Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 17 – The share of
Russians willing to protest or take part in any political activity at all,
never large in the best of times, has fallen significantly since Vladimir Putin
began tightening the screws in 2014.
Instead, ever more Russians are showing their willingness and ability to
adapt to the new situation.
In an interview taken by Roza
Tsvetkova of “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” Natalya Zorkaya, head of social-political
research at the Levada Center, says that not only do fewer Russians now take
part in anything remotely political but they are increasingly hostile to those
who do, viewing them as “marginal figures” or worse (ng.ru/ng_politics/2017-01-17/9_6904_zorkaya.html).
That constitutes a major change
since 2011-2012 when not all that many Russians took part in protests against
election fraud but when “about 40 percent of Russians” supported at least “in a
declarative form” to sociologists that they supported those who did. Now, that
figure is much, much smaller as a result of repressive laws and government
propaganda.
What is striking, Zorkaya says, is
that repressive legislation is supported by a majority of the population, some
55 to 56 percent. While that is not overwhelming, it is one that promotes
passivity not only among those who support these government actions but also
among those who might be more inclined to challenge them if they felt they
would be supported.
This attitude does not mean that
Russians think that “the authorities know better” than the citizens. Rather it
represents “a flight from responsibility, a refusal to act and of solidarity with
those who could and want to represent public interests and the interests of
particular groups. It is,” she says, “a form of self-preservation, of the
defense of one’s own little world.”
According to Zorkaya, “rabid
supporters of repressive measures … are a small minority. The main part of the population
simply has subordinated and adapted itself to institutional force in order to
survive.” Most see now hope for the future or for making a difference in
political life and so they simply pull back into their circle of family and
friends.
At the end of 2015, she notes, there
was a sharp uptick in panic about the crisis and what would happen next, “but
now we see how passions have somewhat subsided.” But neither the one nor the
other has led to demonstrations and protests because there is as yet little
sense of a corporate identity among Russians as a society apart from the state.
For that to happen, there needs to
be more than simply a growth in the standard of living; there have to be “essential
changes” in the nature of the world in which Russians live their lives, Zorkaya
says. That happened among a small group
of the more entrepreneurial of the urban population, but it has yet to occur
more broadly. Indeed, things are now moving backward.
“At the very start of the
transformation” in Russia, the idea of the inevitability of transit, of economic
reforms and the rooting of new democratic values and the construction of civil
society was very strong … but a large portion of people who had grown up in
Soviet times however much they valued this Western life did not understand” how
hard it would be to reach it, a lack of appreciation that affected the elites
as much as the masses.
Not surprisingly when the process
turned out to be hard and to require more from Russians than they had expected,
they became disappointed in the political process and turned away from it to
their own narrow circle, the sociologist argues.
“The share of people who took an
active part in social and political life has remained almost unchanged since the
beginning of the 1990s and forms three to four percent of the entire
population, while at the same time, such activity in developed European countries
is an order higher.” Over the last three years, this Russian figure has fallen.
Russia suffers from “a horrific deficit of
elites for whom the development and modernization of the country in the broad
sense of this term is valued and important … the current elite is focused only
on holding power and building up
resources” and doing so by tightening control.
That approach “works now,” Zorkaya
says, “because the overwhelming majority of people have subordinated themselves
to the situation and want only that things won’t get worse and that they won’t
be touched by anything.” As a result, the people lack any “positive basis for
self-expression and self-assessment” and remain an “amorphous” mass.
Appended to her interview are some
Levada Center statistics that support her conclusion. Among the many
interesting ones, these stand out:
·
The share of Russians who feel responsible for what
happens in the country and believe they can influence the direction it takes is
less than a quarter of the population.
·
The
percentage who have taken part in any political action in the last year has
fallen from four percent to three percent since 2014.
·
The
share who have discussed politics with family and friends has fallen from 21
percent in 2012 to 15 percent last year, and the share of those saying they
have done nothing at all political has risen from 34 percent in 1996 to 49
percent in 2016.
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