Moscow can be stunning in the autumn, its parks a riot of seasonal colours under deep blue skies. A last glorious blast before winter closes in – but behind all that there is rising fear and tension.
Apart from billboards celebrating heroes of Russia’s “special military operation” you would never know this is the capital of a country at war.
Life goes on. But beneath the appearance of normality there is an increasingly sinister undercurrent. There are noticeably fewer people out, especially men of fighting age. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled the country.
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Many left behind are reluctant to leave their homes afraid Moscow’s myriad cameras will pick them up using facial recognition technology. Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation has swept up men in wheelchairs, the elderly, even the dead have received call up papers. No one is safe.
Muscovites fear the knock on the door to take their father, son or husband away to training camps for a war they do not understand and still have no convincing explanation for.
And they know it is not going well. Why else would their president need hundreds of thousands of extra soldiers?
Putin sold his special military operation as something far away and remote, fought by professional soldiers and contractors. Those deluded enough to still believe that received another jolt this week.
Putin did something no other Russian president has done since the Second World War by declaring martial law. He did so in land he has stolen from Ukraine but also authorised a kind of creeping “martial law lite” across the rest of Russia.
He has given local Russian governments powers now to control movement, assembly, communications, transport, even the authority to resettle people. Laws designed for use only in war have been dusted off to give the government more control should it need it.
Russians are tired of being asked by foreigners why they put up with it. Protests have been brutally crushed. Police now routinely stop people on the streets to check their phones for seditious content. Russia is importing surveillance technology from China that may in the not so distant future render dissent obsolete, let alone revolution or regime change.
Muscovites know it can only get worse. The government’s chokehold on society and the economic impact of this war too. Russians have weathered sanctions better than western policymakers had hoped but they are hurting now. Prices are rising and there are shortages in many goods. The spectres of inflation and rationing loom.
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Those old enough remember the seventies and fear the return of those days. But in Soviet times there was at least an ideology many believed in. This time there is just a tsar with his grotesque fantasies of a greater Russia and the ambitions and greed of the corrupt old men around him.
There is no end in sight, because it is no longer clear what the goal is. Russia’s original war aims failed. Has Putin replaced them with any other objective he may settle for? Or will this go on indefinitely as Russia sinks into a permanent winter of repression and economic decline?
