Nearly 200,000 Russian soldiers are believed to be dead or disabled, according to Western estimates. Do you see the beginnings of protest within the Russian population?
No. The exodus that followed the partial mobilization of September 21 caused no awareness. I also notice that the Russians who left Russia did not organize any anti-Putin demonstration abroad, which calls into question their motivations, at least for some of them… Inside Russia, nothing happened either.
Certainly, you will say to me, “the Russians who protest are arrested”. It is both true and false. Anyone who holds up an anti-war sign in the street will be arrested after ten minutes. But what becomes of it? Most of the time, he will only get an administrative fine. The Russian NGO OVD-Info, which fights against political persecution, has published edifying figures. In 2022, there were 6,000 arrests and 420 criminal convictions. These are of course 420 too many, but compared to the Russian population, 143 million inhabitants, or even to the hundreds of dead in Iran, this figure is not high. Repression was much harsher under Brezhnev.
How do you explain it?
The majority of the Russian people agree with the government’s policy. When I said that a year ago, I was objected that the problem was above all the propaganda which was brainwashing the Russians. Today, we realize that the evil is much deeper.
That’s to say ?
It’s a rather strange phenomenon unique to Russians: the existential need to be respected. This is how they reason: “It doesn’t matter how I live, that I have a miserable salary and that the hospital in my city is under-equipped: the main thing is that people are afraid of us at home. outside the country, let us be feared.” Hence the recurring discourse on the nuclear bomb. The Russians find it normal to position themselves as a threat. When the Russian presenter Soloviev, a well-known propagandist, says on a public channel: “We can raze London”, the people are happy…
As if they had both an inferiority and a superiority complex vis-à-vis the West?
That’s exactly it, they are caught in this double gear.
How to get out of this spiral?
The best future for Russia would be to suffer a humiliating defeat. Because it must be understood that Putin has already created a magnificent way out. For the moment, he is convinced that he will end up exhausting this West, which he considers democratic and venal, thinks only of doing business and, he thinks, will end up getting tired. He made Lenin’s phrase his own: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” If, however, Putin realizes that he is losing, then he will solemnly declare to his people that he has achieved all his goals, that he has brilliantly resisted NATO and that he is withdrawing from the Donbass, because he is a man of peace! He will thus avoid defeat and will enjoy a popular triumph in Russia.
And the Russians will swallow that?
When you manage to sell to your population that Ukraine is populated by Nazis and NATO soldiers, you can imagine anything! Contrary to popular belief, Russians are not subject to real censorship on the Internet. Every day, 50 million log on to YouTube. They could counter Kremlin propaganda, read critical analyzes of Russian journalists exiled abroad, but most don’t. They want to believe what Putin tells them. So yes, the Russians will adhere to this triumphalist discourse, except, perhaps, the 5 to 10% of ultranationalists who, like Igor Guirkine, spend their time criticizing the army, and now taunting the “summit of power”. These will pose a danger to Putin. It will certainly think one day of suppressing its most restless representatives.
For its part, the West will also cry victory and will hasten to organize a conference for peace. This paradoxical double victory is a very likely scenario, which however poses two major problems: the Putinian system will remain in place, with the risk that Russia will go back to war in a few years. Then, war criminals will not be tried or punished, as in the case of flight MH17 or the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko.
For Putin, withdrawing from Donbass and proposing a ceasefire is the best way to divide the West. After that, will we still talk about sending fighters to Ukraine? Will we continue to put pressure on Putin who, however, will have consolidated his power? Probably not.
Can the regime, conversely, implode from within?
For that, Vladimir Putin would have to be stubborn beyond reason. He is capable of it. Unlike Lenin, a brilliant tactician who knew how to back down when needed and cared little about issues of dignity or honor, Putin is mediocre. He can very well be stubborn in a scheme of the type: “I will crush them all, we are on the way to victory.” It is all the more likely that he remains, it seems, poorly informed of the situation on the ground. This blindness could lead him to a defeat which would cause a purge within the military high command and a “prigojinisation” of the army. [du nom d’Evgueni Prigogine, le chef du groupe de mercenaires Wagner]. This scenario would accelerate the rotting of the regime which, in my opinion, has already begun. We can see some signs of it. For example, the multiplication, in recent months, of fires in shopping centers, abandoned after the invasion by Western brands. Whether it’s racketeering, insurance scams or settling scores, we are beginning to find in Russia the mafia reflexes of the 1990s.
Another factor could cause an implosion, the exasperation of the peoples living in the East of the country – Tuva, Buryatia, Dagestan… Their populations have always been considered as “Untermensch” [sous-hommes] by the central power. These provinces have contributed enormously to the mobilization. Faced with the number of coffins coming back, they could end up rebelling.
Do you believe in the coming to power of a “providential” man, who would manage to stop this descent into hell of an entire country? Opponents like Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Gari KasparovFor example ?
No. Russian power has a backbone, the FSB, which is a multi-headed hydra, the most important of which is called Vladimir Putin. This one has no ideology. One day he presents himself as nostalgic for Stalin, another as an ultra-Orthodox or a lover of tsarism… But these are only masks! The central element of Putinism is kleptocracy. This system is welded, in a kind of symbiosis, to all the institutions, to the legal system, to the big public companies… Imagine a kind of metastasis which would have ramifications everywhere. The cohesion of the system is not ensured by repression, but by connivance, like a mafia. We do business, we do each other favors… How do you expect a white knight, arriving overnight, to extract this evil? It’s incredibly difficult. On the other hand, the system can, in the event of a major defeat, become gangrenous from within. We can already see some signs of it. Prigozhin and the governor of Saint Petersburg, Alexander Beglov, are in open conflict. They hate each other. The heads of the hydra begin to devour each other.