Monthly Archives: April 2025

Is Russian society ready for a ceasefire?

5 Replies
workers dismantle the motto of the Russian Borderguards Academy which reads ‘We do not desire even an inch of another’s land’

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

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

What’s more helpful is tracking over time the proportion of people who answer that they would support withdrawal from Ukraine without reaching Moscow’s military goals. Especially important are those findings, such as those of Chronicles, which recently show a higher percentage who say they would support a ceasefire without achieving these goals than the percentage who oppose such a decision – Chronicles recently measured this as 40% versus 33%. Significantly, the latter figure has fallen quite quickly from 47% previously. Chronicles overall thinks that the implacable pro-war cohort, or ‘maximalists’, is only 12% of the population. I would agree overall.

We can compare these kind of findings to research undertaken by American political scientists on the structure of Russian society in terms of types of popular conservatism. In a recent article, Dekalchuk and her coauthors argue that there are four clusters of non-conservatives in Russian society and five clusters of distinctly conservative groups. The latter are a majority of the population at 60%. The number of ‘die-hard’ conservatives who align with cultural and military patriotism is 15%, whereas the number of loyal and agreeable authoritarians is around 25% combined. Now, I should say I have some criticism of the overly complex methods of Dekalchuk’s study, but it serves as a complement to other approaches. Importantly, it shows that a similar number c.20% of ‘conservatives’ are not aligned with the authorities, or are even opposed to them, or have interests diametrically opposed to the elite.

At the same time  there is a big core of people who are essentially liberally-minded – perhaps 40% (and in reality if the winds changed, this number would easily be a majority). Thus, if we discount liberals from consideration the die-hard conservatives who are highly trusting in the authorities but not even particularly xenophobic, and then count them together with the group of agreeable authoritarians at 25% we can see that any decision about ending the war is not likely to have any problems justifying itself to these cohorts. Indeed, the paper in question argues that the core conservative groups have relatively weak value systems and can quickly adapt to new geopolitical circumstances.

I would add to this my own observation from polling done before the war on the salience of Ukraine to most Russians. It was very low to be almost statistically insignificant – meaning that if the elite want to drop Ukraine down the agenda this could be achieved almost without political costs among the Putin constituency. Finally, I would mention longitudinal monitoring carried out by Levashov and others at the Russian Academy of Sciences. This shows aggressive forms of patriotism to be extremely low in the general population: ‘patriotism’ as meaning the readiness to take up weapons is measured at only 25% by his team in 2023. A remarkably low number if we consider that this polling was conducted a year after the beginning of the full-scale invasion. In the same survey conducted in June 2023, only 4% of respondents named ‘patriotism’ as a source of national pride in Russia. 13% named the army. And 27% could not answer the question. The highest scoring answer was ‘The Russian People’ at 16%.

Economic imperatives

Deteriorating macro-economic situation is a major factor which will become more salient in the course of 2025 and 2026 regardless of any decision about a ceasefire. The increasing economic costs of the war for ordinary Russians was possible to offset or hide for much of 2022 and 2023, but the cumulative effect of inflation on basic foodstuffs has been relentless. Even where workers have received indexed pay increases, if we take a longer-term view, living standards for the majority have stagnated since at least 2013. It is important to remember that regime legitimacy has been primarily based on economic stability. Defence spending rose by 30% in 2022. For 2024 military spending was nearly 7% of GDP which accompanied the first serious deficit spending by the state of around 2-3%.

Wartime spending has boosted the apparent size of Russia’s GDP relative to other economies but what many observes fail to account for is that most of this spending has little multiplier effect in the economy outside military cities (which are small and isolated) and that given the grave infrastructural deficiencies in the economy and poor level of social protection spending, the decision to cut budgets that would actually improve life for Russians is an increasingly visible political choice by the elite that cannot be hidden even from notionally loyal citizens. The majority of people are less than enthusiastic about seeing a further reduction in living standards like that experienced after the integration of Crimea in 2014. People have economic ‘memories’. People often talk about their grievances about paying pensions to people in Crimea and now in the occupied territories of E. Ukraine to people who did not contribute to the Russian economy and so have not ‘paid their way’. This sense of undeservingness among new Russian citizens is a factor few have discussed.

To reiterate, one of the current major failings in analysis is the attention paid to the apparent growth and robustness of the Russian economy. With or without a ceasefire – the shift to military spending stored up major pain down the line for the main Putin constituency – state workers – in the forms of eroded purchasing power, deterioration in the quality of public services and reduced state capacity. (I will post later on the much commented-upon findings about a rise in life satisfaction among Russians)*.

Furthermore poor choices will only become more apparent as part of a conscious zero-sum policy choice as things like water infrastructure and public transport are characterized by breakdowns which are impossible to hide. Coupled with the plan to abolish the lowest level of municipal governance in favour of clusters of urban forms and the accompanying pressure this will bring on the performance of regional governors, it is highly likely that social strife will be an ever present political risk outside the 10 biggest cities – particularly in the rust belt and secondary cities, even in cities that have been the beneficiaries of military spending like Nizhnyi Tagil.

This is because the multiplier from higher military industrial salaries is much less than people in the West appreciate. If you go from earning 40,000 roubles to 100,000 roubles, that is still a drop in the ocean, especially when the real level of inflation is around 20% for wage-earners. For Russian military spending on soldiers salaries to have a significant impact it would have to change the share of national income accruing to labour. And Russia remains a country where despite very high human development, the share is around 10% less than in other highly developed countries. Consequently while there is an inflation shock, this is not primarily due to increased discretionary spending, which remains low even by East European standards. Similarly, soldiers salaries certainly have an impact on the family fortunes in the short term of the 500,000 -plus service personnel who have received them or who have received injury payouts or death benefits, but again, in the perspective of an economy of 140 million people, this impact does not scale, while it certainly does act as a drain on spending on other social priorities like child benefits, school budgets and hospital maintenance.

Elite opinion on ceasefire

What about elite attitudes? We can take a metalevel perspective on the information they receive about social mood. Likely, because of the ideological positioning of sociologists working for the regime, they get relatively good answers to questions they might ask. But we should be cautious about the quality of the questions they are willing to ask. We see the problem with this in wording of questions that sociologists ask in opinion polls: these are generally quite narrowly worded and focussed on identifying consent among people for decisions already taken or likely. Furthermore, we should recall that there is evidence of conspiracy theory belief and mindsets focussed on the possibility of betrayal by Western interlocutors.

As many have pointed out, the Russian leadership craves, almost pathologically recognition by the West more than anything else, and in the Trump leadership, it is clear they believe it may be possible to get some kind of recognition for Russia’s Great Power status and also carve out at least most of the territorial gains they have captured from Ukraine. It was interesting to observe the recent comments by Trump concerning American recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea. It’s quite possible to imagine that this is a kind of psychological priming or imprinting originating from the Russian side. Recognition of Crimea by the US would be a significant win worth having in exchange for even a relatively long ceasefire commitment. It would also be more realistic than trying to get acceptance of recognition of 2022-2025 territorial gains.

It seems very unlikely that any Ukraine government would agree to giving up more territory that would include the other parts of the regions partly occupied by Russia. The only other area under almost complete control is Luhansk region. Thinking back to how unworkable Minsk Agreements proved to be for both sides, it’s not likely that even after a prolonged ceasefire that the Ukrainian side would agree to any withdrawals. This means a frozen contact line and militarization of the existing contact line as a new border for Ukraine. This is far short of the maximalist aims of Russia, but Crimean recognition would easily compensate for this in terms of justifying a long-term ceasefire to the population. After all, there is significant war weariness, economic fatigue, a lack of belief that Russia can win in the long term, a lack of interest in the territories of Donbas, in comparison to broad and strong belief that Crimea is historically part of Russia.

This kind of ceasefire could easily be sold to the population along with the narrative that Russia can now rearm and regroup – take a breather, so to speak, that Russia has effectively held off the combined power of the collective West, and that it has saved those “Russians” who were in Donbas. Furthermore regime intellectuals can spin a tale of how this agreement effectively means recognition of Russia as one of the three great powers and having surpassed her European peers.

*I’ve been asked multiple times to write about rises in life satisfaction and will do when time permits. In short, the war has led to people focussing on small things of satisfaction and fragility of existence. Furthermore, people express satisfaction with less, as if they are ‘grateful’ the state has protected them from the dire prognoses of ‘blockade’. I would also say that the coverage of the report in question tends to gloss over the fact that the life satisfaction levels are still not that great! Where do they define happiness? What does it mean, cross-culturally, ‘to be happy’? There’s a massive anthropological lit on this, and I’ll unpack that in a future post, but one thing to consider is the extent that cross-cultural ‘contentedness’ derives from the ability to adapt to disappointment and frustration.

Everyday politics in Russia, Part III: Ressentiment and social striving

1 Reply

This is the third post about my book. The previous post is here.

That politics in Russia is mostly ordinary and local and insidious is an observation that partly builds on the insights of scholars like Samuel Greene and Alexandrina Vanke. One of my additions is that such a politics can contain traces of a social, and indeed, communitarian political drive. If we don’t like communitarianism then we can think of a more amorphous idea of social recovery, in particular the idea that a meaningful role in society should be available and that this in turn links to the idea of building and striving towards common aims for society made more or less explicit by state ideologies.

I avoid the term utopian, and I spend a lot of time arguing against the idea that this is a form of Soviet nostalgia, or that this impetus masks imperialist and great power instinctual needs among the majority of Russians. At the same time, I do take seriously that minority who express full-throated enthusiasm for maximalist war aims and for the Russian state-regime as it is presently constituted. But I only afford them the attention they deserve. What’s more striking are the common aims and desires of the majority. And this social-striving towards a common purpose (which contains different ideas of ‘the good’) is what connects both eco protestors and people like Felix. Felix is a composite of what are usually considered passive regime or war supporters. In a dramatic finale in the book, I represent the dialogue that is still possible today between those ‘patriots’ who collect aid for Russian soldiers and the people like Polina who are seemingly implacable opponents. In subtle and not-so subtle ways, their political articulations intersect in a defensive consolidation around recovery of the nation from social injury.

Defensive consolidation (author copy here) is a response I started writing about almost immediately after the start of the war. The potential stakes of the war bring into focus longer-term feelings of loss and hurt – glossed in the book as post-Soviet ressentiment. These include the loss of a master code, or Russian project, to replace the Soviet one that stood in for the absence of a meaningful Russian national identity. So, consolidation is this spectrum response, from pro-militarist *literal* defensive consolidation that is pro-mobilization, aggressive, to almost Tolstoian – the idea that the only viable social response is a return to rural forms of disengagement with the state which now have a quite a following in the form of eco-settlements, but which are no less a form of grassroots patriotism and striving for the social good than that of the jingo-patriots.

Much more typical is how the war pushes people to consider how to reignite the social imperative to care for Russia and Russians in the immediate now and here. And once again, modestly, I must say there’s nothing new in this argument – it is essentially derived from Samuel Greene’s insights about ‘aggressive immobility’. Nonetheless what I try to tease out is how the war pushes people together and then into forms of collective action – some of which become political demands – whether around receiving entitlements, to better infrastructure, to public safety, to environmental security, to socially-reproductive dignity. And of course, it’s not that the war suddenly means an uptick in visible politicking. Not at all. The point is that the war intensifies these socially-striving feelings that simmered away in hurt for a long time, particularly after the disappointment of the misnomered “Crimean Consensus” in 2014.   

‘Okay’, I hear a thousand Russia watchers object, ‘but how can you make these claims that seem so far from what we hear from other researchers?’ That brings me full-circle to the initial purpose of the book as I had been planning it since 2018 – to give voice to the inherently and intensely political talk and action of ordinary people in Russia. Time and again, the level of the ordinary and the political were mutually exclusive zones of scholarly consideration of Russia. People were seen as cynical, apathetic, atomized, traumatized into consent, willing accomplices, imperialists, civilizationally-incompetent, harbouring nostalgic false consciousness, or at best authoritarian personalities. But so often these theses about Russian political values were detached from the reality I observed in the 16 years of fieldwork relations and the ten years prior to that that I lived among people who would later become some of my informants. And that’s not to say that any of these theses are entirely wrong or not based on empirical evidence. Just that that evidence was mainly second-hand and very often informed by an out-dated common sense. Proactive, prefigurative, personally and locally networked negotiation around political issues of all stripes is present in Russia, even since 2022. Most of the book is about the period from 2014 onwards, but wherever I talk about events before the invasion of Ukraine, I try to update and fill-out the picture without romanticizing and without omission.

So, a book about politics in Russia is itself political in how it decides on what counts in the representation of public values, political action, and scientific knowledge about a society. Big politics is never divorced from small or quiet politics. The political content of ordinary people’s lives can have a huge influence on so-called big politics. Just look at failed military mobilization in 2022.

But with my political decision to give voice to small politics with big resonance, comes difficult ethical decisions. Even before the full-scale war I knew that I would have to obscure the identity of some interlocutors. This means that some of the evidence I present has to be schematic, superficial even. To try to address this problem I created composites – combinations of real people and real interview materials and observations. This means that individuals themselves cannot easily be identified. This is especially important because the majority of people I talk to remain active doing what they do in the book – antiwar activities, municipal political campaigns, eco and labour organising. Nonetheless, I do my best to give extended interview excerpts, and a lot of observations taken from the field, not only in Kaluga region where I focus on a few villages and towns, but also Moscow and my very diverse set of interlocutors from further afield.

To conclude, I argue for better and more serious attention to the ordinary and the micro-scale. Even in a high compliance regime like Hafiz Al-Assad’s 1990s Syria, Lisa Wadeen was careful to put ‘authoritarian’ in inverted commas – why? Because performative support never equated to belief or action on the part of Syrians. Just as authoritarianism needs ‘peopling’ if we are to understand today’s limits of consent to rule and tomorrows possible refusals, so too does a critical political economy, and that is also part of the book though beyond the scope of any short introduction. So, in concluding I argue that politics can’t be fully grasped without the inclusion of the people-scale, and the same is true of the economy. So important to understanding sources of support and opposition to the war, the economic needs an ‘everyday lens’, as various feminist and critical scholars have proposed. Following on then and acknowledging once again the work of others on these topics, there are chapters in the book about municipal infrastructure renewal and the right to the livable city, labour migration and garage economies. I  aim to bring to the fore the way economics and politics can’t be disaggregated when it comes to the kind of active, striving life observable, even if it is played out in a landscape dominated by a feeling what Alexander Vorbrugg has described as Russia’s ‘slow violence’.