No matter what we’re talking about now, we must remember one thing: only a month is left till 2023.
And that will be the finish line before the presidential elections. Opinions that the voters will make in these 12 months will affect
the March 2024 procedure.
Don’t underestimate the elections — despite all the fraud, it’s an extremely dangerous moment for the system,
because that’s when the citizens will have the opportunity to discuss and decide whether Russia needs such a president.
And of course they can cause massive trouble with their votes, even if you don’t intend to count them.
What we need to keep in mind in this context is that all negative consequences of war have cumulative
effects on internal politics. And it all is accumulating at once. Victims accumulate.
We remember it well from covid times.
When we’re talking about tens of thousands infected and thousands of dead, the pandemic seems like an abstraction.
News that has nothing to do with your life.
But when the numbers grow tenfold, when they grow to hundreds of thousands infected and tens of thousands dead,
it becomes personal.
A relative, a neighbor, a friend's mother, a former classmate, your hairdresser’s mother —
everyone suddenly knows someone who got critically ill or died.
During the first six months of the war, it was mostly contractors and mercenaries who were dying,
approximately 150 000 – 200 000 men.
Mostly from national republics, poorest regions, small towns and countrysides. I.e. people from “Fourth Russia”
by Zubarevich’s definition, a part of Russia that is not informationally connected with the rest of the country.
Today, even if we only look at the data provided by the Ministry of Defence, at least half a million people are involved
in the war in one role or another.
They are those who are either already fighting, or will be in the nearest couple months.
Half a million means one in three hundred Russians.
That is, almost all Russians will eventually have someone from their close or not so close circle participating in the war,
from a relative to a former colleague’s ex-husband.
And in a few months they’ll start to hear news of the dead and wounded.
And these are the numbers before the 2nd wave of mobilization, which seems to be inevitable.
There is no doubt that in 2023, the war will stop being an abstraction, it will come to every house.
And if things keep preceding as they do now, then by elections every voter will personally know someone
who died or got wounded.
And for no reason and no purpose, mind you.
They aren't even trying to explain what people die for and why this war is needed anymore.
Fatigue accumulates, too. You may think that support for a war depends only on the victories to losses ratio.
But history tells us otherwise: popularity of war is inversely proportional to time passed.
1916, for instance — the most successful year for the Russian army during WW1.
The series of defeats, retreats, humiliation and failure was interrupted by the successful large-scale Brusilov offensive.
The army had learned to fight, more or less, things weren’t going great but it wasn’t too bad either.
Except that the war had been going on for two years.
After two years of pointless war, no one ever wants offensives and victories. No one wanted to protect Balkan slavs.
Everyone wanted one thing: for it all to end as soon as possible and it didn’t matter how anymore.
By the moment of the election, the war will be going on for two years.
Two years of living in a nervous, inflated emotional state, with more bad news every day,
when you never know what happens next.
We talked many times about how it would be incorrect to be relying on opinion polls in assessment of support for
the war and the government in times when anti-war opinions are banned.
Opinion poll results are now completely schizophrenic.
For instance, according to Russian Field, most people would support it if Putin signed a peace treaty soon,
maybe tomorrow. And at the same time, most would support an offensive on Kyiv.
Another example: most Russians think that the so-called Special Military operation is proceeding well.
But at the same time, the majority also says that the war is going on for too long.
And only with responses to indirect questions that aren't about support for the war specifically,
we see that Russians are unhappy with what is happening.
With each new public opinion research, Russians feel ever more anxiety and pessimism about their own future
and the future of Russia. What the regime and its propaganda does only adds insult to injury.
With its usual substitution of politics with the special operation, with its petty lies, the regime leaves millions of people in limbo.
There are no timeframes for the mobilization, no clearly defined stages, no clear parameters at all.
Literally on the next day after Peskov once again says that the mobilization has certainly ended,
you can be knocked on the door and given a summon.
It’s not about life and death even.
It’s just hard to live in a country that seems to have bipolar disorder and is always trying to take you by surprise.
That is always waiting for you to turn back and relax and then catch you off guard with something
that will change your life forever.
This is an extremely exhausting situation.
And in February-March of 2024 they’ll have to explain to people why exactly
they’d want another 6 years of living like that.
When every morning brings new dangers. Living lives that cannot be planned.
Look how every Putin’s speech is announced like a natural disaster by even the most loyal sources.
No one expects anything good from them. What else accumulates during a war? Problems in the economy.
In a week, the most important of the EU sanctions will come into effect — the oil embargo.
We don’t know and we won’t be making guesses on how well it will work.
But even now, before the embargo, the Russian federal budget has reduced all major revenue items,
including oil and gas. At the same time, costs are rising like an avalanche.
The war needs more money every day. You need money to finance production and buying of equipment
and armaments for the frontline to feed its insatiable appetite.
You have to be compensating for sanctions, to be importing banned goods through third countries.
We see that for now, the consequences of the economic isolation are managed.
We can’t say with certainty how well they are managed exactly, because there is less and less of available statistics,
and that which we have is biased. And what’s most important is that we don’t know the cost of it.
We understand that the Russian economy is under a huge stress and has to be burning resources every day.
Here’s something that we do know: real incomes of citizens have already decreased by 10 percent compared to last year.
And the next year’s budget will have a deficit of trillion rubles.
The Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank have excelled themselves in mitigating the consequences of the war.
But they aren’t magicians: they can mitigate the consequences, not cancel them.
When GDP is falling, budget revenues are shrinking, consumer demand and industrial production are declining,
the able-bodied population is being washed out by mobilization and emigration,
while expenses rise rapidly and there are constantly more breaches to be repaired — sooner or later everyone
will certainly feel the consequences.
You can pressure large businesses to save jobs all you want, it will soon find a smart and sneaky way to start firing people.
You can try to rely on gray schemes to import hardware components and spare parts,
but your production can’t survive like this forever.
Fatigue accumulates within the system itself as well.
We tend to underestimate the extent at which various parts of the Russian state have to be performing roles
they were never designed for.
We somehow got accustomed to the fact that governors (regional administrations actually) are conducting mobilization,
trying to find warm trousers, armor vests, and food, solve conflicts, pay compensations,
and sometimes even build defense lines. Governors were practically turned into generals.
The military vertical has failed everywhere and now it is being replaced with civilian one.
Now governors are responsible for everything from conscription to logistics support of the army.
But really, civilian leadership wasn’t built for the task. It has plenty of other tasks to fulfill.
Education, healthcare, communal services, transportation —
it all depends on regional administrations.
Russia has maybe 10-15 regions that have some spare money to spend.
The rest, when they are forced to spend money on trousers, armor vests, payments,
compensations and fortifications, must cut expenses elsewhere.
And anyway when an administration spends time and resources on war,
they have less of it to spend on other things.
And those “other things” are exactly the essence of the job that they took and that they always did:
repairing schools, building roads, replacing water pipes, and other responsibilities that affect citizens’ lives.
The same is true for ministries, state agencies, and all governmental bodies.
Check out what they do today, look at the questions that they’re discussing:
it’s either supplying the war, or counteracting sanctions, or repairing holes that war and sanctions create.
The endless state of emergency. It exhausts not only individuals, but entire institutions.
It takes resources away from other tasks.
And it’s all the more difficult in a situation where one problem clings to another,
when solving a problem is a problem in itself: after all you can’t just catch,
equip, and train a man and then send him to fight Himars.
You’ll still need to heal them, to provide him with prostheses and a wheelchair,
and if he gets drunk and kills a neighbor out of grievance against his broken life,
he’ll have to be once again caught, tried, and sent to prison.
So unless something changes, in March of 2024 we’ll have a sad and nervous voter.
A voter with much lower incomes.
A voter who no longer thinks that a war is a TV show, who knows someone who died or got wounded.
He himself or someone he knows is being shown signs of affection by the draft board.
No good news from the frontline, and no good news at all for two full years.
And what about the next 6 years? It will be a tough topic.
Not only for citizens, but for the system itself: does it really want to keep going like this?
It may seem that elections don’t matter in our system since their results are predetermined.
Especially this time. But it is not so. Elections are always stressful for authoritarian systems.
Elections in an authoritarian system are not just something that voters do.
It’s a question for the elites: where they want things to keep going as they do, or they want changes.
They usually want changes. They are elites and thus are the ones who win the most from the status quo.
But this time, there will be an important nuance, 6 years ago, when they put Putin into the chair once again,
they could not imagine where they'd end up today.
They had it all: villas at Côte d’azur, yachts in Monaco, children’s future ensured, all set up for retirement,
the future of the next 5 generations of descendants ensured.
And now all that they’ve been working hard for for over 20 years has vanished.
And even if it didn’t, if they did find some Ivan to transfer all their wealth to, what’s the point if they can’t reach it.
That world is unreachable for Russian elites now.
Now they can only act inside, tasked with building tanks, smuggling microcircuits through Kazakhstan,
buying instant noodles for conscripts — all under the watchful eye of the FSB looking for conspiracies.
And where will they be in another 6 years? In jail for spying for Ukraine? In Prigozhin’s video with a hammer in their heads?
Poisoned with Novichok? In a bunker in the middle of a nuclear wasteland? In a civil war?
What will 2030 look like, if it will be as bad compared to 2024 as 2024 was worse than 2018?
And they might not get another chance to somehow get rid of Putin while keeping the system intact.
Because an election is not a coup, it’s a legal way to replace Putin with someone else and to begin to crawl out of the pit.
What will happen in these 6 years, who will still be alive free after 6 years,
what will become of the system in 6 years, will they still have any influence and will there be anything left to influence?
So to put Putin in the chair again would mean a huge risk instead of just preserving the status quo.
It’s likely that it will be their last chance to somehow affect the fate of the country and their own fates, because later,
other people may be in charge.
No matter how valuable Putin is for the system, they probably want to remain in the system in which it’s your position,
money, connections, administrative skill and knowledge that makes you an elite, not a gun in your hands.
Because if it’s a gun then everything else becomes meaningless.
A Mayor’s Office in Moscow is not Bakhmut, a single squad can capture it in under 5 minutes.
And then you’ll have to explain to that angry man in a balaclava how good of a manager you are
and why it’s a bad idea to throw you out of the window.
We don’t assume that people within Russian leadership are somehow concerned with the wellbeing of the country.
If they were, we wouldn't end up here. Maybe they’re fine with turning Russia into Somalia.
But for sure Somalia has no use for talented central bankers and bike lanes architects. They can’t shoot well.
In a model like ours, an election is always a window for opportunity and chance for a change.
It is a time when people can legally criticize the chosen course, when you can’t stop them from talking.
It’s a rare moment when we will all have to think about the future.
And right now it seems that the future for the society and the elites doesn’t look good for as long as Putin is in charge.
The upcoming election isn’t just not pointless, it’s the most important checkpoint.
And as the system approaches it, we must watch closely.
Because a window for opportunity may open unexpectedly.
Maybe not in 2024 even, it may happen much sooner.
See you tomorrow.