Let me put a short question to our speakers, to Greg and Ilya. As you stressed and as every everybody knows, since the war started there has been no more politics in Russia. There are no more elections, even in the distorted form in which we had them before. There is no protest. In reality there is no discussion, even on social media or within the trade unions. There is no way there can be any academic seminars.

Yet, on the other hand, millions of people have become involved in politics against their will. I refer, for example, to the hundreds of thousands of who were mobilised into the army. The apparent silence in society could deceive us a bit about this. But check the statistics for Yandex, the Russian Google. If at the beginning of the war people googled in Yandex “SVO”—that’s the abbreviation for “Special Military Operation”—just 1.5 million times a month, now it's more than 13 times million a month. So, there’s a growing kind of politicization without a definite objective, but this state of affairs for the first time for decades concentrates all the contradictions of the regime, of our capitalistic system, unsoftened by the political machine.

And first time for decades the main protagonists in Russian politics could be not the hundreds and few thousands in the activist minority, but millions, including 600,000 with weapons, the soldiers from the front line. And this raises the issue of socialism from below that Ilya Budraitskis touched on, which is a question for all of us as Russian leftists.

Do we have something to say about that to all those people who never read our statements before? Do we have any answers to their main concern, namely, how to achieve peace and what that peace would look like? And what should we do in order to speak to all the millions of people without any political experience who were always beyond our reach, living as we were in the privileged environment where we just used, you know, to develop our talents and opportunities? I formulate that as a question.