What are we seeing in Russia right now, besides the helpless expectation of a Ukrainian counteroffensive?
We’re seeing an obvious campaign for the 2024 presidential election.
When we watch Putin reluctantly climb out of his bunker and ride through occupied areas; when we listen
to a leaked conversation between top Russian entrepreneurs;
when we see the state being cautious about dragging people to the frontlines, two things become crystal clear.
First, the election really is a watershed.
It may unleash the apocalypse that has been prophesied since the war began: from the blocking of YouTube
to forced mass mobilization and the closing of borders.
After the election, the regime won’t need to protect the civilian elites, and the secret police will be free to run wild
in their search for enemies who’ve snuck into the highest levels of government.
This will create extensive opportunities for mass purges.
Second, the regime doesn’t think the upcoming election is a walk in the park. Things are obviously deteriorating rapidly,
and it’s unclear what the regime will end up with in March 2024.
By then, will the elites and the voters need this waddling lame duck of a regime?
It’s all the more surprising that, from the outset of the war, Putin's actions have hit the very people that he counts on.
His policies are hurting his own base with startling precision. This isn’t a very obvious idea, but I’ll try to explain what I mean.
A quick announcement before we begin. My book,
The History of New Russia, is finally in stock at Amazon and easily ships to any country.
If you’re not in Russia and have long wanted to buy this book, now is the time. Follow the link in the description.
OPPONENTS AND LOYALISTS
It might seem to readers of Russian non-mainstream media that there’s nothing worse in Russia than being
a critic of the regime.
Hardly a day goes by without baffling news: some snitching on their neighbors to the police, others slapped with fines
for conversing loudly in a restaurant, criminal charges for anti-war messages on price tags,
toughening of laws, and lifelong sentences for high treason.
But how many people has the hammer of wartime censorship hit? There are less than 200 criminal cases.
And not all who’ve been charged are under arrest — like myself, for instance.
Then there’s a few thousand administrative cases.
Even if we throw in the celebrities prosecuted in absentia, that’s still less than 5,000.
That’s a lot. But only a handful received prison sentences — the rest were just fined.
On the other hand, how many people gave in to propaganda or were tempted by the prospect of riches and suffered for it?
Those who, for whatever reason, went to fight for Putin and were either killed or maimed in this senseless and unjust war?
At least 50,000 were killed and over 150,000 wounded. Hundreds of thousands are in the war zone right now:
wearing in tatters, sleeping in waterlogged trenches, eating expired MREs.
They’re the ones being used as cannon fodder. It’s with their bodies that the generals cover up their failures.
It’s the money for their clothing, food, and ammo that lines the pockets of corrupt officials.
We see a paradox here. The newsfeed makes it look like Putin’s regime is on a rampage obliterating its opponents.
But stats show that it’s the demographics that the regime usually relies on that are bearing the brunt of this war.
The regions that yielding record-high vote numbers for Putin have suffered the heaviest military losses.
These are the places purged of all opposition, whose leaders unfailingly forge 90+% support for
Putin and his United Russia party.
For the centers of protest activity — Moscow, St. Petersburg, or Ekaterinburg —
the war wasn’t real when it started and still isn’t such.
Sure, those who oppose Putin and his war are having to painfully readjust their lifestyles.
They’re forced to flee from mobilization, delete social media accounts,
live in discomfort and fear, or leave Russia altogether.
But those who sincerely believed Putin and his propagandists’ tall tales, people from the country’s destitute outback,
those who’ve no access to independent sources of information — they’re taking the truly catastrophic toll of this war.
True, Putin jails, fines, and drives his opponents out of Russia. But he’s actually killing his voters.
He cripples them physically and morally. He leaves their families bereft. These aren’t outliers.
Take the five-digit death toll and many more survivors of the war inferno and add their family members.
These are the millions of people whose lives were irreparably changed by the war.
These are the people receiving death notices.
The ones who saw their healthy husband and father return home a cripple dependent on care for the rest of his life.
The ones who spent their meager savings to buy warm clothes and body armor.
The ones who suddenly found a stranger in place of their loved one — traumatized, aggressive, deranged, desensitized
to violence, and ready to use it.
The ones who’ve heard first-hand accounts from friends or relatives about what the war
and the Russian army are really like.
It might seem like there’s nothing more dangerous expressing disloyalty to the state —
taking to the streets with an anti-war sign or posting about the Bucha massacre on social media.
But what are the consequences?
The long odds of being fined. There’s also a flimsy probability of facing criminal charges and ending up behind the bars.
If you express an anti-war sentiment, you might get fined or face criminal charges (which is very unlikely).
But what if you pledge extreme loyalty to the government?
If you get on one of those buses that shuttle away mobilized recruits or sign a military contract?
You’ll be in for something far more dangerous.
You’ll definitely end up in an environment that’s very different from that of a prison cell — but immeasurably worse.
Russian prisons have a terrible reputation. And there’s a risk of being jailed for an anti-war stance.
But the government cares about the life of the most downcast inmate infinitely more than about that of a frontline soldier.
And this isn’t the case with political prisoners anyway: all political cases are public,
handled by journalists and human rights advocates.
A person jailed for speaking out against Putin and his war can’t just disappear without a trace.
Meanwhile, soldiers who bet their lives on Putin can, and are doing so by the thousands.
These are only the direct upshots. But the indirect effects of the war also hit precisely those who Putin considers his voters.
THE INDIRECT COSTS OF WAR
International payment systems pulling out of Russia, significant visa restrictions, difficulties buying software and foreign-brand
cars due to sanctions — all of this is quite unpleasant.
But we must keep in mind a simple fact: if you’re worried about visa restrictions and getting a bank card that’ll work abroad,
the odds are, you aren’t bothered by the prices for basic groceries.
It’s likely not a big deal to you that gas and electricity bills have gone up.
If you’re dismayed that a new Toyota can now only be bought from resellers at twice the price,
you’re probably not the one who assembled it. And it wasn’t you who got laid off by the car factory last year.
But how have the sanctions affected the lives of retirees, government-funded employees,
and those dependent on social security?
The lives of a small and depressing town whose only sawmill closed once Ikea exited the Russian market?
Those who are forced to cut down on food expenses, who’ll risk starvation if food prices even start creeping up?
The hallmark of any crisis is that, while it affects everyone, the poorest and the most vulnerable are hit the hardest.
For some, a crisis means eating out twice a week instead of daily.
For others, it means giving up discounted meat in favor of bland cereal.
Some have to take longer and costlier flights to get to Paris while others are forced to walk
to work because they can’t afford a bus fare.
Poorer people are more dependent on government benefits, have less access to independent information,
and are more susceptible to propaganda. Such people are the social base for any autocracy.
That’s not because they’re unenlightened riffraff as the Kremlin spin doctors would like us to believe.
It's because when you’re focused on physical survival, dependent on government aid, and constantly on the lookout
for hot deals and coupons, seeking independent information isn’t a priority.
Such a person will consume information in the simplest way — by watching TV.
It’s these people that the upcoming presidential campaign is supposed to target: those with
an extremely low income who depend on the government in various ways.
Over the past year, the lives of these people have radically changed for the worse.
Not because they might face criminal charges for their views. Not because they had to move
from their nice Moscow apartment to a shoddier one in Tbilisi. But because they now can’t afford even the essentials.
TARGETING YOUR OWN BASE
I think I’ve made myself clear.
In public, Putin hounds the opposition and outlaws any opinion that veers away from the party line.
But in fact, it’s his voters who bear the brutal costs of this war.
The war is being waged at the expense of those who voted for Putin before and “must” vote for him in 2024.
Our viewers, who know how to stay away from the enlistment offices, learn about the consequences of Putin’s policies
from our videos, while viewers of state propaganda experience these consequences directly —
in their wallets and on death notices.
And now the regime needs to approach these people and tell them: vote for another 6 years of this mess.
In five months, we’ve lost more people in the battle for Bakhmut alone than the USSR did in 10 years in Afghanistan.
We’ve littered your towns with graves. We’ve made your life palpably poorer and worse.
And we didn’t deliver what our propagandists had promised since the beginning of the war:
no victories, no capture of Kyiv in three days — only retreats disguised as “goodwill gestures.”
When speaking about war fatigue, which is a well-described social phenomenon,
we’re not talking about the people who only see war in the headlines.
We’re talking mainly about those who bear the tangible day-to-day costs of war.
Who are losing their jobs or simply getting poorer, who are surrounded by rising death tolls.
Those who know about the real scale of the disaster not through Pentagon leaks or news stories,
but through friends and relatives.
Putin’s regime is thus creating a rather spurious social paradox.
If you want to send people to the front — which constantly needs reinforcements — you need them to believe you.
You need them to buy into stories about how they’ll be guarding warehouses in the deep rear.
But if you kill those who believe you, you won’t get them to vote for you.
Getting manpower to the frontlines is incompatible with getting loyal voters to the polling stations.
After all, the more critical a person is of you, the less they believe your propaganda and the more likely
they are to relocate to Yerevan instead of going to Bakhmut.
They’ll survive — along with the people they taught to rely on independent sources of information.
This is like inverse natural selection: the more loyal the voter, the lesser their chance to vote
and the more screwed-up their life.
And vice versa: the protest-minded voters have more survival tools and the government doesn’t bother them as much,
preferring to keep out of their way to avoid annoying them any further.
These are the not-too-obvious prerequisites with which Putin’s regime will enter the election year —
having ruined everyone’s lives, but more those of his friends than of his foes.
The foes went to Tbilisi; the friends went to their graves.
The regime tends to intimidate people of opposing views: “we’ll mobilize everyone, raise taxes, block YouTube,
throw you in jail for life, bring back the death penalty.
You’re such horrible traitors, we’ll show you the worst of hell.”
But when push comes to shove, we rarely see them press criminal charges.
And even when they do, we’re more or less prepared. This is just how the regime treats those whose votes it isn’t looking for.
The regime doesn’t threaten the people whose votes it counts on.
It simply packs their husbands, fathers, and brothers into buses and either doesn’t return them at all, or returns completely
different people — always with a mangled psyche and sometimes with a mangled body, too.
This pre-election state of affairs — the continuous targeting of the regime’s own support base —
isn’t good news for us because it means the death of our fellow citizens.
But it’s definitely bad news for those who want to keep Putin in power for another 6 years.
See you tomorrow!