REBEL RUSSIA

Standing up to oppression.

Arutunyan, author of Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine, reported for Russia’s oldest English-language weekly, the Moscow News, which regularly criticized the government with little interference—although attacking Vladimir Putin personally was off-limits. Opposition peaked around the disputed 2012 election. Often called the “Snow Revolution,” it featured widespread, largely peaceful demonstrations with only spotty police harassment. Arutunyan emphasizes that, like historical protests, most activists were the educated, liberal elite, a minority who succeeded only in exasperating the existing ruler, who turned against them. Today, reformers not in prison or the grave are in exile. Arutunyan emigrated in 2022. She reviews Russian rulers who have faced opposition over the centuries, including Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev, and, of course, Putin. In 1991, when Gorbachev resigned and Boris Yeltsin took over, reformers mistakenly assumed that democracy had won. Despite his rhetoric, Yeltsin looked after his own interests, and since then, the average, patriotic Russian has enjoyed a rising income, thrilled to the 2014 takeover of Crimea, and believes that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine will make Russia great again. Arutunyan rejects the popular notion that Russians are backward, predestined to submit to autocrats—a notion shared by many Russian dissidents, Ukrainian nationalists, and, ironically, Putin himself. Her conclusion is that Russian reformers face the same challenge that advocates of democracy face worldwide: learning to get along with people they dislike. Plenty of nations (the U.S. included) are poor examples, but eventually “liberal opponents to Putin’s regime will have to sit down and have a conversation with the nationalists and the turbo-patriots” to find a common ground.

Thoughtful if unsettling insights into political opposition in Russia.