Boredom kills everything. This applies to both love and politics. Russians learned this lesson after the collapse of the USSR. After years of stagnation, some kind of movement has finally begun. And the one who was late, punished life.
Since then, the largest country in the world no longer misses. Turbocapitalism and managed democracy, scandals in courts and corruption, human rights problems, homophobia, Crimea, Syria, Donbass. But even the imagined achievements of the country and the victories of its president can not kill boredom - just because this president has been too long in power.
Therefore, Vladimir Putin must find himself anew. This need not necessarily happen now, ten months before the presidential election, which, thanks to its popularity, it can win without much difficulty. But this is bound to happen later - when resources run out, when the country and its power will be in even greater international isolation, and today's schoolchildren and students, who are all going out in large numbers to street protests, will abruptly change the political course.
Putin's problem is that he already said everything. Many of his "ideas for success and renewal," which were once loudly declared, are quietly buried. Diversification of the economy? We already had it. Reform of the judicial system? Fighting terrorism? Politics of Putin in relation to the Crimea and "hurray-patriotism"? Nothing else works.
Instead, Vladimir Putin himself acts in his television question and answer show - in 2017, just like in 2016, 2015, and so on: knowledgeable in terms of numbers, but without new ideas. After several hours of "communication with the people" and almost two million questions, it is this people that ultimately does not ask Putin not only for nominating him for the presidential elections in 2018, but also for the country's future in general. No vision, no strategy, no idea that Russia wants to offer its youth, to whom the future belongs precisely. And which is increasingly dissatisfied with its country and its head of state. Which in this regard is convinced that she is forced to defend her prospects in street actions.
Another tightening of fines and even more arrests, mass detentions at protest rallies in recent days? In Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok and Novosibirsk ... It does not matter anymore who was provoked by someone more last weekend in the Russian capital: the authorities - opposition leader Alexei Navalny, exerting pressure on him, or the politician himself - with his calls to protest in an unauthorized place. A really important lesson of protests is that the state power is not able to conduct at least some positive dialogue with the population. First of all, with the youth.
Protests on June 12 showed: rigidity will not help. Despite senseless and sometimes brutal arrests after the March 26 protests, tens of thousands of dissatisfied Russians last weekend took to the streets again. The authorities no longer control the situation.
On the contrary: charismatic opposition politics and well-known critic of Putin Aleksey Navalny managed to take advantage of the situation and expand the geography of demonstrations. They joined the city, where the protests last took place in 1905.
However, the president did not mention this and the word. The president of an aging European country, where a significant proportion of young people live in the same values ??and standards as their peers in the rest of Europe and the US, and rejects all of their ways of life the notorious traditional values ??that Mother Russia wants to impose on her. Ignoring this youth can be dangerous for the authorities themselves.
Yuri Resheto, head of the Moscow office DW.