Thread by @samagreene

One more thread today, and then I'm going to take a break and decompress for a while. This one's about protests and Russian public opinion.

Per @OvdInfo, there have been ~1700 arrests at anti-war protests across Russia today. Given the propensity of these numbers to lag, the actual number is probably higher.

We don't know how many people came out to protest. It may not have been very many, but it will likely have been 10-20 times the number who were arrested, at least.

Bear in mind that the Russian protest scene has been dormant since riot police more or less wiped the streets with Navalny supporters in the early months of 2021. After that, the opposition called off protests, out of concern for the physical welfare of their supporters.

Given the level of ambient repression, the fact that anyone is coming out at all is striking.

Striking as well is the fact that the riot police came out before the protesters did -- especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but not only, according to reports.

And the police didn't exactly behave themselves. At least one of my friends in Moscow was delivered to a police station unconscious, with a fractured skull.

Now, here's what my research suggests about protest in general, and in Russian in particular: People are most likely to turn against the state when it presents an immediate and unavoidable threat to their ability to imagine a future better than the present.

When threats are diffuse, people find individualized ways of coping. When they are concentrated, they have no choice but to come together to seek a solution that helps everyone.

We also know that protests are driven by moral shock -- when the state begins to do something that not only offends a person's sense of right and wrong, but that alters their sense of what the state might do in the future. This can cause a panic and a 'now-or-never' response.

Without the ability to interview protesters, I cannot know what's driving the mobilization in Russia right now, or how much it might grow. But we can form reasonable hypotheses.

We know that this war presents a concentrated threat, in the form of the damage it will do to ordinary Russians' livelihoods for decades to come. So it is possible that some protesters are mobilizing to prevent their futures and those of their children from being foreclosed.

Indeed, that idea -- that Putin has just robbed Russia of its future -- is one of the most common refrains I'm seeing in anti-war posts on social media.

We also know that this war may cause a moral shock. Anecdotal evidence -- and a bit of survey evidence -- suggests that most Russians didn't take the prospect of war seriously, and have thus been caught off guard.

While Russia has been to war before, Russians are mostly accustomed (like Americans or Brits) to seeing their bombs fall on far off places of which they know little (a category that includes, for most Russians, Chechnya). Ukraine, on the other hand, is both close and familiar.

Tens of millions of Russians have Ukrainian heritage or, indeed, were born there. They have family and friends there. The cities they are bombing are cities many of them have visited.

The violence in Ukraine coupled with the violence in the streets at home may -- and I emphasize _may_ -- make many Russians very uncomfortable. It may suggest the potential of both sites of violence to escalate. That, too, may be a future many Russians will want to avoid.

Clearly, Putin will have thought about this. This was a risk everyone knew about going into this war -- that's why he had the riot police ready to go. Putin will have calculated that he'll survive. He may well be right. He often is.

But not always.