“A simulacrum of charismatic authority tending towards shabbiness, decay and deformation.” Russia four years after the disaster

Leave a reply
a wall displays a directions towards a padlocked bomb shelter thousands of kilometres from Ukraine, February 2026.

In a wide-ranging interview for Die Zeit a few weeks ago I said: ‘for most, a national catastrophe seems more conceivable than that Russia could succeed in subjugating Ukraine. The prevailing mood is pessimism.’ In terms of parsimonious analysis, this is probably the most anyone studying Russia can offer.

Outside of Russia however, it’s noticeable how this analysis is not enough for students, colleagues, and media and public alike. After four years of war we are all supposed to have a definitive take. Things must be moving, according to some established rules of causality, in a particular direction.  But a marker in time is arbitrary. There’s nothing about the passing of four years that gives much more insight than six months ago, or six months hence. There’s very little value in giving an assessment of where we are, or where we are going. Furthermore, the temptation to stock take, while useful, often leads off in the direction of causal inference and prediction.

But the invasion of Ukraine, like the collapse of the USSR, should remind us that social sciences are not predictive. And this has been as true the part of the social science spectrum that claims the most “scientific” of approaches – economics. While there was a good lot of literature that said sanctions and embargoes could have effects on belligerents, that same literature also pointed out that this was only likely to work in contexts of massive and overwhelming differences in power.

Nonetheless, after four years, I still think it’s ‘the economy stupid’ that will make a difference. This was discussed in our recent Russia Unfiltered podcast where I made the point that Russia has far fewer resources overall than even Europe alone. The ‘economic’ argument, also offers – I think – a middle way between the rock of the realists, and the hard place of hawks that Seva Gunitsky outlined in January 2022. Incrementally increasing economic pain might make the supposition – that the Russian government cares much more about the outcome of the conflict, and is therefore able to pay much more for it and raise the stakes – irrelevant if the coming real stagnation of the Russian economy becomes visible and felt by everyone (and indeed, it will expose political fractures precisely because it will also reveal who has profited handsomely, and who is cynically protected from pain).

French historian Marc Bloch argued that the most meaningful comparisons are those which are maximally similar and consequentially different in only a few respects. Comparative study might very well be more meaningful within regions like the former Soviet one than across them. This is why most of the best work on the war to date has avoided historical and political parallels that are too distant from the immediate context. Nonetheless, one that I risked making myself – a comparison between the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and the Russo-Ukraine war, perhaps is still helpful for one good reason: its lesson about unpredictability due to the intractable process of long regional wars.

Iran-Iraq showed that outcomes were not at all predictable based on available evidence; outside interventions had effects but not immediately or in direct causative ways. The relative weight of the intervention of individuals and elites changed multiple times (and like in many wars, elites’ non-decisions were sometimes more important). And, to go against one of the points I made earlier about the danger of historical parallels, Iran-Iraq’s outcome was the strengthening through war of both countries’ militaristically-minded core elites. With terrible consequences shorter and longer term for their societies and their prior limited pluralisms.

It might be professionally satisfying for me to say ‘I told you so’ in response to Meduza’s new investigation that shows that Russian battlefield losses are severe but not half as bad as Western intelligence agencies are reporting. Well, I did tell you so, repeatedly – pointing out that because of a lack of professional analysis, Western agencies were mainly just repeating Ukrainian figures which were understandably propaganda. However, even if it were true that losses were much higher it would not change the calculus that it’s the relationship between money, interest rates, exchange rates and oil prices that run the war, not bodies. Bottom line: for Russia war mortgages the state. But sometimes it does so in a way that is unsustainable for non-core powers, of which Russia is a classic peripheral player vulnerable to numerous economic forces beyond its control.

So, beyond this perhaps limited historical comparison, what can I say I got right? Looking back at some of the posts on this site since 2022, a few stand out. There’s my reading of Snyder and Laruelle from May 2022, where the former argues that Russia is fascist and the latter retorts that Putin is not even Pinochet. In the same piece I emphasise the axiomatical political instincts of the regime remain focussed depoliticization and demobilization, but that of course this also creates major weaknesses in governance during wartime.

In October 2022 I wrote about the Donbasification of Russia itself, using the metaphor ‘North Korea-lite’ to show how historically, the erosion of norms and laws in occupied territories and conflicts has a boomerang effect on the imperial core. Little has changed in my assessment and in any case this is hardly an original idea. The problem really comes if the conflict ends, because the erosion of the rule of law, the high corruption within the MIC, and the need to scapegoat insiders, particularly in the security and economic elite only intensifies after a peace is signed.

In April 2022 I returned to my pre-war predictions as to what would happen in Russia and found them overall to be sound. One thing I didn’t anticipate because of my own blinders was how effective the politics of fear would become:

Continuation of the ‘politics of fear’. Again, I underestimated how fast Putin would clamp down and allow the narrative of internal enemies and traitors to justify all kinds of score-settling. I also did not foresee significant emigration by the upper-middle class. Fascism lite? Bonapartism? Others (Greg Yudin here) are very quick to go down those roads. I think for the time being I’ll stick with my version of authoritarian statism inspired by reading Nicos Poulantzas. “the ‘masses’ are not integrated (partly because politics is replaced by a single party centre), and pernicious networks like security interests are ‘crystalized’  in a permanent structure in parallel to the official state”.

In that same post I also refined a little my ideas about defensive consolidation which later appeared in a further revised form in my 2025 book:

Defensive consolidation involves magical thinking and denial… It involves a cleaving to authority (not necessarily the government, but your boss, your factory, your town leader), not out of loyalty or enthusiasm…The more Russians cleave to authority the more they are effectively ‘admitting’ to themselves how bad things really are.

DC is something of a ‘sweaty concept’ – I keep reframing it because it only exists as a very affective and interactive structure of feeling about the war and the state that Russian people have. Maybe the best exploration of it is only possible by reading across various chapters of the book. And reading out from Lisa Wadeen’s work on how, to paraphrase here, the simulacrum of charismatic authority tends towards shabbiness, decay and deformation in such regimes. It produces anxiety as much as compliance.

Finally, I wrote way too many posts about the problems of relying on survey data showing high war approval among the Russian public (a public which of course does not exist and knows as individuals that it cannot have an opinion). One of my most viewed posts in the last four years is this one about the shabby and unprofessional reality behind the smooth veneer that is the curation and presentation of much survey data about Russian political opinion. But don’t believe me, check out this pretty devastating indictment of interview practices which shows how the majority of answers to questions involve information loss, misunderstanding and distortion.

The title of that article is ‘communication breaches’ and for me this continues to be the lesson of the war when it comes to its impact on scholarly discussion and public understanding. Will this change before the war ends? I doubt it, meaning that publics and politicians are also not ready for the new European reality the end will bring – in terms of the new kind of Ukrainian and Russian regimes and states which will emerge and the necessity to have some kind of plan to engage with both. Will they be ‘the same, yet worse’ as I predicted in January 2022?

Books about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Part 1: evaluating the Western-culpability thesis

Leave a reply

(A post that’s really about the value of academic book reviews in understanding why you don’t agree with someone)

Various events recently reminded me of attempts in Euroacademia to adopt a kind of ‘cancel culture’ connected to views about the Russo-Ukraine war. When the US kidnapped Maduro I remembered an email that a colleague based at a Russian university had shared with me in March 2022. I imagined the ridicule that would ensue if someone sent a similar email today to an American academic – demanding they publicly state a position on the US military action and preferably resign their position. This is my almost word-for-word recreation.

Almost at the same time, I myself received a negative review from a mainstream academic journal partly on the grounds that I had cited Viacheslav Morozov’s book on Russia’s subaltern empire (Morozov was convicted of espionage by Estonia) and that my framing of Russian ‘everyday politics’ was flawed because in the view of the anonymous reviewer “a majority of the population supports the war and annexations”.

Now, recently I made the off the cuff comment that peer-review was not only in crisis but was actually dying, and getting this anonymous review only confirmed that feeling for me. For those that don’t know, reviews are supposed to evaluate the quality of the argument, the quality of engagement with sources considered reliable, and the soundness of the data collection and interpretation.

Anyway, this got me thinking about the relative lack of ‘cancel’ culture around people’s views or institutional positioning since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Just to state the obvious, I might grumble about getting reviews like the one above, or being held to a higher standard of evidence and scrutiny because my work is based on fieldwork and is critical of many mainstream approaches to Russia, but I still get a lot of invites, and can publish mostly what I like. Mostly.

The moments of ‘madness’ in 2022 are unlikely to be repeated: when lectures about removing Dostoevsky from academic libraries were received with rapturous applause from career academics in a certain centre for research on East European Studies not far from me.  When career social researchers sincerely debated whether it was permissible to even study Russian society. Once again, I can’t help but visualize an imaginary symposium of ‘Americanist’ scholars disbanding their discipline because they found it morally repugnant to produce knowledge about the United States.

Then, a week ago I noticed that Richard Sakwa had taken part in a discussion with Volodymyr Ishchenko on ‘The Deep Roots of the Ukraine War’. Sakwa published a ‘hot take’ book on Ukraine in 2015 – which I discuss below. Sakwa is extremely prolific in his writing on Russia, and more recently Ukraine, and is emeritus professor at the University of Kent. He’s a household name in Russian political studies in the anglophone world and beyond. Why is Sakwa relevant to the question of permissibly public discourse on Ukraine?

Those listening to the interview might not really notice anything amiss immediately. But most would quickly pick up one thing though. Sakwa is asked whether he considers the 2022 invasion as illegal and he repeatedly asserts that if a state launches what is sees as a preventative war then that can’t be judged through a lens of legality. Without making clear his view beyond these observations, Sakwa keeps repeating the word ‘preventative’ war in the interview, giving various examples of why Russia would see it that way. Using the analogy of kindling for a fire, Sakwa makes mostly reference to Ukrainian belligerent actions since 2013, giving the impression he supports the view that Russian actions were justified in some way.

Now, the point of me relaying this here is not to take a position on the merits of Sakwa’s argument or his noticeable shift to a more active(ist) role in talking and writing about Ukraine and Russia since 2014. Instead, I summarise it here because Sakwa’s views are seen as exculpatory at best, and full-on apologetic for Russian foreign policy at worst by some of his colleagues in political studies. To be fair to him, there’s always a lot of things mixed in with what Sakwa says that many of his colleagues would agree with – like that it was not the fact of NATO expansion that was interpreted as counter to Russian interests, but the way it was carried out. By the way, in the discussion here, Volodymyr Ishchenko is much more circumspect in his talk.

The point is that European anglophone academic has plenty of space for dissenting-from-the-mainstream voices. Sakwa has around 500-600 citations per year according to google scholar, so no one could think he’s a marginal figure – he’s had a deep and broad influence on Russian and Soviet political studies – a pretty niche corner of the world, if you think about it. Moreover, many of his claims about Russia-Ukraine are close to interpretations such as those found in New Left Review (the topic of a future post).

But, and here’s the catch, his perspectives on the causes of the Ukraine war have been subject to detailed and repeated critique – proving, if not the adequacy of pre-publication peer review (which is not necessarily carried out very consistently by some book publishers), then the utility of looking at the dozen or so academic book reviews that a visible author is likely to attract after the fact of publication. This is a ‘hack’ we teach our students – before deciding on whether you want to engage with a particular scholar’s argument, or even their topic, go to the online university library and download a few reviews. You then don’t have to commit to reading two hundred pages of a book you might not need.

Unlike my students though, you, dear reader, might not have an academic library account. So here goes a quick summary of what some of Sakwa’s colleagues say about his 2015 book Frontline Ukraine. I focus on prominent reviews and criticisms here. Why focus on this book?- because it’s probably one of the most visible and publicly promoted books for a popular audience in English on Russia-Ukraine events up to 2015 that lays the blame largely with the ‘West’.

‘Those who have abhorred our worsening relationship with Russia will find it a source of wisdom and reinforcement; to those who have helped to frame today’s policy, Sakwa’s rigorous arguments will be about as welcome as a course of chemotherapy.’ Says James Sherr in his 2015 review. For Sherr, the ‘rigid schematic obscures the centre ground of any argument. Sakwa seems unable to engage with a point of view until he has labelled it. “Monists”, “Maidanists” and supporters of Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic course are treated as if they are one and the same. Yet it was the candidate of the east, Leonid Kuchma, who built Ukraine’s “distinctive partnership”’ with NATO. All four presidents, including Viktor Yanukovych, set their sights on EU integration and resisted incorporation into Eurasian integration schemes.’

Peter Rutland similarly argues that Sakwa’s deployment of ‘monist’ Ukrainian nationalist statebuilding is a red herring. A more expert account would acknowledge that Ukrainianization was a result, not the cause of conflict after 2013.  Sakwa treats Russian perspectives uncritically at times, and his perspective on Putin and Russian motives focusses too much on grievances and not at all on neo-imperialist perspectives or Ukrainian sovereignty.  Furthermore, for a serious scholar there are sins of omission – on Russian intervention in fighting in the East and in largely eliding the evidence of deployment of Russian troops and weapons while ‘both-sides’-ing the Donbas (Ukrainian territory). ‘Sakwa downplays Putin’s agency, arguing that “developments in Ukraine represented a challenge that Putin felt he could not avoid” (119). He writes that “Russia was sucked into the Donbas conflict” (113), as if Russia’s invasion occurred against its will.’

Lisa Baglione in 2016 summarises Sakwa’s argument in these terms: ‘Russian pride and need for respect in the global arena is what Richard Sakwa would contend ultimately provoked the Ukrainian conflict that continues today. As Sakwa explains, Russia was denied what its citizens believe to be its appropriate place in the global hierarchy during the 1990s, both by its own failings and by the efforts of the West to treat the country as an unimportant, past-its-prime player’ …  ‘Moreover, Sakwa argues that in those early post-Soviet days, the West embarked on policies to humiliate and weaken Russia. These policies could only provoke a great country (especially one with a spectacular recent past as a ‘‘superpower’’) to retaliate with efforts to secure its global position and protect itself from hostile others. Sakwa sees the security dilemma as a driving force in the transformation of the Russia-West relationship.’

However, as Baglione goes on to say, many scholars have a very different perspective on Russian intervention, citing Elizabeth Wood, Maxim Trudolyubov. These and other authors ‘undermine Sakwa’s ‘‘victim narrative’’ of Russia in its post-Cold War relations with the West and his claims about its legitimate power considerations in Ukraine. Rather, they contend that Russia and not the West abrogated the rules of contemporary global affairs by seeking to dominate its neighbors (E. Wayne Merry), treating trade as a mercantilist endeavor (William E. Pomeranz), and creating illegitimate security forces within Ukraine, a sovereign state (Wood).’

‘In sum, the evidence suggests that blame belongs on both sides of the current Russia-West divide. Sakwa’s inability to see Russia’s responsibility in provoking conflict and disinterest in seeking negotiated settlements undermines his analysis for some. To provide a more compelling overall assessment, Sakwa needs to convince many skeptical readers that Putin, his system, and his values were not centrally important in producing the current dangerous state in global affairs.’

These are the more sympathetic academic reviews. We can also give a flavour of the more critical ones. Taras Kuzio in 2018 rebukes Sakwa for using no Ukrainian sources in his analysis. For Kuzio, ‘Sakwa denies Russia ever sought “a return to spheres of influence,” quite unlike Mikhail Suslov (2018), who writes that “the idea of a sphere of influence” is hardwired into the “Russian World” imagery.’ Kuzio argues that Sakwa downplays Russian imperialism and presents Crimean annexation as a return to normality, while downplaying Russia’s support for the far right in Europe.

In his review from 2017, Paul D’Anieri critically highlights Sakwa’s vision of Russia as a ‘defensive, conservative, neo-revisionist power’, and made that way by forces beyond her control – Ukrainian nationalism and Western policy. ‘For Sakwa, even when Russia is arming fighters in eastern Ukraine, it is passive and powerless’. Noting that like many other books on the topic, Sakwa’s is not a work of social science, D’Anieri notes that many sources are from Russian government officials or analysts, commentary from the English press, and that this approach is ‘fraught’.

Let’s leave Sakwa alone for now; regardless of what you think of his Frontline Ukraine book, his reputation on Soviet and post-Soviet Russian politics is secure. But I do think the final points by D’Anieri are good ones to remember: a lot of what passes for scholarly work on the Russia-Ukraine conflict – and even more so since 2022 – fails to meet many scholarly standards due to the weaknesses he mentions, becoming all too often a rehash of media sources and stuck in a kind of ‘presentist’ and elite-focussed, geopolitics doom-loop, with scant interest in the societies, let alone the social science beneath this illusion of knowledge – be they Russian, Ukrainian or any other. There isn’t really a further point to this post, merely to remind that the loudest and most promoted voices of any political persuasion are rarely the most interesting. I don’t want to align Sakwa’s position with the ‘Western Left’s’ in general, but we will return to how work like it has influenced parts of ‘the Left’ in a future post.

Doing Russia research with ChatGPT (it doesn’t end well)

3 Replies

“Garrulous prose: a child’s mere babble. And yet a man who dribbles, the idiot…  he is also without words, bereft of power, but he is still closer to talk that flows and flows away to writing which restrains itself, even if this is restraint beyond mastery.”

Maurice Blanchot – The Writing of the Disaster, 1980 [author’s translation].

I have found ChatGPT (free version) is quite good at summarising texts for me. I don’t know, but I’m guessing that the utility of it as a summarizing tool is inversely proportional to the complexity and length of the text you feed it. It works ok on shorter academic pieces, not so great on peer-reviewed articles, and not well at all on books (clearly it wants you to pay £200 for the sub version).

Yes, you can feed ChatGPT a whole academic book if you want, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I encounter numerous problems with prompts. You give it a prompt – do x, y, and z. But if the text is long and complex, the programme obfuscates, evades, and bluffs – rather like a lazy and overconfident undergraduate student (not many of those in my current institution, to be fair, and few use AI at all). Somewhere on Substack one writer said using AI was like having a ‘horde of interns’ producing text.

I never considered using ChatGPT to replace any of my actual writing. But I did do an experiment recently. I was asked by Riddle Russia to write a longer-than-normal piece. I think it was around 1800 words. I had around 800 down and took a break. Here’s two parts of what I wrote: the opening and a transition paragraph about.

Despite the appearance of increasing effectiveness in the Russian state’s ability to monitor economic activities within its territory and impose taxes, fees («sbory»), and levies («pobory») on them, one reassuring constant remains: the unstoppable force of the fiscal state—and now a fiscal-military state—continues to collide with an immovable object in the collective person of the Russian people themselves. As individuals and as groups, they resist and defy any final push to «enwhiten» (i.e., make visible and taxable) their incomes and wealth. More than six years ago, observers described a qualitative shift in the Russian state’s fiscal stance with the pithy slogan «People are the new oil.» Re-reading my own piece for Riddle from early 2019, it seems little has fundamentally changed.

[…]

Poor auditing and opaque ownership of such systems are designed as part of the sistema of extravagant economic rents. As it was with Platon – the road pricing system for heavy goods vehicles which Alexei Navalny revealed in 2015 as essentially a scheme for further enriching insiders – the actual effectiveness of this fee-collection system to the state (in terms of providing revenue for investment in roads) was  shown to be minimal. Subsequently, it has delivered much value to its insider controllers while it’s contribution to the Russian road fund has been modest over more than ten years of operation (approximately $3bn – less than a year’s spending on roads by the state). Road building and construction – which can cost up to $30m per mile  in Moscow (in expensive Germany, highway construction costs around half that) – are even more fertile ground for skimming and kickbacks, with frequent corruption cases and audit problems even published in the Russian press

I pasted the text above and what else I had written into Scholar ChatGPT and asked it to “Continue the report that follows this prompt – complete it with details and links to Russian-language online sources using the same style and argumentation. Incorporate evidence from the sources you find in support of the argument”

I skimmed the results – part of which follow:

Wartime Economic Informality as a Safety Valve

Despite repeated attempts to formalize economic life, the wartime economy has deepened informality in everyday survival strategies. According to estimates by the Higher School of Economics, up to 33–35% of Russian households’ income in 2023 remained “неучтённым” (unaccounted), up from 27% in 2019 (НИУ ВШЭ, 2023). Researchers like Natalia Akindinova emphasize that informal income has become “a crucial buffer in an era of mobilization and inflation.”

Regional press and outlets like РБК describe how self-employed “самозанятые” workers—drivers, delivery couriers, online tutors—have grown rapidly, reaching 8.3 million people by mid-2024 (РБК, 2024). Yet most of these operate in “grey” modes, underreporting or omitting real turnover. This semi-tolerated opacity allows low-income Russians to maintain consumption levels despite stagnant wages and military tax surcharges introduced through indirect levies (fuel, excise, and VAT)

It all looked really helpful. I wouldn’t use the text, I told myself [a warning sign!], but the links would make it a lot easier to finish my assignment. The Chatbot helpfully presented my requested sources and they looked perfect to me:

Cited Russian-Language Sources:

  1. НИУ ВШЭ (2023). Теневая экономика в условиях санкций. https://publications.hse.ru/articles/847392460
  2. РБК (2024). Рост числа самозанятых и доля серого дохода. https://www.rbc.ru/economics/18/05/2024/6648f3729a7947ed8e23d11a
  3. Ведомости (2024). Параллельный импорт как новая норма торговли. https://www.vedomosti.ru/business/articles/2024/02/19/967498-parallelnie-importi
  4. Коммерсантъ (2023). Серый импорт и экономика военного времени. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6059428
  5. РБК (2023). Проверка эффективности системы «Платон». https://www.rbc.ru/business/27/07/2023/64c26f4f9a79475c8f7f1132
  6. Meduza (2024). Война выгодна своим: экономические ренты в инфраструктуре. https://meduza.io/feature/2024/04/29/voyna-vygodna-svoim
  7. Коммерсантъ (2023). Теневая экономика как элемент устойчивости. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6100234
  8. Хазин, М. (2023). Параллельный импорт как форма народного протекционизма. https://khazin.ru

However, a few days later, I tried the links – they’re all ‘hallucinations’ – none of them can be traced to a real-existing source. But they are all so plausible. Especially the academic ones linked to Higher School of Economics, Moscow. One aspect that led me to feel initially feel confident that ChatGPT had given me genuine links and sources and saved me time was that in the text it produced it cited real researchers who actually do work on these topics. For example, the generated text said, “Researchers like Natalia Akindinova emphasize that informal income has become “a crucial buffer in an era of mobilization and inflation.””  This appeared to chime with the kind of topics this Moscow researcher works on. Except that it too, along with all the citations in the ChatGPT document are fabrications.

Face reveal for the researcher Jem Morrow as AI sees him

Overall, the time I spent using ChatGPT for this assignment reduced my productivity – something others have encountered. In summarizing some short texts, I still think it has uses in increasing productivity. But here’s the catch, the temptation to trust it is going to be too high to the time-poor: those under-pressure writers and researchers. Or the lazy – like me. Or the dishonest.

I also think it’s underestimated how many researchers and academics just don’t really enjoy (or value) writing and will go to lengths to avoid it. Added to that is the capture of the academy by the neoliberal concept of value and production (your worth as a scientist is measured by individualized metrics and then expressed financially). Very few people are writing papers because they really want to. Plagiarism is rife already (i recently reviewed an academy grant application that had plagiarised my work and I’m an extremely marginal researcher – think about that!). Many publications are ghost-written for profit. It was already the case that ‘signal detection’ was a problem in academic writing – where the volume-to-noise ratio made detecting worthwhile papers difficult. Someone recently remarked: “bad papers now look like good papers” but has this never not been true?

My 2025 roundup  – The old world is dying; now is the time of monster posts

3 Replies
random monster encountered in the Field

Blogging as ‘public dissemination’ for academics is largely a thankless task. Indeed, a blog like mine arguably brings more costs than benefits to me professionally, while to do it properly takes time. From early 2022 onward I blogged a lot more for obvious reasons and 2022 saw more visitors to this website than before or since. However, looking at the stats for 2025 has cheered me up as they are consistent with 2024 and only a bit lower than 2022 when I was arguably ‘overposting’. Certainly, with long-form scholarly blogging, less is more.

Late 2025 saw an interesting shift in my audience. China is now my secondary audience after the USA. In 2026 I estimate it will become my primary one based on current trends. For some reason unknown to me, in November 2025 I had three times the number of Chinese visitors as those from the USA. The last month (December) has been similar. By contrast, in June 2025 over 50% of my audience was in USA and UK, with 0.3% of readers coming from China. Russia is a tiny and waning fraction of my audience (1.6% in December), although many may be using VPNs there. Not sure what to make of all of this.

What is this blog for? I remain committed to writing things that are a mix of current affairs, more academic stuff, and promoting non-anglo writing/research about Russia. I do this not for any particular audience or for career purposes. In comparison to similar blogs, my audience seems healthier and bigger – the downside of WordPress versus Substack is that few people want to register for the former so my subscribers count is low on WP.

So what are my highlight posts of 2025?

I kicked off 2025 with a theme I would revisit in the blog and in other publications: the divergent economic experiences of the war within Russia. I feel like I’ve been repeating myself since then saying similar things to this:

“many focus on a mistaken idea that a significant segment of Russians are feeling economic benefits, or that wartime spending means real gains (as a share of GDP) for labour (i.e. that gains are redistributive).”

Since then, I have become a dedicated fan of Nick Trickett’s work. He features a lot in my writing about this and I look forward to his 2026 book.

obligatory shots of vodka prices feature in many posts

In January and February I summarised some of Denys Gorbach’s book on the Ukrainian working-class. I recommend this book!

Then in March-April when my Bloomsbury book came out, I made some posts about its content, reusing its original working title: the micropolitics of desire. Here’s the final paragraph of the first post:

“It turns out that the common assumption to dismiss small acts, incremental thinking, and prefigurative desires is self-fulfilling. If we don’t believe in even a small politics and changes, then there will be no change. At the end of my book, I visit a housewife in a small town in Russia. At Eastertime in 2024 she gives out to neighbours some home-baked cakes decorated with icing. The icing spells out the abbreviation “XB”, which can be interpreted as representing ‘Christ is Risen’, or ‘Fuck the War’. Some of the cakes were more explicit than others. Why did she did this? Because she needed to acknowledge others and be acknowledged by them as a political actor.”

In April I blogged about the possibilities of a ceasefire. Here’s the opening of that post:

“Tl/dr: yes, Russian society wants an end to war, but the core hawkish elite craves recognition, at least for Crimea and thinks maximalist extraction from Ukraine via Trump is possible.

Firstly, it’s important reiterate a point I’ve made many times: treat public opinion measurements in Russia by Levada, Vtsiom and others with a healthy dose of scepticism. They of course, do give us a picture of what most Russians perceive to be the politically correct answers to the questions they are being asked. Even Vtsiom admits that only a small minority of people polled believe that their participation in surveys allows them to express their opinion. This figure is 22%. And only 18% of people believe that the authorities are interested in their opinion. This has significant implications for how seriously we should treat surveys as a reliable barometer of public sentiment.

What’s more helpful is tracking over time the proportion of people who answer that they would support withdrawal from Ukraine without reaching Moscow’s military goals.”

I made a conscious decision not to ‘liveblog’ my fieldwork* in summer 2025. But I did condense some of my experiences in three blogs in September and October about ‘comfort-class authoritarianism’, about the spiritual values of the booze shops, and about the loneliness of the long-distance war supporter. These were among my most read posts of 2025 – particularly the war supporter one. In that post I talked about how

“irritability should maybe get more attention as a social barometer in contexts like the one Russians are facing. Irritability pairs with cognitive dissonance, but in turn that dissonance expresses a form of knowledge and a rational reflection of (constrained) material circumstances. That things are not as they are presented. […] Normalization – even in a war – has to be reproduced (and become validated) socially somehow. But think for a minute and this isn’t really possible for a lot of people in Russia.”

*for legal purposes I must state that I did not carry out any employment-based or remunerated fieldwork in 2025.

There are many constituents of a national ideology. Some are more appetizing than others

I then in October and November posted a critically supportive review of Marlene Laruelle’s new book on Meaning Making under the Putin Regime. This review was informed by some of the fieldwork posts of the autumn where I argued that Putinist ‘ideology’ as legitimation is very much over-egged for structural reasons in the West.

But my most popular post published in 2025 was done as something as an afterthought. Not a week goes by without a colleague (usually one who has never conducted fieldwork) or journalist questioning my ‘intellectual credentials’ in a way that few other social scientists experience. I did a long (as yet) unpublished interview with one of the biggest broadsheets of a large European country and again, despite the very sympathetic journalist, I was required to rehearse an argument justifying ethnography, and anthropology, more broadly. This is tiresome. So I finally did a quick run down of why ethnography is a perfectly normal and respectable method in the social sciences. It really is something that in the year of our Lord 2025 I had to rehash some basic social research textbook stuff and even my own powerpoints from the 1990s on this. I guess I just interact a lot more now than ever before with folks for whom post-positivism never really happened, and of course with the mainstream in Russian social science which pines for the days of Talcott Parsons c. 1959.

not Talcott Parsons

“Of course, it’s no coincidence I mention Mills’ example of polls and voting behaviour. For this is still the main way that social reality in Russia is translated and presented for Western audiences. Ethnographers would assume that data are never just ‘gathered’ like fruits in the wild but actively produced in the interaction between the researcher and the human interlocutor. This is what Anthony Giddens refers to as the ‘double hermeneutic’. It means that stating we are ‘objective’ in recording our observations is insufficient grounds for claiming we have generated reliable ‘facts’ and knowledge. The main challenge to positivistic versions of social science (incl.  polling) is ‘interpretivism’: we can only know the social world we study via the meanings attached to it by human subjects. Because meanings are different and changing, and contested, we can’t keep a firm hold on to the idea of a stable external social ‘reality’.”

In total I wrote 20 posts in 2025, including this one. A few posts older than 2025 remain more visited than ever. By far and away the most visited is a post from April 2023 criticizing the methodological nationalism, western-centrism, and blinkeredness of some ‘decolonizers’.

My favourite post of the last year was exactly a year ago today – 30.12.2024 – in response to yet another émigré researcher justifying survey methods – in my view because of the inherent methodological and political biases of many social scientists from Russia who are ‘radical pessimists’ and very comfortable in their new roles serving the neoconservative foreign policy community of the US.

“Snegovaya tries to put to bed many of the criticism I and (much better qualified) others have made of the usefullness of survey polling in Russia. She paints a depressing picture, arguing that young people increasingly align with conformist and conservative views due to exposure to propaganda and the normal process of ageing. Further, she emphasizes the view that alignment with regime narratives due to cognitive dissonance is the norm. She also argues for a strong ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect in Russia.”

And now to what didn’t I post about (and no promises I will get to these topics in 2026, mind!). I didn’t post about how I tried to use AI to help my research and ended up with a completely hallucinated set of Russian scholarly and newspaper citations! I didn’t post about the cottage industry in research – one which I think is intellectually dishonest – which paints a black and white image of youth indoctrination in Russia (though I did podcast about it). I did not post about what the anglo-left gets right and wrong about the domestic causes of the war (basically a review of all the coverage in Jacobin and New Left Review since February 2022). I did not post about the best book on Russia-Ukraine politics in English (teaser).  I did not post about the three main emergent elite groups in Russian politics and their corresponding publics which will all outlast the war (teaser number two). I did not post a summary of the good empirical work being done in Russia by sociologists (feels bad). I did not post about many interesting fieldwork findings, for example regarding wartime corporatism. Maybe I will have time in 2026, or maybe not!

Finally, there’s the question of what platform is the future for this kind of ‘content’. Is it in the walled garden with maximum control on WordPress or is it on the new cool-kids’ Twitter: Substack? Is it in abandoning content based on the written word for the podcast or videocast world? Peer-reviewed scholarship is dying yet the new online world of research blogging struggles to be born. Let me know your thoughts so I can at least plan which extractive monster, I mean ‘platform’, to pay my rent to.  

Here’s the Substack, because some prefer that: https://open.substack.com/pub/postsocialism/p/my-2025-roundup-the-old-world-is?r=o206x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Here, have a meat pie to celebrate the end of 2025 – only don’t inquire too closely as to its ingredients:

Three interview commentaries: Schulmann, Zubarevich, Kagarlitsky

3 Replies
the first in-prison interview of an AI-inoagent

Sometimes I like to blog about what’s going on in Russian social media spaces abroad though it doesn’t seem to bring many readers here. That’s a shame because it’s a space that only indirectly gets attention by anglophones (notwithstanding Meduza’s almost lone attempts to correct this). It’s also pretty informative because some of the best journalists and experts have a big platform there. There is however, just too much material to keep track of. Here’s a rundown of three things I watched via YouTube in the last weeks: political observer Ekaterina Schulmann on how to parse conflicting public opinion indicators; economic geographer Natalia Zubarevich on whether military Keynesianism is paying off; and an interview from behind bars with political prisoner Boris Kagarlitsky.

Schulmann has a brutal schedule – doing public talks seemingly almost every day. At the end of October 2025 she talked to Vot Tak channel (based in Poland with a pretty large online audience). As usual, she covers a lot of minutiae about what’s going on in Russia. What stood out in this episode was her reading of recent polling by Levada about ‘mass perceptions about the influence of the Special Military Operation on society’.  This part of the interview is a good example of how Schulmann has moved to a much more critical position about the meaning of polling in autocracies. She first talks about how Russian propaganda is not meant to be persuasive. It’s instead ‘the voice of force’. ‘Voice of the authorities’. This is why people pay attention to it in so far as it shows the strength and resources of the authorities.

Then she discusses the contradictions at the heart of polling questions: that support for the war appears high, yet, when polled, the majority agree with the statement that the war has mainly brought more ‘negatives’ than positives to Russia. Furthermore, attitudes towards veterans are quite informative: In answer to ‘what has the SMO done to participants in it?’, the main answer is (literally) ‘the war has crippled their souls’. Further, people see the mercenary choice a bit like they see the decision to take up a hazardous job in the Far North: sure, you can get money that way, and this is an ‘honest’ exchange (you know what you’re doing), but preferential treatment/certain social benefits should not accrue to this mercenary choice.

And moreover, society should not be forced into elevating veterans’ social status or respecting this choice. Schulmann adds that this could be symptomatic of a distancing mechanism on the part of society. We could interpret it as ‘infantile’. However, she wisely reserves her own interpretation. Later in the interview she talks more about the growing unhappiness at the government’s economic repression against ordinary people, and its unprecedented political repression against its own elite.

Natalia Zubarevich stayed in Russia after February 2022, teaching and researching in Moscow. She gave a lot of interviews from within Russia and was sometimes painfully careful in how she described the regional economic effects of the war. This interview with a journalist in Paris (November 2025) is therefore something a bit different. Not least because it’s nearly three hours long. I couldn’t sustain any notetaking for that period of time. It’s the usual thing she does, which is almost a self-parody now: barrage the viewer with statistics about employment, profitability, inflation and the like. Quite interesting here was a ‘meta’ moment where they discuss her teaching in Moscow and whether scientific exchange between Russia and the West is possible (c.30m) and what  economic geography in the UK has become: “spatial sociology” (in contrast to Russia where a more ‘traditional’ approach to geography remains). There are loads of moments of incredulity from the interviewer like this at juncture – which is always fun.  

A limitation of Zubarevich is that she confines herself to official statistics, occasionally colouring her assessments with anecdotes – which can also be a bit of a problem given she works at a super elite institution and lives in central Moscow. However, she always says some things that go for and against the ‘common sense’ of the pundit sphere. To summarise, she talks about a significant number of economic losers because of the war while ‘two thirds’ have seen sustained wage increases over inflation.  However, overall, this means competition between employers has been fierce (until recently). A wage spiral essentially is bad for a brittle and regionally-divided economy like Russia’s. She also talks about how the state trying to turn the tax screws on the population will backfire because people will resort to cash and hiding incomes. There’s some interesting stuff about financing and budgets in the occupied territories of E Ukraine. There’s an explainer on regional inequality in Russia and how it’s misleading because of the phenomenon of labour migration (who bring their high wages out of the North).

More interesting than the interview was the divided reaction of the audience. A lot of viewers interpreted the interview as providing cover for the economic choices of the authorities – as painting too rosy, or too detached a picture. Some said that it was unhelpful to use official Russian statistics to argue that there’d been a big uplift to most incomes. For example, some pointed out how the ‘basis’ wage had indeed risen sharply in many jobs but this did not mean a real rise in wages because for many, the main part of paid income is not the ‘basis’, but the discretionary bonuses – the latter being harder to capture in official statistics. It has been very convenient in many sectors to boost the tiny ‘basis’ wage by even 200-300% while cutting or making the achievement of targets for the bonus much harder. Would you feel better off if your basis wage rose from 200 Euro a month to 600 Euro, while the ‘bonus’, which was previously 800 Euro, was now at the mercy of the foreman? You might get a bonus of 1000 Euro when a monthly or bimonthly target is reached, but many are not – or are being forced to overwork for what was previously a given. Especially in service or while-collar work where the concrete output is not a hard quantity of product.

There are good points in the interview about how unsustainable the military ‘juicing’ of the economy already is in 2025. Zubarevich makes it pretty clear she thinks this sugar high will come with a massive crash. People were unhappy to about her repeating policy aims as if they were realizable – like a plan for rehabilitation facilities for veterans all over Russia: pie in the sky, was a criticism from the chat. People really didn’t like her repeating a point that many make – that within the Russian government there are smart, competent and effective pockets of policy making.

The third interview (also November 2025) is something of a landmark. An interview between Andrei Rudoi – a well-known leftwing Youtuber, and Boris Kagarlitsky. Only, Kagarlitsky – roughly speaking, a Marxist historian and public intellectual – is in a prison colony for mildly critical remarks about the conduct of the war. The interview was therefore reconstructed using an AI avatar of Kagarlitsky who spoke the words from the letters, phone call transcripts and such like, of the actual person siting in Penal Colony No. 4, Torzhok, Tver Region.  Even if one has no sympathy for the person of Kagarlitsky (and I certainly do), some of the interview feels poignant. Particularly since Kagarlitsky was also imprisoned by Soviet authorities in 1982 for ‘anti-Soviet’ activities.

Prison is not exactly the place where one improves one’s health, K notes at the beginning. Only it is a very healthy-looking, if a little uncanny avatar saying these words. You’re the first AI Foreign Agent (‘Inoagent’), remarks Rudoi.

What’s most interesting to the general audience is the first few minutes of the interview where K talks about the efforts to recruit soldiers from the penal colony. He’s too old and has a political sentence so is not a target of recruitment efforts. Prisoners are all forced out onto the football pitch to listen to the ‘recruiters’ tell them that even if they die, their relatives will get a good pay-out. Sometimes lectures about this are read and K has been present at them. K talks about the fluctuation in numbers recruited – there’s now few signing up. In 2023 there were hundreds, by May 2024 a few dozen a month. Now it’s less than a dozen a month at best. Recent recruitment was because of a false impression that one could sign up to get out of prison and that a ceasefire would be called. Even recruiters used this argument. K emphasises that ideological arguments are entirely absent – even antiwar people sign up, particularly if they have been jailed for desertion/avoiding mobilization (337th article of the Criminal Code). There are pro-war prisoners in the colony, but not a single one has signed up. Therefore we should really take stock of the real motivations for signing up from prison.

Often those who have been in Ukraine seek to dissuade others from signing up. But they themselves then sign up themselves as a way of getting the punitive 337 label removed. One should not think that because someone went to fight that they are for the war, and that if someone refused to fight they are against.

K is asked why he didn’t leave Russia when he had the chance. He says he does not regret his (in)actions. Where you are doesn’t matter to how to speak about things. And at the same time there’s no shame for those who choose to leave. It’s solidarity that’s important. (full disclosure: I was on a discussion panel with K before he was arrested – he was quite confident he was safe from arrest).

Then the interview discusses the causes of the war from a leftist perspective – putting events into the context of the dead-end choices made by the elites since 2010 – the acceleration towards a form of authoritarianism away from managed democracy, and that most importantly this was a ‘choice’ supported by most liberal elites.

There’s a discussion of how the left can use the demand for Soviet nostalgia and quasi-nationalist figures’ big social media presence to get their own voices heard. But about how the biggest problem for left public presence in Russia was always the visceral hatred for progressive politics among the liberal journalist caste. This, however, is changing because younger people are less politically tribal. There’s interesting discussion about how the war forces leftists to think anew about their attitudes towards the USSR – a split between people who can assess the progressive aims of the Revolution, and those seduced by ‘Red Imperialism’. The latter invariably support the regime since 2022. At the same time, those liberal ‘fellow travellers’ of Putinism are also forced to confront some home truths, such as their cynicism and deep mistrust of democratic transformation.

At the end of the interview the speakers look forward to possible outcomes at the end of the conflict. It’s hard to imagine how weird this is – quite open political discussion coming from within a prison colony. One of the final metaphors K uses is a ship adrift in the Arctic sea with the officers on the bridge unable to even reach the captain let alone get him to make decisions. There’s an iceberg out there in the fog, but no one has time for it. Kagarlitsky reminds us that the great title of Alexei Yurchak’s book on the end of the USSR is still very relevant for today: ‘everything was forever, until it was no more’.

Beyond the Talk: What Questions Reveal About How We Understand Russia Today

Leave a reply
Guess what schooner rewarded me after my long talk?

On Monday this week I was fortunate enough to present my book at the King’s Russia Institute. I’ve now presented it a number of times for different audiences. This time I tried to do a really deep dive into the complex architecture, even though the talk was a public one and had a mixed audience. However, instead of recounting to you the content of the talk, I thought I’d share the questions I got from the audience at the end of around 55 minutes of me yapping. I think often the responses are the most fascinating part of a scholarly event – where you get a good idea of the core interests of the audience and how your talk has connected – or failed to connect.

There were a lot of questions and I didn’t manage to write them down in full, but here’s an approximation of them with a short version of my answer:

How does internet censorship affect knowledge of the war inside Russia? How can people move from a pro- to an anti-war position given the limitation of information about the war? How do people find information about the war to then be able to adopt an anti-war position.

This for me seemed to be based on the mistaken assumption that people are isolated from sources of information that could potentially present a different version of reality to that consumed in mainstream media. However, in my answer I emphasised that information was not the problem, nor was censorship, but that the real problem was that people with doubts or moral objections are made to feel isolated and in the minority, when that’s not the case at all. Making people think no one would share their opinion is the genuine strength of media control and self-censorship. This is also a way to deal with people, who misguidedly in my opinion, think that ‘preference falsification’ is merely a technical problem in surveys, but part of the ‘curse and blessing’ for Russian studies, as Alexander Libman calls it, of the ‘credibility revolution’ (that empirical work should be about showing causal relationships in data statistically).

Can one really say there’s been a growth in repression inside Russia since the war?

I don’t really understand where this question came from, but it allowed me to talk about the power of random and non-predictable repression using examples of people in my research who are openly anti-war, and then the documented cases where people got prosecuted for ‘likes’ and social media posts. I still remain of the opinion that many of the people prosecuted wanted to set a moral example, which in itself is interesting (if very sad). The oppositional people in my research (a very small sample) are extremely careful about some things, but seemingly take risks in other contexts where constructive ambiguity is possible. Of course there is also the possibility of the very Soviet tradition of opposition by analogy or metaphor which some of my Russian colleague like to draw attention to.

How do you understand the term ‘civil society’ as it applies to Russia?

This was I suppose a direct response to part of my talk where I say it’s important to draw on the very rich newer threads in political research that emphasise emotional and social motivation for activists, and the pre-organizational capacity of people to, well, get together and stand up against things they don’t like. One of the more interesting tensions in the books is me saying that things like Navalnyi’s regional ‘training’ of activists was genuinely capacity building while, at the same time, there will always ‘spontaneously’ emerge leader-like or charismatic figures to can anchor the expression of grievances and that often participation is ‘pre-cognitive’ or ‘beyond intentionality’. In that way, I’m merely echoing work being done in disciplinary contexts a little removed from mainstream political science – both in critical human geography and indeed, in Russian sociology itself.  

How have people been able to distance themselves from the war through pursuing a policy of detaching themselves as much as they can from the state (the ‘happy ones’)?

This was a very detailed descriptive question based on personal experience and it allowed to briefly reiterate what I’ve written on this blog quite recently about the very strongly class-inflected experience of the war in Russia (mirrored by the Ukrainian experience to a degree) and how yes, some people can both ‘buy’ themselves out of thinking about it. Though, I emphasise, the book argues that everyone has to deal with a particularly fickle and mean state at various junctures.

How do you gain the trust of people? How do they internalize fear which then affects their behaviour and what they say to people? How do you avoid just circling in the same group of persons in your research?

Some standard answers here about snowballing and long-term embedding in communities. I do think participant observation helped me overcome one failing I had early on after 2022, which Ilya Matveev helpfully pointed out to me: it’s easy to underestimate the power of fear in Russia.

How does resentment against the war manifest itself in relation to how people treat veterans?

I think I maybe misremembered this question, but it allowed me to repeat a point Ekaterina Shulman/Schulmann made recently about how people when surveyed are quite critical of the idea of the state providing more than just mercenary payment to soldiers and are not at all for the idea of giving them political influence or a ‘social’ preference in access to services, etc. In that (Russian language) YouTube talk by Shulman there’s also some interesting critical discussion of how to interpret survey data in Russia.

What do you mean by state capacity? How can Gen Z inspire the rest of the population in opposing the path taken by the state?

Two questions here. The first in response to perhaps the most convoluted part of my book/talk which is where I try to demystify the operations of the local Russian state by saying ordinary people have a lot more power to change how the state operates and that this is a political kind of power. In a sense, ‘capacity’ to get policy done depends a lot on consent, and even a kind of common modus operandi shared between citizens and street-level bureaucrats. The examples I give in the book are trash collection, heating infrastructure, and even 2022 military mobilization. There’s an accessible early version of how I think about this here and again, here.

The last question was in reference to the detention of the street singer in St Petersburg. The questioner was right, I think, to point to the moral example of young people as capable of forcing older people to reflect on their own hypocrisy and cowardice, and, hopefully, change this. On the other hand, I responded by saying that when regimes start policing the minutia of popular culture, they start to look a bit absurd, and from there it’s not a long journey to them looking weak and brittle.

Ethnography (about Russia) is not anecdotes

5 Replies
How positivists try to make me feel about my methods. I hide little, but what’s hiding under their jackets might not be so appealing

How holistic knowledge about societies can only be produced through observation and reflection.

Doing this new podcast on ‘Unfiltered Russia’ reminded me of one of the main problems of the monocrop ‘Russia expertise field’ – its frequent distance, disdain or condescension towards its subject matter. It was really nice that my co-discussants instinctively (and intellectually) grasped the main idea of my research: that externally-imposed theories and even domestically collected statistics don’t even begin to tell the whole story. Genuine social, political, and economic understanding needs observation and even participation.

The experience of talking about this on the podcast was particularly triggering for me. When I present my work, it often meets incredulity or hostility, even among fellow social scientists. I can’t tell you how many times my work has been downgraded to ‘that’s just an anecdote’ (see below), or in the more polite variant – ‘so how generalizable is this to the rest of Russia’. Some younger scholars who’ve never exited the comfort of their methodological prison cells can’t help telling on themselves by saying, ‘so, your ‘n’ [sample size] is like, not statistically significant?’

Now, I’ve grown a thick enough skin not to react when fellow researchers show their ignorance of the last 90 years of post-positivism, or when they show their indifference to the ongoing replication crisis in the so-called ‘harder’ side of the human sciences. However, the podcast reminded me of a couple of recent experiences on the ‘Explain the Russian War’ junket circuit. A ‘junket’ is a paid trip where the real reasons are for pleasure or to engage in ‘self-PR’. ‘The circuit’ refers to the now familiar sight of the same haggard faces who are booked for expert events ‘on decolonizing Russia’, or ‘how to really help Ukraine’.

Because of their spinelessness and simultaneous sense of moral superiority, governments in the European area have paid for events where Russian ‘experts’ come and blather about civil society in exile and the one-true-opposition-that-if-only-was-given-lots-of-cash-would-make-Russia-forgettable-again. I occasionally was an observer or even discussant at a few of these events (unpaid and even self-funded on occasion). The participants (as opposed to audience) are generally what is known as ‘grant-feeders’ – a subcategory of public sociopaths; exile journalists, pundits and publicists – some genuine, many fraudulent; real activists and honest NGO people (small minority, may the Lord protect them), EU-adjacent policy people and even parliamentarians (‘I’m just here for the lunch, is there going to be wine?’), and the occasional activist academic (gurns horribly)!

At one such event I was even on a panel discussing ‘what’s really going on in Russian society’ and had the misfortune to be paired with two excellent quantitative scholars whom I deeply respect. Now, these colleagues are good, nice people, who are at least polite about my work in public (well, actually, they just don’t acknowledge my work exists, but that’s par for the course). They do perhaps know that ethnography exists, vaguely. As is the rule, I got the usual question from the audience: ‘how generalizable are your findings?’ Which is fair enough and hard to answer without giving a minilecture.

However, what was funny (not actually funny), was that while various policy people were perfectly happy with my presentation and even came up and thanked me (including a defence bloke in an effing full dress military uniform), it was a humanities colleague who, in a public question, said: ‘it’s great that we can get these anecdotes from inside Russia from Jeremy, along with the survey data from Dr. Bokolov, and Professor Girskaia’. ANECDOTES!? That’s what you, an archival researcher, got from my talk? Clearly, I have failed. And I blame myself. Well, not entirely. It shows that in humanities too, we can be seduced by the dark arts of big numbers and a dodgy statistical regression. If you want anecdotes I can give them, but they’ll be about academic corruption and faked or manipulated survey data.

Obligatory Oz picture

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the point of this post. How does ethnography justify itself as a method? Here, ‘ethnography’ is just a short-hand for a variety of holistic methods now routinely used by qualitative researcher – be they health sociologists, criminologists, urban planners, occupational therapists, researchers of religion, or even just plain vanilla anthropologists (not so many left, unfortunately).

The ethnographic method* developed as an anthropological tool in the 19th century It was used as a way of documenting and providing an insight into the culture, or everyday life, of previously ‘unknown’ peoples and societies. It also has sociological origins associated with the urbanization of the United States and with the ‘Chicago School’ of the 1920s-. Ethnographers distinguished themselves from social scientists who wanted to reproduce the rigours of the natural sciences through positivism. They did this by emphasising that the researcher must first experience what their research subjects experienced before being able to take a more ‘objective’ or ‘detached’ view.

Throughout the twentieth century, ethnographic researchers were able to use experience to challenge hegemonic ideas about societies. In the English-speaking world, Scheper-Hughes, Abu-Lughod, S. Ortner, L. Wacquant, A. Tsing, H. Pilkington  are just a few recent examples of major ‘disruptors’ who used fieldwork and observation to go against the flow of common sense about some ‘social problem’. (These are just a few who came to mind that I’ve either taught or studied. Hilary Pilkington, who worked a lot on the Russia beyond Moscow, directly inspired me and part of this post rearticulates her teaching).

Ethnography has emerged as a kind of ‘minority report’ – a kind of dissenting way of doing social science (many of us actually reject the application of scientism to our work). We usually share the view that the ‘common sense’ domination of numbers and metrics leads to dangerous groupthink or even complete misunderstanding of what’s going on. Ethnography is useful (maybe even indispensable) when the context of the ‘thing’ under study is important to our understanding of it. For example, it might be that we need a more holistic understanding of an- ‘other’, and this can include a society, like Russia, which is mainly presented through a ‘numbers lens’, or as explainable using quantitative methods (‘60% of Russians support the war, therefore they ergo must be fascists’).

Some of the other advantages of ethnography in general are relevant to the Russian case too: if a group under study is hard to reach e.g. ‘ordinary Russians’ who don’t take part in politics or polling, or whose livelihoods rely in part on the informal economy. If building trust relations with respondents is a prerequisite for the research e.g. people living in a society with a particularly repressive state. Where you are studying complex relationships or the dynamics of social processes e.g. the impact of war and economic pressures on attitudes towards the government.

But how do we get to these insights? What’s special about the approach? Sometimes overlooked is that it’s not just interviewing but also observing and even ‘participating’. William Foote Whyte, in 1984 wrote: ‘Observation guides us to some of the important questions we want to ask the respondent, and interviewing helps us to interpret the significance of what we are observing.’ It’s a reinforcing loop of interpretation.

Paul Willis, another important voice, said that to do an ethnography is to engage in everyday life for the purposes of reflection upon it. This is the essence of ‘the sociological imagination’. What’s that? Most simply, after C. Wright Mills, it’s the idea that ‘abstracted empiricism’ (data produce statistical assertions that then get collapsed into ‘scales’ of public opinion, for example) tends to lead us further away from a deep ‘awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society’, unless we are careful. So, Mills points out, writing in the 1950s, ‘voting behaviour’ might appear to be easily amenable to statistical investigation, but really, it tends to produce an analytically ‘thin’ version of reality: it ignores things like the party machinery for getting out the vote. It might ignore the role of the traditional or extended family in shaping political views.

C. Wright Mills – a powerfully thinking life cut short

Of course, it’s no coincidence I mention Mills’ example of polls and voting behaviour. For this is still the main way that social reality in Russia is translated and presented for Western audiences. Ethnographers would assume that data are never just ‘gathered’ like fruits in the wild but actively produced in the interaction between the researcher and the human interlocutor. This is what Anthony Giddens refers to as the ‘double hermeneutic’. It means that stating we are ‘objective’ in recording our observations is insufficient grounds for claiming we have generated reliable ‘facts’ and knowledge. The main challenge to positivistic versions of social science (incl.  polling) is ‘interpretivism’: we can only know the social world we study via the meanings attached to it by human subjects. Because meanings are different and changing, and contested, we can’t keep a firm hold on to the idea of a stable external social ‘reality’.

Now, there are many critiques of surveys, but you may not be surprised to find that when you mention them to people who rely on survey methods, they respond with technical justifications (that the sample size was representative, that the questions were formulated to cope with preference falsification, and so on). The main critiques come from phenomenology, emancipatory analysis, and feminism. I won’t go into detail here, but on the first point, phenomenologists might point out that the survey is a highly artificial interaction and often the person responding is reacting to expectations – both of the researcher, of what’s the ‘right’ answer, of what’s ‘politically correct’, or the rumble in their stomach because it’s lunch time. In other words, the answers are in no way empirical ‘facts’.

Further, quantification is not ‘valid’: people don’t think of their ‘support for the Russian Armed Forces in the Special Military Operation’ in terms of ‘completely agree’, ‘largely agree’, ‘disagree’, ‘strongly disagree’. Indeed, this language may be so hackneyed or alienating, or, indeed, frightening, that some of the answers might be worthless. Now, it might be that some people actually think that Russian soldiers are above all paragons of virtue and that stories of war crimes are made up Western propaganda. The point though is that a survey certainly won’t help you understand that. [obligatory note that there are people – and they’re mainly Russian researchers based in Russia – critically interpreting survey data to find out important stuff].

Once again, it’s kinda sad that in the 1950s there was already growing scepticism among sociologists about official statistics and survey methods and this was one reason that secondary (more qualitative) analysis exploded, especially in the UK. That’s not to say that quantitative methods don’t have an important role to play elsewhere. There are lots of social relations that are quantifiable in some way or other – age; voting proportions; wages; time spent working; wealth and gender inequalities.

But this post is long enough already. I like the 2017 article on polling by Greg Yudin and often read it with my students. In it, Yudin has some zingers: polls are an institution of political presentation (not representation). They are pernicious because they wholly occupy the public’s imagination due to the absence of other democratic measures of voice. ‘It hypnotizes its audience with its numbers’, but ‘because it is inappropriate to talk about politics… [it is only a radical minority of people [who] answers questions… That’s why the claim that polls represent the population has no foundation in reality’. The article is well worth a read again, especially as it’s not just in Russia that people are hypnotized by the Wizard of Oz.  

Is ‘Putinism’ a coherent ideology? Do Russians identify with it?

2 Replies

A new book by Marlene Laruelle seeks to answer the first question, if not the second. Ideology and Meaning-making Under the Putin Regime is just under 400 pages and is somewhat of a departure from the fashion in US-published books for slim volumes. A few people asked me to write a review of it after I mentioned it previously, but this post is not a real review, but just some reflections based on my interest in criticizing approaches to understanding ‘late Putinism’ that rely too heavily on coherent ideological explanations. Having said that, Laruelle is one of the scholars most careful and scrupulous in her research.

At the outset, Laruelle asks: ‘How did the Russo-Ukrainian war become possible, and what role did ideology play in enabling it?’ The Introduction goes on to argue that the ‘Russian regime does offer an ideological construction that has internal plausibility and coherence’. For Laruelle, and perhaps most political scientists, the regime uses three mechanisms to ensure hegemony: material, ideational , and repressive. The first two are ‘cocreational’ – meaning that people link prosperity with the general will of the regime and identify with it. At the same time, Laruelle admits, the vast majority of Russians sense a lack of a state ideology. Her jobs then is to try to reconstruct something resembling a coherent set of beliefs or a world view and show how it is shaped by the elite in a feedback system with intellectuals, the outside world, imagined history, and ‘the people’.

But before doing that, her intro is really effective at criticizing existing approaches – showing that they severely neglect the ‘ideational’. She confidently dispatches what we can call the ‘kleptocracy’, ’empty propaganda’, ‘totalitarian’ approaches. At the same time, Laruelle sets herself some limits – ideology is about meaning-making and not propaganda, and it’s not about doctrine but worldview. Most importantly, ideology is aggregated from multiple repertoires and may not always/even inform policy.

The rest of the book is smartly structured in four parts. Reordering Ideology; Learning and Unlearning the West; Russia’s Counterrevolution; Russia’s Geoimaginaries.

Part 1 tries to get away from the idea of ideology as imposed by coherent actors from above while emphasizing the general tendency of state ideologues to present the current social order as ‘valid’ and irreplaceable. Three elements of regime doxa were formed in the 1990s: anti-collapse; normative great power recognition; state over (and encompassing) nation. This develops into five strategic metanarratives which then dictate the content of much public speech: Russia as a civilization-state, Russia as katechon (holding back the antichrist), as anticolonial force, as antifascist power, as defender of traditional values. Laruelle argues that despite the ‘chaos’ of ideologemes one encounters, there is a coherence to public speech that adheres to a mental apparatus with ‘roots’ in these narratives (p.19).

All the ‘topoi’ that ever enter lay talk, like ‘Gayropa’, or ‘collective West’, can be traced back to the core metanarratives and then core beliefs. ‘Indeed, as in jazz, there is an established common theme or point, but each authorized player is allowed to improvise at will… There is both ideological opportunism… and stability in the core set of beliefs.’ (23) Perhaps feeling that this is altogether too neat, after some analysis of individual worldviews at the top of the elite, Laruelle acknowledges that various issues still can’t be explained by this framing alone. There are, after all, lots of intervening institutions and actors. ‘It is challenging to to decipher what is genuine cocreation from what is cueing’ (28), Laruelle remarks, before reminding us that very few security elites favoured an aggressive Ukraine policy before the war. Part of the answer is the tendency of authoritarian neoliberalism to produce ideological entrepreneurship, of which Z-patriotism is just the latest example. However, the regime itself is not the addressee here: ‘a vision of Russia that emerged in lived experience by Putin’s inner circles and more broadly the establishment… looked for intellectual soil and a better-articulated doctrine to justify and nurture itself.’ (37).

Part 2 traces the rejection of liberal internationalism since 2000. Analysing the use of the word ‘liberal’ in Putin’s speeches, Laruelle argues that ‘his self-presentation is purely situational, if not opportunistic or cynical… and [while he] has never totally abandoned references to universal values, the shift from supporting liberalism… to denouncing it wholesale has been a major change.’ From here its a short walk (to 2022) to an idea of recovering a ‘first modernity’ – an idea that ‘there exists a true Western heritage rooted in a rejection of some forms of modernity’ (92) and in this sense, Russia borrows from the US culture wars significantly. Partly because of this weak and reactive form of antiliberalism, ‘there is no consensus among the Russian establishment regarding Russia’s relationship to Europe identity-wise’ (96).

This Part also covers Byzantium and the ‘Pontic power’ shift after 2008 but which had weakened by 2022. There follows a chapter on patriotism as state-centrism – the idea that the only soveriengn actor can be the state. Over and above the usual argument about how empire, statism and statehood support each other, Laruelle discusses the discourse of ‘historical continuity’ (preemstvennost).

Throughout the book, there are author-calculated graphs of the rise or variation in the mentions of particular words. For example, on p. 113 we witness a striking rise since 2000 of the use of the term ‘patriotism’ in presidential speeches. Sometimes these figures speak for themselves and help support the main argument, but in other cases the ‘data’ looks noisy and too Putin-centric. On patriotism, it’s striking that Laruelle meticulously documents the spectacular and discursive promotion of pro-patriotic symbols and spaces, but, like the regime itself, emphasizes the closure of narratives, the narrowing of what can count as patriotism and how little ‘content’ the ‘spatial imaginaries’ and ‘uses of the past’ have room for. A genuinely productive and mobilizing deployment of Stalin, WWII, Lenin, Brezhnev is impossible because of the timidity and incoherence of the regime, while the celebration of Russia’s environmental diversity, modernization and ‘valorization of territory’, are notable for what they omit or would appear absurd in proposing.

Similarly, the reconstruction of Russia’s ‘Imperialness’ in the next chapter shows the regime is not without ambiguities and is even half-hearted. For example, rehabilitation of White ideology (the anti-Bolsheviks in the Civil War) is limited to the cultural sphere. Fully embracing it would mean devaluing useful elements of the Soviet heritage. Putin here emerges as a bit at odds with the rest of the elite – much more anti-Bolshevik and more pro-Tsardom. Laruelle gives us a neat overview of how Putin and Medvedev have referred to tsars, but this is a good example of the messy data – the graph is just a series of ups and downs, even allowing for the clear devotion of Putin to Peter the Great (136). This chapter also deals with the very real revival of antisemitism by regime insiders and the extreme anti-Ukrainianism of Timofey Sergeytsev, though none of the radical voices are quoted in the new ideological school textbook sponsored by the regime (144).

Part 3 opens with a chapter on Russian civilization as rejecting Western Universalism. Cue a journey through Spengler, Toynbee, Huntington, Eisenstadt, von Herder and a brief reiteration of the nineteenth-century Slavophilism and then the Soviet rehabilitation of Spengler through to the late Soviet and post-Soviet influence of Gumilev, Panarin and the replacement of Marxism-Leninism by ‘kulturologiia’ – an essentialist new superstructure explaining world history to Russian students. For example, A. Panarin links ‘Russia’s messianism to being a global safeguard of polycentrism: by its very existence, Russia demonstrates that the West is not the sole driving force of development’ (156). Here we get also a reiteration of Laruelle’s argument that ‘Russianness’ has been detached from ethnonationalism by Putin successfully, and a short discussion of three versions of Islamic civilizationalism that compete within Russia today (Slavic-Turkic fusion; Volga-Ural centrism; eclectic Kadyrovist loyalist conservatism).

Chapter 8 is perhaps the key chapter in some ways to the book – on Conservatism. Three sources inform today’s version: tsarist era, Soviet ‘social conservatism’, and the interest in ‘morality’ from the 1990s. Here I feel there are some stretches, or at least some grounds for more debate – as any of the three ‘sources’ here remain obviously open to interpretation. Nonetheless, Laruelle is willing to back up her argument with plenty of evidence, noting, for example, that the moral aspect of liberalism in the 1990s often goes unnoticed (173). Once again, in this chapter, a reader might get the impression that the resort to quantification of terms like ‘traditional values’ in speeches has little to add to the rich scholarship of the author.

Mentions of ‘tradition’ are pretty stable since 2005 (or rather the standard deviation increases for a while and then reverts to a norm when it comes to words like ‘spirituality’ – which is a notoriously empty signifier for Putin). We get intimations of the slippery, unconvincing embracing of conservatism when the author reveals nuggets like the fact that there is hardly any investment by the state in intellectual research on conservatism (186). This leads Laruelle to note that those conservative intellectual entrepreneurs who tried to work with the Presidential Administration were to be disappointed.

This explains why so many ‘entrepreneurs’ like Kholmogorov became more reactionary – not because of an alignment with the regime, but because of their frustration with it. Thus, it is surprising when Laruelle ends by arguing that conservatism really is the ideological backbone of the regime, and indeed, that it is a national conservative one, albeit that it is a national state form of conservatism. Coming away from this chapter I understood that a vague form of conservatism is an organic part of intellectual history in Russia and has a social content, but that has had almost no contribution to policy output directly (beyond contradictory tokenistic lawmaking by the ‘rabid printer’ that is the state Duma). On these terms one might argue that a country like Denmark or the UK is more consistently conservative – especially in terms of what the book proposes as a ‘cocreated’ hegemonic ideology.

In Chapter 9, Laruelle tackles the subject of Katechon as part of a reactionary tradition in Russia of millenarianism and eschatology. Russia, after Maria Engström, is the ‘gatekeeper of chaos’. In this logic, the Ukraine war could be seen as part of a Reconquista. Nuclear Orthodoxy, Soviet imperialism, mystical Stalinism, and my personal favourite – the legend of the City of Kitezh (which can autarkically submerge itself in the heartland to hide from the hostile neighbouring territories) all rub shoulders in a bewildering postmodern eclectic blend of religious inspiration. ‘Teach us to breathe under the water’, never sounded so apt.

In Chapter 10, the scholarly fashionable idea of identity as spatial imaginary gets a comprehensive treatment. Laruelle here reissues her own contribution: Russia as fertile ground for geographical metanarratives (212). Russia is (and can only be) Great because it is big and has expanded a lot. Eurasian destiny as teleology. Without empire, there’s no Great Power status. Cultural and political boundaries do not overlap with state borders – Franck Billé’s idea of ‘auratic bodies’.

But the notion of Eurasia remains horribly elastic and fuzzy, as Laruelle points out herself. A common destiny led by Russia? (remarkable to think about this given the admission by most Russians that they are completely dependent on the whim of China now). Eurasia as civilizational project which differs or competes from Euroatlantic ones (again, an empty signifier)? The book does show that at least performatively, Putin likes to play around with the the term ‘Euro-Asian’ from 2012 onwards. However, characteristic of his improvisation, this discourse drops off from 2020 sharply, perhaps because of the failure of the Eurasian Union. By the end of the chapter, the author admits to ‘numerous semantic gaps. No official text about the Eurasian Union mentions Eurasianism as an ideology’ (230). And the ‘founding fathers’ of Eurasianism enjoy cultural, but not political, prestige (with the exception of Gumilev, perhaps).

Because this is a v. long post already, I will skip the final Russian World and Anticolonialism chapters, though they are just as informative and well-researched.

In the conclusion Laruelle argues that Russia has moved towards a much more rigid ideological structure and has an official ideology (265), but at least to this reader, the book, with its repetition of the terms ‘repertoires’ and ‘plasticity’, seems to argue for something different – perhaps the word ‘ideology’ is inadequate here. Can an official ideology be entirely negative – based on resistance to the West, and promoting an all-powerful state? As Laruelle notes – Russian efforts to project soft-power have failed and ‘the state’s survival remains the main objective of the regime, and acquired territories are subordinated to this state-centric strategy more than having a value in themselves’ (266).

‘Typologizing … the Putin regime may be morally reassuring, but it does not automatically provide a heuristic approach for scholarship if the typology is taken at face value and not itself interrogated’ (269). Should we talk about Putinism? Only in so far as a collective Putinism expresses how all these historically determined discourses get more or less traction over time. ‘War Putinism was only one of the possible options of early Putinism…Ideology matters when it reinforces strategic goals, but not enough to force a decision solely on this basis’ (272). For Laruelle, the war forces the blending of formerly disunited repertoires – soveriengty, civilization, conservatism, traditional values, etc. ‘The war has provided internal coherence to this ideological puzzle’ (273). Manufacturing consent has its limits, but it is aided by depoliticization, dissociation, ‘consentful’ discontent, ideological passivity, and a shared ‘zeitgeist’ with the regime: that Russian society is superior (‘healthier’) to the West. Thus, in conclusion, Laruelle sides with quantitative surveyors in proposing a relatively coherent national-conservative majority, while leaving the future open to alternative reinventions such as cooperation with the West, or an ‘Asian’ model like Singapore, or even an illiberal grassroots democracy.

As regular readers might surmise there’s a lot here I both agree with and disagree with, but for anyone wanting a survey of all the genealogies and diversities of Russian national-conservatism, this book will not be found wanting.

The loneliness of the long-distance war supporter in Russia

8 Replies

Russian street theatre performers rehearse in a public park in Moscow, August 2025

A piece for Ridl in May 2025 anticipated the disappointment Russians would experience at the lack of a ceasefire. I got to confirm the palpable malaise first hand when, this summer, I spent a long period in Russia. This piece then, draws on some first-hand observations of the ‘social mood’ in Russia right now. Irritation and isolation is the flipside of the ‘comfort’ culture. And perhaps what partly feeds demand for it. As one of the few social researchers with access to what we call ‘the field’, I am very careful to calibrate what I hear and see. I don’t want this piece to be read as ‘anecdote’ or the uninformed views of a mere visitor. I take seriously social science methods and reflect a lot on potential bias and the danger of interlocutors misleading me, or themselves.

Irritation as a second-order affect/effect of war-weariness

With that methodological note out of the way, I couldn’t help but echo the comment of a fellow researcher on social media who in July remarked: ‘why are Russians so grumpy?’ Specifically, he was referring to service workers in front-line work with the public in a large city. I also experienced a surprising amount of unpleasant service encounters (in Moscow, of course – a city that makes New York look a bit chilled out). People are genuinely irritable and snippy, and part of this can be put down to the general social situation, while a lot of ink has gone in to ‘proving’ that many Russians have materially benefitted from the war, it’s difficult to avoid the strains and stresses the war has brought to all the rungs on the social ladder.

Before I arrived, Russian people kept telling me that obviously Putin would get a peace on some of his terms and that even if he didn’t, it was clear that Trump would bring the Ukrainians to heel. How do they feel now? Not great, is the answer. It’s an empirical confirmation of a point made by more quantitively-inclined observers: that polls can tell us something, as long as we read them carefully. In a talk a while ago Ekaterina Shulman remarked that it was very revealing that while a big majority tell pollsters they agree with the statement that the ‘SVO’ (special military op) is going ‘very well’, almost the same number agree with the statement that a ceasefire should ‘happen right away’, even at the contact line (in marked contrast to the stated aims of the operation). Hardly compatible evaluations.

Cognitive dissonance is palpable then, talking to all kinds of different people in Moscow and elsewhere. And this is true not only about the misnomer ‘SVO’. ‘The economy is great. But my personal circumstances are tight. And my friend can’t find a decent job. But isn’t the rise in wages [reported on the radio] great? For other people’. You get the idea. This is a classic psychological distortion, a standard effect of suggestion. This isn’t the main point of my post here, but certainly, irritability should maybe get more attention as a social barometer in contexts like the one Russians are facing. Irritability pairs with cognitive dissonance, but in turn that dissonance expresses a form of knowledge and a rational reflection of (constrained) material circumstances. That things are not as they are presented.

On a side note, I should add that most of the people I interact with do not consume alternative media. Some are openly critical of state media, but most are not (which doesn’t mean they don’t know it’s a very distorted picture). Nonetheless, irritability that bubbles to the surface is palpable when vaguely politicizable topics come up. With irritability one could pair: loneliness.

The loneliness of the true believer (in war)

People who feel a lack of connection or recognition or even just the possibility of sharing pleasantries get irritated and frustrated. In the social sciences literature this is covered by the study of the ‘politics of relationality’ and of ‘affect’. A lot of effort has gone in linking alienation and loneliness to a general lack of recognition of particular groups of people as subjects. And some explain the rise of the far right and other political affiliations through this alienation. More generally, ‘relationality’ is about acknowledging our human need for some sense of stable relationships with our world as we experience it. Tradition, and religion and authority are not available for that purpose in many societies. Defensive consolidation at the start of the war might have been a gut instinctive reaction for many people – but the lack of a patriotic cause, or even coherent leadership position on what the war is for, means that any sense of rallying around a symbol of Russianness is hard to put into practice.

***

Sergei Akopov shared with me his 2021 piece on Sovereignty as ‘organized loneliness’ just after I had drafted this blog post. So I need to make a quick aside about it. Akopov focuses on “symbolic representations of sovereignty and their ability to evoke ideological discourse that appeals to notions of identity and loneliness. In the case of contemporary Russia these are also appeals to Russia’s ‘lonely’ civilizational sovereignty, projected both in historical and geopolitical ways.” Later on he argues: “states are able to successfully talk on behalf of their people when state discourse on sovereignty efficiently (directly or implicitly) appeals to a nationally or civilization
ally defined people’s ‘loneliness anxiety.’” Like Akopov, in my book I try to get inside questions of alienation and identity in Russia, though unlike him, I link them to the traumatic social experience of Soviet dissolution. Nonetheless, I would agree with Akopov that ‘organized loneliness’ is a function of the ‘powerful state sovereigntism’ trope in Russia which crowds out more productive forms of shared identity.

***

rubble and ice-cream – the quintessence of Moscow summer

The true believers I talk to are terribly lonely. It has been hard for scholars to address the experience of ‘social death’ that has been injected into Russian society. Just in my own circle, many families are not on speaking terms – and this is just among those who have not left the country. Often it is the anti-war people who have made the definitive break with their relatives and come across as more ‘extreme’ in their views. But the social death itself is then felt most keenly by the true believers. This is because, in reality, apart from the radio and TV, they have no firm sources of confirmation and validation. When I re-entered the field, I was most afraid of my own social death – a number of people had deleted me from Telegram, afraid of any unforeseen consequences of further acquaintance. However, back in ‘the field’, all was good again. Not so for my lonely true believers. And so they turned to me, again and again.  

When a destabilizing or traumatic event is experienced, it’s not just a psychological thing. It’s social as well. People get comfort or strength from a ‘reassurance’ check provided by others, much more than by the media (although parasocial relationships online are very important too nowadays). Social reality is what emerges from sharing experience and validating it. From interacting with others. ‘Fear and anxiety feed off isolation’, as Hannah Arendt showed in her analysis of loneliness. ‘Hope is reinforced by sharing fears with others’, as Anya Topolski remarks in a book on the politics of relationality. And my comments here are largely derived from her work on Arendt. Normalization – even in a war – has to be reproduced (and become validated) socially somehow. But think for a minute and this isn’t really possible for a lot of people in Russia. They know that what they hear is not quite right, or even quite wrong. But it’s not easy to talk about it – even to loved ones.

What was unexpected for me was how many people wanted desperately to talk to me about the war as a relative outsider. Even if they started off by saying ‘we’re not going to talk about the war’, within a few minutes they had invariably come back to it! All of these people were hardcore or normcore war supporters. I think this is partly precisely because I’m considered as coming from a ‘different reality’ to them, as they would occasionally remark. This revealed, again, inadvertently, that they know that their own country’s perspective might well be skewed. Detailed analyses of those conversations are for another post. What I would emphasise here is that irritation (not with me or my answers) and a sense of malaise emerged in those conversations too. A sense of senselessness.

I’ll just give one example. I couldn’t visit one of my oldest interlocutors as she’d been on holiday while I was in Moscow. Later she telephoned me and we had a long conversation supposedly about some house repairs she was planning but she kept repeating – a bit weirdly – how it ‘wasn’t right’ that to get to Crimea was only possible via the bridge and not like in the old days by train through Ukraine. And then she just couldn’t stop repeating that she didn’t understand why the Donbas was laid waste. ‘All that loss’. ‘All that destruction and for what?’ And she kept circling back, almost like someone with early-stage dementia. Not quite getting to the point. Not quite finding her thread. And not really even able to state what was obvious: that she felt depressed after her Crimean holiday.

More than a few observers argue that Russians are ‘bewitched’ by the war and that they require ‘disenchantment’ in some way to come to their senses (Ivan Gololobov has a forthcoming piece about ‘magical Putinism’). I would argue, on the contrary, not that the façade has cracked, but that all the latent disenchantments to do with aspects of Putinism unrelated to the war, are actually accelerating in their ability to resonate. Like a magic crystal.

There’s a word for this too in the literature: ‘crisis ordinariness’.  One could say that every society has its own version of this. Isn’t it the age of crises? To deal with this sense of crisis invading our social spaces, people have to cling to some kind of optimism – often a fantastic or magic one. That was possible, in the Russian case, earlier in the war. But hardly now. So crisis ordinariness is harder to ‘balance out’ with even a ‘cruel optimism’ (Lauren Berlant’s other phrase, specifically about the hollowness of the American dream today).

Is it strange to put so much emphasis on a vague feelings one encounters? For me, this was worth more than a pile of polling interviews or focus groups. But what about the bigger picture of indirect ways of dealing with reality? I don’t normally spend a lot of time in Moscow, preferring the company of people outside the dizzying pace of the capital. But this time I did spend some time there and made a point to make use of the possibility to travel to a number of ‘marginal’ places, touched directly by the war. But further reflections might need to be delayed for another time.

‘Spiritual values’ of the booze shops. Russia’s convenience economy as part of the soft administrative regime, Part II

1 Reply
In contrast to discounters offering vodka for less than £2, the most dismal craft beer styles continue to do a roaring trade in central Moscow (note they’re more than double the price of vodka

This is the second post to look at the ‘convenience’ side of soft authoritarian administration: the comfort it increasingly appears to provide to the majority of Russians. Ideologists of all stripes in Russia have always had a problem with slotting in material well-being and the petite bourgeois life into a set of values that are supposed to be operative in the so-called ‘spiritual’ community of Eastern Slavic culture. But, as I asked in the previous post, what if material well-being itself, as a direct result of authoritarianism, could become a kind of ideology? To think about how authoritarian ‘comfort’ can become a source of public satisfaction (or ‘legitimacy’) we have to re-iterate some home truths about what kind of ‘realism’ most people confront daily. It certainly isn’t open repression or a sense of living in a personalist dictatorship.

A focus on political authoritarianism as all about coercion or about ideological differentiation deflects our attention from the discursive reality as experienced by most, if not all Russians: a kind of socio-economic Darwinism. This is a hegemonic ‘common sense’ that exhorts all to become self-governing atomized subjects – individually responsible for their success and failure in life. The first ‘common sense’ acts from above through dominant discourses and economic policies – the notorious labour code sets an example (making defending workers’ rights legally almost impossible), and the paltry social protections for vulnerable groups make sure they understand their position (‘the state owes you nothing’). Just as important is the response from below which internalizes and reacts – a ‘neoliberalism from below’. People adapt and even partly mould themselves to this unwritten compact. This is explored in part of my new book.

There’s nothing new in this situation since at least the early 1990s. Indeed the whole point is arguing for the timelessness of survival of the fittest as part of a dominant discourse of suspended modernity – ‘you can’t have nice things anymore: social democracy was a mirage’. The war makes things even more obvious and pressing at an individual level. Inflation means that a huge amount of labour market churn has been ignited in a system that was already suffering from labour shortages. Workers internalize the need to ‘hustle’ and be on the lookout for better opportunities. In turn, corporations and employers struggle to offer some kind of enhanced package – a ‘wartime’ deal, to bind workers in place. Ironically, this looks more and more like the Soviet deal: paternalist benefits like special medical insurance, kindergarten vouchers, enhanced holiday pay. That, in some respects, employers are on the back foot partly explains why some Russians consider there to be more opportunities today for them because of the war.

However, the ability to leverage an interest group’s structural power is limited. Pay at all but executive level is still extremely low by middle-income country standards, and physical mobility in search of jobs is hard because of the housing crisis, exorbitant commuting costs and poor infrastructure beyond the centres of large cities. The question of railway modernization came up the other day because of the announcement that the Russian government will invest in a massive high-speed rail programme. While a classic example of political distraction and reannouncing old news with no fiscal capacity to follow up on the plans, it’s also laughable to anyone who knows anything about RzhD (Russian Railways).

RzhD can’t even deal with the oversupply of empty wagons clogging up the creaking existing network and its structural problems as a state monopoly. The latter include extremely low productivity, the inability to cut waste and invest appropriately, being subject to political interest groups (wagon builders), and just not being able to attract skilled workers. Russia is short of 2500 train drivers and 3000 loco crews, and yet RzhD – which cannot go bankrupt because of the state’s backing offered its staff, wait for it, … a 1.2% pay rise earlier in the year. Military Keynesianism this is not. This is a harbinger. If the general crisis of stagflation in Russia becomes entrenched, and it looks that way, the realization of the structural power of workers of all types will become an important barometer. Just because striking and organizing is illegal doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Scholarship on labour unrest shows that when it comes, it is contagious and happens because of rising expectations.  

So far, so good (well, bad, actually). But the dismal reality of labour’s subordinate positioning is not the end of the story. That we can call the evolving regime ‘soft administrative authoritarian’ is because the reverse side of neoliberal austerity + surveillance and monitoring is the democratization of digital convenience, which in the post-Soviet context is often evoked as part of a narrative of authoritarian comparative advantage. Cue one of the endless social media posts of US ‘exiles’ in Moscow marvelling at its profusion of bars and stores, its cleanliness, order and whiteness. Any mention of Moscow should immediately give pause for thought, but sooner or later, innovations to make life easier there do diffuse to the margins.  And this is because an infrastructure of ‘comfort’ is inseparable from the forms of digital control.

hot dumplings from the mall dispenser. The selling point is speed and convenience

Realtime monitoring of people and vehicles using cameras and apps has dual uses – I can see on my state-controlled mapping app where my bus is in real time even in the sticks (something hardly possible even in most European cities). In Moscow, I still can’t get over the unemployed children of upper-middle class people ordering things like a single tub of ice-cream which is delivered in minutes for a tiny delivery fee. The courier is fed the address from that same smartphone that monitors one’s every move. The app prompts the user to feed the gate code to the courier when they forget to buzz him in. When on the move, people pay for little comforts, like a spiced latte, using ‘Facepay’. After all, what’s the harm when all the self-checkouts use face-recognition to prevent shoplifting anyway? Administrative security is built into everyday life like in no other European country, let alone the US where they have a banking system more fit for the 19th, than the 21st  century.

And the point is not to remind people that the security services have access to everything (and that even now, data in the Interior Ministry car owner database can be bought and sold for trifling sums), though they might well ‘remember’ that too. The point is that administrative security – including having everything the state provides on a single app (and soon, communication on a single state-messenger service: Maks) is a meaningful source of national pride – “look at what our programmers can do? You can’t even book a school place or doctors appointment online in the backwards UK”. The idea of technological progress in place of genuine progressive modernity (where rights and entitlements are advanced) renders the voices of those who urge to resist and imagine an alternative political or social order absurd and unthinkable. After all, Moscow is the most liveable city in the world, right?

At the same time, even as the population gets poorer by middle-income country standards (from formerly a position similar to Malaysia, to a position more like that of Mexico), the baubles of the comfort and convenience economy are rolled out even to the smallest humdrum towns like the ones I study. Amazon-type staffed collection depots are everywhere (there are four in the town of 15,000 people I work in). The Yandex taxi app extends its reach into the provinces, and actually has detrimental effects as it makes informal taxi-driving unprofitable for many middle-aged working-class men. But it’s more convenient for the middle classes of course, who can afford the higher fares.

A Russian sociologist who wished to remain nameless reminded me recently that real ‘moral code’ [skrepy] of Putinism for most people is the democratization and stratification of the consumption of alcohol. For every degustation spot for fine wines, or craft beer popups in Moscow suburbs, there’s a ‘Red and White’ booze discounter. Red and White has over 21,000 little stores across the country. That’s twice as many outlets as there are McDonalds in the US, which has more than significantly more than double the population of Russia. There are usually three stores within a ten-minute walk of even the most unfashionable location in Moscow (ask me how I know). There are stores in the Arctic circle and one on the tip of Chukhotka, facing Alaska across the Bering Straits. There is even an outlet in the ancient city of Bukhara in Muslim Uzbekistan.

Red and White doorway with obligatory ad for workers

The number of B&W stores has nearly doubled since the start of the war as has the net worth of its billionaire owner. The slightly seedy, cheap and not-very-cheerful pokey stores are reminiscent of the worst of New York bodegas or UK cornershops. Their explosion shows not only the abiding nature of self-medication with alcohol but the explosion in demand for ‘low-cost’ offerings (the Group owner has also expanded his holding of discount supermarkets which do a roaring trade now – the photo at the top of this blogpost is from one of these stores).

Pity not only those purchasing adulterated beers and nasty red wines, but the hapless Central Asian immigrants forced to work for a pittance in these dives, along with the 24/7 kebab joints that usually spring up next to the wine shops. Comfort is maintained by a neocolonial service class. It’s also about the ‘doxa’: the naturalized and inevitable order: everyone has their labour price, and if yours is low, it’s the Red and White for you.

“From the Barista: add a review in Yandex Maps so that my boss gives me my passport back”

Consumption according to station is a moral virtue – achieving some kind of comfort and habitability becomes an ethical marker, rather than a purely socio-economic one, as researchers Rivkin-Fish and Crăciun and Lipan have argued. How this interacts with the war economy more directly – in the form of creating categories of biopolitical waste, and helping middle-class people distance themselves from responsibility for the conflict – we’ll come back to next time.