That New Yorker article is interesting and also dispiriting in that it says that
What are you hoping to happen here? I mean, obviously, I’m sure, for the war to end, but is there an off-ramp you see for Putin and Russia? How is Russia going to reconstitute itself?
It’s a very hard question, to be fair. We are always trying to make these comparisons with the late nineteen-eighties, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then we got perestroika and all of that. So maybe is it possible to repeat the same thing? I was fifteen years old, but still I remember that back then there was this cheerful mood that people were good, and it was just the system that was bad. So back then maybe I was naïve, maybe my parents were naïve and my friends were naïve, but we had this idea that it was only because of the Communist Party and the K.G.B., and if you could get rid of them everything was going to be fine. People are good. Even the people, say, in the military and in the security services. They were just pressured to be bad and to serve the system.
These days, unfortunately, we don’t have this excuse. We do have lots of people who support the war, unfortunately. Yes, I understand that it’s about propaganda, and it’s about fear, and people are really fearful. They understand what is at stake, and these select repressions were quite successful at freezing society. But, nonetheless, there’s so many people who support the war, and, to be honest, I just don’t know the answer. I don’t know how to get them back as humans.