Paul Goble
Staunton, April 17 – The Putin regime has deprived Russians of a future by insisting that the future is the past, a development that has attracted widespread notice; but it has also deprived the population of any private space by imposing the state on every aspect of Russian life, Fyodor Otroshchenko says.
The Russian specialist on art and intellectual history says that the Kremlin has eliminated any space “’outside of politics,” thus taking away from Russians one of the most prized aspects of life that they gained at the end of Soviet times and the beginning of post-Soviet ones (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/04/17/vne-politiki-bolshe-net).
“The entire life of the most apolitical citizen of the country is now subordinated to politics,” Ostroshchenko continues; and that forces an increasing number of those citizens to confront a question that they had not wanted to answer: “how is that individual to respond when he finds himself face to face with the state” and without the ability to retreat to a private space?
The answers to that question, of course, can be extremely “varied and unpredictable” and “it is certain” that at least some will decide that they must somehow act to oppose the state because the powers have taken away from them not just a future but rather the chance to have a life of their own.
Many will see what the state is doing in this regard with “all its limitations, bans, and blockages” as increasingly unacceptable, the specialist says; and to the extent they do, “the result of these reflections” could be a response the state won’t like and might threaten that state more than almost anything else.
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