Here’s an astute point I heard at a top FCO meeting recently:”The world of states and the world of people are diverging…”Neatly put, and profoundly true. See also the Eurozone, passim.How does that apply to Russia? Russia is the sprawling space on earth which took to the highest, maddest level in human history the idea of ‘the state’. Millions of people were murdered or allowed to starve to death to advance state power as something completely above any other political or moral values. The state as both instrument and end-in-itself.Part of my presentation at Sussex University today was all about the way Belief was replaced by Knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in a stupendous unprecedented new idea pronounced in Philadelphia in 1776: that government derives from the Consent of the Governed. And as we are seeing all round the world, the fact that hundreds of millions of people now have a spontaneous networking ability with their mobile phones compels even the most miserable dictatorship – yes, sooner or later you too North Korea – to have to think about how best to deal with growing mass objection to being taken for granted by an often corrupt and unjust state.In Russia this takes an interesting form. Internet penetration of society is rising fast, as Russia’s powerful urban elite’s interest in new technology inexorably spreads outwards. It turns out that Russians who are not ‘on the Internet’ have very high faith in Russia’s state TV (and therefore the ruling Putinist establishment who dominate it). However, Russians who use the Internet regularly have a lot more trust in the Internet than in state TV. Not that this is necessarily a change for the better: a heck of a lot of raving extreme nationalist websites are alive and well, in Russia as elsewhere.Nonetheless, in one way or the other the underlying tendency (and growing fast) is for Russians to be much more critical about reassuring pronouncements from Moscow. Thus the recent extraordinary spectacle of Putin himself being booed by the crowd at a typical Putin PR event – a martial arts competition – was one thing. Even the TV coverage picked it up. But then a video of the spectacle was soon running round the Russian part of the Internet being watched by over a million people. What does it all mean? That the Putinist tendency will again (of course) prevail in Sunday’s Duma elections unless something unfathomable happens and the various opposition groups spectacularly expand their appeal. Yet slowly but surely even Russia is changing towards some new sui generis pluralism. It will take another 25 years or so before the first generation of Russians not steeped in communism in their adult lives reach the age to dominate society. A society In which the Consent of the Governed will have become a strong factor.