Something has quietly shifted in Russia. Not the social and economic meltdown Western pundits have been confidently predicting almost continuously for the last two decades. Or the imminent economic collapse following each bad data set. But something more subtle: the gradual collapse of the social bargain that held Russian society together through the first four years of the Ukraine war.

Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a recent paper when Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he didn't ask Russians to support the war — he offered them something more modest: the right to live outside it. "You can live outside of the war, but you cannot be against it," went the unspoken deal.

For those who accepted the offer, the Kremlin would allow a way of life close to their pre-war existence. Many accepted it — some out of genuine indifference to others' suffering, some out of desperation, some simply because the alternative was unthinkable.

That bargain held, more or less, through 2024. The ruble didn't collapse. Borders stayed open. Wages rose. The sanctioned shelves were quickly restocked with parallel-imported goods. A curious wartime prosperity emerged from the rubble of the old life. Indeed, after the initial shock of the invasion of 2022, the following two years were amongst the most prosperous since the fall of the Soviet Union. The austerity of almost two decades of Putinomics was turned on its head and the spigot of massive state spending finally opened. A War middle class emerged and the war in the south had very little impact on everyday life. With it came what Baunov calls "everyday patriotism" — a fragile optimism built not on ideology but on the simple satisfaction of survival.

By spring 2026, the regime had shredded that arrangement. "The Russian regime had unceremoniously violated the terms of this compromise agreement one after another," Baunov writes, "and now society is angry. People did not agree to ignore the war only to become the target of prohibitions and repressions themselves and now feel cheated and deceived."

The war comes home

The war has finally arrived in the courtyards of regular Russians. As the military Keynesianism boom of 2023 and 2024 began to fade away as industrial capacity utilisation maxed out the economy was no longer able to absorb the torrent of military spending of around $140bn a year and prices rose. The personal income gains of the previous years were eaten away. The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) hiked interest rates to a crushing 21% to kill inflation, but it wouldn’t die. Then the regular began to clamp down on credits in an unorthodox experiment to deliberately slow growth to pull inflation down. It worked: inflation has fallen from a sticky 10% last year to 5.9% in April and is continuing to fall. The CBR has managed to put through 550bp of rate cuts but interest rates remain in double digits.

With consumption falling, borrowing impossibly expensive, and growth slowing, the slowdown is hitting small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) particularly hard where sales are falling and driving many to the wall. It’s not a crisis yet, but dark clouds have rolled over the skies that were sunny before.

However, the biggest catalyst for the growing public anger is not the war itself or its effects on the economy — it is the internet blackouts.

As the war goes into its fifth year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has rolled out a more overt repression than ever before as the Kremlin finally tries to take full control of the Internet as part of a policy of digital sovereignty, modelled on China’s control of the online world.

During the Victory Day period in Moscow and St Petersburg, mobile internet went completely dark for over four hours on May 5, disabling banking apps, taxis, delivery services and SMS. Even services on Putin's own "whitelist" — which he had personally guaranteed would remain accessible — failed.

The response from a Russian model and popular blogger called Victoria Bonya illustrated the shift in public mood with unusual clarity. In a viral Instagram post she addressed Putin directly — not the state regulator Roskomnadzor, not some lower-level official, but Putin himself — and told him: "There is a lot that you don't know." She listed a range of problems, primarily internet blackouts, that officials are too scared to raise with him.

The post was remarkable on two levels. First, it identified Putin personally as the source of the problem, stripping away the usual deflection onto bureaucratic intermediaries. Personally criticising Putin by name is dangerous, as opposition leader Alexei Navalny found out at the cost of his life two years ago.

Second, it inverted the fundamental logic of the war's legitimacy. The entire "special military operation" rested on the premise that Putin has access to intelligence that ordinary Russians do not — plans for a Nato attack, hidden threats, secret knowledge justifying extraordinary measures, Baunov said. Bonya's message turned that premise inside out: we, the people, know about the country's problems, and perhaps the president doesn't. If he doesn't know about the internet blackouts, maybe he didn't know what he was doing in February 2022 either.

The regime's response was swift and harsh. The authorities have banned WhatsApp and Telegram – the two most popular messaging services – on the grounds they are "non-transparent". In their place the state is pushing a homegrown replacement — the Max app — whose transparency is of a rather different, less reassuring kind – unlike the privately-owned apps, the FSB has full access to all the users data and content as part of an expanding surveillance operation.

Simultaneously, the Finance Ministry has raised VAT from 20 to 22 per cent and introduced requirements to register a taxpayer identification number for bank transfers that previously required only a phone number. Russians now complain they have to completely declare, with documentation, the details of any transaction they make through the banking system.

The cumulative effect is an increasingly visible surveillance and extraction apparatus. Russians who accepted the wartime bargain accepted it on the understanding that the state would leave their private lives alone. The combination of communications monitoring, tax tightening and internet control and increasingly obvious repressions has demolished the social pact. Personal space — Baunov notes — is all that unfree people have left once the state has taken over public space. The regime is now encroaching on that too.

The fear beneath the surface

This would be the second time that Putin has reneged on his social contract with the people. When he took over in 2000 there was another simpler social contract with the people: you stay out of politics, and I will stay out of your everyday lives.

That deal held for much of the boom years in the noughties and life improved out of all recognition. The size of the economy doubled, companies boomed, wages were hiked by almost 10% every year for nearly a decade. But that boom too faded away after the 2008 global financial crisis. The petrostate economic model was exhausted by 2013. And the annexation of Crimea and the start of the sanctions regime in 2014. Throughout this period, the Kremlin slowly tightened the screws and introduced measures like the “foreign agents” bill that allowed the state to brand anyone it liked a de facto spy and close opposition parties and press.

Things came to a head with Navalny’s return to Russia from Germany where he had been recovering from an attempted state-sponsored assassination attempt. He was immediately arrested and sent to a high security prison in Russia’s far north. He was dead three years later.

Putin realised there was no recovering from these blows to civil liberties for the Kremlin's reputation. The gloves came off and Putin abandoned what commentator Mark Galeotti dubbed “repression-lite” for the real thing.

Fast forward to this year’s Victory Day parade, one of the most important events on the public calendar – an event that Putin has used to unify the Russian people in their shared pride of the defeat of the Nazis in what they call The Great Patriotic war.

This year it was held without rehearsals, without military hardware, with minimal personnel and with internet jammed across Moscow to prevent Ukrainian drones from navigating to the site. It was, as Baunov observed, not a demonstration of strength, but of fear.

"A military parade is intended as a demonstration of strength and bravery, but if it is held furtively, without rehearsals, and with the internet jammed, it demonstrates nothing but fear and weakness,” Baunov said.

Putin's approval rating has declined noticeably this year, but still remains above its pre-war highs. Usually the parade lasts hours with colourful troops marching with impeccable timing across the famous square. This year the whole event lasted barely 45 minutes and Putin’s speech was confused and rambling. His pre-war image — bare-chested, horse riding vigorous strong man has faded away to a bloated-faced bureaucrat that hides in bunkers from where he runs his wars. "Instead of a guarantor," Baunov writes, "he is becoming a liability."

The social tradeoff that sustained Russian acquiescence for four years was always fragile. It required the regime to keep its side of the bargain: let people live. The regime has stopped doing so. What comes next is the question that no model has yet answered — because what is happening now in Russia has no modern precedent.