Protest actions by long-haul truckers against the forced introduction of fees for using federal highways are continuing all over Russia for a second week already.

Thousands of people are coming together to block roads in the most varied points of the country, from Makhachkala to the Far East.  Usually the authorities label the protesters a fifth column and blame everything on State Department cookies, but they haven’t been able to pull it off this time around:  the fact is that these are the most ordinary of ordinary Russians, who learn the latest news about the fifth column from Dmitry Kiselev on Sundays.  These are the people who supported the annexation of Crimea and whom the Levada surveys include among the 86 percent (actually it’s 89.9 percent already).  These are people who were simply toiling at an extremely difficult job so they could feed their children.

But the authorities need to feed all the Rotenbergs.  And so it is that they have laid the blame for their own policy right onto the shoulders of ordinary rank-and-file citizens.  Those same authorities that for the past 15 years have been letting the business elite throw away trillions of oil dollars instead of putting up quality infrastructure.

So now it turns out that the reason there aren’t roads in Russia is not because they’d forgotten to build them while they were so busy looting money that had been allocated from the budget.  No, it’s the fault of the long-haul truckers, who had the audacity to drive on these roads.

It was with relation to this that the authorities decided to retaliate and strike back at domestic lines of communication, which are impeding the regional elites as they go about their not at all easy task of monopolizing intra-regional markets once and for all.  This is yet another step towards the destruction of our country’s unity, which is already pretty flimsy as it is.

Our common goal is to not let this happen, notwithstanding our different interests and views on other issues.  And we need to be doing this not only before the elections, when the authorities may be prepared to make concessions because they doesn’t want to see their popularity ratings fall, but after them as well.

Open Russia