Opposition

There is a sentence that a certain kind of decent Russian likes to say, and that I have come to regard as a small masterpiece of self-deception. “I am against Putin,” the sentence goes, “but I am for Russia.” It sounds balanced. It sounds like the position of a grown-up who refuses to be swept into hatred of an entire nation. And in peacetime it would have been a perfectly serviceable thing to believe. The trouble is that we are not in peacetime, and the sentence, transposed into the year a country is bombing its neighbor’s maternity wards, becomes something else entirely. It becomes the exact structural equivalent of saying, in 1943, “I am against Hitler, but I am for the Third Reich.” Once you hear it that way you cannot un-hear it, and you begin to understand why I no longer accept the formula, however gently it is offered. ...

There is a particular kind of theater that unfolds whenever the people who call themselves the leaders of the Russian opposition are handed a microphone in a European institution. They are well dressed, they speak fluently about human rights and political prisoners, they have suffered real imprisonment, and yet, the moment a sharp question is put to them, something gives way. They cannot answer it. Not because they lack the words, but because answering honestly would force them to stand on one side of a line they have spent years refusing to acknowledge exists. I want to describe that line, and why the inability to step across it tells us almost everything we need to know about the state of the Russian emigration today. ...

Notice what is never on the table. Every Western discussion of how this war ends circles the same small set of options — arm Ukraine a little more, tighten sanctions a little further, wait for the front to shift, or, in the worst version, lean on Kyiv to trade away land for a pause. What is never proposed, never even uttered as a thought experiment in the serious rooms, is the most obvious thing of all: that the war could be ended from inside Russia, by Russians, with Western help. The assumption that arming Russians against their own regime is unthinkable has hardened into a reflex so deep that no one notices it is a choice. It is a choice. And it is the wrong one. ...