Believing There Is an Opposition Movement in Russia Is Naive
Most Russians this weekend will happily cast votes for Putin.
All across Russia, citizens sick and tired of the tyrant Vladimir Putin are pouring green ink (“zelyonka,” which is used to disinfect minor cuts and abrasions) into ballet boxes, ruining the votes that had been previously cast. Others are scribbling the name of the recently deceased and imprisoned opposition politician, Alexey Navalny, across their ballots, making them unusable.
In more extreme cases of civil disobedience, citizens of all ages are tossing Molotov cocktails at polling stations and even inside the stations. In the photo above, an elderly woman voted and lit her ballot on fire, causing a small blaze. In the second image, the blaze quickly got out of control.
All of this seems quite heartening, indeed. In conversations all over the “free-thinking” world — and say what you want, citizens in Europe, North America, and even many countries in South America and Africa are not forbidden by their governments from having opinions that don’t align with the government — will be tossing back happy-hour cocktails and praising the efforts of the Russian opposition. I imagine myself at each of these watering holes across this celebratory universe, and I want to be the rain on the parade — the dud, the guy who pulls the plug on the record player and says, “Guys, it’s time to go home.
Even though many Russians do have opinions that differ from those of their murderous, uncivilized government, these efforts will change nothing. These opinions — and actions — will actually unite the majority of soul-less cowards who make up the Russian nation. Despite what has become a Chinese-style labyrinth in which people search for non-government-approved facts about the war of genocide in Ukraine, most Russians, if they had a sliver of morality, could learn the truth about the atrocities the Russian government is committing in Ukraine. However, the overwhelming majority of Russians don’t search for the truth. They are content with accepting the lies. This makes every single Russian this weekend who casts a vote for 12 more years of Putin — he will hopefully die before then — complicit in the crimes their army commits in Ukraine.
Is opposition worth it?
Opposition has become fashionable for the million or so Russians now exiled from their homeland and living in countries throughout the world. Many talk about how they wish they had been more engaged in fighting Putin when they had a chance 10 and 12 years ago. The protests in Moscow at “Balotnoye” when well over a hundred thousand middle-class and educated Russians took to the streets to demand an end to Putin’s tyranny was the last chance. Cowering in fear at his Moscow dacha, the rat-like former KGB bureaucrat summoned the most sycophantic and, after brainstorming, came up with the idea of a domestic army — Putin’s praetorian guard — whose purpose would be to terrorize Russian citizens and weed out the enemy of dictators: free thought and differing opinions.
In 2024, the herd has been tamed, and like millions of lemmings, they have invested their future in the paranoid fantasies of a sick little boy from Leningrad. The image below was also a protest by someone in St. Petersburg yesterday — that is, a stream of urine washing off the sins of Putin’s parents.
However, this will sadly dampen our celebrations and glee at the civil disobedience in Russia. Young and old this weekend are emerging from the lairs constructed in the piles of Kremlin-inspired manure to vote proudly for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. As a friend — now cast into the pile of “people I used to know” — wrote me yesterday, “Nothing happening here isn’t happening in America. The government (this was how she referred to Putin) here is good and has our best interests at heart. If something seems wrong, it’s the people making it wrong, and there are people everywhere.”
This woman is not dumb. Until the war started, I considered her brilliant. Since Navalny’s death, her comments about how good Putin is for Russia and how “silly and confused we are in our herd-like rejection of Putin” have confirmed my doubts that she is just another face in that big, not-so-bright herd of morally corrupted cowards known as the majority of Russia. Like millions of people between 20 and 40 years old, this woman has grown up knowing only Putin. Putin is good. Going against Putin is like going against their “papa.”
Putin is angry as hell, they say about, the protests of the elections. The ball-less Russian Duma is already passing laws that will punish citizens with up to eight years in prison for doing anything to harm the voting process. The punishments in Russia are getting more severe for more minor infractions. This is the greatest claim to legitimacy that a totalitarian government has: Scare the shit out of the citizenry and turn them into cowering zombies ever ready to turn their fellow neighbors into the police.
Today and tomorrow, millions will go to the ballot box and think: Do I want to spend the rest of my life rotting in the gulag in Siberia for something I can’t change? Or do I want to go home tonight, have a nice cup of tea and watch a movie? A vote for Putin means going home; anything else could mean spending your days on Earth in prison.
According to a recent Levada poll, 75 percent of Russians are happy with the country’s direction. The majority also believe Russia has a healthy and functioning democracy. It’s that belief, which is utterly mind-boggling, that demonstrates how hopeless Russia’s “opposition movement” really is.
Putin has already won. It would have been nice for him to have gotten a true sense of how much his people hate him, but they don’t, and this is something we need to understand.
As the Polish president said yesterday, “It’s time we take this war to Putin and let him know that it is we who control the context, not him.”