By admin 
This summer, Ukraine began one of the most ambitious campaigns of its war with Russia. It launched drones deep into Russian territory, hitting some of the country’s biggest oil refineries and causing a nationwide fuel shortage. In some areas, Russians have waited for gas for as long as 69 hours, in lines stretching miles. Impatient drivers have beaten and stabbed one another. Even state-controlled media have acknowledged the problem.
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Ukraine and its allies seemed to hope that frustrated Russians would rise up in protest. After more than four years, the war had finally “come home.” Now that more citizens were feeling its effects, one might assume, they would demand its end and apply pressure to President Vladimir Putin ahead of parliamentary elections in the fall. But so far, no mass uprising appears likely, now or anytime soon.
Russians are used to inconveniences. Under Soviet rule, they lived with shortages of just about everything. Lines were so ubiquitous that academics theorized about Russian identity being shaped by waiting. Books were published with chapter titles such as “The Queue as a Form of Soviet Life.” The newspaper Socialist Industry estimated that Soviet citizens spent 30 billion working hours a year waiting in line for essential goods.
In the late 1980s, at the peak of Soviet scarcity, my family lived on the outskirts of Gorky, a city east of Moscow. Sometimes my mother would send me shopping. I hated it. At a small, gray store called Vegetables, I would wait in line to pick through boxes of rotting produce, hoping to find an acceptable carrot or beetroot for borscht. Then I went to Bread, where I waited some more. Shelves were half empty. The only item that never seemed to run out was margarine; enterprising salespeople tried to make it more appealing by sculpting it into hedgehogs, which they put in display cases. Lines got even longer on the rare days when cheese or butter were delivered. Meat hardly ever came.
Still, nobody protested. We waved away the deprivation and delays. Everyone lives this way, we told ourselves. After all, Soviets knew the cost of complaining. In 1962, thousands of demonstrators gathered to protest wage cuts and government-imposed price increases. In response, Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s government deployed thousands of troops, who killed roughly two dozen demonstrators in what became known as the Novocherkassk massacre.
Russians continue to fear their government. I recently called my former neighbor in St. Petersburg, an art teacher and activist whom I’ll call Svetlana. When I asked whether she had witnessed any street protests, she laughed. “Are you guys living on the moon out there?” she asked me. “Don’t you get how dangerous it is here?”
“It’s even worse than in the Soviet days,” Svetlana continued. “One guy bragged to me the other day that he’d reported his neighbor to the FSB”—the successor of the KGB—simply for listening to anti-war music. She also told me about an acquaintance who had spent two years in prison for leaving a poem and flowers at a monument to a Ukrainian poet. In most households, gripes about the regime don’t leave the kitchen.
At the start of the war, demonstrations were more common. In 2022, police arrested nearly 19,000 anti-war activists, according to OVD-Info, an independent human-rights group. Since then, protests have all but disappeared. This year, one of the most notable critics of the regime was a veteran named Alexander Lunin. In June, Lunin put on his military uniform and recorded a speech denouncing Putin and the war. He posted it on social media, where it received more than 12 million views in 24 hours. The police jailed him, and Lunin publicly apologized for “giving in to emotions due to fatigue.”
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Earlier this week, the only anti-war party was banned from parliamentary elections. Far-right politicians had sued the party, named Yabloko, alleging that it had received foreign funding, violated copyright law, and promoted “extremism.” The supreme court ruled in the far right’s favor, removing Yabloko from the ballot. Only a few hundred Russians protested outside the court.
Most Russians seem to have inherited the long-suffering mentality of the generations who grew up under Soviet rule. Rather than tiring of the war, “Russians realize that they are under attack, and that it’s time to stand together and tighten their belts,” Irina Borogan, a journalist who has studied Russian dissidents, told me. When the BBC asked a middle-aged man living in Crimea about the fuel shortages, he shrugged them off: “We are humans. We’ll adapt.”
Last month, I called Konstantin Sonin, an economist and a professor at the University of Chicago who left Russia in 2015. He told me that his friends in Moscow have made only the barest wartime accommodations—such as sending their kids to summer camp in Gelendzhik, a town on the Black Sea coast, instead of one in the heavily shelled Crimea, even though both areas are well within range of Ukrainian drones. He sounded astonished by his friends’ comfort with risk. “We’ve seen what Ukrainians have been capable of coping with,” Sonin told me. “Russians can endlessly adapt to this crisis too.”
I heard a similar message from Vladislav Inozemtsev, a Russian economist and political scientist who lives in the United States. Inozemtsev told me that his friends in Moscow have used their contacts to circumvent the fuel shortage and get gas delivered to their door. “It’s twice the normal price, but they can afford it; the middle class quickly adapts to difficulties,” he said, while acknowledging that Russians in rural areas will likely have a harder time.
By some accounts, Moscow hardly looks like the capital of a country fighting a war of attrition. Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, described his walk to work to me. The city center, he told me, is filled with decorations that the government has put up: an oversized samovar, an inflatable elephant, sprawling flower beds. Volkov said that he sees no sign of a public revolt. “I would say that the expectations of a revolution in Russia are not based on any real facts,” he said. “All our data proves the opposite.”
A few months before the war, Levada found that Putin’s approval rating was 63 percent. In June, it was 74 percent, although it has been dropping since the start of the year. A majority of Russians—52 percent—said that their country was moving in the right direction. “People blame mainly the West and Washington for all their troubles” instead of Putin, Volkov said. These findings undoubtedly reflect the reluctance of citizens in an authoritarian country to complain to pollsters about their government. Nonetheless, according to Volkov, Levada found that 16 percent of Russians said that they would participate in street protests, up from 11 percent in 2024. Last year, 16 percent of respondents said they felt fear or sadness. This summer, that figure was 29 percent.
Even though there have been no signs of mass protest, Putin is preparing. This year, the Kremlin increased the budget for the national guard and other law-enforcement agencies to a record high of more than $47 billion. Just like Russians who fear the reprise of Soviet-era government violence, Putin also has a precedent to worry about. In 1991, after years of keeping Russians off the streets, the Soviet regime was unable to stop a rally of hundreds of thousands in Moscow, which accelerated its end. Putin may not have much reason to fear such a protest in the near future, but he can’t be too careful.
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