Last week, people in Moscow and elsewhere around Russia were bidding farewell to their old lives - getting their last BigMac, going on the last shopping spree at Uniqlo and Zara. All of these brands are pulling out of the country, which has been turning North Korea on steroids with a lightning speed.
They are now also blocked from withdrawing hard currency, while the ruble remains in free fall. Meanwhile the government is busy restricting access to all major social networks, including Instagram on which numerous small businesses - from cafes and barbershops to tour guides - were dependent.
Who knows how long it will last for? Maybe a couple of weeks, maybe many decades. There is nothing as stable as a regime under Western sanctions. Iran, Cuba and - yes indeed - North Korea are three most striking examples.
Should blame themselves
Russians, at least the 60-plus per cent of them who are known as “Putin’s majority”, should blame themselves for this predicament. It is them who allowed a small and close-knit group of security agents and businessmen from St Petersburg to dismantle their democracy and capture their state over the last 20 years.
Even more people supported the occupation of Crimea in 2014, which now feels like a mere prelude to the horror of Russian invasion in Ukraine. Few registered Putin’s mental deterioration in recent years which can prove to be suicidal for his political regime and perhaps even for Russia as we know it.
The main difference between totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and Putin’s Russia is that this cancer didn’t develop through mass political mobilization. On the contrary, it is apathy and self-exclusion from politics which played the biggest role.
I remember how in the early Putin’s years some of the brightest and most successful people were dismissing those concerned about human rights and degradation of democracy as “demschiza” - democratic schizophrenics. Many of these people are now firmly anti-Putin, but others are part and parcel of the regime.
Russian society is badly traumatised
Most ordinary people, however, remain loyal to Putin. What is at play here? Russian society is badly traumatised by its experiences in the 20th century, half of which was sheer genocide of two world wars and communist and another half - bleak life in the totalitarian prison. There was a brief explosion of enthusiasm about democracy and integrating with the West after Russia’s democratic revolution in 1991, but it was followed by re-traumatization caused by the turmoil and hardships of the 1990s.
Kremlin’s propaganda offers them a psychological escape by shifting the blame to the Ukrainians
People’s natural reaction to trauma is withdrawal, a refusal to accept any information that could make their psychological wound deeper. Kremlin’s propaganda offers them a psychological escape by shifting the blame to the Ukrainians, described as “nazis” by the propaganda, or to the West. Millions accept those justifications because the reality of Russia obliterating Russian-speaking cities in Eastern Ukraine as we speak is way too painful.
I am no expert in behavioural psychology to predict whether Western sanctions will crack up Putin’s majority or - on the contrary - they will mobilise these people behind him as hostages rally behind their hostage taker in a phenomenon known as Stockholm syndrome.
A positive alternative to Putin
The issue is that, unlike the case of Ukrainians or other east European nations, there is no positive avenue for them offered by the West. There was no prospect of EU or NATO membership before the war, there is only the prospect of punishment, reparations and alienation now.
The narrative of their collective guilt, so common in the West these days, is not a particularly great incentive, especially as in actual fact it mostly reaches only those Russians who are already mortally ashamed of what Russia is doing. It only leads to depression and the proliferation of suicidal tendencies, emanating from their leader who happens to control a massive nuclear arsenal and once said that «the world without Russia makes no sense».
It is this arsenal which makes it impossible to solve the problem Russia is posing to the world without getting Russians on board. People who oppose Putin at the moment are a minority, but a sizeable one, as per various polls. In absolute numbers they make up several Norways.
Russians badly need a positive alternative to Putin, an avenue that will lead them out of their suicidal depression towards a realistically attainable dream
Most of them are too fearful to protest in the streets. Yet, dozens of thousands across the country do, risking arrests, beatings and lengthy prison sentence. This struggle is clearly donquixotic when you know all too well that the majority is not your side. Many who protested in the past are now choosing to flee Russia. That maybe a wise decision, because the issue is not about getting these people into the street. The biggest issue is how to crack up Putin’s majority.
You can’t do that without a major input from the West. Russians badly need a positive alternative to Putin, an avenue that will lead them out of their suicidal depression towards a realistically attainable dream. A comprehensive integration with the West is the only concrete and easy-to-communicate goal that can possibly play this role.
The strategic error of the West
It is the prospect of integration into Euroatlantic structures which fired up Maidan revolution in Ukraine and eventually united what used to be a very polarised nation when Putin’s regime attempted to stop this transformation. Same would apply to Russia, if this prospect is offered.
If the West wants to have Russians on board, it needs to send them a message of future acceptance, conditioned of course on their decisive rejection of authoritarianism and irredentism, which led to the war in Ukraine.
Back in the 1990s, the American-led West chose the path of containing rather than integrating Russia, which it saw back then as a diminished or largely irrelevant power. Rather than working on integrating Russia as a first priority matter, the emphasis was on slicing away Moscow’s former dependancies in Eastern Europe, gradually approaching the Russian border, which resulted in Russia’s alienation and empowered authoritarian forces with the country.
The fact that we are now talking, in all seriousness, about the threat of World War III is a testament to those policies constituting a strategic error. It shouldn’t be repeated again.
