I love Russian people and culture - to the point that I even learned how to read Cyrillic (which I've unfortunately had a lot of practice at in the last few days). So I don't want to see Russians get hurt, but think about it this way: What would you want Germans to do in the 1930s? What if they said "it rubs me the wrong way when people say I should do more to stop the NSDAP"? I sympathize, but when you're a piece of a system that threatens the entire world, it rings a little hollow to say "what am I supposed to do?". I can't believe the people that captured the largest landmass on the planet under their control are really all that helpless. Russian Serfdom was abolished in the 1800s. So if you, or a 1930s German is asking "what am I supposed to do?" the answer is "everything".
And I'll jump in front of the "But the U.S. is bad, too. Why don't you stop what you're doing and overthrow the U.S.?": You can't point to anything since the bombing of Dresden/Nagasaki where the U.S. military was intentionally inflicting mass civilian casualties with advanced weaponry the way Russia is in Ukraine right now. Not Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, etc. 0 land annexed since WW2, 0 threats against our neighbors, even though we have the most powerful military on earth. Even under Trump: 0 wars started, despite his belligerence. And Dresden/Nagasaki happened under duress. Ukraine posed no threat to Russia in any way, shape or form.
“Everything” is not an answer, it’s refusing to think of an answer. Please, try to actually think about what can a Russian person do to overthrow the government.
Oh, and let me give you some prerequisites:
1. You can’t use mass media to spread your message. Independent mass media are banned. There’re some leftover newspapers like Meduza and Novaya, but they’re niche and can be easily banned too.
2. Firearms are banned and it’s expensive to acquire one illegally. While rich person probably could arm, like, 10 people, it’s impossible to raise an army without massive funding.
3. You can’t rely on international organizations. When Navalny was jailed, Council of Europe had done precisely nothing to enforce ECHR decision to free him.
4. You can’t have visible leaders of opposition, because they would be murdered (like Nemtsov), jailed (like Navalny) or forced to leave the country (like Sobol).
5. 2% of the country population is serving in some kind of armed forces or law enforcement. They’re well paid, receive huge benefits and are ready to detain, torture and kill protestors. There’s a National Guard (340k people) which specifically exists for that purpose.
6. Elections are not working. They’re rigged, and opposition forces are banned from participating in them anyway. Every big party publicly supports war.
7. Mass protests on the scale of 100-200k don’t achieve anything. We don’t know if bigger protests would have any effect, but given [1] and [4] it’s unclear how to organize them. Protesting is illegal. Mass protests usefulness to influence the public opinion is limited, because media consistently underreports amount of people present.
Given that set of constraints: what would you do? I’m actually interested in your reply. If you think you would do better if you were Russian, what that “better” is?
I know that seems glib, but it's not. Unlike a lot of others in the West, I recognize and feel how cruel it is that when the world is in these situations it always seems to be the Russian commoners who we ask to make the biggest sacrifices. I recognized this even when I was a kid in U.S. school being taught the "narrative" of U.S. sailing across the oceans to make huge sacrifices to save the world... I know the West owes Russia a lot, and that's not something we like to talk about because it makes us uncomfortable. I ascribe to the theory that since the end of the Renaissance, "how good things are in the world at large" is tightly correlated with "how good things are for Russian serfs/commoners" and one of the most efficient ways to achieve the former is to improve the latter. So I'm not entirely callous to how hard it is and in the end I want Russia and her people to prosper....
But: We're in a crap situation right now and Russia put us here. Russia is a nation of people and those people can't enjoy the privileges of the Global Economy and Technological Revolutions while the nation they constitute tries to burn that world down. That's a tough pill to swallow.. we tend to get used to the things around us and treat them as "owed to us": The internet, thriving economies, banks... but it's not. You can lose it all, and so can the entire world.
So here we are in Stalingrad again. I'm sorry we put you here, disarmed in front of a maniac's henchmen cutting their way through innocent people's lives. I'll admit: I didn't do enough to pay attention to Navalny... we had our own mission and our own madman we had to stop. But here we are playing Shostakovich again and asking Russians to charge into the rubble and attack the enemies of civilization again with their whatever rocks or weapons they can pick up along the way.
So I'm not going to ask you to do anything, I guess. If you want to sit and rock back and forth with your head in your hands because it seems hopeless, I can't blame you. I don't know that I would be capable of doing anything different in your situation, to be perfectly honest.
Yes, and there’re groups that resists Putin’s government in Russia, and it doesn’t stop Putin any more than White Rose stopped Hitler.
And while we’re fighting an uphill war, world does everything to help Putin.
World buys Russian oil and gas, so Putin has money.
World don’t enforce international treaties, so Putin can jail anyone even if ECHR said no.
And now world stop selling goods and services to Russians, so
1. Money stays in Russia
2. Putin gets to claim “the West hates you” in propaganda and it sounds very plausible
3. The opposition has additional problems, so less time to do something useful
Isolation helps tyranicall regimes, not hinders them! NameCheap (and now many more companies) are literally helping Putin to stay in power. Taking resources from Russian people doesn’t “motivate us to revolt”, it takes resources to revolt from us.
And I'll jump in front of the "But the U.S. is bad, too. Why don't you stop what you're doing and overthrow the U.S.?": You can't point to anything since the bombing of Dresden/Nagasaki where the U.S. military was intentionally inflicting mass civilian casualties with advanced weaponry the way Russia is in Ukraine right now. Not Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, etc. 0 land annexed since WW2, 0 threats against our neighbors, even though we have the most powerful military on earth. Even under Trump: 0 wars started, despite his belligerence. And Dresden/Nagasaki happened under duress. Ukraine posed no threat to Russia in any way, shape or form.