Amid the apocalyptic news about Russian pensioners being unable to afford any medicines beyond traditional folk remedies, Russian workers not paid salaries for months and Russian children in the on the verge of starvation, one piece of news is conspicuously missing: reports of mass protests. It is true that nowadays Russian voters support only those political candidates who proclaim themselves fierce opponents of the federal government and its disastrous economic policies. An occasional Communist rally may assemble up to 10,000 volatile sympathizers. In a local grocery store, one is very likely to come across an old lady liberally sharing her views on "these scum in the government" and her nostalgia about the Soviet past when she used to be able to pay her bills. However, this is a far cry from the antireform mass movement that was predicted by many experts after the financial collapse of Russia last August.

It goes without saying that Russians themselves feel cheated and discouraged. It is the second pauperization in the last 10 years -- the first one occurred in 1990-1991 when the Soviet Union was convulsing in agony of mismanaged reforms put in to place by Mikhail Gorbachev. To lose three-quarters of your income and savings twice in one decade is more than a person can endure without feeling frustrated, abandoned and betrayed by the state.

Current Russian apathy is even more remarkable in the historical retrospective: Patience has never been one of Russia's national virtues. Tyrannized by the despotic Czarist regime before 1917, Russians used to find an outlet for their rage and discontent in periodic riots and mutinies against the arrogant ruling class. Those massive riots were invariably extremely violent and atrocious. Thousands of landlords and Czarist generals died the most terrible deaths in the hands of the mobs.