Sergei Podgorkov, A Cafe on Vasillievsky Island (St. Petersburg). Source: Facebook
[…]
Living their best life
And here, the reader will stop for a second and most likely ask the question — but what about Russians, don’t they want the war to stop?
And the answer is most likely no.
Recently, I fell into a rabbit hole, watching videos posted by ordinary Russians on Instagram. It all started when on Twitter (X), people began discussing a post by a Russian blogger who wrote that Moscow is beautiful, sprinkling it with hate speech.
The blogger, who clearly was working with the local government to promote Moscow, basically said that the Russian capital is the best city in the world because it’s clean, everyone is happy, and there are no homeless people and “LGBTQ+ propaganda.”
Displaying a rainbow flag is a criminal offense in Russia.
I went to his page and looked at the videos he was posting. And then some more videos from people living in Moscow.
For a person living in Kyiv, bombarded on a nearly daily basis, this was a very interesting dive. Watching those videos, you would never think that their country is at war.
Moscow has experienced a few waves of transformation since 2022.
Before the start of the all-out war, Moscow was thought to be the most liberal Russian city. The Russian capital harbored people with higher education and better income. Opposition activists were living their lives in Moscow cafes. Late opposition leader Alexei Navalny even once ran in the city’s mayoral election and gained a substantial number of votes.
As soon as the all-out war started, there were even some protests in Moscow, and some members of the local art and culture scene, those who traveled abroad and saw the world, were not supportive of their country’s slide into totalitarianism.
Still, Moscow was far away from the war. Cafes were still packed and people’s day to day, if they weren’t in active opposition, only changed insignificantly.
In late 2022, this changed. When Russia faced one military defeat after another, the local government was instructed to make the war felt in Moscow.
Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, who at first deliberately distanced himself from the war effort, was now traveling to the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, and banners depicting Russian soldiers appeared on the city’s streets.
The 2022 Russian forced mobilization campaign saw police grab people from Moscow’s streets and send them to fight in Ukraine.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians, most of them from major cities such as Moscow, left the country. Some of them for good.
Soon after that, Moscow changed once again. Since late 2023, Russia has been on the offensive. Those who were against the war or actively opposed it are no longer in the country. The Kremlin also has enough troops and hardware to continue the fight indefinitely. It doesn’t need to rely on forced mobilization — instead, it uses high wages to lure volunteers.
It doesn’t need to shove the war in the face of Moscow residents, especially those who do not care. The government is now deliberately shielding the residents of its most important metropolis from the hardships that a war can bring.
Bars, cafes, concerts, new metro stations, international football stars visiting the city, and playing friendlies with the local players who are banned from international competitions. People are living their best lives, while their compatriots, friends or even relatives are murdering civilians in Ukraine.
Watching the videos from 2025 Moscow is a surreal experience. I can’t stop thinking that it must be similar to what life was like in Berlin in 1941 for those who didn’t care about the atrocities their country was committing.
Source: Oleksiy Sorokin, WTF is wrong with Russia? newsletter (Kyiv Independent), 17 July 2025. This post is dedicated to Nan Kim, who has supported this website with a monthly donation for the last two years. I would like to apologize to her for posting so infrequently in the past few months. The work-at-home jobs which over the last eighteen years also afforded me the time and space to produce this website have dried up or disappeared altogether (along with all other donations to this website), so I have had to take work that keeps me away from home most of the day nearly every day. This extreme slowdown in producing this blog is not necessarily a bad thing for me personally. Among other things, it keeps me from asking the question Oleksiy Sorokin asks at the top of this entry: don’t Russians want the war to stop? \\\ TRR
A Chechen refugee in front of her destroyed apartment building in downtown Grozny, February 17, 1995. Photo: Reuters (via Julia Khazagaeva)
On the thirtieth anniversary of the storming of Grozny, the liberal Russian media reminded the Russophone audience that there had been such a war—the Chechen War. When I see this title, I don’t even open the movie, I flip through it. A couple of excerpts are basically enough for me to be convinced that these people have still understood nothing after three decades. Even over the three years of the recent, utterly treacherous imperial war in Ukraine, the obvious facts about what Chechnya means to Russia have not became obvious to them.
Almost any decent Russian would point out to you, of course, that bombing towns chockablock with civilians was a bad thing to do and foul play. Carrying out mop-ups in villages and burying the victims in mass graves was also outrageous. But then the exclamation “but!” is sure to follow. They will tell you about Chechen bandits, forged letters of credit, and the intransigent Dudayev. Yes, it was wrong to destroy a third of Chechnya’s population, this notional Russian would lament, but the Chechens were bad eggs themselves and were asking for it.
If you ever do open a Russian [documentary] film reconstructing the events in Chechnya thirty years ago, you will find that it is about the enlisted lads who on New Year’s Eve 1994 were thrown into the epicenter of hell. Not properly trained to shoot or drive a tank, alone against hordes of heavily armed rebels, they were unfortunate sons of the Motherland: may their memory live forever. This artistic device is deployed, for example, by the Maxim Katz-affiliated project Minute by Minute. The [YouTube] channels Current Time and Popular Politics have also recalled this selfsame “Chechen War.”
Minute by Minute, “The New Year’s Eve Storming of Grozny: A Minute by Minute Reconstruction” (December 31, 2024)
Semantically, the construction “Chechen War” operates the same way as the coinage “captive of the Caucasus.” It conceals the aggressor, suggesting we look at the object of the aggression as the aggression’s cause. In this logical trap, Chechnya seems to have gone up in flames by itself. It was its inhabitants who shelled and bombed themselves silly. It was not Russia that invaded the Caucasus, it was the Caucasus which for some reason held Russia’s soldiers in captivity. It is not without reason that when people say “he was killed in Chechnya,” it is the place where he was killed that appears to be the malefactor. The listener is not prompted to wonder what this soldier was doing under arms in a foreign land. It is as if Chechnya had shown up in Samara and killed an innocent tanker.
When we think, write and say “Chechen War,” we automatically interpret it from the point of view of the colonizer and the aggressor. We accept the interpretation imposed by Moscow, which insists that Chechnya is part of Russia, not a sovereign country it attacked. If Russia is not mentioned in the nomenclaturee of this historical event, Chechnya is automatically read as an undeniable part of the empire, and the conflict itself sounds akin to the November Uprising or the Tambov Rebellion.
In fact, it was the Russo-Chechen War which began on December 11, 1994. The war deserves to be identified as such both in terms of the nature of the hostilities and the status of the warring parties, because by the time the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria was invaded by Russian troops, it had been three years since it had legally, by popular vote and a declaration of independence, withdrawn from the USSR on an equal footing with the RSFSR. The Chechens had NOT been part of the newly minted Russian Federation for a single day.
The independent journalist Vadym Zaydman has written about this better and more clearly than anyone else. There is no need to paraphrase him when I can instead quote what he has written:
“At the time of the USSR’s death/colllapse, Chechnya was no longer legally related either to the defunct Soviet empire or to the RSFSR. By that time the Chechen-Ingush ASSR had existed as a Union Republic for over a year. Thus, by definition it could not be a part of the Russian Federation, as proclaimed on December 25, 1991. When the Russian Federation was born, Chechnya was initially not a part of it.
“Russia itself did not regard Chechnya as part of Russia during this period. On March 31, 1992, the Federation Treaty was incorporated into the Russian Constitution. It changed the status of autonomous republics to sovereign republics within the Russian Federation. The treaty was signed by representatives of twenty federal subjects of the Russian Federation. Neither the Chechen-Ingush Republic nor Chechnya was involved in the treaty.
“It was only in the wake of the notorious events of October 1993, when Yeltsin was adopting a new Russian constitution, that he unilaterally incorporated Chechnya into the Russian Federation. In fact, Yeltsin committed a fraud like the one committed by the Russian authorities when, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, they declared Russia a member of the UN Security Council as the USSR’s legal successor, although Russia was not even a rank-and-file member of the UN. Ukraine and Belarus were members of the UN, but Russia aka the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was not! Having incorporated Chechnya, a year later Russia started to establish ‘constitutional order’ in Chechnya as its own fiefdom! Clever, isn’t it?!”
End quote.
The term “Chechen War” is thus as illegitimate as the use of the term “Ukrainian War” is unacceptable. Ukrainians would not allow the latter, and the entire civilized world would not agree to it. For everyone, the current war is the Russo-Ukrainian War. But the same thing should happen in our minds when describing the war in Chechnya. It is the Russo-Chechen War.
Many Russians would understandably prefer it go down in history in a more modest way—ideally, not as a war at all, but as a “special military operation,” or a “counter-terrorist operation,” for it is the security forces, not the simple folk, who are responsible for such operations. “SMO” and “CTO” sound mundane and localized, like a police “amber alert,” nor are they freighted with collective guilt and responsibility. Most vitally, if correlated with these Putinist terms, western sanctions come to be regarded as an exorbitant and unwarranted punishment, since they make “ordinary people suffer.”
Why do you think various Putinist and anti-Putinist institutions have spent the last three years relentlessly measuring public opinion on whether Russians want war? Yes, it’s simple: because of the sanctions—and Russia’s slightly tarnished image in the eyes of the international community. But if the West is shown the relevant polls quite often and reminded that “public opinion polls don’t work in a totalitarian society,” this mantra will work like a charm the thousandth time. It will then be much easier for Brussels officials to explain to themselves and their electorate why they are lifting restrictions: because they oppress an already “downtrodden” civil society, which in no way wanted war, but which was forced by Putin to want it.
Meanwhile, to answer the question of how much the Russian populace shares its leadership’s imperial mindset, it is enough to take the case of the Russo-Chechen War. From the sociological viewpoint, it is a scientifically pristine experiment. In 1994 (as in 1999, when the second phase of the war began) there was no totalitarianism in Russia. There were no western sanctions, and there were no Russian émigréscriticizing the regime from abroad. U.S. President Bill Clinton expressed “concern” when he learned that civilians were being killed in Chechnya. France supported the establishment of constitutional order on Russia’s own territory. They all thought that the new Russian Czar Yeltsin was better than any Communist, even if he fought like one.
Enjoying the full favor of the international community, Russia razed Grozny to the ground along with the remnants of its civilian population on New Year’s Eve 1994. This did not cause any outcry in Russian society. The first protest rally in Moscow took place on January 10, 1995: organized by Yegor Gaidar, it was a partisan affair and sparsely attended. Noticeable civil protests against the war in Chechnya would not begin until 2001—that is, five years later. [My comrade Antti Rautiainen, who was very much in the thick of things in those years (he was a co-organizer of the first antiwar street protest in Moscow, in November 1999), has pointed out to me (in a comment to Ms. Khazagaeva’s original post in Russian) that the biggest protest in Moscow against the Second Chechen War took place in January 2000, not in 2001 — TRR.] However, even then, according to Radio Svoboda, which interviewed passersby, “Muscovites were in no hurry to join the protesters: everyone was rushing about their business.”
Protests during the first phase of the Russo-Chechen War were isolated and (one might say) personal in nature. From the very first days of the invasion, the Soviet dissident, Russian human rights activist and Russian human rights commissioner Sergei Kovalev traveled to Grozny. He tried to stop the bombing of the city. In March 1995, he was removed from the post of human rights commissioner for supporting the “wrong” side. TV news presenter Svetlana Sorokina took liberties on air: after a commercial break she emotionally remarked that “no laundry detergent can wash clean the conscience of the Russian generals.” Independent Chechnya and its legally elected presidents Dzhokhar Dudayev and Aslan Maskhadov were subsequently supported by Valeria Novodvorskaya. Boris Nemtsov tried to stop the war by circulating a petition [which was allegedly signed by a million Russians—TRR]. But there was no grassroots public outrage in Russia, apart from the campaign led by the mothers of the conscripts, neither in the first phase of the war, much less in the second.
This was how sociologist Yuri Levada described attitudes to the war in Chechnya in 2001: “Sentiments against the war are strong in [Russia], but unfortunately we cannot overestimate their significance. The fact is that many people think that more decisive actions, with greater loss of life, perhaps could have led to success. Disavowing the war does not exclude, for example, approving such savage measures as ‘mop-ups,’ which are now quite difficult for the authorities in Chechnya and Russia to cope with. So, an unwillingness to continue the war is an expression of fatigue, not an expression of conscious, directed protest.”
Sociologist Lev Gudkov described Russians who supported Chechnya’s return to the bosom of the empire as follows: “They are younger and better educated Russians who argue that the Chechens must be crushed at any cost and this problem must be solved by force, that no negotiations with Maskhadov are possible, that he represents no one, and that there is only one solution—the total, crushing defeat [of the Chechens]. On the contrary, those who argue that it is necessary to seek a peaceful resolution however possible, including entering into negotiations with Maskhadov, are people of an older age, somewhat wiser and more experienced, and in this sense more tolerant, inclined to recognize Chechnya’s independence as long as the war is brought an end.”
So when Russian liberals, society’s cream of the crop, write and talk about the “Chechen War,” you now know their attitude toward the empire and its conquests. Were it not for the unprecedented western sanctions for invading the European country of Ukraine, you would be surprised to learn what Russians really think about the war. As a gentleman who left Russia twenty years ago once told me in a private conversation: “I still feel sorry for our guys. After all, the Ukrainians have killed more Russians in this war than the Russians have killed Ukrainians.”
Faithful to its avant-garde nature, Noise Cabaret premieres the immersive series Dialogues, based on the philosophical works of Plato, on December 25. Alexander Khudyakov turns ancient Greek philosophy into a lively, witty and provocative dialogue with the audience.
Along with his partner Ivan Wahlberg, Khudyakov, who not only acts in the project but directs it, will guide the audience through the labyrinths of Plato’s thought. What is justice? Where is the line between existence and non-existence? What is the true nature of love? These and many other fundamental philosophical questions will serve as starting points for reflection and debate.
Dialogues is a series of interactive performances in which each viewer is involved in a philosophical discussion consisting of adapted texts by Plato and actorly improvisation, meaning that the way the performance goes depends on the audience’s involvement. Each new performance is a separate chapter dealing with a specific philosophical problem, so you can join the series at any stage. The first episode deals with the concept of justice.
Noise Cabaret plans to invite Petersburg celebrities to enrich the conversation with the audience with their own opinions and views.
Khudyakov shared the idea behind the project.
“We wanted to do a story related to people talking in a bar. But just people talking to each other is not interesting. There has to be a big focus. When I studied Plato, I was interested in several aspects of his philosophy. It would have been wrong to limit ourselves to a single topic. So the idea to make a series arose: take Plato, read him, and discuss the themes he raises in the Socratic dialogues.
“We plan to produce a new episode every two or three months. There’s no pretense here that we’re serious scholars of Plato’s philosophy: it’s more of an excuse to talk to people about difficult topics, to air the Dialogues and reflect on them. And a bar is a place where you can talk about all sorts of things, including philosophy.”
Russians spent almost 6 billion rubles on Ozempic generics in 2024
Semaglutide-based drugs are commonly used for weight loss
In the first ten months of 2024, Russians spent 5.9 billion rubles [approx. 52 billion euros] on over one million packs of generic versions of the drug Ozempic (semaglutide), according to DSM Group, as reported by Vedomosti.
Among the most popular generics are Geropharm’s Semavic and Promomed’s Quincenta. The original drug Ozempic stopped [sic] official supplies to Russia in December 2023, opening the market to domestic analogues.
2024 was a record year for drugs in this category. By comparison, in 2023, Russians spent only 297 million rubles on Ozempic, buying 20 thousand packs. In 2022, they spent 1.9 billion rubles (256 thousand packs); in 2021, 758 million rubles; and in 2020, 76 million rubles.
Semaglutide-based drugs are used to treat diabetes but have recently been gaining popularity as weight loss drugs, which has also contributed to their sales growth in Russia.
St. Petersburg will open a new metro station this week, Governor Alexander Beglov announced Thursday, marking the former Tsarist capital’s first new metro station in five years.
The Gorny Institute metro station, located on Vasilievsky Island, will extend the fourth (or “orange”) line westward. It will begin operations at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, with its vestibule open for both entry and exit, Beglov said.
“The opening of Gorny Institute is a milestone,” the governor wrote on Telegram, noting that the city had overcome “significant challenges” during the station’s construction.
Beglov thanked President Vladimir Putin, metro builders, engineers and residents of St. Petersburg for their patience and support, calling the station’s completion the “first results” of sustained efforts to advance the city’s metro system.
The station’s opening comes after years of delays. Initially scheduled for completion in 2015, its opening was postponed to 2018 and later to 2022. Construction efforts were further overshadowed by a fatal scaffolding collapse in June 2020 that killed one worker and injured another.
Gorny Institute is the first station to open since 2019, when three others — Prospect Slavy, Dunayskaya, and Shushary — were inaugurated.
St. Petersburg’s metro is currently made up of five lines and 72 stations. However, it has expanded slowly over the years, in stark contrast to Moscow’s burgeoning metro system, which this year opened eight new stations.
In trying to grasp the tonality of the film [Anora], I am reminded of a line from Francis Bacon: “You can be optimistic and totally without hope.” The situation the characters find themselves in, being at the mercy of the rich, is totally without hope. The “hopeful” version of the script would be one in which Vanya does stand up to his parents and runs off with Ani, even at the price of losing his wealth—this is the film’s narrative lure. Or maybe another where the ruthless capitalist mother gains a grudging respect for her tough daughter-in-law, like in the last season of Fargo. But despite its grim closure, the impression the film gives is far from dreary or pessimistic. The hopeless optimism of Baker’s cinema lies in the sheer life that seems to almost burst out of the filmic frame, and, especially, his deep care for his characters, even Vanya.
In the fall of 2023, with the goal of understanding what is really happening with Russian society during wartime, the Public Sociology Laboratory team went on ethnographic research trips to three Russian regions—Sverdlovsk, Krasnodar and Buryatia. Over the course of a month, PS Lab researchers observed how people talk about the war and how it affects daily life in cities and villages. In addition, they recorded sociological interviews with local residents. PS Lab has compiled three detailed ethnographic observation diaries (more than 100,000 words apiece) and conducted 75 in-depth interviews. Overall, it has managed to collect truly unique data that provides an idea of what people say and think about the war in everyday situations, and not only when answering researchers’ questions.
The full text of the report is book-length and written in a book-style format: it consists of seven chapters, introduces many characters, and allows readers to be fully immersed in contemporary wartime Russia. The following summary, meanwhile, highlights the main analytical conclusions.
Russian society remains politically demobilized and deideologized. Despite the prevailing opinion that it is strictly militarized, we see that the war has become routine and therefore a disregarded part of reality. For example, compared to the first years of the war, the amount of prowar symbolism in public spaces has decreased in all three regions. The war has neither become a source of new ideas in the cultural life of cities or villages nor been integrated into familiar and already-established cultural formats. The war is not discussed in public places, including, with rare exceptions, local online communities.
In spontaneous conversations, Russians rarely discuss the overall goals and causes, criminality, or justifications of the war. They are concerned with the impact of the war on their everyday lives. When they talk about the war, they mostly talk about the same things they discussed before the war, for example, everyday difficulties, money, or ethics. Men more often discuss topics that are considered “masculine” in society, such as the technical side of the war, and women usually talk about “feminine” topics, such as how war destroys families.
Participation in various types of prowar volunteering and organized assistance for the military, which are often cited as an example of the mobilization and militarization of Russian society, is rarely motivated by people’s firm support for the “special operation.” It is usually associated with pressure from the administration, community moral norms (concerning mutual assistance), and/ora desire to help loved ones, rather than a wish to make victory for Russia more likely. Observation of volunteers’ activities show that while working, they do not discuss the war or politics, rather choosing topics that are personable and relatable to them: prices, pensions, families, and/or stories related to the volunteer centers.
Despite all these similarities, the war is perceived slightly differently in different regions. The peculiarities of each region’s view owe to factors like the number of military units and penal colonies from which prisoners are recruited, proximity to the combat zone, the prosperity of the region and the availability of decent jobs, the density of social ties, the circulation of news transmitted by friends on the front lines, etc. In other words, the differences in perceptions of the war are attributable mainly to the peculiarities of life in the regions before the invasion of Ukraine.
The conflict between opponents and supporters of the war is gradually subsiding, while the rift between those who stayed in Russia and those who left is growing. This is happening both because the shared experience of living through a difficult situation within the country is becoming more important for many Russians than any differences in viewpoint, and also because people are discussing the war less.
At the same time, the waning conflict between opponents and supporters of the war does not always mean more social cohesion. Since people are trying to live as if the war is nonexistent and the government does not talk about any losses or problems associated with the war, all negative consequences of the war are either normalized or pushed into the realm of “personal problems” that are not discussed with anyone and that everyone must deal with on their own.
Overall, many people do not feel able to influence political decisions. Therefore, they are increasingly distancing themselves from the war. They understand that they cannot change government policy, but they retain at least some control over their private lives—and therefore they are immersed in them. Over time, not only apolitical Russians but even sure opponents of the invasion experience this powerlessness and, as a result, some of them accept the new reality while continuing to condemn the war internally.
Consequently, many Russians are increasingly distrustful of political news from a broad range of sources. Instead, they put their trust in local media. Local problems and news seem much more important and relevant to them. Moreover, they feel that, unlike the war, local issues are at least sometimes within their ability to influence.
At the same time, the war is weighing people’s emotional state. Many of our interlocutors admit that they experience anxiety, tension, uncertainty, fear, even if these things are not usually spoken about openly. The departure of sons and husbands to war makes women “scream at the top of their lungs.” However, people rarely share such emotions with others, and if they do, they do so in groups with close friends.
Many Russians who are not interested in politics may justify or condemn the war depending on the communicative context.
They tend to non-emotionally justify the war through normalization (“there are always wars”) or rationalization (“it was necessary”) when asked about it directly in more formalized settings, such as research interviews.
They are more likely to criticize the war when prompted to think about how it negatively affects them as ordinary Russians. This criticism differs from that of war opponents. For opponents, the war is a moral crime against Ukraine, whereas for apolitical Russians, the war is seen as something that destroys Russian society and harms ordinary people. However, this criticism does not lead apolitical Russians to question the war’s necessity or inevitability, nor does it extend to criticizing the Russian government.
They tend to emotionally justify the war when confronted with traditional anti-war narratives. When Russia is accused of committing moral crimes against the Ukrainian people, they often take such accusations personally and attempt to defend their own dignity.
Some people have experienced a strengthened sense of national identity, and sometimes a demand for greater solidarity arises. It’s important to note that this increased sense of national identity does not lead Russians to adopt the official imperial brand of nationalism. Unlike the Kremlin, ordinary people live in a world of nation states, not in a world of imperial fantasies (according to which Ukraine is not a real state and Ukrainians are an inferior people).
A feeling of uncertainty is what truly unites Russians today. Despite the fact that people choose various strategies to cope with this feeling, it still significantly complicates the ability to plan one’s life and plunges Russians into pessimism.
Thus, on the one hand, the formerly extraordinary nature of the war is giving way to normalization: the war is gradually becoming something ordinary, another unremarkable part of the surrounding world. In a sense, many Russians resist both the Kremlin’s attempts to turn ordinary citizens into ideological supporters and the attempts of the anti-war liberal opposition to force society to actively experience guilt and fight. On the other hand, the war constantly reminds us of its existence, creating new threats, new anxieties, and new reasons for discontent in Russians.
Dear readers! Times are tough, and the key in this case is holding on in every sense. No one says it’s easy. But it’s not so hard either. The other day I asked Vladimir Putin whether he expected anything more from himself in the outgoing year. But I want to ask you: do you expect anything more from yourself in the coming year? We need to expect things. We need to want things. It’s a way of holding on to ourselves. Of looking after ourselves. Of not losing ourselves. And even of finding ourselves. A hard sign (“Ъ”) will never be a soft sign (“Ь”)! Happy incoming New Year! Let’s not be on the defensive!
Andrei Kolesnikov, Special Correspondent, Kommersant Publishing House
Source: Email from Kommersant, 31 December 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. The so-called hard sign, which the Bolsheviks dropped from the Russian Cyrillic alphabet in 1918, has been the logo of Kommersant since the newspaper’s relaunch in January 1990. Andrei Kolesnikov has been the newspaper’s special Kremlin correspondent — that is, its chief Putinversteher — for many years. Of course he’ll deny it all when push comes to shove and Putin goes, and he’ll point of course to the cynical, jocular (but ultimately loyal) way he’s written about the Russian dictator and war criminal all these years.
Screenshot of Mediazona infographic, as published here
Russia is losing more and more men in its war against Ukraine.
As of 5 July 2024, Mediazona and its partners in the casualty counting project have ascertained the names of more than 58,000 Russian soldiers killed in action.
The real losses are twice as many, however. Journalists have calculated the actual number of war dead based on information from the probate registry. How they did their work is described in this article by Mediazona. You can read here about how our methodology has been corroborated.
The real losses of the Russian army, including mercenaries, in the war against Ukraine, come to 120,000 dead. The Russian army’s casualties are thus already greater than both the number of US military deaths since the Second World War and all the losses of the Soviet and Russian armies since 1945. Most of the men killed were between the ages of twenty and forty. Those who were younger were usually draftees and prison inmates, while those who were older were “volunteers.”
Seventeen thousand prison inmates recruited by the Wagner Group perished at Bakhmut, according to the mercenary organization’s own documents, as examined by Mediazona. Meanwhile, journalists had estimated that Wagner had lost around sixteen thousand men, which is nearly the same number. Wagner has recruited a total of 48,366 men during the war, meaning that a third of them were killed in the so-called Bakhmut meat grinder.
Prison inmates, “volunteers,” and conscripts, if we judge only by confirmed deaths, have borne the brunt of the losses in the war. At 47.4 percent, they constitute almost half of those who have been killed.
In over two years of war, 3,700 officers of the Russian army and other security forces have been killed, 430 of them in the rank of lieutenant colonel and above.
Between 200 and 250 men are killed every day. This year, the Russian army’s losses have risen dramatically. In 2023, an average of about 120 men were killed every day.
There are two points of view on Russia during the full-scale war. The first is that Russia has turned into a fascist militaristic state in which everyone marches in step and sincerely hates Ukraine. The second is that cynicism and apathy have won the day in Russia: people don’t care about the war as long as it doesn’t affect them personally. Both of these views are mistaken, according to the authors of “We Have to Live Somehow,” a study from the Public Sociology Laboratory (PS Lab).
The researchers traveled to Krasnodar Territory, Buryatia, and the Sverdlovsk Region, living there for a month and interacting closely with the locals. What they tell us does not fit into either of the two common stereotypes about Russians and the war. Here are a few of the tendencies they observed.
The war is invisible in daily urban life. Residents in the Sverdlovsk Region town of Cheryomushkin (whose name was deliberately changed by the researchers) could not recall a single event in support of (or against) the war during the year. In Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, the pro-war agitprop consisted of a single poster on a Lenin monument. In Krasnodar, pro-war banners still hung on buildings, but people had long ago removed pro-war stickers from their cars. There is no institutional support for the war at the municipal level: such support is the bailiwick of ideological loners and small groups of pro-war volunteers.
Apolitical Russians justify the war, but arguments like “NATO soldiers” and “defending Donbas” are not of primary importance to them. Rather, they simply want to save face themselves, because they take the accusations directed at their country personally. For this reason, Russians have previously been inclined to justify the actions of the state, even when they do not understand or approve them.
The majority of the populace is not opposed to the war. They may disapprove of it in some respects, but they simultaneously defend the state. For example, in the Sverdlovsk Region, women were outraged by the deaths of young soldiers at the front (“They are sending children to fight! Why?!”) while also parroting the propagandists’ arguments about the war against the “collective West” (“Them United States are hammering civilians!”). Non-opponents of the war argue that Russia has been proactive, defending itself rather than attacking (“Now the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics are part of Russia, but our guys aren’t advancing any further—they’re defending all of it”).
Non-opponents of the war regard the residents of Donbas as Ukrainians, not Russians. They scold Ukrainians from the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and the “Luhansk People’s Republic” (“They don’t defend themselves. They’ll be coming here [to Russia], and what, I’ll have to go fight in their place? I don’t want that”) and do not regard these areas as “their own” (“They are not my blood relatives, they are not my own people”).
While opponents and supporters of the war initially had bitter conflicts, solidarity between them has emerged despite their differences of opinion. Those who generally condone the war are increasingly questioning the official version of events, while those who oppose the war are beginning to listen to their opponents (“I have to build a life and continue living with these people”).
Russians try to pretend that the war has not impacted their daily lives in any way, but its signs still permeate their everyday lives and conversations. In the Sverdlovsk Region, a woman is going to “go to great lengths” to prevent her son from serving as a contract serviceman. In Buryatia, a volunteer says mundanely, “I have eight grandchildren, all boys. And it just happened that four more died at the front.” In Krasnodar, a sociologist’s source says he is glad that the city is not being bombed and that the “Wagnerians” did not come their way, but then confesses in a low voice that the future is hazy and “let’s put it this way: things have become a bit tense.”
The big takeaway, however, is that Russians are pushing the war to the back of their minds. And this is bad news for the Kremlin: it has failed to convince the public, over the past two years, that the invasion was launched in pursuit of noble ends. Even as they justify Russia, its citizens don’t understand what good the war does for them personally.
A week ago, a Moscow court sentenced fifteen-year-old Arseny Turbin to five years in prison after convicting him on charges of “involvement in a terrorist organization.” The security forces accused the schoolboy of aiding the Free Russia Legion, which has been officially banned in Russia.
Arseny lived with his mother Irina in the small city of Livny in the Oryol Region. Although he was one of the most successful pupils at the local prep school, he was bullied by his classmates, and yet his teachers did not respond to his complaints. At the war’s outset, Turbin supported the Kremlin’s actions, but later became disillusioned with the government and took an interest in politics, even telephoning [exiled online news channel] TV Rain and telling them that the Conversations about Important Things lessons at school were “utter nonsense.”
In early June 2023, Arseny wrote an email to the Free Russia Legion (an organization we described in detail in a previous newsletter). He wanted to сampaign against the war, but they asked him for too much personal information and he did not send the application form to these strangers. Instead, he started distributing leaflets criticizing the authorities and taking pictures of himself in front of the white-blue-white flag. (The Russian authorities regard this flag as a symbol of the Legion, which has been fighting against Russian forces in Ukraine.)
Meanwhile, a strange thing happened. Turbin made the acquaintance of someone called Maxim, who immediately gave him access to the Telegram channel Occupy Slutophilia 14 (similar names have been used on the Web by the fans of the late Russian neo-Nazi activist Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich) and asked him to help with the channel’s content by editing videos. The channel had only a few subscribers, and it featured posts in support of Yevgeny Prigozhin and far-right content revolving around Tesak. Investigators then used Turbin’s involvement in the channel to accuse him of neo-Nazism, despite the fact that the schoolboy’s father was from the UAE, and Turbin himself had been bullied at school due to his dark skin.
At the end of the summer, FSB officers searched the Turbins’ home and summoned Arseny for questioning. It was a very strange conversation: for almost an hour and a half, in different ways, two investigators questioned the schoolboy about his connections with the Free Russia Legion. At the end of the conversation, as Mediazonadiscovered, they assured the teenager that it was “normal” and “not against the law” to send an application to the Legion, which has been declared a “terrorist organization” by the Russian authorities.
The court was not interested in this peculiar circumstance, however. It was interested in Turbin’s statement, allegedly made during the interrogation, that he had sent the application: this was the basis for the charge that he had “joined” the “terrorist organization.” The thing is that Turbin did not say this. Mediazona has in its possession a full transcript of the conversation, and it simply does not contain mention of Turbin’s sending off the application. The investigators inserted it for their own convenience.
Irina Turbina was present at the interrogation. She says that the investigators retyped the statement three times because of mistakes, and suggests that they could have discreetly amended it after lulling her into a false sense of security.
After seeing the transcript, the investigator, Trunov, had even wanted to close the case. In February 2024, however, the investigation was assigned to another investigator, Irina Simonova. She spun the line about Turbin’s alleged neo-Nazi views, obtaining testimony from the boy’s classmates, who assured her that his “idol was the so-called Tesak,” that he had advocated “exterminating the Ukrainians,” and had supported Alexei Navalny. Irina Turbina does not believe this testimony, producing correspondence in which her son called Tesak a “blockhead” and himself a “liberal.” Turbina argues that her son’s classmates testified against him in exchange for “excellent high school diplomas.”
Due to the increased harassment at school, Turbina transferred Arseny to home schooling. He managed to pass his year-nine exams before the verdict was handed down. On 21 June, the court sentenced Arseny to five years in prison, although the prosecution had requested an even longer sentence of eight years. After the sentence was read, he burst into tears, telling his mother, “Mom, I’m sorry—forgive me for letting you down. But I really didn’t know I was violating any laws.”
No one looked for the mysterious Maxim. The court was also uninterested in Turbin’s conversation with the FSB officers who openly provoked the schoolboy and falsified his statement.
PROMPT: Make an illustration on the theme of “Russia’s Fascist Meltdown”
Creating an illustration on the theme “Russia’s Fascist Meltdown” involves capturing the essence of nationalism, authoritarianism, and geopolitical tension. Here’s a description of an illustration:
The illustration features a powerful and imposing figure symbolizing the Kremlin, with a stern-faced leader resembling Vladimir Putin at the forefront. Behind him, the Russian flag waves prominently, but instead of the usual tricolor, it blends with darker hues suggestive of authoritarian control. The background is a stark urban landscape, reminiscent of Moscow’s skyline, but with ominous shadows and smoke rising in the distance.
In the foreground, there are smaller figures representing dissenters and protestors, their faces obscured in shadows or masked to symbolize anonymity and resistance. They hold signs with slogans advocating for freedom and democracy, contrasting sharply with the dominant figure of Putin. The atmosphere is tense, with a palpable sense of division and discord.
To further emphasize the theme of “meltdown,” the illustration includes elements like cracked ice or fire, symbolizing internal turmoil and instability within Russian society. The color palette leans towards shades of red, black, and grey, evoking a sense of danger and crisis.
Overall, the illustration aims to visually convey the complex and contentious dynamics surrounding Russia’s shift towards authoritarian nationalism, capturing both the gravity of the situation and the resilience of those who oppose it.
Ana Tavadze and Dachi Imedadze, members of Georgia’s Shame Movement. Photo: 60 MINUTES
Ana Tavadze: We’re going in with a government that’s completely corrupt, a government that’s pro-Russian, clearly anti-Western, clearly does not really care about what the majority of the population wants and needs.
Ana Tavadze and Dachi Imedadze are members of the Shame Movement – a group with thousands of young followers working towards Georgia’s entry into the European Union.
Ana Tavadze: If Russia wins, it means loss of freedom, loss of everything that we fought for in the past 30 years basically. It’s a fight for values, it’s a fight for where you want to stand in this big fight for democracy.
Dachi Imedadze: As soon as the West in any form, be it the U.S. partnership, be it the European Union, is not represented in this country, Russia will fill the void right away.
They say the influx of Russians is already changing the face of Georgia.
Ana Tavadze: What are they doing, if we look at it? They’re buying apartments. They’re buying private property. They are opening up businesses. Their actions changed — Georgian economy.
Dachi Imedadze: The Russians are buying apartments here in every 33 minutes. They’re purchasing a piece of land in every 27 minutes. And they’re registering a business in every 26 minutes. So, I think we are on the brink of very dangerous situation here in Georgia.
According to public records, Russians have registered more than 20,000 businesses in Georgia over the last two years. And launched five new Russian-only schools, none of which are licensed by Georgia’s department of education.
Russians have driven rent up nearly 130%, prices for everything from food to cars have gone up 7%. over 100,000 Georgians have left the country because many of them can’t afford to live here anymore.
Sharyn Alfonsi: I’ve heard this described as a quiet invasion.
Dachi Imedadze: Quiet invasion, yeah. There is a risk of the economic diversions. There is a risk of military intervention. And there’s a risk of — Georgia’s statehood being destroyed.
Emmanuil Lisnif, George Smorgulenko and Pavel Bakhadov don’t look like much of a threat.
All Russians in their twenties, they fled their country for fear of being drafted or imprisoned for speaking out against Putin.
George Smorgulenko, Emmanuil Lisnif and Pavel Bakhadov are all Russians living in Georgia. Photo: 60 MINUTES
They now live in Georgia and work at this Russian-owned comedy club in Tbilisi.
Emmanuil Lisnif: I try and said ‘I’m against the war in Russia. I was beaten. and after that going to prison three times.’
Sharyn Alfonsi: So three times you went to jail?
Emmanuil Lisnif: Yes, yes three times.
Pavel Bakhadov: I believe and I know that Russians actually against the war.
Sharyn Alfonsi: You think that most Russians are against the war?
Emmanuil Lisnif: Yeah, just scared, really scared.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Have any of you had any aggression towards you because you’re Russian?
Pavel Bakhadov: Actually I have a big writing on the wall. It’s the biggest thing I see from my window, just big ‘Russians go home.’
There is no subtlety in spray paint… anti-Russian graffiti blankets the city along with support for Ukraine.
This text is based on interviews I did as part of the Hidden Opinions public opinion polling project, which I launched in 2022 and continued in 2023 and 2024. I spoke with dissenting Russians — with those who oppose the current regime and its military actions against Ukraine, both those who have stayed in Russia and those who have left the country. My youngest respondent at the time of the [first] survey was sixteen years old, while the oldest was seventy-two years old. These people hail from a wide range of professions and walks of life, but what they have in common is their categorical opposition to the actions of the Russian authorities. In just two years, I have interviewed 154 people for this project, some of whom I have spoken with two or three times.
In 2022, all of my respondents — both those who had left the country and those who stayed — espoused anti-war views and expressed a negative attitude toward the Kremlin’s policies. However, in 2023, about a year and a half after the war’s outbreak, a group amongst my sources in Russia emerged. Small at first, but constantly growing, it consisted of people who had changed their negative attitudes toward the war and/or the government.
This does not mean that such changes are impossible among those Russians who have left the country. Amidst a full-scale war, research based on representative samples is hampered by the fact that the most accessible respondents are those who have agreed to be interviewed as a result of self-selection. This is a significant limitation to the project.
My research is qualitative, not quantitative, meaning that it would be wrong to speak of a particular percentage of anti-war Russians who have become pro-war. I think it is important to study and understand how views are transformed and what triggers them to change. It is the subject of this text.
***
The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, experimenting with means of gauging the conservatism–to–radicalism spectrum, asked his students to do the following exercise. They were shown twenty drawings, the first one depicting a dog, the last one depicting a cat; in between, the dog gradually shed its canine features and turned into the cat. It was vital that the researcher record the moment when the test subjects had doubts about what exactly was depicted in the picture, when they realized that the dog had mutated irreversibly. In a sense, I have been doing something similar, trying to record the moment at which anti-war or anti-Putin views have been transformed into pro-war or pro-government views.
I have observed that such a change in views depends on a number of extrinsic factors, and the more such factors that are combined, the more likely it is that the person’s stance will change. In addition, a great deal is determined by an individual’s (psychological, social, etc.) resources. Finally, inconsistent views play an important role in transformation and adaptation. In recent years, sociologists have increasingly noted that people often pursue mutually exclusive goals simultaneously without noticing the contradictions in their own behavior.
New rationalizations, disillusionment and loneliness
The gradual realization that the war is a long-term affair, combined with Alexei Navalny’s sudden death in a penal colony, has had a considerable impact on those resisting the regime within Russia. One can swim against the current, but it requires a considerable amount of strength, something not everyone possesses. It is difficult to be amongst the minority for years on end, to conceal one’s views and live in fear of being reported to the authorities. Respondents have thus begun reformatting [sic] their attitude to reality, explaining events in a new light and providing new rationalizations.
Failing to receive the expected support from the outside world or the possibility of a dignified workaround, some of my respondents eventually chose non-resistance to the regime, which in some cases has transmogrified into full-fledged loyalty.
“I don’t want to go to prison, I don’t want to play the rebel. I just want to live. If they send me to listen to ‘Exorcist TV,’ I’ll go without question. If they tell me to go to a [pro-war] concert, I’ll go. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything anymore. I’m tired. I can only accept it and live the life I have.”
This stance is not directly bound up with support for the war or the regime. Rather, it indicates fatigue and the lack of strength to resist. If the circumstances shift in a direction more in keeping with their own values, these people will gladly slough off the “burden of adaptation.”
It is worth noting that, over the last year, many of my respondents have stopped following the news and focused on their daily lives. There are respondents who, despite the troubling times, have decided to have children. This is also a way of disconnecting from current events.
Another important factor influencing the change of respondents’ views is the narrowing of their circles of trust. Fearing denunciation, dissenters avoid making new contacts. Afraid of being alone and unwilling to live in fear, uncertainty and/or exile, they then join the majority.
The distance between Russians who have left Russia and those who have stayed in Russia has grown greater with every passing year. In 2022–2023, when I asked my respondents about opposition members who had left Russia, they most often would say nothing or would limit themselves to brief remarks along the lines of “We still watch them on YouTube, but they have less and less sense of what’s happening at home.”
Expressions of resentment and frustration have become more frequent in my interviews in 2024. My sources have said that the opposition often engages in wishful thinking and plays fast and loose with the facts, and that the west does not always act logically and decently.
Consequently, previously opposition-minded people have chosen to abandon painful and exhausting self-reflection in favor of loyalty to the regime. This helps them to get on with their lives, normalizing both the war and the political crackdowns. As one respondent put it, “Since the opposition and the west cannot be trusted, we will make friends with Putin. He is an ogre, but he is our own ogre.”
“Western countries seem to be doing everything to help Putin’s propaganda machine. I was quite surprised when I heard Angela Merkel say that all our negotiations were just a smokescreen: we wanted to let Ukraine catch its breath, and the negotiations were just a deception. That is, the leader of one of the largest countries in Europe openly says: a) we can’t be trusted in any negotiations, and b) we have conspired to deceive you. […] Putin’s propaganda machine skillfully makes use of this. But the point is not that the propaganda machine is using it, it’s that it is reality. As a normal person, a question occurs to me: if they treat us this way, [then] we are their enemies. After such statements, the ‘west’ is regarded as the enemy of Russians, and, accordingly, their enemy — Putin — is our friend.”
Those respondents who have changed their views on the war emphasize that when the west blocked their bank cards and accounts, when they heard what Ukrainians (including their relatives and friends) were saying about Russians and how they called for killing them, they decided that the current regime, whatever it was like, was less hostile to them on balance.
Tired of guilt, shame, disappointment and indignation, they have essentially chosen peace by joining the majority and accepting the existing rules: don’t discuss politics, don’t speak out publicly, swear to the values that the government declares. This choice seems reasonable to them in a situation in which no political activism is possible anyway, and the political crackdown machine is only picking up steam.
This strategy ensured material well-being and career success for some of my respondents. For example, some mid-level specialists in the IT sector received good positions and salaries, while for other people the involvement of their relatives in the war has been a means of social mobility and a source of access to material goods. Still others have benefited from the war by arranging parallel imports, etc.
Another factor contributing to the shift in sentiment from anti-Putin to pro-government has been the radicalization and polarization of society.
“A sharp delineation between ‘black and white’ leads to the opposite outcome. Any attempts to express doubts about the actions of the Ukrainian or western side are automatically regarded both inside and outside [Russia] as pro-Putin behavior, the outcome of brainwashing, etc. The other side appears infallible and beyond criticism.
“If you criticize the west’s actions in any way, you are automatically pigeonholed as a ‘Putinist.’ It makes me feel like saying: if that’s how you treat me, well, to hell with you, chalk me up as a Putin supporter.”
The state of rejection and isolation provokes protests amongst some people: since the west condemns them for staying in Russia, they “will go the full mile and become real orcs.”
The mechanisms by which feelings of rejection are transformed into collective pride have been described by researchers and are not unique to Russia. These feelings reinforce nationalist sentiments and contribute to the strengthening of authoritarian regimes.
Emotional dilemma
Speaking about the change in their views from anti-war to pro-war, my respondents noted that in one way or another they were surrounded by people who had suffered in the war: classmates or school friends who had been drafted to the front or had volunteered for combat, their children, colleagues, and mere acquaintances. Telling them straight to their face that their sacrifices were in vain had become both emotionally more difficult and more dangerous. To maintain relationships and friendships, my sources generally had to listen in silence to their acquaintances’ stories about what they had experienced and seen at the front. And if they were people who mattered to them, it was impossible not to sympathize with them.
We should understand that Russians who initially opposed the war and the regime but remained in Russia feel definitely closer to those who went to the front or delivered humanitarian aid there than to those who have left the country. They are “in the same boat” as their relatives, friends, and colleagues. They feel compassion for them.
“When we were teenagers, all sorts of things happened. If the guys were caught [by the authorities], I would perjure myself and lie in all sorts of ways. Later I could tell them what I actually thought of them, but I wouldn’t abandon them. That’s not the way that blokes do things. Now I realize with my head that they are wrong a hundred times over, but they are my boys, I am on their side. And even if I am against the war, I cannot be against them.”
Propaganda equates anti-war sentiment with betrayal, and it paints people who espouse such views as accomplices of Russia’s enemies, who want to kill as many Russians as possible. This causes a very heavy feeling, my respondents note.
Meanwhile, the state softens such emotional blows by offering loyal citizens new benefits and additional material and social goods, free concerts, and beautiful and comfortable urban environments, demonstrating concern for people in general and for those returning from war in particular. “People-centeredness” has become the buzzword in the PR strategies of many employers and officials throughout Russia.
Russians who are concerned about their neighbors also respond to calls for help front-line soldiers, because amidst war and external isolation it is these people with whom, they say, they “share a common plight.” One of my respondents, overwhelmed by such sentimental feelings, volunteered for the army.
As a religious man, he hoped he would not face the need to kill others, but would be able to help “his boys” without bearing arms, because he “could not stand on the sidelines any longer.” If the need to kill arose, he would desert, my source had decided, explaining that he was emotionally prepared to be beaten up and go to prison.
Another type of people whom I have encountered more and more often are those whom researchers Maria Lipman and Michael Kimmage have characterized as anti-anti-war: these people do not necessarily support the war, but they strongly condemn or resent “unpatriotic” fellow citizens who do not support the Russian army or who even take the side of Ukraine.
Seeing soldiers returning from the front and watching the growing number of Russians killed in combat, my sources now often place the blame not on Putin or the Russian military, but on their compatriots who oppose continuing the war until Russia achieves total victory.
Ressentiment and the “demons” of propaganda
Propaganda has awakened ressentiment in some of my respondents. They have come to believe that this war is really about maintaining Russia’s status as a great power, which its enemies are trying to flout and rob. Such people believe it vital that Russia maintain its status as a victor, and they accept the state-imposed version of Russian history that asserts Russia’s greatness in all periods.
War, as happens under autocracies and dictatorships, is seen as the ultimate manifestation of the nation’s strength and vitality and a guarantee that its culture and traditions will be maintained. In conversations with me, my sources have repeatedly used the phrase “releasing demons,” referring to the fact that the current situation helps their acquaintances and themselves experience a sense of unity and superiority over the rest of the world, a sense of their own righteousness and chosenness.
Some respondents noted that the official rhetoric, concrete and catchy, seemed more acceptable to them than the verbose arguments and meaningless self-reflections of the opposition.
Meanwhile, according to my respondents, the number of anti-war-minded Russians today is decreasing. Since Navalny’s death, I have often heard in interviews that every second or third person in the orbit of my sources has changed their views.
It is difficult to say how strong this trend really is. I would estimate that a third of those who unequivocally opposed the war and the regime when I spoke to them [initially] have changed their views, but of course these numbers are in need of supplemental verification, which is not easy to accomplish today. There are probably also people who have switched their pro-war patriotic views to oppositional ones, but I assume that we hear the voices of these people even less frequently.
Respondents who are in a state of uncertainty and/or in the course of switching their views feel the need for support, at least informational support. They need arguments explaining that anti-war sentiments are not a betrayal and that the current war is destroying Russia, not restoring its greatness. But they also acknowledge that such an argument would hardly convince them under the current circumstances. For now, the only thing they think they can do is to maintain their sanity and adapt to reality in order to live to see better days.
***
The Russian regime has proven to be “smarter” and more adaptive than Russian opposition activists and western democracies thought, but this does not mean there is no point or possibility of supporting by any means possible those who have remained in Russia and are still resisting the regime or straddling the fence. One way or another, positive change in Russia is impossible without their involvement.
The Russian Justice Ministry has once again designated Republic a “foreign agent.” This happened for the first time in 2021, but at that time a legal entity with which we soon severed ties was placed on the register of foreign agents. Now the publication itself has been put on the register. We are charged with “shaping a negative image of the Russian Federation,” as well as publishing “inaccurate information about the decisions taken by Russian federal officials and the policies they pursue.” I would like to remind you that Republic has always been financed solely by subscriptions, and Justice Ministry’s unjust ruling is a great reason to subscribe (if you are not subscribed already) or to renew your subscription.
And now, as usual on Saturdays, here are links to our latest articles and the best stories of the past week.
In “Power,” Ivan Davydov attempts to explain the psychology of Russians who have taken a position neither for nor against the war, but are “unopposed” to it. They probably make up the majority, but what explains their stance? A habitual mindset that regards political power as a force of nature, with which nothing can be done and which is better to ride out. “This stance is ethically vulnerable, but it is warranted by the know-how of several generations and supported by the self-preservation instinct,” argues Davydov.
[…]
Dmitry Kolezev, Editor-in-Chief, Republic
P.S. This is my last newsletter as editor-in-chief of Republic. I am leaving the post of my own free will. I announced my resignation a week ago: it has nothing to do with the Justice Ministry’s decision. I thank the authors, editors, and readers of Republic for the three years we have spent together. As they say in such cases, take care of Republic. And take care of yourselves, too.
Source: Republic Saturday newsletter, 1 June 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader, who has (mostly) happily subscribed to Republic for several years running. I will definitely be renewing my subscription later today to show them my support.
A “For Victory!” banner on the facade of the Contemporary, a long-shuttered movie house in Ivanovo, Russia. Photo: Ivan Davydov/Republic
Since the death of public opinion polling, people who are professionally obliged to speculate about Russian politics and make predictions about the future have been looking for signs literally everywhere, gradually turning from analysts into soothsayers.
For example, a respected opposition political scientist based in Europe recently wrote that “General Popov’s arrest may generate serious friction between society and the authorities.” By the way, this same political scientist has also been trying to gauge the mindset of Russians by counting the poop (excuse me!) and other unpleasant emojis that Russians (presumably) post as comments on the Telegram channels of Russian government officials and pro-regime propagandists.
He is an optimist, of course, confident that the regime is about to collapse. Poop emojis don’t lie!
Another political scientist, a pessimistic lady, on the contrary, gazes at Russia from her distant American vantage point, but does not even condescend to comment—she simply reposts a photo from a certain bookstore where Darya Dugina’s works are displayed on a separate shelf.
And really, what good are words? One glance at the photo is enough to get the whole point, to forget forever about terrible present-day Russia and wave it goodbye.
Nor am I an insider, alas. I’m not endowed with secret knowledge, and it has been a long time since I perused the “real polls” said to be commissioned by the presidential administration and other important agencies. Frankly speaking, I’m not even sure that such studies are still being conducted.
But there are still some advantages to being a participant observer, a person looking at Russia from the inside. In any case, I will risk sharing my own observations.
Has the Russian state been expanding into the cultural realm (since we mentioned bookstores)? Does it seek to reshape culture for propaganda needs? Yes, undoubtedly. It would be foolish to deny the obvious. And it has been invading more and more realms, where, until recently, it seemed one could sit back and wait out the storm. It has finally gone after “bad” books in a big way, it seems. Museums have also been toeing the line. Right now, for example, there are two exhibitions related to the special military operation underway in Moscow: Behind the Lines, a large-scale project at the Russian State Historical Museum, in whose launch [pro-war TV presenter] Vladimir Solovyov personally had a hand; and War Correspondents, at Zaryadye Park, in which the work of today’s TV correspondents is shown as a continuation of the work of journalists during the Second World War, in full compliance with the basic propaganda narratives. Regional museums have not been lagging behind the capital’s museums either.
Although television has indeed reduced the number of programs dealing with the ins and outs of the special military operation, even now they take up most of the airtime on the major channels.
The information warriors have been firing all guns. The only question is their firepower’s effectiveness.
In February and March 2022, the special military operation was undoubtedly the main topic of all conversations, from television studios to kitchens. Emotions were voiced in a variety of ways (and I wouldn’t say that enthusiastic support prevailed in the kitchens and subways), but rather quickly it all shifted to the outskirts of public opinion. There has been a “normalization” (that’s the accepted term, it seems) that has equally outraged both the vocal pacifists and the supporters of an immediate nuclear strike on Washington, the latter, perhaps, even more so. Complaints that no one on the home front cares about the war front are the leitmotif of many posts on the social media channels of the Zeds [Russian pro-war activists].
The zed (since we are on the subject of signs) is also an important sign. Nowadays you can find this letter in ordinary Russian cities, but it is no longer as prolific as it once was. There is, as a rule, one, big, main zed (Z) somewhere on a government building in the city center, but that’s all. And even that one is faded, mounted there long ago and thus overly familiar to the point of invisibility.
There are, of course, the Defense Ministry posters for recruiting contract soldiers. But they seem out of context as it were, speaking as they do about the chance to “join up with people just like you,” solve your financial and social problems, and, ultimately, rake in hefty paychecks. They are outside of time and devoid of specifics, of references to reality. We see a rugged-looking man in soldier’s kit, the Russian tricolor flag, tantalizing numbers….
If we speak, as is fashionable, of the current Russian regime as restorationist, we can argue that the country’s masters have succeeded in restoring only one thing—total depoliticization, the leadership’s fear of any doings that might be unwieldy and thus regarded as political. This was typical of the late-period Soviet Union (and ended overnight, we should note, when Gorbachev loosened the screws a bit). Cities that are like enclaves, people who are like atoms, the plight of the Russian opposition in the twenty-teens, and the isolated (yes, as yet isolated) crackdowns have vividly reminded the doubters what happens to eager beavers.
In this sense, nothing has changed in recent years. Perhaps the intensifying propaganda shows that the authorities have new ideas in this regard, that they have decided to make their words about the nation’s unprecedented unity mean something. It is unclear why, though: the regime will get nothing but problems by politicizing the populace. So far all these efforts have failed, however. The Master and Margarita and 1984, not the works of the Dugin family, are still atop the Russian bestseller lists. Brought to museums by their teachers, schoolchildren yawn and poke at their smartphones, while adults are almost absent. The escalating propaganda makes people neurotic rather than political, but since Soviet times the populace has had a remedy—an effective remedy—for countering this neuroticization.
It’s all the business of the folks in power. As long as it doesn’t directly concern you, don’t make a move, nothing good will come of your flailing. Political power is a force of nature, an element beyond human control, so try to have as little contact with it as possible. When asked whether you are for or against something, answer evasively, “I’m unopposed to it.” Better yet, hang up immediately if pollsters call you. The times are such that they can be even more dangerous than bank fraudsters.
Talking to crooks may make you poorer, but it certainly won’t get you sent to prison.
This stance is ethically vulnerable, but it is warranted by the know-how of several generations and supported by the self-preservation instinct. This stance poses obvious problems for the future—for any future, both the one cherished by fans of rights and freedoms and the one imagined by armchair slayers of Washington.
Popular opinion polls show that the majority of Russians support the military action in Ukraine. Researchers, however, continue to argue that society’s support for the war is much lower than these figures suggest. In their new study “Perception of the conflict with Ukraine among Russians: testing the spiral of silence hypothesis,” V.B. Zvonovsky and A.V. Khodykin, drawing on Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s “spiral of silence” model, argue that many opponents of the war are not willing to voice their opinion, believing that it is unpopular and fearing social disapproval.
Noelle-Neumann argues that before people with a “limited interest in politics” decide to voice their opinion on a politically significant matter, they assess the risk of being condemned by others. The spiral of silence “twists” as follows: people who are afraid of being isolated due to the unpopularity of their opinion refrain from voicing it → this opinion is thus heard less and less often in society → people thus increasingly think that their own opinion is not popular → they are thus even less likely to be willing to voicing it.
Zvonovsky and Khodykin discovered that the spiral of silence actually does have a great impact on discussion of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Russian society. They were able to verify this by doing a nationwide telephone survey (N = 1977) using Noelle-Neumann’s “train test.” The “train test” measures the willingness of “adherents of a particular stance on a socially significant matter to openly voice it by discussing it on a train with a random fellow passenger.” Supporters of the more popular stance, in their opinion, are more likely to openly voice it, believing that they are “in a stronger camp and less at risk of being judged by others.” Sometimes, their opponents are also encouraged to side with the “stronger” position.
Applying the “train test” to the Russian context showed that the topic of the war is highly sensitive both to its supporters and opponents, and that the spiral of silence affects both sides of the discussion. However, its impact on opponents of the war has proved to be much stronger than on its supporters. Thus, people who oppose the special military operation in Ukraine are less willing to discuss the Russian-Ukrainian conflict with those who support it.
Another important finding made by the researchers is the fact that a person’s willingness to speak out about the war is influenced most by the distribution of opinions about it in their immediate circle of acquaintances. So, the more people in the orbit of respondents who had shared a similar opinion with them, the more the respondents were willing to discuss the war, and vice versa. It can be assumed that the need to maintain social ties is stronger for Russians than the need to defend and disseminate their political views, as we noted in our analytical report “The war near and far.” Zvonovsky and Khodykin suggest another explanation, however: the “bad experience” of political discussions, which often end in conflict and frustration, also has an impact, since the opinions of interlocutors are not changed, and the desire to talk about the war with one’s political opponents thus simply disappears.
The last interesting finding of the authors about which we want to tell you is the following. If the environment of the respondents is divided approximately equally (~50% “for” the war and ~50% “against”), then the probability that those oppose the special military operation will discuss it does not decrease—unlike supporters of the war, who are much less likely under the same circumstances to discuss the military operation with strangers of opposite views. Thus, the opponents of the military conflict “have learned to resist the spiral of silence better than their opponents.” This means that if the distribution of opinions in Russia changes, “opponents of the military conflict will have greater opportunities than [their] opponents to promote their own narrative about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.”
IOWA CITY, Iowa — Anti-Donald Trump Republicans know they are in the middle of a critical moment to stop the former president’s political comeback. But for some, the steep cost of voicing resistance to Trump often renders them silent.
“If you go against Trump, like — you’re over,” said Kyle Clare, 20, a member of the University of Iowa’s College Republicans.
“I don’t talk about Donald Trump a lot because I’m afraid of the backlash,” said Jody Sears, 66, a registered Republican from Grimes, Iowa.
“If you would say something negative about Trump, we had one person that would just go bang for your throat,” said Barbra Spencer, 83, a former Trump voter describing her experience living in senior apartments in Spillville, Iowa.
Trump still enjoys broad popularity in the Republican Party, and that’s driving his polling leads among Republicans in Iowa, New Hampshire and every other state ahead of the 2024 primaries. But he has also used that popularity to enforce unity. And the same impulse that has led Republican officeholders to avoid criticizing Trump because of potential threats to their safety and their jobs is also holding back rank-and-file voters from opposing the former president in public with the full strength of their personal convictions.
NBC News spoke to more than a half-dozen Iowa voters turned off by Trump — but some were anxious about talking on the record out of fear of being shunned by friends or family. One Iowan said they plan on saying they caucused for Trump when asked by members of their community but will actually caucus for Vivek Ramaswamy.
That adds up to signs going unplaced on front lawns, conversations with friends and family about other candidates avoided — and fewer opportunities for opposition to Trump to take hold in different Republican communities.
NBC News first spoke with Clare in a University of Iowa auditorium Aug. 23, the night of the first GOP presidential debate. Fellow College Republicans were reacting to the debate and voicing steadfast support for the GOP candidate who wasn’t on the stage: Trump.
Clare chose to wait until the end of the night, after the rest of his classmates left the auditorium, to share his thoughts.
“I’m just so scared of doing this right now,” he said, fighting back tears. “I want to be able to have my opinions on our politicians, and I want to be able to speak freely about them and people still understand I’m a conservative.”
Clare criticized Trump, particularly for his actions Jan. 6, 2021, saying, “The end of his administration was un-American.” He also said Trump’s supporters are in denial about losing the 2020 election.
“They don’t want to believe he lost the election. It’s hard to swallow. Losing is hard to swallow. But it’s important that when we lose, we recognize that we lost and we think, ‘What can we do better next time to win over Americans?’” Clare said.
Clare was right to expect backlash from speaking out on Trump. After NBC News published the interview with him on a “Meet The Press” social media account, hateful and homophobic comments poured in. Clare said later that a student came up to him at a university event, shoved a phone in his face with the video on it, and asked him why he’s “scared of Trump and not scared of getting AIDS from having gay sex.”
“Say something they disagree with, and they go after your sexuality,” said Clare, who added that he doesn’t regret doing the interview with NBC News. Many of the comments questioned if Clare — who holds a leadership role at the University of Iowa’s College Republican organization, interned for a Republican on Capitol Hill, and is heavily involved in the Johnson County, Iowa, GOP — was truly a Republican.
“I think it shouldn’t be a bad thing for me to say I am conservative and that I think there are other options, and I don’t think that this person is good for our country,” Clare said. But he’s worried those opinions will stunt his own long-term political ambitions.
“If people as powerful and as prominent as members of Congress can be taken down because of their criticisms of one man, what’s stopping that from happening to me?” Clare noted, referring to the Republicans ousted from Congress after voting to impeach Trump.
Trump’s criticism forced several senators and House members into retirement or primary defeat during his first years in office. Later, of the 10 House Republicans who voted to bring impeachment charges against Trump following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, four retired before facing voters in 2022 and another four lost their next primaries. Only two remain in the House.
In the Senate, three of the seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump have since retired or resigned, and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah is retiring next year.
Romney recounted to biographer McKay Coppins that Republican members of Congress confided to him they wanted Trump impeached and convicted but would vote against the charges because they were worried about threats to their families.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of the Republicans who lost a 2022 primary after voting to impeach Trump, detailed similar conversations in her new memoir.
Cheney wrote about one colleague that she “absolutely understood his fear” about what would happen if he voted to impeach Trump. But, she continued, “I also thought, ‘Perhaps you need to be in another job.’”
‘It was easier to be quiet about it’
Rank-and-file voters are less prominent and thus less likely to be harassed or threatened, but some of the same worries and experiences remain. Sears, the Republican from Grimes, Iowa, feels Trump doesn’t reflect her values. But that’s an opinion she kept to herself until recently, because of the fear of being cast off by family and friends.
“Family and people I work with are Trump supporters,” said Sears, describing her hesitancy to speak out about her beliefs.
“I think Trump supporters tried to coerce or bully people into also being Trump supporters. And so it was easier to be quiet about it,” she said.
Spencer, a retiree now living in a nursing home in Decorah, Iowa, says Trump supporters at her previous retirement community created a toxic environment that stopped her and her friends from voicing opinions.
“We were afraid of arguments,” she said. “When you live with that many old people, sometimes they have very strange but very firm thoughts and you better think the way they do,” she said, explaining her silence.
Clare, Sears and Spencer are not the only people who feel this way.
And as Cheney and Romney’s stories demonstrate, social ostracization isn’t limited to just voters who speak out against Trump. Former Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican who represented a slice of Virginia from 2019 to 2021, says his mother texted him, “I’m sorry you were ever elected,” after he came out against Trump.
“It was so soul-crushing to have a family member choose Donald Trump over you,” Riggleman continued. He said evangelical Trump supporters in his life saw Trump as being blessed by God. “I was going directly against religious beliefs. And that’s a losing battle.”
It’s now been almost six months since a member of Congress endorsed a non-Trump candidate in the 2024 GOP primary, according to NBC News’ endorsement tracking.
The trend has popped up elsewhere on the 2024 campaign trail, too. When Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds endorsed Ron DeSantis in November, the Florida governor mentioned in an interview with NBC News that he “had people come to me and say they endorsed [Trump] because of the threats and everything like that” during the campaign.
Trump quickly went after Reynolds after news of her DeSantis endorsement broke, posting on social media that it would “be the end of her political career.”
‘Vortex of controversy and vilification’
Charlie Sykes was a conservative radio show host in Wisconsin for more than 20 years before Trump burst onto the political scene. Sykes was skeptical and critical of Trump, eventually confronting him in a heated interview about insults Trump hurled at Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s wife in 2016. But for Sykes, it began to become clear that there was no room anymore for anti-Trump conservatives on talk radio.
“The audience of conservative talk radio began to think that loyalty was required. They wanted conservative media to be a safe space for them,” Sykes said, describing how his role became untenable.
After leaving radio, Sykes didn’t let up on his Trump criticism, which he says got him booted from a think tank and led him to lose friends and become a self-described political orphan. He says his criticism was met with bullying — and he understands why people who don’t work in the public eye might be hesitant to voice their true feelings about Trump.
“I do understand why people in their normal lives don’t want to be caught up in this vortex of controversy and vilification — why they would step back from all of this,” Sykes said.
Another longtime Wisconsin Republican recently detailed one of the results of that pressure.
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan recently spoke on video at an event for Teneo, a global consulting firm where he serves as vice-chair. Ryan said the impulse to avoid getting on the wrong side of angry Trump supporters pushed former colleagues to vote against impeachment even though they wanted Trump gone — and now he thinks there are many who regret those votes.
“They figured, ‘I’m not gonna take this heat and I’m going to vote against this impeachment because he’s gone anyway,’” Ryan said. “But what’s happened is that he’s been resurrected.”
Yekaterina Duntsova, who wants to run for president, said the Kremlin should end the conflict in Ukraine, free political prisoners and undertake major reform to halt the slide towards a new era of “barbed wire” division between Russia and the West.
Nearly 32 years since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union stoked hopes that Russia would blossom into an open democracy, Duntsova, 40, said she was afraid as she spoke to Reuters in Moscow.
In opinion polls, Russians voice support for the Putin regime’s action in Ukraine. And yet, many Russia would like the war to end, and the dynamics of recruiting “contract” soldiers does not demonstrate that a large number of people are ready to rise up “to fight the West in Ukraine.” What are the real sentiments of Russians? What do they think about the war and how do they justify it?
Lev Gudkov, deputy director, research director, Levada Center, “The war and collective identity,” (online)
Andrei Kolesnikov, senior researcher at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, “A semi-mobilized society in a hybrid totalitarian regime” (online)
Svetlana Erpyleva, Humboldt Fellow, Research Center for Eastern European Studies at the University of Bremen; researcher, Public Sociology Lab and the Centre for Independent Sociological Research, “Accepting the inevitable: how Russians justify the war in Ukraine”
Source. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader
Viktor Filinkov, convicted in the Petersburg portion of the high-profile Network Case, turned twenty-nine in early November. It was his third birthday in the penal colony, and for the first time he was not given any special “gift” there. Previously, surprises had been waiting for him that were even hard to imagine—for example, a new uniform with a piece of razor inside it. Filinkov has been imprisoned for six years total. During this time, he has seen a lot, including being threatened with dispatch to a war zone, but he quickly put a stop to such “jokes.” Now he is housed in the high-security wing along with other “repeat offenders.” And he constantly files suits against the penal colony. We talked to his girlfriend and public defender Yevgenia Kulakova, who loves him with all her heart and helps defend his rights behind bars.
Source. Excerpt translated by the Russian Reader, who looks forward to the day when he can see his friend and heroine Jenya Kulakova again and meet his hero Viktor Filinkov in person.
Putin noted that visitors from Tajikistan can stay in Russia for an extended period—fifteen days—without registering with the immigration authorities. They can also apply for a work permit that is valid for up to three years.
In addition, Putin announced the expansion of the quota for university students and postgraduates from Tajikistan—from 900 to 1,000 individuals.
The head of the Russian Federation added that the state would allocate 200 million rubles annually from this year for purchasing textbooks for Russian-speaking schools in Tajikistan.
Various regions of Russia have recently imposed restrictions on migrant labor. There have also been proposals to introduce such bans everywhere for visitors from countries where the Russian language is not recognized at the state level. In Tajikistan, Russian is enshrined in the constitution as the language of interethnic communication.
Due to the unstable financial situation, migrant workers have been leaving Russia. Up to a third of Tajik and Uzbek nationals may leave the country.
As of February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the beginning of what he dubbed the “special military operation” and the Russian Armed Forces invaded Ukrainian territory. What the Russian authorities assumed would be a swift operation soon became a drawn-out, full-fledged war. Many events occurred over the course of the first year of war, keeping Russians in suspense, forcing them to detach themselves from the situation, giving them hope, and then driving them to despair. When we conducted our first interviews in spring 2022, many thought the war would not last long.
Since then, it has become clear that the war will be with us for a while. The daily life of Russian citizens has been invaded time and again by dramatic events. The Russian retreat from the occupied territories, the annexation of new regions, the bombing of Kiev, the first Crimean Bridge explosion, and the “partial mobilization”— to name just a few. Have these events changed the average Russian’s view of the war, and if so, how? How did residents of the Russian Federation perceive the “special military operation” more than half a year later? These questions are the focus of the report you see before you.
There are several research teams monitoring changes in Russian perceptions of the war through opinion polls (for example, Russian Field and Chronicles). The work they are doing is very important. However, like any research method, surveys have their drawbacks—there are some things they simply will not show. For example, surveys do not always allow us to understand a respondent’s attitude towards sensitive or hot-button topics, as sometimes people have a tendency to hide their true views. But more importantly, for Russians largely removed from the political process, perceptions of such politically-charged issues as the “special military operation,” war, and military conflict do not fit neatly into the standardized set of coherent positions that a survey is capable of capturing. These perceptions may be complex and contradictory, and in this case, in-depth interviews and long conversations with people allow us to better understand the idiosyncrasies of each viewpoint. To our knowledge, we are the only team that systematically monitors Russian perceptions of the war using qualitative (interview) rather than quantitative (survey) methods.
We released our first analytical report in September 2022. You can read it here (in Russian) and here (in English). In it, we presented the results of our qualitative study through interviews conducted over several months after the start of the war, in March, April, and May 2022. Our interviewees held a variety of opinions on the military conflict—there were those who supported the hostilities in one way or another (war supporters), those who condemned military aggression (war opposers), and those who tried to avoid giving any explicit assessment of the situation (undecided). We compared these three groups of respondents with each other: how they perceive the armed conflict, what emotions they associate with it, and how they consume information, assess the victims of the conflict, discuss the situation with loved ones, reflect on the consequences of the war, and so on. We have also published the results of this research in analytical media outlets, a few examples of which can be found here, here, and here, as well as in scientific journals, such as those found here (in Russian) and here.
The paper you are currently reading is the second analytical report we have published and a continuation of this research. It is based on qualitative sociological interviews with Russian citizens conducted in fall 2022, from 7 to 9 months after the outbreak of the war. We wanted to determine how Russian perceptions of the war had changed during this period. This time, we excluded subjects who consistently opposed the war from the sample and decided to focus our study on the specifics of perceptions held by Russian citizens who did not have an unambiguous anti-war stance.
In audio intercepts from the front lines in Ukraine, Russian soldiers speak in shorthand of 200s to mean dead, 300s to mean wounded. The urge to flee has become common enough that they also talk of 500s — people who refuse to fight.
As the war grinds into its second winter, a growing number of Russian soldiers want out, as suggested in secret recordings obtained by The Associated Press of Russian soldiers calling home from the battlefields of the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine.
The calls offer a rare glimpse of the war as it looked through Russian eyes — a point of view that seldom makes its way into Western media, largely because Russia has made it a crime to speak honestly about the conflict in Ukraine. They also show clearly how the war has progressed, from the professional soldiers who initially powered Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion to men from all walks of life compelled to serve in grueling conditions.
“There’s no f—— ‘dying the death of the brave’ here,” one soldier told his brother from the front in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. “You just die like a f—— earthworm.”
The prospect of another wave of mobilization lingers, even as Moscow has been trying to lure people into signing contracts with the military. Russia’s annual autumn conscription draft kicked off in October, pulling in some 130,000 fresh young men. Though Moscow says conscripts won’t be sent to Ukraine, after a year of service they automatically become reservists — prime candidates for mobilization.
Twenty months ago, after Vladimir Putin had launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many high-ranking Russians believed that the end was near. The economy faced disaster, as they saw it, and the Putin regime was on the brink of collapse.
Today, the mood has changed dramatically. Business leaders, officials and ordinary people tell me that the economy has stabilized, defying the Western sanctions that were once expected to have a devastating effect. Putin’s regime, they say, looks more stable than at any other time in the past two years.
Restaurants in Moscow are packed. “The restaurant market is growing, not only in Moscow, but throughout Russia, facilitated by the development of domestic tourism,” said a top Russian restaurateur. “And the quality of food is also changing for the better. Sure, panic struck the industry in early 2022, but it quickly passed.”
Due to Helsinki’s decision to temporarily close the border with Russia, Finnish resident Yevgeny doesn’t know when he will be able to see his father again. He and other Russian-speaking residents of Finland are trying to get through to the authorities to convince them to open at least one border crossing.
Source. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader
Unprecedented dragnets for conscripts have been taking place in Moscow. The capital’s military enlistment offices have launched a large-scale “single-day” conscription campaign, dispatching people with serious illnesses and visitors from other regions to the army. The Russian conscripts have not yet been sent to Ukraine for full-scaled combat. But the number of lawsuits against draft commissions has tripled compared to 2022 and is approaching a thousand cases. The BBC tells how conscription is taking place in the Russian capital, which lawyers describe as lawlessness.
Maria Andreeva, whose husband has been fighting in Ukraine for more than a year, is also waging a battle in Moscow: to get him home.
She is not alone.
A growing movement of Russian women is demanding the return from the front of their husbands, sons and brothers who were mobilised after a decree by President Vladimir Putin in September last year.
Initially, the movement pledged loyalty to what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” (SVO) but what they regard as the perfunctory response they have received is hardening some of their opinions.
The Udege language is so phonetically rich that linguists have devised several Cyrillic-based alphabets for it in an attempt to capture this wealth. Udege has both an inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronoun (“we”), and the terms describing spatial relationships have parallel meanings in the home and beyond its confines. The language of the Udege people reflects their idea of the equality of time and space, and the starting point for the speaker is either a river or a hearth. Linguist Elena Perekhvalskaya acquaints us with the Udege language.
Source. Excerpt translated by the Russian Reader, who was told the other day by a prominent Udege civil rights activist that the number of native speakers of Udege is now eleven.
In reality, as the testimony of numerous witnesses shows, the armed conflicts between the Russian state and the subjugated peoples of Siberia demonstrate that Russian colonization differs little from European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The only apparent difference was how the colonizers treated the people they conquered. While the Spanish Conquistadors committed large-scale massacres in their pursuit of gold, the Siberian Cossacks were more interested in extracting lucrative tributes from locals. These tributes, paid in the form of furs collected by the legendary hunters of the conquered peoples, became a major source of wealth for the tsars. The legend that indigenous peoples were such expert hunters they could “shoot a squirrel in the eye” persists to this day.
Irina Gurskaya, a human rights activist and volunteer, arrived in Cologne from Penza a year ago. More precisely, she did not come willingly but fled to Germany on a humanitarian visa. At the age of sixty, the pensioner had to leave her home, fearing for her life. The reason for Irina’s intimidation and harassment by the security forces in Penza was that she had helped Mariupol residents taken to Penza to return to their homeland or leave for safe countries.
We don’t know whether there will be a stalemate on the battlefield moving into 2024, or more dramatic changes in the frontline like we saw in May and November 2022. It remains to be seen whether a more ambitious mobilization campaign will be attempted after the presidential elections in March 2024. It would face the same problems as those I have described here. Utter lack of capacity and resources among the commissariat, informal institutionalized ways of avoiding or undoing the will of the centre to recruit. Massive labour shortages which make industry hostile. A counter-productive administrative system of coercive command. Active and passive agency of the vast majority to avoid the draft. There are various indirect signs that the authorities collectively fear the results of having to implement further mobilization.
The botched first mobilization created an atmosphere of bitterness, fear and hostility to the state’s conduct regarding the war. It would be a mistake to say that mobilization in 2022 broke the social contract between state and people, because there was none to begin with. If the war continues, Russian society will become ‘insurgent’. Not literally, but figuratively, people will become more actively resistant to recruitment to the meatgrinder. No monetary offers, nor spreadsheet autocracy will be effective.
Despite decades under Putin’s rule, it is too simplistic to assert that authoritarianism in Russia has eliminated activism, especially in relation to everyday life. Instead, we must build an awareness of diverse efforts to mobilize citizens to better understand how activism is shaped by and, in turn, shapes the regime.
Varieties of Russian Activism focuses on a broad range of collective actions addressing issues from labor organizing to housing renovation, religion, electoral politics, minority language rights, and urban planning. Contributors draw attention to significant forms of grassroots politics that have not received sufficient attention in scholarship or that deserve fresh examination. The volume shows that Russians find novel ways to redress everyday problems and demand new services. Together, these essays interrogate what kinds of practices can be defined as activism in a fast-changing, politically volatile society.
An engaging collection, Varieties of Russian Activism unites leading scholars in the common aim of approaching the embeddedness of civic activism in the conditions of everyday life, connectedness, and rising society-state expectations.
The Bolshoy Kinel River flows among the forests of the Orenburg Region. Its name derives from the Bulgar word kin, meaning “wide.” When the ancient Bulgars first encountered it, they saw a wide, full-flowing river and decided to settle there. But nowadays the river is gradually disappearing: the banks have shoaled, the bottom is silted up, and the springs that feed it are clogged. And yet, the Bolshoy Kinel is only source of water for several towns. Its tributaries are also drying up. In 2021, the Turkhanovka River, which flows through the entire length of the city of Buguruslan, completely disappeared. It was a tragedy for the townspeople. The local residents joined together and together cleared the river of debris—and the water returned. It transpired that there are many people living in the town who feel a great love for their land. I spoke with them. And, as I gathered their stories, I saw how everyone’s small deeds, like rivulets, combine into one big, important cause—just as the Turkhanovka River flows into the Bolshoy Kinel, the Bolshoy Kinel into the Samara, the Samara into the Volga, and the Volga into the Caspian Sea.
Source. Excerpt translated by the Russian Reader. Photo by Darya Aslanyan for Takie Dela
There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.
Both sides of the author’s family were remarkable. His maternal grandfather, Alfred Wiener, was a prominent German Jew who created the most extensive archives documenting the Holocaust; Alfred’s wife and daughters were deported to a concentration camp. The author’s paternal grandmother was transported to a gulag in Siberia. A tale of survival, eloquently told.
A lyrical excavation of trauma and healing in the midst of early motherhood – the debut work of an endlessly inventive poet whose work ‘fizzes with energy, physicality, and the levitating openness of song’.
It was snowing heavily when Yulia walked across the only open border between Ukraine and Russia last month, carrying her two cats and dragging a large suitcase behind her.
She had left her village on the edge of Russian-occupied Melitopol, a city in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, more than 24 hours earlier, paying a Russian ‘carrier’ with a minivan around $250 (nearly £200) to take her to the border-crossing in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region.
Walking across the two-kilometre no-man’s land was the final step in a long journey that is not without risk. Just two weeks earlier, a Russian volunteer who was transporting Ukrainians to the Sumy checkpoint was detained and tortured by Russian security personnel.
It was Yulia’s second attempt at the crossing. The first time, in early autumn, she was turned back at the border because she did not have a Russian passport and her name was flagged in a Russian state database as she had been questioned by the security services twice: once for tearing down Russian propaganda posters and then for arguing with a neighbour about life during the Soviet Union.
If you’d like to see any of the Russian-language articles excerpted here translated in full and published on this website, make a donation in any amount to me via PayPal, indicating which article you’d like me to translate, and I’ll make it happen. ||| TRR
“Underwear and swimsuits from 900 rubles.” An image from a circular I got this morning from Russian online retailer Ozon
We are not ashamed
I’ve been doing my favorite thing for almost the whole month—hanging out with ordinary Russians, not only in Moscow, but also in the regions—in my capacity as a sociologist, via focus groups. Ten random people are brought together, and we sit and simply talk “about life,” and I’m among them with a dictaphone. It’s the best format, and ordinary folk like it too.
Naturally, I was curious about people’s opinions about what was happening: their reactions were very different, expressing a whole range of emotions. In most cases, people sense the crisis, and they complain especially about prices… Although then they cheer up and say that “life is livable.” Some even argue that this is not a crisis, but that there are “certain crisis phenomena.” However, after thinking about it, they usually said that it would get worse; this is the easy part now, they said.
I won’t describe everything they said, because I want to get to the main point, the horrible point.
People voiced a variety of emotions (and I carefully monitor them: focus groups are not so much about information as about feelings, about which events excite people more): despair, apathy, depression, anger, patriotic enthusiasm, complacency, and braggadocio… Some still “believe in victory,” some already have doubts, but most are unable to articulate what “victory” would look like… But one emotion—and I conducted more than a dozen focus groups both in Moscow and in the back of beyond—was practically absent, manifested by no one.
I’m talking about shame. There was “we’ve been betrayed,” or “we can still win,” or even “we shouldn’t have started it at all,” but there was no shame. And this, in my opinion, is a very bad symptom, showing that society has not even started down the road to recovery yet. And it may well happen that they will lose and fall face first in the mud, but will still not understand a thing.
This is sad. I’m not trying to show off my own “moral rectitude.” I don’t claim to have it, of course: I’m just as much a bastard as my dear compatriots. My claim is purely pragmatic: if we are still not ashamed, it means that for the time being we are a long ways away from the only emotion that gives us a chance at rebirth—horror towards ourselves. While everyone continues to justify themselves (even if by citing their own weakness: “What can I do?”), the cart won’t budge an inch.
We know that no one ever feels sorry for anyone in Russia. We have always known this, and we didn’t need Sergey Shnurov to tell us that. But the complete absence of shame, and in its place, again, this incredibly vulgar self-pity, pity for us poor unfortunates, “the whole world is against us,” is still quite eye-opening. You listen to how enthusiastically folks pity the “Russian people,” and all you can do is feel gobsmacked. They screwed up completely, betrayed everyone, they are up to their elbows in blood, they can’t do anything, they don’t know how to do anything – but no, they don’t feel even a smidgen of shame.
Nothing’s going to change their minds. Indeed, this, apparently, is the Russian people’s principal tragedy.
HBO and Russian streaming service Amediateka have made sure that wartime Russians are au courant when it comes to prestige television, as illustrated by this image from a circular I found in my mailbox the other day.
[…]
After witnessing the country’s crackdown on opposition activists and independent journalism — and the prosecution of hundreds of people who do not support the war or President Vladimir Putin — many emigres expect to encounter a dystopia when they arrive in Russia.
The reality is more banal.
“It’s corny, but the first thing that caught my eye after returning was that Twitter and Instagram don’t work without a VPN,” said Yulia, referring to Russia’s wartime ban on several foreign social media sites.
“Moscow bars were packed with visitors even on Monday evenings,” added the 25-year-old screenwriter who returned in April after fleeing to Georgia last year.
“Recently, my friend and I went out for a glass of wine. All the tables were occupied.”
It’s not the prices that are rising — it’s the ruble that is falling. The “special operation” is a war. You can’t force Ukraine to like you. We haven’t surrendered to NATO. The neighbors have no more Nazis than we do. Soldiers should be alive, healthy, and at home. The president has gone mad, and everyone is afraid to contradict him. Your children love you and want to live like human beings.
That’s it, thank you. So that’s how it is. Yeah, it’s time to end it. Wow. Thanks, I feel relieved. Oh, would that they would explain it that way on TV.
The war has made us take a look around. In whose midst do we live? Do our fellow citizens think the same way we do? Public Sociology Lab (PS Lab) is a research team that studies politics and society in Russia. In 2022, it launched a project to study the attitudes of Russians to the war.
How do people explain the conflict’s causes to themselves? How does their attitude to politics affect their personal interactions and self-perception? Do they have a political position at all? We talked about this with researchers at PS Lab. Svetlana Erpyleva works at the Center for Eastern European Studies at the University of Bremen, while Maxim Alyukov, a political sociologist, works at the Institute for Russian Studies at King’s College London.
How is your research on the attitude of Russians to the war with Ukraine set up?
Svetlana Erpyleva: Qualitative methods are the main difference between our team and the other teams doing systematic research on perceptions of the war. We have long conversations with our informants and try to find out not only their attitude to the war directly, but also many other things related to it — what sources of information they trust, how they interact with loved ones, their fears and hopes, and so on.
We searched for respondents using social networks, ads, and the “snowball” method (that is, when an informant helps us set up a conversation with their ow friends). It was a big help in contacting people who do not often reflect on politics.
Some people responded enthusiastically to the ads we placed about finding informants — they wanted to talk to us themselves. Moreover, these are not only people who have a clear stance for or against the war and are willing to share it, but also those who feel that their opinion is not represented in public discussion. Such people do not see other people who think like them on social networks or in the media and want to put themselves on the map.
For example, during the the second stage of our research, in the autumn of 2022, we realized that dividing people into “supporters of the war,” “opponents,” and “doubters” (as we had done in the spring) was no longer warranted. Our sources support some decisions by the authorities, but not others. They regard the war as necessary in some ways, but some things about it terrify them, while other things cause them to doubt. Our interviews, which last about an hour (sometimes longer), have in fact enabled us to understand the peculiarities of how the war is regarded by Russians, with all their contradictions and complications.
Our other goal is to study the dynamics of how the war is regarded. We conducted the first series of interviews in the spring of 2022. We did the second series between October and December 2022. It is important to note here that in the autumn we spoke only with “non-opponents of the war,” that is, with those whom in the spring we had provisionally labeled “supporters” and “doubters.”
Maxim Alyukov: I would also make another important clarification. When people talk about studying perceptions of the war, they often have in mind representative surveys. Using them, we can indeed more or less accurately describe the range of opinions around the country. But polls cannot show how opinions about the war are shaped, or what emotions people experience. We are going deep rather than wide. Yes, we cannot draw large-scale conclusions about public opinion in general, but, unlike the polling projects, it is easier for us to talk about specific mechanisms — what emotions tend to shape certain positions, how different types of media consumption affect perceptions of the war, and so on.
What is the difference between how people regarded the war in the spring and the autumn?
SE: On the one hand, we see from the autumn interviews that perceptions of the war had not changed radically. Almost none of the people with whom we had repeat conversations had changed their attitude to the war from “plus” to “minus” and vice versa. Of course, there have been small shifts in this regard. For example, some of the springtime convinced supporters remained “optimists,” while others had become “pessimists.” The former believe that the “special operation” is going in the right direction, despite all the shortcomings, while the latter criticize the chaos in the army, the chaos during the mobilization, retreats by Russian troops, and so on.
But we shouldn’t deceive ourselves: the pessimists have not stopped supporting the war. Rather, they want Russia to act tougher and more effectively, and ultimately win.
In the first series of interviews in the spring, we identified a group of so-called doubters. But it is clear that even back then different informants in this group were closer to one or the other pole of opinion. Some doubted, but were inclined to support the war, while others were against it. In the autumn, there were fewer informants who were completely unsure of their position. Those who had been closer to the supporters of the war had often begun to support the war a little more. The same thing happened to those who had been more against the war than not: many of them had become a little more strongly opposed to the war (without turning into unambiguous opponents).
On the other hand, the ways people have for justifying the war have changed. Some of the old methods are losing popularity, while others are emerging.
For example, one of the new justifications for war involves imagining it as a natural disaster. We feel sorry, of course, for those who perish in a flood. We cannot regard this other than negatively. But it is impossible for us to oppose it. The same thing has happened with the war.
From the viewpoint of the informants who have resorted to this excuse, the war just happened. It is a terrible reality that we can only accept.
Another new way of rationalizing the war involves turning its consequences into its alleged causes, as when our informants say, “Ukraine has been bombing our border cities, so we need to continue the war,” or, “The war has shown that we are fighting not with Ukraine, but with the collective West. We are fighting not with a fraternal people, but with our perennial enemy, so it is right that we started this war.” The second statement had also come up in the spring, but it has become much more popular. The rationale behind such justifications involves arguing that events that happened after the war started seemingly reveal the enemy’s true identity.
MA: Attitudes towards sources of information have also changed. There are two trends: polarization and stabilization. At the war’s outset, people tried to seek out information, including information from the “opposite camp.” For example, those who supported the war sometimes read opposition and Ukrainian media, because they understood that the Russian state media are propagandistic. Now, on the contrary, many people are so weary that they have not only reduced their consumption of information in general, but also have stopped following sources that reflect the opposite opinion.
At the beginning of the war, the following idea was often discussed: information about the destruction, civilian casualties, and losses among Russian soldiers would gradually undermine the effect of propaganda. Now we see that, over time, the simultaneous consumption of information from pro-government and opposition sources, which paint radically different pictures of the world, has had the opposite effect. It causes discomfort, which leads to the fact that people who are less involved try to shield themselves from information about the war in general, while more involved people consume propaganda and stop paying attention to alternative sources. This is a conscious choice: they realize that they are consuming propaganda. I remember the words of one informant: “There are different points of view, but the brain tends to stick to one theory. I’m inclined to choose the theory of my country, of the state media, so that my brain follows it.”
It transpires that the person understands perfectly well that they are consuming propaganda, and they consciously choose it amidst conflicting explanations that cause discomfort.
Do these changes produce any practical actions? Maybe people stop talking to certain people or get involved in charity?
SE: There are only a few volunteers among our informants.
People can have a positive view of charity, and worry about their country, but most of them do not take any action themselves.
And yet, volunteering that involves assistance to the mobilized is certainly seen positively by our informants (that is, by “non-opponents” with very different views of the war). Such volunteering is regarded not as involvement in the war, but as support for “our boys,” for “our country.” This is not surprising: there are always significantly fewer “activists” and volunteers than there are sympathizers. Only a few people are involved in protests, too.
Changes have also been taking place in the way people talk about the war with their loved ones. For example, many of our informants described the summer as a carefree time when the war had completely disappeared from their lives: they stopped discussing it. The mobilization was the “new February 24” for those informants (who were most often people remote from politics). The topic of war had returned to everyday conversations again. The informants were discussing the events even with strangers. For example, one of our sources told us that even at work meetings with her clients she had occasion to discuss the mobilization.
Do attitudes to specific events affect everyday practices? For example, the mobilization began and people decided to check whether their foreign travel passports were still valid.
SE: Unfortunately, we didn’t talk much about everyday practices in our interviews. Probably the most common reaction to the mobilization’s announcement was anxiety and, simultaneously, the absence of concrete action: “Whatever will be will be, but I hope that nothing bad happens.” Some of our informants who did not want to be sent to the front changed their places of work and residence, but we didn’t often encounter such people in our interviews. (It is important to understand that we were talking to “non-opponents” of the war.)
MA: It’s also worth recalling that a minority of Russians have the possibility of leaving the country. According to our research on social networks (this is another project that my colleagues and I are doing), the most common reaction to the mobilization has been evasion.
Is it possible, then, to talk about a desire for inneremigration among those who have remained in Russia? For example, a person says, “Actually, I have a lot more important and valuable things in my life [than the war], and I want to pursue them.”
SE: It was the presence of this desire among people in the spring of 2022 that made us single out the doubters as a separate group. All of them were typified by the notion that the “distant war” was secondary compared to more important values — work, loved ones, and family. But in the autumn, we saw that fewer and fewer of our informants were able to take a neutral stance, to completely distance themselves from assessing the war. Our informants talked about pressure: they seemed to feel that society demanded that they voice their opinion. In this sense, as Maxim has said, the polarization of views has been increasing.
But our informants assess [this polarization] in different ways. Many supporters of the war say that it is awesome because people are becoming more united, more interested in what is happening around them. The “anti-patriots” will leave the country, but patriotic Russians will remain. Others complain that it is hard for them to cope with the pressure. They would like to take a neutral position, but they cannot manage it. One of my sources described it this way (I’m quoting from memory, of course, but nearly verbatim): “I would like not to take a side, but my smart friends say that the war should be continued. And I understand that they are right, that one should support one’s country in such circumstances. I’m unable to take a back seat.” But a little later she said: “I’m afraid that time will pass and [people] will come and ask me, ‘Have you been reading Meduza? Have you been watching Channel One? Whose side are you on?’ And I won’t have any answer.” This situation even makes her think about emigrating. That is, on the one hand, she chooses to side with supporters of the war; on the other hand, she is afraid to make this choice.
MA: I would add that the desire for neutrality remains. One respondent put it this way: “There is war all round, but I try to maintain peace on my VKontakte page.” He moderates disputes there and shares links to articles about the importance of neutrality. For him, this is a way of creating a space for himself in which there is the possibility of remaining neutral, since he doesn’t have this possibility in other contexts. It is another matter that there are fewer and fewer opportunities for such neutrality.
You say that your respondents feel pressure. Where do they feel this pressure? In interactions with loved ones and colleagues, or somewhere else?
SE: It is often the pressure of their immediate environment. Many opponents of the war have left the country, and the doubters thus have fewer contacts with their viewpoint. They are surrounded, as a rule, more by supporters of the “special operation.” But the cause of such pressure may be an inner conflict. For example, our sources tell us that they were taught at school that when the country is in difficult straits, the worst stance is neutrality. But now they have found themselves in exactly this position. It is really difficult for them: they see the propaganda on both sides, but do not feel strong enough to resist it. This can be illustrated as follows: “Maybe Russia was right to attack, or maybe it was wrong to do so. Maybe Ukraine is the enemy, or maybe it isn’t the enemy. I don’t understand what’s going on at all. But how can I fail to take a stance?”
In such circumstances, people turn to what seems certain to them — for example, to their Russian identity. You may not know who is right, but you have a native country and it must be supported.
MA: This feeling of pressure consists of two parts. The first is personal interaction, about which we have said our piece. The second is the influence of the media, in which you can constantly see appeals and reminders of the war. This background encourages a person to clearly articulate their position.
Is the official newspeak (“special operation”, “line of contact,” etc.) incorporated into the explanations given by the “non-opponents” of the war? Is the state discourse generally used to justify it?
MA: Yes and no. It does happen that our sources literally quote propaganda narratives. For example, they start saying on TV that there are fakes everywhere, and a person repeats this idea. But at the same time, an absolute minority of our sources trust state broadcasts, although there are such people among them. They have doubts and come up with their own hypotheses. But it is important to take into account that our informants live in large cities, so it is likely that, for example, in smaller cities far from the capitals, the ratio is different, that there are fewer people there who are like the majority of our respondents, and more people who trust propaganda.
SE: You also have to understand that there are different types of support for the war, and therefore different explanations for it. There are people who accept the explanations given by the state media. Most often these people are elderly: they regularly watch TV, and then rehash the rhetoric of the propagandists. But there are other kinds of people — for example, those whom we call “committed supporters.” Their attitude to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict was shaped back in 2014, or even in 2004. They can be quite critical of propaganda narratives and are fond of saying, “We have bad propaganda. It is incapable of explaining anything.” Such people are able to explain the war’s causes on their own. And there are, for example, people who are remote from politics, who might watch TV sometimes, but it doesn’t convince them. They can even rehash propaganda cliches, but they do not adopt them, they do not present them as their own words. For example, they say, “We were told that…” or “We are told that…”
Is it possible then to say that, despite propaganda, polarization, and state pressure, even those who are not against the war are in a gray area? In other words, there are no views that could unite people, and accordingly, that is why they cannot unite and make demands.
SE: Yes, that’s right. Unless “convinced supporters” could try to create some kind of association. But I’m sure they’re a minority. Most people are busy with their daily affairs: they are not interested in political positions and movements. We are currently preparing a second analytical report on the results of the autumn stage of our study, and there we even try to avoid the word “position.”
Most of our informants have no “position.” Their attitude to the war is a bundle of fears, doubts, hopes, and other feelings. Such people may want Russia to win, but sincerely worry about the victims of the shelling in Ukraine.
One of our informants said, “If I had been subject to the mobilization I would have been out of Russia in three minutes.” And yet she, for example, wants Russia to win.
MA: Especially since propaganda does not just attempt to impose a certain point of view. It also generates a multitude of contradictory narratives that simply confuse people. This is a paradox of authoritarian propaganda: the state needs this vital demobilizing effect to maintain control, but it also prevents it from generating broad support for the war.
You mentioned sympathy for the victims of the shelling. In your spring report, some of your sources say that they would tolerate a decline in the material standard of living, because for them what matters are spiritual values. Since they are so clearly aware of losses, can we say that Russians perceive themselves as victims?
SE: We rarely see people regarding themselves as victims directly. They say, “The situation has become worse in Russia as a whole, but everything is fine with me. Yes, people are being mobilized, and that’s scary, but my loved ones aren’t being mobilized. Prices have gone up, but we’re coping.” Our sources often regard Russia as a whole as a victim. They are offended on Russia’s behalf: it was forced into the conflict, and it is humiliated everywhere and considered an aggressor. That is, they don’t think “[international] brands have abandoned me,” but those brands have abandoned “poor Russia.”
MA: Ukrainians are also regarded as victims. “The poor residents of Ukraine are being used by NATO. Would that it were over as soon as possible.” In many ways, this is part of the propaganda narrative that Ukraine has become a firing range on which NATO and Russia are fighting using Ukrainians as proxies. But this is, rather, a propaganda cliche that people simply repeat without thinking through their own position on this issue.
It follows that “non-opponents” of the war do not regard it as part of their personal lives?
SE: This is a generalization, of course, but I would say that it is basically true. For the opponents of the war, on the contrary, the war has become an existential challenge. Sometimes they even make themselves experience it as such: “I cannot live an ordinary life. I must remember that there is a war going on.”
But isn’t there a contradiction here? The “non-opponents” of the war do not regard it as a personal matter, but we are saying that they feel pressure from their loved ones, are trying to find their own identity, and are grasping for rationalizations.
SE: This is a difficult question, but let’s try thinking about it. Compared to opponents, supporters and doubters are more likely to try to rid themselves of negative thoughts, to distance themselves from the war. And yet it regularly makes its presence felt. The latter is a new trend, and many of [our respondents] do not like it: they would prefer to live their lives without being reminded about the war. But it has become more difficult to do this.
MA: In our research on how the war is seen by Russians, we have been observing what I had observed in my pre-war research. People, if they are not politicized, rarely hold consistent positions at all. I will give an example from my research on Russian perceptions of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine prior to February 24. A person has a smorgasbord of different political ideas. He supports all the decisions made by the authorities, including the annexation of Crimea and military backing for the so-called DPR and LPR. And yet half an hour later he says, “Basically, it would be a good idea to withdraw the troops and leave Ukraine alone. It’s bad for us.” It’s just that he hadn’t needed to make connections between his disparate views on this issue before. This necessity emerged during our conversation.
We have been observing the same thing now. People are trying to push the war out of their lives. They need arguments in favor of the war — not because it is their political position, but because it is safer to live that way. For many of our respondents, the interview was like an exam in which they were forced for the first time to think about logical chains and formulate at least some kind of a clear opinion about the war, which they had not tried to formulate before.
What goes on in your mind?
I think that I am falling down.
What goes on in your mind?
I think that I am upside down.
Lady, be good, and do what you should,
you know it'll work alright.
Lady, be good, do what you should,
you know it'll be alright.
I'm goin' up, and I'm goin' down.
I'm gonna fly from side to side.
See the bells, up in the sky,
Somebody's cut the string in two.
Lady, be good, and do what you should,
you know it'll work alright.
Lady, be good, do what you should,
you know it'll be alright.
One minute one, one minute two.
One minute up and one minute down.
What goes on here in your mind?
I think that I am falling down.
Lady, be good, and do what you should,
you know it'll work alright.
Lady, be good, do what you should,
you know it'll be alright.
Throughout Putin’s war on Ukraine, the attitudes of the Russian public toward the regime and the conflict have been the subject of much scrutiny. This talk addresses this question by analyzing data released by the Presidential Administration that summarizes monthly correspondence received from the public from January 2021 through December 2022. While the identity of these correspondents is not known, their decision to send non-anonymous appeals to the President suggests that they support or tolerate the Putin regime. The data demonstrate that after an initial period of uncertainty about the war’s economic impact, these concerns abated until the announcement of mobilization in September. Since then, the appeals depict a Russian public that is increasingly concerned about conditions of military service and the war’s impact on service members and their families. At the same time, the data indicate that the Kremlin’s strategy to shift the blame for mobilization from the President to regional authorities appears successful.
Pollsters argue over how many Russians support the Ukraine war
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, sociologists have grappled with the question of how many Russians support the Russian army in Ukraine. Both independent and state-run pollsters claim they are the majority, and these studies are frequently referenced in Western media. However, at the same time, a group of independent sociologists have pointed out that these polls may not be representative — many Russians are reluctant to speak freely about their thoughts on the conflict due to draconian wartime censorship laws.
Independent researchers from the Khroniki project recently presented the findings from their latest survey, which suggest using a percentage of how many Russians support the war may not be a very meaningful statistic. In their view, this figure comprises a misleadingly wide spectrum of people: from those who volunteered to fight in Ukraine to those afraid of repression. Moreover, at least half of those who are opposed to the war are afraid to speak out, the Khroniki sociologists said.
To identify the core pro- and anti-war groups in Russia, the pollsters devised a series of questions. The results of their survey suggests that the core support group represents 22% of the population, while the core opposition is 20.1%.
Separately, researchers stress that “the fridge counters the effects of the TV,” and this effect is felt more and more with each passing month. The level of support for the war among TV viewers who are encountering economic pressures is falling. Among TV viewers who have encountered at least one economic problem, support for the war was down 11 percentage points in February.
Other polls, however, show that a vast majority of Russians support the war. For example, according to state-run pollster VTsIOM, 68% of Russian residents welcomed the invasion of Ukraine and just 20% are opposed to it. And leading independent polling agency Levada Center published results in January that suggested 75% of Russians support the war — to varying degrees.
Why the world should care:
It’s not easy to work out exactly what proportion of the Russian population supports the war, but Khroniki is certain that the pro-war lobby is far smaller than polls from leading agencies would suggest. If that is true, it casts doubt on the widely-held belief in the west that the war in Ukraine is supported by most Russians who remain inside the country.
On 1 September 2022, I returned to Russia after almost a year away. The war that began six months ago had been present in my life daily: in the news, in conversations with friends and colleagues, and in the Ukrainian flags on the streets of the European city where I lived. But there was no trace of the war in the town near Moscow where I grew up, and where my parents still live. I did not see pro-war or anti-war graffiti or slogans; war was not mentioned in the streets or by my friends and acquaintances. As I sank into the familiar rhythm of my childhood town, I caught myself thinking that perhaps I was beginning to forget about it too. That all changed on September 21, the day ‘partial mobilisation’ was announced. Suddenly, the war was being mentioned all around me, or rather whispered about, in the cafe where I listened to Putin’s address, in the local library, in the street, on the train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. The war seemed to have reappeared in Russian society instantaneously, with the snap of a finger.
I had observed something similar before, not around me, but as a researcher: in the data my colleagues and I collected. Our Public Sociology Lab began conducting a qualitative study on Russians’ perceptions of the war on February 27, 2022, just three days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. During the first months of the war, we conducted (link in Russian) over 200 interviews with supporters of the war, its opponents and doubters. At that moment, many of our informants, including those who were far from being exclusively anti-war, also said that they had been shocked by the news of the start of the ‘special military operation’ and had tried to make sense of events in their conversations with friends and relatives. But after a few weeks, the emotions of shock and confusion began to fade. The war became routine and faded into background noise.
So we knew that the ‘return of war to society’ following the announcement of mobilisation would also likely be temporary. We waited a few weeks and, on October 11th, conducted our first interview as part of the second stage of our research into Russians’ perceptions of war. Between October and December 2022, we conducted 88 interviews with ‘non-opponents’ of the war, deciding this time to focus the study on support for and disengagement from the war, rather than resistance to it. Forty of these interviews were repeated conversations with supporters of the war as well as its doubters doubters, with whom we had already spoken in the spring.
We were driven by the desire to understand how perceptions of, and predominantly support for, the war were evolving. From the interviews conducted in the spring of 2022, we roughly divided all ‘non-opponents’ of the war into supporters and doubters. Despite the fact that among supporters of the war, there were interviewees who were convinced to a greater or lesser extent, all of them found some means to justify the ‘special military operation’. Some were staunch supporters of ‘the Russian world’ and believed that the war would push the geopolitical threat away from Russia’s borders and strengthen the country’s position; some were worried about loved ones in Donbas and rejoiced at the prospect of an imminent resolution to the longstanding conflict; some, viewers of Russian TV channels, spoke of ‘combating fascism’ and ‘protecting the Russian-speaking population of Donbas’; many expressed confidence or, at the very least, hope: ‘if our government started the war, then it must have been necessary’. Although these people were worried about the casualties caused by the war and looked with apprehension at a future defined by isolation and sanctions, they remained supporters of the ‘special operation’.
It seemed to us, as it did to many others, that the announcement of mobilisation might fundamentally change something in the way Russians viewed the war. However, in addition to mobilisation, the war was marked by a series of other events, each of which could have left an impression on Russian society: the seizure of new territories and their subsequent annexation to Russia, the retreat of Russian troops, the bombing of the Crimean bridge, news of the bombing of Russian border regions. All this occurred against a backdrop of increasing Western sanctions, muddled explanations from the authorities as to why the country was at war, repression of dissenters, and increasing polarisation of views on the war in society. In such a state of affairs, we assumed that the views of the war held by ordinary Russians could not be sustained. In some ways, our assumptions were right, and in other ways, we were wrong.
It was not without reason that we waited a few weeks after the announcement of mobilisation and the swift ‘return of the war to society’ before we began the second stage of our research. The October interviews showed that the emotions associated with the announcement of mobilisation were as strong as they were fleeting. After a few weeks, they began to subside, and ‘partial mobilisation’ became normalised as a part of the new everyday reality. But, most interestingly, despite the negative attitudes towards mobilisation expressed by many of our informants who were not opposed to the war, their dissatisfaction with mobilisation rarely translated into dissatisfaction with the ‘special military operation’.
