“What is Everyday Politics when you’re speaking about Russia?” The Eurasian Knot podcast. Part I.

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Listen to the whole one-hour conversation here: https://www.euraknot.org/everyday-politics-in-russia/

But for those who would prefer to read or skim, here’s a lightly edited version of the first half of the conversation with the two hosts.

If you can, please support the podcast in a time when humanities and social sciences are being defunded in the US. https://www.patreon.com/euraknot

And of course, the first question I have is, what is Everyday Politics when you’re speaking about Russia?

Well, I originally wanted to use the term “micropolitics” but the publisher didn’t like that. So I compromised, but I figure it’s a good compromise. Everyday politics is a way of drawing attention to the way that it’s not just electoral politics, it’s not just NGOs that do politics, it’s not just politicians that do politics. It’s a way of really grounding the term and trying to give voice to people who may themselves say that they’re not interested in politics, that they’re alienated from politics, but by interacting with them, listening to them, talking to them, you kind of tease out what the content of their everyday life is, that is still political. What they’re unhappy with, what they’re satisfied with, their attitude towards what’s going on in the life of their country, even if they don’t recognize that as political.

I have asked, given that you brought up a challenge, maybe this is because I’ve been reading your blog for a long time, your social media interactions, but reading this book, I feel it comes from a sense of frustration on your part, in the way that politics, however we frame it, or the Russian people are understood. And it sounds like you’re trying to push back against a lot of our assumptions and tropes that we use, like around, you know, atomization and the apolitical and these types of things. Am I right with that sense?

We need to remember that most of what we read about most places in the world that are not the US, you know, they’re filtered through multiple layers. They’re filtered through the way the media decides to cover things, but even when it comes to scholarly research, there’s also a filter, you know, there’s kinds of truths, you said tropes, but we could also call them paradigms or truths that are widely accepted, particularly in political science, which is the big daddy of ways of looking at Russia. Although, you know, my book also responds, and tries to engage in dialogue with the dominant paradigms as they have been promulgated in anglophone political science. But absolutely, I’m also frustrated because, as I said, the whole reason for choosing the term everyday politics is that most of what gets heard and what gets visibility is this very top level of politics.

“Let’s try and work out what Putin is thinking, who has his ear, who he talks to in his bunker during COVID, was that why he started the war”;  it can get to a point where it’s as if he’s the only political actor in the country, and obviously that’s not true, that’s kind of almost a caricature, but, you know, if you want to get a book published, you’ve got to have Putin in the title, and obviously I didn’t want to do that. On the other hand, obviously, there’s maybe an unhealthy obsession with the most visible liberal political opposition actors, including the late Alexei Navalny, who I have a lot of respect for, what he did, and I write about this in the book, but again, it is a bit unhealthy because it tends to crowd out other grassroots activities.

These things may not appear overtly political, but of course are. If I am sitting in my little town, deindustrializing town, my Rust Belt town, thousands of kilometers from Moscow, and some oligarchic forces in Moscow want to make money from dumping trash in my neighborhood illegally, and I approach my elected representatives, and I get pushed back, you know, the grassroots organization of opposition to that, which is also part of what I write about in the book, is political, and is generally neglected in the way that journalists and researchers write about the political in Russia, which is all the more surprising because, very often, these kind of local actions are successful because the whole political atmosphere in Russia is very brittle and febrile, and actually quite often elected politicians, if there is pushback, there is some kind of compromise or backing down for various reasons, which maybe we won’t get into now,

But there’s all kinds of political stuff going on in Russia, and then we can actually find out something that is surprising perhaps to some people, which is that even as the Russia state becomes more and more repressive, and tries to control all kinds of different things going on, you know, from what messaging app you use in your phone, to what kind of on-demand video you access, despite all of these things, people are not passive, and that’s a problem, again, if we talk about the word “trope”, there is an unhelpful, and I would say unhealthy trope even in scholarship, that is, Russians are depoliticised, atomised, and passive. Of course, there is something about that that’s true: people are quite scared often to get toe-to-toe with the powers that be because they have a huge coercive apparatus. But at the same time, that leads us down some dangerous pathways in assuming that Russians are not just coerced, but conformist, and coopted into supporting the war on Ukraine.

 So let’s dispel some of those myths, and go down to the local level. You already mentioned the successful story, but at Archangelsk and the trash scandal, and people’s pushback against it, there was of course kind of couched in this, like, as an environmental issue, but we could say that it’s also a political, deeply political issue. Could you tell us some more of these successful stories? I just want to feel better about today.

This is really frustrating because I was pitching an article, to an American journal, of political science, and they were like, well, there isn’t really anything going on, you know, no protest is possible. And then I just opened a social media feed, and I see that in the Far East, there’s street protests by local residents in a small city against the local authorities because the local authorities are allegedly poisoning stray dogs. So again, is that political? Well, yes, it is because although it’s a little bit like your example of environmentalism in Arkhangelsk protecting the local environment there; maybe it’s a moral objection to what’s going on, but it is also inherently political because it’s showing that people are not only unhappy with what their local authority is doing, they are willing to publicly show up and express their political subjectivity. We might believe that we have very little say when it comes to elections and the cross that we put on our ballot paper may or may not make any difference. We’re not necessarily interested in a wholesale change of elected officials at national level, you know, you very rarely get people say, oh, well, you know, I want the whole system to collapse, right? Because the system, the system has offered relative economic and social stability.

If I then link it to my own work, so I mainly focus on two small towns in the Kaluga region and I pseudonymise them, I obscure exactly where they are, but it’s a little bit like the our Arkhangelsk case, but on a smaller scale, a trash disposal site was located in a very small village in a protected environmental area, close to a national park, and that was successfully fought against by local people. And that was relatively recent. That was less than 6 years ago, but that really culminated in them being able to use legal, protest, organisational, social media, social network, ways and means to push back And the private company and the Moscow government

that was backing the private company, they backed off. Not before trying to use the security services and the police to intimidate these local people. We’re not saying it’s all, you know, ideal and wonderful; it just shows that political power, sometimes we call it associative and structural political power, is there, even if it’s not visible, even if many Russians themselves don’t believe that they can do this. But once it starts, once they get involved, they often feel empowered by this and then go on to become much more politically radicalised. And that, again, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re massively anti-regime, but they become politically aware and politically empowered in ways that they weren’t before.

So, do you think that the invisibility of everyday politics in Russia is a result of certain, say, expectations coming from political science or Western observers more generally that say, politics or political action comes in this form, say, like a street protest or showing up at elections. So, I guess what I’m trying to ask is that, do you think that scholars and wider audiences sort of try to cast political action and the forms that are expected or are usual to them onto a different space and that’s where the invisibility is coming from? Or is it just a result of stereotypes about Russians as passive, more general?

I think that’s part of it. I mean, it’s multi-layered and that’s the problem with it because you start talking about this and people are like, well, you know, Russians don’t do this or Russians don’t do that. So, it’s multi-faceted, unfortunately, cultural stereotypes, pernicious cultural stereotypes of which I’ve mentioned, you know, passivity and atomization. And again, we should say that the protests in 2022 against the invasion of Ukraine were unprecedented. This is extremely repressive authoritarian regime and yet people still risked a lot to come out. And a lot of people were arrested and their lives were ruined as a result. And that then leads into these impossible expectations that we in the West often impose on Russians, taking a cue rightly from the extremely courageous and successful protests in Ukraine in 2004 and then 2013, 2014.

It’s almost like, you know, Russian society is almost the victim of Ukraine’s success in that, you know, the Ukrainians were able to do it. Why can’t the Russians do it? Well, you know, the Russians did what they could. And they live in a much more [repressive environment] even in 2022, even in 2014, even in 2004. They lived in a state which had a much higher coercive capacity. And yet, there are still protests going on. We won’t call them protests. They’re actions. They’re anti-war actions going on. They have to be clandestine. And that’s the next point, the third point, if you like.

The problem is with political science and just the media in general’s coverage of all processes. It needs something really visible and sound-biteable and newsworthy. So somebody risking it all to go out, night after night and graffiti, “I love Ukraine”, in their local environment. Okay, that might not mean very much to Ukrainians and I totally accept that. And they might say that’s totally inadequate. And I understand that. But it’s still political and it’s still something that is really important to maintaining a sense of purpose and solidarity among the many, many, many millions of people in Russia that do not support the war and feel a strong sense of shame and emotional hurt for what is being done in their names to Ukraine.

So there’s all kinds of stuff going on. Also, like I said, it’s not avertly about the war, but for example, these protests against dogs being euthanized. A lot of that just gets completely ignored. And I was saying just the other day when I was in Russia to an activist and I just was like, yeah, is anybody in Russia doing this collating and collecting this data and they’re like, “no, it’s up to you”. And I’m like, well, are we doing it? And no, we’re not. There’s not really as far as I’m aware, a good protest database.

And this then leads into the next point, which is researchers are really lazy. And I mean, I know journalists are lazy because they tell me that as well. And maybe researchers are almost as lazy as journalists in that they want a quick win. They want an off-the-shelf database or they want a pre-existing survey. Maybe if they get grant money, they’ll pay for a survey. But again, it’s also like, we’ve got these things set up to quickly gather data. So we can quickly gather data about this favourite subject of political scientists, “do Russians support the war?”

Something that I’ve kind of hooked on several years ago. And that is our as outsiders, and maybe even within Russia itself, but as outsiders, a lot of us, particularly those who have problems or against the Putin system, Putin regime, we’re looking for a revolutionary subject. We’re searching for that individual or social group that’s going to tip the scales against this system. And I remember just in my years of observing Russian politics, it was the middle class, and then it was the youth, and then it was…, it’s this constant, searching and searching and searching. And I think that’s another reason why we missed the trees for the forest, maybe, or however to put it.

 I agree. And again, we can’t help here, but like call back to the life and death of Navalny, and how, as I said, I’ve got respect for what he did, especially the building of capacity and the training of activists. But his personality, again, was an example of that, you know, people pinned their hopes on him, as this revolutionary subject. And then that bias and that unhelpful kind of blinkeredness in coverage extends to these other figures.

Yeah, so let’s talk about these characters other than Navalny and Putin, other than the protagonist and then antagonist of this drama. Let’s talk about your interlocutors

[tbc…]

The kids (if not all the teachers) are alright – watching the Oscar-winning documentary Mr. Nobody against Putin

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I had put off watching the documentary Mr. Nobody against Putin. Partly because of the feeling that I would find it annoyingly kliukva (sensational distortion of Russian reality for a Western audience that doesn’t know any better), and partly because it felt like taking a busman’s holiday – my ‘day’ job is talking to Russian people in ordinary circumstances, observing them, and then communicating a sense of the everyday experience to Western audiences.  

Then I made the mistake of reading a load of long-form blogs in Russian that really tore into it. Basically, those thousands of words boiled down to two objections. One: people in the film, especially the underage school pupils, were not treated ethically because Pavel Talankin, the teacher shooting most of the footage, did not have permission to use his footage in this way. Two: the director (American David Borestein) manipulated the footage and narration, and even got Talankin to stage some awkward and unlikely ‘political’ scenes that Western audiences would like for dramatic effect. As a result of the second point, the charge is that the film distorts Russian reality to such a degree that one cannot take the overall intention seriously. Positive reviews among public intellectuals invested in Russia – on the contrary – argued that the film faithfully showed the heavy weight of state indoctrination on children but also the value of everyday resistance against it (in the form of Mr. Nobody – Talankin’s efforts).

But what is the intention of the film? Leaving aside the ‘blurb’ and the pronouncements of the film makers and critics, my fellow podcasters and I discussed this at length ,but even we couldn’t quite agree. Jonny’s point I think was strongest – that the ethical issue is really about how school children get exposed to unethical and manipulative behaviour by politicians and that’s the tragedy. In my view, the film is not really about ‘everyday resistance’, however much people would like it to be. It’s also not really about indoctrination. The best and ‘truest’-to-life parts of the film are about the difficult relationship between Talankin – who is unhappy about the war and the direction of the country – and his mother, colleagues and pupils. It’s a classic setting: the bloody-minded ‘free thinker’ unwilling to go along with the absurdity of the stupid system that is beyond his control.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest comes to mind on the dangers of institutional ‘violence’ to the individual. There are many precursors in Russian and Soviet cultural production too – which I’m not going to go into here.  The façade of patriotic education lessons increasingly dominate in a system which demands absurd rituals. This distracts (and emotionally is harmful) from the purpose of education – particularly the strong Russian tradition of whole-person ‘vospitanie’ – upbringing as an intersubjective experience which helps develop the moral, socially responsible, and intellectually curious-critical and knowledge-rounded person. This is a very Russian-Soviet version of the German idea of Bildung.

In a sense then, the film is meant to be about competing versions of political socialization through formal education. But the footage clearly is not enough to answer the question about the success or otherwise about the heavy-footed ‘patriotic’ and nationalist shaping of young minds. What’s good about the film is that there is enough to show how despite the best attempts of the state to deprofessionalize teaching, there remain adults dedicated to guiding and mentoring young people through the formal education experience in a status-quo-critical manner.

So for me, I could look over the clumsy attempts to make the film relevant and legible to a US audience (after all, how else is a film going to get an Oscar and festival showings?). The scenes with Talankin’s mother are an absolutely perfect encapsulation of the ‘anti-war’, versus ‘defensive consolidation’ difficulty inherent to the intersubjective situation in Russia. The scenes with the one-and-only absurd and caricatured ‘villain’ are perfect in showing the hollowness and intellectual bankruptcy of nationalist ideologues.

The person of Talankin himself (as a character) is perfect as a critically-thinking, professional, yet patriotic and caring person – a model of what a citizen should be.

People might object – why so positive when, after all, the teachers do comply with the patriotic education directives. The true-believer-teacher Abdulmanov does seem to get rewarded for his sycophantic transmission of regime messages to the kids. And this is a problem with a cursory analysis. That’s where the footage of the kids comes in and why it is so important. What the film actually shows is that there is no measurable effect of patriotic indoctrination. That the teachers don’t even understand what they’re being asked to do. The majority of the patriotic education reminds us more of Communist Pioneer marching and flagwaving for the hell of it, rather than having nationalist ‘content’. And Abdulmanov is not rewarded for his bizarre behaviour (even by nationalist pedagogue standards) in class.

Overall however, the question of ‘indoctrination’ is the biggest weakness of the production and editing because any actual effect isn’t spelled out or illustrated. There is also a bit of cheating here – as has been pointed out, the scenes about former students becoming soldiers are manipulated to conflate ‘ordinary’ conscription with being sent to fight in Ukraine. We’re left with narrative lacunae. There’s also obfuscation of the topic of patriotic education itself. We discuss this in the podcast, but essentially the editing and narration give a false impression that the nationalistic agenda has taken over the school (in terms of time devoted to it), when in reality it’s a small part of the curriculum. Even so, we do witness teachers push back against it. A nice touch that might make you think, is the lesson on the historical destiny of Crimea as part of Russia. If even this is having to be drummed into kids in the most egregiously ham-fisted manner, one wonders about the enduring strength of ideology.

The boys who had no sense of a future and who subscribed to traditional ideas about masculinity (a man must go to the army first) would have allowed themselves to be mobilized/conscripted/contracted anyway. The girls must suffer their boys to be sent to the meatgrinder. The mother-librarian must swallow her misgivings and tell her non-conformist teacher-son to be quiet or face the consequences. Essentially this is the story. Coming of age in a time of war.

It could be a very American film by just changing a few small circumstances (maybe it tells the future there too). Ideologies that the people in the film internalize are hardly to do with the Ukraine war itself, or the ‘regime’, or Russia’s Great Power status. They are much more insidious (you are powerless against the ‘system’). I wouldn’t want to push it too far, but essentially, a lot of the film is about the ‘idiocy’ of small-town and rural life – to paraphrase and misunderstand Marx at the same time. The ‘idiocy’ of having no choice other than exit (there being no possibility of ‘voice’ or ‘loyalty’), is compounded by the extractive, exploitative, and Darwinist nature of Russia’s political economy. But here you can see I’m talking my own book – if you’ll excuse the pun.

And the social context of the film once again should give pause for a more positive take – this is a tiny town 20 hours from Moscow (including plane journey). Yet it produced a ‘high cultural level of schooling’ that allowed Talankin’s mother to raise him. The kids, despite the reality they face are future-orientated and full of hope. It’s a human portrait –really of Talankin who is depicted as loving his job, his wards, and in turn is valued as a trusted adult of those who are coming of age. The school resembles a total social institution of the kind anthropologists described in Soviet times – but with as much ‘good’ going on in it, as ‘bad’. As such, it’s part of a bigger ‘island’, as Finn Sivert Nielsen described Soviet factory towns in the 1980s. There’s safety and some danger in the island. Now, as then, the island is also under siege from the other pressures in society. Eventually you must leave such islands and, if you’re like Talankin, become a nomad, even if such places offered you more good than evil.

The best book on Russia-Ukraine? On structural, proximate, and contingent causes of war

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D’Anieri on history, security dilemmas, democratization and European divergence after 1991

In this post I want to share with you why I think Paul D’Anieri’s updated Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War is the single best book you can read to understand the domestic and geopolitical causes of the current war. Originally published in 2019, he updated it in 2023. I’m not saying it should replace wider reading, and in this blog I have often made mention of other sources on both Ukraine and Russia which are indispensable – particularly to socialists. So, disclaimers: it’s not the only good book, but it covers most bases for the casual, non-specialist reader. I use it to teach an elective course, along with a long reading list of other authors.

It’s main merits are that it keeps sight of the actual relationship between Russia and Ukraine, the domestic and international factors, and the longer historical context. In the introduction, D’Anieri argues that the typical approaches to understanding the conflict contradict each other: on the one hand we have a focus on Russian revanchism. Others focus on the war as a result mainly of the domestic logics of autocracy. A third ‘school’ blames the West for expansion of NATO, and partly Ukrainian nationalism. We looked at the ‘West is to blame’ approach and its flaws in a previous post.

D’Anieri’s main strengths then are in looking at long-term trends as well as short-term triggers. These in turn can be explained as part structural and part ‘normative’. What would be a mistake is to focus too much on individual leaders who were always to an extent carried along by the underlying conflicts evident even in the early 1990s when mutual trust was still high. That isn’t, however, to let Putin of the hook. Ultimately the escalatory decisions in 2014 and 2022 were his alone. Would Medvedev, or Ziuganov, have acted differently? Maybe less so than people think. D’Anieri’s argument boils down to the contention that ‘as long as Russia’s definiton of its great power status included controlling Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine would be at odds’ (3). The ‘security dilemma’ meant that each action Russia and Ukraine individually took was perceived as undermining the or even threatening the ‘vision’ of each country’s future secure place in the world.

Secondly, processes of democratization, regardless of their real results, undermined Russian elites perceived national interest. This was a normative conflict from at least 1993 onwards, but especially after 2004. In the author’s view you cannot disaggregate NATO, European normative rules, and EU membership from this process of growing Russian ‘resentfulness’.  Without consolidation of democracy in Russia (which began to fail in 1993 accelerated in 1996, and became inevitable after 1999), and the embracing of a post-imperial idea of its relations with neighbours (arguably also unlikely after 1999, and especially 2008), it was increasingly likely that sooner or later Ukraine would be the unlucky territory upon which Russia’s unfinished normative and revanchist politics would meet in their final conjunction.

Loss aversion is better than blame

It might seem here, that D’Anieri is going to follow so many observers and assign blame – presumably to Russia, just as we saw with Sakwa the apportionment of blame mainly with the West. As the author notes, even ‘excellent scholars have resorted to simplistic renderings of blame: John Mearsheimer stated that “the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” while Andrew Wilson wrote that “the Russians went ape.” For D’Anieri though, this approach ignores all kinds of constraints and sets out further his focus: security dilemma plus democratization pressures, and the multiplier of domestic politics. Both Putin and Zelensky had much less agency than some observers would admit.

D’Anieri takes to task both ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ realism. The former can inadvertently lead to assigning blame to the West if an author is sympathetic with Russian perspectives. The latter sees the international system as inevitably riven by conflict. Here the author notes that even if you don’t see Russia’s concerns about Ukraine as ‘legitimate interest’, the latter’s gravitation towards even just an EU normative order would naturally be perceived as a loss. Loss aversion then while not inherently leading to aggression, has to be taken seriously as potentially leading to conflict. Furthermore, solely looking through the lens of realisms, ignores that international and domestic goals may reinforce each other – certainly the case for Putin who was coming under significant pressures at home by 2014 and again by 2018.

Domestic politics loom large

Along with the security dilemma and democratizing pressures, it’s important to remember that in domestic politics ‘there was almost always more to lose and less the gain […] from taking a conciliatory policy than from taking a harder line’. And this is true of the USA and EU. Furthermore, perceived state capacity is another variable – both in terms of real hard power recovery in Russia, and the wrong calculus, also on Russia’s part, that it could quickly decapitate a ‘weak’ Ukraine in 2022. Here we can make a minor concession to an idea that some kind of visionary leadership might have made a difference. But would it really? How could another version of Clinton/Bush, or Medvedev, or Schröder/Merkel really have overcome both structural inertia and domestic distractions to really change things? The end of the Cold War, ironically, reduces the likelihood for conciliatory policies to actually get traction beyond rhetoric and countries failed to account for the continuing gulf between their different understandings of what the status quo was.

Perhaps most importantly, we can look at the example of Crimea here for Russia. D’Anieri gives the examples of how even leading intelligentsia or ‘liberal’ figures, bitterly disparaged Ukrainian independence, or reiterated the ‘historical justice’ of returning Crimea to Russian control. The foundation myth that Russian statehood can be traced back to the Rus civilization inflected strongly part of Russian normative thinking in relation to Ukraine. Loss aversion again looms large in calculus. As is known from psychology, loss aversion leads to disproportionate risk taking even in supposedly risk-averse individuals. Crimea was invested with magical meaning for Russian statesmen in a way that gamblers think about good luck totems. Nonetheless, Crimea alone would never have become a sufficient factor for war to occur. Overall, D’Anieri here returns to his understanding of the particular security dilemma in play. Even at peace, unintentionally, action and inaction have the effect of increasing stresses between states. Concessions which could have been made, were not – for example, more forthright telegraphing by Russian elites to Russian constituencies that ‘Ukraine was lost’. Alternatively, EU calculus that would have acknolwedged Ukrainian and Russian economic interdependence and a modified form of Eastern policy was always missing.  

The dangers of democratic peace theory

Here D’Anieri takes to task the implicit assumption underlying democratic peace theory. War between democracies was supposedly impossible so expanding democracy promoted security. On this, realists and liberals could agree. In terms of their different normative assumptions, there was little different between the Clintons, Talbotts and the Brzezinskis and Kissingers when it came to resulting policy – a push to the East. Kennan of course is the usual exception. See the recent interesting article in NLR: “There was need for a realistic accommodation with them about the future of Europe,” (writing about how Containment after 1945 would also require a real engagement with the USSR afterwards).  What Westerners fatally downplayed were the geopolitical implications of democratization. They saw the implications of Russian objections as irrelevant and thought they’d found a magic elixir in the form of colour revolutions: isolate, support internal elite defection to democratic forces. Rinse and repeat. While Russia saw a democratic Georgia or Ukraine as inevitably rejection Russian control and therefore inadmissible to Russia’s own security and stability. From 2004 democratic overturn of regimes and geopolitical competition becomes impossible to separate for both West and Russia.

All of that said, we shouldn’t lose sight of Ukrainian agency. Any account of ‘cause’ that doesn’t foreground Yanukovych’s actions in precipitating internal and then external conflict is going to be suspect. As D’Anieri says, how ‘international factors interacted with internal forces within Russia, Ukraine… has been underemphasized in most analyses of the conflict.’ (17). Yanukovych is important because his government threatened to upset the three sources of internal balance in Ukraine: political pluralism through regional diversity, foreign policy balancing between Russia and the West, and oligarchic, or clan pluralism. All of these fulcrums that made Ukraine unlike Russia were under threat after 2010. His actions threated to autocratize Ukraine via presidentialism as had happened in Russia. In turn Ukraine might have gained an ascendent oligarchic elite group drawn from his particular regional clients. As it is, the Maidan led to a restoration of 2004 Ukrainian constitutional arrangements and free and fair elections – by post-Soviet standards.

On the Russian side too, D’Anieri notes provocatively asks – would a more democratic Russia have prevented a Russian president from opportunistically seizing Crimea in 2014? Trump 2.0 shows that this assumption is naïve. Furthermore, domestic politics in Europe and the USA are also important. A new ‘Marshall Plan’ was untenable politically in the US – Bush senior lost on the economy – how could he (or Clinton) have sold massive aid to Russia? Finally, the status quo in the 1990s of economic interdependence of Ukraine and Russia also prevented domestic developments that might have changed the later calculus. The Ukrainian state also remained remarkably weak and corrupt, just as the Russian state after 1999 regained some capacity. Why didn’t Russia attack sooner then? Because it took until 2022 for it to fully develop a sufficient number of battle tactical groups for the mission envisaged.

Overall then, one of the strengths of D’Anieri is to continually remind readers of the ‘underlying’ (historical/structural), ‘proximate’ and ‘contingent’ factors. Without all of them coinciding or reinforcing each other, ‘violent conflict was never inevitable’ (21).

Was full-scale war inevitable after 2014?

Fast forward to the conclusion of the book, D’Anieri starts by focussing on Putin’s echoing of George Kennan’s assertion in his June 2022 remarks about there being no ‘in-between, no intermediate state’ between sovereign power and colony. Kennan: ‘There is no border zone of Russian power. The jealous and intolerant eye of the Kremlin can distinguish, in the end, only vassals and enemies, and the neighbors of Russia, if they do not wish to be one, must reconcile themselves to being the other’ (308).

For D’Anieri, questions worth considering are: is 2022 inevitable after 2014 or was it always inevitable? In his view 2022 present greater challenges for interpretation even if the ‘causes’ look similar. Timing is one challenge, the other is rationalism versus the question of groupthink and personal traits.  

It could be that Russia only felt strong enough for all-out-attack in 2022, but that alone is likely an insufficient explanation, according to D’Anieri. Similarly, Ukraine’s reassertion of independence after 2004 and 2014 doesn’t necessarily mean compromise was impossible. What’s needed is a ‘historical’ and ‘conceptual’ answer rooted in the long-term driver of Russia’s relations with Ukraine: its elite’s opposition to Ukrainian independence dating to 1991 when Yeltsin believed that the creation of the CIS would tie the two countries in defence and economic matters and thus limit Ukraine’s sovereignty. This is ‘historical’ disjuncture number one. The second ‘disagreement’ was between Russia and the West. Thirdly, Ukraine’s consensus about independence regardless of varying relations with Russia was only cemented by a lack of conciliatory policies from Russia. Even presidents called ‘pro-Russian’ like Kuchma and Yanukovych strongly rejected formal integration with Russia.

Along with ‘historical and conceptual’ causes, there are ‘events’ – or contingencies. These span the period in question: from 1993 elections in Russia which had the effect of focussing the minds of Ukrainians about seeking alternative security arrangements,  to Kosovo in 1999, the financial crisis in Russia in 1998, and of course the ‘acrimonious’ relations due to NATO expansion. US invasion of Iraq was ‘aggravating’ and ‘corrosive’.  As were the Arab Spring and Syria. Efforts to improve relations were weak. Opportunities by changes in leaders were lost. Even sincere efforts like the deferring of a NATO action plan for Ukraine and Georgia – a major concession to Russia, was seen by them as a provocation, arguably leading to the invasion of Georgia that year.

These contingencies though, need to be connected to the underlying structural constraints: the security dilemma, democratization pressures, and domestic politics. D’Anieri writes that ‘while one can argue that the real problem was Russian imperialism, the security dilemma created problems independent of Russian imperialism. Russia’s dissatisfaction would have been easier to manage if every effort to insure against renewed aggression did not make Russia feel less secure as well as insulted.’ (314-15). But this works in reverse for Russian potential concessions to a Ukraine with some free trade with the EU. Russia could have continued with a friendly president in Yanukovych even if he’d signed the Association Agreement.

D’Anieri particularly emphasises Russian domestic politics, perhaps surprisingly given, as we’ve seen, some experts on Russia do the opposite – focussing much more on the security dilemma. He reminds us that looking weak in domestic politics on the ’national’ question was never going to go well for Russian leaders.

Was war inevitable then?

No, writes D’Anieri. The Cold War was more intense in terms of relations and yet was managed over four decades. Similarly, in the run up to 2022 it looked like Russia had time on its side to consolidate its power over Ukraine. It had choices and leverage. Thus the personal decision-making must inevitably come into focus. But nonetheless assigning ‘blame’ is probably not very useful for analysis of actual causes because it ‘obscures the extent to which leaders see themselves as having much less freedom of action than later analysts ascribe to them.’ (319).

The prospects for peace

Europe cannot have a high level of security if a state as powerful as Russia remains dissatisfied with the status quo, concludes, D’Anieri. Should it be accommodated or appeased? Russia wants a veto on European security affairs and some control over much former Soviet territory. Its regime also wants broad geopolitical recognition as legitimate by Western states. ‘It is hard to see most of Europe being willing to grant these things’ (320). But what if it had these things? Would that end conflict or aggravate it further? D’Anieri is pessimistic about resolution – both of the actual war and the broader conflict.  The relationship now ‘embodies both a conflict of values and conflict of interest’ (321).

The final part of the conclusion is understandably more sketchy – questions about Ukrainian devastation and depopulation, the decoupling of Russia from Europe both economically and existentially. The question of Russians’ support for the war and more importantly, the future foundations of Russian leaders’ legitimacy beyond war and petrorents.

Realists argue that the West ‘should not particularly care what happens to Ukraine’. But D’Anieri argues that  Russian control over Ukraine would not make Russia a ‘status quo power’. But this extends to the West too. It would be unlikely for the West to completely renormalize relations to a victorious Russia. Maybe there is no European order that is consistent both with western norms and with Russia’s great power aspirations, ponders D’Anieri. ‘In the absence of any better strategy, the West will likely be left with a policy of containing Russia, dissatisfying as many find that’ (331).

D’Anieri’s final paragraph: ‘To return to the book’s epigraph (Lev Tolstoy – War and Peace), “our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe.” We want Russia to be satisfied and Ukraine kept independent and whole. Achieving even one of these goals has proven elusive. Achieving both now appears impossible.’

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

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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 just as true of 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

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(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)

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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.