Recently I tried to correct somebody suggesting that ‘the Russian working class lifted not one finger in defence of 'their' state’. At first I offered a video of the demonstration from 1993, and some opinion polls, but she basically said that they weren’t good enough.

I am tempted to link to her essay where she justified her arguments, but to be honest it’s so messy and lengthy that I feel like it would be too distracting to share here. (But I can concede if somebody insists.)

Still, it raises an important question: where were the tens of millions of Soviets demonstrating or striking in favor of their union?

One possible reason for this is that, since the working masses already had so much political power, physical demonstrations would have been unnecessary and many thought that their electoral input would have sufficed. This might be begging the question (‘did they really have much political power?’), but surely they had ways to fight back besides physical demonstrations or strikes.

Either way, it’s clear that people were being too polite and gentle with the anticommunists infiltrating the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s and later.