And now, on to the main event…

The mood in Russia, it seems, is turning very, very dark, very, very quickly. The country, a petrostate and one of the top oil producers in the world, is in the grip of a gasoline shortage. Miles-long traffic jams are forming at gas stations, where desperate Russians are getting into physical altercations, having meltdowns, and often not getting any gas. In the meantime, Crimea is increasingly cut off from mainland Russia—its only land connection, after all, is to Ukraine—and stranded tourists are sending desperate messages, pleading for help getting home. All of this is the work of Ukrainian drones, which have been hammering Russian oil refineries, taking nearly a third of them offline.

Because of the draconian military censorship and increasingly brutal dictatorship (highlighted by Evan Gershkovich’s imprisonment), there aren’t many independent or Western journalists on the ground anymore. So I called my dear and brilliant friend Nina Khrushcheva—granddaughter of Nikita—who teaches the interplay of propaganda and dictatorship at the New School. Despite the dangers, and the fact that the Kremlin recently labeled her a foreign agent, Nina continues to go back to Russia to bear witness to how the war is transforming the country of our birth. I called Nina, who is now in Moscow, to get her view of what things are really like in the Russian capital—and what the Russian version of hope looks like. I hope you find our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length, as fascinating as I did.

Julia Ioffe: What’s happening in Moscow and the rest of the country?

Nina Khrushcheva: There are gas lines, even in Moscow—although, of course, Moscow is being better supplied than anywhere else. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is telling people, “Oh, it’s just logistics.” And everyone can see that it’s not. When [the Moscow oil refinery at] Kapotnya is exploding in front of their eyes, it’s obviously not logistics. [Putin’s spokesman Dmitry] Peskov is saying everything is under control at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, while half of St. Petersburg was getting blown up. Even pro-Kremlin war bloggers are pissed because the Kremlin keeps blocking mobile internet service on the pretext of protecting Moscow from Ukrainian drones. But half of Moscow is still getting blown up, and they’re like, “I’m sorry, you’re blocking shit, and they’re going through, so how is that possible?”

For the first time, I’m seeing how the picture the Kremlin is painting no longer corresponds to whatever the Kremlin is saying it is. It didn’t before, but they went in parallel. If you don’t want to listen to the Kremlin or the Duma, fine, you go to your McDonald’s—or whatever it is, the non-McDonald’s—and you go to the bookstore and the theater and you basically shut it out. You can have a parallel life. But your parallel life is no longer possible because the prices are high. There are lines for gas. You can no longer pretend that all this doesn’t exist.

What about all the things that Muscovites loved to brag about, all the mobile services where everything you could ever need is yours with the push of a button on your phone. How do mobile internet restrictions affect something Muscovites were always so proud of?

I was meeting a friend for dinner and she told me the address of some restaurant I’d never heard of, and I got lost. So I’m running around and I can’t call her because we have no service because of these restrictions, so I had to turn on my American phone, which went through a satellite, and call her through America because I couldn’t reach her with the Russian phone—even though she was down the block. It was absolutely psychotic.

What do other Russians do? I imagine most of them don’t have an American phone they can fall back on.

Well, the government is now blocking V.P.N.s on mobile networks. V.P.N.s work on Wi-Fi at home, but most of the time, they don’t work on your phone when you walk the streets. Telegram is not working because Telegram is “dangerous.” There’s a South Korean messenger, there’s a Turkish messenger. People just download them all. I know a friend who has 10 apps like that, and so she said, “Well, if something doesn’t work, I just use another one.” It’s that Russian thing when, instead of fighting, you adjust and circumvent. But it’s getting harder and harder to adjust and circumvent, and it’s getting harder and harder not to notice.

If I can describe the feeling in Moscow, it’s this: There was despair at the beginning, in February 2022, and then the despair went away and people went back to normal life. Now it’s back to despair. It’s not even apathy—it’s a resignation. You cannot do anything, shit is going to hit the fan, things are horrible, and you are just basically like, “How do we survive until the bottom drops out?” But then there’s also the very Russian hope that maybe it’s not going to get to that point. It is going to get to that point, but they hope that maybe it’s not going to.

Has that changed popular opinion or support for the war?

Russians never agreed with the war—maybe 20 percent supported it at the beginning, and there’s probably even less now. But when Putin started fighting it, they were kind of like, “Okay, well, we’re going to ignore it.” And you remember, when the war began, Putin said, “It’s going to last five minutes, your lifestyle is not going to change, we’re just going to teach them a lesson, and then we’re going to be loved even more.”

Four and a half years later, clearly it didn’t work out this way, and now nothing can be changed. It’s not that Russians don’t want to lose. In fact, a lot of people just think it needs to be lost so the freaking regime goes down. But there is also fear when you lose, with all the vigor of the Europeans now who are saying, essentially, “We are really going to fuck you over when it’s over.” When Putin is over, we’re not going to fuck only him over, we’re going to fuck all you Russians over. And, you know, no nation wants to be defeated in this sense.

Now that it’s all going sideways, whom do people blame? The Kremlin? Ukraine? Both?

I talked to a cab driver the other day, and he said, “I was such a patriot, I thought we should not lose, but now we lost, this is ridiculous, we should just stop this war. This is a good deal that we got [from Trump to freeze] the front line. Stop the war, lift some sanctions. What is [Putin] going to prove? He already proved that he cannot win.”

Then there are those who wanted to fight ’til the end but couldn’t imagine that, in the four and a half years of war, Russian oil refineries were going to be attacked. They’re wondering, “Where is our protection? Why are you sitting on your ass when these things are happening to your people?” The problem for Putin is that he lost both. He obviously lost the liberals a long time ago, but now he’s losing these militant patriots, who are furious.

Of course, the next conclusion, which we already knew—though, for them, it took another autocrat to get to—is, “Who cares?” Do you really think anybody in the Kremlin ever cared about your comfort? Because all of this is material for Putin’s power. The only reason he may care about the gas lines is because, god forbid, there might be some sort of revolution about it. When I was here in the winter, about 50 people in my neighborhood came out and had this winter wonderland moment. People brought snow from all the neighboring streets and made this huge hill. People brought their kids, sleds, coffee. It was lovely, like something you’d see in the old Russian paintings of Russian winter. The police came in 30 minutes. They checked everyone’s documents and dispersed the crowd, even though no one was protesting. Because it was an unsanctioned gathering, and that terrifies them.

When we were texting earlier, you told me, “No one’s going to storm the Kremlin with pitchforks.” Why do you say that? Because Americans are always waiting for Russians to do basically that.

Yes, Americans are waiting. You also asked me, “Do Russians understand that this is all because of Putin and the war?” Of course they understand. They’re not idiots. But it’s a very Western idea that if things are going horribly, you’re going to go and express your disillusionment publicly. Russians don’t protest this way. Russians protest with a middle finger hidden in their pocket.

I’m hearing from so many people that the regime is going to fall soon, that the Kremlin is running out of money. Do you think that’s a realistic assessment of the situation?

We hope. It’s a hope. When Stalin died, Khrushchev was not even supposed to happen—and yet he did. When Chernenko died, Gorbachev was not supposed to happen—but he did. When the 1991 coup happened and Yeltsin got on a tank, he wasn’t supposed to win—but he did. It’s Russia, things can happen.

But in my view, what I’m seeing from Putin is that his regime is the war, so he’s not going to stop it. If things go badly or get to the point where he cannot do it through reasonably acceptable means, whatever that means, he’ll just flip the board over and the next thing is going to be a great escalation. Remember that story that he used to tell about the rat in the corner? So unless he’s eaten, it’s going to get worse.

Do you remember, at the beginning of the war, everybody was talking about the “snuff box option”? That somebody from the elites would hit Putin in the back of the head with a proverbial snuff box—a reference to the fact that political change in Russia usually comes from the elite. Do you think that’s a real possibility in the near future?

Possibly. People say that if he turns to nuclear weapons—which he may, if he feels like he’s deeply threatened—then the snuff box comes in, because nobody wants to be blown up. But who knows? Russians are unpredictable.

On the other hand, he is the guarantor of all the different political clans, and they need him to stick around so that they stay in power. And he gave too much power to the siloviki [the strongmen of the security services]. And these are a different breed of siloviki. This isn’t the K.G.B., which was under civilian control. This is the N.K.V.D. I could never understand the difference, but now, the way we’re treated, the way it’s happening, the way they’re basically punishing you for your existence. And that’s exactly how it is. This is the N.K.V.D.

I think the siloviki are telling Putin, “We’re dealing with security, and we’re there to make sure this grumbling among the people doesn’t turn into anything bigger.” The other night, I was in the historic city center. For the first time, I noticed that all the security guards standing outside the old mansions are now armed with big machine guns. That’s new. There were always guards, but never machine guns. All of that is there to make sure you understand that, if anything happens, they’re ready to shoot.

So on one hand, it’s getting more difficult for Russians to ignore all this shit. But Russians are very good at ignoring shit, because they know they cannot change anything and that the guards will shoot. So Russians are just going to milk as much of normal life as possible, even if it’s not normal.

That’s all from me, friends. I’ll see you back here next week. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

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