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‘They just want the war to end’: Moscow-based politician Yulia Galyamina on why she believes most Russians are pacifists — and whether the opposition can reach them

Source: Meduza

After the Yabloko party — which ran on antiwar slogans and briefly gave hope to many Russians — was barred from the State Duma election, the opposition, both inside Russia and in emigration, has been debating what voting strategies to adopt now. The Bereg cooperative spoke with Moscow-based politician Yulia Galyamina about the hopes tied to Yabloko, what the election results might actually change, the divide between those who left and those who stayed, and the prospects for a new democracy. Meduza is publishing the interview in full.

— Did you expect the authorities to let Yabloko run its campaign and compete for votes, or did you assume they would block it?

— There was a sense that the Kremlin had its own separate line, or at least an internal debate, about softening the regime. The wavering was obvious: Yabloko was registered and approved, after all. Perhaps [some officials] pinned their hopes on the negotiations that began after Trump took office, hoping for reconciliation. But it’s become clear recently that things are actually headed toward continuing the war, toward finishing it off — and the negotiations have been shelved indefinitely.

The period when negotiations were actually underway was, of course, full of hope, and traces of that hope still lingered this past spring. Yabloko being allowed to run would have signaled that the negotiating track was still being considered — and had they been barred, that would have signaled the opposite.

— Did you notice growing interest in Yabloko?

— Activists really did start talking about voting for Yabloko. There was enthusiasm among a certain segment of society — people who had been to at least one protest in their lives.

— What was the mood among these people after the party’s list was disqualified?

— They hoped for a miracle. It didn’t happen, but life goes on — there’s no sense that life has stopped. Young people who came to politics for the first time probably feel the disappointment more deeply. Those who are older have already lived through so many political disappointments…

— You’ve surely heard the opposition debate various election strategies: boycotting, voting for anyone but United Russia, or backing a specific party like New People or Russia’s Communist Party (KPRF). But this debate mostly plays out outside Russia, among opposition figures abroad. Does it exist inside the country?

— The mood is roughly this: “How much longer can this go on? Nothing depends on this, nothing will change because of it.” Among a certain segment of true Yabloko supporters, there’s talk of spoiling the ballot or not showing up at all.

Protest voting can produce political consequences, but they’re so illusory, let’s say, that it doesn’t feel worth the energy overall. The idea of voting for any party at all, which used to excite people, doesn’t excite me anymore.

— What are these illusory consequences?

— There’s a pragmatic logic to voting for one of the parliamentary parties, but that logic only applies in a crisis scenario. During turbulence, when the system becomes unbalanced, change always happens through institutionalized players, actors within the system. If several establishment parties won a slightly higher share of the vote, that would, in theory, position them to become those players.

The vote share [for them] would have to be large enough that it couldn’t be masked by fraud — and right now, it’s far from certain that’s even possible. With electronic voting, there may be no limit to fraud at all.

There’s also symbolic voting, which doesn’t inspire me at all — going to a polling station and writing in Yabloko on the ballot. That’s unlikely to accomplish anything, and as for a clean conscience… Honestly, I’ve cleansed mine so many times already that I don’t really need to. Especially since it’s not even a unified strategy — “Smart Voting” has shown that, for the most part, it doesn’t produce results.

You’re choosing one cannibal over another. Let everyone decide for themselves — the main message is just: go vote, and decide [who to vote for] on your own, however you want.

— So voters can still show the authorities their discontent?

— I think the government knows all about that discontent. It just no longer takes society into account — its mood is well known. Instead, it works on society through violence, aggression, and a steady drip of one nasty thing after another. They do something nasty, wait a while, make some noise, let people get used to it, then take the next small step. Society manages to adapt, to adjust. People have even somehow adapted to the shortage of gasoline.

— And you?

— We fill up at night and only drive when it’s absolutely necessary. There’s even something environmentally friendly about it — you ride a scooter or walk to the nearest store. Everyone now keeps a gas canister in the trunk, like in the 1990s. And we just keep living.

— Perhaps people started supporting Yabloko precisely because they’re tired of constantly adapting?

— People started supporting Yabloko for another important reason too. I wrote an article called “5 Discourses Around the War,” where I showed how the antiwar and pro-war discourses diverged.

But the largest and most important layer of opinion was never expressed publicly anywhere. Most people were pro-Putin and antiwar. They had no public spokespeople at all, but they could be called pacifists. [In the media space, it’s assumed that] you’re either pro-Putin and pro-war, or anti-Putin and antiwar. There’s also a variant — anti-Putin but pro-war — which exists among Z bloggers.

People who were pro-Putin and antiwar had no talking heads of their own — until Viktoria Bonya. They were a silent majority. When negotiations with Trump began, and there was hope for a ceasefire, they thought: “Fine, we’ll wait — they’ve started negotiating, so it will probably be alright.”

A year passed, the negotiations went nowhere, problems kept mounting, and that silent majority’s voice began to emerge — we saw it in Bonya’s statement and others like it. The authorities tried to silence those voices, and in response, this group’s views began shifting toward an anti-Putin position.

The antiwar discourse split long ago into a pro-Ukrainian strand and a pacifist strand. Lev Shlosberg represents the latter, and so do I. Most people in Russia identify with the pacifist discourse — most citizens were raised as pacifists in the Soviet Union. Everyone sang Let There Always Be Sunshine, and today’s young people sang it in school too.

Not everyone within that broad pacifist discourse is ready to come out against Putin. Some of them supported Yabloko and started moving toward an anti-Putin position. The party doesn’t directly say it’s against Putin — it focuses instead on its opposition to the war.

And that’s a smart approach — it draws in more and more of these people, because they’re for peace but not yet ready to talk about Putin. The next step for them is lifting the taboo on criticizing Putin, the way the taboo on discussing the war was lifted.

— So, to win over public sympathy, you shouldn’t talk about Putin, because it’s still too soon?

— People react to events in bursts. For example, when the gasoline problems began, open rejection of the Russian authorities appeared, in some cases even hatred. But it’s not directed at Putin personally — he’s too sacred a figure. It’s impersonal hatred toward “the bosses” in general.

The position favoring a Ukrainian victory resonates with hardly anyone in Russia. These people exist, but there aren’t many of them. The old opposition can speak loudly because it’s in emigration. But, in my view, this position will never be shared by the majority in Russia.

— And what position could it share? Accepting an outcome, where neither Ukraine nor Russia wins?

— That’s the most likely outcome. But the trend [in Russia] has changed: previously, holding the position “let’s have peace, and it doesn’t matter who wins” wasn’t punished as a matter of principle — now, it seems to me, it’s starting to be. The Shlosberg case showed that, as did [Andrei] Klepach’s dismissal. You can no longer question the idea of victory.

— Does the silent majority need this victory?

— They just want the war to end. It seems the victory narrative isn’t aimed at ordinary citizens but at the most active, pro-war segment of society — maybe at Putin himself too, who probably belongs to that segment as well.

There’s a segment of society that isn’t ready to let this go without a victory — they’ve paid too high a price over these four years: many of their people have died, a great deal has been invested.

But that’s a small share. Most people don’t care, as long as it all ends. And what kind of victory would that even be? What is victory, really? People generally aren’t very interested — they’re ready to accept whatever they’re offered as victory.

— Maxim Katz believes the opposition in emigration is largely to blame for Yabloko being barred — that they showed support at the wrong time. Do you share that view?

— I think it sped up the process, but Yabloko would have been barred anyway — maybe a bit later, and the campaign would have run a little longer. I don’t know whether they would have expanded it [nationwide] or not. In Veliky Novgorod, banners reading “For Peace!” and “For Yabloko!” are still hanging, because they’re running for the regional assembly there and have an active local cell. In Moscow, there was nothing visible at all — zero.

The problem is that no one negotiates with anyone, no one talks things through — just like Putin doesn’t with Volodymyr Zelensky. Yabloko never coordinated with the opposition [in emigration] on whether support was needed, or what kind. And the opposition never approached Yabloko in advance to discuss the form or timing of support.

I never publicly support anyone unless asked to, because I know my support could do harm — even though I’m only designated as a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities, and I live in Russia. When you have “undesirable” status, or something worse, you have to handle this very carefully. It seems to me that some kind of ethic around this should have developed by now, over these years. But it hasn’t, unfortunately — everyone tries to distance themselves from everyone else.

— Maybe the Kremlin is making an effort to set opposition figures against each other?

— The Kremlin didn’t need to make any effort, because Yabloko never really entered into negotiations with anyone — or did so only rarely. I can’t complain here, since I’ve collaborated with Yabloko a great deal and I’m very grateful to them for that. But I know plenty of stories where they simply wouldn’t negotiate with the rest of the opposition. And the rest of the opposition didn’t come to them either.

There’s also an additional factor now: media visibility. The laws of the mass-media market demand an immediate public reaction to the political agenda, and that factor plays a bigger role than the political one.

For many well-known opposition figures in emigration, the public sphere just comes down to mass media — an old model built around a single source of information. There can be competition among several major players, but it’s neither networked nor horizontal. You can only take part in that process as a unit within the mass — through your like.

The public environment needs to be built differently, starting today. Social networks, when they first emerged, offered hope that it could be. But in the end, opposition actors continued to mirror the existing order — the power-based model for organizing the public sphere [and don’t create platforms for discussion, only broadcast their own views].

— In your view, what election strategy is the Kremlin pursuing?

— The authorities used to feel a need to simulate elections more convincingly. In our district, there was genuine competition in the 2021 elections to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, and strong competition across Moscow generally.

Now the authorities aren’t allowing anything genuine at all. They’re suppressing turnout — it’s very important to them that only their own people show up at the polls. In Moscow, only single-mandate candidates are running any kind of campaign; in our district, an SVO veteran has been at it for months already.

There’s also electronic voting. In my view, the entire electronic vote in the last Moscow City Duma elections was fabricated. I went to my polling station on Sunday at 7 p.m. and voted with a paper ballot — mine was the first one in the ballot box. People did come to the polling station, but everyone there was made to vote electronically.

— Observers say electronic voting can’t be monitored at all.

— There will still be plenty of paper voting in the regions. But the observer movement has grown quite weak — few people volunteer as observers anymore, and all the active organizations have been crushed. It probably takes society some time to understand that no public leaders or organizations are going to appear anymore, and that people need to organize on their own here.

There’s a big open question: are there limits to fraud under current conditions? Observer theory holds that every instance of fraud has its limits — that you can’t falsify more than a certain percentage. But does that rule still hold now?

— If the limits on fraud are loose enough to manufacture any result for United Russia, even an implausible one, and the authorities use that leeway — what reaction would that provoke in society?

— In my view, it’s the youngest part of society — the ones who suddenly believed in something — who could end up demoralized and disillusioned. On the whole, people don’t place much hope in elections and are unlikely to be disappointed. In advanced political thought, which runs a bit ahead of political reality, elections as a symbol of democracy have long been discredited.

The discrediting of elections will help give rise to new forms of democracy in this country. They’re already emerging, and this alternative experience could become the basis for a new political philosophy, practice, and democracy here. But these are lengthy processes.

— Are you talking about horizontal interaction between people?

— Yes, these are horizontal forms. Some communities, for instance, have devised complex combinations of lottery and voting for decision-making. People in small communities choose leaders simply because they know them, and leaders rotate quickly. That includes political communities, women’s communities, and local interest clubs.

I know a theater group that stages its own plays with its own money and tours with them. This amateur theater has its own forms of democracy, its own forms of decision-making. A director originally brought the group together and made the decisions, but after he died, the group decided not to disband and to run things themselves instead. Now they look for directors and make democratic decisions about whom to hire.

Horizontal structures exist all over the country — gardening co-ops, homeowners’ associations. The whole country is threaded through with a variety of democratic formats.

— Do the authorities notice them? The Kremlin is now promoting the concept of “social architecture” — supposedly not a political technology, but engagement with citizens and communities on social projects.

— They have this new term because they consider only geopolitics to be politics. Of course, they’re not going to build real democracy or real democratic institutions — they always build an imitation.

But hijacking the agenda [from the state] was dangerous in the 2010s. Now the top leadership cares about only one thing — the ”special military operation” — and has no time for such games.

I think it’s dangerous that the very people who want to build a different Russia — not a Limonov-style one, but a genuinely different one — don’t fully grasp the importance of real democratic alternatives. They’re still playing by the old rules. Under the old system, you can outplay those in power, break the regime, build another one, but fundamentally it will still rest on all the same original patterns.

In my view, we need to come up with new ideas, find them within society, help them develop — and then a new political event will happen. We need to dream, to build utopias — that’s very important. We’re going through a phase of major historical shift right now. We all sense it. People have been talking about it for 100 years already.

When I was studying cultural studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, everyone talked about this major shift. I really hoped the changes would come without violence. But, unfortunately, we entered this historical cycle along with it.

— You’re speaking in terms of a broad historical framework. What if we narrow it down to talk about the so-called ones who left and the ones who stayed? People can presumably be divided based on whether they emigrated, but can these groups be generalized by their views and convictions? Is there some essential conflict between them?

— I don’t think there’s any conflict between “those who left” and “those who stayed” — people communicate with each other. But there is a conflict between public discourses. When that gets translated into personal terms — explaining someone’s views and positions by whether they left or stayed, as if that determines who they are, [that’s wrong]…

Your everyday reality probably still shapes your perception. Perhaps a larger share of nonconformists — people willing to break many ties — ended up among those who left. These people often have a hard time accepting others, other ways of life. But claiming that nonconformists left and conformists stayed is an oversimplification. Often, leaving or staying was simply a forced decision.

— On July 2, you published a post on Facebook calling for an end to the cycle of “retaliatory strikes” between Russia and Ukraine. At the time, some politicians and activists criticized you for “abstract pacifism” and “equalizing morality” — or, more gently, for an unfortunate choice of words. How did you feel about those accusations then, and how do you feel about them now?

— It was unpleasant that people resorted to personal attacks instead of debating the ideas.

Naturally, I never intended to equate the aggressor with the victim — I don’t even understand what’s meant by that [in the critical posts]. I was talking about children. They’re not aggressors. Children are always victims.

Not long ago, I talked with some random people about this — about the drones. People were complaining, and I asked them: “You understand why this is happening, who started all of it, right?” They answered: “The main thing is for it all to end soon, for them to somehow reach an agreement. It doesn’t matter how, let them just agree.”

People aren’t demanding “payback” — they’re reacting like pacifists, not militarists bent on revenge. Hatred toward Ukrainians in Russia hasn’t spread as much as I feared back in July, after all. What people have developed instead is hatred toward the war and those who continue it.

— How do you think Russians will discuss these painful topics a year, five years, 10 years after the war ends? Or is this not really a matter of time, but of something else?

— If it all ends within a year — and there is hope for that — people will want to forget all of it. This is a painful experience, a major trauma for society.

Over a 5–10 year horizon, everything will depend on how events unfold. If Russia changes, I think the question of responsibility will come up eventually. But in my view, those changes will be gradual rather than revolutionary. After some time, people will start asking themselves what they did wrong, how they let this happen. I, at least, hope for that.

Right now people are in a state of trauma, and it’s pointless to ask them these questions, especially since ordinary citizens didn’t make the actual decisions. So right now, it seems to me, these conversations just pour fuel on the fire of the war.

Dialogue is possible in principle, even between the most radical people. Except… you know, it’s already a bit of a broken record: “Well, you over there.” — “Well, you should repent.” — “Well, you won’t understand us.” You open Facebook, read all this, and close it again.

We can all understand each other, especially when we want to. Jürgen Habermas called this communicative ethics. A genuine communicative action is an effort to understand another person, not to convince them otherwise, humiliate them, or prove them wrong. Even people who don’t share a common language share common facial expressions — you can smile, and that smile will be understood in every language, by every people.

Communities that work toward understanding others, toward building discussions and debates, are really valuable, and there are plenty of them in Russia right now. Don’t take this as me criticizing “those who left” again — no, I mean public figures in emigration, as political actors.

Unfortunately, many of them are once again resorting to old methods: “Let’s not try to understand the other person — let’s just explain to them that they’re a fool, let’s shut them up.” In doing so, they’re only perpetuating those same old habits: the absence of dialogue, the drive toward total unanimity.

— When the war ends, will Russia change?

— The end of the war will bring relief. It could also become a trigger for change — some kind of democratization movement might begin, which would ultimately turn the wheel. Either that turn will come from above, or it will be some joint movement, from above and below. History is unpredictable. But I’d like the change not to happen too quickly.

If it’s the proverbial short-term “window of opportunity,” it will lead to unfounded changes imposed from above. Someone will appear who says, once again: “We’ll solve everything in 500 days.”

People can’t handle that, which is why I think the pace of change matters. It’s important that changes be rooted, that their direction be shaped with society’s participation. Society needs to be brought into a conversation about its own future — and that can and should start now. Otherwise, we’ll end up again in a situation where one part of society wins and another loses, and on the next turn, revanchism sets in: the losing side will want to replay everything all over again.