Repeating What Happened at End of Soviet Times, Russians are Changing in Their Thinking but Not Yet in Their Behavior, Shelin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 24 – “Putin’s subjects are embarking on the path taken by people in the late Soviet era,” Sergey Shelin says. “They are beginning to spend their leisure time engaging in cautious jabs at the regime and are growing accustomed to complaining about the Leader’s obsolescence. But this shift has not yet translated into a change in public behavior.”

            Many have come to believe that the declaration by Vika Bonya has raised “oppositionist sentiments among Russia’s ‘deep people’ to a new and formidable level,” the Russian commentator says; but he argues that this is “an exaggeration” except in one area (ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/04/24/chto-menyaetsya-v-golove-u-rossiyanina-a193554).

            The loyalist complaints she made are shared by almost all Russians today, Shelin suggests, except for one thing: her attacks on misogynistic attitudes by Kremlin allies. Such attacks on women are out of step with he views of many, and the Kremlin has responded by declaring through its mouthpieces that Russians must “do more” to combat misogyny.

            “The runaway success of Bony’s show suggests,” Shelin continues, “not so much that popular anger is on the verge of erupting but rather that the public has grown nostalgic for media freedom and is delighted when someone gossips about current troubles in the style” of the earlier Putin years.

            On the key issue of the war in Ukraine, attitudes among Russians “do not appear to have changed over the past year” in terms of willingness to dissent. But “Russians have grown more weary of the war than they were, a form of ‘loyal weariness” that “doesn’t translate into aner or a desire to change the status quota but rather into a wish to disengage from the conflict.”

            Russians haven’t “suddenly experienced a moral awakening” about the war. They have simply become increasingly concerned about their “own personal hardships,” although even there “this anxiety is not translating into any form of collective action, whether grassroots or top-down, even of the most innocuous kind.”

            What has happened is “a growing public appetite for consuming media criticism as a form of leisure,” just as was the case at the end of Soviet times, Shelin says. At the same time, direct attacks on Putin are being offered by military correspondents, where the image of ‘the Leader’ is now associated with obsolescence and a complete loss of touch with reality.”

            That, of course, is “a bad omen for an autocrat!”t

            Moreover, “after a three-year break, discussions, albeit still theoretical, have once again come into vogue among affluent circles, centering on the notion that emigration is after all inevitable.” People in them are withdrawing money from their bank accounts; and while it is still too soon to call this panic, that certainly appears to be something looming in the future.”

            Shelin continues: “Arguably, while the level of loyalty in the minds of Russians has not diminished of late, their sense of discontent has certainly intensified. Disapproval of the regime’s growing irrationality now encompasses virtually everyone—from staunch conformists to rabid statists.”

            And he concludes: “As of today, this discontent is likely no more intense than the routine cynicism that characterized the populace of the late Soviet Union. It could persist for a long time in forms that pose no threat to the regime—but only if Putin ceases his relentless efforts to drive his otherwise compliant subjects to the brink of exasperation.”