It started with one viral influencer complaining about Russia’s economy. Now a record 60% of Russians are pessimistic about their country’s outlook

Overnight, Victoria Bonya went from being a Russian influencer known for exercise routines and cosmetic endorsements into a catalyst for widespread public discontent about the state of her home country’s society and economy. Bonya, a former television presenter in Russia who now makes a living as an influencer in Monaco, enjoyed the sort of virality most activists and politicians can only dream of in April, when she uploaded a screed critiquing Vladimir Putin’s handling of the Russian economy. The 18-minute video, posted to Instagram, has received around 32 million views and 1.7 million likes. Bonya’s laundry list of grievances attacked everything from the government’s failed response to extreme flooding in southern Russia earlier this year, to rising inflation and taxes hurting households. The widely viewed and reshared video included a direct message to Putin: “You know what the risk is?” Bonya asked in the video. “That people will stop being afraid, ​and they’re being squeezed into a coiled spring, and that one day that coiled spring will shoot out.” While Russians have yet to air their disapproval of the status quo in a Bolshevik-style rebellion (which some Kremlin leaders cautioned to be a real possibility in the turbulent weeks after Bonya’s video went viral), the country’s economy is starting to show strain at the most basic level: its people. Russians might be famous for their pessimism. Long a middling country in world happiness rankings, cross-cultural studies have shown the archetype of the brooding and gloomy Russian as described by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy might actually be a learned concept. But years into a war that has left Russians excluded from the world and saddled with broken promises from the government, official readings of economic pessimism have recently hit record highs, threatening the Kremlin’s tenuous hold on its society. Losing the people Putin might scoff at the idea. Four years on from the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has proved remarkabl