About three years ago, some 100 men and women in a remote village somewhere in Russia made a big fire and burned all their documents - passports, birth certificates, medical records... As it became known, the government of the nearby town refused to pay their salaries and pensions since they couldn’t show any proof if ID. That was fine since villagers expected something worse, like getting arrested... People resorted to growing their own food, but because Russia has like 5 months of snow, it wasn’t enough to survive. Eventually they were allowed to get their salaries back, and received new passports, but some other things changed after that... the village became more autonomous, it doesn’t get much intervention from any outside agencies.
Along with burning their ids, people refused to vote for the head of their village officially. Instead, they chose one man by themselves during one if the village meetings.
Of course I understand that it was possible only because this place had a small number of people. If the same thing happens now in the big city, say Los Angeles where I live, we might face total chaos and destruction since unfortunately many people aren’t ready to manage themselves and act humanely if all control over them is suddenly taken away.
But still, as I was reading your post I remembered this little story of quiet peaceful revolt )
I remember many years ago when the then Soviet Union sent the military in to arrest the mayor who was defiant. The people took to the streets as the tanks rolled in, and the military refused to run over and kill those people, in effect, stopping the coup underway. My views towards those in the Soviet Union changed that day as I witnessed (on TV) people willing to die for their principles by defending a man they believed in.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/soviet-hard-liners-launch-coup-against-gorbachev
Yes, I think people are almost never exactly what their political system/government is... I always think these two entities - we as human beings and our government and its system - don’t really reflect one another although one is dependent on the other in so many ways. Soviet times had lots of crazy, bad propaganda, drastic measures towards its own people (I think more people got killed in Stalin times than the official numbers of holocaust), destruction of culture, but there were also good spirits, people getting together to achieve what they believed in, etc. A very long and a very strange period in the history of that region indeed...