There are two Russias. The one on the postcards, and the one nobody likes to show. On one side, the gilded onion domes of the Kremlin, the marble metro stations of Moscow, and the palaces of Saint Petersburg. Moscow and its outskirts alone account for a quarter of the national GDP. The rest of the country is made up of small towns without proper sewage systems, pensions of one hundred and fifty euros a month, district hospitals where patients bring their own bedsheets, and schools that close for lack of heating. As if two different countries shared the same flag.

The numbers expose just how violent this wealth gap really is. The richest ten percent of Russians own 82% of the national wealth, which is a record among developed countries. Twelve percent of citizens cannot afford enough food to eat. Twenty-five percent spend their entire income on food and therefore cannot afford clothes. Thirty-five percent of households cannot give every family member a single pair of shoes per season. Two-thirds of families have no savings at all. I’ll leave Russian poverty there, because the list is sadly far longer. These figures are not from Western NGOs. They come straight from the Russian Federal Statistics Service. So you can bet the reality is even worse.

The vast Russia of the exploited lives in Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, and Kazan. In the countryside of the Caucasus, in Buryatia, Dagestan, and Yakutia. That is the Russia supplying the cannon fodder for the war in Ukraine. Buryats and Tuvans, for example, are four times more likely to die there than a Russian from Moscow. In Crimea, 80% of mobilization orders target the Tatars, who only make up 20% of the population. Meanwhile, the children of the nomenklatura have a great time in London or Dubai while their parents run a rentier economy from Moscow that enriches only a tiny caste of the privileged.

What a strange country! Because Russia has gigantic natural resources, an enormous territory, universities that have produced Nobel laureates, a literature that shaped global thought, and talented engineers who put the first man into orbit. Despite all of that, for three centuries, nothing has changed for the better. Tsars, Bolsheviks, Stalin, Brezhnev, Putin. The names parade past, and the same machinery holds firm thanks to a carefully maintained cult of the all-powerful leader.

So the question is fair. Why has a country with so many opportunities been a real hell for the majority of its inhabitants for centuries? That is what we are going to try to understand in this article.

What Russia has given the world that is truly great

Before we get into everything that is seriously broken, let’s start with the positive. Because few countries can claim to have weighed as heavily on world culture and scientific progress as Russia.

In literature, Russia invented a psychological depth that no other literary tradition can match. Dostoevsky probed the human soul like a scalpel before Freud had even theorized the unconscious. Tolstoy wrote, in War and Peace, what is probably the greatest novel ever written. Chekhov reinvented the short story and the theater. And Gogol inspired Kafka.

The twentieth century kept this tradition alive, but in an even more tragic form. Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita in total secrecy under Stalinist terror. Pasternak was persecuted for his Doctor Zhivago and had to refuse the Nobel Prize under pressure from the Kremlin. Akhmatova refused to leave Leningrad during the purges and waited every night for an arrest that never came for her, but did strike her loved ones. Mandelstam died in the Gulag for a sixteen-line poem against Stalin. Brodsky, also a Nobel laureate, was convicted of “social parasitism” and then forced into exile. Solzhenitsyn documented the Gulag Archipelago at the risk of his life. So we are talking about a whole string of talented and courageous authors who built a literature out of resistance to oppression.

In the sciences, the picture is just as impressive. Mendeleev and the periodic table of elements. Lobachevsky and non-Euclidean geometry, which paved the way for Einstein’s relativity. Pavlov and physiology. Kolmogorov, probably the greatest twentieth-century mathematician in the field of probability. Landau, Kapitsa, and Sakharov. Sakharov is worth a pause, because he was the creator of the Soviet H-bomb. Yet he then became the greatest dissident in the USSR. Despite winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, he was placed under house arrest in Gorky for seven years. So Russian scientific genius often went hand in hand with political backbone.

When it comes to space exploration, Russia wrote the opening pages of the story. First Sputnik in 1957, Gagarin in 1961, Tereshkova as the first woman in space in 1963, the Mir station, and even today the Soyuz capsules that keep ferrying crews up to the ISS.

In the arts, Russia’s contribution carries just as much weight. Classical music owes it Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev. Above all, Russia gave the world Shostakovich, who survived Stalin by encoding his dissent into his scores.

Dance had its revolution with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the start of the twentieth century. Nureyev crossed the Iron Curtain in 1961 to embody what freedom could do for a body and for an art form.

Painting saw the birth of Kandinsky, the inventor of abstract art. Malevich signed Black Square on White Background, one of the most radical paintings in history. Chagall carried his Jewish dreamlike vision from Vitebsk all the way to Paris. Rodchenko and the Constructivists reinvented graphic design and architecture in the blazing 1920s, just before Stalin crushed the movement.

Russian cinema is no slouch either. Eisenstein laid the foundations of modern grammar with Battleship Potemkin. Tarkovsky filmed poems that influenced three generations of filmmakers worldwide.

Video games are also very well represented. Tetris was invented in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov in the basement of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow on an Elektronika 60. It has since become one of the most-played games in history. Yet Pajitnov did not see a single ruble in royalties for ten years, because the fruit of his genius had been confiscated by the Soviet state before he finally got it back in the 1990s. Beyond that landmark title, a whole industry has thrived. Take Saber Interactive, founded in Saint Petersburg in 2001. That studio now co-develops blockbusters like Space Marine 2. More broadly, Russian creators have put out cult games with dark, demanding worlds.

And then there is the angle that almost always gets forgotten when people talk about Russia. I am of course talking about its anarchist tradition. There were great thinkers like Pyotr Kropotkin, who theorized cooperation as the driving force of life. There was Mikhail Bakunin, the father of collectivist anarchism, who crossed swords with Marx in the First International and fiercely defended a revolution that would not create a new master. And Tolstoy himself, toward the end of his life, drew close to a Christian anarchism that influenced Gandhi.

And the practical applications followed. Take Nestor Makhno, who held a self-managed zone in Ukraine for three years from 1918 to 1921 before being crushed by the Red Army. There were also the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who won the majority in the first free elections in Russian history in November 1917. But they were dissolved by force by the Bolsheviks two months later.

In the end, this whole tradition represents an enormous heritage. And above all, it shows clearly that authoritarianism is not encoded into the genetic makeup of a people. If Russians have been ruled this way, it is not by choice. It is mainly because the other paths had been wiped out. So yes, Russia has everything it takes to shine. And shine it has. But for the past few years, the light has been almost completely turned off.

The history of Russia’s dark side

From tsars to dictators, from one betrayal to the next, Russia keeps telling the same story. The story of a people that hopes. But the same patterns of confiscated freedoms and stolen wealth keep snapping right back into place.

Let’s start with the Romanovs. Three centuries at the top, during which the bulk of the population remained the legal property of the powerful until 1861. You bought the peasant along with his land. You sold him. You inherited him. You even gambled him away at cards. What a charming country! The tsar called himself the “Little Father of the People”. A touching phrase, when you remember that it referred to the head of a family whose members were his property. And when that family came to the Winter Palace on January 22nd, 1905, to politely ask for a little justice, daddy answered with machine-gun fire. A thousand dead. The lesson was understood.

It would be remembered for twelve years. Until February 1917, when Petrograd rose up. Workers and soldiers refused to obey. The Romanovs fell, and the people who had defeated their tyrants then organized, for the first time in Russian history, free elections. Citizens voted overwhelmingly for the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who promised land to the peasants and a real democracy. The Bolsheviks came in fourth. But there was one very important little detail. They had the rifles! With that going for them, in January 1918, Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly after a single session. The first real Russian democracy lasted only thirteen weeks. A world record for brevity that still stands. The anarchists, the SRs, and the Mensheviks were liquidated right after. “Communism” had just seized power in the form of a one-party dictatorship.

In 1921, the sailors of Kronstadt, the heroes of October three years earlier, dared to point out that this was not exactly what they had in mind when they revolted. They demanded free soviets and the end of terror. Trotsky’s answer was to send the Red Army to massacre them on the frozen ice of the Baltic. Which came down to killing the revolutionaries in the name of the revolution. The stage was set for the decades to come.

Then came Stalin’s turn. He invented nothing. He just perfected the brutality of power. He patiently waited for Lenin to die before taking over the party. Then he liquidated his old comrades one by one over the years. Forced collectivization starved all of Ukraine. The Holodomor alone killed between three and five million people. Whole peoples were deported in cattle cars. Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, and Volga Germans. The Gulag swallowed eighteen million people. The 1937 to 1938 purges sent 750,000 citizens to the firing squad based on trials wrapped up in twenty minutes. For those who quickly cry “Western propaganda”, all these numbers are taken from the Soviet archives themselves. Under state “communism”, a human life was worth nothing anymore. It was just a data point broken down into arrest quotas sent by Moscow to the regions. In the end, Stalin may well be the only ruler in history to have killed his citizens according to a five-year plan.

He died in 1953. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and Khrushchev cracked open the windows. He denounced the cult of personality and freed a few Gulag survivors. Then Brezhnev locked it all down again, and Russia sank into its great gerontocratic nap, with old men in gray suits ruling from their hospital beds over a country that had forgotten what a new idea looked like. Until 1986, when the Chernobyl nuclear plant blew up. Of course, in the great tradition of Russian rulers, the regime’s first reflex was to hide the disaster. They even let Ukrainian children parade through the radioactive cloud for the May 1st celebrations.

It’s worth pointing out just how badly the Soviet economy was on its knees. While leaders were taking turns in their wheelchairs, the country was bankrupting itself in silence. Central planning had killed off all innovation. Factories were producing goods that nobody wanted. Stores were empty while surpluses rotted in warehouses. Lining up to buy bread became the norm in provincial cities. All because the USSR was spending a quarter of its GDP on weapons just to keep up with the United States. Stretched that thin, the coffers ran dry. From 1986 onward, the house of cards really began to shake, because the price of oil had collapsed.

That is the context in which Gorbachev came to power. He, at least, had understood that the country was heading straight for the wall. So he tried to manage an honorable exit. Glasnost to free up speech, perestroika to reform the economy, and de-escalation with Reagan to stop the military spending hemorrhage. He was probably the first Soviet leader since Lenin to have a real vision. But it was too late, because everything collapsed in 1991, when the USSR vanished within a few months and took with it whatever could still pass for a state.

The 1990s could have been Russia’s great chance. The opportunity to finally make the turn the country had never made. But it was the exact opposite! Because about a dozen guys cynical enough to do it grabbed every single industrial asset in the country in a matter of months, thanks to rigged privatizations and the loans-for-shares scheme. And while a handful of people became billionaires in a single season, male life expectancy collapsed to 57. Pensions were not even being paid out anymore. So vodka went back to being what it had always been for crushed Russians. A powerful and cheap anesthetic.

At the top of this shipwreck, Boris Yeltsin came along to deliver the finishing blow to the country’s development. He was a man with a heart condition, an alcoholic, sometimes lucid and often absent. Yet he was still re-elected in 1996 thanks to massive backing from the oligarchs he was letting strip Russia of whatever wealth was left. But in 1999, the old lion decided to step aside, taking care to handpick his successor. And the man he chose was no reformer, no democrat, not even a political figure the public knew. He was just a former KGB agent who had moved over to Saint Petersburg city hall under Anatoly Sobchak. The city was rotted through with post-Soviet organized crime, and his job was to oversee relations between city hall and the business world. In other words, relations between city hall and the Tambovskaya, the mafia octopus running the port, drugs, and real estate. He had already been flagged at the time in the 1991 food scandal, a case of fake export contracts signed in exchange for goods that never reached a city that was actually starving. So the country was handed over to a small, cold man with no obvious charisma, but well plugged into the security services and the criminal networks of Saint Petersburg. His name: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Three centuries of misery to land at this pitiful handover! From a tsar who owned his serfs to a mobster who owns his country. Going through Bolsheviks who stole the revolution, a Georgian who hijacked the one-party system, a gerontocracy that let everything rot on the vine, and an old alcoholic who ended up selling the house to a former KGB man. Coherent, in a way. But mostly hopeless.

What three centuries of authoritarianism have hammered into the Russian mind

A people is not its leaders. But three centuries of fierce conditioning are bound to leave traces. And these traces are not Russian by essence. They are Russian by accumulation. Accumulation of internalized fears, of official lies swallowed to survive, of obedience reflexes passed down from one generation to the next the way a mother tongue or a religion gets passed on.

Let’s start with the worst of it. When a state kills several million of its own citizens in one or two generations, something breaks inside the society that has lived through that. Human life stops carrying the same weight. Not because Russians are cruel by nature, but because the norm has been pushed so far that it ends up redefining what counts as normal.

When your neighbor disappears in the night and nobody asks any questions, you learn to stop asking questions yourself. When a million dead trigger no emotion at all in the state press, you end up not feeling much either. That is how human life became an adjustment variable in Russia’s public sphere. Just look at the terrifying figures of military losses in Ukraine, treated with the kind of accountant’s detachment you would usually reserve for economic data. Nobody is really moved. Nobody takes to the streets. Because the unacceptable has had time to become routine. Because the fear of merciless repression outweighs everything else. And yet, far fewer Russians would have died if they had dumped Putin instead of diving into a tragic fratricidal war against a neighboring country. But it seems it was more comfortable to back the madness while telling themselves lies.

Along the same lines, Russians have learned to accept inequality as a law of nature. Yesterday, it was the nomenklatura. A caste of two or three million privileged people with access to luxury stores reserved for them, official dachas, decent medical care, and trips abroad. All while the rest of the country lined up for soap. Today, it is the mafia of billionaire oligarchs. An even narrower caste, made up of just a few hundred families that own yachts, private jets, sun-drenched villas, and shares in the country’s hydrocarbons. Meanwhile, the pensioner in Novosibirsk counts his kopecks and just hopes to make ends meet.

The mechanics have been the same for three centuries. A small caste has every right except the right to criticize the leader. And everyone else has no rights at all. Especially not the right to criticize the small caste of parasites in power. So why does this unacceptable situation keep going? Why doesn’t anyone take to the streets with pitchforks when an oligarch buys an English football team while a hospital shuts down two hours from Moscow? Because every attempt at revolt has been smothered before it could succeed. The Russian people have ended up swallowing the false idea that revolting is useless. This resignation is not cowardice. Once again, it is the product of a long conditioning.

The other inheritance is called self-censorship. It even has a Russian equivalent that the Russians themselves coined to describe it. Dvoyemyslie, which means doublethink. Orwell actually theorized it in 1984, but the Russians had already been practicing it for half a century when the book came out. In practice, it amounts to saying one thing in public while thinking the opposite. Applauding in a meeting the leader you viscerally hate. Or signing the petition condemning a neighbor you know to be innocent.

Under Stalin, this kind of mental gymnastics was a matter of survival. After Stalin, it became second nature. Even today, when a poll announces 80% approval for Putin, you have to understand what the figure is really measuring. In reality, it just measures how many Russians still have the reflex, when a stranger calls them up with political questions, of saying exactly what they need to say to avoid attracting attention. The USSR has been dead for over thirty years. But the reflexes it managed to drive in are still very much alive.

And on top of all that, there is one big fat myth holding the whole thing together. The myth of Eternal Great Russia. A messianic nation, the keeper of values that would save the world. Which is a story as crude and as effective as the American dream at its most mystical. Because it is the kind of fable that lets poor Russians feel great when they cannot manage to be happy. It also turns every imperialist war into a defensive crusade against a hostile West. In short, the myth of Great Russia is the cement that keeps the house from collapsing. It is also what makes any reform impossible. Because you cannot reform yourself as long as you believe you stand above everyone else.

That is the real dead weight. It is not Russian nature, it is Russian heritage. And the difference is crucial. So nothing is set in stone. To see this clearly, take the example of Germany. In 1945, it carried the same historical burden. But instead of running away from a brutal truth, it looked it in the eye, named it, taught it, and settled the score. That is what Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the work of coming to terms with the past. Russia has never done that work. It has never settled the score with Stalin. It has never settled the score with the KGB. It has never settled the score with the empire. And until that work is done, every generation will inherit the same burden. The burden will only get heavier, producing the same totalitarian system again and again.

The Russian Federation is the biggest cartographic lie in the world

On paper, Russia is a federation. With eighty-three subjects, including twenty-one republics, territories, regions, and autonomous districts. But in practice, Russia is an empire centralized from Moscow that treats its own territories like colonies. The word federation is just a stage prop, there to make the whole thing a bit more palatable. Because nothing gets decided outside the Kremlin. And whatever flows into the federal coffers is pulled from the soil of the periphery before being redistributed at the whim of the central power.

The ideological framework of this domination has a name that Putin and the Orthodox Church have brought back into fashion since the 2000s. It is the Russkiy Mir, the “Russian World”. Officially, it is a cultural and spiritual community. In reality, it is a hierarchy. At the top, the ethnic, Orthodox, Slavic Russian, who is supposed to be the guardian of civilization. Below, all the other peoples of the federation are tolerated as long as they stay in their place. And even though the propaganda boasts about the harmonious cohabitation of one hundred and fifty nationalities under one flag, the reality on the ground tells a different story.

Because the reality on the ground is internal colonialism that does not say its name. The twenty-one so-called autonomous republics are home to most of the country’s non-Russian peoples. Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis, Bashkirs, Yakuts, Buryats, Tuvans, Kalmyks, Udmurts, Maris, Komis, and dozens of others. Each of these populations had its own language, culture, institutions, and sometimes even its own state before being absorbed by the tsarist empire or by the USSR.

For all these colonized peoples, the Russian language was imposed as the language of instruction. In most of these regions, local languages have been reduced to optional and marginal subjects in schools. Since 2018, a federal law has scrapped the obligation to teach regional languages in the republics concerned. Which basically amounts to a death sentence carried out over two generations. Beyond language, material culture suffered the same fate. Sacred sites were desecrated or destroyed under the Soviets. The national history of the colonized peoples was rewritten to fit it inside the great Russian narrative. And any attempt to assert an identity is automatically reclassified as separatism. And therefore immediately put down in blood.

In this context, racism is not some individual flaw you might lament in a few bad apples. It is plain and simple, on a massive scale. People from the Caucasus and Central Asia are constantly stopped by police on the streets of Moscow, insulted on public transport, and discriminated against in jobs and housing. The word “churki”, one of the most insulting in the Russian racist repertoire, points to any citizen with non-Slavic features, even Russians by nationality.

Mobilization for the war in Ukraine tore the mask off. While Moscow and Saint Petersburg were relatively spared, mobilization orders zeroed in on the peripheral republics. Buryats and Tuvans were four times more likely to die there than Russians from the capital. Dagestan saw its villages emptied of their young men. Buryatia buried its sons at a frightening pace. In other words, the central government sent mostly to the front the very populations it despised, to fuel a war of expansion in the name of a “Russian World” they were never fully part of. So Russian colonialism has found its most Machiavellian form, using the lives of the colonized to conquer new colonies.

Now let’s compare with what is called a federation elsewhere. In the United States, every state has its own legislative, judicial, fiscal, and educational powers. Texas does not work like Vermont, and that is precisely the point of a federation. In Germany, the Länder raise their own taxes, run their police and education, and carry weight in the Bundesrat against the federal government. In Switzerland, the cantons are so sovereign that they decide their own tax and health policies. In a real federation, the center and the periphery share sovereignty and wealth, with common values built collectively over time. Russia has been doing the opposite forever. One hand sucks up the resources, while the other imposes terror. And whatever trickles down is just crumbs, redistributed at the discretion of the Kremlin.

Russia is therefore not a federation. It is just an evil empire. Or, more simply put, a colonial state. And either way, colonialism and empires have always carried out the worst horrors throughout the history of human civilizations.

Where does the complicity between the Russian people and the dictatorship begin?

That leaves the awkward question. The one politely sidestepped in Western press articles for fear of looking contemptuous. The one that still has to be asked if we want to break out of the victim narrative that suits everyone, especially the regime we claim to be calling out. Are Russians victims or accomplices of their own political system?

Both, obviously! But the proportion matters. A people muzzled for three centuries does not wake up overnight. A people who saw their grandparents disappear into the Gulag for the wrong word do not have the same reflexes as a people who have been demonstrating freely for ten generations. These nuances are real, and it would be unfair to ignore them. But they have their limits. And those limits, Orwell put into words better than anyone.

A people that elects corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims. They are accomplices.

The line is harsh. It hits hard! It refuses the comfort of perpetual complaint. It says that beyond a certain threshold, the excuse of ignorance no longer holds. That the excuse of fear is no longer enough. That the excuse of propaganda bombardment is no longer enough. That there comes a point when doing nothing becomes a form of action. That staying silent becomes just as clear a statement as speaking up.

Sure, Putin has crudely rigged elections several times. But who showed up to vote? Who signed the electoral rolls? Who agreed to play along with the democratic charade instead of publicly disowning it? Sure, Putin launched a war of conquest in Ukraine. But how many Russians took to the streets in February 2022? A few thousand, quickly dispersed. That was clearly not enough! How many refused the September 2022 mobilization? Several hundred thousand fled abroad. Was it courage or cowardice not to rebel? Maybe both? But it is worth noting that among those who did not have the means to leave the country, very few found the strength to say no in public.

Putin has been ruling for twenty-five years. To do that, he has needed the daily work of millions of civil servants, teachers, judges, police officers, journalists, and soldiers. And every one of them chose, day after day, to keep the machine running. Orwell described this mechanism perfectly. Because he had built Animal Farm explicitly as a critique of the betrayed Russian revolution. And he drew this precise moral from it, which is worth quoting in full:

I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.

Knowing how to chuck out your leaders. That’s the key phrase! What Russians have never managed to do. Or rather, what they have been methodically prevented from doing at every attempt. But at some point, you have to take your own history back into your own hands, even if you have to do it bare-handed.

Central Europe did it in 1989, without bloodshed in most countries. Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, East Germans, and Balts managed to chuck out regimes that looked just as immovable as today’s Russian regime. Some with Solidarność from 1980 onward, some through general strikes, some through round-table negotiations, some through the fall of a wall. And they all had one thing in common. They had decided that they would no longer be accomplices. That they would refuse to keep the machine running. The rest followed on its own.

Russia has never had that moment. It came close in 1991, but it let Yeltsin and the oligarchs steal that historic opportunity. It has not tried again since. That is the real contemporary tragedy of the Russian people. Not being oppressed, since so many peoples are, or have been. But not knowing how to get rid of their oppressors, or wanting to, when the window was open. And letting the lid of lead press down harder and harder as time goes by. Whatever the level of suffering endured, the dominant feeling is lethargy.

Conclusion: What Russia could become

Let’s take a clear-eyed look at who Russia shares the diplomatic benches with today. Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, which supplies shells and military manpower in exchange for oil and technology. The ayatollahs’ Iran, which delivers Shahed drones to hit Ukrainian buildings. Lukashenko’s Belarus, which is just another mafia dictatorship turned into a docile satellite. Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, until his fall in 2024. Maduro’s Venezuela. The military junta in Burma. There you have the friends’ circle of so-called Great Russia! So when the only partners still willing to shake your hand are the worst regimes on the planet, the problem is on your side.

For now, the image people have of Russians in the West is that of a nation that claims to be fighting Nazism while ticking every single one of its boxes. To the point of shamelessly calling its neocolonial forces in Africa “Africa Corps”. Sure, the spelling is a little different from the Nazi expeditionary force led by Erwin Rommel during World War II. But the reference at least has the merit of being explicit about its ideological inspiration. On top of that, you have the constant cyberattacks that very often hit hospitals and other public services that should be kept clear of this kind of operation, which only highlights the evil character of the Russian regime. And let’s not forget the meddling in elections, designed to push the most reactionary politicians possible into office. Put all these pieces together, and the image of the Russian abroad is that of a fascist troll soaked in vodka. Which is not exactly a flattering picture.

Through its anti-democratic actions, Putin’s Russia has therefore picked the side of shame. Nobody forced its hand! It has even become one of the godfathers of every rogue state on the planet. And while its diplomats vote at the UN alongside the North Korean regime, its artists are fleeing by the tens of thousands, its scientists are emigrating, its students are losing access to Western universities, and its athletes are banned from international competitions under their own flag. This shame is not a misunderstanding. It is the deliberate result of a policy of breaking with the developed world. A break the regime sells as sovereign pride. A break that ordinary Russians pay for in cash, in falling living standards and in a confiscated future.

And yet, Russia had a totally different path within reach. Just imagine for a moment what it could have been. An imperfect but functional democracy, like all major countries. A full member of the European family, tied in by trade, by culture, by shared universities, by high-speed trains linking Saint Petersburg and Moscow to Berlin and Paris in just a few hours. A stable and respected energy partner, whose natural resources would benefit all Russians instead of being used as geopolitical blackmail. It would, of course, have become a top-tier scientific power within European research programs, with Novosibirsk plugged into the continent’s innovation ecosystem. Siberia would be treated like a global ecological lung instead of a deposit to be drained. And Russian students could be part of the Erasmus program. Which would give the country a youth no longer dreaming of emigrating, because it would be living in a country worth staying in.

This scenario is no abstract utopia. Because that is exactly what Poland, the Baltic countries, the Czech Republic and Hungary did from the 1990s onward. And yet they were poorer than Russia, with fewer natural resources, fewer graduates, and less industrial infrastructure. Despite all that, these countries today have GDPs per capita that easily beat Russia’s, populations that live better, and democracies that work pretty well. And above all, citizens who are no longer afraid of talking to each other on the phone. What these countries have done, Russia could do. Especially since it is in an even better position to do it than they were. But it is not doing it!

Instead, it bombs Ukrainian cities, kills journalists, poisons opponents, and sends its poor youth to die by the tens of thousands for an imaginary empire. The appointment with Europe has been missed. Not lost, just missed! Missed by choice, not by some practical inevitability. But a missed appointment can be rescheduled, on the sole condition that you have the courage to call back yourself.

To call back, you still need to be able to talk freely. And that is where a real problem shows up. Because the centralized platforms Russians use every day are all under control. VK has been a shop window for the FSB for years. Telegram, long touted as a sanctuary, now regularly cooperates with the Russian authorities on data requests. WhatsApp and the American services are blocked on and off, and in any case run on centralized operators that can be ordered to hand over metadata.

So talking in Russia today means talking in a monitored corridor. But decentralized tools exist to step out of that corridor. Peerbox, for example, is free software that allows direct peer-to-peer communication without going through any central server. No phone number to give, no account tied to a civil identity, no database for the political police to grab. It is one of the few real, reliable options today for those who want to organize out of sight of the regime.

So everything starts with relearning how to actually talk to each other. Not with slogans, not with prefab phrases. But with real words. The ones you keep to yourself because you no longer know who you can trust them with. Every people that has freed itself from tyranny did it like that. For years, in Central European kitchens, in hushed voices, among trusted friends, with the tap running in the sink to drown out the microphones. First they told themselves what they really thought. Then they told a friend. Then two. Then ten. And then one day they realized there were millions of them thinking the same thing and daring to say it out loud. That day, the regimes suddenly looked very fragile. When in fact, they always had been.

I spent a lot of time writing this article. So if you enjoyed it, thanks for taking a few seconds to share it with the people around you. You can even print it out and pass it around, it is copyleft. And even better, if you have the skills to translate it into Russian, that would be perfect. Because if this text could find its way over there, it could play a part in raising awareness. Even if the impact is modest, every bit helps to stamp out totalitarianism. At the end of the day, every action counts. See you very soon for new adventures.