A piece for Ridl in May 2025 anticipated the disappointment Russians would experience at the lack of a ceasefire. I got to confirm the palpable malaise first hand when, this summer, I spent a long period in Russia. This piece then, draws on some first-hand observations of the ‘social mood’ in Russia right now. Irritation and isolation is the flipside of the ‘comfort’ culture. And perhaps what partly feeds demand for it. As one of the few social researchers with access to what we call ‘the field’, I am very careful to calibrate what I hear and see. I don’t want this piece to be read as ‘anecdote’ or the uninformed views of a mere visitor. I take seriously social science methods and reflect a lot on potential bias and the danger of interlocutors misleading me, or themselves.

Irritation as a second-order affect/effect of war-weariness

With that methodological note out of the way, I couldn’t help but echo the comment of a fellow researcher on social media who in July remarked: ‘why are Russians so grumpy?’ Specifically, he was referring to service workers in front-line work with the public in a large city. I also experienced a surprising amount of unpleasant service encounters (in Moscow, of course – a city that makes New York look a bit chilled out). People are genuinely irritable and snippy, and part of this can be put down to the general social situation, while a lot of ink has gone in to ‘proving’ that many Russians have materially benefitted from the war, it’s difficult to avoid the strains and stresses the war has brought to all the rungs on the social ladder.

Before I arrived, Russian people kept telling me that obviously Putin would get a peace on some of his terms and that even if he didn’t, it was clear that Trump would bring the Ukrainians to heel. How do they feel now? Not great, is the answer. It’s an empirical confirmation of a point made by more quantitively-inclined observers: that polls can tell us something, as long as we read them carefully. In a talk a while ago Ekaterina Shulman remarked that it was very revealing that while a big majority tell pollsters they agree with the statement that the ‘SVO’ (special military op) is going ‘very well’, almost the same number agree with the statement that a ceasefire should ‘happen right away’, even at the contact line (in marked contrast to the stated aims of the operation). Hardly compatible evaluations.

Cognitive dissonance is palpable then, talking to all kinds of different people in Moscow and elsewhere. And this is true not only about the misnomer ‘SVO’. ‘The economy is great. But my personal circumstances are tight. And my friend can’t find a decent job. But isn’t the rise in wages [reported on the radio] great? For other people’. You get the idea. This is a classic psychological distortion, a standard effect of suggestion. This isn’t the main point of my post here, but certainly, irritability should maybe get more attention as a social barometer in contexts like the one Russians are facing. Irritability pairs with cognitive dissonance, but in turn that dissonance expresses a form of knowledge and a rational reflection of (constrained) material circumstances. That things are not as they are presented.

On a side note, I should add that most of the people I interact with do not consume alternative media. Some are openly critical of state media, but most are not (which doesn’t mean they don’t know it’s a very distorted picture). Nonetheless, irritability that bubbles to the surface is palpable when vaguely politicizable topics come up. With irritability one could pair: loneliness.

The loneliness of the true believer (in war)

People who feel a lack of connection or recognition or even just the possibility of sharing pleasantries get irritated and frustrated. In the social sciences literature this is covered by the study of the ‘politics of relationality’ and of ‘affect’. A lot of effort has gone in linking alienation and loneliness to a general lack of recognition of particular groups of people as subjects. And some explain the rise of the far right and other political affiliations through this alienation. More generally, ‘relationality’ is about acknowledging our human need for some sense of stable relationships with our world as we experience it. Tradition, and religion and authority are not available for that purpose in many societies. Defensive consolidation at the start of the war might have been a gut instinctive reaction for many people – but the lack of a patriotic cause, or even coherent leadership position on what the war is for, means that any sense of rallying around a symbol of Russianness is hard to put into practice.

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Sergei Akopov shared with me his 2021 piece on Sovereignty as ‘organized loneliness’ just after I had drafted this blog post. So I need to make a quick aside about it. Akopov focuses on “symbolic representations of sovereignty and their ability to evoke ideological discourse that appeals to notions of identity and loneliness. In the case of contemporary Russia these are also appeals to Russia’s ‘lonely’ civilizational sovereignty, projected both in historical and geopolitical ways.” Later on he argues: “states are able to successfully talk on behalf of their people when state discourse on sovereignty efficiently (directly or implicitly) appeals to a nationally or civilization
ally defined people’s ‘loneliness anxiety.’” Like Akopov, in my book I try to get inside questions of alienation and identity in Russia, though unlike him, I link them to the traumatic social experience of Soviet dissolution. Nonetheless, I would agree with Akopov that ‘organized loneliness’ is a function of the ‘powerful state sovereigntism’ trope in Russia which crowds out more productive forms of shared identity.

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The true believers I talk to are terribly lonely. It has been hard for scholars to address the experience of ‘social death’ that has been injected into Russian society. Just in my own circle, many families are not on speaking terms – and this is just among those who have not left the country. Often it is the anti-war people who have made the definitive break with their relatives and come across as more ‘extreme’ in their views. But the social death itself is then felt most keenly by the true believers. This is because, in reality, apart from the radio and TV, they have no firm sources of confirmation and validation. When I re-entered the field, I was most afraid of my own social death – a number of people had deleted me from Telegram, afraid of any unforeseen consequences of further acquaintance. However, back in ‘the field’, all was good again. Not so for my lonely true believers. And so they turned to me, again and again.  

When a destabilizing or traumatic event is experienced, it’s not just a psychological thing. It’s social as well. People get comfort or strength from a ‘reassurance’ check provided by others, much more than by the media (although parasocial relationships online are very important too nowadays). Social reality is what emerges from sharing experience and validating it. From interacting with others. ‘Fear and anxiety feed off isolation’, as Hannah Arendt showed in her analysis of loneliness. ‘Hope is reinforced by sharing fears with others’, as Anya Topolski remarks in a book on the politics of relationality. And my comments here are largely derived from her work on Arendt. Normalization – even in a war – has to be reproduced (and become validated) socially somehow. But think for a minute and this isn’t really possible for a lot of people in Russia. They know that what they hear is not quite right, or even quite wrong. But it’s not easy to talk about it – even to loved ones.

What was unexpected for me was how many people wanted desperately to talk to me about the war as a relative outsider. Even if they started off by saying ‘we’re not going to talk about the war’, within a few minutes they had invariably come back to it! All of these people were hardcore or normcore war supporters. I think this is partly precisely because I’m considered as coming from a ‘different reality’ to them, as they would occasionally remark. This revealed, again, inadvertently, that they know that their own country’s perspective might well be skewed. Detailed analyses of those conversations are for another post. What I would emphasise here is that irritation (not with me or my answers) and a sense of malaise emerged in those conversations too. A sense of senselessness.

I’ll just give one example. I couldn’t visit one of my oldest interlocutors as she’d been on holiday while I was in Moscow. Later she telephoned me and we had a long conversation supposedly about some house repairs she was planning but she kept repeating – a bit weirdly – how it ‘wasn’t right’ that to get to Crimea was only possible via the bridge and not like in the old days by train through Ukraine. And then she just couldn’t stop repeating that she didn’t understand why the Donbas was laid waste. ‘All that loss’. ‘All that destruction and for what?’ And she kept circling back, almost like someone with early-stage dementia. Not quite getting to the point. Not quite finding her thread. And not really even able to state what was obvious: that she felt depressed after her Crimean holiday.

More than a few observers argue that Russians are ‘bewitched’ by the war and that they require ‘disenchantment’ in some way to come to their senses (Ivan Gololobov has a forthcoming piece about ‘magical Putinism’). I would argue, on the contrary, not that the façade has cracked, but that all the latent disenchantments to do with aspects of Putinism unrelated to the war, are actually accelerating in their ability to resonate. Like a magic crystal.

There’s a word for this too in the literature: ‘crisis ordinariness’.  One could say that every society has its own version of this. Isn’t it the age of crises? To deal with this sense of crisis invading our social spaces, people have to cling to some kind of optimism – often a fantastic or magic one. That was possible, in the Russian case, earlier in the war. But hardly now. So crisis ordinariness is harder to ‘balance out’ with even a ‘cruel optimism’ (Lauren Berlant’s other phrase, specifically about the hollowness of the American dream today).

Is it strange to put so much emphasis on a vague feelings one encounters? For me, this was worth more than a pile of polling interviews or focus groups. But what about the bigger picture of indirect ways of dealing with reality? I don’t normally spend a lot of time in Moscow, preferring the company of people outside the dizzying pace of the capital. But this time I did spend some time there and made a point to make use of the possibility to travel to a number of ‘marginal’ places, touched directly by the war. But further reflections might need to be delayed for another time.