The main sports nowadays are the attempts to predict the future.
We all know that the current situation in the country can’t be like this forever.
The degree of governmental insanity in Russia and the pressure on the system are too high –
we can see that the machine is stalling and coughing. It’s not falling apart yet, but it can’t keep up any longer.
It’s very likely that the system will not survive until the end of 2024 with all those failures at the front
and increasing internal problems.
Or maybe even till February. While Putin is at power, the war will not end.
There is no intermediary option. Either Putin, or the end of the war.
So, we’ll have to get rid of him.
Any management which will come next (it doesn’t matter who will be its head) will have to do obvious things.
To stop the war, negotiate with Ukraine and the West, cancel the most obvious and the craziest repressive laws.
To get the country back to normal.
Any future management, whether it likes it or not (and it won’t), will have to open a window of opportunities for the civil society
which will lead us to the desirable democratization if we use it properly.
Regimes fail and transform inevitably when it becomes obvious for everyone – from a loader to a minister –
that they can’t live like this anymore.
Of course, the future is unknown and scary, but the present is so bad that no changes can make it worse.
They’ve got nothing to lose. And we are very close to this point. It's an obvious prediction.
Many people say this, and I agree and predict it too, but there is one problem with it.
And we need to understand it when we hear about it and especially when we make plans based on it.
To explain what this problem is, we need to take a step back and look at the past.
The arrangements for this war have been made for many years and right under our nose – it was obvious and public,
but we didn’t notice it, we didn’t notice it not because we were stupid and careless,
but because it’s a basic feature of a closed political system.
Having a result, it’s very easy to make a logical sequence out of the past events, but it’s almost impossible to predict the future.
ALL THE MONEY TO THE BANK
For the last 8 years anyone who has been watching the Russian economy had one question –
why is the government collecting money so desperately?
It’s an inexplicable hoarder syndrome. It doesn’t matter that the economy is decaying,
that the citizens’ real income is decreasing. The only thing that matters is a budget surplus.
What was the aim of making the pension age higher?
Why did they increase VAT?
Such actions would be appropriate if there were a budget crisis, but there weren’t.
Why did they strangle the economy then and take money from people risking their rating?
Just to make the reserve numbers grow?
It’s like in the old joke – the guy saved so much for a rainy day that he can’t wait until it finally comes.
There are so many problems in Russia which haven’t been solved for years because of money shortage.
Residential buildings in critical condition, old communal and road infrastructures,
thousands of schools with outside toilets and stove heating.
Public transport outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, budgetary workers’ salaries, hospitals’ condition –
there is no need to remind you.
A pile of problems which could be immediately solved with money.
But no one has done anything about it for decades, while an equivalent of the federal budget was in the reserve fund
and half of a GDP in the Central Bank reserves. In the margin we should note that it’s the most sad and bitter thing about it.
It’s so sad to see how the government spends macroeconomic sums for nothing damaging
two huge countries and the whole world.
And this money would be enough to make the citizens’ lives better and let people escape absolute poverty.
So that the Russian province wouldn’t look like a post apocalypse decoration.
So that people could live longer, wealthier, and more comfortable lives.
To eliminate this shameful gap between Moscow and the rest of the country.
So that village children could get to school without risking their lives on the ruined bridge.
We could live in a completely different country, but we prepared for the war and ended up in the war.
It’s a catastrophe.
Now we understand what the rainy day we have been preparing for looks like.
It doesn’t mean that the financial and economic management knew what they prepared for.
It means that they were given an order – it’s bad to spend money, you should save money
in any way available disregarding common sense.
That’s what the financial and economic management did.
Now we understand that we paid with economic growth and income so that today we could provide
for the military company “Wagner” and buy drones from Iran.
The increase of the retirement age looked really strange – it almost had no budget effect.
It’s like shooting in your own foot, in a sacred rating. But only if you don’t count 11 million Ukrainian retirees.
If Ukraine is to be taken in the nearest future in your imagination, it all fits – there will be 25% more retirees,
you should get ready for that and think about saving money.
NAVALNY
The same thing with Alexey Navalny. He was a real pain for the system –
he didn’t just poke into its eye showing the scale of shameless robbery, but he also had the only organization in the country
which looked like the oppositional political party – with its structure, regional net, real supporters and public financing.
Navalny really destroyed political careers. It’s not just Dmitry Medvedev who was done after the Navalny’s investigation.
Then for the first time we saw him as we know him today – disfigured by alcohol abuse.
If we remember other characters of big and high-profile investigations like Yuri Chaika and Vladimir Yakunin,
their stories ended quite soon too.
The side effect of all this was a simple fact that Navalny was a guarding dog which made the burglars nervous.
Every big official who had the misfortune to become an object of Navalny’s investigation realized
that his physical freedom was not his own achievement but a result of Putin’s good mood.
It wouldn’t be necessary to make some fake criminal case or persuade people –
everyone had already seen what a disgusting fraud and thief he is. This situation existed for many years.
There is Putin, and here is Anti-Putin. It looked like the system had adapted to it.
It’s not bad for any system that there is a person who doesn’t obey censorship and who is not scared to call black “black”
and ready to take big risks because he is one of the few remaining feedback tools.
Any problem Navalny paid attention to can’t remain hidden, it has to be solved this or that way.
And if there is a mechanism which corrects at least obvious errors in the system, it makes the system
more stable and not vice versa.
Yes, neither Navalny nor people connected with him can participate in any elections (they tried in 2013 and it went bad).
People desperately want to elect Navalny for some post.
He can’t go to any on-air media, except for the Echo of Moscow.
Because he can persuade too many people if he is allowed there.
It’s literally forbidden to say his name.
But as a big independent speaker he can exist in the current model.
The attempt to murder Navalny in August 2020 looked crazy. What has happened to the system?
Why is it so that half a year ago the system could tolerate free Navalny, and now it can’t tolerate him even alive?
I made a hypothesis then, everyone did, but no one could answer that question. We learnt the answer 18 months later.
The system can have Navalny in peaceful times but not during the war.
It can’t afford to have a figure who can arrange a protest, or tell millions of Russian people that this war is a crime and
coordinate massive protests against it. Who will show people that it’s the right thing to do to protest against the war.
Who will make protest normal. There can be no Anti-Putin in a country at war, there should be no second “normal” there.
HASTY ELECTIONS
Looking back from today, all the events starting from January 2020 have become a logical sequence.
Now everything is clear about the State Duma election of 2021 when obvious falsifications ensured that no deputy who can
vote “against” anything or say anything at all was elected to the Parliament.
It’s clear why they bothered to rewrite the Constitution in advance and not at the last moment as it usually happens.
It’s clear why it was so important to hold a plebiscite right in the middle of pandemic, what exactly prevented them from waiting a
year or two instead of that hasty voting, it seemed that no one hurried them up – four years before the election,
there was plenty of time.
If we come back to January 2020, it looks really weird. In a stable and peaceful period the system suddenly decided
to have a huge and expensive adventure, the system which has always refused to repair anything that isn’t broken, which
has always put things off for tomorrow instead of doing it today. It has always avoided any risk.
Now it’s clear that it has been less time than we expected.
That before the formal annulment and the election itself there was another event planned
they should be completely prepared for.
A triumphal referendum on the trust to Vladimir Putin, a heroic victory over Ukraine and confident re-election on his 5th
(that is to say, 6th) term.
All those events should have happened in different times, they couldn’t happen all at once, the system would break.
Looking back, it’s unclear how we could be so blind.
How could we miss that all the actions followed one logic – the logic of preparing for the war?
Why did we think it’s an abstraction when the leading economists said it on air in the Echo of Moscow
that the budget for the next year was the budget of a country at war?
SPYING AFTER THE NEIGHBOR
The most prominent marker is propaganda. Whoever and however tried to explain this unchangeable narrative –
why do the federal TV channels keep discussing Ukraine year after year?
The ratings are falling down, people get tired of it. It was OK in 2014, 2015, and even in 2016.
But now it’s 2017, 2018, 2019, everyone is tired of the Crimea, and people have forgotten about Donbas.
But the TV is stubbornly following its instructions.
Russian propaganda has never watched the Russian election as attentively as the presidential election in Ukraine.
It seems it’s counterproductive – you are losing viewers and making propaganda less effective.
It’s even humiliating – we are looking through a keyhole that our neighbor has a real election with real competition.
People explained it differently – like it was just an inertia, like it’s difficult to forget about the topic which provided ratings
and support even if now it’s over.
Or it was an attempt to hide your own problems, by savoring rumors about your neighbors.
But all of that could be explained simply – Vladimir Putin has never moved on from the Ukrainian topic.
He has always known that the time to repeat 2014 will come.
WHAT AWAITS US
That is the main feature of closed systems. That’s what makes them different from public competition-based democracies.
When something comes out of this black box, there’s no problem explaining where it has come from because
all the previous events become logical.
But it’s almost impossible to predict what happens inside this box or what will happen afterwards.
So that no one thinks that our speculations about the future are crazy, we should understand this very restriction.
As soon as the system fails, it will be easy to explain why it has happened.
We will say that 6 months after the war has started the government has lost the monopoly for its two instruments
of power – violence and propaganda.
That a lot of private, regional and criminal organizations emerged who led an open informational war
for influence and resources.
That Ramzan Kadyrov is just a governor who made a deal with Prigozhin (a mere criminal) and who could make the army
generals lose their posts, we will remember the moment when the power vertical started crumbling.
The President announces mobilization, the mayor of Moscow cancels it.
The governor says one thing, the conscription manager – another, and then the governor chastises the conscription
manager like a schoolboy though he is not even his superior.
We will say that at some point it became unclear who obeys whom. That there were formal positions and informal statuses.
That some coordination councils emerged and substituted both government and army management.
We will say that at some point the dissonance became so strong and the announcements of the officials
(including Putin) became so crazy that it became unclear who is leading the country.
Whose word, or not even word, but whose signature and a seal on the piece of paper is legally and actually valid.
We will say that it’s an astonishing time – the Minister of Defense ended mobilization,
and a conscription manager Sidorov from the district center in the Ivanovo region started the second wave of raids hunting
people who looked like adult upright-walking men.
I wish you could hear that-time propaganda, my dear friends. While the Ministry of Defense swore that the mobilized men
had everything they needed, the governors and propagandists collected donations for underpants and socks for the army.
Can you imagine that it happened simultaneously?
In the dungeons of the Gatchina Palace there is a special place where you can shout in Russian
“Who did rule here?”, you will hear an echo “Pavel”.
Suddenly we found ourselves in the country where the right answer for such a question is “Who knows”.
It depends. It became the point of no return.
After that the system never managed to stabilize itself and crumbled.
And we, the citizens of two-thousand-whatever-year-it-is, live in the outcome now. It will be easy to describe and explain it.
We’ve seen it with our own eyes. Like we’ve seen the preparations for the war,
we can see the shape of the collapse now.
The problem is that public preparations for the war became obvious when the war started.
Likewise, the shape and the mechanisms of the collapse will become obvious as soon as it happens.
I would be happy to provide you with spoilers on how this TV series will end as soon as we are its supporting cast,
whether we want it or not. It’s obviously too long now, and the screenwriters invent more and more crazy twists to keep the
viewer’s attention, but the truth is that we follow the storyline together and we’ll say in the end,
“That’s how it happened! Now, it’s clear.”
Be careful with predictions!
Till tomorrow!