I don’t think I’d ever heard of Alla Pugacheva before today but in Russia she’s been a huge pop star since the 1970s. In the late 90s, the NY Times quoted a Russian music critic saying she was the “most popular human” in Russia.

”She is not just the most popular singer here,” said Artyom Troitsky, a former music critic who is now the editor in chief of Russian Playboy. ”She is the most popular human being in Russia.”

She has sold more than 100 million records, as many as Michael Jackson or the Beatles, all in the old Soviet bloc.

Yesterday, Pugacheva announced on Instagram (where she has 3.4 million followers) that she was against the invasion of Ukraine.

Her husband, the television showman and comedian Maksim Galkin, has been vocal in his opposition to the war; but Ms. Pugacheva, while voicing support for her husband, had not directly commented on the war before her post on Sunday…

It was the Kremlin’s crackdown on Mr. Galkin, 46, her fifth husband, that apparently precipitated Ms. Pugacheva’s decision to come out publicly against the war. The Russian Justice Ministry on Friday declared Mr. Galkin a “foreign agent,” a legal designation that the Kremlin has increasingly been using against its opponents.

Ms. Pugacheva addressed the Justice Ministry directly in her post on Sunday, declaring that she now wanted to be made a “foreign agent” herself.

“I request to be added to the ranks of foreign agents of my beloved country,” she wrote. “I am in solidarity with my husband, an honest, respectable and genuine person who is a true and incorruptible patriot of Russia, who wishes his Motherland prosperity, peaceful life, freedom of speech and the end of the death of our guys for illusory goals that are turning our country into a pariah and worsening the lives of our citizens.”

No reaction from the Kremlin so far but Pugacheva is famous enough that she has met Putin on several occasions. In any case, what she’s saying about freedom and “worsening the lives of our citizens” may resonate with Russians. Russia’s economy is shrinking and they have seen the ruble decline before bouncing back a bit. The situation is slowly getting worse but while the Russian economy has already taken a hit it hasn’t been nearly as big or as fast as many in the west hoped.

Russia’s economy still shrunk by about 4% between April and June as compared to the same period last year. But that’s nowhere near the 15% decline that some had expected earlier in the year.

“We were expecting that things like SWIFT and all the blocking sanctions on Russia’s banks would totally crater the Russian economy and that basically, by now going into September, we’d be dealing with an economically much more weakened Russia than the one that we are dealing with,” said one senior US official, referring to the US and European decision to cut some Russian banks off from the SWIFT international banking system…

The disconnect between early expectations and reality appears to stem from the fact that many US and western officials underestimated the sky-high revenues Russia would initially reap from rising oil prices, and the willingness of countries like China and India to continue buying Russian oil…

“The United States underestimated it, and we were slow in actually starting to think about deploying sanctions against Russia energy interests,” said Jason Blazakis, a sanctions expert who served as the State Department’s Director of the Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office from 2008-2018.

The Atlantic Council published a story yesterday arguing there was another reason Russia’s economy hasn’t collapsed: A lot of multinational corporations have continued to do business there.

Following the invasion, McDonald’s declared it would shutter all its locations in Russia and put the business up for sale. The company’s bombshell announcement explained that “the humanitarian crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, and the precipitating unpredictable operating environment, have led McDonald’s to conclude that continued ownership of the business in Russia is no longer tenable, nor is it consistent with McDonald’s values.”…

But the unfortunate reality is that, McDonald’s aside, three-quarters of the most profitable foreign multinationals remain in Russia according to research conducted by activist group B4Ukraine, a coalition of Ukrainian and international civil society organizations.

“To date, only 106 companies have exited the Russian market completely, while over 1,149 internationals remain,” claimed WeAreUkraine.info founder Nataliia Popovych via email. “The public is under the impression that most of the major international brands have already left Russia. In reality, most of the companies that downscale and suspend operations do it loudly while eight in ten companies doing business at some scale in Russia have kept silent about it.”

Companies that stay continue to pay taxes that, in the current environment, are funding the Russian invasion, which costs Putin about $1 billion per day. But even if Russia has avoided a more serious downturn so far, that’s not expected to last.

“What happens is that [isolationism] reduces the number of products that [Russia] can buy,” Jay Zagorsky, a markets professor at Boston University, said. “It can only buy Indian agricultural goods, it can only buy Chinese manufactured goods, that sort of thing. And when you limit yourself to one particular country you often end up not getting the highest quality, or the best price.”

That means Russia’s payment ban on the “unfriendly” US dollar – which accounts for 88% of global foreign exchange transactions – is a huge barrier, allowing sellers to charge a premium and make imports more expensive.

Energy remains nearly half of Russian exports and Russia has been spiking the price by cutting of the gas to Europe. The official explanation for the shutdown was that there were some technical problems with the German-made equipment that powers the pipeline. Those claims were a lie but at some point Russia really will need spare parts from the west that it won’t be able to buy.

…boosting and maintaining energy production in the long-run hinges on being able to purchase the machinery and the technology required to power the industry, much of which is produced in the west.

“Many of the oil field exploratory kits and machines are extremely high-tech. We’re talking about GPS systems and robots that are controlling things deep underground. It’s not just a bunch of guys with a big pipe and a bunch of sledgehammers,” Zagorsky said.

Putin has been betting that the situation for Europe this winter will deteriorate more quickly than the economic situation in Russia. He’s hoping Russia can endure the misery longer than Europe can. And of course he can personally just remain in his mansion for as long as he needs to. None of this impacts him directly. But there may come a point where the public turns on him. And on that front, the decision of Russia’s most famous pop star to take a stand against the war in Ukraine probably matters. It shows that even as Putin is trying to freeze out Germany to turn the public against any support for Ukraine, he’s also taking a risk. His situation is bad and getting worse by the day and it doesn’t sound as if China and India are interested in bailing him out.

And for those who are curious what this best-selling singer sounds like, here’s a video which I think is from 1979.