Translated material
I explain to those interested
The International Herald Tribune asked me to explain what, from the writer's point of view, is happening in Russia and what to expect in the future.
I wrote what I thought. Didn't hide anything.
Russian text of the article here:
Win without haste
On September 24, when at the congress of the Russian ruling party it was announced that Vladimir Putin would again be our next president, my wife told me: “That’s it now. We need to leave. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in Mister Dobby's country." “This is not his country,” I replied. - Let's wait. There will be a social explosion. People are not idiots, they will not agree with this castling.”
But days and weeks passed, and there was no social explosion. Well, several notorious anti-Putin grumblers grumbled, including me. And the rest of Russia, it seemed, didn’t care: Putin is Putin. For another 12 years? Yes, even for life, no problem. And I also began to seriously think about leaving. If we - those who are sick of Putin's state - are so negligible, why will we interfere with our serene compatriots living and enjoying themselves?
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the rest of the fall was one of the most depressing periods of my life. It’s hard to feel like a stranger in your own country, especially for a writer.
But December came, and in just a few days Russia seemed to wake up and become a completely different country. Suddenly it turned out that people like me are not a marginal minority, that there are a lot of us. In Moscow, we constitute a clear majority. And all the debates about leaving among my friends fell silent, as if they had never happened. The discovery that plunged us all into euphoria can be expressed in three words: “ This is our country .” The last time we had such a feeling was twenty years ago, when the communist regime collapsed.
From the outside, Russian events probably strongly resemble the revolutionary storm that swept through Arab countries, which, one after another, began to get rid of dictatorial or authoritarian regimes. But this analogy is deceptive. The only, purely external feature of similarity is the important role of social networks as a way of spontaneously organizing protest actions.
In Russia, something completely different is happening, a rather unusual thing: a revolution of the middle class - a class that is by its nature non-revolutionary.
To many people, including Russians themselves, the sudden awakening of society seems like a miracle. But there is no miracle. This is a consequence of a natural social process. More precisely, two diametrically opposed processes.
The first is the profound changes that have occurred in society over the course of two decades. Tens of millions of people learned to live under “wild” capitalism: to solve their material problems without the participation of the state, to exist in conditions of fierce competition, to provide a normal standard of living for their families. These seeds sprouted underground, almost invisible to the eye - and suddenly grass began to grow from everywhere at once. The black, bare earth instantly turned green.
This sudden spring was accelerated by a second social process, which also began not a year or two ago: the worsening degradation of the Putin regime. In the absence of any control on the part of deputies, courts and the press, the system fell into the illusion of absolute permissiveness and began to make mistake after mistake, without even realizing that it was destroying itself. The Russian spring in the middle of winter is a direct consequence of the shameless castling of September 24 and the equally shameless falsifications in the parliamentary elections. Suddenly it turned out that Russian society no longer wants to put up with such methods of management. It has grown, the swaddling clothes of authoritarianism have become too tight for it.
Between two gigantic rallies, on the tenth and twenty-fourth of December, Putin still had a chance to explain himself to the protesters, but the “national leader” (as his supporters like to call the prime minister) made another mistake, irreparable: he publicly insulted the participants in the movement, accusing them of being zombies and venality. After this, the main subject of indignation was no longer the ruling party, but Putin personally.
It was in these two weeks that Putin lost his country.
He, of course, hasn't realized this yet. It seems to him that only Muscovites are making noise, and the rest of the country still supports him. Moreover, by all accounts, he sincerely believes that he will win the election.
In the current conditions, this can only happen with colossal fraud. There is no doubt that the huge fraudulent apparatus in charge of counting votes in Russia will not stop at any falsification. But the victory will be Pyrrhic. Putin will lose what remains of his real rating and will turn into an all-Russian object of hatred and ridicule. This will be a very weak president who is unlikely to last long.
This may sound like a paradox, but I would prefer that the Putin regime did not collapse too quickly. Let him resist for at least another year. If Putin leaves right now, without completely squandering his popularity, he may well return, and in a completely democratic way - when the crisis hits the standard of living and people begin to feel nostalgic for the “fat years.” The “second coming” of this politician will be a disaster for the country.
In addition, it is necessary to give time to the sprouts of the still very green civil society to grow and become stronger. The best way of social maturation is a gradual attack on inert authoritarianism that does not want to give up. In the process of this struggle, civil society will learn to organize itself and build muscles. A political palette of real, and not puppet (as in Putin’s parliament) parties will be formed: a powerful democratic center, on one side of which there will be the new “left”, that is, socialists and communists, on the other – the new “right”, that is, nationalists.
If a change of power occurs when this process is already completed, post-Putin Russia will move relatively painlessly to the next stage of state evolution. In a political sense, it will be a turbulent country - with parliamentary crises, sudden resignations of governments, demands for presidential impeachment and other attributes of an emerging democracy. But in the country of a middle class that has awakened and realized its strength, neither the “siloviki” nor the oligarchs will be able to monopolize power again. Moreover, the regime of personal power of one person will become impossible.