Monthly Archives: November 2025

Three interview commentaries: Schulmann, Zubarevich, Kagarlitsky

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the first in-prison interview of an AI-inoagent

Sometimes I like to blog about what’s going on in Russian social media spaces abroad though it doesn’t seem to bring many readers here. That’s a shame because it’s a space that only indirectly gets attention by anglophones (notwithstanding Meduza’s almost lone attempts to correct this). It’s also pretty informative because some of the best journalists and experts have a big platform there. There is however, just too much material to keep track of. Here’s a rundown of three things I watched via YouTube in the last weeks: political observer Ekaterina Schulmann on how to parse conflicting public opinion indicators; economic geographer Natalia Zubarevich on whether military Keynesianism is paying off; and an interview from behind bars with political prisoner Boris Kagarlitsky.

Schulmann has a brutal schedule – doing public talks seemingly almost every day. At the end of October 2025 she talked to Vot Tak channel (based in Poland with a pretty large online audience). As usual, she covers a lot of minutiae about what’s going on in Russia. What stood out in this episode was her reading of recent polling by Levada about ‘mass perceptions about the influence of the Special Military Operation on society’.  This part of the interview is a good example of how Schulmann has moved to a much more critical position about the meaning of polling in autocracies. She first talks about how Russian propaganda is not meant to be persuasive. It’s instead ‘the voice of force’. ‘Voice of the authorities’. This is why people pay attention to it in so far as it shows the strength and resources of the authorities.

Then she discusses the contradictions at the heart of polling questions: that support for the war appears high, yet, when polled, the majority agree with the statement that the war has mainly brought more ‘negatives’ than positives to Russia. Furthermore, attitudes towards veterans are quite informative: In answer to ‘what has the SMO done to participants in it?’, the main answer is (literally) ‘the war has crippled their souls’. Further, people see the mercenary choice a bit like they see the decision to take up a hazardous job in the Far North: sure, you can get money that way, and this is an ‘honest’ exchange (you know what you’re doing), but preferential treatment/certain social benefits should not accrue to this mercenary choice.

And moreover, society should not be forced into elevating veterans’ social status or respecting this choice. Schulmann adds that this could be symptomatic of a distancing mechanism on the part of society. We could interpret it as ‘infantile’. However, she wisely reserves her own interpretation. Later in the interview she talks more about the growing unhappiness at the government’s economic repression against ordinary people, and its unprecedented political repression against its own elite.

Natalia Zubarevich stayed in Russia after February 2022, teaching and researching in Moscow. She gave a lot of interviews from within Russia and was sometimes painfully careful in how she described the regional economic effects of the war. This interview with a journalist in Paris (November 2025) is therefore something a bit different. Not least because it’s nearly three hours long. I couldn’t sustain any notetaking for that period of time. It’s the usual thing she does, which is almost a self-parody now: barrage the viewer with statistics about employment, profitability, inflation and the like. Quite interesting here was a ‘meta’ moment where they discuss her teaching in Moscow and whether scientific exchange between Russia and the West is possible (c.30m) and what  economic geography in the UK has become: “spatial sociology” (in contrast to Russia where a more ‘traditional’ approach to geography remains). There are loads of moments of incredulity from the interviewer like this at juncture – which is always fun.  

A limitation of Zubarevich is that she confines herself to official statistics, occasionally colouring her assessments with anecdotes – which can also be a bit of a problem given she works at a super elite institution and lives in central Moscow. However, she always says some things that go for and against the ‘common sense’ of the pundit sphere. To summarise, she talks about a significant number of economic losers because of the war while ‘two thirds’ have seen sustained wage increases over inflation.  However, overall, this means competition between employers has been fierce (until recently). A wage spiral essentially is bad for a brittle and regionally-divided economy like Russia’s. She also talks about how the state trying to turn the tax screws on the population will backfire because people will resort to cash and hiding incomes. There’s some interesting stuff about financing and budgets in the occupied territories of E Ukraine. There’s an explainer on regional inequality in Russia and how it’s misleading because of the phenomenon of labour migration (who bring their high wages out of the North).

More interesting than the interview was the divided reaction of the audience. A lot of viewers interpreted the interview as providing cover for the economic choices of the authorities – as painting too rosy, or too detached a picture. Some said that it was unhelpful to use official Russian statistics to argue that there’d been a big uplift to most incomes. For example, some pointed out how the ‘basis’ wage had indeed risen sharply in many jobs but this did not mean a real rise in wages because for many, the main part of paid income is not the ‘basis’, but the discretionary bonuses – the latter being harder to capture in official statistics. It has been very convenient in many sectors to boost the tiny ‘basis’ wage by even 200-300% while cutting or making the achievement of targets for the bonus much harder. Would you feel better off if your basis wage rose from 200 Euro a month to 600 Euro, while the ‘bonus’, which was previously 800 Euro, was now at the mercy of the foreman? You might get a bonus of 1000 Euro when a monthly or bimonthly target is reached, but many are not – or are being forced to overwork for what was previously a given. Especially in service or while-collar work where the concrete output is not a hard quantity of product.

There are good points in the interview about how unsustainable the military ‘juicing’ of the economy already is in 2025. Zubarevich makes it pretty clear she thinks this sugar high will come with a massive crash. People were unhappy to about her repeating policy aims as if they were realizable – like a plan for rehabilitation facilities for veterans all over Russia: pie in the sky, was a criticism from the chat. People really didn’t like her repeating a point that many make – that within the Russian government there are smart, competent and effective pockets of policy making.

The third interview (also November 2025) is something of a landmark. An interview between Andrei Rudoi – a well-known leftwing Youtuber, and Boris Kagarlitsky. Only, Kagarlitsky – roughly speaking, a Marxist historian and public intellectual – is in a prison colony for mildly critical remarks about the conduct of the war. The interview was therefore reconstructed using an AI avatar of Kagarlitsky who spoke the words from the letters, phone call transcripts and such like, of the actual person siting in Penal Colony No. 4, Torzhok, Tver Region.  Even if one has no sympathy for the person of Kagarlitsky (and I certainly do), some of the interview feels poignant. Particularly since Kagarlitsky was also imprisoned by Soviet authorities in 1982 for ‘anti-Soviet’ activities.

Prison is not exactly the place where one improves one’s health, K notes at the beginning. Only it is a very healthy-looking, if a little uncanny avatar saying these words. You’re the first AI Foreign Agent (‘Inoagent’), remarks Rudoi.

What’s most interesting to the general audience is the first few minutes of the interview where K talks about the efforts to recruit soldiers from the penal colony. He’s too old and has a political sentence so is not a target of recruitment efforts. Prisoners are all forced out onto the football pitch to listen to the ‘recruiters’ tell them that even if they die, their relatives will get a good pay-out. Sometimes lectures about this are read and K has been present at them. K talks about the fluctuation in numbers recruited – there’s now few signing up. In 2023 there were hundreds, by May 2024 a few dozen a month. Now it’s less than a dozen a month at best. Recent recruitment was because of a false impression that one could sign up to get out of prison and that a ceasefire would be called. Even recruiters used this argument. K emphasises that ideological arguments are entirely absent – even antiwar people sign up, particularly if they have been jailed for desertion/avoiding mobilization (337th article of the Criminal Code). There are pro-war prisoners in the colony, but not a single one has signed up. Therefore we should really take stock of the real motivations for signing up from prison.

Often those who have been in Ukraine seek to dissuade others from signing up. But they themselves then sign up themselves as a way of getting the punitive 337 label removed. One should not think that because someone went to fight that they are for the war, and that if someone refused to fight they are against.

K is asked why he didn’t leave Russia when he had the chance. He says he does not regret his (in)actions. Where you are doesn’t matter to how to speak about things. And at the same time there’s no shame for those who choose to leave. It’s solidarity that’s important. (full disclosure: I was on a discussion panel with K before he was arrested – he was quite confident he was safe from arrest).

Then the interview discusses the causes of the war from a leftist perspective – putting events into the context of the dead-end choices made by the elites since 2010 – the acceleration towards a form of authoritarianism away from managed democracy, and that most importantly this was a ‘choice’ supported by most liberal elites.

There’s a discussion of how the left can use the demand for Soviet nostalgia and quasi-nationalist figures’ big social media presence to get their own voices heard. But about how the biggest problem for left public presence in Russia was always the visceral hatred for progressive politics among the liberal journalist caste. This, however, is changing because younger people are less politically tribal. There’s interesting discussion about how the war forces leftists to think anew about their attitudes towards the USSR – a split between people who can assess the progressive aims of the Revolution, and those seduced by ‘Red Imperialism’. The latter invariably support the regime since 2022. At the same time, those liberal ‘fellow travellers’ of Putinism are also forced to confront some home truths, such as their cynicism and deep mistrust of democratic transformation.

At the end of the interview the speakers look forward to possible outcomes at the end of the conflict. It’s hard to imagine how weird this is – quite open political discussion coming from within a prison colony. One of the final metaphors K uses is a ship adrift in the Arctic sea with the officers on the bridge unable to even reach the captain let alone get him to make decisions. There’s an iceberg out there in the fog, but no one has time for it. Kagarlitsky reminds us that the great title of Alexei Yurchak’s book on the end of the USSR is still very relevant for today: ‘everything was forever, until it was no more’.

Beyond the Talk: What Questions Reveal About How We Understand Russia Today

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Guess what schooner rewarded me after my long talk?

On Monday this week I was fortunate enough to present my book at the King’s Russia Institute. I’ve now presented it a number of times for different audiences. This time I tried to do a really deep dive into the complex architecture, even though the talk was a public one and had a mixed audience. However, instead of recounting to you the content of the talk, I thought I’d share the questions I got from the audience at the end of around 55 minutes of me yapping. I think often the responses are the most fascinating part of a scholarly event – where you get a good idea of the core interests of the audience and how your talk has connected – or failed to connect.

There were a lot of questions and I didn’t manage to write them down in full, but here’s an approximation of them with a short version of my answer:

How does internet censorship affect knowledge of the war inside Russia? How can people move from a pro- to an anti-war position given the limitation of information about the war? How do people find information about the war to then be able to adopt an anti-war position.

This for me seemed to be based on the mistaken assumption that people are isolated from sources of information that could potentially present a different version of reality to that consumed in mainstream media. However, in my answer I emphasised that information was not the problem, nor was censorship, but that the real problem was that people with doubts or moral objections are made to feel isolated and in the minority, when that’s not the case at all. Making people think no one would share their opinion is the genuine strength of media control and self-censorship. This is also a way to deal with people, who misguidedly in my opinion, think that ‘preference falsification’ is merely a technical problem in surveys, but part of the ‘curse and blessing’ for Russian studies, as Alexander Libman calls it, of the ‘credibility revolution’ (that empirical work should be about showing causal relationships in data statistically).

Can one really say there’s been a growth in repression inside Russia since the war?

I don’t really understand where this question came from, but it allowed me to talk about the power of random and non-predictable repression using examples of people in my research who are openly anti-war, and then the documented cases where people got prosecuted for ‘likes’ and social media posts. I still remain of the opinion that many of the people prosecuted wanted to set a moral example, which in itself is interesting (if very sad). The oppositional people in my research (a very small sample) are extremely careful about some things, but seemingly take risks in other contexts where constructive ambiguity is possible. Of course there is also the possibility of the very Soviet tradition of opposition by analogy or metaphor which some of my Russian colleague like to draw attention to.

How do you understand the term ‘civil society’ as it applies to Russia?

This was I suppose a direct response to part of my talk where I say it’s important to draw on the very rich newer threads in political research that emphasise emotional and social motivation for activists, and the pre-organizational capacity of people to, well, get together and stand up against things they don’t like. One of the more interesting tensions in the books is me saying that things like Navalnyi’s regional ‘training’ of activists was genuinely capacity building while, at the same time, there will always ‘spontaneously’ emerge leader-like or charismatic figures to can anchor the expression of grievances and that often participation is ‘pre-cognitive’ or ‘beyond intentionality’. In that way, I’m merely echoing work being done in disciplinary contexts a little removed from mainstream political science – both in critical human geography and indeed, in Russian sociology itself.  

How have people been able to distance themselves from the war through pursuing a policy of detaching themselves as much as they can from the state (the ‘happy ones’)?

This was a very detailed descriptive question based on personal experience and it allowed to briefly reiterate what I’ve written on this blog quite recently about the very strongly class-inflected experience of the war in Russia (mirrored by the Ukrainian experience to a degree) and how yes, some people can both ‘buy’ themselves out of thinking about it. Though, I emphasise, the book argues that everyone has to deal with a particularly fickle and mean state at various junctures.

How do you gain the trust of people? How do they internalize fear which then affects their behaviour and what they say to people? How do you avoid just circling in the same group of persons in your research?

Some standard answers here about snowballing and long-term embedding in communities. I do think participant observation helped me overcome one failing I had early on after 2022, which Ilya Matveev helpfully pointed out to me: it’s easy to underestimate the power of fear in Russia.

How does resentment against the war manifest itself in relation to how people treat veterans?

I think I maybe misremembered this question, but it allowed me to repeat a point Ekaterina Shulman/Schulmann made recently about how people when surveyed are quite critical of the idea of the state providing more than just mercenary payment to soldiers and are not at all for the idea of giving them political influence or a ‘social’ preference in access to services, etc. In that (Russian language) YouTube talk by Shulman there’s also some interesting critical discussion of how to interpret survey data in Russia.

What do you mean by state capacity? How can Gen Z inspire the rest of the population in opposing the path taken by the state?

Two questions here. The first in response to perhaps the most convoluted part of my book/talk which is where I try to demystify the operations of the local Russian state by saying ordinary people have a lot more power to change how the state operates and that this is a political kind of power. In a sense, ‘capacity’ to get policy done depends a lot on consent, and even a kind of common modus operandi shared between citizens and street-level bureaucrats. The examples I give in the book are trash collection, heating infrastructure, and even 2022 military mobilization. There’s an accessible early version of how I think about this here and again, here.

The last question was in reference to the detention of the street singer in St Petersburg. The questioner was right, I think, to point to the moral example of young people as capable of forcing older people to reflect on their own hypocrisy and cowardice, and, hopefully, change this. On the other hand, I responded by saying that when regimes start policing the minutia of popular culture, they start to look a bit absurd, and from there it’s not a long journey to them looking weak and brittle.

Ethnography (about Russia) is not anecdotes

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How positivists try to make me feel about my methods. I hide little, but what’s hiding under their jackets might not be so appealing

How holistic knowledge about societies can only be produced through observation and reflection.

Doing this new podcast on ‘Unfiltered Russia’ reminded me of one of the main problems of the monocrop ‘Russia expertise field’ – its frequent distance, disdain or condescension towards its subject matter. It was really nice that my co-discussants instinctively (and intellectually) grasped the main idea of my research: that externally-imposed theories and even domestically collected statistics don’t even begin to tell the whole story. Genuine social, political, and economic understanding needs observation and even participation.

The experience of talking about this on the podcast was particularly triggering for me. When I present my work, it often meets incredulity or hostility, even among fellow social scientists. I can’t tell you how many times my work has been downgraded to ‘that’s just an anecdote’ (see below), or in the more polite variant – ‘so how generalizable is this to the rest of Russia’. Some younger scholars who’ve never exited the comfort of their methodological prison cells can’t help telling on themselves by saying, ‘so, your ‘n’ [sample size] is like, not statistically significant?’

Now, I’ve grown a thick enough skin not to react when fellow researchers show their ignorance of the last 90 years of post-positivism, or when they show their indifference to the ongoing replication crisis in the so-called ‘harder’ side of the human sciences. However, the podcast reminded me of a couple of recent experiences on the ‘Explain the Russian War’ junket circuit. A ‘junket’ is a paid trip where the real reasons are for pleasure or to engage in ‘self-PR’. ‘The circuit’ refers to the now familiar sight of the same haggard faces who are booked for expert events ‘on decolonizing Russia’, or ‘how to really help Ukraine’.

Because of their spinelessness and simultaneous sense of moral superiority, governments in the European area have paid for events where Russian ‘experts’ come and blather about civil society in exile and the one-true-opposition-that-if-only-was-given-lots-of-cash-would-make-Russia-forgettable-again. I occasionally was an observer or even discussant at a few of these events (unpaid and even self-funded on occasion). The participants (as opposed to audience) are generally what is known as ‘grant-feeders’ – a subcategory of public sociopaths; exile journalists, pundits and publicists – some genuine, many fraudulent; real activists and honest NGO people (small minority, may the Lord protect them), EU-adjacent policy people and even parliamentarians (‘I’m just here for the lunch, is there going to be wine?’), and the occasional activist academic (gurns horribly)!

At one such event I was even on a panel discussing ‘what’s really going on in Russian society’ and had the misfortune to be paired with two excellent quantitative scholars whom I deeply respect. Now, these colleagues are good, nice people, who are at least polite about my work in public (well, actually, they just don’t acknowledge my work exists, but that’s par for the course). They do perhaps know that ethnography exists, vaguely. As is the rule, I got the usual question from the audience: ‘how generalizable are your findings?’ Which is fair enough and hard to answer without giving a minilecture.

However, what was funny (not actually funny), was that while various policy people were perfectly happy with my presentation and even came up and thanked me (including a defence bloke in an effing full dress military uniform), it was a humanities colleague who, in a public question, said: ‘it’s great that we can get these anecdotes from inside Russia from Jeremy, along with the survey data from Dr. Bokolov, and Professor Girskaia’. ANECDOTES!? That’s what you, an archival researcher, got from my talk? Clearly, I have failed. And I blame myself. Well, not entirely. It shows that in humanities too, we can be seduced by the dark arts of big numbers and a dodgy statistical regression. If you want anecdotes I can give them, but they’ll be about academic corruption and faked or manipulated survey data.

Obligatory Oz picture

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the point of this post. How does ethnography justify itself as a method? Here, ‘ethnography’ is just a short-hand for a variety of holistic methods now routinely used by qualitative researcher – be they health sociologists, criminologists, urban planners, occupational therapists, researchers of religion, or even just plain vanilla anthropologists (not so many left, unfortunately).

The ethnographic method* developed as an anthropological tool in the 19th century It was used as a way of documenting and providing an insight into the culture, or everyday life, of previously ‘unknown’ peoples and societies. It also has sociological origins associated with the urbanization of the United States and with the ‘Chicago School’ of the 1920s-. Ethnographers distinguished themselves from social scientists who wanted to reproduce the rigours of the natural sciences through positivism. They did this by emphasising that the researcher must first experience what their research subjects experienced before being able to take a more ‘objective’ or ‘detached’ view.

Throughout the twentieth century, ethnographic researchers were able to use experience to challenge hegemonic ideas about societies. In the English-speaking world, Scheper-Hughes, Abu-Lughod, S. Ortner, L. Wacquant, A. Tsing, H. Pilkington  are just a few recent examples of major ‘disruptors’ who used fieldwork and observation to go against the flow of common sense about some ‘social problem’. (These are just a few who came to mind that I’ve either taught or studied. Hilary Pilkington, who worked a lot on the Russia beyond Moscow, directly inspired me and part of this post rearticulates her teaching).

Ethnography has emerged as a kind of ‘minority report’ – a kind of dissenting way of doing social science (many of us actually reject the application of scientism to our work). We usually share the view that the ‘common sense’ domination of numbers and metrics leads to dangerous groupthink or even complete misunderstanding of what’s going on. Ethnography is useful (maybe even indispensable) when the context of the ‘thing’ under study is important to our understanding of it. For example, it might be that we need a more holistic understanding of an- ‘other’, and this can include a society, like Russia, which is mainly presented through a ‘numbers lens’, or as explainable using quantitative methods (‘60% of Russians support the war, therefore they ergo must be fascists’).

Some of the other advantages of ethnography in general are relevant to the Russian case too: if a group under study is hard to reach e.g. ‘ordinary Russians’ who don’t take part in politics or polling, or whose livelihoods rely in part on the informal economy. If building trust relations with respondents is a prerequisite for the research e.g. people living in a society with a particularly repressive state. Where you are studying complex relationships or the dynamics of social processes e.g. the impact of war and economic pressures on attitudes towards the government.

But how do we get to these insights? What’s special about the approach? Sometimes overlooked is that it’s not just interviewing but also observing and even ‘participating’. William Foote Whyte, in 1984 wrote: ‘Observation guides us to some of the important questions we want to ask the respondent, and interviewing helps us to interpret the significance of what we are observing.’ It’s a reinforcing loop of interpretation.

Paul Willis, another important voice, said that to do an ethnography is to engage in everyday life for the purposes of reflection upon it. This is the essence of ‘the sociological imagination’. What’s that? Most simply, after C. Wright Mills, it’s the idea that ‘abstracted empiricism’ (data produce statistical assertions that then get collapsed into ‘scales’ of public opinion, for example) tends to lead us further away from a deep ‘awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society’, unless we are careful. So, Mills points out, writing in the 1950s, ‘voting behaviour’ might appear to be easily amenable to statistical investigation, but really, it tends to produce an analytically ‘thin’ version of reality: it ignores things like the party machinery for getting out the vote. It might ignore the role of the traditional or extended family in shaping political views.

C. Wright Mills – a powerfully thinking life cut short

Of course, it’s no coincidence I mention Mills’ example of polls and voting behaviour. For this is still the main way that social reality in Russia is translated and presented for Western audiences. Ethnographers would assume that data are never just ‘gathered’ like fruits in the wild but actively produced in the interaction between the researcher and the human interlocutor. This is what Anthony Giddens refers to as the ‘double hermeneutic’. It means that stating we are ‘objective’ in recording our observations is insufficient grounds for claiming we have generated reliable ‘facts’ and knowledge. The main challenge to positivistic versions of social science (incl.  polling) is ‘interpretivism’: we can only know the social world we study via the meanings attached to it by human subjects. Because meanings are different and changing, and contested, we can’t keep a firm hold on to the idea of a stable external social ‘reality’.

Now, there are many critiques of surveys, but you may not be surprised to find that when you mention them to people who rely on survey methods, they respond with technical justifications (that the sample size was representative, that the questions were formulated to cope with preference falsification, and so on). The main critiques come from phenomenology, emancipatory analysis, and feminism. I won’t go into detail here, but on the first point, phenomenologists might point out that the survey is a highly artificial interaction and often the person responding is reacting to expectations – both of the researcher, of what’s the ‘right’ answer, of what’s ‘politically correct’, or the rumble in their stomach because it’s lunch time. In other words, the answers are in no way empirical ‘facts’.

Further, quantification is not ‘valid’: people don’t think of their ‘support for the Russian Armed Forces in the Special Military Operation’ in terms of ‘completely agree’, ‘largely agree’, ‘disagree’, ‘strongly disagree’. Indeed, this language may be so hackneyed or alienating, or, indeed, frightening, that some of the answers might be worthless. Now, it might be that some people actually think that Russian soldiers are above all paragons of virtue and that stories of war crimes are made up Western propaganda. The point though is that a survey certainly won’t help you understand that. [obligatory note that there are people – and they’re mainly Russian researchers based in Russia – critically interpreting survey data to find out important stuff].

Once again, it’s kinda sad that in the 1950s there was already growing scepticism among sociologists about official statistics and survey methods and this was one reason that secondary (more qualitative) analysis exploded, especially in the UK. That’s not to say that quantitative methods don’t have an important role to play elsewhere. There are lots of social relations that are quantifiable in some way or other – age; voting proportions; wages; time spent working; wealth and gender inequalities.

But this post is long enough already. I like the 2017 article on polling by Greg Yudin and often read it with my students. In it, Yudin has some zingers: polls are an institution of political presentation (not representation). They are pernicious because they wholly occupy the public’s imagination due to the absence of other democratic measures of voice. ‘It hypnotizes its audience with its numbers’, but ‘because it is inappropriate to talk about politics… [it is only a radical minority of people [who] answers questions… That’s why the claim that polls represent the population has no foundation in reality’. The article is well worth a read again, especially as it’s not just in Russia that people are hypnotized by the Wizard of Oz.