Most Russians Don’t Want to Take Part in Demonstrations -- Either Against or For the Regime

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 23 – Three out of four Russians – 76 percent – say they will not take part in mass protest demonstration, 54 percent say they are not ready to support either opponents or supporters of the regime, 20 percent said they would support the regime but not by taking part in protests, and only nine percent said they would take part in pro-government meetings.

            Those are the results of a new poll by the Public Opinion Foundation, and they send a mixed message about the Russian people and the powers that be. On the one hand, they indicate that very few Russians want to engage in protests, thus suggesting it will be very hard for the opposition to get them to do so (ria.ru/society/20170922/1505308615.html).

            But on the other hand, these figures show that the government itself cannot count on mobilizing the population to go into the street if the political situation should require that, an indication of the growing indifference of the population toward the Kremlin and a better measure of how much support Vladimir Putin really has than the much-ballyhooed “86 percent.”