When Will Russians Start Protesting?

(MOSCOW, RUSSIA) – The Kremlin’s accelerating campaign to seize absolute control over the Russian internet is dismantling the digital coping mechanisms that have long kept the population passive, raising critical questions about when the fragmentation of daily life might finally trigger significant unrest.

This digital iron curtain is not merely expanding website blocks but represents a fundamental restructuring of how Russian society operates, directly threatening the workarounds citizens rely on for everything from banking to basic communication.

The current crackdown is unfolding on a scale far exceeding previous restrictions. For years, Russian authorities blocked specific platforms or degraded traffic on services like YouTube. The present situation is markedly different. The Russian dictator has reportedly tasked the second service of the FSB with implementing any measures necessary to bring the internet entirely under state control. The objective is to create a government approved whitelist of websites and services, making everything else impossible to access. The practical effect is that the internet is ceasing to function as a reliable utility; social media, banking applications, online ordering, digital payment for taxis, and even bank cards frequently fail.

Russia has a long history of blocking certain websites or slowing down internet traffic on platforms like YouTube. What is happening now is on a completely different scale. The ambition to implement a whitelist of approved sites is technically difficult, which has resulted in the internet broadly becoming less and less usable. Many websites do not work, and Russians cannot access their banks, order pizza or pay their taxis.

A critical escalation in this campaign is the state’s assault on Virtual Private Networks. For years, VPNs provided a simple workaround, but authorities are now locked in a cat-and-mouse game, blocking IP addresses as fast as providers can change them. Far more insidious is a new rule requiring Russian businesses to block VPN traffic in order to have their own websites placed on the state’s whitelist of approved domains. This forces users into a dysfunctional cycle of constantly switching VPN services on and off depending on which site they wish to visit, leading to a situation where the internet is becoming an increasingly unreliable and useless tool for the average Russian.

This aggressive disruption of daily life might prove to be a red line that previous economic hardships or security failures were not. For people in the West and in Ukraine, it can be hard to understand why Russians are not protesting.

A concept from Professor Sam Greene of King’s College London, termed “aggressive immobility,” offers a compelling framework for understanding this. This theory suggests that Russians are not passively adapting to a dysfunctional state but are aggressively conservative, relying heavily on deeply ingrained informal coping mechanisms to navigate the system.

They oppose change not because they support the government, but because they fear any alteration could shatter the grey zone networks that make their lives functional. The last thing Russians want is for their government to start changing anything, as any change can break the coping mechanisms they depend on.

The theory of aggressive immobility best explains when protests have historically ignited in Russia. It is not economic crisis or general hardship that mobilises people, but rather state actions that fundamentally break societal routines. The current turmoil regarding internet regulation is a textbook example because it plays with the basic infrastructure of how society works. It challenges the routines that Russians depend on in their daily lives. This is not a case of the government failing to deliver prosperity; it is the government actively dismantling the tools used to survive its previous failures.

Fissures are already appearing, even among some previously loyal quarters. Long-time supporters of the dictator, like Ilyaret Maslou, have suddenly come out against the authorities and demanded that Putin be put on a war tribunal. Perhaps most notably, the Instagram glamour blogger Victoria Bonya, a figure with no traditional political history, has published highly critical videos. She has done so under the headline, “Mr. Putin, people are afraid of you, but I’m not.”

Her message is dangerous precisely because it aligns with the aggressive immobility thesis. It focuses on how the government is altering the fundamentals of societal function, thereby provoking a deeply conservative, protective anger among the populace rather than an ideological revolt.

The broader context for this digital lockdown is a recognition within the Kremlin that a storm is coming. The war in Ukraine, in combination with a deteriorating economy, is making it impossible to shield the Russian population from state failure. The time when the dictator could isolate the population from the war is approaching an end.

The internet crackdown is therefore a pre-emptive strike, an attempt to shape the information environment to lay the groundwork for future decisions that they know will be controversial. These future steps will more directly interfere in people’s lives, creating precisely the kind of aggressive, conservative backlash that the current internet protests have hinted at.

Even if these digital protests do not immediately swell into a mass movement, the ingredients for a broader mobilisation are being systematically mixed by the Kremlin itself.

Video analysis provided by Anders Puck Nielsen.