14 January 2025
By Aleksandr Podrabinek
Source: Radio Svoboda
They tell us we are few. That we are isolated individuals. That we don’t exist at all. The regime makes every effort to convince everyone that we are the exception to the rule and there is no need to listen to us. We are supposedly a negligible percentage, a statistical error, a ripple on the water. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev we were called dissenters, under Stalin enemies of the people, and under Lenin White Guard holdovers. The despotic regime always insisted on the people’s unity with it and on the futility of resistance.
In fact, no one knows exactly how many of us there are now. There is no way to measure the public mood in Russia: no elections, no honest opinion polls, no free press. But we opponents in Russia of the authoritarian regime and the war against Ukraine are definitely not isolated individuals. We are millions. But the weapons and power are in the hands of a ruling minority.
You won’t see patriotic hoopla or frank militaristic moods on the streets of Russia’s cities. No one is cursing the Ukrainians or extolling Putin. On street billboards you will find propaganda for the war and calls to sign contracts with the army, but people’s eyes pass over the blatant propaganda, expressing neither obvious delight nor frank condemnation. The street is impenetrably silent, but in a country of official unanimity this silence says a lot.
Yes, fear of repressions is muzzling public protest. A day does not go by without new arrests and trials on political charges sometimes so absurd that I feel like I’ve fallen into a dystopian novel. The regime makes no attempt to hide its legal cynicism from the public eye; on the contrary, it publicizes its impunity in order to sow fear in society. This is an instrument of terror, and it’s hard to withstand.
Nevertheless, nearly every day reports appear about new attempts to set fire to military recruitment offices, the offices of United Russia, or local organs of power. If so many people are willing to take these harsh actions, then we can only imagine how many in fact simply disagree with the regime. In order to demean the seriousness of the protests in society’s eyes, the regime has taken to explaining these acts of arson as the actions of Ukrainian “telephone fraudsters” who supposedly offer people money to commit a crime. A confession like this in an investigation either eases the fate of those arrested or gives them hope of a reduced sentence. And the state is content. A self-serving motive is preferable to an ideological one.
The authoritarian regime creatively couples intimidation and propaganda. In Russia, the experience accumulated from both these instruments of tyranny is considerable. The repressions are reproducing the experience of late and at times even Stalinist socialism. The propaganda is aimed at making any independently thinking person feel like a stranger, an outsider, a white raven in a happy flock of loyal subjects. For this, the regime limits access to information, blocks all attempts at the political unification of regime opponents, and levels at the most active among them the labels “extremist,” “foreign agent”, and “purveyors of Western influence”. As the regime thinks, if society is atomised and people are estranged and politically mute, then the usurpers’ regime can keep on going for as long as it likes. If they take away people’s language of communication, they won’t be able to live in society; if they take away their political language, they won’t be able to build a just state.
The regime is trying to demoralize society, to instill in people a sense of hopelessness, to force adherents of democracy to consider themselves isolated marginals cast onto the sidelines of public life. In this vile business, the state is supported by those for whom the idea of a hopelessly dying Russia helps raise their self-esteem, helps them justify themselves and look “good” in the “bad” Russian context. The accusatory pose assumes that the accuser is above suspicion when it comes to what he is criticizing. A cheap way to whitewash a reputation! The servile consciousness looks for ways to rise up over someone, the opportunity to feel its own superiority, to look down on those around it. And what could be simpler for this than to humiliate a neighbour?
And so quite a few people, including among the Russian emigration, taking their cue from Kremlin propaganda, assert that there is nationwide unity between Russians and Putin, unanimous support for the war against Ukraine, and an absence in Russia of any resistance whatsoever to the regime. They are not basing themselves on facts or data. They are citing their own impressions, their own circle of aquaintances, their bad relatives or classmates, and what seems logical to them. Meanwhile, this is nothing more than their conjectures, born of their desire for psychological comfort. They are shifting the fear of the regime and possible repressions that moved them to emigrate onto everyone who stayed in Russia. They are doggedly refusing to acknowledge any signs of resistance whatsoever, and when “not acknowledging” no longer works, they condescendingly respond that the protests are negligible in number, pointless in result, and utterly useless in all senses. They look with perplexity at our attempts to oppose the dictatorship and try to convince us that they know the situation in Russia much better than do those who live in Russia.
What else can they say? How do the venerable oppositionists, high-status human rights activists, thoughtful political scientists, and fiery political writers look compared, for example, to 15-year-old Arseny Turbin, who was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for anti-Putin leaflets? Or compared to the eighth-grader in Petersburg who was arrested for hanging photographs of two Freedom for Russia fighters on the school bulletin board? I will tell you how these important political émigrés look: ridiculous! They have become political chickenfeed, a caricature of the opposition.
I think that when Russia is liberated from its despotic regime and the state security archives are opened, we will learn a great deal that is interesting about those who today are attempting to devalue the resistance in Russia and are assiduously spreading in the press and on social networks the Kremlin’s views on the impossibility of democracy in our country and the vanity of attempts to create a stable civil society.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
