And Russians across the country are feeling the heat
The diners might also have made out, less than a kilometre away, the building housing Memorial, Russia’s oldest human-rights organisation, which was at the time being stormed by masked thugs. Dozens of them, accompanied by statecrews, crashed into a screening of “Mr Jones”, a film by Agnieszka Holland, a Polish director, about the famine Stalin inflicted on Ukraine in the early 1930s.
The increasing number of political prisoners—there are eight times as many as there were six years ago, according to Memorial—is not a return to Soviet form, as the high life which surrounds the repression bears witness. But the people of late-1930s Berlin would find the mixture of the two quite familiar.and imperial nationalism. They can be recognised in media images of the male body beautiful, encouraging healthy living, and in laws against homosexual propaganda.
Open Russia, a pro-democracy organisation funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former billionaire once jailed and since exiled, has been declared “undesirable” and forced to close. Its former boss, Andrei Pivovarov, is facing six years in jail for Facebook posts.
In the same period, trust in Mr Putin has fallen from 60% to 30%. In the 2000s members of the younger generation were among Mr Putin’s most loyal supporters. That has now been reversed , and not just because of internet access. The young feel more disgust at corruption, which deprives them of prospects, and have a more positive view of Europe and America. They resent the state’s increasing intrusions into their lives and they value human rights.
That did not mean they were winning. Though Mr Navalny had support in Moscow and some other places, only 20% of Russians approved of him. But 80% now knew who he was. One of the key assets of any autocracy—the apparent absence of any alternative—had been lost. The Russian elite started to talk about succession. So Mr Putin changed the constitution to let himself stay in power indefinitely and reinforced that change with repression.
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