serving people with residency started asking questions like
“You’ve got 20,000 euro in your account, tell us where it came from and don’t forget confirming it with a bunch of papers.
We’ll freeze your account for now, just in case.
Who knows these Russians, with whom they are affiliated and what they are doing?”
And playing hide-and-seek with the financial authorities could result in gambling away your business.
With this scope of sanctions, any money, any contractual relations with any person or company somehow related to Russia would be a red flag for the lawyers and security services.
It would concern even the lowest levels like opening a debit card.
The bank specialist would see a red warning on the screen if he chose Russia.
It would concern everyone.
If your surname or the name of your company is not on the list, it doesn’t mean that you’re not under sanctions.
It just means you aren’t named personally.
The Western companies flee from Russia not because their managers are of high morality
but because working with Russia is bad for business now.
No one wants to be that very European, American or Japan company, whose taxes allow to bomb the maternity center in Mariupol.
What does the reputational damage look like and how important it is, we could see in the story of harassment in Hollywood.
Those people who were involved in it most of all — Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey — were not just ordinary people, they were the golden geese.
Their cancellation cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It killed a lot of profitable projects.
But the reputational risks were higher.
Those are very real financial and reputational risks.
Any serious business will say
“We don’t want to work with the Russians, any Russians, because better be safe than sorry.”
This situation will hold for a while. It won’t end with the war.
After the war we’ll start a long way out of isolation — at first, legally, then de-facto.
Any person near Putin, somehow connected with big financial operations, knows that.
They also know that day after day the repercussions become worse, and the time when we start earning money again instead of sitting in the fighting holes, becomes more distant.
The grim likeness with the Crimean war for Putin is that he himself is the only problem for his friends on their way out from all of this.
It doesn’t matter who would win in this dog fight behind the scenes.
Whoever it is, he would be able to pin all the blame on the person who made this decision.
Anyone could play a victim of his regime, the president himself worked very hard to create this reputation.
Anyone could cancel all his decisions and start a struggle with the heavy autocratic heritage,
and, most importantly, with his opponents in power.
Those who had lost would become putinists and fire starters, but those who had won — the liberators.
Therefore, we’ve got three issues. First, one person is the root of all problems.
Secondly, there’s a real chance to grab power when there's a crisis and the system is about to burst.
Thirdly, the situation is hopeless under Putin. And these problems altogether make the coup a real possibility.
The tone he chose for the common economic session tells us that he can appreciate this danger himself.
It’s highly unpleasant to suddenly become not a solution for your friends’ problems but its source.
Till tomorrow!