When will Russians start protesting?

Putin's recent crackdown on internet freedom raises new questions about what it will take for Russians to start protesting against their government. In this video, I share some thoughts about when we might expect that to happen and discuss whether dissatisfaction with internet restrictions can lead to more widespread protests.

Watch the video here or read the transcript below.

Best,
Anders

Transcript:

What I want to do today is to address the question of when Russians will start protesting. This is, of course, one of the big questions that's been discussed a lot since the full-scale invasion in 2022. It's an important question for two reasons right now. One of them is that the prospect of protests in Russia is seen as something that might force Putin into ending the war in Ukraine. And the second reason is that we currently have an interesting situation with crackdowns on internet freedom, which have sparked protests in Russia in a way that we haven't seen before. It's still small scale, but the big question is, are these internet protests the beginning of a bigger movement or are they going to lead to nothing? So let's talk about it.

Before going into the discussion about internet crackdowns and what that might lead to, it's helpful to have an idea of what it will take for Russians to start protesting in the first place. And this is something that's received quite a lot of attention during the war in Ukraine, because for people in the West and in Ukraine, it can be hard to understand why the Russians are not protesting.

So I'm going to start with a theoretical discussion. When it comes to the question of Russian protests, there are different schools of thought. I'm going to describe three perspectives and I will be leaning heavily on the work of Professor Sam Greene from King's College in London. And I'm going to put a link in the video description to a blog post where he discusses some of these topics.

The first perspective is what can be called the social contract theory. The idea here is that there is a kind of tacit agreement between the Russian elite and the population. The population will stay out of politics, and then in return, they will receive security and economic prosperity.

This is a very common way to describe the Russian system, especially among Western analysts. The problem with the social contract theory is that it implies Russians would start protesting if the political elites stopped delivering on promises of security and prosperity. And indeed, that doesn't really seem to be the case. Putin has, in fact, delivered the exact opposite over the last few years. There's less security and less prosperity, but Russians are still not protesting. So the social contract theory is not actually very good at predicting when Russians will start protesting.

The second theory is what Sam Greene calls passive adaptation. This theory is more popular among some Russian analysts, and I'd say it's also quite common to find among Ukrainians. The idea here is that Russians have become so accustomed over many years to hardship and bad interactions with the government that they have learned to just passively adapt to whatever the government throws at them. They know that the government is bad, but they have a very cynical attitude about it where they don't expect that any government could be better.

So protesting doesn't really help because even if you remove the politicians that are in power, the ones that are replacing them will just be just as bad. So instead of protesting, what the Russians do, according to this theory, is that they just decouple from politics. They adapt to the situation and they try to get the best out of it.

What that means is that we should not expect Russians to begin protesting as long as they still have the resources to make ends meet in their personal lives. Even if things get really bad, they are still willing to absorb that because they don't have any expectations from their politicians about actually doing anything good. They fully expect their politicians to make bad decisions, and as long as they can find ways to work around the system, then things are fine.

The problem with the passive adaptation theory is that we have actually seen quite a few examples of different kinds of protests in Russia over the years. Most of them have not been sweeping demands for reforms or things like that, but instead they've been more local protests, something about specific causes that have managed to mobilize the population to some extent against the government. And in these cases, the government has often given in to the pressure and they've rolled back the proposal or plan or whatever people were angry about. So the passive adaptation theory is also not very good at predicting protests in Russia.

The final theory is what Sam Greene refers to as aggressive immobility. The point here is that Russians are not just passively adapting to whatever the government imposes on them. Russians have indeed experienced lots of hardships and dysfunction, and they are very cynical about their government and politicians. But what they've done is to start to rely heavily on different kinds of coping mechanisms and ways to work around the system.

This means that the lives of Russians depend heavily on their ability to continue using those coping mechanisms and for these workarounds to continue functioning. And that means that they are heavily dependent on the system not changing. The system may not be good today, but at least I know how it works and I have my workarounds. So the last thing the Russians want is for their government to start changing anything. They just want things to continue working the way they do because any change is dangerous and any change can break the coping mechanisms that I depend on to make my life work.

So it's an extremely conservative position. That's why Sam Greene calls it aggressive immobility. Russians are not just passive, they are aggressively conservative. Even if the government is trying to do something good to make the system less dysfunctional, there are going to be protests against it because they don't want the system to change.

So that's a bit about the academic debate about protests in Russia and when we might expect Russians to start protesting against Putin's policies. I find the aggressive immobility theory most convincing to me. It seems to best explain what's going on and when we have historically seen protests in Russia about different kinds of things.

So if we work with that theory, what that suggests is that the interesting situations to look for if we want to be able to predict protests in Russia are those where the government takes steps that fundamentally change how society functions, because those are the situations that can lead to protests. It's not going to lead to protests just because the economic crisis is getting worse or things are hard. But if Putin starts tampering with the fundamentals of how Russian society operates, that's worth following because those are exactly the kinds of ingredients that can mobilize Russians into aggressive protests.

And that's why the current turmoil regarding internet regulation is worth following, because it's playing with the basic infrastructure of how society works. It challenges many of the routines that Russians depend on in their daily lives. What's happening is that the Russian government has decided to bring the internet under control. This is a crackdown at a level that is far beyond what we've seen before.

Russia, of course, has a long history of blocking certain websites or slowing down internet traffic on platforms like YouTube, for example. But what's happening right now is on a completely different scale. It seems that Putin has given the task to the second service of the FSB to implement whatever measures they deem necessary to get the internet under control for the Russians. And the idea is to have a whitelist of websites and services approved by the Russian government that Russians can access, and everything else will be impossible to access.

This is actually quite difficult to do, technically speaking. So what Russians are experiencing right now is that the internet is, broadly speaking, becoming less and less usable. They can't use social media the way they used to. Telegram does not work. YouTube does not work. Instagram does not work, et cetera. Many websites don't work. They can't access their banks. They can't order pizza. They can't pay their taxis. Their bank cards often don't work. All these things depend on the internet, and this is what the FSB is currently attempting to block.

Some of these things are not new. The Russian government has tried to ban Instagram for a long time, for example. But what is new is that they're also increasingly targeting VPNs. So that's a workaround Russians have started using. And what they do is they have VPNs on their phones and computers so that they can get around the restrictions. But now they've also decided to put an end to everyone just using a VPN to circumvent the blocks.

So the Russian authorities are targeting VPN providers and there is a cat and mouse game going on. They block certain IP addresses that VPNs use, and then the VPNs change those IP addresses and this keeps going back and forth.

But they've also implemented another measure. If you are a Russian business and you want your website to be on the whitelist of approved websites that Russians can access, then you need to block VPNs from accessing your website. And this makes it much more complicated for people to use VPNs. Essentially, it means that you have to turn your VPN on and off all the time, depending on which website you're visiting. And you can only write to people that currently have their VPN on, et cetera. So overall, Russians are experiencing that the internet is becoming increasingly unreliable and useless.

And that's exactly the kind of thing that according to the theory about when Russians might protest has the right ingredients to potentially be something extraordinary. And that's why I think it's worth watching.

And we have seen some fairly high-level Russian personalities expressing discontent with the direction that the government is taking here. We've seen protests among the Z-bloggers who depend heavily on Telegram to reach their audience. We've seen longtime Putin supporters like Ilya Remeslo, who suddenly come out against the authorities and demand that Putin be put on a war tribunal.

Right now, there is an interesting case that involves a Russian Instagram glamour blogger named Victoria Bonya who has published some very critical videos about the direction of things in Russia. I think Bonya's case is especially interesting because this is a person who has not traditionally had any political views, but now suddenly she does. And she does so under the headline, "Mr. Putin, people are afraid of you, but I'm not".

I've had discussions with people who say that this is just a Kremlin-controlled information operation, but I'm pretty sure that it's not. Her message hits all the right points to be something that is potentially dangerous. It's exactly about how the government is now altering the fundamentals of how society functions in a way that challenges people's coping mechanisms.

The idea that this would be a Kremlin-controlled information operation could make sense if Putin were preparing to suddenly emerge as the big savior who reprimands the FSB and rolls back all the internet restrictions, and so people can go back to live the way they did before. But Putin is not preparing to do that.

So I'm pretty sure that this is not something that the Kremlin has staged or initiated. Now, they're of course going to do damage control as best as they can. I would not be totally surprised if they tried to recruit Victoria Bonya, for example, into politics and have her run for Putin's party in the Duma elections in September or something like that. But I'm pretty sure that it's not something that the Kremlin has planned. And they don't like this situation because they know it's dangerous.

And that leads to perhaps the bigger perspective in all this. Right now, there is the question about internet restrictions and how that is a government-enforced change in the structure of Russian society. This has the potential to mobilize Russians in protests against the government. But we are now at a point where due to the war in Ukraine, Putin will need to take multiple such steps in the future because the current system is broken.

The war, in combination with the bad economy, will force him to make more and more changes that interfere directly in people's lives. The time when Putin could shield the Russian population from the war is approaching an end.

So that is also the context in which we should see these internet crackdowns. They're trying to shape the information environment to lay the groundwork for future decisions that they know will be controversial. These steps will more directly interfere in people's lives, and they're exactly the kinds of changes that can mobilize that aggressive conservatism, that desire to keep things just as they were yesterday, and can lead to protests in Russian society.

So even if you don't think these current internet crackdowns are going to lead to broader protests in Russia, it's absolutely worth following the developments in the coming time because there are going to be other things that might.