Russians Begin to Show Growing Discontent

You remember the narrative, don’t you? The one the Kremlin has been feeding us for two solid years after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The story went like this: Russia is a fortress. Sanctions? A nuisance. Casualties? A tragedy, but a necessary one. Dissent? A myth invented by the West. The average Russian, you were told, had shrugged off the war, retreated into petty consumerism, and learned to love the new normal of isolation.

Well, forget that narrative. I’ve been watching the wires, reading the regional Telegram channels, and parsing the state’s own frantic moves. Four years on, something has cracked. It’s not a revolution — don’t let me oversell it. But it’s a discontent. A sullen, weary, and increasingly visible grinding of teeth. And it’s not coming from the usual suspects — the liberal intelligentsia in Moscow or the exiled bloggers in London. It’s coming from the queues at the grocery store, from the parent trying to pay a utility bill, and from the teenager whose favorite book has just been declared illegal.

Russia is facing a spring of discontent. And you, if you’re paying attention, can see it in three distinct tremors: the rage over rolling digital blackouts, the frantic revival of Soviet-style repression, and the bizarre, almost contemptuous public indifference of Vladimir Putin himself.

The Lights Go Out, and So Does the Patience

Let’s start with the thing that finally touched a nerve. Not war losses. Not mobilization. No, the spark that has ordinary citizens grumbling aloud is something far more mundane: the internet.

I want you to imagine your life in 2026. You live in a major Russian city — let’s say Moscow or St. Petersburg. You do everything through your phone. You order food, you call a taxi, you pay your electricity bill, you check your child’s school assignments, you log into work. Now, imagine that three or four times a week, without warning, all of that dies. No WhatsApp. No banking app. No maps. Just a spinning wheel of death and a cold, bureaucratic error message.

That is the reality of the rolling digital blackouts that began in early March. The authorities say it’s about security. Putin himself finally broke his silence on Thursday, and his explanation was a masterclass in gaslighting. He said, and I quote, “I can’t help but point out what people are also encountering in large cities — it’s rare, but unfortunately, it does happen.” He then claimed the outages were “related to operational work to prevent terrorist attacks.”

Do you believe that? Because I don’t. And more importantly, neither do the millions of Russians who can no longer buy bread without cash.

Here’s what’s really happening. The Kremlin is slowly strangling the free internet and replacing it with a state-controlled digital iron curtain. They’re testing a system called the Sovereign Internet, but what they’re actually doing is stress-testing the population’s tolerance for pain. The official push to install the state messaging app, MAX, as the default portal for digital services isn’t about convenience — it’s about surveillance. They want to control every packet of data. And when the old systems glitch, as they have been doing for weeks, the official response is a shrug.

But you notice the difference this spring. Two years ago, people would have grumbled in private. Now, I’m seeing public pushback. Not protests in the street — the security services are too effective for that. But in apartment building chat groups, in anonymous reviews of utility companies, in the bitter jokes shared over smoking breaks. “We won the war in Ukraine,” the joke goes, “but we lost the war against the spinning wheel.”

This is the paradox for Putin. He needs total digital control to suppress dissent, but the very act of imposing that control is creating a new kind of dissent — one based on pure, apolitical inconvenience. You can’t call a broken app a “Nazi,” and you can’t arrest 10 million people for being annoyed.

The Ghosts of the Lubyanka Come Marching Back

And yet, they’re certainly trying to arrest everyone else. If the digital blackouts are the symptom of a society fraying, the crackdown on culture is the regime’s diagnosis. And the diagnosis is: freedom is the disease.

I want you to look at what happened this week. Russia’s Investigative Committee raided one of the country’s largest publishers, Eksmo. Their crime? They published a young-adult novel called Summer in a Pioneer Tie. It’s a 2021 bestseller about a queer romance between two boys at a Soviet summer camp. I’ve read excerpts. It’s tender, nostalgic, and about as threatening to the Russian state as a cup of warm milk.

But in Putin’s Russia, a tender story is a weapon. Because in 2023, the Supreme Court declared the “international LGBTQ movement” an extremist organization. That means publishing a book about two boys holding hands in a pioneer tie is now a felony. Top Eksmo managers were hauled in for questioning, released on bail, but the message is clear: your bookshelf is a crime scene. The Popcorn Books imprint, which published the novel, was shut down in January. The publisher itself is now under the boot.

You might think this is a side issue. A culture war distraction. But it’s not. It’s a warning. If they can raid a major publishing house over a work of fiction, no creative act is safe. And here’s where the “spring of discontent” gets interesting: this crackdown is clumsy. It’s aggressive. And it’s alienating precisely the middle-class, urban Russians that the regime needs to stay quiet.

Because it’s not just books. Earlier this month, police raided the offices of Novaya Gazeta. That’s the independent newspaper whose co-founder won the Nobel Peace Prize. The pretext? A criminal case over “illegal mishandling of personal data” involving journalist Oleg Roldugin. Roldugin denies guilt, but that’s not the point. The point is the chilling effect. Novaya Gazeta was forced to shut its print edition after the 2022 invasion, but it continued online. Now, with a raid and a criminal case, the message to every other editor is: the long arm of the state will find you.

And on the same day as the Novaya Gazeta raid, the Supreme Court designated Memorial — the legendary human rights organization — as “extremist.” UN human rights chief Volker Türk said this was “effectively criminalizing critical human rights work.” He’s right. But he’s also late. Memorial has been hounded for years. What’s new, this spring, is the speed and the symbolism.

Because the symbolism is what really tells you where we are. A few days ago, the FSB Academy — where Putin himself trained to be a KGB agent — was renamed. Its new namesake? Feliks Dzerzhinsky. “Iron Felix.” The founder of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka. The man whose statue stood outside the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters until 1991, when a joyful crowd toppled it in one of the great symbolic acts of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Now, the FSB is putting his name back on a school. They are, quite literally, resurrecting the ghost of the Soviet secret police. And they’re doing it not from strength, but from a kind of frantic insecurity. If you have to remind people that you are scary, you are no longer scary. You are merely authoritarian.

I see this, and I think: they wouldn’t be going this hard if they didn’t feel the discontent growing beneath their feet. You don’t rename an academy after a mass murderer when everyone is happy. You do it when you need to remind people what happens to those who step out of line.

The International Front: A Boost, Not a Bailout

Now, you might be wondering about the other war. The one in the Middle East. And I’ll be honest with you: that conflict has given Russia an unexpected gift. Oil prices are higher than they would have been otherwise. Russia’s war economy, while brutal and distorted, is still chugging along. The energy revenues are propping up the budget. The Kremlin can still afford to pay its soldiers and its security services.

But don’t mistake a cash infusion for stability. Higher oil prices don’t fix the rolling blackouts. They don’t put books back on shelves. And they certainly don’t make Russians feel safer. What they do is allow Putin to project an image of resilience. He can point to the GDP figures and say, “See? The West’s sanctions failed.”

And in a narrow, technical sense, he’s right. The Russian economy hasn’t collapsed. But the social contract has changed. The old deal was: you stay out of politics, and we’ll give you a stable, predictable life. The new deal, four years into the war, is: you stay out of politics, and we’ll give you a state-controlled app, intermittent electricity, and a criminal investigation if your teenager reads the wrong book.

That is not a winning deal. That is a recipe for the kind of quiet, grinding discontent that eats empires from the inside.

The Indifference of the Tsar

And then there is Putin himself. This is the most telling detail of all. When he finally broke his silence on the blackouts, his tone was revealing. He acknowledged the problem — “certain internet problems,” he called them — but he immediately infantilized the public. He said that “widespread public information in advance” would be harmful, because “the criminals, after all, hear and see everything.”

Let me translate that for you. He said: Your internet is broken because we’re hunting terrorists. And even if we wanted to tell you why, we can’t, because the terrorists are listening. So just be quiet and put up with it.

That is the language of a ruler who no longer feels the need to persuade. It is the language of a manager who sees his citizens as a security risk, not a constituency. And that indifference — that casual dismissal of the daily misery of rolling blackouts — is going to fester.

I think back to the other news from last week. The Polish, Estonian, Lithuanian, and Latvian embassies officially protested to the Russian Foreign Ministry after a memorial in Tomsk — dedicated to victims of the Soviet secret police — was dismantled. And earlier this month, Russia installed an exhibit that defiled the Katyn Memorial, the site of the 1940 mass execution of Polish POWs by the Soviets.

These are not random acts. The Kremlin is deliberately provoking its neighbors and glorifying its own violent history. It is making a calculated bet that fear and nostalgia for the Soviet empire will hold the country together.

But I see the other side of that bet. The same week they rename the FSB Academy after Dzerzhinsky, a mother in Yekaterinburg can’t order diapers online because the app is down. A student in Novosibirsk is warned that sharing a poem might get him a fine. A librarian in Kazan has to hide a novel about first love because it might be “extremist.”

This is not a stable equilibrium. This is a regime that has run out of carrots and is doubling down on sticks. And sticks, as any historian will tell you, work until the person holding them gets tired. But the person holding the stick in Russia isn’t tired. He’s indifferent. And indifference, in a leader, is the first sign that they have lost the plot.

So, here is my conclusion for you. Watch the digital blackouts. Watch the book raids. Watch the Dzerzhinsky statues. Russians are beginning to show growing discontent — not with placards or Molotovs, but with a slow, poisonous realization that the bargain they made with Putin is broken. They gave up their freedom for stability. And now they have neither.

The spring of discontent is here. It’s cold, it’s digital, and it’s only just beginning. And I, for one, am watching the lights flicker. You should too.

“They came to where I work. A police car and three people. They filmed me signing the official warning from the prosecutor. I felt like some kind of terrorist.”

Similar applications for public protests were rejected in dozens of Russian towns and cities. In the Moscow region local authorities cited coronavirus concerns. Officials in Penza claimed that a rally couldn’t go ahead due to a roller-skating masterclass at the requested location.

In the centre of Vladimir I check my phone. The taxi booking app is functioning and I can access state media. But Google searches aren’t working. And independent news sites aren’t loading.

“It’s much harder to communicate,” says Maria, who is out strolling with her baby. “We want to keep across the latest news and trends. Instead, we’re lagging behind.”

The longer we chat, though, the less Maria seems to want up-to-date information.

“In the past, when there was no internet, the world seemed a brighter place, because we knew less,” she tells me.

As for Russia’s war on Ukraine: “I try to avoid this kind of news,” Maria says. “I don’t want to fill my head with it. We’re tired of news about people being killed.”

“[Internet restrictions] create daily problems,” says Denis. “Today I couldn’t pay for petrol. And my satnav is glitching.”

Is Russia’s internet crackdown a road to the past?

“No, it’s not,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov assures me back in Moscow.

“In the current situation, security considerations dictate the need for certain measures,” Peskov continues. “These are being taken and most of our citizens understand the need for them.

“It’s clear that internet restrictions inconvenience many people. But this is the period we’re in. Once the need for such measures disappears, services will be fully restored and return to normal.”

But restrictions and repression are beginning to feel like the new normal.