this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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I suppose this is off topic but I'll ask anyway:
The article repeatedly states that the Russian liberal opposition operates almost entirely in exile. I am aware that Putin regularly dominates elections, but I am curious of the liberal opposition's popularity. Has it been growing in recent years, or has the war in Ukraine destroyed whatever appeal they had in the eyes of Russians?
Would appreciate a Russian's view of the situation, but happy to hear other's as well.
Before the war kicked off, there was a strong liberal movement in Russia. That was especially the case in bigger cities, where a lot of people genuinely wanted more integration with Europe and the West in general.
But then the war started, and the mask came off. The West’s response wasn’t just sanctions on oligarchs or the government. It immediately devolved into an unhinged, open season on anything and everything Russian. We’re talking about regular people getting banned from sports and arts, calls for collective punishment, and just a flood of the most vile, racist garbage directed at Russians as an ethnic group. It went from “we hate Putin’s regime” to “we hate you people” in about five seconds flat.
And that was a gift from heaven for the Kremlin. They’ve been saying for years that the West secretly despises all Russians and wants to see Russia broken up and erased as a culture. Suddenly, they could just point to the news and say see? we told you so.
Western behavior completely nuked any domestic liberal opposition. What were they supposed to argue for? Hey, let’s be friends and emulate the people who are calling for us to be shoved back into the stone age?
By treating the entire Russian population as subhuman orcs, the West forced even those skeptical of Putin to rally around the flag in a defensive posture, ultimately consolidating his power in a way he could have never achieved otherwise.
However, the political landscape is now shifting due to forced economic reorientation. As ties with the West fracture, Russia's primary economic partners are now China, Vietnam, and the DPRK where Communism is the official state doctrine. An economic realignment towards the East will inevitably drive a political change in turn. The liberal ideology associated with a hostile and crisis-ridden West is becoming discredited, while the Marxist ideology of Russia's successful new partners gains prestige.
When your major allies are communist nations where people live well, and your enemies are capitalist states whose economies are faltering, the perceptual shift is inevitable. This fundamental reordering of Russia's economic life will directly fuel the rising popularity of communist opposition at home. People are starting to realize they took a big detour in the 90s, and that USSR could've developed the way China did if different decisions were made.
Thank you for this detailed write up.
In what ways has it changed? I agree that Russians will inevitably favor communism over capitalism, but I just don't see it manifesting without another revolution. In the end of the day, Putin is a neoliberal.
Russia was enamored with the western system for a long time, and now people are turning away from it. That's the key change that's currently happening. It's hard to say whether a revolution will be necessary or not. It's worth keeping in mind that the transition from socialism to capitalism was largely peaceful. So, there could be a compromise possible where Russia allows capitalists to continue to exists as seen in China, but there's going to be the communist party in charge of the state as a whole and capitalists lose the political power they currently enjoy.
It's also worth noting that much of the core industry in Russia is already state owned, and it's actually just behind China in that regard. A 2023 World Bank study gives a pretty good overview. In particular, it distinguishes between businesses of the state (BOS), that are at least 10% government owned by some government, and state owned enterprises (SOE), which are majority owned or more, and controlled, by the government.
Top line result is shown in the following chart:
And here's another chart showing SOE in Russia compared with China https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/state-owned-enterprises-global-economy-reason-concern
Thanks for the write up, I'm just unsure about this last part:
Which decisions could have achieved that? Nixon and Kissinger deciding to go to Moscow to make a deal and the USSR fueling the Walmart economy for the next decades instead of China? But than China wouldn't be the same today.
This was actually a decent write up on it https://www.noemamag.com/how-china-avoided-soviet-style-collapse/
TLDR is that the big mistake that USSR made was to rush into privatization instead of using a measured approach that China used where they started introducing market mechanics in localized and controlled fashion.