Resistance is Real

“You cannot build a state on violence; it was the common ground under everything in the Soviet Union and in Russia. It will be up to those who did not start this war to lead the society out of the rut, and that takes a lot of strength. You have to understand the depth of society’s decline, understand how much we, our parents, our grandparents and many generations before them are involved in this.”

– Inna Berezkina, Moscow School of Civic Education.

Two years ago, we noted that, as a consequence of ordering Russia’s War on Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin had “boomeranged Russia into its Soviet past” – a past he seemingly longed for but which the people do not. “For all of Russians’ nostalgia for the past,” we wrote, no one "would accept being stuffed back into Soviet skins.”

And yet, the Powers That Be keep trying to stuff their subjects into those skins. The screws get tighter and tighter, even though this is 2024, not 1964 or even 1984. Resistance is real if not immediately apparent.

First, there has been the mass exodus of young, educated Russians – the brain drain of an estimated 900,000 souls. If seen in the context of denying the regime access to its most valuable resources, this is huge, and these brave souls should be given their due (and support), and a safe haven in Europe and the US. That the Kremlin now seeks to criminalize them and strip their Russia-based assets shows how important a resource they are.

Second, we see a burgeoning of defiant, independent new Russian language media outlets. Many are based in the Baltics or the Caucasus, allowing them proximity to their readership (who can easily install VPNs to circumvent Kremlin censorship) and to correspondents still working inside the country. We will continue to publish some of the best work these outlets are creating.

Third, in acts of astounding bravery and selflessness (e.g. see Readings, pages 4-9), individual twenty-first century dissidents caught in the Kremlin’s net are fighting back against the unconstitutional criminalization of free speech and free assembly by telling truth to power, by using the vast communication resources now available to make their suffering known.

The current Russian regime is as ruthless and anti-democratic as the one that Soviet dissidents stood up against. It uses many of the same methods to crush human spirits, to build complacency out of fear. But whereas the Soviets justified their power-preservation through a tortured ideology that saw all non-socialist nations as enemies, the new tsars (whose prime directive is self-enrichment) must concoct enemies out of thin air, based on historical slights instead of class theory, on greed instead of Karl Marx.

Inevitably, the Kremlin's lies and the people's brave resistance will cause this criminal regime to crumble. All that is required, as Berezkina notes above, is “a lot of strength.” And time.