Countries and People
Articles about political life
№3
One hundred years later
(March 31, 2017)
On March 26, 2017, Russia was shaken by anti-corruption rallies that took place in about ninety cities. In many cases, these protests, symbolized by a yellow duck, ended in dispersal, and now some participants may have to spend weeks in pretrial detention. The very next day, a truckers' strike began in Russia, in which, judging by video chronicle, hundreds of drivers took part, unwilling to to bear the tax imposed on them by the "Platon" system.
In their conversations with correspondents, carriers complained en masse about falling profits and actual unemployment, the cause of which was the deepening crisis in the country. If we are to believe some fairly well-known Russian economic observers, then truly noticeable stagnation has only just begun, which means that even with the complete abolition of "Platon", the prospects for the Russian cargo transportation business seem rather vague.
Even if carriers achieve the complete abolition of the ruinous "Platon-draconian" payments for them, they will have to work in conditions of a further decline in production, trade turnover, retail sales, and impoverishment of the broad masses of the population. According to one of the protesting drivers, some of his colleagues bought their trucks on credit when the economy was still in good shape, and now it is impossible to pay off the expensive vehicles. Selling them to anyone is also very difficult, which puts carriers in a truly stalemate. In the conditions of shrinking business, falling incomes, cuts in consumer spending, rising food prices, it is more profitable for truck drivers to simply not go on a trip, so as not to waste time, energy and fuel.
The inspirer of the March rallies and the exposer of corruption, Navalny, has been covering his work for a long time now, and it is now difficult to even remember when people first started talking about him. It was many years ago, when he started blogging on LiveJournal, and now, about ten years later, the blogger-lawyer-anti-corruption enthusiast has grown into a political figure of global significance. Leading world publications write about his investigations, and a report about his participation in the March 26 rally and arrest was published by the popular British newspaper The Guardian.
As some observers note, until recently, anti-corruption investigations did not evoke such a heated response from the general public. The reason for this was the relatively high oil prices, which allowed the authorities to maintain an acceptable standard of living and thus act within the framework of a long-standing social contract in Russia, according to which the population, receiving high incomes, refused to actively participate in politics. Alas, recently, as the country plunged into an economic crisis, the authorities stopped observing this contract, the standard of living dropped noticeably, and the seeds of another exposure of Navalny fell on freshly loosened and generously watered by hunger and need soil.
That is why the victory of the long-empty refrigerator over the still propaganda-filled television, the battle of which has been constantly discussed in the Russian information space for two years now, can be considered another reason for the appearance of thousands of dissatisfied people in city squares. The Russian media immediately launched a debate with those who claimed that the main driving force behind these protests was school-age and college-age youth.
Commentators objected to such claims and stated that there were also quite a few adults and elderly people in the squares. Indeed, quite a few people who are clearly well over 50 can be seen in numerous videos captured at these protests in various cities. Perhaps so much is being said about young people today simply because there were an unusually large number of them at anti-corruption rallies, and they behaved very bravely. It is not surprising that many students and even schoolchildren were among those detained. True, in some previous rallies, including Bolotnaya Square, there were also quite a few young people, including college-age people. Thus, the young rebels expressed their discontent not for the first time, their number in the total number of participants increased significantly, and they behaved, perhaps, more actively than usual.
This fact is especially curious because in modern Russian schools, most likely, such persistent propaganda of revolutionary values is no longer carried out, which was unleashed on Soviet students in the 1980s. Those who are over forty today, of course, still remember very well that they are "young Leninists", former Octobrists, Pioneers and Komsomol members who are "faithful to Lenin's cause", and that all of Russian history began on October 25, 1917, and the thousand years that passed before it were "an era of dismal vegetation, timelessness, slavery, exploitation and oppression of peasants and proletarians by landowners, bourgeois, cruel tsarism and its secret police".
Lenin's monuments in Russia, of course, are still mostly safe and sound, but they are unlikely to be such unconditional symbols of the era today as they were thirty years ago, and newlyweds are unlikely to rush to lay flowers on their pedestals every Saturday. At the same time, Russian school-age youth showed themselves to be a very active part of the protest masses on March 26.
This means that revolutionary consciousness is not formed by taking notes on communist tomes in a school Lenin notebook, not by marching around the school yard in a pioneer uniform, not by chants about the "Aurora" and not by the hackneyed, obligatory essay-writing discussions about the unprecedented breakthrough in human history made by the October Revolution.
The events of March 26 clearly demonstrated that protest consciousness appears under the influence of the political, social and economic situation, which brought hundreds and thousands of young people to the squares, who had hardly ever written essays about "the most humane man" Lenin, who in October 1917 overthrew the Provisional Government and "led humanity onto the road to happiness." If we are to believe Russian economists, the crisis will only worsen further, and therefore, as some observers claim, the Russian spring of 2017 could become hot.
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