Russia is gearing up for its annual festival of state-sponsored militarist kitsch that are the 9 May Victory Day celebrations, albeit in rather more limited form thanks to security concerns surrounding the ongoing war. Amongst all this, it is all too easy to forget that not everyone is consumed with nationalist pageantry. Instead, what is in many ways so much more striking is that there is still an active, if beleaguered, civil society in this country.
To be sure, open protests against the war have become increasingly small in scale. This is an authoritarian regime sliding into full-blown totalitarianism, which has been cracking down viciously on any such ‘fifth columnists’. Tens of thousands were rounded up, arrested, fined, beaten and imprisoned in the early days of the war precisely as a dramatic gesture of the Kremlin’s ruthless determination.
The more Russians protest, the more their fellows realise they are not alone
Since then, protest against the war has largely been evident in small-scale and personal acts of defiance, from graffiti and individual vigils to arson attacks.
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