Paul Goble
Staunton, Jan. 13 – Many observers in Moscow and the West have focused on whether the mounting utility problems Russians now face will prompt them to protest and otherwise challenge the government (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/01/utilities-problems-in-russia-wont-spark.html).
But in doing so, they have neglected another development that could prove almost as difficult for the Kremlin to cope with: the propensity of Russians in places where the outages have been long and extensive to try to work together independently of a government bureaucracy that is unwilling or unable to help.
Russians who have taken part in such cooperative activities are likely to look at the Russian bureaucracy at all levels differently than they did before and either ignore it or make more demands upon it in response, either of which will represent a different but potentially serious challenge to the bureaucracy in Putin’s Russia.
That makes a report in the Horizontal Russia news agency about how residents in Belgorod after losing light, heat, and water as a result of Ukrainian drone attacks just before the new year came together to try to solve the problem after officials failed to respond quickly enough (semnasem.org/articles/2026/01/13/belgorod-blekaut).
Russian bureaucrats are probably likely to view such help as useful in the short run because it prevents the problems with infrastructure prompting Russians from protesting. But over the longer haul, this experience of cooperation may be a bigger threat to a regime which rests in large measure on the radical atomization of the population.
That is because cooperation among citizens in one area can often be a school in which those who take part learn to engage in cooperation in other areas, a slow process perhaps but one that will help transform the population and could lead it to demand an entirely different relationship with the powers that be.
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