The other day, the concierge in our apartment building watched the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) film Chaika: A Criminal Drama on my laptop. The film genuinely shocked and outraged her. "How ужасно! How are we supposed to live now?!" she asked. "And why aren’t they talking about this on television?" I explained that serious criticism of top officials has long been impossible on TV; it was strange that she still didn’t know that. But the concierge did not calm down, and the next day she greeted me with: "Why don’t you demand that they show it on the state channels?" The thought had never even crossed my mind. What is the point of demanding something we obviously will not get? It is perfectly clear that investigations like this will not be shown on the main TV channels; there has long been nothing surprising about that. Just as there is nothing surprising anymore in the fact that officials’ declared incomes often do not match their real spending, or that civil servants who urge people to hate the West are perfectly happy to keep assets there and educate their children there. It is hard to shock us with a story about a minister or deputy who wholly or partly plagiarized a dissertation, let alone with criminal cases against people the regime dislikes—or simply people who happened to get crushed by the law-enforcement system. Read more.
A good column in *Vedomosti* about how many of us acquire a “habit of the outrageous.”
People often say to me, for example: how can you still be outraged or surprised by anything at all? Against the backdrop of this or that, everything else no longer seems important.
So much was stolen at Transneft, why should we even be outraged by theft at Rosneft?
After the Bolotnaya trials (the prosecutions following the 2012 Bolotnaya Square protests in Moscow), why should we be outraged by the obvious escalation reflected in Dadin’s sentence.
As for us, we are demanding that Channel One air reports on the “Chaika case,” and we plan to sue over censorship. Whoever I tell this to responds with an understanding but ironic smile. Yes, yes, censorship—but why be outraged by it? It has been around for years.
I would put it this way: the choice now is not even “be outraged or endure it,” but “be outraged or support it.”