As Putin’s War in Ukraine Drags On, Russians are Beginning to Listen to the Opposition, a Harbinger of Future Challenges to the Kremlin, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 13 – “When a war remains somewhere far away, it is easy to support it,” Abbas Gallyamov says; but when it begins to affect one’s own life or the lives of families and friends, it becomes less so – and a process begins which initially reduces popular backing for the war but then for the regime that launched it.

            The opposition Russian commentator who earlier served as a Putin speechwriter argues that at first, Russians like other peoples back the authorities  and accept the notion that what their enemies are doing is the result of the nature of those enemies rather than the product of what Russia and Russians have done (vot-tak.tv/92058694/vojna-i-nastroeniya-rossiyan).

            But as research on other countries at war, including totalitarian states like Nazi Germany has shown, he continues, when the war drags one people begin to ask whether the costs of the war are the result of their own government and even themselves rather than entirely the result of the nature of those fighting against them.

            “At the first stage of a war, especially in authoritarian countries where opposing the powers entails serious risks, the basic part of the society easily falls into jingoism.” But as the war continues, people begin to question the arguments for the war and even more the broader actions those responsible for the war have taken.

“Initially the majority of Russian residents saw no connection between their own bombing of Ukraine and the strikes coming from the other side—reasoning that ‘they are bombing us not because we are bombing them, but because they are fascists,’" now much as was true with the citizens of Nazi Germany, other causal relationships are being recognized.”

Ever more Russians are increasingly recognizing that what the Ukrainians are doing “are merely a reaction to steps taken by the Russian military;” and some of them, “no longer satisfied” with what the Kremlin is saying, are “beginning to listen to the opposition that they had refused to listen to only yesterday.”

In an authoritarian state like Putin’s Russia, this shift is neither universal nor instantaneous and will take some time to spread and intensify. Those Russians whose regions have been directly attacked by Ukrainian forces will ask these questions sooner and more insistently demanding to know why Moscow hasn’t defended them.

But they will be joined by others, Gallyamov says, concluding that he believes “during the phase of the weakening of the regime when the question of the country’s disintegration will once again raise to the national agenda as it did after the 1917 revolution and again at the end of perestroika, separatist sentiment will enful not just national republics but also border regions most devastated by the war.”

Russians living in those areas, he says, “may well decide that they no longer wish to remain bound to Moscow; and the concept of an independent ‘Central Russian Republic’ is thus becoming an entirely realistic prospect,” however little attention is now being given to the broader tectonic shifts that is making that outcome ever more likely.