The key to authoritarian rule in the 21st century is deception, concealing oneself from serious scrutiny while imposing progressive control over society by a variety of means including the establishment of a secret police to enforce guardrails that prevent the dismantling of that control. Yet circumstances arise whereby a black swan wrenches that control away bringing with it the realization of past deception reinforced by all the grievances left unresolved in the sordid affair. This is the recurring story of authoritarian Russia – the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) – a story on its way again to ending a corrupt regime in some catastrophic fashion.
Public Sentiment
In the early stages of Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” (SMO) in Ukraine, Russian public opinion was much in favor of the Kremlin’s military plan. Opinion polls consistently identified more than 70% support for the invasion, similar to the sort of favorability shown toward the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea. The reasoning provided by many of the supporters for this “unavoidable measure” of aggression, as it was termed, was the need for a “defense against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)” which seemed somewhat contrived as NATO likewise defined itself as a defensive organization. This sentiment underlines the effectiveness of state propaganda that attempts to justify the war as if Russia was the victim just as it attempts to convince the public of Putin’s mission to “denazify” Ukraine and to protect Russian-speaking people of Eastern Ukraine from fascist oppression. Such rhetoric has even managed to convince some of the more poorly educated members of the United States (U.S.) House of Representatives of the same nonsense. Not uncommon among Russian supporters of the war, however, has also been the fear of adverse consequences for saying anything in opposition to the regime and the inherent passivity among Russians borne of an historic notion that submission to the state was often the expectation.
There were certainly mass anti-war protests throughout Russia by early March 2022 with Russian police already arresting about 13,500 activists within the first couple of weeks. More than 5,000 were detained in 69 cities in a widespread day of protest on March 6 alone. By April, more than 15,000 protestors had been arrested with accounts of mistreatment and subsequent loss of employment for their participation. By the middle of July, 16,000 protestors had been detained in 200 Russian cities. The protests received more attention outside Russia because of media censorship, outright elimination of independent media, obfuscation through propaganda and the shutting down of social networking sites thus isolating the events one from the other within the country. Most Russians, otherwise, have had little awareness of any government restrictions upon journalists, activists or critics of Putin. Of those few who were aware, 73% were apprehensive regarding such action, realizing the personal isolation that comes about with such measures.
Numerous well-reported incidences, familiar to the public, of relatively prominent Russians clumsily “falling” from upper story balconies and windows or, more mundanely, down a flight of stairs, attest to the consequences of ill-advised statements protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Less violent outcomes have also been advertised. It seemed necessary, shortly following the invasion of Ukraine, for Russian authorities to dramatically escalate censorship of free speech as part of a campaign of repression, criminalizing the spread of “false information” regarding the military and imposing fines or imprisonment of upwards of 15 years. Those noted for a certain level of recidivism or perhaps of a certain social rank or occupation were met with a more demonstrably violent end.
By September 2022, six months after the start of the war, 20% of Russians were in disagreement with the war. These were likely to be urban-dwelling youth who supported anti-Putin opposition figures and were more familiar with Western culture. The regularly imposed military conscription in Russia took on new meaning for these youth with the announcement of Putin’s “special military operation” (SMO) in Ukraine. The Russian Armed Forces had routinely been conscripting men semi-annually with the spring draft normally scheduled from April 1 to July 15. Individuals aged 18 to 27 years were enlisted for a year of compulsory military service. In the late summer of 2021, however, local regional administrations had also begun distributing information about enlistment in the Russian Combat Army Reserve, offering substantial financial incentives for three years of service. More notably, the 2022 spring conscription draft was announced early on February 18 rather than waiting for April in preparation for the yet unannounced Russian offensive. Legislation on February 22 then made it mandatory for reservists to report without receiving conscription notices from regional authorities in order to expedite mobilization should it be needed in the case of martial law.
On September 21, 2022, a “partial” mobilization of 300,000 military reservists was declared despite previous repeated denials by Russian authorities. The decision came in response to Russia having suffered one of its worst defeats in seven months of fighting in northeast Ukraine. A general survey released on September 29 identified that a growing number of Russians now felt that the SMO was no longer going “according to plan,” dropping from 73% to 53%, with 47% reporting a significantly increased anxiety regarding their circumstances. An additional 13% identified themselves as angry. Whereas only 28% of Russians felt in February that a nationwide full mobilization would be declared, this had now increased to 66%.
By late September 2022, it was also becoming clear that ethnic minorities, of which there are 193 in the Russian Federation (RF) according to a 2010 census – Tatars, Buryats, Tuvans, Chechens, Bashkirs, Avars and others – were being disproportionately recruited into the Russian military over those Russians who resided in major cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg within European Russia. Even Kazakhs crossing the border for work into Russia from neighboring Kazakhstan and other migrants with recently acquired Russian citizenship were being coerced into enlisting. Mortality for ethnic minority combatants exceeded that for urban Russians from Moscow by more than 100 times. This prompted a surge in national movements among several ethnic minorities largely distributed among the 21 republics within the RF and who make up about 20% of its population. Prior grievances related to the lack of freedom of speech and religion and a pattern of disinvestment in ethnic minority communities resurfaced adding to the acuity of the human loss suffered in their respective populations.
A discriminatory Russian attitude toward ethnic minorities has, in fact, remained unresolved throughout Putin’s tenure as president with his increased centralization of authority within Moscow and denial of the rights afforded them within their territories. A large riot broke out in January 2024 in the Republic of Bashkortostan in the southern Ural Mountain region of Russia prompted by territorial disputes. These were mounted upon a longer standing dissent over Russia’s discriminatory policies regarding ethnic issues and led by Fail Alsynov, a Bashkir nationalist and political activist. The situation recently worsened with Alsynov’s prosecution and sentencing to a penal colony for four years. Ethnic conflict, at times with lethal consequences, has even entered into the Russian military itself with reports of enlisted Tuvans, a Turkic people indigenous to Siberia, confronting ethnic Russians on the front regarding racial issues.
Two all-Chechen military units, the Sheikh Mansur Chechen Peacekeeping Battalion and the Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalion, have been fighting alongside Ukrainians against the Russian invasion. Memories run deep in recognition of a Ukrainian unit having helped the Chechens against Russia in 1999 during the Second Chechen War when Putin unleashed a brutal campaign that had decimated their capital, Grozny. Two other units, the Special Purpose Battalion of the Ministry of Defense of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and the Khamzat Gelayev Chechen Peacekeeping Battalion formed more recently. Another unit from the neighboring Republic of Dagestan, the Imam Shamil Dagestan Volunteer Battalion, also recently joined on. The shared aim of seeking independence from an oppressive regime in Moscow underlies a common mission for all these groups.
The Erzya people, an ethnic group of some 800,000 people residing in the Russian Republic of Mordovia, 350 miles southeast of Moscow, have also been sending volunteer fighters to fight for Ukraine. The republic is part of the League of Free Nations, a gathering of anti-Putin ethnic minority groups opposed to the war and committed to the dissolution of the RF with the intent of transforming the large land mass into independent democratic nations. It is, indeed, a tall order to reconstruct a significant portion of the Eurasian landscape but one for which many feel the time has come.
The Forum of Free Peoples of Russia gathered in Sweden in December 2022 for the fourth meeting of the League of Free Nations since the start of the war to issue a declaration proclaiming Russia a “bankrupt state.” A declaration was made for the independence for Karelia, a large republic in northwest Russia of over 500,000 people that makes up about half of Russia’s border with Finland, was one of two during the same conference. The second was for the independence of the Siberian Confederation that happens to contain most of Russia’s fossil fuel resources in its eastern territory. The existence of the forum serves as a reminder that simmering discontent fueled by widespread ethnic grievance may serve as a catalyst for revolt under the right circumstances as history has been witness to in Russia. Whether Russia as a federation will crumble or not because of such a circumstance is still an open question but it cannot continue as it is. Otherwise, the real question for Russia now revolves around how it could possibly normalize itself to become a functional enterprise in a global community that largely regards it as dysfunctional and a threat. That may be the taller order.
Ethnic Russians themselves have shown a similar discontent with Putin’s regime. Attention of Russians has become more focused upon socioeconomic conditions as a new reality is overtaking the nation – increased cost of living, loss of savings, commercial product shortages, dwindling health care, and a critical labor shortage among other concerns plague the nation. With this comes a lack of confidence and a resignation toward a need to cope with mental hardship in a society not well equipped to manage psychological distress. War fatigue has set in with a new poll indicating that 58% of the public were opposed to a second mobilization and 74% say they would support an end to the war “tomorrow.” Only 18% still sided with the regime. Draft avoidance has become a much greater reality in Russian society and will threaten future mobilization efforts in any case. Protests by women, both mothers and wives, have broken out over the length of deployment of their sons and husbands, casualty numbers, and the manner in which convicts are allowed to go free after only six months of service on the front. Aggrieved mothers make for a very bad public image in a place like Russia, a lesson learned by Soviet Russia’s regime with its war in Afghanistan 40 years earlier.
Young Russians began leaving Russia in appreciable numbers in 2020, well before Putin’s war, having become disillusioned not only by pervasive government and societal corruption and political repression but also coming to the realization of much greater economic and life opportunities in a more open society elsewhere. The outbreak of war and subsequent mobilization provided additional impetus to this trend so that by the spring of 2023, 1.3 million Russians, largely below the age of 35, had left their country bringing with them a good deal of talent and expertise in several fields, along with $30 billion in capital. An estimated 100,000 information technology (IT) specialists making up 10% of the technology sector have now left the country in the course of this war. The brain drain has depleted Russia of future potential for innovation aside from the loss of its labor force. Putin’s tenure as leader during the past two decades has seen a 25% decline of scientific and engineering personnel from leading Russian institutes, again with a significant escalation following the invasion of Ukraine. About 50,000 scientists had left in the previous five years alone.
Of the Russians who stayed behind, several have expressed their dissatisfaction regarding conscription and the announcement of mobilization with outright violence. From the outbreak of the war in February 2022 and, particularly following the first mobilization in September 2022, a flurry of attacks targeting mostly enlistment centers but also government buildings, police stations and training facilities had occurred numbering 138 by the spring of 2023. The Molotov cocktail has been the favored means of expression in 62% of incidences with other forms of arson employed in another 32%. There was the associated stabbing and shooting incident in some cases. By January 2024, 220 attacks had been reported. Afraid to utter the thought of a second mobilization, the regime has simply proceeded with an escalation in conscription, enlisting upwards of 30,000 monthly on a continuing basis. In keeping with efforts of enlistment has been the desire for desertion that has doubled during the autumn of 2023.
Acts of sabotage by Russians protesting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have largely targeted trains and railway tracks and have continued over most of the past two years with nearly 150 Russians facing criminal charges in the process. Similar acts have been carried out in Belarus by anti-Russian guerillas reacting to their country’s involvement in aiding Russian troop transport through their territory into Ukraine. An anti-war, anti-Putin Russian network, Rospartizan, recently reported the burning down of the headquarters of Russia’s 70th Motorized Rifle Regiment in Chechnya although the group did not claim responsibility.
Unusual numbers of mysterious fires, with and without explosions, have occurred throughout Russia at oil and munitions depots, military manufacturing plants, refineries, military bases, government ministry buildings, power and chemical plants, warehouses, transformer substations, pipelines, and churches. They have also been attributed to Russian partisans, mixed at times with Ukrainian and/or other ethnic elements, belonging to a number of groups – the National Republican Army (NRA), the Freedom of Russia Legion, and the Atesh Partisan Legion. One of the more dramatic fires involved a huge 70,000-square-meter distribution warehouse in St. Petersburg causing $122 million in damage. Suspicion has turned upon an internal worker dispute that may have been prompted by the excessive military enlistment of warehouse workers at the facility.
The International Legion of Foreign Nationals in Ukraine consists of more than 2,000 combatants fighting for Ukraine. They are Russians, Belarusians, Georgians, Poles, Brazilians, Colombians, Canadians, Americans, Britons, Israelis, Turks and Nigerians to acknowledge some. Most recruits from Russia or, better said, the RF, come from the North Caucasus or majority-Muslim regions but some, distinctively, are anti-Putin ethnic Russians who have carried out incursions into Russia. They are formed into three units, the Legion Svoboda Rossii, the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Siberian Battalion. The Russian opposition organization, the Free Russia Forum, founded by chess champion, Gary Kasparov, have raised funds for these combatant groups. Ultimately, the groups look beyond the conflict in Ukraine to support regime change in Russia by establishing a much wider network of collaborators within and outside the country.
The August 2022 car-bombing assassination of Darya Dugina, the 29-year-old daughter of prominent Russian Putin ally and ultranationalist political commentator, Alexander Dugin, was organized by the NRA and executed in the outskirts of Moscow. Dugina, herself, was a commentator on state television promoting anti-West, nationalist rhetoric while also running the United World International website which was part of a larger propaganda enterprise called Project Lakhta belonging to Russia’s Internet Research Agency. The latter deployed online trolls set up to interfere with U.S. elections by attempting to radicalize political conversation within the public arena. The NRA used the occasion of laying claim to the assassination on the Telegram channel, Rospartisan, to also issue its manifesto in which it declared Putin to be “a usurper of power and a war criminal . . . who unleashed a fratricidal war between the Slavic peoples and sent Russian soldiers to certain and senseless death.”
There is no escape from the knowledge seeping into Russia that its war in Ukraine continues to account for unacceptable combat losses both in personnel and armament, and a worsening economic outlook as Ukraine turns its sights upon directly crippling Russia’s oil and gas industry to worsen the impact of international sanctions. Putin’s lack of attention given to Russia’s domestic concerns in sacrifice to his imperial designs will now become the substrate for a growing public discontent that, of itself, has become a manifold issue. His inability to address the deteriorating welfare of Russian society as a whole cannot be overcome by the zealotry of ultranationalism and hateful rhetoric. But there are yet other elements in the global dynamic that will further the odds of a critical breakdown in Putin’s world. And so, there is more to come.
Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2024. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.
