The last time I was in Russia, in the summer of 2015, I came face to face with a contradiction. What if a place was free but also happy? How long could it stay that way? Moscow had flourished in a beautiful, European city, filled with meticulously planted parks, bike paths and parking lots. The average Russian’s income had risen sharply over the past decade. At the same time, its political system was getting closer to authoritarianism. Fifteen years earlier, Boris Yeltsin had left power in shame, apologizing on national television “for failing to live up to the hopes of people who thought we could make the leap from a bleak and stagnant totalitarian past to a bright, prosperous and prosperous one.” a civilized future with a single movement “. Subscribe to The Morning Newsletter from the New York Times By the summer of 2015, his successor, President Vladimir Putin, had ostensibly made Russia bright and prosperous. The political system he built was increasingly restrictive, but many had learned to live with it. Many Russian liberals had gone to work for nonprofits and local governments, throwing themselves into community building – making their cities better places to live. A protest movement in 2011 and 2012 had failed and people were looking for other ways to shape their country. The big policies were desperate, the thought went, but one could make a difference in small actions. There was another side to this negotiation: Putin was also seemingly limited. Political action may have been forbidden, but there was tolerance when it came to other things, for example religion, culture and many forms of expression. His own reasoning for the smooth running of the system meant that he had to make some room for society. I lived in Russia for nine years and started covering it for the New York Times in 2000, the year Putin was first elected. I spent a lot of time telling people – in public writing and in my private life – that Russia may sometimes look ugly, but that it also had many wonderful characteristics. The story goes on But in the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, I have felt like I see someone I love losing their mind. Many of the Russian liberals who turned to “small acts” also feel a sense of shock and horror, said Alexandra Arkhipova, a Russian anthropologist. “I see a lot of posts and discussions saying these little things, it was a big mistake,” he said. “People have a metaphor. They say, “We were trying to make some aesthetic changes to our face when the cancer was growing and growing in our stomach.” I began to wonder if Russia would always end up here, and we just did not understand. So I called Yevgeniya Albats, a Russian journalist who had warned of the dangers of a KGB resurgence in the 1990s. action. He has long argued that any bargain with Putin was an illusion. He said 2008 was a turning point, when Putin split from the West, invaded another country, and the West barely realized it. “For Putin, it was a clear sign,” he said by telephone last month, “that he can do whatever he wants. And that’s exactly what he started doing. He behaved extremely rationally. “He just realized that you do not care.” He was referring to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, which came shortly after President George W. Bush began talking about Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO. I covered this war and spent the night with a Russian unit in the Georgian town of Gori and I remember how refreshed the soldiers looked, laughing, joking. The Soviet defeat in the Cold War had left a bitter sense of humiliation and loss. The invasion seemed to renew them. “When Putin came, everything changed,” an official told me. “We took back some of our old strength. “People started respecting us again.” Albac sounded tired but determined. The day we spoke, he had traveled to a Russian penal colony to attend the sentencing of his friend Alexei Navalny, a popular Russian opposition leader who used his time to speak out against the war. “Now we understand that when Putin decided to start a war in Ukraine, he had to get rid of Navalny,” he said, because he is the only one with the courage to resist. Indeed, Navalny never accepted the move away from direct confrontation and was building a nationwide opposition movement, leading the people to the streets. He rejected the agreement and was willing to go to jail to defy it. Arkhipova pointed out that his mantra, that the struggle was not for the good against the bad but for the good against the neutral, was a direct challenge to the political passivity that Putin demanded. Many people I interviewed said that Navalny’s poisoning in 2020 and his imprisonment in early 2021, after years of freedom, marked the end of the social contract and the beginning of Putin’s war. Like the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud by al Qaeda on the eve of September 11, 2001, Putin had to clear the field of opponents. Greg Yudin, a professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, says it was the success of the political opposition, which began to accelerate in 2018 and 2019, that led Putin to war. Yudin said it was inconceivable to Putin that there may be people in Russia who want the best for their country, but are against it. So he was looking for traitors and had an obsession with the idea that the West was chasing him. “It’s typical of this kind of regime,” Yudin said. “It re-encodes internal disagreement into external threats.” As for my question in 2015 – how long can a place be free and also happy – we may have lived to the answer. Many liberals are gone. Many of those who have not left face fines or even imprisonment. In the weeks after invasion, the police arrested more than 15,000 people at national level, according to OVD-Info, a group of human rights, much higher than in the 2012 demonstrations when about 5,000 people were held in a 12-month period, said Arkhipova, who studied that move. Albatz stayed and is angry with the Russian liberals who did not do it. The message, he said, is that “Russian liberals have no tolerance for any problems.” He added: “They just run away.” At the same time, he said, it is an extremely difficult choice. “Choosing between jail and not jail, I would rather not go to jail,” Albacs said, adding that she already faces thousands of dollars in fines just for reporting on the war. Yudin said the choice was difficult because the crackdown was over and because the political opposition was now pulverized. “The best comparison is Germany in 1939,” he said. “What kind of democratic movement would you expect there?” This is the same. “People are basically trying to save their lives right now.” Not everyone, of course. Lev Gudkov, a sociologist at the Levada Center, a research group that monitors Russian public opinion, told me that about two-thirds of people nationally approve of Putin’s actions in Ukraine. “It is a less educated, older section of the population, living mainly in rural areas or in small and medium-sized cities, where the population is poorer and more dependent on the government,” he said, referring to those who rely on the public. funds such as pensions and government posts. “They also get all their construction of reality exclusively from television.” “If you look at the 20 years of our research since Putin came to power, the peak of support for Putin and his popularity has always coincided with military campaigns,” he said. One such campaign was the war in Chechnya, a particularly brutal subjugation of a population that in 1999 was Putin’s signature act before being elected president for the first time. We are beginning to see some of the features of this war in Ukraine: handcuffed corpses, mass graves, stories of torture. In Chechnya, the result was the systematic elimination of anyone linked to the struggle against Russia. It is too early to say whether this was the intention in Ukraine. Now the bazaar is broken, the illusion is shattered. And the country has entered a new phase. But what is it? Yudin argues that Russia is moving from authoritarianism – where political passivity and bourgeois disengagement are key – to totalitarianism, which is based on mass mobilization, terror and the homogeneity of beliefs. He believes Putin is on the brink of collapse, but he may be reluctant to make the turn. “In a totalitarian system, you have to release free energy to start the terror,” he said. Putin, he said, “is a maniac, accustomed to micro-management.” However, if the Russian state begins to fail, either through the collapse of the Russian economy or through a complete military defeat in Ukraine, “the release of terror will be the only way to be saved.” That’s why the current situation is so dangerous, for Ukraine and for the people in Russia who oppose Putin. “Putin is so convinced that he can not afford to lose that he will escalate,” Yudin said. “He has bet everything on him.” © 2022 The New York Times Company
