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I made this a top level post because I think people here might want to discuss it but you can remove it if it doesn't meet your standards.
Edit: removed my opinion of Scott from the body
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Notes -
I agree that protests sometimes have very little success or no success at all in near term. However, with time they can change collective minds more effectively than armed resistance. After the WWII many Latvians took the arms and waged guerrilla war against Soviet occupation (fondly remembered as Forest Brothers). They failed and had no impact at all. What changed everything was Gorbachev's glastnost (openness) policy, people were allowed to talk freely and they decided that they don't like the Soviet system anymore. Despite what you read in history books, that was the main reason why the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Today I learned from my aging mother that during WWII as a small child she was a refugee in camps in Germany. She might remember some details wrong but when the war ended they were let out and they had to decide: stay in Germany or go back to Latvia. She said that they had no information, no understanding about global things and they were afraid to stay in Germany (after all, Germany had started the war), so they decided to return to Latvia. Today it sounds like a monumental mistake considering that Latvia remained occupied by the Soviet Union and how different the post-war development turned to be. This just illustrates that sometimes people make bad choices because genuinely they don't know better.
Ukraine is again a good example of that as well. Areas with greater Russian loyalties are much easier to conquer by Russia. Ukraine is in a bad shape but encroaching totalitarianism is much worse with potentially poor future outcomes. Beliefs that people have in Russia about the west are main reason why this war is happening at all. Protests can nudge people to change their minds better than weapons.
But that ultimately reveals the answer as to why the Soviet Union fell: for one critical moment, the Russians lifted the boot.
Fast-forward 30 years, and now everyone there is clamoring for re-application of said boot.
Not everyone, only people who are misinformed.
The communist party tried to put the lid back and a coop was staged against Gorbachev and army units were sent to the Baltic countries etc. They failed because people were not afraid to talk about it anymore.
I don't know why Russians willingly blinded themselves afterwards. Of course, it was the government that gradually started to control information and played on their nationalistic feelings. Most people who support Putin, do it because they favour Russian supremacy, they want to feel that Russia is the greatest nation on earth. Globalization robs you of that. As many critics say that people in the European Union have lost their roots and exchanged their culture to material goods. When one sees oneself as a true carrier of civilization and the rest of the world as rotten, one can justify all brutalities in Ukraine.
But the reality is that Russian culture is nothing special, based on the same things that people value all around the world.
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