Early in the war, the deaths of senior Russian officers were covered up, and we learned about them via dodgy posts on Telegram. The quick confirmation of Gudkov's death represents, I think, a change in the Russian narrative. The war began as a "special operation" that was supposed to go quickly and with minimal losses. That narrative was sustained domestically by never talking officially about casualties. But as the war went on and the losses mounted that narrative broke down. After all the Russian military, like most major forces, has traditions of funerals and military monuments that are very important to soldiers and their families. So the funerals had to be held, and new names had to be added to the monuments, and it became impossible to ignore the size of the losses.
It also seems to me that society has shifted over the past 3 years—the tendency to hide the dead has disappeared. It’s hard to justify when propaganda claims that they are dying to protect Russia and are heroes...I think this narrative has been successful with many Russians, which is one reason why there has been no real opposition to the war.
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I think this narrative has been successful with many Russians, which is one reason why there has been no real opposition to the war.
One reason, perhaps... but far from the main one.
There's no real opposition to the war because there's no real opposition to anything, just as it was before the war. Russia is run by an ex-KGB officer. The modern FSB and various other governmental organs are full of ex-KGB officers, who employ former KGB methods. Dissent is not tolerated and opposition figures who gain any kind of meaningful influence are quietly jailed or killed.
Russia is a mafia state. Anyone who might pose a threat is either bought out, threatened into submission, or destroyed.
People in Russia know what the score is. They know that the government narrative is nonsense. But they also know what can happen to them if they do anything more than quietly grumble about it. They know that the police can show up, break in their door, drag them away, charge them with sedition and treason, and then send them to the front as a convict conscript. Or worse.
The idea that people genuinely believe the West is coming to destroy Russia is absurd. People remember the fall of the USSR - and they remember that the West did not destroy Russia then, but rather helped the oligarchs into power in order to make money trading with them, then turned a blind eye to everything else.
If anything, the fall of the USSR feeds into Russian fatalism, and the belief that change is impossible, opposition is pointless, and they are eternally doomed to misery. They embraced the West, and nothing meaningfully changed. They were still ruled over by corrupt, ruthless leaders who kept them poor and quashed dissent. If anything, it got worse in some ways. And it echoed the transition from the Empire before to the USSR itself - the Russians themselves joke that they've never stopped having Tsars.
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