Why Russians Rarely Talk About Putin

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two Moscow ladies take a smoke break from not talking about Putin

On the nature of depersonalized authority.

When I sit in the kitchen of Nikolai Viktorovich the TV above the fridge is always on. It’s impossible to ask him to go to another room to talk because there’s a screen in every room of this unusually spacious flat in Kaluga region. It’s invariably one of the main state channels. He loves the Army channel best, but we often watch what his wife disapprovingly calls ‘the shouting shows’ in the evening. These are the well-produced rants by the chief domestic propagandists, like slimy former Lake Como resident Vladimir Solovyov, or ‘Iron Doll’ Olga Skabeeva. Nikolai is in his mid-sixties but has limited mobility because of multiple health conditions. He rarely leaves the flat: these screen people are some of his favourite parasocials. His wife can’t stand them and usually scurries away to watch Korean soaps in another room.

I’ve known Nikolai since 2009. I know his views on most topics and they’re pretty standard for a man his age: not so much resentment towards the West but a fierce sense of loyalty to the Big Idea: the recreation of a powerful, purposive state to rival the Soviet Union, whose passing he regrets. The war ‘was inevitable’, he remarks, long after the fact and forgetting that it was the last thing he saw coming. The West is obviously to blame, and the Ukrainians are (not particularly sympathetic, mind) victims of their own hubris. However, these projections are more recently adopted ideas. The capacity for forgetting one’s own opinion is a mark of the effectiveness of public propaganda. The TV has helped him rehearse these ideas as his own. Having said that, he’s hardly what I would characterize as a ‘hurrah patriot’ – an even narrow demographic that loudly declares its xenophobia and glorifies the war, while doing its best to avoid incurring any of the costs. While I’m family to him, in my presence, Nikolai has never once uttered the words ‘Putin’ or ‘president’.

This is not a personal idiosyncrasy of Nikolai’s. It is a phenomenon I’ve come to witness again and again and struggled to explain: that Putinism survives not because ordinary Russians feel loyalty to the man himself, but because it has built a system of depersonalized authority, one that routes blame downward: to ministers, governors, and an unaccountable, shapeless ‘They’, while Putin alone floats above it, untouched. Consequently, people have more of a feeling for Putin than admiration or trust: a negative identification forged against the trauma of the 1990s, rather than any positive attachment to him. That structure is now beginning to fail.

Why do so few people ever mention the chief architect of today’s Russia and its (self-)destructive war? I’ve made it part of my professional life to become taken for granted among my dozens of interlocutors. They don’t see me as an anthropologist but as someone they hang out with, someone who brings them groceries and discusses (Korean or Turkish) soap operas, the price of petrol. I might remain a foreigner, but I’m certainly an adopted local in the compressed social geography of two little towns and a village not far from Kaluga, three hours’ drive from Moscow.  

One of the most misunderstood things about Russian society is seeing it as mute or passive, or even worse, approving of the politics of war. Young or old, rich or poor, almost everyone constantly bemoans the terrible governance on offer from the ruling party (from which Putin began distancing himself many years ago). No one ignores the high inflation the war has brought, nor the inadequate rises in wages and pensions that never keep up. They complain about it constantly. Everyone knows a relative or acquaintance whose children go to school in a dilapidated building where teachers work in double shifts because so many have quit, and where even basic educational equipment supplies – such as pens and pencils – ‘cannot be afforded due to budgetary restrictions in the region at this time’.

After more than four years of war, it’s also likely they know of a nearby neighbour in their housing block whose hapless son took the shilling and lost his eyes, or his legs, or his life. There’s little sympathy there, but there’s also a muttering and shaking of heads when they relate the follow-up story: some or all the pay-out money was ‘lost’ or withheld pending a protracted legal process to convert ‘MIA’ to ‘KIA’. Or the relatives of the disabled veteran discover they are at the back of the queue for rehab at a centre that hasn’t been built yet, if it ever will. Then there’s the never-ending stories of mid-level corruption, bringing home the realization that one is only ever a couple of degrees of separation from a functionary – be it mayor, police captain, or chief hospital surgeon – who has siphoned off many millions to fund an apartment in Dubai, or an increasingly conspicuous high-end German car.

But here’s the thing – Putin never figures here – even though it is calculated bureaucratic corruption and rent-seeking that grew to monstrous proportions – perhaps as much as the war – that his reign will be remembered for in the history books. People talk endlessly about the hopeless ministers, governors, and even local and largely powerless bureaucrats. But in the unlikely event Putin comes up (often prompted by me, acting as the ethnographic provocateur), ‘He’ is unaware. Or maybe He’s poorly advised. Maybe He’s just really, really, busy. He’s got a war to fight after all.

One of my other dearest interlocutors is a Klara, a woman in her eighties living alone in a well-appointed brick house in the village. She doesn’t drink coffee herself but likes to invite me over as an excuse to use the fancy beverage machine her mercurial son gave her (he lives in Miami now – ‘He had some problems with the tax authorities and then there’s this SVO business’). Klara remembers Stalin’s funeral and often repeats the same stories. Once, and once only, she remarked to me how concerned she was about the toll on ‘The President’s’ mental health from having the fate of the nation on his shoulders. Even this rare, unprompted mention of him personalizes Putin only as an object of concern, never of judgment – depersonalized affect is the only register in which he can be discussed at all.

they’re also not talking about Putin

The village is my favourite place in Russia – and not only in the summer when there are so many visitors from the Big City. Gosha is a self-made man who ‘imports equipment – you know – the things that are needed right now’. He bought a big plot near me a few years ago. There, he built a rather ugly disproportionate house ‘in the classical style’ (I don’t know what that means either). Like Klara, he often seeks out my company because he’s bored. He likes to cook pancakes for his whole family and drops me a text to come over. His wife is a child psychologist in Moscow and works according to the principle of exclusivity: a few ‘cases’ a year, word of mouth, money up front. These are perfect representatives of the demographically narrowly, yet aggressively successful, upper-middle class. Yes, they are ‘upper-middle’, because if you take into account the lower cost of living and low taxes in Russia then essentially you can compare their sense of where they sit in society to the top ten percent, if not five percent in the US.

I am not just an ethnographer though. I am a troll, especially to Gosha’s wife, Masha.

I noticed your Gosha had to text me by SMS rather than Telegram. Have you, Masha, downloaded the new messenger Maks? I hear it tracks you, records you and other things besides.

Masha is totally unfazed. To paraphrase her:

We need Maks for the school chat. Teachers refuse to contact us on other platforms now. We’ll keep Telegram for when we go to Bodrum though – it’s useful there for meeting up with all the compatriots. We’ll be there for nearly a month after all. ‘They’ want to keep us safe after all and ‘They’ must have their reasons for blocking things. It’s annoying that ‘They’ don’t want us to watch YouTube because there were so many useful furniture restoration and DIY videos there. But after all, ‘They’ must have their reasons – it’s not my business to tell them theirs.

I take another risk: maybe all this nonsense with the internet signal blocking is because the president himself has never held a smart phone in his hand? No – a disinterested look to the side – it can’t be because of that. There are very talented people in the [Presidential] Administration, after all.

This is Putinism in essence: the state becomes a diffuse ‘They,’ its logic assumed rather than questioned, while the possibility that Putin himself authored its more absurd decisions is waved away before it can even be entertained. A variation on this is the theme of incoherence of the state. Quite rightly, some of the savvier surmise that actively harmful policies emerge from the infighting of agencies. Here it is supposed that security hawks have somehow outmanoeuvred the technocrats in the Administration and that’s why Telegram – which serves as a major source of revenue via marketing for tens of thousands of businesses – is being blocked.

Are there exceptions? Of course, and a growing number. There have always been plenty of people in my circle who from the outset knew what a security man would do to the country’s constitution – one that was only six years old when he came to power. I tend to separate these folk from my ethnographic core of interlocutors because they are the small yet vocal minority. They often consider themselves to be ‘awake’ in a land full of sleepwalkers with heads of cottonwool. But they too have their blinkers, preferring to blame the ‘majority’ for a series of political decisions and backslides that the more privileged were the chief beneficiaries of – like Gosha.

scene of an unusually animated conversation about things going on but not about Putin

The success of ‘Putinism’ then, is that it operates as a system of depersonalized authority. The man himself sits apart. He still, broadly, enjoys the benefits of hovering above everything else. To be more precise – Putin does have a personal sense of authority, but the point is that actual responsibilities – for stuff the state does: build roads, fix up schools, shoot missiles at Kyiv – these are socially and politically distributed far and wide. This, along with the heavy-handed security theatre on display especially in Moscow, helps us understand why the system feels so unyielding.

One must also look at how Putin built such paradoxical authority – responsible for everything and for nothing. It’s something of a cliché that much of his legitimacy rests on negation rather than a positive vision. Putin may be (to put it mildly) unremarkable as a personality, but that blank canvas was always part of his attraction as someone who positioned himself – and got a supine media to work hard on curating this image – as (falsely in every case) the “anti-Yeltsin,” “anti-1990s,” “anti-oligarch” and now the “anti-West” incarnation of Russia’s pendulum-like political identity.

Many people felt Putin channelled their own minor or major resentments and so projected onto him their own psychological states which allowed them to identify with him – to feel for him – at least at a distance. It was always at a distance. Which is why there’s no need to mention him. Perhaps, after all then, it’s better to talk of a feeling for Putin, rather than his ‘authority’ or even legitimacy, let alone ‘approval’ – a largely meaningless artefact of polling. The feeling-in-common was there for many people, but it always rested on a kind of photographic negative – undeveloped, lacking warm colour, and predicated on assumptions of gradual amelioration through the 2000s of political and economic circumstances in the 1990s that almost all had experienced as dislocating, demeaning, and frightening.

There was a time (and that time was long ago) that even dyed in the wool opponents would, sitting at the dacha cottage over a beer and a barbeque, intone wistfully that ‘At least He knows what He’s doing, God help Him. Does He know where it’s going? He must do’. They would chide the killing of a journalist (committed as a birthday present to the man). They would lament the packaging of state tenders worth billions for his cronies. But overall, even they would hem and haw and consider that things could be much worse. Until they did get worse. For ‘stability’ and ‘order’ are not the same as economic growth and well-distributed prosperity.

The last time Russians actually experienced more than a fleeting experience of wealth trickling down from high hydrocarbon prices was 2007. Since then, it’s become harder to sustain the myth of Putin as the architect of a glorious revival and guarantor of order. Old habits of disassociating his authority from responsibility for the dysfunction of the state die hard. But die they must in the face of failure after failure. Today, we’re rapidly approaching an inflection point when Russians are more likely to associate him with stagnation, inertia and even social and economic ‘blocking’ of progress. The more engaged people, even back in 2020, were likely to guardedly talk about opposing the constitutional ‘corrections’ (not about Putin personally) that enabled his rule for life. Now there is danger for him, rapidly approaching, that the majority will start to ask the question: Whose war is this but his?

Few can yet allow themselves to ask that question – even to themselves. But silence is not consent. It’s pregnant with fear, foreboding, and imposed deference. People, little-by-little, trade it for cryptic remarks. I buy a new chain for a petrol saw and chat to the attractive late-middle-aged lady who owns the only DIY store in the little town. She recognizes me as ‘some kind of foreigner who used to come here with that strange plumber. Did he get your bathroom finished in the end?’ She is surprised ‘that you’re still coming here’. To her store? No, to Russia. ‘Let’s hope it ends soon. These circumstances affect everyone. I’m very sorry indeed about it.’ A masterclass of impersonal grammatical phrasing in which the Russian language excels. Once again, a mistake is to read this as cynicism, or a symptom social pathology. These kind of comments are almost the only politics possible for the majority, for the meantime.

Yet there is a paradox at the heart of this enforced political silence. The more a regime tries to maintain a voiceless endless present, the more it breeds an undercurrent of deep uncertainty, insecurity and quiet unhappiness throughout society. In a sense this is what makes a ‘regime’ authoritarian – a felt disjuncture between the shape of order and the flow of people’s needs and wants.  The thing about Putinism – it’s strength and weakness – is that as the petro-wealth model started to fail, it has tried to populate the whole country with authoritarian institutions. These are the ‘They’ that give permission for people to normalize – if not consent to – the chipping away first at political, then social and now personal freedoms. But ‘institutions’ are not just government agencies; they also refer to particular workplace relationships (the boss is a dictator and unions proscribed), and, notably, families. It’s not for nothing that the leading ideological entrepreneurs are keen to decriminalize domestic violence, equate childlessness with psychological illness, and even propose denying women the right to higher education if they refuse to make babies first. The performatively conservative institution of parliamentary politics would like to silence them too.

How effective is this imposition of airless compulsion and mute submission? A new breed of researchers, such as Konstantin Gaaze and Anna Schwenck, in different ways urge us to examine authoritarianism ‘subjectively’. Through a lens of how it is actually lived and felt on the ground. Schwenck looks at why young people buy into the status quo: they understand its corruption but feel the only way to get ahead is to get on the ladder of state-sponsored ‘NGOs’ and entrepreneurial self-help ‘trainings’. Gaaze tries to break with historical and deterministic explanations about Russia by drawing attention to how autocratic rule is experienced as a kind of endless present, deferring any sense of future or alternative. And this can be internalized at a fundamental level of the personality by many people, even those who despise the regime.

Only by looking at these human element can we understand the fractures that prefigure and trigger political change. This sounds less radical than it is, but analysts often ignore it. After a regime collapses or transitions, pundits rush to blame grand structural forces. In the Russian case it would sound something like: ‘Russia’s history of political culture is inherently totalitarian leading to periodic overturn’. Or, more often, personalist perspectives crowd out everything: ‘Putin became isolated during Covid and went round the bend reading conspiratorial and messianic historical destiny literature and philosophy’. In choosing either of these media-friendly explanations, we miss the shifting tide of public sentiment, of feelings experienced by ordinary people long before the breaking point arrives. The danger for the Kremlin begins when people stop speaking about ‘the present state of affairs’ or ‘these circumstances’ and start speaking about Putin himself.

an example of pathetic fallacy

“For most people, Putin is like the weather”*, or, my Night of the Living Dead with the Russian opposition

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Look, I even screenshot the ‘wtf’ moment when Khod says there aren’t any oligarchs in Russia

It started inauspiciously – they were supposed to make common cause. To set out a unitied front that put democratic values first, for when the ‘political opening’ comes to Russia again. The format was not great – three speakers, a host, and a moderator/mediator: Yulia Navalnaya, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Sergei Guriev (moderator), Mikhail Lobanov.

The inheritor of the anti-Putin opposition’s mantle, the technocrat manager [sic], the liberal economist, the democratic socialist – these were some of the self-projections of the participants. What stuck out immediately here was Khodorkovsky’s waffly and curious pitch – I’m a ‘manager’ – upravlenets. It’s the manager’s job to reel in unrealistic competing demands and overcome Schmittian politics in Russia. The charitable interpretation was that he was all about building robust institutions, but less charitably, he channelled a depoliticized, technocratic take on the future hardly different from how the Russian government (under Mishustin) operates today. This intoning of ‘I’m a manager’ from the man worth at least 100 million dollars later became a rather spurious reason for an unedifying argument between him and Navalnaya. Overall, despite how dull the discussion was, Khodorkovsky’s performance was quite revealing because it was significantly at odds with the progressive and ‘left-friendly’ vision he has set out in writing in his Garðaríki writings. As others have remarked – he also sadly looked like he has no fewer health issues than his nemesis.

But back to the dingy Amsterdam studio: immediately discussion got bogged down (for nearly half of the allotted time!) because of a rather weird set of statements by Mikhail Khodorkovksy about young people being particularly pro-war in Russia. Cue a back and forth about surveys, evidence, and so on – the kind of arguments I rehearse on Twitter all the time. This derailed discussion so much that one of the audience later remarked – in really the only interesting point of the whole two-hours discussion – “It’s a great shame that the moderators allowed the interesting discussion about those responsible for the war to be diverted into discussion of some conspiracy theories about the guilt of young people.” The audience member then argued that banks enjoy record profits (elsewhere we find calculations that Russian billionaires increased their net worth by 50% thanks to the war); there has been a major redistribution of property; that a new clan of oligarchs has emerged (The Khod hated this comment!). It was a good point: various actors have accumulated resources that could obstruct socially meaningful reforms even in a best-case scenario of ‘transition’. In a related question, another audience member asked about the 1993 constitution and revisiting the botched privatization of state businesses in the 90s – the latter of which our liberal commentors rejected.

Let’s face it, none of these speakers are really ‘media-trained’ and that’s part of the charm. The majority of YouTube comments were critical of Yulia Navalnaya for her not coming across well. Part of which we can put down to sexism, but part to the light-weight approach she took: dealing in generalizations – platitudes even (“I want to be of use to the Russian people”), expressing open hostility and other negative emotions to the others.  This roughness at the edges– on the part of all the speakers, made it captivatingly-dull viewing.

Then another set of unproductive discussions: ‘red lines’ (who should be allowed to take part in political processes in the new Russia), lustration. Things risked looking more and more ridiculous – The wonderful Russia of the future is La Fontaine’s  bear hide. Lobanov was really the only person to offer much detail: on the need for things like worker control over labour processes, public (not state) ownership of enterprises, avoiding another oligarchic settlement as well as avoiding western capital capturing the Russian economy. A well-rehearsed set of democratic socialist demands including – again – some of the only concrete political proposals of any of the speakers – such as a solidarity tax on war profiteers like the one imposed on assets accrued during Vichy rule France.

Lobanov’s ideas get little but scepticism from the others. No doubt they and some of the audience see him as wanting to return to the bad-old days of Soviet state ownership. However, his ideas are close to the traditions of a perfectly reputable market socialism, economic democracy and workers’ self-management. There is also a substantial Russian intellectual history behind this distinction: scholarship on Russian democratic socialism has identified workplace democracy, worker ownership and economic decentralisation as an important alternative tradition to both Bolshevik command socialism and neoliberal transition.

Moreover, Lobanov highlights a problem the others are little concerned with: the transition itself will be a struggle over who controls the enormous wealth accumulated during Putinism and the war. For Lobanov and democratic socialists, neither institutional design to prevent the same disaster recuring (charitable reading of Khodorkovsky), nor simply free elections and robust political democracy with lustration (Navalnaya) is enough: unless ordinary people gain institutional power over economic as well as political life, the same concentration of power will reproduce itself under a different political regime.

*the comment about the ‘weather’ was from Lobanov – correctly restating the problem that at the moment this is the attitude people rightly have in Russia. You can’t change the weather; you have to wait it out. He made the point that it’s only economic crisis that will change this attitude.

Meanwhile the phony war Russians enjoyed for some years after the invasion continues to crumple a deflating balloon. This is just the beginning of the return of immiseration – real deterioration in the material conditions and wellbeing for millions. In rather different online space Oleg Komolov and Rafail Abdulov discuss the slow-motion stagnation of the economy and its effects: the juicing effect of increasing military spending is nearing its end. A key indicator is wage arrears – a phenomenon that almost everyone in the West overlooks, indeed, struggles to understand. “How can it be that people work when they don’t get paid?”, I’m continually asked by students and colleagues alike. The amount of unpaid wages has doubled in the last year but still looks relatively low: a lot less than 1% of GDP. In the 1990s this figure reached 3%. However, one needs to think about the cognitive effect of this; ‘at least this isn’t the 90s’, is pretty much the only legitimating rhetoric from the government that everyone can agree on. But what if it gets worse and involves not just blue-collars but white-collars as well?

Actually it already is. Wages stopped rising, indeed, even official statistics reports large, double-digit declines in the most vulnerable regions, while inflation remains high (10% on consumer goods, according to Rosstat). The leading indicator here is the not-so-slow collapse of the construction industry that in turn feeds into metallurgy. Even making a big war cannot save these sectors when their profits are mainly from building boxes for people to live in and shop in. If you lose 40% of production in these sectors because of high costs of investment borrowing, then, guess what – that’s 40% of a workforce you can’t pay anymore.

But that’s not quite right. Along with wage arrears, the classic Russian obfuscation of such economic pain is via forced reduction in working hours – a four-day week (and it will get worse than that). Which of course means a 20% reduction in pay (actually more). I personally experience this phenomenon in that ‘my guys’ generally have a lot more time to talk to me because they are working so much less nowadays. Komolov remarks that forced furlough has affected most vehicle producers, rail, engineering, machinery and loads of other industries. A perfect storm: demographic (aggregate) shortage of labour gets worse and worse at the same time as a large-scale destruction of ‘good jobs’ in both blue- and white-collar work, and among many self-employed (the Wildberries factor). Very old, yet familiar economic phenomena rise from the dead (not only from the 1990s, but all the way back to the 1930s): enterprise labour hoarding and labour immobility. The tradition of dead generations does not weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, but is more like in a George A Romero film: enterprises are like zombies stumbling through a waste-land in search of sustaining blood, in an ever decreasing pool of living humans.

The Trouble with Avos: Inside P*tin’s Magical Thinking

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Any excuse for an EU4 reference

Over 1600 days of war. Is that a lot? Maybe it is when you consider full-scale war has lasted more than a sixth of Putin’s time in power. Really this is just an excuse for me to do something in this blog I’m usually critical of others for: a bit of Kremlinology. It’s prompted by what seems to me to be the beginning of accelerated unravelling of the spool we could call ‘decision avoidance once path is taken’. It started unspooling in 2022 and now the reel is just singing as the twine pays out. When will it end? Well, it would be foolish to judge.

I like Stanimir Dobrev’s coverage of the fuel crisis of 2026; I always find his work useful to triangulate with “my guy” observations in the field. On Twitter, Dobrev wrote last week: “If the Kremlin had a plan on how to deal with a new fuel crisis in 2026 they could have signed long term contracts for fuel deliveries earlier in the year when fuel prices were low, they could have tried inventive ways to store fuel in non permanent storage. They exported.”

“There are plenty of reason to say they don’t have a contingency for something that Ukraine was bound to repeat based on 2025 results.”

“Now what they have as their main options are rationing and forcing people to abandon vehicle use.”

“Destructive optimism, they believed the situation would improve for them while the higher energy costs and imposing some costs on the US would aid them. They simply did not take into account they might be forced to look at importing products. Chronic arrogance strikes again”

The last sentence here is telling for today’s theme: a Russian version of magical thinking. While some say Putin has lost touch with reality, it’s probably better to think of him being cognitively trammelled by his anxiety, poor knowledge of his own country, and his compulsions to control. However, these alone should not be fatal.

Meanwhile, Gosha from the ‘objekt’ overcomes his own fears to write to me and we later talk about his ‘options’. The last time Gosha took the risk to write to me – usually he prefers only in-person conversations – was during the outbreak of the war in February 2022. Then he ended up relocating to Asia with his family for three months until the money ran out. Since 2024 he’s worked at what I will just call the ‘objekt’. ‘They burnt it down’, he writes me in early July this year. ‘What to do? What’s the view from Europe?’ It’s hard to know what he means by the latter. But it could be part of a trend where some Russians ask me to evaluate European support for Ukraine. In other words, as Dobrev indicated, the strategy of targeting fuel infrastructure is working.

Gosha has told me lots of things about his wartime life. He’s not unusual in taking risks, though almost all the ethnographically ‘heavy’ conversations have been in person (and not only with Gosha). One of the recent exchanges was about how few people want to work at these ‘objekty’ because there’s no money for spares, no money for shelters for the staff, and while furloughed, staff get their ‘basic’ pay only – not enough to live on.

Gosha used to occasionally say he trusted ‘the leadership’ to have a plan. But what is Putin doing in response to all this? According to Meduza it is going to be more double-down because he is focused on taking Donbas. But this seems predicated on his poor grasp on both the economic realities and the capacity for societal resilience inside his own country.

***

Andrey Pertsev among others recently noted how the Presidential Administration is only the most visible actor vainly attempting to signal to Putin that his popularity is dangerously tied to the prosecution of the war and that this brings perilous risks to the presidency. Pertsev writes that regime-adjacent sociologists have begun releasing their surveys later than usual, and one report was even quickly removed shortly after publication. What to do with ‘early warning’ signals? The answer seems to be pretend they never happened. A process that started in the spring of 2026 is obviously accelerating because of the Ukrainian switch-up to US-sanctioned consistent strikes on fuel infrastructure.

Notwithstanding a proud discursive embracing of multipolarity and the assumptions that ‘partners’ will get behind his leadership of the multipolar world, a more realistic assessment would be that bluster hides an increasingly ‘paranoid style’ of politics – even if that politics is mainly hidden from direct view behind the Kremlin walls.

What is really happening, since 2022, is what we can call Putin’s double-down on his core emergent ideology about encirclement by Western forces, a coalition intent on dismantling Russia or severely weakening it. Since the war became an entrenched reality, it’s important to note also his wavering belief in the concept of Russian allies. This existential doubt about even the possibility of allies can be deduced from the inconstancy of relations with mercantile and unreliable fellow travellers in the journey towards multipolarity.

More importantly though than a fortress mentality itself is what could be termed a resort to magical thinking by the core inner elite as they increasingly refuse to accept reality – even that reality reported to them by sociologists and economic ministries and Central Bank. Part of that magical thinking is embedded within a classic, deeper cognitive set of (mistaken) beliefs: the idea that Russia is a ‘lucky civilization’ and that fortune ever shines on it. (This is easily shown to be both strongly held and a mistaken belief on a long enough timeline: look at Prussia and the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, for example). (There’s also the characteristic social racism of the elite who genuinely, and equally mistakenly, do believe that most Russians live like animals and therefore can put up with endless privation – but that’s a topic I’ve done to death).

The cognitive pitfall of voluntarism and trust to luck is powerful. Revealing was Putin’s response in late spring to the ‘news’ that the Russian economy faces recession. His response was declarative – ‘fix it’! Behind the façade: that words of the leader can magically right the situation, lies the old Russian ‘muddle-through’ mentality. Putin resorts to ‘avos’ (a concept that expresses the idea that contingency or luck will save the day and course-correction or re-evaluation is therefore unnecessary. Putin, after all, does believe that Russia is a ‘special’, or lucky civilization with a destiny.

This in turn should idea us to the familiar idea that decisionmakers get trapped by their over-identification with earlier policy errors yet are unable to learn from them and which then leads to increasingly reactive irrationalism and trusting to fortune. In other words, this is a form of path-dependency and even walled-in thinking. The war must continue until complete victory (taking the remaining parts of Donbas at a rate of 2.6 kilometres a day would take until 2032 at the earliest), or almost unthinkable concessions from the US, Europe and Ukraine.

The sacrifice demographically, and in terms of economic costs to the country is secondary to this aim-fixation. Sunk cost fallacy mixed in with avos’. Once a pathway is taken and significant resources expended on it, it becomes increasingly difficult to explore alternative possibilities because that would lead to admitting some failure in the path taken. You don’t even need psychology here but just systems theory. There is good evidence even now that much of the poor performance militarily has been because of the reinforcement of prior failure (and strategy) due to co-dependency between the executive (including Putin himself) and the Chiefs of Staff and Security Council.

This line of thinking can be evidenced by reports from insiders accessed by the RAND Corporation which concluded that Putin was making key decisions largely on his own, without substantial influence from the Russian General Staff at least in 2023-2024. Putin’s failure to use the opportunity of his Alaska summit to extract realistic concessions from Ukraine is evidence of an increasingly irrationality where clear strategic aims get lost in favour of magical thinking based on ‘muddling through’, and believing that things will turn out well because of Russia’s history/civilisational superiority/force of arms. This is a form of metaphysical voluntarism (personal will is the basic factor in human conduct) mixed with a belief in good luck or fortune emerging from not necessarily overconfidence, but dangerous avoidance of critical thinking. After all, Putin also believes all other political actors are either weak, puppets, or inferior in some way.

While there is plenty of opportunity for those willing to take Putin at his word when he expresses a worldview aligned with a multipolar world and future, at heart he remains a certified ‘subaltern’ (as Viacheslav Morozov memorably argued) Eurocentric or even Anglocentric thinker. He believes only recognition – and some concessions by the hegemon – matter to Russia’s and his own futures. With Trump at the helm for at least another two years, Putin is unlikely to get genuine satisfaction he craves.

It remains for a ‘first mover’ in the Russian security elite or government to burst the bubble and ‘speak truth to power’. However, contrary to the myth that the first mover gains an advantage in negotiations or innovation, politically, the first mover is always more likely to become a scapegoat in Russian politics. Nonetheless, what we often forget is that Putin’s real power was based on his ability to elicit (not just force) compromise among the elite. In return, they were able to enjoy a high level of rent seeking at the cost of long term economic stagnation. In times of distress, he risks becoming the scapegoat that will be sorely needed in the next two years.

Masha and the Experts

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As the row over banning Masha and the Bear continues to escalate, British Russia experts have themselves come under attack, accused of spreading pro-Russian propaganda. Both the calls for a ban (Guardian, 2026) and the social media attacks on Mark Galeotti rely on claims made by Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation and Estonia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They argue that the cartoon is “an instrument of Russian soft power”, featuring “the mockery of other nations’ traditions through Masha’s behaviour, and the normalisation of Soviet symbols and militaristic themes”, (Guardian, 2026), citing a 2010 episode in which Masha guards the Bear’s carrot patch from a thieving Hare while wearing a battered Soviet border guard’s cap dating from the 1930s.

Anyone who actually takes the trouble to watch the episode to the end, however, will see something very different from a glorification of Stalin-era militarism. The Bear cannot guard his carrots himself because he desperately wants to sleep. To stay awake, he resorts to the familiar tricks used by generations of soldiers everywhere who have struggled to remain alert while on sentry duty. Having exhausted every possible way of fighting off sleep, he asks Masha to keep the Hare away, handing her the now-infamous border guard’s cap (which features for a whole two minutes of this shockingly jingoistic seven-minute piece).

At first, Masha says she doesn’t want to guard the patch—”I’d rather catch a butterfly”. Masha promptly interprets guarding the Bear’s vegetable patch as if she were defending the state’s frontiers. Mangling the words, she sings the only line she knows from an old Soviet song about guarding the Japanese-Mongolia border: “The clouds fly gloomly across the border”. Yes, it is a Stalin-era song from the 1930s—but Masha knows only the opening line, and even that she gets wrong. She does indeed stop the Hare from stealing the carrots and drives him away from the garden. At the same time, however—perhaps in the heat of her militaristic zeal—she destroys every carrot bed, wrecks every structure on the property, and leaves the Bear’s house in complete chaos. The Bear is then left to rebuild his home, reinforce the boundaries of his little domain himself, and plant the carrots all over again.

Still from the film ‘Tractor Drivers’ which popularized the song about the border

Ironically, Russian advocates of banning the cartoon object not to this particular episode but to the programme’s entire premise. Hyperactive Masha lives alone at a tiny rural halt where trains no longer stop. Four-year-old Masha constantly creates havoc for the adult Bear, a retired circus acrobat surrounded by trophies from his glory days. Her nearest neighbours are a pig of indeterminate sex, a mongrel of dubious pedigree, and a goat—kozyol, a word that also happens to be one of Russia’s favourite insults. Even the Wolves are frightened of her, despite her determined attempts to reform them and administer medical treatment with an enormous syringe and an enema.

It is therefore hardly surprising that calls were made in Russia more than a decade ago to ban Masha and the Bear for failing to uphold “traditional values” (MK, 2016). More surprising is that those Russian loyalists eager to tap into the ever-expanding propaganda budgets have not yet spotted another supposedly subversive symbol: the dilapidated, wheel-less carriage from a Moscow–Peking train which stands beside Masha’s house. ’Moscow-Peking’ is itself a slogan popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s. One might have expected them to interpret it as an allegory for the lamentable state of the railway infrastructure linking Russia and China.

When sound expertise is displaced by media noise, public pressure, and the intimidation of influential but poorly informed decision-makers, failure in both domestic and foreign policy becomes almost inevitable. The governments of the UK, the EU and Russia are becoming increasingly alike in their preference for dramatic but ill-conceived gestures over the harder task of addressing the structural causes of their internal and external problems.

Anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of the Russian cultural context—and the patience to watch a single seven-minute episode through to the end—should at the very least question the claim that the series advances either a “pro-Kremlin” or, for that matter, a “pro-Western” narrative. The references to Soviet-era slogans, catchphrases and music from beloved Soviet films are there to amuse the grandparents watching alongside their grandchildren. Every one of them knows the difference between Soviet border guards—an armed service within the NKVD and its successor organisations, the KGB and today’s FSB, responsible for protecting the state frontier—whose caps had green tops, and officers of the Soviet secret police, whose blue-topped caps became symbols of political repression. None of the Soviet songs appears in the cartoon with its original lyrics intact. Above all, Masha and the Bear is simply a fairy tale about an independent little girl. It belongs in much the same tradition as Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking. Lindgren fortunately did not live to see the day when children’s stories would be prosecuted in the court of public opinion as propaganda for one geopolitical camp or another.

Context, however, is of little interest to those seeking to increase their influence by ostentatiously demonstrating loyalty to whichever set of political values currently enjoys official favour. That is why such a torrent of hostility has been directed at those prepared to call out this performative display of loyalty applied to material far removed from real concerns; at those those prepared to watch the episode to the end; and at those prepared to question whether banning a children’s cartoon is remotely relevant to supporting Ukraine, curbing Russian influence, or solving their societies’ actual problems.

The responses of the British Parliament and Netflix will reveal whose expertise ultimately carries more weight. The Russian authorities have long relied on the advice of security-service hardliners who explain away their own failures by attributing them to malign foreign influence spread through the media. Yet banning Roblox, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube has done nothing to curb the power of monopolies that inflate prices, create shortages and sustain wars. British parliamentarians now appear to be following much the same logic, paying little attention to genuine expert opinion questioning whether such measures achieve anything at all.

guest post by Charlie Nail

Sources:

Masha and the Bear (2010). The Border is Secure https://yandex.ru/video/preview/11995598889559404205

Guardian (2026). https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jul/02/mps-uk-broadcast-russian-cartoon-masha-and-the-bear

Spectator (2026). https://spectator.com/article/in-defence-of-masha-and-the-bear/

Известия (2016). «Маша и медведь» признан самым вредным мультфильмом для детей. К такому выводу пришли российские психологи   https://iz.ru/news/641913

KP (2013). Психолог: «Маша и медведь» — очень вредный мультфильм»

«Комсомолка» встретилась с гостьей Первого Международного форума библиотек, посвященному 100-летию Сергея Михалкова, психологом, публицистом, общественным деятелем Ириной Медведевой. https://www.kaliningrad.kp.ru/daily/26103.4/2999318/

Мел (2016). «Мультфильм садистский, но смешно».Учителя и психологи — о том, почему «Маша и Медведь» стал самым популярным мультфильмом в мире  https://mel.fm/vospitaniye/psikhologiya/6347512-Masha_and_bear

360.ru (2016) «Они просто не смотрели»: режиссер не согласился с психологами в оценке «Маши и медведя» https://360.ru/tekst/obschestvo/oni-prosto-ne-smotreli-rezhisser-ne-soglasilsya-s-psihologami-v-ocenke-mashi-i-medvedya-77889/

MK (2025). Машу и Медведя хотят запретить из-за недостаточно традиционных ценностей https://karel.mk.ru/social/2025/10/28/mashu-i-medvedya-khotyat-zapretit-izza-nedostatochno-tradicionnykh-cennostey.html

When a Mutiny Becomes a “March of Justice”: The shifting boundaries within authoritarian media

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On the three-year anniversary it is pretty interesting that a piece about Prigozhin’s March is published by Fontanka. It’s an interview with Prigozhin’s former lawyer-troubleshooter who is pedalling his book. His clear message: “The leadership of the country fled like cowards when faced with the first hint of armed insurrection in June 2023. While Putin could do nothing, Lukashenka took a major role in staving off a civil war erupting in Moscow.”

Tl/dr:

  • the march is repeatedly called a “March of Justice” rather than a mutiny;
  • Wagner’s actions are framed as a reaction to MoD misconduct;
  • the downing of aircraft/killing of Russian soldiers is rationalized as self-defence;
  • senior officials are described as fleeing Moscow;
  • Prigozhin is presented as a patriot not a traitor;
  • the possibility that Wagner could have reached the Kremlin/MoD is treated as plausible;
  • corruption and elite decadence are presented as explanations for popular sympathy toward Wagner.

The key quotes that made me sit up straight:

“Высокопоставленные чиновники сообщили нам, что высшее руководство покинуло Москву…” (“High-ranking officials informed us that the top leadership had left Moscow…”)

and then:

“…в случае прямого столкновения ее будет не удержать, и ‘вагнера’ … зайдут в Кремль.” (“…in the event of a direct clash Moscow could not be held and Wagner would enter the Kremlin.”)

Fontanka remains of interest because before 2022 you could plausibly argue that it remained ‘critical’ but ‘system-tolerated’. If you were to categorize its evolution it would be a nice case study of what ‘investigative journalism within tightening regime constraints’ looks like. It’s in the top ten of ‘trad’ media webpages in the country – not just in St Pete. It’s got an extremely interesting history that mashes up the lines between the police, investigative journalism, and organized crime, but that’s for another time. Having said that, Fontanka has historically been seen as a reasonably safe place to push boundaries, with the understanding that they will back-pedal if needed and even pull stories after the fact. The interview thus maintains legal distancing from the interviewee.

In this article just the fact that they use ‘March of Justice’ in the title, even if in quote marks, is pretty glaring. It’s funny that Fontanka allows this. It even allows the speaker to legalistically say it’s not technically a coup according to the Criminal Code. Ok, so this is both an exculpatory piece from a lawyer who worked for Prigozhin, a promo for his book, and simultaneously conforms to the basic principles of ‘safe’ Russian journalism (‘we can’t really know the truth, but everyone’s intentions are patriotic until we hear otherwise after the fact’).

What’s interesting about this is that it can be interpreted as pushing boundaries of what can be said. There’s open discussion of the necessity of Russian troops being killed for resisting the ‘march of justice’ without further comment or condemnation. There’s general tone of displaced sympathy for Prigozhin now he’s safely dead, but even this is pretty unusual, I’d say, to see in print. It’s kind of projected onto the interlocutor to further diffuse its potential impact, but, nonetheless. Whether this reflects changing political winds or merely the safe rehabilitation of a dead actor remains unclear.

Most revealingly – and what steps over various ‘lines’, is the bit where the ‘bosses’ are described as fleeing Moscow because they believed that Wagner would be able to take the Kremlin. And that this would have been justified in the face of ‘the need for change given the facts of corruption and fat-cat officials which had pissed everyone off’. This bit isn’t even caveated by mention that it was the Ministry of Defence that was the main ‘baddies’ and not the Commander in Chief. Pretty remarkable.

As we get further on, the ‘voice’ of Prigozhin from beyond the grave is presented as a true patriot who was provoked into rational action against the defence establishment because of their incompetence and corruption. Also revealing: without caveats, Prigozhin’s military achievements are presented as being usurped violently by the army which was intent on screwing him and his men royally. His hand was forced – the army would have tried to physically liquidate him and his men. He didn’t want to overthrow ‘power’ but he could have. There’s a lot of puff, mythos, ‘mut’ i pizdezh’ as they say, and more self-exculpation, hemming and hedging – it’s not worth actually reading the thing. But the vibe. The ‘vibe is off’, as the kids say. Or maybe it’s ‘on’?

Meta: Obviously my whole schtick is that I don’t go in for ‘Kremlinological’ takes. But this was juicy and tells us something interesting about what’s going on in the Russian deep-state-media cesspit. The boundaries of what is ‘askable’ are not nearly as narrow as many would believe. It also comes hard on the heels of a number of Carnegie and other pieces by the looking-glass opposition that are equally self-exculpatory – only from the other end of the spectrum ‘Ru technical liberals were powerless, don’t blame them’.

Accordingly, we should treat takes by former functionaries and communicators from ‘inside’, but who are now safely in Berlin London or Washington, with the same critical analysis as we treat pieces like this. Everything published on Russia looks like what they used to call ‘article-to-order’ if you look at them hard enough. In short, what I’m labouring to say here is that sometimes – often even – things published within Russia, in conditions of high risk and self-censorship, can be much more use to our understanding than, say, Carnegie. Tolstoy’s unhappy families principle applies surprisingly well to Russia-watching. Fontanka, Carnegie, Meduza, and the rest all have credibility problems—but not the same credibility problems.

[Thanks to ‘Charlie Nail’ for his insights on the murky world of Russian mazhory and journalism]

How flexible is Russian authoritarianism?

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Or is it class war all the way down?

This question is asked by Anna Schwenck’s recent book, but it is more relevant now than ever as the economic decline in most parts of the Russian economy accelerates, reducing the present and future ability of the state to buy people off, and more importantly – to coopt ‘strategic potential elites’ of the future with the prospect of social mobility. The latter is a key theme of Schwenck’s book.

I was fortunate to take part in a roundtable podcast with Schwenck, Johanna Bockman, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, and Greg Yudin about her book. You can watch or read that discussion at the link, but in this blog post I’ll condense some ideas about the relevance of the book in 2026.

Schwenck’s argument is straightforward: flexible authoritarianism is governance that simultaneously incentivizes a can-do spirit (voluntarism) and suppresses dissent, reflecting the resonance between authoritarian and individualizing neoliberal ideas. The greater part of the book focusses on young, upwardly mobile people in Russia, arguing that ‘promising young adults’ are courted by the regime to support its political legitimacy. In turn, their entrepreneurialism is parlayed into a form of patriotic performance and rewarded monetarily. Such people can also become agents of a quasi-market, quasi-state form of social provision of goods and services to the rest of the population. They are addressed as potential future elites.

The empirical part of the book opens with a revealing set of contrasts. On the one hand, young attendees are more inspired by Steve Jobs and US hustle culture than agents of change from Russia’s present or history. On the other hand, the franker exchanges between people at the core ‘event’ of the book: a youth-leadership summer camp (modelled on Seliger) in Sakha in 2013, show ambiguity. Numerous participants openly discuss that corruption is the name of the game when it comes to getting ahead, or they bemoan the fact that ‘favouritism’ (clientelism and cronyism) is the biggest obstacle for young people seeking to better themselves “in Russia, the problem is that knowing the right people is much more important for your career than your skills and knowledge.” Perhaps despite her aims, Schwenck effectively describes the emerging class conflicts in Russia since 2000, in a way that supplements the argument Volodymyr Ishchenko makes about political capitalism in Ukraine.

For Schwenck then, the camp represents Russia in a microcosm: a veneer of entrepreneurialism with US-trappings, undercut by the same insider networking and an overlayed policing of behaviour and the internalization of the extents of permissible responses. Perhaps though, the book is weaker on the last aspect, extrapolating from the highly artificial experience of the summer camp to the rest of society. Having said that, the chapters are very wide-ranging and do give a flavour of how normally diverse Russian youth is: – Racist and anti-racist. Westernising and anti-West. Civicminded and individualist. Patriotic and orientalizingly self-stigmatizing. Once again, though, I can’t help but feel the book is pregnant with what must be just a surface level expression of the emerging identity of a genuinely post-Soviet ‘ruling class’, desperate and earnest to find a way of expressing its difference to the ‘cattle’ below. Hence the recourse to bizarre self-help gurus and the need to hire trainers and coaches to ‘look and sound the part’.

The key idea of flexibilization, though, is the main thing for Schwenck. If the dominant ‘ideology’ imparted is genuinely ‘flexible’ in its coopting of bright young things, then it points to a way out of the current impasse: the elite will renew itself, even dynastically, regardless of the outcome of the war. The ambitious up-and-coming will adopt what they need from a confused melange of hustling protestant ethics to make their way.

Like in the 1930s, catastrophe affecting the upper elite might even turn out to be a blessing, allowing wholesale turnover in positions and rapid advancement for people in their 30s or even their 20s. This perspective may be a way of avoiding the traps of two current perspectives: ‘Putin-stasis’ and geriatric degradation into the 2030s and, alternatively, rapid elite fragmentation and disintegration.  It is also telling that it is an outsider voice (Schwenck is a political sociologist from Germany) who challenges a dominant paradigm: that depoliticization is the same as atomization and inaction. What she shows is that human capital as a mobile resource is well understood by the regime, and that even in a highly unequal society like Russia, the myth of social mobility is strongly resistant to reality. A very americana cosmology of the ‘Putinism Dream’ is palpable in these pages.

A few reflections: Schwenck’s Foucault-inspired take prompts some questions: if the point of flexible authoritarianism is to push people to focus on their own advancement first, and only as a secondary the benefits to their society, are discussions of ‘legitimacy’ building even relevant now, ten years later when presumably many of these young people are in positions in bureaucracy?

Where does compulsion and coercion sit in this calculus? Here it seems, I should be talking my own book: the nature of ‘authoritarianism’ in Russia is more about the harsh impersonal (yet networked) nature of capitalism there. Schwenck’s book looks at those from more privileged strata who have more to gain from flexing their selves and hustling. As well as flexible selves, we also have a lot of compulsion by the market for those that don’t make it. (to be fair to Schwenck, her conception of what makes Russia ‘authoritarian’ is close to my own: it’s the internalization of conforming hopes and despairs that count)

The paradox of simultaneous ‘accountability sabotage’ as well as ‘you must adopt a vita active and be the change’ is very visible among the young people Schwenck talks to. She’s not alone in writing about this as a characteristic of Russian authoritarianism and how it creates schizoid political subjects. But it prompts me to again think about the current impasse. Don’t both these contradictory cosmologies end up destroying themselves eventually?

I don’t fully buy how much emphasis Schwenck puts on the internalization of conformism, and submission to what she calls ‘authoritative parenting’ as a throw back to Soviet ‘whole-person upbringing’. On the other hand, like other sociologists she shows how enduring is the Soviet discourse of ‘patriotism’ as social altruism and care for other people and one’s environment. Even in 2013 these feelings were rubbing up against a sense of the difficulty for young people in accounting for the structural limitations of the ‘will’ and their freedom to choose how to be flexible subjects.

As Schwenck addresses the 2022 invasion late in the book, it may well be that some of her interlocutors are those now administering the occupied Ukrainian territories. In that sense they would provide an answer to some of the questions as to how these dilemmas are resolved. Equally, many of these young people have clearly long disabused themselves of both their political and economic blinkers.

What’s most heartening is that there are a number of young Russian researchers with personal experience of these dilemmas now undertaking serious social research in the vein suggested by Anna Schwenck’s welcome contribution here.

‘Russia’s Spiral into Madness’ reviewed: The Times’ man in Russia writes his acid take on 25 years in Russia

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Marc Bennetts’ new book pretty much hits the spot for anyone who wants a comprehensive and accessible journalistic treatment of ‘how we lost Russia’. Now, to those who know my extreme prejudice against journalists, this might sound like a backhanded compliment but it’s not. Having met Marc after he returned to the UK after more than half a lifetime of living in Russia, I knew how angry he was at the country he’d devoted so much to. I was frankly a bit scared that his book would join a long shit list I’ve made of ranty, self-indulgent and poorly researched takes puking on their own moral clarity.

Thank God I was wrong. What Bennetts has produced is a product of anger and disappointment, but it’s all the better for that. Many of my well-informed readers will not need to read this book. But then it was not written for them. It does exactly what it needs to do to inform the educated Western reader and actually give them a real taste of the foreign journalist’s life in Russia and, as the title says, a ‘spiral’ into madness.

I may quibble at the psychological metaphors at the best of time, but Bennetts is very careful to document things he’s experienced – like the utter cynicism and mendaciousness of other – particularly Russian – journalists and broadcasters like Kiselyov and Popov. These are the scenes that stand out – as one would expect from probably one of the best embedded and connected foreign journalists in Russia. Standout moment in this genre for me was when Bennetts phones up an ailing Gleb Pavlovsky after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine to ask him about D. Medvedev’s transformation. He’s told curtly: Medvedev ‘is not a popular person’.

Now, the insider journo view, while welcome and interesting, is not even the main thing though. Thank goodness. We’ve got chapters on Galina Starovoitova (assassinated 1990s politician who represents the ‘road not travelled’ and where Bennetts examines the question of lustration). We have zoom-ins on Nemtsov, Navalnyi, Zhirinovsky, the Orthodox Church, the occult, and plenty of Bennett’s exceptionally good Ukraine journalism post-2022. And a lot on Putin. But in a good way, trust me.

I particularly liked the way that the book moves back and forth from Russia to Ukraine – this is surely something that will give it lasting power given the allergy journalists have towards such an approach. The book actually opens with the liberation of Kherson – which is both extremely smart and also serves to illustrate one of the main conundrums: the production of pathological indifference (in this case Bennetts; supposition about the motives of Russian soldiers).

Off the bat, Bennetts doesn’t shy away from strong metaphors (like the title and subtitle of the book) and for a little while I wondered whether he’d also go off the deep end. However, even in the preface he says that he’s given the material enough space to ‘control my hatred’. He wonders for moment whether his relationship to Russia is like the conflicted emotions of the relatives of brutal criminals. It could have all unravelled after this. So too could have a thematic commitment to the topic of ‘collective delusion’. It’s there, but only to the extent it should be – the first-hand accounts of people denying the reality beyond their bubbles and contorting themselves to protect their received views. The depiction of how people avoid cognitive dissonance is almost identical to that I describe in my own book. Overall then, two shit-list bullets dodged.

The opening chapter ends then with a question that really sums up the problem with journalistic accounts: why has Russia ‘allowed itself’ to be ruled by the same ‘unremarkable’ man for a quarter of a century and so quickly slide into ‘violent nationalism’. This is again, shit-list territory for me. Thankfully, Bennetts doesn’t give in too much to amateur political science and the book quickly settles down after this to the much more revealing, rewarding, and informative work of explaining why the British gen-Xers are so Russia pilled. Much of what Bennetts writes applies to so many of us. For shame! When he returns to the ‘why’ questions, it’s generally along the lines of what one would expect: Putin bought people off. Which is not exactly wrong.

Early in the book, Bennetts is effective in portraying the ‘revenge’, ‘humiliation’ motivations among interlocutors as they sometimes gleefully indulge their geopolitical id and cathetically (not cathartically) allocate their darkest mental energy to the dreadful objects of Ukraine and West. This somewhat undercuts the earlier ‘apathy’ musings. But that’s ok, I think. Some of the time one gets the impression that already long ago Bennetts had become more than a little jaded – as one might expect – and that he enjoyed baiting and provoking ‘believers’. I’ve done the same, I have to admit. He doesn’t seem to reflect on how this approach might affect the kind of defensively consolidating reaction he often describes

I’ve also experienced the same ‘demonic’ reactions when cognitive dissonance threatens to come undone (when he tells someone Ukraine is not being ‘liberated’). I too could have used the term ‘poisoned’ to talk about the effect of continuous exposure to Russian TV. Nonetheless, for a fourth time, Bennetts avoids the easy moral pandering of 95% of his colleagues when he quickly follows all this up by reminding us that none of his Russian acquaintances supported the war or Putin and later discusses the thousands of anti-war arrests. I’m genuinely surprised when a journalist resists the temptation to do this nowadays. Even after meticulous descriptions of wartime Mariupol, Kharhiv and Kherson, Bennetts returns immediately to undercut the implication of collective guilt by focussing on the organized and principled opposition within Russia to the invasion.

As I mentioned – the sections about Putin are surprisingly nuanced: especially where Bennetts does the job so many émigré Russian experts (and scholars!) are unable to do and expertly dismantles the myth that Putin is popular or represents some secret connection between state and people. We also have multiple excellent takedowns of the fellow-travellers and state propagandists – acid depictions of their intellectual and moral corrosion.

Bennetts’ book has something of the John Reed about it. Sincere, insider, adventurer and shrewd observer. That’s probably less of a compliment than it sounds, because despite its skill and immediacy it has some of the same blinkers, as one would expect. But overall, it is excellently done. I cannot say I agree with all of it, especially when it gets psychological or sociological, but I’m glad I read it.

“Russia: A rich country full of poor people”

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The quote is from my book, but I wanted to write a bit more here about inequality in Russia because it is often underplayed and misunderstood. Scroll to the end if you just want the ‘news’ about the statistical manipulation of inequality statistics for political reasons.

First though, why care about inequality (specifically, wage differences) at all? High wage people tend to spend a lot less of their incomes. This money-wealth ‘leaves’ the real economy or contributes to asset inflation – notoriously, real estate prices that are now many multiples of average wages in most developed countries. Russia is no exception. Moscow apartment prices are eye-watering, even for those on ‘decent’ salaries. Being in the top 2% of earners nationally, inherited or gifted wealth are the only ways of getting access to real estate ownership in the (greater) city centre. In that sense, Moscow is not very different from Greater London or Manhattan. Wage inequality directly leads to wealth inequality. The poorest are unable to accrue even enough wealth to stave off emergencies, and the richest are unable to recirculate it in society.

One way of measuring wage inequality is the Gini coefficient. Lower means less inequality. Ginis go up and down over time, and Russia’s famously went up after 1991. For every sustained 1% increase in the Gini, there’s a 0.3% increase in inflation – a persistent scourge for Russian citizens’ sense of well-being. In 2024, the Gini for where I work, Denmark, was 0.29. For the UK it was 0.33. For the USA, 0.49. For Brazil, 0.50. Russia sits around 0.40. It’s a national priority for the Russian government to get the Gini falling into the 0.30s. It is a revealing policy objective that shows elites believe Russia has more in common with Europe (and a welfare state) than the US or middle-income countries like Brazil. But wage inequality in Russia sits at a level 25% higher than most Western European countries even as Russia continues with failed policies of low public investment and almost no consistent policy-led redistribution or progressive taxation.

Then there’s the global trends. I was reminded of Branko Milanovic’s contribution to this when he remarked the other day that one of the problems with tackling inequality is that income distribution is not something mainstream economists really care about even though it is obvious that it affects economic growth. This is very true of Russia – high hydrocarbon incomes have not been redistributed much at all, hence the high Gini. As a result, now that the ‘punchbowl’ has been taken away and the country faces a stagflationary crisis not seen for 35 years, the ‘real’ rate of economic growth is shown to be close to zero. One of the reasons for low growth is that the average Russian has few savings or economic resources.

Milanovic became famous for his research that showed that despite global inequality falling (between-country inequality), the emergence of a middle-class in China would likely increase inequality there. Furthermore, in developed countries the reductions seen in inequality thanks to post-war social democracy were – by the 2000s – going into reverse: absolute gains in income went mostly to the richest 5% of the world after the Cold War ended. It is a ‘novel’ situation that while global inequality falls, we ‘feel’ the world is more unequal than ever because within countries inequality is generally rising and becoming more visible. Middle-income countries like Russia are important because they show us what it will be like to live in a world with a shrinking middle-class (spoiler – it’s not good). This is the sharp end of the social grievances stick in a country like Russia.

Now, I’ve been banging my scholarly head against a brick wall trying to emphasize why social inequality in Russia should matter to people interested in politics for a long time. This is not a topic many pundits or scholars think is important. One of the main conclusions of my recent book is that political ressentiment in Russia is driven as much by the frankly traumatizing experience of going from low inequality to high inequality overnight in the early 1990s, as it is to do with the fashionable explanation that geopolitical ‘resentment’ animates people. When a ‘political opening’ comes, as it must surely soon do, then the gulf between the haves and have-nots will feature somehow and a smart political operator may well exploit it.

It’s nice to feel vindicated then, when I recently found two pieces outlining how wage inequality is being downplayed and statistically manipulated in Russia. For me this is personal; whenever I present my work, there’s invariably a Russian person in the audience from a privileged background who flat out denies that inequality is ‘really that high’ in Russia. Or often they say that it’s a good thing. They necessarily say it exactly like that, but often it’s along the lines that either I’m being lied to when I say how little my interlocutors earn, or that ‘these people’ have significant hidden forms of income, alongside their earnings (which is not really true – but that’s another story: spoiler – there’s good reason to believe than money wages only get a 10-15% boost by hidden incomes).

Statistical manipulation of average wage rates is now widely understood

The first piece confirmed that, as long suspected, the average wage in Russia is distorted by the few with very high wages. We already knew this, but many ignored it for political reasons. Now an analysis conducted in Russia shows that by excluding outliers, the average wage is a much lower 60,000 rb a month ($800) and not 75,000 ($1000) – the figure used by the state statistics agency Rosstat. Yes, in Moscow to earn three times this sum is ‘average’, for the city ($2230). But Russia is regionally very unbalanced on pretty much any indicator you’d care to think of. The bottom line – according to the same analysis – is that only 17 million people (out of country of 143 million) have access to incomes more than equivalent to $1333 (or £1000) a month, before tax. And if we shift the picture from ‘average’ to median – the middle point of incomes, then we get an even more sobering figure: in 2024 the median wage was 47,000 rb ($630) – 26% lower than the statistical average. Officially, wages are expected to continue to rise above the rate of inflation in 2026. But that’s just officially.

The second piece of interest was from the analytical project Esli Byt Tochnym ‘if we’re going to be precise’ . It drew attention to how Rosstat recently started publishing internationally comparative inequality measures again for Russia but then abruptly deleted them from its website. These stats showed that Russian inequality had risen back to 0.422 after a falling trend for many years. This figure is a ‘return’ to 2007 inequality levels. And those levels, by any measure, were high given the quantity and quality of human development, industrialization, social and other infrastructures available in Russia to provide dignified lives and incomes to the majority. In contrast to the dominant narrative even in the West, the rising Gini is useful because it serves as a counternarrative to the one that says ordinary people have been beneficiaries on aggregate from the war economy spending.

On the contrary, inequality has increased in every year of the war according to these figures. Shares of income also tend towards record inequalities in the 21st century– around 47% of all income is captured by the top 20% (in the USA it’s 52%), the top 10% capture 30% of incomes in Russia. The poorest 20% get 5% of the pie (in the USA it’s 3%). Overall then, we can draw the conclusion that 2022 was a watershed year – the end of a trend towards lessening economic differences and a return to earlier trends, albeit compensated by the fact that absolute poverty is lower (well, maybe).

Of course, rising inequality sometimes means that everyone is getting better off, but the rich are winning out more than the rest. What’s also nice about Esli Byt Tochnym is that in their Telegram account they also provide decile breakdown of incomes – the fifth 50% to 60%) get 55,157 roubles ($730). A pretax income of 339,054 ($4520) would put you in the top 1% of wage earners. EBT is useful to draw attention to statistical manipulate for ideological and political reasons – they also previously reported on the covering up by Rosstat of the real levels of poverty in the country. These poverty rates may be relative (by any measure outside Africa and a few places in Asia), but they are still high for such a well-endowed country. Once again, many people are in denial about this because of the political implications. And they continue such fictions because their audience is from the same privileged class as they are and do not know any better.

Coda: one materialist critique of Gini, and one anthropological intervention

Another topic entirely is the problem with using wage differentials as an expression of ‘inequality’. As Oleg Komolov said the other day in his own commentary to the recent statistical adjustments, it may well be that low wages in Khabarovsk buy more than median Moscow wages in Moscow – if you follow me. But the Gini itself understates the whopping inequality when it comes to accessing the services that are needed for basic human flourishing such as education, medicine and infrastructure. On these ‘measures’, a life outside the metropole looks much more starkly unequal than one inside it.

Then, finally there’s anthropology. On the basis of work done in Russia it has tried to rethink inequality by foregrounding its political and discursive contours rather than treating it as an outcome of economic or distributive injustice. Caroline Humphrey wrote about this at the tail ends of the 1990s – a decade of massive apportionment of misery and riches seemingly at random in Russia. For Humphrey, the Russian ‘case’ allows us to sensitise ourselves to how inequality emerges not only from material disparities but also from political anxieties: about the integrity, unity, and governability of social groups.  It calls back to some of her earlier work about institutionalism in Russia being about incorporation and the creation of ‘insider’-‘outsider’ status. In this framework, inequality is relational and fluid, rooted in historically variable discourses that construct categories of the dispossessed. This explains partly why material misfortune so often is accompanied by ‘social death’ in Russia – in a cycle that compounds misery. There’s no more space here to go into this, but if the Russian ’regime’ gets reconstituted, this less visible sense of inequality may become more salient that the purely economic one.