Russia.Post is an expert journalism platform that has published many interesting and important articles about the war. Sergei Chernyshov recently wrote an article there called ‘The Majority Never Had it So Good’. It’s a shorter English version of this Russian article. Chernyshov gives an ‘eye witness’ account of the beneficiaries of the war in Russia – poor people who got a sudden windfall from participating as soldiers. The article sets up a number of generalizations smuggled in via anecdote: that the underclass is happy at the prospect of fighting and dying for money. Second, that Wagner veterans are everywhere and lording it. A windfall means return soldiers are blowing it all on conspicuous consumption. The veterans feel part of something and are prowar; they are revealed as fascistic. They are somehow so inured to everything they are unreachable. Magically even, the author knows that it is precisely these rural and feckless folk who actually voted for Putin. (Wait, I thought the author lived in a city?)

Chernyshov is billed as a historian, but people are loving this piece because they crave ‘eyewitness’ accounts that confirm their dark prejudices. The war has made us all go a bit mad.

For me there are many problems with this piece which indicate the dangers of how knowledge about the war is framed. Without generalizing, it’s indicative of what might become a trend. High-minded yet misguided liberal people with no real claim to unbiased and socially scientific knowledge make some grand claims. Not only that, but the personalistic ties of Russian journalism via Facebook mean outlandish stuff gets promoted because some very detached emigres in Washington DC see it on their feed. Perhaps unintentionally such people project onto the Western audience their own deep-seated fears and misgivings about Russia. What’s wrong with that? Well, it’s not even good journalism and it’s just plain wrong. I’ve been writing about this for years and it never gets old.

I wouldn’t have bothered writing about it here if I hadn’t encountered broad incredulity when I criticised the piece. Sure, as you, dear reader, know, I’m a bit snarky. But I think in this case it’s entirely justified. I have no doubt in the sincerity of the author. But I do think he lacks the capacity to reflect on how his interpretation of the confused anecdotes reveals more about him, and not any social reality.

But let’s do some quick fact checking. A very small number of people got temporarily a relatively larger amount of cash money than they could earn outside of the war. Not a lot of people. This is why this kind of article is dangerous. First, there are not so many surviving Wagnerites, but the author gives the impression that his Russia is being taken over by militarised thugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Veterans of any kind are a drop in the ocean – something less than 1% of the working-age population. And that’s a generous calculation, not counting the lots of dead people who stop earning when they come home in a coffin.

And even in ‘provincial’ Russia, not to mention Novosibirsk (?), which the author is writing about, the money is not going to go far. It is ten times a poverty wage. But only ten times. It is somewhere approximately what a good white-collar manager earns in a big city in Russia, or a middle-rank academic in a good Moscow university. The article writes off inflation and other economic effects in a disturbing way: ‘Russians live like animals and so it doesn’t matter to them’ (my paraphrase, but it’s really what he seems to think). Nothing could be further from the truth: absolutely people do know that living standards are precipitously declining because of war, and have been deteriorating for many years. This has political effects, if only the author wasn’t so detached from life to see them.

What is the result of this ‘windfall’ when it comes? Widows and survivors tend to pay of debts (author does mention this, to be fair). If they’re lucky, they tend to buy apartments (or rather put down deposits on them – does the author not know how expensive housing is?). What else is missing? The author doesn’t even seem to realise how socially divisive the war ‘dividend’ is. How many, if not the majority of working-class Russians look very askance, if not with derision on the people the author sees as the ‘majority’.

Next up, the ‘sociological’ thesis of the piece is this: Russians always lived in poverty so thinking that material privation from sanctions will change things is naïve. They are inward looking and prone to swearing and shouting. This is the ‘two-thirds’ of Russians the author mentions. Neat, huh? Sounds like a basket of deplorables to me. Now, I’m with the author when he draws attention to socio-economic despair. This is absolutely the biggest problem in Russia today. But he falls completely for a kind of ‘cultural essentialization of poverty’, a sociological idea debunked in the 1970s, but somehow allowed in the case of Russia. Orientalizing, isn’t it? To be fair to the author, he does mention how it is the regime which stole all the cash, but to him, these lumpen don’t really care. I would say even that the piece veers pretty close to a racialized view of the subjects the author so obviously fears and loathes.

The other tone of the piece is about soldiers embracing neoimperialism and militarism. The underclass prone to violence and crime are living their dreams. Where is the evidence? It is one thing to say the war selects the people with fewer social ties and those with little to lose. But this piece would be laughed out of town if it were suggested as explanatory of a ‘veteran mindset’ in any other societies with aggressive foreign policy.  Let’s just say a piece like this could not, for good reasons, be written about US service-personnel. And need I remind, the vast majority of people in Russia fighting are from all walks of life, not from prisons. And they fight for many different reasons because they feel powerless, because of social sanctions, and, yes, to overcome a sense of powerlessness. Oh, and by the way, any serious piece employing the word ‘mindset’ in the first sentence like this one does, should set off all kinds of alarm bells. (Admittedly that’s the editor’s frame).

The purpose of the piece seems to be to say that there are ‘winners’ and that they are a desperate lot. And that perhaps Putin can buy these bad people off. Some people who commented said it was a wake up to those who thought war fatigue had set in, and that sanctions had started to wake people up in Russia. The ‘military Keynesianism’ argument has been bandied about without much evidence about effects on real incomes at the aggregate level. In short, the impact on incomes of ramping up weapons production and mobilization is small because capacity is small and demography in crisis. The ‘negative shock’ to the economy as Nick Trickett call it, including to all Russians’ income apart from a tiny number, is real and highly palpable.

Even more surprising to me, some colleagues whom I respect, wrote that it seemed to show support for war aligns with being less affluent. The evidence we have says that there’s a strong correlation with war support and being comfortably off. Whether it is polling, or ethnographic work like my own the people precisely least enthusiastic for the war are the socio-economically vulnerable of working age.

Finally, the tabloid framing doesn’t help ‘The Majority Never Had it So Good’. What does that even mean? The accompanying picture is typical ‘ruin porn’ – a depressing yard with some déclassé types drinking. It this the majority? Hardly.  

This piece and the response to it frightens me. It makes me think that we are already entering a Cold War 2.0 space for social science. The reason articles like this are published is because actual Russian sociologists and anthropologists are in exile, or cannot safely counter such caricatured and distorting pictures for fear of repression. Furthermore the academic boycott of Russia means there are no ways for the professional remaining scientists in Russia to speak out either. The ground is then left to people who are not professional scientists but who are in a precarious or desperate position and choose for unknown reasons to write this kind of thing. We should sympathize with them, but not take his emotive impressions as sociologically representative. In the first Cold War emigres and dissidents often gave an equally distorted impression of life in the Soviet Union. Even giants like Solzhenitsyn were obviously politically motivated to present a particular version of reality, even as they told themselves they served a higher truth. In some senses things are different – we have access to lots and lots of Russians and some still can travel. But we should not lose sight of the fact that they, by and large, represent a much more coherent and real class (an educated metropolitan upper-middle class, in fact) than the mythical one the author describes. And with them they bring a particular set of class interests and phobias.