Only the blind can claim that Vladimir Putin wants to revive the Soviet Union. On the contrary, he has built one of the most Darwinian and irresponsible capitalist systems on the planet. Only its imperial ambitions and the normalization of permanent theft bear any relation to the late Soviet state. Only the fear of the return of a totalitarian regime, which struck several generations in Russia, has delayed a left turn among the young. But the war has finally started it.

After February 24, the protest against the Putin regime, amplified by antiwar sentiment, was embodied in a digital resistance movement. The global media has been largely silent about this fact, but military commissariats in Russia burn down every few days, freight trains with weapons or raw materials for military factories derail, and the walls of houses and fences are covered with huge pro-Ukrainian graffiti at night. Volunteers take care of Ukrainians forcibly displaced to Russia and help them flow to Europe. This resistance is horizontal and egalitarian, and it is mainly engaged in by twenty- to thirty-year-olds. What values drive them?

If you look at the decade leading up to the war, it becomes clear that Putin himself provoked the left turn among the youth. Businesses in Russia had fantastically low tax rates and a staggeringly inefficient system of control over entrepreneurs that fed on bribes, allowing employers to do whatever they wanted with their staff. That is why the view of the Russian economy as state capitalist is deeply erroneous. Yes, in recent years, state-owned enterprises have begun to absorb private companies, but before that, for twenty years, business developed in conditions close to the libertarian utopias of Ayn Rand novels.