Society without the future. What have we come for thirty years?

Everyone feels tightening the regime, but adapt to it, pretending that something can be fixed

Samara. Photo: David Mdzinarishvili / Reuters

The period of rise in national pride, consolidation around the authorities is completed for four years. Behind the phase of patriotic excitement, euphoria and collective mobilization, caused by the experience of Russia returning the status of a great power (“Crimea - ours!”). The fall in the standard of living and raising the retirement age by the end of 2018 “broke” the Putin’s support base. Euphoria gave way to chronic social irritation: it is difficult to live, but you can endure. Diffuse discontent turned into a decrease in the rating of the approval of the “national leader”, which took off to the marginal values ​​after the annexation of Crimea and the extraordinary anti -Western and anti -Ukrainian propaganda campaign.

At the same time, those institutional and ideological changes that have been accumulated in Russian society since 2003 were fixed, but acquired a new quality after mass anti -Putin protests in 2011-2013. This is a relapse of totalitarianism, a return to the practices of the late Soviet era. The Crimean phenomenon, which followed the disappointment in the protest movement, showed how easily imperial attitudes and mechanisms for preserving Soviet, totalitarian identity were reanimated. She suggests:

• the establishment of an autocratic, sovereign vertical of power, independent of society and unaccounted for it;
• the omnipotence of the secret political police acting outside the legal framework and controls all spheres of public life (management personnel, distribution of financial and information flows, ideological processes);
• the full dependence of the judicial system on the Presidential Administration in all issues regarding politics;
• the actual monopoly on the media, turned into a total, very powerful and effective propaganda;
• sterilization of the opposition while maintaining a fiction of multi -party, pluralism and electoral democracy;
• manipulated elections, imitation of civil society organizations in the displacement and destruction of any forms of independent associations and public initiatives;
• The gradual approval of the unified ideology of state patriotism.

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