Where is the resistance to Putin’s war?

If you look only at the streets of Moscow, you might conclude that it doesn’t exist.

There are no enormous anti-war demonstrations. No opposition leader is addressing a crowd of half a million people. Most Russians go to work, shop for groceries, complain about prices, and continue with their lives.

But that does not mean political resistance has disappeared.

In a country where a placard can send you to prison, resistance changes shape.

Sometimes it appears as thousands of people quietly lining up for a candidate the Kremlin did not expect them to support.

Sometimes anger erupts around a movie, a video game, or something that does not look political at all.

Sometimes resistance is simply refusing to cooperate, refusing to volunteer, refusing to believe, or waiting for the moment when obedience begins to crack.

Those signals can be easy to miss from outside Russia because we tend to imagine political resistance as something visible: demonstrations, slogans, leaders, crowds.

But what does resistance look like when all of those things have been made dangerous?

Today, we’re going to look beneath Russia’s strangely quiet surface and examine the political life that still exists underneath it—how dissatisfaction finds safer outlets, why it rarely reaches the streets, and what would have to change before hidden resistance became something much more powerful.

Here’s our roadmap:

Politics Is a Dirty Business — How Russians were taught that politics belongs to other people.

The Anti-War Vote That Never Happened — What happened when Russians briefly found a legal way to signal opposition to the war.

Protest Hides in Plain Sight  — Why political anger sometimes erupts around seemingly trivial cultural issues.

Why the Streets Stay Empty — What prevents widespread dissatisfaction from turning into organized protest.

When the System Stops Obeying — The moment when an authoritarian system becomes genuinely vulnerable.

The Men With Guns — Who could enter the political struggle if Moscow begins losing control.

Let’s begin with one of the Kremlin’s most successful political achievements: convincing millions of Russians that politics is something decent people should stay away from.

Politics Is a Dirty Business

Politics is simply the process of deciding how we live together: who makes the rules, how much tax we pay, where that money goes, and whose interests the state protects.

But in Russia, people were encouraged to think about politics very differently. Politics was dirty, dangerous, and dishonest. Respectable people should stay away from it.

The problem is that when you refuse to participate in politics, political decisions do not stop being made. You simply leave somebody else to make them for you.

A recent Carnegie study describes how Putin spent his first two presidential terms systematically depoliticizing the ruling elite. Governors were turned from independent political figures into administrators. Oligarchs learned that political ambition could cost them their businesses. Disagreements at the top were pushed behind closed doors. The job of most officials was no longer to debate where the country should go, but to implement decisions made above them.

The message was simple: do your job and leave politics to the people at the very top.

And over time, a system like this selects a particular kind of person.

Imagine two officials.

One looks at a stupid order and says, “This will not work. Here are the numbers. We should change the plan.”

The other understands that the boss loves the plan and says, “Excellent decision. We will implement it immediately.”

Which one has the safer career?

In Putin’s Russia, it is the second one.

Repeat that choice thousands of times over twenty-five years, and you produce a very particular ruling class: people who may be excellent at solving technical problems but have been trained not to question the goals set from above.

This does not mean Russian officials are stupid. Many are highly capable professionals. The problem is the incentive structure. Independent judgment can damage a career. Correctly predicting what the superior wants can advance it. Carnegie’s analysis makes essentially the same point: the system rewarded adaptation and compliance while gradually destroying the ability to challenge its basic direction.

And this is where the phrase politics is a dirty business becomes almost self-fulfilling.

Create an environment where honesty is dangerous, disagreement is punished, and obedience is rewarded, and many independent people will avoid that environment altogether. Those who remain learn how to survive inside it.

Then ordinary Russians look at politics and say, “See? Politics really is disgusting. I want nothing to do with these people.”

Which is exactly what the system needs them to think.

You no longer have to physically remove every decent person from political life. Many will surrender the field themselves because entering it looks humiliating, dangerous, and morally compromising.

And by the time people decide that perhaps politics is too important to leave to somebody else, they discover that the door has already been locked.

The Anti-War Vote That Never Happened 

In early 2024, almost nobody outside Russian political circles had heard much about Boris Nadezhdin. He was a former member of parliament, a familiar face on political television shows, and hardly the kind of charismatic opposition leader who seemed capable of frightening the Kremlin.

Then he said Putin had made a disastrous mistake by invading Ukraine and called for an end to the war through negotiations.

Nadezhdin decided to run for president. To get onto the ballot, he needed 100,000 valid signatures from across Russia. And suddenly, people began lining up to give them to him.

There were queues in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in cities across the country. On January 31, Nadezhdin delivered 105,000 signatures to the Central Election Commission.

A week later, election officials rejected his candidacy, saying more than 9,000 of the signatures were invalid.

The interesting part was never whether Nadezhdin could defeat Putin. He obviously could not compete on equal terms inside the Russian political system.

The interesting part was what happened when Russians were suddenly given a legal and relatively safe way to say: I want this war to end.

Thousands stood in line. And by standing there, they could see one another.

This matters because propaganda does more than persuade people that the war is justified. It also tries to persuade anyone who disagrees that they are alone. If you want peace, perhaps you are weak. Perhaps you are selfish. Perhaps everyone around you supports the war and you are the strange one.

That perception can paralyze political life even when private dissatisfaction is widespread.

But give people a legal way to reveal what they think, and suddenly they begin discovering one another.

Two and a half years later, something similar happened again.

Yabloko, an old liberal party that had almost disappeared from national politics, entered the September 2026 parliamentary campaign openly calling for a ceasefire. It had little political power, but it was the only officially registered party opposing the war. On August 10, Russia’s Supreme Court removed it from the ballot after a lawsuit by the nationalist Rodina party. Yabloko denied the allegations and appealed.

A few hundred supporters gathered outside the court. Again, the important question was not whether Yabloko could take power. It was whether Russians who wanted the fighting to stop would be allowed a legal political vehicle through which to identify themselves.

And the polling helps explain why that matters.

According to the Levada Center’s July survey, 66 percent of Russians still said they supported the actions of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine.

But 62 percent also said Russia should now move to peace negotiations. Only 28 percent wanted the fighting to continue.

At first this sounds contradictory. It makes more sense if you stop imagining Russian society as two clean camps: “pro-war” and “anti-war.”

A woman can support Russian soldiers because her son is one of them and still want him home tomorrow.

A man can believe television when it says the West provoked the conflict and still think four years of fighting is enough.

And that creates a problem for the Kremlin. If peace is allowed onto the ballot, the government can no longer safely claim that continuing the war simply expresses the will of the Russian people. So the candidate – or the party – disappears.

And afterward, officials can point to the absence of an anti-war vote as proof that nobody wanted one.

Protest Hides in Plain Sight

Now we come to one of the strangest political stories in Russia this summer.

Kolobok.

If you didn’t grow up with Russian fairy tales, Kolobok is a famous children’s character: a round piece of bread that comes to life, runs away from home, and is eventually eaten by a fox.

Think of him as the Russian cousin of the Gingerbread Man.

In August, a new fantasy movie called The Last Bogatyr: Kolobok arrived in Russian theaters.

And almost immediately, people began attacking it online.

The reason had little to do with Kolobok itself.

Russian cinemas had expected to show the new Spider-Man movie through the unofficial arrangements now used for Hollywood releases. But Kolobok’s distributor asked theaters to delay Spider-Man so the Russian film would face less competition.

People were furious.

Kolobok was flooded with negative ratings, many posted before viewers could even have seen the movie. Fans organized petitions and mocked the film across social media. What should have been a minor dispute over movie schedules turned into a cultural rebellion.

Why?

Not because Spider-Man is politically important. The important part is where the anger went.

For years, Russians have watched their choices steadily shrink. Websites disappear. Foreign platforms are blocked. Western movies vanish from official distribution. The state constantly promotes Russian substitutes and tells people what they should watch, use, and support.

Then even something as trivial as choosing which movie to see becomes another reminder that somebody else is making decisions for you.

Most people are not going to connect all of this consciously and say, “I am protesting authoritarianism.”

They simply know that they are angry.

And Kolobok was safe to attack.

An anti-war protest can bring police to your door. A furious review of bad CGI probably will not.

So resentment that cannot safely express itself politically leaks into places that appear completely apolitical: movies, games, consumer choices, celebrity scandals, even fights over entertainment.

That does not make every angry moviegoer a secret dissident.

But it tells us something important about political life under repression.

When people cannot attack the source of their frustration, they often attack the nearest target they are still allowed to touch.

Why Streets Stay Empty

Russia does not lack dissatisfied people. It lacks the machinery that turns dissatisfaction into political force.

A mass protest requires more than anger. People need to know that others feel the same way, trust that enough of them will show up, and have some way to organize without being stopped first.

That is exactly what the Russian state has spent years making harder.

By 2026, internet restrictions had become part of everyday life. Websites were blocked, messengers were pressured, mobile internet was periodically shut down, and the government pushed people toward state-controlled alternatives.

When Russians tried to protest these restrictions, authorities repeatedly blocked the demonstrations themselves.

In Perm, organizers received permission for a rally, only to have it revoked two hours before it began. An 80-year-old man who came anyway with a sign calling for freedom of thought, speech, and the internet was detained and fined.

Now imagine organizing not a protest about internet access, but one against the war.

Millions may dislike what the government is doing, but if everyone believes that the first person to step forward will simply be arrested alone, the streets can remain empty.

And even a large crowd is not enough by itself.

The state still has police, the National Guard, intelligence services, weapons, and chains of command.

Authoritarian power becomes truly vulnerable only when that machinery begins to fail: when police hesitate, soldiers refuse orders, commanders stop trusting the leadership, or parts of the system begin switching sides.

Until then, protesting is a terrible gamble.

A Russian citizen may hate the war, hate the government, and hate what is happening to the country—and still conclude that going into the street will cost them their freedom without changing anything.

When the System Stops Obeying

An authoritarian government becomes vulnerable at one specific moment: when it gives an order and the people with weapons stop obeying.

Russia has experienced this before.

In February 1917, the capital was filled with strikes, food protests, and demonstrations. Tsar Nicholas II ordered the city’s garrison to suppress the unrest by force.

At first, soldiers fired on demonstrators. Then units began refusing.

The Volynsky Regiment mutinied. Other soldiers followed. Weapons moved into the hands of protesters. Police stations were attacked. By the time Nicholas understood how badly control had deteriorated, the question was no longer whether protesters could defeat the state.

The state itself was splitting.

That does not mean Russia in 2026 resembles Russia in February 1917. Modern Russia is older, wealthier, more urban, and equipped with surveillance technology Nicholas II could not imagine.

But the mechanism is worth remembering.

We saw a smaller and very different demonstration of this principle in June 2023.

Yevgeny Prigozhin turned Wagner forces against Russia’s military leadership. His fighters seized control of key military facilities in Rostov-on-Don and drove north toward Moscow.

They did not overthrow Putin, but for several hours, something extraordinary happened.

An armed force openly rebelled, moved hundreds of miles through Russia, and encountered remarkably little resistance on the ground before turning around.

Suddenly the Russian state looked different. Institutions that appeared solid the day before were waiting to see what would happen.

The trigger does not have to be a dramatic revolution planned months in advance. It could be something much more mundane. Perhaps salaries stop arriving reliably or a military disaster destroys confidence in the leadership.

This is the point where political systems can change with extraordinary speed: because the cost calculation changes for everyone at once.

But a collapse in obedience does not necessarily enable a democratic transition. It simply opens the field. Whoever is organized, armed, trusted, and capable of offering a convincing future can seize this opportunity – and power.

The Men With Guns

If central power ever weakens, Russia will enter that crisis with something it did not have before 2022: a huge population shaped directly by war.

By early 2025, one expert interviewed by Reuters estimated that more than 1.5 million Russians had participated in the fighting.

Most remain under state control. But veterans, soldiers, security personnel, and armed formations will matter enormously if that control begins to fracture.

There is another development worth watching.

As Ukrainian drones strike refineries, factories, and other infrastructure deep inside Russia, businesses are becoming more involved in their own defense. Private security forces have been given greater access to weapons, while major companies have discussed paying for more sophisticated defensive systems.

Under normal conditions, these groups remain subordinate to Moscow.

But during a struggle for power, armed men do not simply disappear. They choose whom to obey and that choice may determine who wins.

At that point, ambitious officials, commanders, business leaders, and regional elites will ask a very practical question: which side gives me the best chance of surviving—and keeping my position?

This is where public opinion suddenly matters.

If millions of Russians have made it clear that they want peace, predictable law, and a government they can influence, someone inside the system may discover that championing those demands is the fastest road to legitimacy.

But if society has no visible alternative, the men with guns will provide one themselves: order, revenge, empire, or another strongman.

That is why political expression matters even when it seems powerless today.

People do not need to overthrow the government tomorrow. They need to make one thing unmistakable: what kind of country they want when the present system finally loses its grip.

Peace. Freedom from fear. And the right to have a say in the decisions that shape their lives.

A political opening, if it comes, may be brief, and if there is no recognizable democratic alternative waiting for it, Russia may simply replace one authoritarian ruler with another.

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