There is a question hanging in the air over the last six months:
will there be mass protests in Russia against the war and against the Putin’s regime? And if yes, when?
On the one hand, there is an understanding
that the agitation into which the country a s plunged cannot continue forever,
that fatigue is accumulating from everything that is happening and its consequences,
and this fatigue must find a way out.
On the other hand, over 20 years, and especially since 2012, Putin has accumulated an apparatus
of violence and repression that seems capable of suppressing everyone and all dissent.
Today we will try to talk about it.
We won’t be making prognosises, but talking about possible futures.
The main slogan that the Soviet regime never said allowed but always followed since Stalin’s years was:
Moscow must be an island of prosperity.
By Soviet standards of course.
We’d see it as merely a different kind of poverty.
But Moscow, the capital of the USSR, should’ve had different supply standards.
Not just better, but much better.
Yes there could be long lines, there could be rudeness, maybe you had to wait for a couple of hours
in the freezing cold, but muscovites should have always had the opportunity to buy sausages, butter,
buckwheat, and sometimes even fruits of progress like instant coffee or toilet paper.
GUM, TSUM, Moskovsky department store should’ve had good (by soviet standards)
clothing, footwear, household appliances.
Moscow should’ve had more square meters of housing per person, better houses.
It should’ve had well maintained streets with watering machines working there.
No matter a crisis in the economy in general — Moscow would be the last to be affected.
When there were food stamps everywhere else already — Moscow still didn’t have them.
Basically, when the Soviet economy lost its ability to sustain relative prosperity even in Moscow,
it was a sign that the Soviet regime had only a few years left.
A young viewer may fall under the impression that Moscow actually lived in some kind of communism.
Surely it wasn’t the case, not even close.
But think about the contrasts of living in the Soviet Union: in Moscow you had to wait in a long line to buy a sausage,
but somewhere in Kirov region they didn’t know what sausage was.
This answers the question: why were people willing to accept limited registration,
were willing to endure years of horrible conditions in life and in work, all for a chance to get full Moscow registration,
a right for at least a bet in a dormitory.
Because Moscow was a kind of a different country, an island of comfort and abundance.
Why was it like that?
Why had the totalitarian regime always tried to make Moscow a state within the state?
There are many small reasons, like Moscow being a showcase of the country,
something that foreigners could see.
And it was important that foreigners would see wide avenues and impressive high-rises, not rickety barracks.
But there were two reasons that were most important.
First, the capital is where the nomenclature lived.
There, people who made decisions and those who implemented them, lived and worked.
People in power were their own best friends and wouldn’t let themselves down.
They wanted to live better than everyone else, and they had the means to ensure just that.
Second and most important is that revolutions always happen in capitals.
It may sound surprising, but in the Soviet Union mass protests did happen,
sometimes even riots with violence and killings that involved entire cities.
But apart from a few exceptions like the Novocherkassk Massacre, the memory of them
remains only in files of criminal cases.
No matter what and why happened in Murom, Ivanovo, or Aktau,
the regime always had the capacity to deal with it with ease.
Somewhere the police did it, somewhere the army had to be involved, but in any case,
the news didn’t leave the area, and if it did, it was all rumors.
Even the bloodiest of incidents: mass shootings, storming of police departments, burning down courthouses —
if they happened outside the capital, they didn’t have any effect on the country as a whole.
There were many protests in Soviet history which, when you read about them, may seem like civil wars.
Thousands were involved, dozens were killed, but even today only historians know about those events.
But on 25 of August of 1968, 7 people went to the Red Square with a slogan “for our freedom and yours” —
it was a protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The protest lasted 10 minutes but remained in history books forever.
The whole of Moscow knew about it, foreigners knew about it.
The defeat of SCSE in August of 1991, the event that buried the USSR, was actually two mass protests:
in Moscow and in Leningrad.
Outside capitals, people kept living their usual lives, wondering how it would all end and who would win.
All of the above are more than mere historical notes.
It’s something that you must keep in mind when you talk about possible protests and reaction of the regime to them.
Any protest in Tuva, Dagestan, Buryatia, in small and impoverished cities of the central Russia,
will remain local.
Any such protest can be rolled into the asphalt without giving it two thoughts.
But a protest of any kind in Moscow, or (not as important but still isn’t insignificant) Petersburg,
or a few major cities, is a real threat.
Let’s recall an event that is more close to us in time: winter rallies of 2021,
when Alexey Navalny returned to Russia and ended up in prison.
Tens of thousands of people marched in the streets in various parts of the country.
In some places they were violently dispersed by Rosgvardia, somewhere
they were even allowed to march through main streets.
But in Moscow, all hell broke loose, there was a whole army of riot police,
entire streets were blocked, Metro stations were closed.
It was like the Moscow Panic in autumn of 1941, when there was a possibility that Hitler’s army would enter the city.
Except this time there wasn’t an enemy anywhere near Moscow.
All those inadequate measures were aimed not against a hostile army that would bring death and destruction,
but against their own citizens, who wished to take part in a peaceful protest according to the Constitution,
to just stand with banners or maybe give speeches.
The regime in the current situation cannot allow a mass protest in the capital and it’s willing to throw away
what’s little left of its human mask and to bristle with batons of riot police.
It may look ridiculous, a tank in a kindergarten level of ridiculous, but it’s ok
as long as you can say on TV that no one came to the rally.
So just like in the past everyone responsible for internal politics are tasked
with keeping Russian megapolices under an umbrella.
So that the picture of people in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Yekaterinburg,
Novosibirsk, in every economic or cultural center in Russia, drinking wine in summer terraces
“while our guys are dying in Ukraine”, would remain.
Many militarists and right-wing critics of the regime may hate it to the guts, but such must be the impression.
Apparently it is that desire of the Kremlin to preserve the illusion of normality that is one of the reasons why,
six months after the war began, after everything from Echo of Moscow and Novaya Gazeta to local newspapers
with 2 thousand readers got banned, YouTube keeps working as if nothing happened.
YouTube is so influential that only Federal TV can compete with it, its audience outclasses
all independent media outlets in Russia and it’s completely out of government’s control.
I’ll remind you just in case that persistent rumors about the blocking of YouTube started spreading
a year before the war, but YouTube is still there.
Thing is, YouTube is an essential part of a way of life in a big city, the main source of recreation and information.
Banning it would be like placing anti-tank hedgehogs on Tverskaya street and Nevsky Prospect,
closing all restaurants, and establishing military patrols that would be checking papers of young men.
Like there is a war going on.
God forbid coffins would go to Moscow, Petersburg, or other major cities.
People there must feel that no crisis or tragedy is happening.
If a person who slept through the last six months decides to go to Pushkin Square
in Moscow or Rubenstein Street in Petersburg,
they must find the same old crowds of people in pubs.
After that, they must be able to check on the YouTube channel of his favorite video blogger,
rent a scooter, and drive to his favorite restaurant.
And not notice any major changes.
Still, if you look at it rationally, such a situation is in direct contradiction
with the objectives that Putin wants to fulfill.
When his blitzkrieg failed, Putin’s military campaign turned into a prolonged conflict,
in which victory depends on your available resources.
Ukraine is helped by the West, but Russia still has reserves of military equipment —
they have accumulated insane amounts of it during the Soviet era.
Yes, most of it is obsolete, but it can still drive and it can shoot.
But there isn’t a tank invented yet that can drive and shoot on its own.
Simply having weapons stocked won’t help if you don’t have anyone to use them.
And such people are something that the Russian government is in short supply, unlike Ukraine.
Major cities are where most of the human reserve is.
It is here where you can find most young men that you can conscript and send to the front.
It’s easier in terms of logistics, too: the territory is small and the population density is high.
Delivering ten thousand summons would involve going around a couple of city blocks,
which can be done in a single morning with the help of local janitors.
A single recruitment office with a dozen employees in its staff can provide an entire military division with living force.
But you can’t conscript any of those potential soldiers, you can’t even conscript people they know.
The war must remain outside three degrees of separation,
it must remain something that happens in the background,
where people that you don’t know shoot at other people that you don’t know.
So they have to go over prisons and recruit convicts, that is, to go to the extremes
in resupplying the army with living force.
To give weapons to convicts, to outright murderers and bandits,
seems less problematic than to disturb residents of major cities and to take away their usual way of life.
It is for the same exact reason there’s practically no visible campaigning for war.
Banners with letter Z on buildings and cars are a rare sight, and the initiative
always comes from below, not from above.
Some highways now have banners portraying Russian soldiers with a slogan “Glory to the Heroes of Russia” —
but even those banners don’t go into details of how and where all that heroism is happening.
Not a word about Ukraine, the special operation, all that.
Merely an abstraction.
All while the capital with all its power vertical could easily be turned into a promotional showcase of war.
But they cannot do it, that would disturb the muscovites.
They must never feel that something might not be right.
So why is this strategy flawed?
Because it’s completely useless.
I mean for some time it can keep the people in power in the illusion of calm and stability.
No protests happen, any one-man picket lasts for a maximum of two minutes,
all the activists have either left the country,
or are in prisons, or are in danger of being jailed.
But at some point all that nice picture can be ruined in a single day.
And what’s amazing here is that you can’t predict what might cause it.
It can be any small thing that you can’t control and can’t prevent
even if you put an anti-extremist agency officer at every corner.
The Arab Spring that had put an end to several dictatorships that used to seem eternal,
started with a local tragedy:
a fruit seller in Tunis commited a self-immolationdue to a conflict with a local administration.
In a few months, an angry mob lynched Muammar Kaddafi who ruled Livia for more than 40 years.
I doubt anyone could predict that anything like that would happen.
The biggest protests in Russia during the Putins era which led to
a major change in the political landscape happened in 2011, after fraudulent elections into the state duma.
Elections being fraudulent is nothing new in our country,
and nothing out of the ordinary really happened back then.
But for some reason such an ordinary event caused outrage among citizens.
But the voting for constitutional amendments which was much more fraudulent didn’t cause any major dissent.
It’s impossible to predict what will be the spark that lights the flame.
And you can’t prepare for it, either.
When all conditions are met, when there will be a public demand for it — people will march on the streets.
And no amount of cunning on the side of the presidential administration can stop it.
The most annoying problem in the analysis of autocracies is that they can’t be just a little bit autocratic.
A dictator cannot be only a half dictator.
Such regimes, they either control it all and everything depends on a dictator,
or they fall, and their dictators lose power.
If it becomes absolutely clear that the regime has cracked, that there is a divide,
that some other centers of power have arisen,
that control is lost — that means that the regime has days, if not hours of life left.
In a developed democracy you can have a political crisis every morning for hundreds of years.
But the regime that has been established in Russia is different: a week before its fall
it will still give an impression like it's gonna stay for eternity.
You can call such regimes Schredinher’s regimes.
You have two cats in an enclosed box: the elites and the society.
We know nothing about them: the elite doesn’t share its thoughts with us,
the society has no elections and no polls.
The cats are always both alive and dead.
And when you open the box you might discover that cats had been dead for quite some time.
That everyone had enough of militantism and of the irreplaceable great leader.
That the “leader of the nation” has no support — neither from above nor from below.
This is what the danger is.
Because if that happens, if the regime collapses as the result of a divide within the elites
and mass protests, it will happen rapidly.
And not the most noble of people may come to power,
but probably those who will react fast, those who had both ambition and supporters united in some organization.
We must be ready for it.
You need to preserve yourself and your connections.
Two years ago, the alternative to the regime was represented by people we liked,
like Navalny’s organization, but now guys with rifles, military experience,
and grudge against the state that sent them to fight for hell knows what, have entered the stage.
Nothing I said today was a prognosis.
It’s just a possible course of events.
We all know that the established status quo cannot last long, it’s just too costly in all aspects.
When and how it will change is a major question.
But if it happens as a result of “velvet revolution” which would be the most favorable outcome for us —
our task is to ensure that evildoers that multiplied during Putin’s regime won’t be able to take advantage of it.
See you tomorrow!