Two recent videos from #Russia — first one, people in Belgorod queueing at freezing dawn to buy eggs, whose prices have recently skyrocketed due to inflation and other factors. The first impression I have on watching this: you wanted to return to #USSR, your dream has come true. This looks very much like the Soviet food queues I remember from 1980's.

The second video is the essence of today's Russia: residents of one district of Krasnodar, a town in the south of Russia, appeal to Putin to fix central heating, which has been failing for the last three years and local authorities notoriously ignore and dismiss all complaints. Residents say temperature in their apartments doesn't exceed 15°C since the start of heating season. Such "appeals to Putin" are a very popular and probably the only socially acceptable form of public protest in Russia.

To appreciate the fascinating absurdity of the situation, just imagine yourself, wherever you live, appealing to the president of your country to fix your house's heating system.

Of course, this situation is much more complex from sociological point of view. If we strip it from all the tragicomedy and ritual, the root cause of their problems is that these pension-age citizens of Russia are stripped of any subjectivity, and they know about it. They're treated as powerless serfs at any decisive layer of their country, starting from the local council who is likely responsible for the heating systems. But this serfdom was well earned by their persistent passivity and compliance with the rules of the system when it was only being built. The system has tested them many times during the last decades, checking how far it can go, but their response was always "we love Putin regardless of what he does to us".

Polish writer Stefan Kisielewski wrote in 1980's, from the very depth of Soviet economic depression, a very wise phrase: a government with ambitions to control everything in the country will be inevitably blamed for failures of everything.

That's kind of the model of governance Putin has recreated...