"This pact has been broken, people want their voices to be heard," said Lipman. "First the population broke the pact, coming out into the streets, but then Putin broke it himself, with his interference in Russians' daily lives by forcing the church on them." She went on to say that he's counting on a traditional Russian passivity toward the state that has partly disappeared, but which he well remembers from the Brezhnev era of stagnation, when things, she noted, were "dead and cold and cynicism was the norm. That's nothing people want to go back to."
But Putin has further, and more substantial, reasons to feel he can eventually prevail. Leaving aside issues of campaign fairness (a field of straw-man candidates, near-total dominance of the airwaves), he was, after a winter of opposition demonstrations, reelected to the presidency in March. He won, if not with 64 percent of the votes, as was officially announced, then with 50.2 percent, according to the independent vote-monitoring group Golos. And he is still popular, with an approval rating hovering in the mid-60s, according to the reliable public opinion research center Levada. (This, after 12 years at the helm!) The approval, based to an extent on fear of the unknown and a desire for stability, forms part of the "deep reserves" the state possesses, which otherwise include the military, the security services, and the courts -- all of which Putin has commandeered and which he can deploy against the opposition at will -- plus state-controlled media. (There is "no sign that the FSB, the police, the army, or the courts are becoming disloyal," Lipman said.) Faced with such resources, the opposition's look puny indeed -- at least for now.
The absence of a single candidate of paramount stature (a Russian Nelson Mandela, as it were), the abstract nature of the opposition's plans (free elections, in effect, being abstract in a country that has never had them, or not had them for long), and the lack of a gripping vision for a post-Putin Russia, to say nothing of a deep-rooted reluctance to confront a state considered, at least in the past, omnipotent and dangerous, all coalesce to provide powerful disincentives for the development of a truly country-wide opposition movement. Moreover, Navalny, according to a VTSIOM Center poll, is now known by more than half the population, but this in nowhere near enough, and he has not yet broken ranks with his cohorts to declare himself the One Who Shall Rule Russia. And surely there is no coincidence in his newfound visibility and Russia's level of Internet penetration, which this year reached 49 percent. "The country needs an opposition, that would excite the provinces" -- where a majority of Russians live, and where the Internet is only just arriving -- "and not just the Moscow elite," Lipman said.