kravietz 🦇 on Nostr: #Russia war correspondent Andrei Medvedev quotes two private letters from his ...

#Russia war correspondent Andrei Medvedev quotes two private letters from his readers, who complain that the Russian authorities are “doing everything they can to stifle patriotic fervour among the people”. The first complains that “in 2022 I was ready for anything; today I’d think twice… . The worst thing is that no one is trying to explain (…) what is happening and where we are heading‘. The second writes, ’I will stay in the country, but my son is 20; he used to be a fervent supporter of ‘faith, tsar and fatherland’, decked out in eagles and tricolours, and now he is extremely disillusioned”.

The funniest thing is that the latter were disappointed not so much by the defeats at the front but above all by the Russian authorities’ decisions on domestic policy – that is, “blockades, restrictions on Telegram, etc.” – but also by tax hikes, including mainly the “utilsbor” or car tax, which has a tangible impact on owners of imported cars. Russians don’t particularly care about what’s happening abroad, but if the war starts to affect them directly, public discontent grows.

Will there be protests? It doesn’t really matter, because protests in Russia do not translate in any way into legislative action (see the recent protests against cattle slaughter in Siberia), as the legislature does as it pleases because that is how the architecture of the Russian ‘vertical of power’ (lit. ‘power vertical’) was designed. However, as the Russian anthropologist Arkhipova noted at the start of the war, a key feature of Russian society is group conformism – that is, as long as the majority of people do nothing, the rest will also remain passive. At the same time, however, in conditions of growing social discontent, sooner or later this will end in an outburst which, thanks to that very same conformism, could quickly spread across the whole country.