AS THE SUN set over the Kremlin on the first day of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Moscow felt tense. Black cars with tinted windows, flashing lights and police escorts zipped around the city centre. Police vans pushed ordinary cars to the side of the road. It was as though Moscow itself was coming under attack.
And the “attack” did come, a couple of hours later as several thousand people, mostly young, poured onto the streets holding signs condemning the war their president had unleashed against their brothers and sisters in Ukraine. They chanted, “Net voine” (“No to war”). The same words were splashed with paint on the glass doors of the Russian state Duma, the parliament that had almost unanimously supported the invasion.
The protesters’ faces were crestfallen, gripped by dismay and grief. And they were met with brutality. Helmeted riot police pushed them to the ground and bundled them into vans. Gregory Yudin, a sociologist and left-wing philosopher, was beaten and taken to a police cell before finally being transferred to hospital. On February 24th some 1,700 people were arrested, half of them in Moscow. But anti-war protests also rolled through the country from Siberia to St Petersburg, where more people were detained the following day.
The protests lacked political leadership and organisation, and were not big enough to prompt the authorities to reconsider the war. But they expressed the dominant feeling among Russia’s educated class. “Pain, fury and shame–these are three words that define our attitude to what is going on,” a statement from the dwindling band of independent media outlets read. While on the surface life in Moscow carried on as normal, underneath for many there was a sense that something had changed. On the streets, people stopped to check their social media and watch video streams. In cafés, young people sat in stunned silence, shocked that their country had unleashed war on a neighbour.
Journalists, artists, celebrities, rockstars and bloggers have been speaking out. “Fear and pain,” wrote Ivan Urgant, a popular host on state-owned television, on his Instagram. Monetochka (“Little coin”), a pop star, published a photo of her own face, weeping, with a sign: “So ashamed!”. So far there have been no resignations among senior officials, but neither has there been any enthusiasm for war. Sergei Utkin, a security expert who had previously peddled the Kremlin's line on foreign policy, wrote on Twitter, “My country is committing a horrible crime in Ukraine that can have no justification…We all bear a part of responsibility. There is no good way out of that.”
A petition against the war has gathered 500,000 signatures in a single day, and is growing. Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s main pro-opposition newspaper, came out in two languages, Russian and Ukrainian. Its editor, Dmitry Muratov, the most recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that Mr Putin “is spinning a nuclear button around his finger like some expensive car key chain…But we can never recognise Ukraine as an enemy. And never will.”
Like the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, which shaped the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, the invasion of Ukraine is a departure for Russian society.
The sombre, shamed mood in Moscow could hardly be more different from the euphoria that gripped it in 2014 when Mr Putin seized and annexed Crimea. Then Russian society swelled with pride. Even those who recognised that the annexation was illegal admitted that the bloodless operation had been well executed. Mr Putin’s sagging popularity rating soared. His speech in St George’s hall in the Kremlin was interrupted repeatedly by thunderous applause, standing ovations and chants of “Russia, Russia”. There were tears of joy. Large crowds celebrated the return of Russia’s lost imperial jewel. Dissenting voices, such as that of Boris Nemtsov, a liberal opposition politician who was later murdered in a street near the Kremlin, were drowned out by the patriotic frenzy.
This time opinion polls by Levada, an independent pollster, show that the country is divided, with less than half of the population supporting Mr Putin’s recognition of two Potemkin republics in Ukraine–a precursor to the war. There are no public displays of support for Mr Putin’s invasion.
Government propaganda, which dominates the state television and is also disseminated through YouTube channels and radio, is markedly different from in 2014. Its tone is aggrieved and defensive, not triumphant. It seeks to diminish the scale of the war (or “military operation” in the Kremlin’s parlance). The authorities are trying to steer Russians away from other sources of information. On February 25th the Kremlin limited access to Facebook and instructed the media to rely exclusively on official sources. Footage from Kyiv, where people are sheltering in metro stations, is rare. The Russian public did not want and was not prepared for this war. Indeed, the Kremlin had repeatedly insisted that it would not go to war in Ukraine.
Mr Putin’s supporters are appealing not for celebration but for stoicism. Valentina Matvienko, the president of Russia’s upper chamber of parliament, who has gushingly backed Mr Putin’s every move, is now asking people to bear with the consequences. “Yes, it won’t be easy for some time to live through [Western sanctions] but we will try to reduce their effect,” she said on February 25th. Meanwhile, Russians rushed to their banks to take out dollars. Many electronics retailers have raised their prices by 30% as a result of the slump in the value of the ruble, and people are rushing to buy while stocks last. It is presumably not how Mr Putin imagined they would mark his crowning foreign foray. ■
Our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here