[Please stop identifying Putin and his gang with Russia. Realize
at last: those who want the good of Russia and the Russians cannot but
be irreconcilable enemies of this power.]
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A PLEA FROM THE RUSSIAN LEFT TO WESTERN PROGRESSIVE FRIENDS  
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Boris Kagarlitsky
May 23, 2023
Russian Dissent
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_ Please stop identifying Putin and his gang with Russia. Realize at
last: those who want the good of Russia and the Russians cannot but be
irreconcilable enemies of this power. _

,

 

A long-retired Russian military man was discussing current events by
phone with a former colleague living in Ukraine. Both resented the war
between the two recently fraternal countries and expressed the hope
that this madness would soon end. A few days later, representatives of
the special services raided the Russian. He did not give out any
military secrets, and no one accused him of this. He was charged,
however, with publicly discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian
Federation. In turn, the former officer, who knew the laws, objected
that the conversation had been a private one. And such a charge was
meant to apply to public statements only. “But it was public,”
objected the intelligence officers. “After all, _we_ heard it!”

This is not a fragment from a story written by a modern imitator of
Franz Kafka or George Orwell, but news that is now being discussed on
Russian social networks. There you can also find numerous reports of
fines imposed on people who had inadvertently painted their fence
yellow and blue many years ago, now risking undesirable associations
with the Ukrainian flag, or who thoughtlessly went out into the street
in blue jeans and a yellow jacket. It got to the point that the police
considered writing a denunciation on a box of apples. The fruits were
guilty of the fact that the same “enemy colors” were present in
the package.

Perhaps Western readers may find all these episodes ridiculous. But
try to imagine what it is like to live in a state where you can be
detained and prosecuted for wearing the wrong clothes, for liking a
“seditious” post on social networks, or simply because the
incoming police chief did not like your appearance. As a matter of
principle, Russian courts do not pass down acquittals (in this regard,
the situation is much worse than in Stalin's time), so any accusation,
even the most absurd, is considered proven as soon as it is brought.
And this applies not only to political matters, which would be at
least somewhat understandable in a war, but in general to any criminal
or administrative case.

To my Western colleagues, who, after more than a year since the
beginning of the war, continue to call for an understanding of Putin
and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. Do you
want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent
courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into
your house without a warrant? In a country where museum buildings and
collections formed over decades are handed over to churches, heedless
of the threat of losing unique artifacts? In a country where schools
drift away from the study of science and plan to abolish the teaching
of foreign languages, but conduct “lessons about the important,”
during which children are taught to write denunciations and are taught
to hate all other peoples? In a country which every day broadcasts
appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?

I don't think I really want to.

So, we in Russia also do not want to live like this.

We resist or at least try to preserve our beliefs and principles based
on the humanistic tradition of Russian culture. And when we read on
the Internet about another call to “understand Putin” or “to
meet him halfway,” this is perceived inside Russia as complicity
with criminals who oppress and ruin our own country.

Such appeals are based on a deep, almost racist contempt for the
people of Russia, for whom, according to Western liberal pacifists, it
is perfectly natural and acceptable to live under the rule of a
corrupt dictatorship.

Of course, when someone tells you that the Putin regime is a threat to
the West or to the whole of humanity, this is complete nonsense. The
people to whom this regime poses the most terrible threat is (aside
from the Ukrainians, who are bombarded daily by shells and missiles)
the Russians themselves, their people and culture, their future.

It is clear that Putin and the system he leads have changed over the
past few years; these same people in the mid-2010s could look quite
decent compared to other world politicians. Certainly, they pursued
the same antisocial policy, lied the same way, tried to manipulate
public opinion just like their Western counterparts. But the crisis
that has been going on for the past three years, the war and total
corruption, have led to irreversible shifts, in which the preservation
of the existing political regime turned out to be incompatible not
only with human rights and democratic freedoms, but simply with the
elementary preservation of the rules of modern civilized existence for
the majority of the population.

We must deal with this problem ourselves. How quickly this will
happen, how many trials will come along the way, how many more people
will suffer, no one can know. But we know exactly what will occur. The
decay of the regime will inevitably lead the country to revolutionary
changes, which the supporters of the existing government will write
about with horror.

And from the Western progressive public, we only need one thing - stop
helping Putin with your conciliatory and ambiguous statements. The
more often such statements are made, the greater will be the
confidence of officials, deputies and policemen that the current order
can continue to exist with the silent support or hypocritical
grumbling of the West. Every conciliatory statement made by liberal
intellectuals in America results in more arrests, fines, and searches
of democratic activists and just plain people here in Russia.

We do not need any favor but a very simple one: an understanding of
the reality that has developed in Russia today. Stop identifying Putin
and his gang with Russia. Realize at last: those who want the good of
Russia and the Russians cannot but be irreconcilable enemies of this
power.

_Translated by Dan Erdman_

_BORIS YULYEVICH KAGARLITSKY
[[link removed]] is a
Russian Marxist [[link removed]] theoretician
[[link removed]] and sociologist
[[link removed]] who has been a political
dissident [[link removed]] in
the Soviet Union [[link removed]]. He is
coordinator of the Transnational Institute
[[link removed]] Global Crisis
project and Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social
Movements
[[link removed]] (IGSO)
in Moscow [[link removed]]. Kagarlisky hosts
a YouTube [[link removed]] channel Rabkor,
associated with his online newspaper of the same name and with
IGSO. _

_Russian Dissent [[link removed]] is a
reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my
work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber
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