Last Sunday in Moscow, according to the news, a large unauthorized rally took place, organized by the disqualified candidate for the Moscow City Duma, Lyubov Sobol, described as “the largest in recent history”. The protesters demanded, in her words, “simple and understandable things”: elections, freedom, and respect. Putin, Sobyanin, and other “villains” from the government are blocking the path of the oppressed people. A little more effort is needed, and evil will retreat, prisons will crumble, and freedom will greet us joyfully at the entrance. We thought the same way in 2004, decorating ourselves with orange ribbons in Kyiv. And then again in 2014 at the Euromaidan. And we were wrong.
Have you ever tried to organize a rally with thousands of participants? In theory, it’s not difficult. There is an obvious agenda: Putin is a scoundrel and a thief. This is currently a trend, and everyone seems to support you in it, right? Create a YouTube channel, record some videos, tell the truth, present facts, call for action and resistance. Then set a date for the rally and come with posters, megaphones, and leaflets. How many people do you think will show up?
A few of your friends, no more.
Of course, Navalny has almost three million subscribers on YouTube, you might say! First, you need to build an audience, and then the rally will gather, right? Not quite. Sometimes I watch the channel Enough Silence!, hosted by a guy not from Moscow (I don’t know his name). He has eight times fewer subscribers than Navalny. Not a thousand, but eight. However, with such a seemingly large audience of 330,000 people, even a flight ticket to Moscow to participate in the rally was, in his own words, “an expensive pleasure” for him.
Do you know how much it costs to set up a stage for a rally and rent the necessary sound equipment? What about paying the campaign headquarters, motivating “volunteers”, rally moderators, and of course, the “independent” press? Some time ago, the late Boris Berezovsky revealed the amount of financial assistance he provided to the forces behind the Orange Revolution in 2004: $45,000,000.
Organizing a large-scale rally with just a call to fight for “freedom and respect” is impossible.
Rebellions, protests, and revolutions can have very different natures, but essentially, they probably fall into two categories. The first is riot. Bright examples include Krasnodar (1961), Alexandrov (1961), Tambov (1920-1921), and finally the Spartacus uprising. The cause of a riot is mass dissatisfaction of the population with living conditions, specifically hunger and/or violence. Life becomes increasingly difficult, people can’t take it anymore, patience runs out, and they take to the streets, no longer afraid of punishment because they have nothing to lose.
Of course, drawing a clear line between the rebellion of an oppressed people and the organized transfer of power under the guise of the people’s struggle against tyranny is quite difficult. Certainly, on the Maidan in Kiev in 2014, there were many who were sincerely dissatisfied with their lives and hoped to change something by overthrowing Yanukovych. Certainly, at the rally last Sunday on Tverskaya Street in Moscow, there were many who sincerely believed that by replacing Putin with Navalny, they would be able to improve their personal well-being. And, of course, every rebellion inevitably mobilizes all the processes of power transfer that have matured by the time it begins. Naturally, any rebellion mainly brings to power those who were already fighting for it in one way or another before the mass actions began.
However, sometimes the ears of those fighting for power stick out too much.
It is clear that the protest movements in Russia in recent years should be attributed precisely to the second category - the transfer of power. There are no objective reasons for dissatisfaction with life among Russians. Certainly, Russia is not the most comfortable country to live in, and I have written about this more than once. However, thanks to powerful propaganda and a slowly but growing economy, there cannot be natural mass protest sentiments among the population. There are excesses, there are shortcomings, there is corruption, but there are not enough conditions for a massive rebellion against the existing system.
I was not at the unsanctioned rally last Sunday, but I attended a sanctioned one two weeks earlier. The overall impression: this is not a protest, it is a Sunday stroll. By and large, people are content. They are fashionable, they are calm, on Monday they have a well-paid job waiting for them, they came to take a walk in the beautiful center of Moscow, to look at people and show themselves. They have no aggression and are very afraid to get into any conflicts with the police. They are polite, friendly, and their behavior is completely devoid of signs of rebellion.
Russia is not rebelling on its own. More accurately, it is rebelling, but within the framework of a normal rebellion of a Central European country, like Italy, Germany, or England regularly rebel. Some want Russia to rebel more intensively. So intensely that a change of power would take place. Who wants this? What forces are behind Navalny and others? Where will these forces lead the country after gaining power? Will this direction be more democratic than it is now? I do not know.
Do those who attend the rallies ask themselves these questions?
And do they know the answers?
Translated by ChatGPT gpt-3.5-turbo/42 on 2024-04-20 at 17:49
