On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine (axis chronicle from the site meduza that day). Sociologist Hryhoriy Yudin was among the few Russians who dared to go out into the streets and protest against the war. After Yudin's detention at the protest found himself in the hospital. Despite this, he remains in Russia — and as the researcher tries to understand (and also topic others), why there is no mass resistance in the country. In a column for the Swiss publication Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the sociologist places at least part of the responsibility for this war on the leaders of Western countries - especially on those who did not want any war, but simply pretended that it was possible to continue "business as usual" with the regime in the Kremlin. .
With the permission of the author, "Meduza" publishes the Russian-language version of Hryhoriy Yudin's column.
I am standing in a comfortable carriage of the Moscow metro and reading on my phone the forecasts of military analysts about the course of hostilities. A stranger approaches me and shyly says "thank you". This has been happening to me regularly since the war started.
I'm a researcher, and my typical day is spent at home in front of the computer. I don't go out that often, and in recent months I've started to do it even less. However, since the war started, every day, without exception, strangers come up to me on the street and in transport to say "thank you". This happens wherever I am - in Moscow and Vienna, Yerevan and Berlin. What are they thanking me for? Simply because I publicly spoke out against the war at the beginning.
It creates a strange feeling: as if you are a member of some invisible order, a silent and huge resistance waiting for your moment. I suddenly discovered something that many people around me do not know: that they are not alone. That those around have fully preserved their common sense, compassion and responsibility for their homeland. But they come to me alone, say the word "hope" and leave, gloomy and hopeless.
I know the name of this suffering all too well—it is called "atomization." When the ties between us are destroyed, when it is uncomfortable and pointless to talk about "dangerous topics" in any company, when public opinion polls are the only source of information about neighbors - then everyone feels in the midst of a hostile, stupid and embittered crowd. You can pour into her, lean on her strength. You can stay away from her, feeling your superiority and temptation. It can be resisted by gaining audacity. But it is impossible to talk to her, it is impossible to deny. She still presses. It flows and threatens. She looks like an indomitable force — even though she doesn't exist.
Every day I receive new and new messages from foreign journalists who want to know the same thing: how is it possible that eighty-some percent of Russians there support this war? I can hear surprise and indignation in their question: before their eyes the same terrible mass appears, merciless Russians, who want to rob, rape and kill as a single horde. I start typing answers on my phone: “You see, that's not how it works. If on February 24, Vladimir Putin announced that, for some important security reasons, he would transfer the territories of the LPR and DPR to Ukraine, the number of support would be the same..." I shake the outstretched hand of the stranger and glance around the car, mechanically trying to project my journalist's question onto its passengers. who asks about them from somewhere far away.
I want to answer the journalist in such a way that he does not have to explain to his audience: "You see, Russians are completely different, everything is arranged differently for them." Because it's not true. Because in order to understand how Russians reason, it is enough to imagine how Gerhard Schröder, Francois Fillon or Karin Kneisl think. None of them is a bloodthirsty murderer, none wants suffering for the Ukrainian people. They just want to live well and not be touched. They want the war to end as soon as possible and to return to a "normal life" - where you can make good money and be a respectable person.
Unfortunately, there is nothing particularly sinister about the Russians - because in this case it would be enough to simply isolate them, fence off from them forever and reliably protect the planet. Unfortunately, it's not the Russians. The fact is that Vladimir Putin understood too well how the modern world is organized - he recognized its weaknesses and the levers that must be pressed in order to control it. The social order he built in Russia is a radical version of modern neoliberal capitalism, where greed rules, personal good is the ultimate measure, and cynicism, irony, and nihilism provide a salutary sense of easy superiority.
Putin did not suddenly emerge from the Siberian forests — he spent years corrupting the global financial and political elites. Its oligarchs have enjoyed outrageous luxury and flattery all over the world for so long that they have rightly decided that they are the masters of the world. He has so successfully corrupted politicians from dozens of countries, including them in his boards of directors and sharing frankly bloody money with them, that he has good reason to think of them as weaklings. Putin offered the Russians the same principle that the powers of the world have learned so well: "if something cannot be bought with money, then you simply did not offer enough money."
My foreign correspondents are interested in how Russians can be so "fooled by propaganda". But I look around and see no idiots at all. Instead, I see a lot of people who have firmly learned the main lesson: do not try to contradict Putin, the world is set up in such a way that he always wins anyway. I look at those who tried to prevent the current catastrophe, who risked their freedom and their lives - and every time I saw that Putin's money solved everything. That after each crushed uprising, Putin gets new multibillion-dollar contracts, his oligarchs get even richer, and his "European friends" get new positions on new boards of directors. That international technological giants are ready to make any concessions in order to make money in the Russian market — from Google, which is ready to keep silent about physical threats to its top management from Russian special services, to Nokia, which helped Putin build a total surveillance system of his opponents. Each time these fearless Russians started again and again - they have been fighting this war with Putin for a long time, only without NLAW and howitzers. Every time we heard "no one will help you anyway, Putin has bought everyone." Today, many of them finally believed it.
One by one, my friends who work for international corporations tell me about how their foreign management is reacting to the war. Actually, no one reacts to the war - they don't say a single word about it. However, general irritation is caused by the notorious "sanctions", which force them to limit revenue on the profitable Russian market with their own hands. And if in American and British companies this dissatisfaction has to be hidden in order not to irritate the global management, then German and especially French companies, almost without hiding, say that they do not understand what they have to do with the war in Ukraine and why they should lose because of it , money for her.
In an interview with Der Spiegel, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says that his understanding of Russia was influenced by Masha Hessen's [2017] book Future Is History. This book insists on one point for several hundred pages: Russia never changes, its past, present and future are totalitarianism, and any attempts to change it are futile. Vladimir Putin and his liberal critics have long agreed on exactly this: Russia cannot be changed anyway. Scholz gives me the impression of a person who is frightened by this Russian fear, the fear of a terrifying horde, which is still impossible to cope with.
I examine my Moscow carriage again. Heavy looks, exposed to the window or to the floor; Russians are known to be unsmiling. Hope will not appear here until the world recognizes that Vladimir Putin and his war are the inevitable result of all the global development of recent decades. No earlier than global business will feel responsible for the lives of Ukrainians, and not only for the dividends of its shareholders. Not before the world realizes that we are all riding in a Moscow metro car. No sooner than Chancellor Scholz will believe that another Russia is possible.
