Laure Mandeville: “In Russia, the automatons, the rebels and the silent ones”

The writings of Astolphe de Custine, a French aristocrat who went in the 19th century to seek arguments in the snows of Russia to extol the merits of enlightened despotism, but returned frightened by Russian tyranny, remain implacably relevant today. Thus his judgment on the state of Russian society, where, he noted, “only rebels and automatons remain” in “a country where the climate and the government devour everything that is weak”.

Today's automatons are the officials under Putin's orders who have once again transformed Russia into a police superstate, scanning the web for the slightest dissident tweet. These are the masses of Russian soldiers who go to fight in Ukraine to make ends meet or because they were forced to. It is also the business leaders who, like the central character in the film Minotaur by Andreï Zvyagintsev, give in to the injunctions of those in power by creating lists of employees...