Тen years and a week ago, the history of the new Russia was split in two.
It is on the 7th of may of 2012, that which brought us to the february of 2022, began.
We are talking about the inauguration of Vladimir Putin to his 3rd presidential term.
Yes, this is merely a formal date: already at 24th of september of 2011 it was clear that it’s going to happen,
after the announcement of Medvedev’s “castling”,
then there were fraudulent state Duma elections and winter rallies they caused.
There were a lot of things leading to this date —
it does not exist in a vacuum, but it doesn’t make it less important.
Since then, the entire Putin’s regime in terms of law, procedure, and constitution, is hanging on a single phrase: “in a row”.
Such abuse and chicanery would be the envy of the most shameless drafters of microloan agreements.
Obviously, those who did this: those who led Putin to his third term, those who watched it, and Putin himself —
they all knew that such understanding of the Constitution is nonsensical.
Even in a dispute over a room in a communal apartment, and certainly not over a place at the head of a nuclear power.
The whole point of the constitutional norm was to limit presidential terms to two, not to enable leapfrogging with a temporary holder of the chair.
The first two terms and even the premiership during Medvedev’s presidency were rather questionable, but there was no doubt about him being in the chair back then.
The third term on the other hand begins with the outright and cynical mockery of the law.
Since then, Russia was split into before and after.
And before we move on to the new Russia — the one we have now,
we will take a closer look at its history — we will look at what the old Russa,
the one which began in 2000 and lived until 2012.
I have a book on the subject by the way - here it is - it starts from the events of 1985 and ends with 2012.
It’s cool, it has pictures, we’ve already sold the first batch and now have a presale of the second batch, the link is in the description.
So basically, Russia in 2011 was not the same as Russia in 2007.
The country fell into the middle income trap — a situation when a fast catch-up growth ends,
and to develop further you now need political institutions,
independent courts, radical decrease in corruption, a reduction in regulation and in the power of the security forces.
But you don’t have any of it.
Unlike 2007, money no longer grows on trees anymore in 2011.
New markets don’t pop up out of thin air and immediately skyrocket.
The country is slowing down.
That “slowing down” would be a blessing compared to what’s happening now of course, but people in 2011 didn’t come from 2022,
they came from 2007 and are now totally alien to us.
However, 2011 is still a time of tremendous personal freedom.
It is the time when the unwritten agreement between the state and the active part of society that was created in the 00th, is still in power.
The state took over the federal media — the largest television channels, radio channels and newspapers,
the state controls the largest backbone businesses:
raw materials, industry, banks, the construction complex, transport, communications at the main level.
The presidential administration controls the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government.
Poking your nose into any of these spheres without their royal permission is dangerous for your health and for your freedom.
But the state officially doesn’t care about anything else.
Who you sleep with and how, what you believe in, your thoughts about the government and the words you use to call Putin in the internet,
whatever they say on Echo Moskvy and whatever they write on then still free Lenta.ru,
whatever there is on the Yandex frontpage doesn't concern us,
we can afford being not loved by 20 millions because the rest will hear our version.
And the internet in this past Russia was a very special beast.
Compared to the Russian internet, the western one seemed like it was run by the Inquisition.
While western governments were chasing after PirateBay,
while people were put on trial and sentenced to pay huge fines for an album they downloaded,
while in the USA and in Europe more and more laws to control the internet were being made,
the Russian internet was the space of such freedom that now is impossible to imagine even in the TOR network.
This was when VKontakte was at the peak of its popularity.
It was everything:
a chatroom for classmates, a place for political discussion, including a very radical one,
the tool for self-publication for beginning musicians,
and most importantly, it was the biggest archive of pirated music and movies, compared to which all those websites that the developed world was so worried about seemed like a child’s play.
It is hard to believe today, but this how it happened until 2012:
if you want to create something in a safe harbor, under a jurisdiction that is both safe and free,
if you don’t want to worry about a whole bunch of regulations and want a radical freedom of speech — you need a server in Russia.
As long as it’s not millions of dollars in revenues, the state doesn’t care what you do to live.
Half a country trades with no checks, half a country is on gray salary,
and people openly carry contraband iPhones in their luggage, fix cars and create websites without any registration.
In this Russia, it was difficult to understand all these stories told by western criminal dramas like Breaking Bad.
The schemes people use to explain how they bought their new house, a car, luxury items.
In Russia, you take your suitcase full of money and just buy an apartment.
No one cared how an officially unemployed person got $100 000.
You just visited a salon and grabbed your million rubles Camry.
Yes, in the payroll your annual income was 200 000, everyone knows that and nobody cares.
The state cares about getting billions of rubles in taxes from a metallurgical plant.
The state cares about profiting from an oil company on every stage: extraction, selling, and exporting.
But catching flies and collecting pennies from freelancers, garage workshops, private builders,
importers of all shades of gray, half legal or completely illegal stores, counting someone’s incomes — this is not only not required, but is actually harmful to the state.
Because in exchange for not caring about your sexual life, your beliefs, and you finances,
in exchange for not asking how can someone with 20 000 rubles in salary fly to Europe on holidays every few months,
the regime expects you to not poke your nose in its matters.
Or whatever it considers to be "it's matters".
Elections, budget money, financing of politics, law-making.
Why do you care about all of this if in practice, the state doesn’t affect your life
and almost lives on another planet and on television?
So yeah some tax was raised from 10 to 15%, why do you care, it’s not like you’ll be paying it.
2011 is the last year of the Russa that began in the early 00th,
when two seemingly opposite, but in fact complementary processes flourish:
while the state is intentionally building a personalist autocracy,
the society lives in spontaneous libertarianism, as if there was no power at all.
This answers the question why it was so easy to build a destructive regime here.
When the level of personal freedoms when it comes to business, to self-expression,
to your public and private life is practically still in the 90th,
when the state doesn’t restrict you in anything and is keeping itself away from sight,
and unlike 90th, you not only have freedoms but also possibilities and money —
in such a situation it becomes easy to miss the fact that the new Russia that has already been born within the government
will soon crawl out of its cradle and you will not like it.
By the 7th of may of 2012, the regime is in trouble everywhere:
first, the very foundation of Putin’s power is nothing but a fraud,
second, no one elected the people who took seats in the Parliament and everyone understands it,
third, the people are protesting and there seem to be no end to it,
and fourth, people got tired of seeing the same man holding power so ratings are going down.
Everything is not good with legality, everything is not good with the legitimacy of all kinds,
the popularity fades, the economic growth of the past is no more, and fewer and fewer people are happy with the “stability”
that manifests itself only in seeing the same people holding power.
In short, foundations of power become extremely fragile, and as a result, the regime transforms rapidly.
Surely, the curtailment of political freedoms in Russia did not begin at all in 2012, but much earlier.
Even after Beslan, in 2004, gubernatorial elections were canceled,
the entry barrier to the State Duma seriously increased, the majority system was eliminated, that is, elections were held only according to party lists.
And the elections themselves were rather fraudulent already in 2000, when Putin became President for the first time.
The government violently dispersed rallies which they considered illegal — for example, Triumfalnaya Square meetings in defense of the 31rd article of the Constitution.
The participants were not facing criminal punishment yet,
but they could regularly enjoy the views of Moscow from the paddy wagon’s window.
After that they only paid 300 rubles in fines though.
For now however, it all remained isolated excesses and not a general strategy.
Sometimes, under public pressure, the authorities even had to make concessions.
At one of the Strategy 31 rallies in Petersburg in 2010, Vladimir Boyko, an ensign known as “pearl ensign”,
called the people who gathered there “ferrets” and hit a young man with a baton.
Today we are used to a lot more violence at any rally, and there are no consequences for policemen.
Back then, in 2010, the ensign was tried and sentenced to three and a half years of probation.
They tried to counteract rallies not so much with violence as with conductive alternative events,
pouring a lot of money into various youth organizations like Nashi.
Their members took to the streets to shout down the opposition.
For as long opposition rallies were small, that tactic worked, more or less.
But Bolotnaya square events have washed away all those Nashi from the political scene in just one day.
It is hard to believe 10 years later, but on the 7th of may of 2012, there was a single man in Russia who definitely fulfilled the definition of political prisoner,
that is, someone who was in actual prison due to political reasons — his name is Michail Khodorkovsky.
Things weren’t perfect of course:
there were a lot of fabricated cases of extremism, and people who barely knew each other
had been declared members of criminal organizations and put under criminal investigations.
Some people were being targeted even for their livejournal posts.
But it was all a personal initiative of security forces members.
There was no centralized campaign on suppression of political and protest activity back then yet.
It was then that it emerged.
And starting from May of 2011 that centralized campaign was put on rails.
Pussy Riot case, 6th of may case, Anatomy of the Protest case.
From today’s perspective, all these sentences seem quite humane.
But it is then that the practice of systematic persecution of people for nothing else but their political activity has started.
The Parliament that was created as a result of fraudulent elections has become known as the “mad printer”,
working overtime to ban and regulate anything that has anything to do with public political activity.
Blocking websites, expanding the definition of “extremism” to infinity, the Foreign Agents law,
Yarovaya laws, arbitrary bans on participation in elections, tightening punishments for rallies to the extreme —
it was all born there, in 2012.
The regime that used to be based on common consent and true popularity of Vladimir Putin,
on the growth of living standards and widespread indifference;
the regime that had enough control on television, since 2012 it demanded more repression, propaganda, and censorship.
It is then that the start of Dmitry Kiselev has risen, it is then that Vladimir Soloviev has turned into who he is today
it is then that the first stage of the cleansing of the internet Media has begun.
And it is then that the rhetoric in which we live in today begins:
the rhetoric of a besieged fortress, the “counteracting the West”, talks of nuclear weapons and the rest of the dismal schizofrenia.
The regime has lost its former stability, has become a repressive one on the inside and more aggressive on the outside.
One can say that in 2012, a new regime was born, a regime in which that which used to be unimaginable, has become possible.
If you would tell the events of the last ten years to someone from 2011,
who just last summer drove with a blue basket on the roof of his car to protest against the growing number of flashing lights (yeah, such were the problems),
a man who argued whether Kapkov manages the Gorky Park well,
if that man would hear from you the news of the last 10 years, he would have thought that you are a madman.
Because to these people who lived in the reality shown in a movie “What Men Talk About”,
where the main characters are four representatives of the middle class who succeeded in the 00th
and are now driving the roads of Russia and Ukraine to visit Bi-dva concert in Odessa,
to them everything that is happening to us today would seem like nothing but insanity.
Crimea is annexed, Nemtsov is murdered, Navalny is poisoned and imprisone,
there is a big war against Ukraine, Russian planes can’t fly across the border,
McDonalds has left, Visa and Mastercard no longer work in Russia, and Russians are banned everywhere
and the smartest of them now emigrate to Taskent.
For making an anti-war statement, you can get a prison sentence as if you killed two people.
Tell that to someone who lives in 2011 and he would think that it’s a scenario for a low-budget disaster movie.
We could dwell into long details about how the country was changing through all these years, I have plenty of videos about that.
But what is important now is the result: in 2012, Russia of the past was done.
Wounded by rallies and the loss of legitimacy, the government simply sacrificed it.
A citizen of a Russia whose President shook hands with Steve Jobs, talked of modernization and liberalization,
of freedom that is better than unfreedom, who talked simple human language and not that unbearable muttering about geopolitics —
a citizen of that Russia is a foreigner to us now.
A foreigner who would be stunned by everything that is happening a lot more than today’s foreigners.
This other Russia that started in 2012 has no future. It’s more than merely a figure of speech, it literally has no future.
Any undertaking in it is obviously meaningless.
You want to build yourself a successful corporate career?
Any moment your foreign corporation flees the market, and a Russian one falls under sanctions.
Wanna build a factory? You won’t be sold factory machines and software.
Studying to become a pilot? You won’t become one, because with the flights that are still left, airlines don’t need graduates.
Want to create a startup, some service on the internet, an application on subscription basis?
Well first of all, no one will give you the money, and second, you can’t even receive payments.
Maybe you are a sportsman? No international competitions for you, which means no career and no income.
A scientist? No grants, no publication.
No matter what you do there will be a wall you’ll hit, there is no strategy that would allow you to succeed while remaining in Russia.
We are not even talking about any public professions here, from journalists to singers, from directors to poets, from artists to video bloggers.
Any public activity bears a risk of criminal prosecution, and you never know what may hit you and how to avoid it.
That photo of a white pigeon flying over a yellow wheat field that you took could be absolutely innocent, but the prosecutor knows better.
And in addition to all of this, you need to keep in mind that both for you and for the country as a whole the situation may change for the worse at any moment.
Your profession may get banned, you or people close to you may fall under a hidden or open mobilization, the state may bite you no matter what you do or if you do anything at all.
And the only strategy that works for living in this new Russia apart from leaving it is to wait.
Try to lay below the radar until the regime is gone.
From the country that wasn’t perfect but was still normal,
to a country that you need to simply survive and wait out.
In which everyone is busy surviving and waiting out: from a regular worker to a big official.
In which no one expects a change for the better.
In which everyone is waiting for the end and hoping to see it while still being alive and free — this is the path we’ve crossed since 7th of May of 2012.
This is both bad and good news.
Russia that was born in 2012 and became an adult 10 years later is a disgusting and shameful display.
In all things big and small: it is impossible to calmly watch how Ukrainian cities are being destroyed and peaceful people die,
it is impossible to listen to the nonsense that Russian officials say each day.
On the other hand, that Russia of the 00th that we talked about today serve
as a very important reminder of what Russians capable of if you just don’t hit them in the head with a baton and not spoil his mind with propaganda,
and this is the best answer to adepts of theories of “slave mentality”, “patternalism” and “imperial thinking”
which are supposedly characteristic of Russian citizens.
If the Soviet government truly taught our people something, then it is not to believe a single word from your government,
not to ask it anything and always count on yourself.
As soon as the state left the man alone, as soon as it stopped forcing its ideology down his throat,
the interned which (by the effort of the entire Russian-speaking community, there was no division for business and culture on the basis of nationality),
without all the protectionism and blockings, gave birth to companies like Yandex and VKontakte,
which competed and defeated Google and Facebook in our area.
That man didn’t care for the dissolution of the USSR, didn’t care who has what territories.
All that Russian politics is mired with, the Crimea, the Novorossia,
the confrontation with NATO, all that unbearable nonsense that has become mainstream due to propaganda,
just 10 years ago it all was as marginal as reptilian people and flat earth are today.
You couldn’t even call it “nationalist talk”, the idea of retaking Crimea seemed no saner than the idea of retaking Aliaska,
and they both were coming from the same people.
All that we have to deal with today, all that fear and hatred towards the outside world — nothing of it is a part of Russian culture.
These are fantasies deliberately hammered in by propaganda, censorship, and coercion,
and they will only live for as long as the Russian regime, and they will die along with that doomed Russia of the past.
Of course, the war has changed a lot.
Even after Putin's regime, society will require a lot of time to heal and recover. It won’t be easy.
On the other hand, we all know that this society used to be different, which means that it can be different,
that it can heal itself even after it was deliberately poisoned with hatred.
Till tomorrow.