13th December 2011
Vladimir Putin, Democracy, and Activism in Russia
“It is not the end of an epoch. It would be hasty, in fact, to declare the event the beginning of the end. Any comparison to the May Day events of 1990, much less to Tahrir Square, last winter—an event discussed constantly in political circles in Moscow—discounts the fact that millions of Russians remain apolitical and atomized, and have learned to live with a system that provides few legal guarantees but does offer some economic advancement. Yet even before the Duma elections something was clear. Despite Putin’s high approval ratings—–sixty-something per cent, down from the mid-eighties, in 2007—the Russian people can no longer be portrayed as uniformly bovine and apathetic, anesthetized by stability.
