How flexible is Russian authoritarianism?

Or is it class war all the way down?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Russia: A rich country full of poor people”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistical manipulation of average wage rates is now widely understood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Altmetrics Break Bad: Why We Need a New Filter for Academic Integrity

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Soros reading a very expensive Palgrave book

Andreas Umland, Professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and founder/editor of the book series on Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics published by ibidem-Verlag, just highlighted on Twitter a ’collective warning’ letter to readers of Ivan Katchanovski’s new Springer-published book: The Russia-Ukraine War and its Origins: From the Maidan to the Ukraine War.

The criticism was that Katchanovski blames mainly Ukraine and the West for conflict since 2014. Russia appears as more of a reactive force than an instigator. The letter says that “Katchanovski fundamentally misleads his readers when he explains Russia’s attack as the result of alleged Ukrainian transgressions against political pluralism. […] Whoever wants to understand the sources of the Russo-Ukrainian War should read less about Ukrainian domestic politics and international relations – the primary foci of Katchanovski’s book. Instead, Russia’s war was caused and is driven by Russian political traditions, ideas and interests.”

Full disclosure, I’m blocked by Katchanovski on Twitter for criticizing him. I think some of his claims are poorly evidenced and his arguments objectively ‘bad’. He came to my attention for his assertion that the Maidan snipers were part of a false-flag operation in 2014. Katchanovksi bludgeons the reader with analysis of ‘2000 videos… 6000 photos… 30GB of radio intercepts’ to give the appearance of objective sleuthing. However, a large part of his writing lacks direct relevance (e.g. going off on tangents about 1989 Romania), he does not consider the problem of testimony after the fact, its veracity versus hearsay. On careful reading the result is more an assertive interpretation which is not convincing as an evidentiary demonstration of a false flag. Its central weakness is not that it raises no legitimate questions, but that it repeatedly overstates what its sources can actually prove. On the sniper question and beyond, the evidence is presented in a way that is polemical, cumulative in appearance, and much less conclusive than the author claims. Confirmation bias, circular references, cognitive closure are just a few of the more general issues, in my opinion.

That aside, what this letter reminded me was that Altmetrics (internet-related measures of impact) is having a significant interactive effect with how AI answers questions. Just a few weeks ago I saw a student include Katchanovski on a literature list because AI had suggested him. There was no Andrew Wilson nor Sarah Whitmore on that list. Does the volume of Altmetrics create a feedback loop that AI then propagates?

…

What does this “J’Accuse…!” affair tell us about the state of academia? It doesn’t reflect well on publishers, but nor does it reflect well on ‘us’ as so-called gatekeepers of quality, sourced knowledge. There are some massively respected names on the list of signatures, but I would have expected more of them. What do they want? It’s not clear. Do they want the publisher to withdraw the book(s)? From a critical perspective, it might be more productive to investigate processes for selecting peer-review experts and those who supported Katchanovski’s efforts to publish. The elephant in the room is the low bar to scholarly publication.

What the broad public don’t realise is that academic publishing is extremely varied in its quality filter. I’ve seen terrible books published by the ‘best’ university presses in the world based on pure nepotism or name-value. Presses that pretend they have rigorous peer-review and editorial processes. At same time, small, indi presses are sometimes more engaged with writing and editing processes. Then there are essentially the Walmarts of academic publishing. Their oligopoly model passively and actively killed the mom-and-pop stores of academic publishing and also some medium-sized players. The accusation is that they tend to churn massive numbers of books with less regard to quality.

Academics who need a book for internal institutional reasons go there. Unlike the real Walmart, the profit is not in low prices and volume, but in high prices to the captive and uncritical academic libraries in Euroland. These ‘trade’ presses make a profit by publishing a lot of books seemingly without an editor even reading them, and depending on a light-touch rapid ‘peer review’. If academic libraries in Europe buy 200-500 copies in total, the publisher makes a small profit because the price is €100 for a hardback. No ‘real’ people buy the book (except for your mum – thanks mum!), but now with AI these books get more traction because somewhere an AI has ‘consumed’ them – often because their high prices allows them to be Open Access.

A book about George Soros was just published with one of these presses. There was a joke on Twitter that he was the only human to actually buy the hardback book when he was pictured reading a physical copy. That was because all academics know the ridiculous price of hardbacks (targeted at librarian buyers): that book cost €162.49! And yet just googling it from my workplace gets me to a free link, courtesy of the Royal Danish Library’s krone.

According to WorldCat (a database of thousands of university libraries) one of Katchanovski’s earlier books, published by Ibidem Verlag(!), is held in 773 libraries. Is that a lot? Well yes and no. In reality, with the advent of e-versions of books, it’s largely useless to use sold copies as an indicator of impact. Nonetheless, the fact is that many of these ‘churn’ books are subsidized for publication by European universities and that means e-copies can be downloaded for free while libraries buy a few hundred hard copies. The downloads of e-copies are part of Altmetrics. And these online copies are consumed and archived by AI.

Whether you agree with its contents or not, the letter by Umland et al. indicates a collective action problem I’ve talked about before in my blog – when the war started in 2022 all kinds of crazy texts emerged from marginal and not-so-marginal voices with dodgy claims. They got published in the biggest newspapers in the world. People’s reputations were cemented on outlandish claims about Russia and Ukraine. If scholars don’t like this kind of thing they should do something about it. Writing a long-winded letter that doesn’t even address the core criticism towards someone like Katchanovski is not going to help.

Two takeaways:

There’s no reliable ‘scholarly’ filter and reputations are no guide to ‘goodness’ of argument and evidence. This is normal and we should just admit it. There are disreputable and just downright poor scholars at all kinds of institutions. What I mean by that is that there are people just churning unevidenced (or massively over-evidenced non-relevant ‘proof’), poorly argued stuff that gets published because they are ‘academics’ in an institutional ecosystem. If it’s ‘timely’, contentious, it will get Altmetrics attention (basically media and social media mentions of ‘scholarly’ work).

Katchanovski’s most controversial article (which feeds into his book content) was published in a journal many people consider questionable in terms of reputation and ethical practices. His reviewing editor has no expertise or knowledge of Ukraine. [full disclosure: there is an editor there with Ukraine knowledge with whom I have worked closely] The article was quickly accepted for publication despite being a long piece with a lot of big claims based on footnotes with links to media. This journal was successfully hoaxed ten years ago by people trying to prove its poor peer-review and editorial practices. Others consider the outlet a ‘vanity or predatory journal’. It’s also a ‘pay-to-play’ journal. If you or your university has €2110. Some argue that this model encourages poor editorial filters. Anyway, the point is that this journal is only an outlier in a questionable system based on public subsidy of private profit. And the journal itself is owned by what is considered a solid publisher!

Second take away is the death of good, critical literature reviews. People knew about the controversial aspects of Katchanovski more than 10 years ago. To the qualified people who disagree with him, the problems with his reasoning, evidence, and research are very clear – pellucidly clear. There are dozens of respectable and tenured names on the letter criticizing him. But how many of them turned down the opportunity to write an excoriating review – if not in a visible academic journal – then in a public forum? According to my university library there are zero academic reviews of his recent books. If he’s so egregious, ignoring him won’t make him stop.

Here though the takeaway should not be that Katchanovski’s scholarship is bad or reinforces Russian propaganda (the accusation of the letter, which I agree with). The takeaway is that what makes it ‘bad’ is not so different from what makes much qualitative social science poorly evidenced! Too much is published that overly relies on piled up testimonies, media mentions, and reconstructed inferences while treating them as if they were cumulative proof, even when many are second-hand, self-reported, or produced in a politically charged, chaotic environment. I recently criticized a scholar of Russia on related grounds (that confirmation bias can easily be ‘supported’ by piled up ‘evidence’).

Many researchers start off with solid claims and carefully crafted arguments but then get into what we could call the xerox of a xerox problem in research. Doing archival work is expensive and unrewarding. Trudging around Kyiv to interview people is hard. Conducting your own in-person survey rare as hens’ teeth. The biggest problem then is gradations of dodginess emerging from second- or third-hand evidence in support of cognitively biased research.

Total Recall? How Russian Polling Manufactures Consent and Fools the West

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Is the firewall broken between unpopular decisions and Putin who in the popular imagination is a figure hovering above the political fray?

Andrei Pertsev’s analysis from April 17 is instructive: what seem ‘timid’ signals in his measured rating, are seismic if we really try to unpack them – a 50% rise in disapproval, and a similar rise in the figure for distrust in the president. 2026 is going to be the year of surprises in Russia…

Putin ended 2025 with an approval rating of around 85% which was close to the all-time high. His approval had surged in March 2022 from 71% to 83% and largely stayed above 80%. However, by early 2026, approval fell to 67.8% in the week ending April 5, 2026. These were rapid downshifts in the space of a few weeks. By contrast, United Russia’s approval is around 27%.

As readers of this blog will know, I’m a big sceptic about the value of political polls. Especially in Russia. In particular I’ve written on these pages about the deep biases and methodological flaws underlying Levada’s political numbers, but the same applies to the other two big players FOM and VTSIOM (essentially they all stem from the same Soviet intellectual stable and some figures there are either implicated with undermining democratic institutions since 1995 or have never hidden their reactionary views and cynical ideas about the necessity of political manipulation of populations).

To repeat myself, there are five overarching problems:

Social desirability bias. The accuracy of any survey depends on respondents having no fear of negative consequences and being able to regard their questioners as trustworthy – neither condition is a given in Russia. SDB is the pressure to say what you’re expected to say. This is a problem in democracies – think about how in Anglophone countries it’s socially unacceptable to say you don’t want your kid to be trans, or marry a black person. And yet many people hold these views but will rarely share them. I wrote about this in relation to Russia’s homophobia, by the way. There are attempts to measure SDB, but the take away is that this is very hard to do.

Biased question framing by state pollsters

Political questions in Russia are often structured with preambles that remind respondents they are disagreeing with the authorities. Questions are often framed with the idea that there is a consensus in society, or which reflects the ‘common sense’ as presented in the heavily censored media. I’ve also written about fraudulent and shady practices which permeate Russian polling industry

Fear of answering at all

A Levada Center survey found that 26% of respondents admitted being afraid to answer political questions.

Non-response, access bias, broader credibility problems

Independent entities like the Levada Centre, though seemingly more credible, face “foreign agent” restrictions and limited rural access, and their results should still be interpreted cautiously due to non-response bias. When they are questioned about this they avoid answering. Levada has consistently avoided any platform where their methods can be openly discussed.

The “depth of support” question

Questions about support for the war lack context. For example they are rarely followed by asking whether respondents would accept cuts to social spending to fund the military. Without ‘depth’ and context, knowledge about war support is very shaky.

How do pollsters ask about politics?

VTSIOM regularly conducts opinion polls Putin’s approval and war. Their polls are widely used by war supporters and opponents across the world and in Russia. These polls provide a sort of scientific justification for the Russian leadership’s decisions. Polls serve as a pillar of the intellectual co-optation of social scientists (including Levada) by ‘proving’ the existence of a collective consensus in society. In return, pollsters and sociological agencies get to present themselves as “social architects” and valuable assistants of the Russian authorities due to “a close contact with people”.

Recently, I received further direct evidence of how problematic polling in Russia is. This is because one of my research colleagues in Russia got contacted by VTSIOM for his opinion and was able to do a kind of ‘reverse’ sociological experiment by recording the interaction and analysing it. Here’s what he found:

First of all, a respondent’s anonymity is questionable. The VTSIOM interviewers call you on mobile numbers through which owners could be identified easily in the case of particular interest. An interviewer asks a respondent their name, age, and city. A respondent can hear how an interviewer types in these data on the end of the line. At the end of the interview, a respondent is asked to provide an email for further communication with VTSIOM. The interviewer informs the respondent about recording their talk. Of course, a respondent may stop the talk any moment or refuse to provide an email. But this approach to communication makes questionable not only anonymity but truthfulness of answers, even if a respondent decides to continue an interview. People are scared by long prison sentences for political actions and opinions in Russia. In these realities, some questions of VTSIOM look more like gathering data for potential political criminal investigation than for scientific scholarship.

Today as a respondent I was asked about different aspects of societal and political life in Russia. The set of questions is intended to reveal a respondent’s awareness about recent developments across the globe and in Russia. Notably, VTSIOM is primarily interested in three events in the world which attracted a respondent’s attention last week.

Other questions are related to approval of and trust in the institutes, leaders and parties. The list of institutions includes the President, the Government and the State Duma (parliament). The list of leaders comprises Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Mishustin and the governor of the territorial subject where the respondent’s city is located. VTSIOM asks what party would the respondent to vote for if elections were held this week. The list of parties corresponds with the list of political parties registered in Russia at the moment. The answer ‘against all’ is not included on the ballot (removed from papers more than 20 years ago).

VTSIOM is interested to know whether respondents trust Vladimir Putin, and do they approve of his recent activities. Only if you say you don’t then they follow up with open question which asks them to list three of Putin’s actions which a respondent disapproves of in the last week. As to the Government of Russia, VTSIOM inquires whether it manages well the challenges caused by sanctions, also asking on approval/disapproval of Mishustin’s actions (without listing them, however).

VTSIOM makes inquiries regarding the sources of information which their respondents use. They are asked about how much they watch TV and use the Internet (maximum choice is four hours or longer per day). Telegram is also in the focus as a source of information while other messengers are not mentioned at all, as if they do not exist.

At the fifth year of war, VTSIOM asks whether the respondent “approves the decision about launching the special military operation”. The respondent could choose to approve, disapprove or have difficulties answering. There is a question on the attitude of SMO-related information found by the respondent in Telegram: Does the information in channels you read there provide more positive, or more negative information, or both? [crazy phrasing throughout]. When you answer ‘both’, the interviewer gets a bit confused. It seems that VTSIOM is interested in exploring the structure of respondents’ information bubbles more than to assume that someone is capable of finding and reflecting on a variety of sources of information related to the SMO.

It’s somewhat remarkable that Telegram is considered the main source of information. This indirectly confirms the attempt to justify the continuation of Telegram for commercial purposes of propaganda by ‘responsible’ officers and pro-state bloggers; the large investments in propaganda will definitely come to naught if the authorities block both VPNs and Telegram. Small businesses and the everyday life of ordinary people suffer a lot from the from blocking of mobile internet; the same is true for state-affiliated landline providers. So the next group of questions relate to the probability of mass protests.

Questions about a respondent’s attitude to mass protest in their locality is the most sensitive part of the poll. The authorities prohibit attempts to legally protest against their stupid policies, for example, on the basis of COVID-prevention measures. An illegal protest is treated as a mass riot with those found guilty of instigating potentially spending from eight to 15 years in prison, with penalties of from three to eight years for ordinary participants. Now, can you imagine your willingness to tell the truth if someone records your answer to the question “Are you ready to participate in the mass protests in your locality?” Obviously I said “no” to these questions.

The upcoming State Duma elections are in VTSIOM’s focus. But questions on the attitude to online voting obviously do not take into account how often and intensively the internet is blocked in Russia.

A question asks about the material situation in the respondent’s family as linked to the SMO. Has life become better or worse since the its launch, and how does a respondent estimate the family’s situation: as good, medium or bad.

The most manipulative question relates to “changes and stability”. VTSIOM asks whether a respondent prefers societal changes at the expense of stability, or stability without changes. This question reflects the dominant political discourse since the early 2000s when Putin justified his campaigns on the basis of ‘stability’: opposing the unpredictable changes since the mid-1980s and evoking the ‘stable’ Stagnation of the 1970s. However, the any respondent, the current times remind them much more of the 1980s than the 1970s. In any event, few can avoid the déjà vu effect mixed in with the plots of ‘The Running Man’ and ‘Total Recall’: stupid bans on accessing online content but which don’t apply to the law’s authors or business, an unpopular war where the recruits are the subject of trade and bonuses for the recruiters, and deepening privileges for those who serve the authorities at the expense of austerity politics elsewhere. All while life opportunities for the majority get narrower and narrower. Wartime Russia moves further and further from stability. Any option to change the situation positively is not considered in any meaningful way in these polls.

VTSIOM’s director started as a Komsomol activist, then became a ‘democrat’ and currently earns his keep though his work for this polling company and in two universities funded by the Government of Russia and supervised by the Presidential Executive Office. Wallowing in his ability to satisfy high-ranked clients, both he and his subordinates develop questionnaires that are intentionally based on both obscuring reality and reinforcing the impression among those who take them that the elite have lost any contact with reality. Think about that when you read in the Western press about how many Russians approve of Putin and the war.

Thanks to ‘Charlie Nail’ for his reflections!

“a geopolitical disaster has unfolded. We didn’t get a say in it, but we have to do something” Eurasian Knot interview, Part II

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The second part of the interview. First part is blogged here. Transcript lightly edited for readability. Once again, a huge thanks to Sean and Rusana for the chance to talk about the book this is based on.

Sean: Yeah. So let’s talk about these characters, other than Navalny and Putin, the protagonist and the antagonist of this drama. Let’s talk about your interlocutors. You treat your interlocutors as co-creators. You even revise the manuscript based on their comments. So can you tell us a bit more about them and their place in your book?

Jeremy: This book is full of very, very different people from different walks of life, and I, I hope that’s a strength of it. So I have people that I knew before I started doing ethnographic work who live in Kaluga region, people who work in factories, people who work just in the local authority, pensioners, students. And they gradually became part of my work. obviously the whole point of doing anthropology/ethnography is that you don’t hide the fact that you’re a researcher, although of course now I have to obscure things. You know, I can’t officially be doing research there. I would get into trouble for that, but there’s nothing to stop me talking to people, chatting to people and remembering what they’ve said to me. So there’s this kind of very difficult methodological dilemma going on, an ethical one as well. But largely, you know, I’m talking to people, some of whom I’ve known for 25 years.

They know that I’m gonna write something and that they may feature in that. And then there’s people in Moscow that are also part of this book in contrast to the previous book. and that was also important to kind of gauge the whether or not people in Moscow generally had different attitudes towards the war or not. And actually what I guess is surprising is that you find the same people in equal measures everywhere. You know, there isn’t this strong pro-war, bias in small, disadvantaged places where people think they’re gonna do well. There’s just as many “loyal xenophobes” in the upper middle class in Moscow, that are like, yeah, we like this war. We, you know, we’re gonna make Russia great again. You know, it’s a lot of stereotypes that we have to get over, get away from.

But when it comes to your question about including people In the research, this is what anthropologists are supposed to do. They’re supposed to have some kind of, reflexivity and feedback from the people that they are extracting resources from. I’m gaining things and I can never give back what I have got from these people. When it came to my previous book, I went around and gave people copies of this book and people translated it. and now with the internet and with AI, when I write something very often I say to people, look, you know, you told me about this ,Andrei ,working in a turbine factory making; you told me this right? I’ve written about it. I send them a link and I say, you tell me where, whether I was right or wrong. And sometimes they’ll say, “yeah, this is fine. sometimes they’ll say, that’s not what I meant. You got it completely wrong. You’re an idiot.” But that’s part and parcel.

And again, in this book, I have people that I wrote about before in depth, and I can almost do a kind of oral history of their life with them, because I’ve known them for 25 years or 15 years. And I could see how they’ve completely changed. And I document that in the book. People, especially people who have working biographies that I’m really familiar with. I talk a lot about their job prospects and how they feel about changing jobs and retraining and the opportunities. But also the risks that the war brings, particularly for blue collar workers, in these de-industrializing and now re-industrializing places. And I’m in a constant dialogue with many people about this. Now, of course, the war complicates that because some people are scared, rightly and wrongly about talking to me, whether it’s over Messenger apps or in social media, or even in person sometimes. So that complicates it. But still I’m trying my best to involve people in a dialogue. and that’s the best you can really hope for. And I would say that I’m probably the only person doing social research on Russia that is trying to do that.

Sean: since the war has come up repeatedly, let’s talk about that. ’cause that is one of the big questions that people who even pay attention to Russia are interested in. And you say that in response to the outbreak of the war, which you say was shocking to many people, and you have this concept of defensive consolidation. What does that mean?

Jeremy: It’s not a perfect formulation. I started with this very early in the war and I’ve adapted it and kind of tinkered with this term, but really it’s a response to what is very a Anglocentric imposition of the term “rally around the flag”.

So there’s all this work done on rally around the flag and how after 9/11 Americans rally around the flag and they strongly supported military intervention in Afghanistan. Iraq’s a little bit different as we know, but there’s this idea that there was a strong consensus, a rallying around the leader, massive increase in the popularity of Bush. And so, partly, rightly, partly wrongly, anglophone political scientists kind of impose this model on Russia because they see that Putin is super popular.

They also see that the annexation of Crimea led to a spike in his popularity and that his popularity supposedly is now also higher, as high as it’s ever been. Now, I think that’s misleading. I think that’s problematic on multiple levels, but defensive consolidation is my way of saying “Yeah, sure. When a country goes to war and it’s big war with a lot at stake, regardless of how people feel about the justifications and aims and the decision that the leader made, they fundamentally come to have to deal with that in their daily lives. But also they have to deal with that and thinking about the future of their society.”

And so defensive consolidation for me is a way that the war actually kind of makes people much more reflective on what they would like their society to look like in the long term, and indeed what is lacking and what potentialities are missing. and so here then defensive consolidation links back to history and all the lost opportunities of the last 37 years, back to the break up of the Soviet Union. And so it’s this longue durée: So it’s defensive because it prompts people to look to what they think the government could be doing and isn’t doing. And it’s consolidating also because they look to each other and they look to local sources of authority and leadership in this time of crisis as well. So it’s not rally around the flag. Because a positive sense of patriotism in the service of war is missing. That isn’t to say that people don’t become more patriotic, but as I’ve said, there’s a difference between nationalism and patriotism which goes back to George Orwell. There’s an essay by George Orwell on English patriotism where he, he tries to kind of, recover, recuperate patriotism in a non-aggressive way. I’m not saying that he’s totally successful, and I’m not saying that my concept is perfect, but it’s just this alternative to rally around the flag because fundamentally, I don’t believe, and the more I talk to people, the more I become, firmly convinced of this. I don’t believe that a majority support anything to do with the war. That is to say they don’t want to see more Russian people die. And they don’t want to see more Ukrainians die, actually.

I mean, I think we’re at the point now where most Russians would accept peace on terms short of the, the indictment of the leadership, the loss of territorial integrity of Russia as it was [after 2014], the loss of Crimea. They wouldn’t want that, but most Russians would accept a ceasefire. and that’s something, I mean, again, it, it’s a million miles away from I think what is still the dominant kind of paradigm, which is that Russians are enthusiastic for the war.

Sean: Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, they, they change all the time as we, as we know here too, Ana.

Rusana: I tell you this, I’m gonna borrow your term defensive consolidation for my work too, because I was doing field work during the war. So part of it was before the war, and then part of it was after the war started. And I also had a very acute sense of like, you know, I was trying to find like kind of a spectrum of opinion, even though like my work is not about the war at all.

But among the people I worked with, my interlocutors, I was looking for some sort of spectrum. And then I felt like after the war there was some sort of consolidation. You had to be, at least in the group of people I work with, you had to be pro-war, but not necessarily like you were saying because people felt like it was a good cause.

But more so in the face of this enemy, you kinda had to unite despite your sort of smaller differences in opinion, you had to unite because there is this kind of external threat.

Jeremy: And it could be both. It’s flexible. It’s what Sara Ahmed calls a sweaty concept. It’s emotional and it’s flexible, right? It’s, it, you could be pro-war and defensively consolidate. And I also document that in the book. You know, I know plenty of people that, again, they, they don’t like the war. They don’t want, they didn’t want the war, but it’s happened. And, you know, we’ve gotta do something to support Russian soldiers because actually they’re also the victims in the eyes of some of my interlocutors, they’re not seen as aggressors. They’re seen that way often especially if they’re mobilized and not volunteers. There’s very little sympathy and empathy for volunteers who are seen as kind of making a mercantile decision.

But there also is defensive consolidation around people adamantly opposed to Putinism and who who’ve been reinvigorated in a defensively consolidating way. They’re like, okay, this actually makes it even more important to think about making the future better for our country when peace comes and when there is a transition. And then there’s people in the middle,who again, it’s kind of trying to get away from this idea that they’re apolitical. So again, people much more willing to volunteer to get involved with things like ecoactivism. That’s also an example of defensive consolidation. Like we have to do something to make things better for our country because our country is in crisis and a disaster, a geopolitical disaster has unfolded. We didn’t get a say in it, but we have to do something.

The four big challenges in studying Russia since 2022

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A Birmingham sculpture. Credit: Oosoom – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7042851

I just returned from the annual conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies where I discussed my book and also chaired a session on the Hidden Pillars of the Soviet Economy. But in this post, I want to summarise some interesting discussions about the challenges of doing research on Russia since 2022. I am going to decontextualize the discussions here, so as not to identify individual who may not want to be identified. There aren’t really just ‘four big challenges’, but just overlapping methodological, conceptual, practical and ethical ones.

Self-censorship in media and social media

People kind of assume a continuity of media self-censorship from early in the 2000s, but it’s important to remember that it is only recently that the practices of the periphery in Russia – complete journalistic obfuscation and avoidance – returned to the core (the colonial boomerang again!). This was a drip-drip process and it’s also important therefore to realise that if one wants to think about reliability of media sources one also needs to contextualize and historicize the degree and nature of self-censorship. This is a major challenge because so often our ‘Kremlinological’ tendencies – where ‘information’ about elites is filtered through multiple invisible sources – can mean we forget that so many accepted truths are open to question. In fact, when this discussion was going on, I was reminded of some of the very well-respected work on ‘oligarchs’ from the early 2000s which now look rather naïve and dated when one considers how researchers got access to the narratives they then relatively uncritically transmitted to Western audiences in their scholarship. Will we look back on scholarship about the war in 10 years time in the same way and ask ourselves – how could we rely on this narrow perspective? How could we seriously believe this?

Having said that, there’s also a related problem of ‘presentism’ and exaggeration of the issue of self-censorship, in that in many ways, difficult topics still get discussion in the Russian media and press and that we shouldn’t project on to 2010, or even 2018 our assumptions that heavy self-censorship now defeats the purpose of relying on journalists’ reports or perspectives even from ‘late Putinism’ prior to 2022.

‘You can’t go there!’

We talked a little about how major misconceptions about the risks to researchers and field-based research have always been present. Even fifteen years ago to some there was a perception that fieldwork in Russia was somehow too ‘dangerous’ for Western-based researchers and that this has led to incredulity towards those who chose to carry on doing ‘normal’ fieldwork with interviews etc. While not downplaying how much contact and travel is now off limits, we reflected on how difficult it has become to communicate the irreplaceable value of ‘being in the field’ and how much the loss of these embedded perspectives – even if just containing informal contact with interlocutors – leads to impoverishing sociological, political and other attempts to grasp what’s going on. We agreed that fieldwork is indispensable in challenging group think among researchers who may get more seduced by their paradigms as a result of loss of contact with ‘reality’ via the field.

Media and social media are increasingly fractured and unrepresentative snapshots

One interesting point made by a digital media researcher was about VPNs. If media is used as data in research then there needs to be careful appreciation that – for example – if it concerns material that Russians can only access via a VPN then that will mean that such data will become increasingly unrepresentative of the general population as only a particularly tuned-in minority will be willing to pay for VPNs that work well. This might mean we need to focus a lot less on ‘opinions’ and more just on how information circulates in the Ru-internet spaces and beyond.

It is impossible to anticipate ethical problems

Both in ‘my’ panel and in others the problem of unforeseen ethical dilemmas for field researchers arose. Some may well choose to stop doing any kind of ‘ordinary’ field-based research because they cannot anticipate harms to interlocutors and we should respect that. Having said that, the biggest ethical issue is field researchers ceding the right to speak on behalf of Russian people to unethical expert-entrepreneurs who may propose themselves as experts on Russia society without speaking Russian or having been to Russia in many years or ever. This reminded me of a post I wrote just before 2022.

A big question then, given the difficulties of field-based research is: who is authorized to know and to speak about what’s happening in Russia? Non-access is transforming the field and we should be reflecting on this much more.

More briefly, here are some other topics:

The problem of perception among potential interlocutors about journalists and scholars who ‘left’ Russia.

Acknowledging the loss of our expertise over time because of loss of the field. This can lead to woolly schematic thinking as well as normative (what we’d like to see) or even wishful thinking because of the loss of granularity.

Should we be making more use of autoethnography, not because we have something to say about Russia, but because this moment too will pass and this autoethnography will help us process things like the dangers of schematic thinking?

Normative thinking as a danger also pertains to those studying ‘activism’. Finding what’s going on ‘out there’ in terms of politically active people is in danger of getting subsumed by the restrictive frames of the ‘political’ and the ‘civic’. One participant certainly shared my views when she said: ‘what even is an activist in Russia now during war?’ Are we expecting actives to effect positive change in Russia? Of course not. Does that mean we should ignore them, write them off, or – even worse – look for a mythical revolutionary subject in the person of a charismatic leader? The heavy burden of social movement theory can be a hindrance to foregrounding and documenting what ‘is out there’ – which might well be 3-4 anti-regime people doing things in a city of 100,000 people.

Is the legacy of social movement theory a hindrance to those who wish to build theory in the area of civicness and opposition under harsh repression? This is a bigger methodological and conceptual issue than many seem willing to admit. Among the harshly and hardly surviving committed activists in Russia who remain, there is a growing resentment of the opposition abroad, of the Western governments in general and even a recognition of things in common with people who seem to be superficially ‘pro-war’. When the war ends, political oppositionists will ‘have to live with the majority’, whether they like it or not. Acknowledging certain structural feelings like anger at the double-standards of the global core and the way events like Iran and Gaza contribute to a sense of defensive consolidation within Russia and the idea of long-term isolation are things that anti-regime actives in Russia are considering now.

There were many other thought-provoking topics which came up in the course of these discussions, but this post is long enough already.

“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.’

Postsocialism

I write about how Russia has changed since 1991. If you want to read more, try the 'Research' page.

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