I just returned from the annual conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies where I discussed my book and also chaired a session on the Hidden Pillars of the Soviet Economy. But in this post, I want to summarise some interesting discussions about the challenges of doing research on Russia since 2022. I am going to decontextualize the discussions here, so as not to identify individual who may not want to be identified. There aren’t really just ‘four big challenges’, but just overlapping methodological, conceptual, practical and ethical ones.

Self-censorship in media and social media

People kind of assume a continuity of media self-censorship from early in the 2000s, but it’s important to remember that it is only recently that the practices of the periphery in Russia – complete journalistic obfuscation and avoidance – returned to the core (the colonial boomerang again!). This was a drip-drip process and it’s also important therefore to realise that if one wants to think about reliability of media sources one also needs to contextualize and historicize the degree and nature of self-censorship. This is a major challenge because so often our ‘Kremlinological’ tendencies – where ‘information’ about elites is filtered through multiple invisible sources – can mean we forget that so many accepted truths are open to question. In fact, when this discussion was going on, I was reminded of some of the very well-respected work on ‘oligarchs’ from the early 2000s which now look rather naïve and dated when one considers how researchers got access to the narratives they then relatively uncritically transmitted to Western audiences in their scholarship. Will we look back on scholarship about the war in 10 years time in the same way and ask ourselves – how could we rely on this narrow perspective? How could we seriously believe this?

Having said that, there’s also a related problem of ‘presentism’ and exaggeration of the issue of self-censorship, in that in many ways, difficult topics still get discussion in the Russian media and press and that we shouldn’t project on to 2010, or even 2018 our assumptions that heavy self-censorship now defeats the purpose of relying on journalists’ reports or perspectives even from ‘late Putinism’ prior to 2022.

‘You can’t go there!’

We talked a little about how major misconceptions about the risks to researchers and field-based research have always been present. Even fifteen years ago to some there was a perception that fieldwork in Russia was somehow too ‘dangerous’ for Western-based researchers and that this has led to incredulity towards those who chose to carry on doing ‘normal’ fieldwork with interviews etc. While not downplaying how much contact and travel is now off limits, we reflected on how difficult it has become to communicate the irreplaceable value of ‘being in the field’ and how much the loss of these embedded perspectives – even if just containing informal contact with interlocutors – leads to impoverishing sociological, political and other attempts to grasp what’s going on. We agreed that fieldwork is indispensable in challenging group think among researchers who may get more seduced by their paradigms as a result of loss of contact with ‘reality’ via the field.

Media and social media are increasingly fractured and unrepresentative snapshots

One interesting point made by a digital media researcher was about VPNs. If media is used as data in research then there needs to be careful appreciation that – for example – if it concerns material that Russians can only access via a VPN then that will mean that such data will become increasingly unrepresentative of the general population as only a particularly tuned-in minority will be willing to pay for VPNs that work well. This might mean we need to focus a lot less on ‘opinions’ and more just on how information circulates in the Ru-internet spaces and beyond.

It is impossible to anticipate ethical problems

Both in ‘my’ panel and in others the problem of unforeseen ethical dilemmas for field researchers arose. Some may well choose to stop doing any kind of ‘ordinary’ field-based research because they cannot anticipate harms to interlocutors and we should respect that. Having said that, the biggest ethical issue is field researchers ceding the right to speak on behalf of Russian people to unethical expert-entrepreneurs who may propose themselves as experts on Russia society without speaking Russian or having been to Russia in many years or ever. This reminded me of a post I wrote just before 2022.

A big question then, given the difficulties of field-based research is: who is authorized to know and to speak about what’s happening in Russia? Non-access is transforming the field and we should be reflecting on this much more.

More briefly, here are some other topics:

The problem of perception among potential interlocutors about journalists and scholars who ‘left’ Russia.

Acknowledging the loss of our expertise over time because of loss of the field. This can lead to woolly schematic thinking as well as normative (what we’d like to see) or even wishful thinking because of the loss of granularity.

Should we be making more use of autoethnography, not because we have something to say about Russia, but because this moment too will pass and this autoethnography will help us process things like the dangers of schematic thinking?

Normative thinking as a danger also pertains to those studying ‘activism’. Finding what’s going on ‘out there’ in terms of politically active people is in danger of getting subsumed by the restrictive frames of the ‘political’ and the ‘civic’. One participant certainly shared my views when she said: ‘what even is an activist in Russia now during war?’ Are we expecting actives to effect positive change in Russia? Of course not. Does that mean we should ignore them, write them off, or – even worse – look for a mythical revolutionary subject in the person of a charismatic leader? The heavy burden of social movement theory can be a hindrance to foregrounding and documenting what ‘is out there’ – which might well be 3-4 anti-regime people doing things in a city of 100,000 people.

Is the legacy of social movement theory a hindrance to those who wish to build theory in the area of civicness and opposition under harsh repression? This is a bigger methodological and conceptual issue than many seem willing to admit. Among the harshly and hardly surviving committed activists in Russia who remain, there is a growing resentment of the opposition abroad, of the Western governments in general and even a recognition of things in common with people who seem to be superficially ‘pro-war’. When the war ends, political oppositionists will ‘have to live with the majority’, whether they like it or not. Acknowledging certain structural feelings like anger at the double-standards of the global core and the way events like Iran and Gaza contribute to a sense of defensive consolidation within Russia and the idea of long-term isolation are things that anti-regime actives in Russia are considering now.

There were many other thought-provoking topics which came up in the course of these discussions, but this post is long enough already.