Bernard Guetta: The Russia of the 200

2023-04-04 | Political initiatives, Geopolitical analysis

There should have been cameras, microphones, a director. The fear of provocation and manipulation should not have prevented the 200 or so Russian journalists gathered abroad from debating in broad daylight, because the world would then have been able to see another Russia, the real one.

All of them were born or came of age after the communism, under the perestroika or in the Yeltsin years. Like all Russians under 40, they had grown up in debates, confrontation of ideas, and free expression, and for them, the present times are thus not a continuity but a total and sinister novelty. Coming from Russia itself or, mostly , from the countries where they found refuge and recreated their sites, they could all have been French, German, Italian or Polish. All of them were urban middle-class Europeans, of the generation and social background that will shape the post-Putin Russia and whose mobile phones and computers were not the only signs of their country’s break with the Soviet past.

Read the full publication (also published in German, French, Hungarian).