On June 24, like all my friends and acquaintances, like everyone trying to make sense of what is happening to our country, I was glued to Telegram channels, following the astonishing and seemingly impossible march of the Wagner PMC towards Moscow. No one could explain or even comprehend what was happening: experts were at a loss, "people with connections" were at a loss, and, as it became known shortly thereafter, the President of the Russian Federation himself was very confused.

The mood was varied: in Moscow, some trembled at the thought of street battles, in Rostov-on-Don, residents took photos with the masked militants who had seized the city, and social media was overflowing with memes and jokes about the events. But overall, everyone who followed the political life of the country was engulfed in a state that can only be described as frenzy.

Yes, everyone understood that Yevgeny Prigozhin was a bandit and a thug, that he was flesh of Putin's flesh and blood of the rotten and cold blood of the Putin regime. It was known that such a man in power could be even more dangerous than the current president, who lives in his fantasies, is confused, and indecisive. And yet, it was impossible to suppress a feeling of joyful and malicious anticipation... Anticipation of what?

Certainly, no one wanted a civil war, no one wanted bloodshed, but it was precisely the swiftness and relative bloodlessness with which the Wagner PMC columns raced along Russian roads towards Moscow that suddenly gave people a sense of the unexpected fragility, even illusoriness, of the seemingly mighty, ironclad, eternal Putin regime. It turned out that just a few thousand resolute armed men with combat experience were enough, and not a single soul from the formidable million-strong repressive apparatus, built by a paranoid tsar over decades, was ready to risk themselves for this tsar.

Perhaps it was the anticipation of a miracle? Because what was happening seemed like a true miracle, so much did it not correspond to our, Ukrainian, or Western ideas about what material Putin's Russia is made of, what fabric Russian life is cut from, and what laws govern our society.

It's no wonder: Russian propaganda distorts the perception of Russians, Ukrainians, and Europeans about how things really are in the country to such an extent that even those constantly deconstructing its myths are still under its influence. Putin's Russia is a kingdom of continuous, total lies that have sunk too deeply into the consciousness not only of ordinary people but also of those who relay these lies, those who write manuals for them, and even those who order these manuals—and, as we see, the person in whose interests all this is done.

For all of them, what happened on June 24 was a shock. Even if Prigozhin's rebellion ultimately turned into a farce, best illustrated by the photo taken in Wagner-captured Rostov, which became a meme: "Tank stuck in the circus gates." But the conclusions about the state of Russia and its inhabitants based on this story can be numerous—and very unexpected for both the Kremlin's masters and the Western public.

Firstly, no one is ready to die for Putin. Neither the army nor the National Guard, whose sole purpose and reason for existence is to protect the authorities from any encroachments, nor the police, nor the FSB. Not to mention ordinary people, who did not even think of taking to spontaneous rallies in support of their president to protect the country from a military coup.

Is it just that soldiers and police were afraid of the battle-hardened thugs, whose reputation is known to everyone in Russia thanks to media praise and self-promotion on the Internet? It seems not.

The ease with which he took Rostov, the lack of resistance to his advance from the military, and—surprisingly!—the joy of the city's residents, who almost greeted the Wagnerites with flowers and took selfies with the thugs, in my opinion, speaks precisely about this: Putin and his regime have, in fact, incredibly exhausted the Russians. If Prigozhin had been a little more decisive, he probably could have taken Moscow that day.

But what about the stunning figures with which Russian sociologists illustrate the people's love for their president, which were about eighty percent before the rebellion and allegedly jumped to ninety percent afterward?

Whatever numbers the official Russian sociological services might produce, we must always remember that our authorities established total control over sociology even before they completely subjugated the media. The support of the Russian population for the war is just as exaggerated by sociologists as their support for Putin. The illusion of almost unanimous approval by the people of the authorities and their most cannibalistic initiatives is necessary so that all doubters feel alone and doubt silently, or better yet, join the imaginary public consensus.

That is why sociologists were urgently ordered to draw an unprecedented ninety percent support for Putin immediately after the coup: Russians live in a Wonderland, in a kingdom of lies, where everything seems similar to reality but is turned upside down; where consciousness determines being. Having confirmed that the real support for Putin is about ten percent, the authorities decided once again to turn reality inside out and order the people to believe in a picture that is as similar to reality as a reflection in a mirror is to the original.

Living in a kingdom where the word of truth is severely punished requires considerable daily effort from its subjects: the longer such a regime exists, the more all-pervasive and total the lie becomes, invading from the realms of the abstract, ideological, and empirically unverifiable into the area of the everyday. One cannot speak about losses in the war, about one's personal feelings regarding the endless bloodshed, one cannot speak honestly about friends and enemies, about such fundamental things as notions of good and evil, about what is permissible and impermissible, and other spheres of state and public life are rapidly politicized, and therefore subjected to censorship and propaganda.

Healthcare, economy, finance, travel, child-rearing, and education—all become areas of close attention of state ideology, and on all these issues, citizens have to convince themselves of the correctness of state lies, which, moreover, in regimes like Putin's, change direction from day to day, like a weather vane—at the whim of opportunistic winds. Lying is exhausting, and it is humiliating to convince oneself every day of the reliability of state lies.

And Prigozhin, who only a few months ago began a career as a political blogger, turned into a real star of Russian YouTube and Telegram, primarily because he portrayed himself as a truth-teller and a fighter against Putin's ossified system, attacking it at its weakest point—the completely ineffective Russian army.

And although, mainly, he demanded the eradication of army corruption (and this from a man who earned billions because he was allowed to take grandiose contracts for supplying the Russian armed forces with food without competition!) and the removal of incompetent military leadership that wastefully spends soldiers' lives in Ukraine (and this from a man who easily and aimlessly annihilated twenty thousand of his own mercenaries in the Bakhmut meat grinder!), his voice messages and YouTube appearances gathered millions of listens and views.

Prigozhin built himself a reputation as an ultra-hawk, ready to go to total war, and constantly reproached Putin's military leadership for half-measures. One might assume that the people raised him on a shield because they were even more belligerent than the president—but it seems to me that it's something else.

The myth that the war in Russia enjoys broad popular support has the same origin as the myth of the Russians' unanimous and fierce love for their president. In fact, despite the titanic efforts of Russian propaganda, which for a year and a half has been trying to ensure public consensus in justification and support of military actions, the absolute majority of war supporters are for it only in words, and the army still has huge problems with recruiting volunteers. It is for this reason that last fall, the Kremlin had to forcibly mobilize hundreds of thousands (the mobilization has not ended to this day) of men.

The fact that Prigozhin is supposedly teaching the authorities how to fight better is only a legitimate reason for ultra-patriots to listen to his messages. The real reason is the determination and impunity with which Prigozhin "fired at headquarters," subjecting the thoroughly corrupt, impotent, and completely indifferent to the lives of loyal subjects Russian political establishment with Putin at its head to ruthless criticism.

Initially, Prigozhin played the ancient Russian game called "the tsar is good, the boyars are bad": his ostentatious anger was directed at the Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu and the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Alexey Gerasimov, who were allegedly responsible for failures at the front and the deliberate oppression of the Wagner PMC—with the aim of weakening and destroying Prigozhin's private army.

And this criticism met with such a sincere and enthusiastic response from his followers that Prigozhin decided to go further, allegorically attacking Putin himself. There are different opinions about what he was trying to achieve—perhaps a personal audience with the monarch or some guarantees for himself and his mercenaries—but obviously, these desires were not satisfied, and Prigozhin developed a taste for direct attacks on Putin.

And so, when on the day of the rebellion, Putin in his televised address demanded that Prigozhin surrender, he immediately replied that the president "was deeply mistaken," and no one was going to surrender to him. Here it should be explained that in the criminal slang, which the "cook" often uses, having served a serious term, the words "deeply mistaken" weigh much more than in ordinary speech: in the zone, such mistakes can cost you your life.

And it turned out that this kind of brazenness was exactly what people expected from him. Yes, a bandit, yes, a criminal, yes, a barbarian executing deserters and traitors with a sledgehammer, and then sending souvenir sledgehammers to Russian and European politicians. But—for the first time in a long time!—a person who, it seemed, was not afraid to challenge the tsar, and speaking to him in his own language, the language of force, so convincingly that the tsar, who should have, without flinching, summoned the rebel to his palace and ordered him to surrender without any preconditions, fled from the capital, asked for help from his vassals, and eventually agreed to a disgraceful compromise with the rebel who came out unscathed.

The people, though a bit frightened, expected Prigozhin to go all the way. And when he announced on his Telegram channel that he had decided "not to shed blood" and stop his march on the Russian capital, all the popular admiration for him immediately turned into disappointment. Under Prigozhin's post about the voluntary cessation of the rebellion, his followers placed almost four hundred thousand clown emojis, mocking Prigozhin for cowardice, theatrics, and abandoning revolutionary plans.

And the swiftness with which the sovereign evacuated from the not even besieged capital also became a great revelation, an important discovery that we all made as a result of the current events. Volodymyr Zelensky stayed in Kyiv, despite the fact that the advanced units of the Russian army were already fighting on the outskirts, and Putin's blitzkrieg seemed successful. Vladimir Putin disappeared from the radar, apparently going to a shelter in Valdai, even before the vanguard of the Wagner columns approached four hundred kilometers to Moscow. This speaks, above all, of how confident Putin himself is in the strength of his power machine and the loyalty of his praetorians: the indicator of this confidence hovers around zero. And this too we still have to realize.

Not only he was confused, but the entire entourage was confused: from the "faithful infantryman of the president," the head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov, to the pack of propagandists. The Minister of Defense, the commander of the National Guard, the director of the FSB simply disappeared, not commenting on the situation. Instead, field generals were persuading the rebel. The entire system of power suddenly turned out to be paralyzed. They say key people simply did not answer the phones; it turned out that no one believes in the reality of Russian power.

And those desperate attempts to demonstrate this machine to the people after the rebellion: here they are, the ministers, and even Shoigu, despite Prigozhin's demands, was not dismissed, and here are all the top siloviki in uniform frowning at the camera and shaking their fists after the fight, and here is Putin himself frowning, and here are the mock guards built on the Kremlin parade ground, and the flags, and here is the gold of the coats of arms, we have a real state, yes, yes, and everything works like clockwork!—are shattered by the inability to punish the rebel, by attempts already after the failed rebellion to appease, reconcile the rebels.

On social networks, and as I have already said, I have no other sociology for you, both those who are against the war and those who are for it mock Putin. And even the propagandists, who, if Putin ends, will follow him, find it hard, impossible to present this idiotic epic in a way that is at least somewhat worthy for their employer.

But—the possibility of a miracle flashed by, people didn't even have time to yawn. Putin gave his speech, the siloviki threatened from the screen, the news switched to Ukraine, the communal workers patched up the ditches on federal highways, which were planned to stop the advance of Prigozhin's columns, hurriedly buried the "Russian pilots" shot down by Wagnerites—and that's it. Passed. Forgotten. The boundless Russia dozed off further. Maybe it was all a dream.

But what about her, Russia? She awaits change.

What kind? Any kind.

And why doesn't the people dare to sweep away this rot themselves? Because they are frightened and have been taught not to meddle in politics, as the army has been taught over the last hundred years, repeatedly cleansed by repressions. No, as they say, when the lords fight, the peasants' forelocks crack. It would be good if there were changes, but let's somehow manage on our own.

And yes, alas, we must admit, it's not just about the truth that people are longing for. Prigozhin had power, unlike, say, Navalny, who spoke the truth and voluntarily returned to Golgotha. Martyrs in Russia may be secretly honored, but they will not sacrifice themselves for them.

So it turns out that the hopes of Russians are only for one force to sweep away another. This can be attributed to the fact that our political culture is still medieval.

And it can also be explained by the fact that, despite everything, the Russian commoner is a realist.