How does it work then, why isn’t there this expression of discontent that we observe, for example, in Iran?
“Street protest has never been the favored mode of expression of political discontent among Russians. Beyond the question of repression, Russia is an archipelago of islets so isolated from each other that what happens in one affects the others very little. Protest movements in one of these islets do not affect Moscow. We hardly have, in Russia, the experience of a conflagration which would have taken from town to town.
The Russians’ preferred mode of protest is not to confront the state but to slip through the cracks of the state, to dispossess it of its power from within. For example, giving a bribe in order not to be mobilized is a practice of sabotage, it is another way of confronting the state.
The Russians’ preferred mode of protest is not to confront the state but to slip through the cracks of the state, to dispossess it of its power from within.
Moreover, during the seventy years of the Soviet Union, the citizens of that country were asked to sacrifice themselves for their country, to agree to give their lives if necessary, to be united before a great ideal. Since the fall of the USSR, they aspire above all to live their private lives, to be actors in their own lives. The political question, the adherence to ideas remind them of bad memories, ‘we are so dead for ideas that we don’t want ideas, ideals anymore.'”
