But what has changed here since 2014? An explosion in traffic cameras and fines, more restrictions (prescriptions and bans) on medicines, inflation, reforms (attacks) in pensions and healthcare, skyrocketing housing costs and an simmering education crisis from preschool to university where money increasingly buys limited space over need or merit. Now like a rotten cherry on top, there is this quarantine which seems arbitrary except when you realize the whole police force has been turned against the citizens to check QR code passes. Who is deemed essential is also arbitrary and favors the government while bankrupting everyone else. Gasterbyters, the backbone of the economy, are literally destitute. Russians also dislike seeing the government luxuriously spend resources in the form of political-point scoring coronavirus aid to the US and Italy, and then abruptly flip-flopping on the severity of the pandemic at home. On tv its is Corona Vision 24/7 here, while families with small children are forced out of work and cramped into tiny apartments in ugly neighborhoods, forbidden to walk more than 10 meters from their door, their money and sanity running out. Russians who are able, flout the quarantine at every opportunity, more concerned about being harassed by police than getting sick.

There is a lot more I could say, but I will leave it at on this note; This new wave of disillusionment is not coming from the West. The West has virtually no direct influence here anymore. This is all homegrown.

Replies: @Cyrano, @Alden, @Derer, @Jerome_Montreal, @FB

Saker can't be taken serious. He is a child engaging in wishful thinking and wish fulfillment of his childhood fantasies. This perhaps might be understandable as he grew up in a milieu of White Russian emigres and a fatherless, iirc, family. He is an emotional man-child who engages in endless stream of rationalizations, twisting reality and justifications for the right cause in his mind, the cause of Russia, Mother Russia - the entity that only exists in childhood dreams that were fed by his mother, the entity that never existed even before the Bolshevik Revolution.

This kind of fantasizing that is data poor but theory rich is something that Russians may have a proclivity for. It often amounts to casting the spells against reality.

Replies: @anon_382, @jerome_montreal