Love is stronger than war. Violence is never the answer. It is too easy to hate.

As Vladimir Putin rained fire and death on Ukraine, these are some of the tiny hand-written messages which appeared on supermarket shelves in his home town of St Petersburg.

To a western audience the sentiments spelled out on the little tickets – which were decorated with little love hearts or shining suns – might sound mundane, platitudinous, banally safe.

Maybe even jejune.

However, in increasingly authoritarian Russia, their wording is an act of revolutionary, democratic courage.

This week an artist called Sasha Skochilenko appeared in court charged with “discrediting” the Russian armed forces. She had, reports said, been spotted leaving the protest tags in her local Perekryostok supermarket.

Ms Skochilenko was remanded in custody for eight weeks. She faces another decade in jail for her “fakes”.

In the dock, which in Russia is caged, she was photographed making a heart with her hands.

Just like the detained women who led the 2020 democratic protests against Mr Putin’s ally and crony, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

Messages have not just appeared in St Petersburg. In recent weeks, images of printed price tags on the shelves across the country have gone viral on social media.

One was for 14-rouble Picnic bars. The snack’s product description reads that civilians in Kherson, an occupied Ukrainian town, needed food and medicine.

The ticket for 400-rouble upmarket instant coffee told how the Russian army had bombed the Mariupol theatre where hundreds of people were sheltering.

Other supermarket messages are explaining to shoppers why their groceries are so dear: because of the war, or the “special operation” as Putin calls it and insists all others do, too.

This is information Russians will not get from their TV, radio or newspapers.

The supermarket messages are tiny acts of defiance in the face of tyranny.

They are like the protest postcards anti-Nazis left in the stairwells and windowsills of Hitler’s Germany and which inspired Hans Fallada’s chilling novel, Alone in Berlin.

Those who protest like this are not just campaigning for an end to a cruel and bloody war.

They are trying to salvage the dignity and conscience of their people, their nation, as crimes are committed in its name.

Even in the face of a violent, unforgiving and corrupt dictatorship, some see silence as complicity.

That, at least, is Andrei Kolesnikov’s take. In an essay last week, the analyst – a supporter of 1990s-style democrats – laid out a grim picture of national political culture in Putin’s Russia.

The country, he said, was in the grip of a cult of war, of an obsession with its victory over Nazism in which all past misdeeds were whitewashed and violence “heroised”.

Russians, in endless rants on state TV, are being told Ukraine is not a real country, that even its name should be wiped from history, that it is part of Russia that is occupied by fascists and drug-addicts led by the West.

How, asked Mr Kolesnikov, could Russia and Ukraine be a united nation after the atrocities of Bucha and Mariupol?

“Russians will bear the stigma of the people who allowed Putinism to come to pass, and who supported it,” he argued. “With this, the question arises of guilt and responsibility, including collective guilt and responsibility for what has happened between Ukraine and Russia.

“For the fact that Russia has been cast back into the same moral state as during the most repressive and paranoid years of the Stalinist terror, when denouncing another person was considered a virtue and a duty, when black was white. For the fact that Russia is undergoing an anthropological catastrophe.”

Russians, he said, should be feeling shame. Instead, many – the majority in Mr Kolesnikov’s view – show glee. They are, he claimed, whipped up by what he called “cheerleaders of death” such as Margarita Simonyan, the boss of RT, the Putin TV channel which platformed the likes of former Scottish politicians George Galloway and Alex Salmond.

Those who want to wash Putin’s blood from their hands remind Mr Kolesnikov of a protestor who stood against Leonid Brezhnev’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Larisa Bogomaz, a Ukrainian-born dissident, was one of seven people who stood in Moscow’s Red Square as tanks of Warsaw Pact nations trundled into Prague. One of the hand-written placards – reminiscent of Ms Stolichenko’s – read “For our freedom and yours.”

Why did she do it? At her trial she explained that she knew “the practical futility” of her demonstration but added: “In the end, I decided that, for me, it was not a question of what good it would do, but of my personal responsibility.”

Bogomaz, or Bohomaz in Ukrainian, went on to campaign for political prisoners, eventually convincing the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, to release them.

For Mr Kolesnikov, the legendary dissident epitomises the idea that not speaking up against a crime is the same as agreeing with it. Or at least that this has the same practical effect.

Others take a different view. Marina Ovsyannikova, the state TV journalist who did a one-woman protest against the war live on air, warned it would take Russians generations to clear their consciences.

She has also, however, urged the West not to target sanctions at ordinary people who she says are not to blame for Putin. This, it has to be said, has prompted some Ukrainian commentators to brand her a propagandist.

Ms Osvyannikova worked for Channel One, where dissent is never aired. Mr Kolesnikov is an analyst at the Carnegie Center, which, along with other international bodies, has been effectively shut down.

The last properly independent national newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, has suspended publication. For the first few days of the full-scale war, the pluralistic radio station, Ekho Moskvy, continued to broadcast, airing the voices of ordinary Russians who were describing, in detail, what friends and relations in Ukraine were saying was happening. Now “Echo” too is off air. Only those Russians willing to hunt on the internet can know what is going on.

Opinion polls suggest Mr Kolesnikov is right and that a majority of Russians back Mr Putin’s actions. Any survey, of course, carried out in a country where opposition is criminalised and information tightly controlled comes with a health warning. A big one.

The Levada Center – which, like any remaining relatively independent civic thepollster, is now officially branded a foreign agent – asked Russians in face-to-face interviews what they thought of the ongoing conflict. More than half said they strongly backed the war. More than another quarter said they “somewhat supported” it. Just 14% said they were opposed.

What did respondents think lay behind Mr Putin’s latest attack? Well, 43% thought it was to defend Russians and Russian speakers; 25% to stop Ukraine attacking Russia; 21% to rid Ukraine of Nazis; and just 14% to prevent Nato expansion.

These views reflect the endless talking points on state TV. Levada also found that more than two out of three Russians got their news from Mr Putin’s big propaganda outlets. Older people were more likely to depend on television than younger ones.

Levada earlier this month published another set of findings from its survey. It discovered that only 58% of Russians had even heard of the demonstrations against the “special operation”. Asked why people would protest, nearly one third of respondents suggested it was because they were paid to do so.

Tellingly, younger people and those who used the relatively secured social media app Telegram were most likely to be aware of have noticed protests.

Polls also reveal that one in 10 Russians now want to leave the country. With millions of Ukrainians forced to flee their homes, this may not evoke much sympathy abroad. But many people who fear Mr Putin, or the economic and human consequences of his war, are already on the move.

Estimates vary. But by the middle of last month more than 300,000 Russians are thought to have fled the country. They have borne some of the toll of sanctions. Refugees are finding their credit cards do not work, that they cannot access services like PayPal or use Airbnb to find somewhere to stay.

Many of those fleeing Russia have landed in neighbouring countries, like Armenia, whose economies are also suffering as an unintended consequence of the war.

Western sanctions are designed to make Russians pay a price for Mr Putin’s crimes. There has been a real impact, in some places more than others. However, if the polling is correct, Russians have been rallying to the flag. And, increasingly, they see the West, not the man in the Kremlin, as the enemy. The share of respondents in the latest Levada survey who relate badly to the United States is 72%, up from 55% in February. Ukraine is less disliked.

Protests continue. And so does a repressive response, one which some critics are now referring to as “hybrid totalitarian”.

Meanwhile, A man, Dmitry Silin, was arrested in the Russian city of Ivanovo for offering free copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from a little trestle table in the street. Like Skochilenko, he is said to have “discredited the army”. Most people will never hear of this but Mr Silin’s deliberate irony did not escape social media users. “War is peace,” tweeted one anonymous user. “Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”