"I will participate in the elections… as a candidate" when the time is right, Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny told the BBC in an interview published on Oct. 21.
And she’s always publically criticized the regime, while staying loyal to her husband (which is important in Russia’s culture).
WDYM? As somebody living in Russia, I just don’t understand this sentence.
This just might give progressive groups inside Russia hope for a better future after an unfortunate accident of Putin.
It might not.
The “public” Russian opposition is mostly tainted by most of it being rats who left Russia very quickly when their political activity would be in some demand. They are now condemning from abroad all the people who didn’t have the economic means to pack up and leave, blaming them for Putin and so on, and not themselves as the part of the Russian elite which is definitely more responsible. While that’s not what Navalny did, and his supporters were somewhat better, he was relevant in the discourses of that opposition.
That opposition also has suspicious amount of people who are basically related to Russia’s elite. A lot of them are not in any kind of opposition anymore really. It came out of fashion, so to speak.
And a lot of those people have shown their rot - say, Makarevich (the musician), who, when it stopped being a low-effort visible social activity to be in opposition, just left for a country that “doesn’t attack that neighbors”, bought some land that apparently is not stolen from people ethnically cleansed and produces wine from grapes grown on that land. Said country is Israel of all places. I still can’t stop feeling dirty, I’ve listened to his songs when I was a kid. About how it’s, quote, “not worth it to bend before the changing world” and so on.
OK, what I really meant to say - there are anti-totalitarian and humanist groups in Russia. But they don’t have much in common with the “public” opposition and even with Navalny’s opposition.
They are more like “demschizo” types of Novodvorskaya’s kind, dissident types similar to people like Sakharov, Starovoytova and Politkovskaya, who all went out of relevance or were murdered in late 90s, in views, and most of all a thousand kinds of communists and anarchists, with not a lot of “progressiveness” in what they think and do. All depressed and silent.
And that’s good, because that’s what the real popular demand was in Russia since 1993 and till now. Between 1996 and 2004 that demand was being murdered, gaslighted, propagandizes, otherwise suppressed out of visible conscious existence.
What you may consider Russian “opposition” are the part of the Russian elites that helped do that, the rich kids and whores who liked to play “opposition” when Putin needed that instead of something real, and then just left for greener pastures.
And Navalny’s opposition consisted of some of their disillusioned, but still clueless supporters and also some people of the real kind. Navalny himself was a neo-Nazi who joined that “soft” Putin’s opposition and then gradually grew some brains.
And I respect his redemption arc. But he does not represent the majority of protest. He consciously chose to cater to, I repeat, Putin-grown elites playing “good Russians”, because those seem important people in important places with glossy appearances. And he shouldn’t have thrown out his life.
I am a libertarian, but 90% of communists in Russia are better than any of those glossy boys and girls with degrees from MSU or HSE, who pretend to support some opposition, but run away from questions relating to where we all stand and what we all are, and whether they realize that innocent people murdered and tectonic changes in our world are real.
WDYM? As somebody living in Russia, I just don’t understand this sentence.
It might not.
The “public” Russian opposition is mostly tainted by most of it being rats who left Russia very quickly when their political activity would be in some demand. They are now condemning from abroad all the people who didn’t have the economic means to pack up and leave, blaming them for Putin and so on, and not themselves as the part of the Russian elite which is definitely more responsible. While that’s not what Navalny did, and his supporters were somewhat better, he was relevant in the discourses of that opposition.
That opposition also has suspicious amount of people who are basically related to Russia’s elite. A lot of them are not in any kind of opposition anymore really. It came out of fashion, so to speak.
And a lot of those people have shown their rot - say, Makarevich (the musician), who, when it stopped being a low-effort visible social activity to be in opposition, just left for a country that “doesn’t attack that neighbors”, bought some land that apparently is not stolen from people ethnically cleansed and produces wine from grapes grown on that land. Said country is Israel of all places. I still can’t stop feeling dirty, I’ve listened to his songs when I was a kid. About how it’s, quote, “not worth it to bend before the changing world” and so on.
OK, what I really meant to say - there are anti-totalitarian and humanist groups in Russia. But they don’t have much in common with the “public” opposition and even with Navalny’s opposition.
They are more like “demschizo” types of Novodvorskaya’s kind, dissident types similar to people like Sakharov, Starovoytova and Politkovskaya, who all went out of relevance or were murdered in late 90s, in views, and most of all a thousand kinds of communists and anarchists, with not a lot of “progressiveness” in what they think and do. All depressed and silent.
And that’s good, because that’s what the real popular demand was in Russia since 1993 and till now. Between 1996 and 2004 that demand was being murdered, gaslighted, propagandizes, otherwise suppressed out of visible conscious existence.
What you may consider Russian “opposition” are the part of the Russian elites that helped do that, the rich kids and whores who liked to play “opposition” when Putin needed that instead of something real, and then just left for greener pastures.
And Navalny’s opposition consisted of some of their disillusioned, but still clueless supporters and also some people of the real kind. Navalny himself was a neo-Nazi who joined that “soft” Putin’s opposition and then gradually grew some brains.
And I respect his redemption arc. But he does not represent the majority of protest. He consciously chose to cater to, I repeat, Putin-grown elites playing “good Russians”, because those seem important people in important places with glossy appearances. And he shouldn’t have thrown out his life.
I am a libertarian, but 90% of communists in Russia are better than any of those glossy boys and girls with degrees from MSU or HSE, who pretend to support some opposition, but run away from questions relating to where we all stand and what we all are, and whether they realize that innocent people murdered and tectonic changes in our world are real.