Can we trust surveys? We once again were shoved as unwilling passengers onto this merry-go-round with the publication of a report by Maria Snegovaya entitled The Reluctant Consensus. In it, Snegovaya tries to put to bed many of the criticism I and (much better qualified) others have made of the usefullness of survey polling in Russia. She paints a depressing picture, arguing that young people increasingly align with conformist and conservative views due to exposure to propaganda and the normal process of ageing. Further, she emphasizes the view that alignment with regime narratives due to cognitive dissonance is the norm. She also argues for a strong ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect in Russia.

A lot of the report reads like a defence of Western-based academics reliance on Levada – a ‘foreign agent’ sociological centre that nonetheless is able to carry out research in Russia.  I am not going to rehearse the objections I have made in detail and based on good evidence: that methodologically and philosophically, political surveys need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Snegovaya in the report emphasizes that all kinds of polls beyond Levada (though revealingly, she relies almost entirely on their data-visualization) show comparable results, are representative, have acceptable response rates, etc.

Once again, as I have argued before though, this defence is itself reveals more about the ecosystem of knowledge among favoured Western expertise on Russia than it does anything about Russian societal mood.  That such a report was commissioned by Atlantic Council shows the cracks in the edifice of the construction of knowledge about Russia: that the artefact of public opinion is based on a narrow and opaque machine to produce sentiment as raw and binary numbers (and one that’s largely acceptable to the Kremlin). That at no point should we step back and show reflexivity that numbers are only as good as the honesty of those collecting and collating them. That ‘opinion-as-choice’ (between war and peace) is an absurd starting point to talk about complex societies subject to the kind of coercion, monitoring and conformism (‘social desirability bias’) that Russia is.

Alexei Titkov of Manchester University put together a summary of the subsequent discussion Snegovaya’s report provoked. While Titkov raises philosophical objections to polling, he also defends their overall objectivity. “The difficulty is that the meaning of these useful and objective data is not as obvious as we would like […] Of course, you understand the wording of the questions. But what the answers mean, what their distributions mean – is better seen as a black box in which the owls are not what they seem.”

Titkov (in seven posts to date, in fact) goes on to faithfully reproduce the essence of the arguments of both sides (Snegovaya subsequently joined in online debate with Aleksei Miniailo – associated with Khroniki). In his fifth post on the topic, Titkov contrasts the nitty-gritty of the technical-methodological debate (which I’ve edited here):

“the coincidence of values (across difference surveys showing high war support) gives confidence in Snegovaya’s argument that ‘something’ was measured, and not just a random artifact. Checking the results of different surveys for ‘convergence/non-convergence’ is a useful procedure. But there is a flip side, which is revealed by the episode with the Khroniki data. If the results can be distorted due to the wording of questions and answers, this is a systematic error and it does not depend on the number of times a poll is carried out.” I.e. if a department of cops use speed detectors that are all badly calibrated, should we be reassured they are all showing similar readings? Miniailo essentially comes along and says he’s got a better calibrated detector and the drivers were not speeding after all.  

Titkov in his sixth post: ‘Snegovaya suggests dividing into segments: “Hawks” (20%-30%), “Loyalists + Uncertain” (40%-50%), “War Opponents” (20%-30%). The dispute, she says, is about how to interpret the intermediate group, whether to add it to the “hawks” (“Support = Loyalists/Uncertain + Hawks”). Snegovaya explains why she adds it: the middle group “tends to support everything Putin proposes.”

But “Loyalists” do not coincide with Putin in their opinions and desires, – argues Miniailo. According to him, those who answer “I trust Putin” simultaneously want, for the most part, peace with Ukraine, normal relations with the West, and a redistribution of spending from the military to social spending. In this sense, “support” is not obvious.

However, Snegovaya does not argue that the mood of the “loyalists” is the same; she herself writes in the report that, according to polls, citizens are more concerned with the economy and social issues. She explains that by “support” she means not opinions, but practice. The idea is that Putin’s policy “does not meet resistance.” Instead of protesting, citizens remain silent and adapt, thereby “giving Putin the green light.”

Miniailo’s answer to this is that the “green light” argument does not take into account that today’s Russia is a consolidated autocracy, in which citizens have no leverage to influence policy. Accusations should be made to the political establishment, not ordinary Russians.

The conversation reaches a point where the details of the polling technique fade into the background. Political and ethical arguments begin. All the demons of hell are ready to flock to the favourite delicacy of “collective guilt and responsibility.”’

It seems like Snegovaya has the upper hand here: even if in private people have diversity of opinions, in public there is either approval or silence, and no public contestation. Miniailo’s short answer is simple: that in an autocracy, citizens know they have no leverage to influence politics, thus, Snegovaya’s implication of passivity or connivance is has no political or sociological value.

But here we depart from Titkov’s useful summary and try to zoom out – which is what Rossen Djagalov does: “I understand that positions like theirs (the latest iteration of Levada Center’s Homo Sovieticus thesis, i.e. Russia’s underlying problem is not Putin or his regime, but the Russian people, of which Putin and that regime are just an accurate reflection) can be psychologically helpful in washing one’s hands “from that,” appearing pitilessly honest, harshly prophetic. They find eager audiences among Western media and academic publics these days, facilitating publications, earning positions, etc. But in as much as politics is about constructing majorities, working with and winning over people outside of your narrow elite, offering the population visions beyond “you are not only dumb and poor; you are also morally deficient,” they also signify a principled refusal to fight Putinism, a refusal that has long predated the full-scale invasion and that in fact paved the way to Putin’s rise to power.”

Djagalov in turn cites Kirill Medvedev’s Despair and Civism Telegram channel. To summarise, Medvedev sees observers like Snegovaya as ‘radical pessimists’, wedded to an ideological position where, for various reasons, they find it necessary to prove that Russians fully accept Putin’s actions. Medvedev indicates an upward trend in polarization, where Russian liberals in emigration radicalize themselves into a position where they adopt absurd sociological contortions to fit all political events in the last 30 years to a simple narrative that hardly differs in essence to that of the Russian elite: ‘the wrong, bone-headed sheeple’.

However, as Medvedev points out, while we would be foolish to subscribe to unfounded optimism or pride, actual Russian politics over the Putin 2.5 decades are equally a progressive history: of antiwar and prodemocratic actions in the 90s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Of protests against the rolling back of the social state, against ecological degradation, and in support of the fundamental dignity of the people living in the Russian Federation. This is essentially the witness I bear in my new book, focusing on how much this everyday politics in search of dignity has been intentionally obscured because so many observers choose to use faulty instruments, or subscribe to the group-think of what Medvedev calls here the ‘demotivitors’: an infantile liberal tradition that devalues a genuine civics-from-below tradition among fellow Russian citizens.