Dear comrades! I disagree with the author’s opinion. I.e. he is certainly right stating that people’s individualism and profit motive increased compared to the Soviet era but "homos Sovieticus" haven’t become any super-individualists and their present political passivity is to be explained in other way.

People’s passivity is caused by total intimidation and paralysing fear.

A common person feels his complete helplessness and insecurity in this society. He lives in a permanent fear of dismissal from work, of consequent lack of money to pay for his apartment and eviction from home! Lord forbid – a hardball scopes on you or your nearest and dearest, then there is no rescue, nobody sticks up. The authorities are anti-people’s. They won’t defend you but will even suppress you by any ways; all your protests will either be ignored or oppressed brutally, with shots and tortures. Fundamentally the authorities have shown it clearly – in October 1993 and in Ukraine in 2002 (in the pretext of the case No.144) and dozens and hundreds of times on small points. So everybody who needed it realized to whom Putin’s threat to "get in the toilet" is addressed indeed and whom the permission to use torture against "suspects of terrorism" - "on an exceptional basis" will enlarge upon.

That’s why appeals like "thou have been robbed!" will be as ineffective as appeals of Marxist or patriotic trend.

There is one way out as always in similar cases. It is necessary to show the people vividly that the enemy is not almighty, not invincible, that a real force exists to support in order to defend themselves and their nearest and dearest, and then they raise from knees. Reminds of the film "Lark". The bourgeois understand it very well, that’s why each report about losses in Iraq is accompanied with affirmations that "the helicopter broke down because of technical defects" or "because of the pilot’s mistake" but a successful terrorist act was "a provocation organized by secret services on purpose" indeed. As a Marxist I am not a supporter of terrorism like a method of political struggle but if this feeling of fear and helplessness is not dispelled in people they will still remain a bunch of ineffective people, which the organized butchers may treat as they like. And it is not impossible that we’ll have to begin with something like in Strugatskys’ story "An Inhabited Island".