[Military mobilization has finally buried the “Putin social
contract,” which assumed the political passivity of the people. How
will people act when suddenly and unwillingly awakened to politics and
civic activity?]
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RUSSIAN PROTEST AND EXODUS  
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Boris Kagarlitsky
October 7, 2022
Russian Dissent
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_ Military mobilization has finally buried the “Putin social
contract,” which assumed the political passivity of the people. How
will people act when suddenly and unwillingly awakened to politics and
civic activity? _

,

 

Vladimir Putin, by declaring a “partial” mobilization in Russia,
achieved at least one thing: society finally realized that it was in a
state of war. In fact, in a few minutes, the president not only
destroyed the social contract that had been functioning in the country
for the more than two decades of his rule, but also nullified all the
work of his own propaganda during the previous 7 months of the
conflict with Ukraine.

Until the mobilization was announced, most of the society did not
think about the war, and it can be said that they did not even know
about it. Of course, propagandists raged on TV literally every day,
and on the internet there were fierce battles between supporters and
opponents of the military operation in Ukraine. But the apolitical
Russian society did not show much interest in this; most people do not
watch political television shows, nor do they read political websites,
whether oppositional or pro-government. Somewhere in the background
there is information about battles and losses, but this is nothing
more than the noise of everyday life, which goes on as usual.

On September 21, the situation changed radically and irreversibly.
Awareness has come, and resistance has begun with that. Of course, one
can be outraged that Russians reacted to the tragedy of Ukraine only
when it at last directly affected them. But after all, it took
American society several years for public opinion to react to the
Vietnam War.

The war has actually became not only a part of public consciousness,
but also a defining fact of both public and private life. The first
response to the announcement was a mass evasion of mobilization. In
the days after Putin’s speech, the number of young men leaving the
country far exceeded those who planning to answer the call to mobilize
(of course, if one wants to believe the clearly underestimated
official figures). The number of people who crossed the border
approached 300,00, more than twice as many _refuseniks_ as there are
soldiers in Ukraine. And these are only those who ended up in
neighboring states. Endless crowds of people gathered at the borders
of Kazakhstan and Georgia. They left by personal transport, on
bicycles and scooters, even on foot. On the other side of the border,
in Kazakhstan, many volunteers met the arrivals and helped them. This
is not the first time Kazakhstan has received mass flows of people
from Russia - there have always been exiles, evacuees, and settlers.
At the same time, thousands of young people remained in Russia but
have evaded the clutches of the recruiting stations; some have gone
into the woods, and in some places military enlistment offices and
administrative buildings have been set on fire.

The news is not good for those who came to the recruiting stations
either. Although there have been hints about a secret plan to recruit
a million or even 1.2 million men, there is no way to do this in the
coming months. It is expected that instead of the officially announced
300,000, they will be able to call up between 140,000 and 150,000. But
even this is too much, given the current state of infrastructure,
state organization and industry. Having already received more than a
hundred thousand new conscripts, the military and officials can
neither properly provide them with everything necessary, nor organize
them into combat-ready units, nor equip them with modern weapons, nor
even transport them to the place of combat operations. Approximately
50,000 people are supposed to be distributed among the active units.
How much the front will strengthen from such replenishment is a big
question. It may possibly decline, especially if the newcomers bring
information about the mood in the rear to the soldiers. Having neither
training nor combat experience, those mobilized for the warring army
may become more of a burden than help.

But the problem of the mass of fresh recruits outside the theater of
operations will be much greater. The newly mobilized will have to be
kept somewhere in the rear, scattered across training camps and
barracks throughout the vast country. They sit idle or go through
meaningless and poorly organized training, because there is not enough
equipment, competent instructors, or commanders. The drafted officers
are, firstly, incompetent, and secondly, they are even more
pessimistic than the rank and file. An illustrative example came to
the fore in the form of a fight among the mobilized in Penza, which
began after one of the officers spoke about the gloomy prospects for
the continuation of the war.

Although the regional authorities are desperately trying to do
anything to maintain order, they do not seem to be succeeding. The
supply of men is unlikely to be met, it is already clear that failures
are occurring almost along the entire chain of command, and soon the
real trouble will begin. Left to their own devices, poorly provisioned
and unmotivated units (more precisely, gangs) become a source of
headache for the military and civilian authorities. Maintaining
control and discipline will require enormous effort, but no one has
thought about how to accomplish this yet. From all over the country
there are reports of drunkenness, fights, and disobedience of the
instructions of superiors. Often people are physically nowhere to be
placed. They use stadiums, rest houses, sports bases. Sometimes they
land people in an open field.

The mass of mobilized have posed a threat already, but not for the
enemy. As you know, the mortal blow to the regime of Tsars in 1917 was
dealt not by revolutionaries, but by rear units that had no desire (or
even ability) to go to the front.

In the provinces, resistance takes on more active forms. Protest
actions were held in Dagestan, Yakutia, Tyva and have gradually
appeared in more and more regions. It is significant that it was
Dagestan, from where many contract soldiers left for the special
operation, that turned out to be the epicenter of the protest. But the
fact of the matter is that the popularity of military service in this
region is explained not by the loyalty, but by the poverty of its
people. And now social and national protest have united them.

It is often written that mobilization foretells a genocide of small
peoples. In fact, officials are not interested in the fate of the
Yakuts, Buryats, Tuvans or Avars, but only in indicators. According to
information circulating on the net, the authorities, fearing
discontent in big cities, are directing their main efforts towards
mobilization in rural areas and in small urban settlements. But it is
precisely there that a significant part of the representatives of
small peoples is concentrated, who have to bear the hardships of
mobilization on a scale disproportionate to their numbers. In short,
even if no one wants to arrange genocide, it can somehow turn out by
itself due to bureaucratic panic.

The unrest in Dagestan showed that such actions do not happen without
consequences. True, the number of protesters in Makhachkala was not
particularly large (in absolute numbers, Moscow and St. Petersburg
give a much greater mass character to the protest). But it is
important that the Dagestan women, who made up the majority in the
crowd (which, by the way, included Russians), turned out to be
extremely determined and even aggressive. The police, on the other
hand, were confused. The National Guard is concentrated in the
capitals or is located in the territories of the neighboring state
occupied by the Russian troops, ensuring that referendums occur. So
there is an elementary shortage of security forces.

It is not yet clear whether the Dagestani protest was a one-time
outbreak or the beginning of a large movement. If events in Dagestan
develop, then the authorities will have to shift their attention from
geopolitical conflicts to their own citizens, who can turn into the
biggest problem.

The fact that the mobilization finally buried the “Putin social
contract.” which assumed the political passivity of the people in
exchange for the willingness of the authorities to also leave us the
opportunity to live our philistine life in peace, was not assented to
only by the lazy. But now, when this treaty has collapsed, another
question arises — how will a society operate where social ties have
been undermined for decades, where there is no culture and experience
of solidarity. How will people act when suddenly and unwillingly
awakened to politics and civic activity?

Dagestan shows us one of the options for what should happen next. It
is likely that there will be other options. In any case, society will
no longer be the same as it was before September 21st. Russia did not
want to rise up, not for the COVID epidemic, nor February 24, nor for
the news of early September. But the ruling circles, with their
irresponsible decisions, nevertheless have found a turning point. The
country has finally been woken up.

Whether the authorities will be able to cope with the situation, the
near future will show. Until now, the Russian authorities have shown
an amazing ability to get away with it, to climb out of even the
deepest holes they dug themselves. True, each time, having got out of
the latest crisis provoked by their own decisions, they emerged
convinced of their invulnerability and immediately began to dig a new
hole. Sooner or later they will dig too deep.

_BORIS YULYEVICH KAGARLITSKY
[[link removed]] (Russian
[[link removed]]: Бори́с
Ю́льевич Кагарли́цкий; born 29 August 1958) is a
Russian Marxist [[link removed]] theoretician
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dissident [[link removed]] in
the Soviet Union [[link removed]]. He is
coordinator of the Transnational Institute
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project and Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social
Movements
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in Moscow [[link removed]]. Kagarlisky hosts
a YouTube [[link removed]] channel Rabkor,
associated with his online newspaper of the same name and with IGSO._

* Russia
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* Vladimir Putin
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* Ukraine
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