In the period between writing the first post and this one, Michael Burawoy has died. Burawoy was one of the formative influences on both Gorbach and me. Here’s a short excursus on how he influenced our approaches to writing a novel (in the Ukraine and Russia contexts) form of political-economy-ethnography. I hadn’t intended to focus on Burawoy (because there’s so much else of interest in the book), but here goes.
Both Gorbach and I try to synthesise our cases from what Gorbach calls ‘participant truth’ and ‘sociological truth’ – and here he cites Burawoy’s 2017 piece. Burawoy there argues that ethnography needs to be liberated from the naïve empiricism that still plagues anthropology and sociology and which is continuously re-invented by scholars unwilling (or afraid) to confront the political implications of their own work. Burawoy uses this opportunity to make the case again for bringing structure and comparison to any micro-level work. Only by linking specific ethnography cases to the broader structural constraints (oligarchic capitalism in Ukraine/authoritarian neoliberalism in Russia) can research do justice to the ‘common sense’ of interlocutors. This is what Gorbach and I attempt. The social ‘facts’ of cases do not speak for themselves. And this, via Bourdieu, is a point Burawoy hammers home in his robust writing. At the risk of overshadowing the discussion, it’s worth citing Burawoy further (here reviewing contemporary ethnography of Wisconsin):
While there’s much more to say about Burawoy’s influence, I want to turn to Gorbach’s very extensive discussion of politics in his second chapter (and the empirics of Chapter Nine). As I wrote previously, Gorbach makes a pitch for those interested in Ukraine to take more seriously ‘everyday politics’ and ‘moral economies’. Having said that, he starts off with a welcome ‘intervention’ – one highly topical to the ascent of Trump 2.0: to paraphrase – to take populism seriously we need to move beyond discourse analysis (MAGA, get rid of woke, etc), and use empirical tools like ethnography to uncover the material basis for populists’… popularity. I’ve mentioned in this blog many times Arlie Russell Hochschild who wrote two books on the Tea Party and Trumpism, but it’s indicative of the timidity of indigenous US political sociology/anthro that this barely scratches the surface and does not qualify as ethnography in way that Gorbach’s or my work does. Gorbach has lived and worked with his interlocutors, as have I. One can barely imagine this possibility in the class-fractious society of the USA. Yes there are some exceptions, but they still amount to general handwringing, or poverty porn. The truth is, an intersectional yet working-class ethnography is just not going to be interesting to the scions of Anthro in the US who get to do PhDs by virtue of precisely that privilege that would make it unthinkable for them to do the necessary work. (For a good general anthro account of Trumpism, see Gusterson who rightly says it ain’t all about class, yet…. ‘Trump’s victory confronts US anthropology with an incompleteness in the project of repatriated anthropology. While anthropologists of the United States have been busy studying scientists and financial traders at one end of the social scale and crack dealers and immigrant communities at the other, we have not had so much to say about the middle ground, the people who supported Trump—people we tend not to like.’ Shout out here to someone who HAS done this work, only in the UK context: Hilary Pilkington. Shout out to, to Christine Walley
Gorbach reminds readers that the best work on postsocialist populism emphasizes its shadow relationship to democracy, avoiding the normative stance that opposes democracy and populism and which is so frequently deployed to show how ‘defective’ Eastern Europe is by mainstream observers. Gorbach, following the work of Tarragoni and Canovan, argues that populism, while expressing a crisis of representative liberal democracy, is not a ‘thin ideology, but contains a radical democratic critique of representative government. But what’s missing is what Gorbach and others aim to provide – the material basis of populism’s rise which ‘aspires to distribute income and, nourishing illusions about the function of the state, is politically disorganized (Boito 2019: 135.)’. In an abrupt turnaround though, Gorbach’s innovation is to relegate populism as just a Gramscian ‘morbid symptom’ of the crisis of capitalism. Parapolitical processes that themselves are generative of populist ‘supply’ are more important to look at and these are perfectly adequately grasped using the long-standing terms ‘moral economy’ and ‘everyday politics’. The ‘crisis of representation’ that populism reflects is then doubled in scholarship: mainstream liberal political science has no tools with which to move towards a diagnosis of the disease (it ignores those that Gorbach offers here), instead offering ‘game theory’ or the pseudoscience that is ‘mass’ social psychology and which includes bizarre claims about whole ‘national groups’ on the basis of dubious experiments conducted on American undergraduates which cannot be replicated and remain ‘WEIRD’.
Gorbach returns to his problematizing of ‘populism’ in the empirical chapter on language politics in Ukraine. There’s an enlightening discussion of how pro-Ukrainian language narratives align with upwardly mobile citizens after Maidan, how the far right may find allies in LGBT organizations in opposing ‘vatniks’. A ‘thin patriotic identity’ (before 2022) emerges that papers over deep ideological differences among liberals and nationalists (p. 224). Uniquely in Ukraine, language affiliation plus civic involvement then serves as a way of denying (or exiting) a stigmatized working-class identity. But, as Gorbach continues:
At the end of the same chapter, Gorbach shows how ‘East Slavic’ Nationalism acts no less powerfully (and does not necessarily conflict with) the ‘ethnic’ Ukrainian model. Indeed, in a place like Kryvyi Rih (recall, Zelensky is from this city), Gorbach uncovers an inversion of the ‘vatnik’ theme – ‘stupid nationalists’ and ‘civilized Soviet-type people’.
After a long discussion of the mayorship of O. Vilkul who would later become a key figure that confounds stereotypes about the political views of Eastern Ukrainians, Gorbach concludes this section:
However, ‘One must take seriously the words of many adherents of both camps when they say they are not ethnic Ukrainian or Russian nationalists. The root of the political cleavage is the perceived moral difference between the self and the other rather than ethnic animosity.’ And in a subsequent final post about this book we will return to that topic of moral economy how it expresses everyday politics.
First off, Gorbach focusses squarely on a key question about class domination in Ukraine which is of relevance in Russia too: if enterprise paternalism – both materially and symbolically – is so decayed then why aren’t workers more militant? This is a question I also ask in my book and in a spin off article about Russia. While Gorbach’s book is not really about wartime Ukraine, the question of how to coopt or placate workers during a period of unprecedented social stress is even more relevant now than it was when he completed most of his fieldwork in 2019.
Gorbach’s book is unprecedented in its range, intellectual ambition and empirical quality. He manages to do a deep dive on the roots of populism, oligarchy, the misnomered language ‘divide’ in Ukraine and even has time for a pitstop in Russian imperial colonial history in his native Kryvyi Rih (a city of iron ore production formed by Belgian, British and French capital, Polish landlords and the power of the Russian imperial state). He looks at how today, organic intellectuals are made within the Ukrainian working classes and how this consciousness is mapped onto ethno-linguistic identity in often contradictory and unpredictable ways. He even shows how the war makes some into ‘East Slavic Ukrainian patriots’, and how people hold simultaneously incommensurate views about social democracy, private property and populist politics.
Gorbach starts off with an analysis of the 2017 coordinated yet wildcat strike in Kryvyi Rih around falling wages. He illustrates that regardless of the strength and weaknesses of alliances and leaders, strikes in the postsocialist world still have the potential to trigger broader protest and act as catalysts for change – coalescence and contagion are distinct possibilities for any future labour unrest as a result of war…. or peace. And a part of this is because workers themselves are increasingly able to access a sense of their demoralized place in society and experience historical learning. However, Gorbach also illustrates that the key paradox of labour unrest in such states remains operative: one can find militancy and class consciousness at the same time as timidity, cynicism and distrust – the partial success of an ‘anti-politics’ hegemonic discourse (later Gorbach will critically discuss both Chantal Mouffe and Nina Eliasoph). In this way, while not developing it fully, Gorbach explains how elite reshuffle to maintain domination, ordinary people get alienated from ‘big politics’ but intense political contestation and strife still occur. Indeed, both the Zelensky and Putin phenomena are end products of the exasperation and desperation of people in this situation, of course noting the fundamental differences between regime type and political system in Ukraine and Russia. This is my view, not Gorbach’s, as he is careful not to discuss Russia, which lies beyond his empirical base – his book is based on impeccable Ukrainian fieldwork which many would envy.
Gorbach is all the more impressive for having done ethnographic work on five different factory sites in Ukraine and charts informants living in three different ‘scales’ of existence in the post-Soviet city: individual life, their embedding in value hierarches, and their use of survival strategies. This is what makes the book so rewarding to a reader who wants to get a feel for the granularity of Ukrainian life beyond the redundancy of so many Ukraine politics books (even the fewvery goodones) or the political science literature focused on moments such as elite contestation, or voting, or the overall political relations of Ukrainian and Russian elites.
I preserve in full Gorbach’s key questions from the intro:
Gorbach then provides a reminder of the failure of both liberal and Marxist theories about capitalist transformation; both predicted their own normative versions of transformation and both were wrong. ‘Instead of capitalist and liberal democratic normalization of the local politico-economic field, the transition produced unorthodox polarizations and populist political templates that were later exported westwards, reversing the expected direction of the flow of ideas and models (Kalb 2015)’. This was also the subject of a post from a couple of months ago about David Ost and ‘semi-peripheral innovation’.
I will summarise more of Gorbach’s book in later posts. For the time being, its worth noting that point 3 above – about how ‘personal trajectories’ tell us a lot about political shifts and how worldviews ‘from below’ exert pressure upwards on the immediate urban context, on the formal economy (because of the availability of the informal economy as a material and symbolic source of alternatives). Various ‘moral economies’ (Gorbach and I prefer the E. P. Thompson pedigree of this term) coexist and influence each other – in particular around how people relate to property relations. They acknowledge as legitimate despotic behaviour by bosses in new businesses, but refuse to pay for a tram ticket because such transport is deemed part of the state, or pay taxes on their side hustles.
Discussion of the inflationary side effects of war spending in the Russian economy has been inconsistent. Even when observers note how in the long term economic decisions store up trouble, many focus on a mistaken idea that a significant segment of Russians are feeling economic benefits, or that wartime spending means real gains (as a share of GDP) for labour (i.e. that gains are redistributive).
Now it’s true that the government did signal a willingness to depart from decades of austerity when it comes to funding the war, but as Nick Trickett points out, spending more to foster growth only works if productive capacity actually expands as a result. Historically, fiscal expansion has increased demands for imports instead of domestic output. Despite recent rises in GDP, a rebound from the economic shock of the start of the war and indeed, the long recent history of Russian underconsumption and underproduction continues.
In the piece from August 2023, and in a recent follow-up piece Trickett offered a corrective to the idea that wages have seen a sustained outpacing of inflation. Incomes are still probably lower in real terms than ten years ago, even accounting for a 9% rise in 2024 (these are the latest Rosstat figures. In 2022 real wages fell by 7% according to RLMS; in 2023 they rose slightly). In other words, Russia would need a decade-long shift in the share of income accruing to labour, and a similar period of real income (over inflation) increases to register. And the actual trend since 2017 is downwards.
The norm of low wages means that big percentage increases matter little to people
This point about the longer-term context is echoed by another granularly serious observer, economic geographer Natalia Zubarevich, who in every interview emphasizes the ‘law of small numbers’. Even a 20-40% rise in your take-home pay (which might well be experienced in well-placed blue-collar jobs over the period 2022-2024), does not mean very much if you’ve been working for subsistence wages for the last decade and set against high ‘real’ inflation.
Eurasianet discussed the manipulation of official inflation statistics in 2023, citing alternative sources which estimated real inflation at 20%. One of my better-off informants was called in to Sberbank for an interview in November. Her high level of rouble deposits was a concern for the bank worker who recommended she reinvest in gold and that the internal calculation by the bank, shared with high net-worth customers, of real inflation was 43% in 2024.
Widespread pessimism and dissatisfaction among wage earners, contrasting with optimism from business owners is what I find in my latest round of interlocutor interviews. These are taken from the same set of research participants I’ve been engaging with since 2009 in a well-placed part of Kaluga region – itself a ‘goldilocks’ zone of development near Moscow. Added to the mainly working-class men and women in my sample, I’ve extended my reach to new entrepreneurs who have expanded business since 2022, as well as more middle-class interviewees in Moscow and other large cities. Here, I condense around 20 hours of talks since early November 2024. For readability and ethical reasons, these are composited characters.
The view from the Kaluga-Moscow corridor
Gennady the small-business entrepreneur is ebullient. Patriotism and making money go hand in hand for him. The exit of Western companies allowed him to lever a wedge, going from importing and selling catering equipment via a US-based supplier to now dealing directly with the Chinese manufacturer. Gena is proud of his ability not only to markedly increase his profit margin this way, he has ‘onshored’ a small, but significant part of the production process involved. He now employs three times as many people as before and a third of those are in primary production – making components that are disposable parts for the Chinese equipment. Russians are like “sponges” when given the right opportunities to learn. They’re also like “mushrooms” – given the right conditions, they thrive and grow.
Gena likes his organic metaphors, but most of his talk is full of anglicisms taken from corporate speak. When we were chatting in Russian it took me a while to work out that when he was speaking about ‘khantil’ for able workers, he was using the Russified past-tense form of ‘hunt’: ‘I’ve been on the hunt for a good freight driver’.
At the same time, Gena says that reacting with resilience and entrepreneurialism is not about ‘patriotism’, but about the need to get ahead and make money. Nonetheless he makes it a point of patriotic principle to end our talk by saying ‘As you are recording this, let me say that we will win the war. Victory is ours’.
Misha is a technician in an industry that should have benefitted from spill-over of orders from the military industrial complex. I can’t be more specific than that, but I’ve never seen him so negative – and he is one of the classic ‘defensive consolidators’ who shifted from opposition to the war in 2022 to acceptance in 2024. Misha’s enterprise is affected by the shortage of workers. Because there aren’t enough workmen, he is not getting enough hours as a technician as not all the equipment can be utilized. The shortage of workers is not because of the war – few people in this region have volunteered for the front. The bigger picture is the one I highlighted at the outset – even with a wage increase of 60% since 2022, for many, the job is not attractive enough in comparison to lower-skill/stress/pace work in Moscow or elsewhere.
There’s also the major demographic squeeze in general – the c.1% annual fall in working people available nationally. Misha talks to me a lot at the moment because even when his plant is up and running, his boss has to meet his demands for more flexible working hours, so sensitive is he to losing more workers. His micro-situation is a good illustration of broader processes – like the ‘work to rule’ in the Moscow metro because of a shortage of staff there but the inability to improve pay and conditions. This implies something of a negative feedback loop for productivity. The more an employer ‘sweats’ assets, be they labour or capital, the sooner they meet hard limits on increasing output, and even reversals.
Misha’s working biography features prominently in my new book, illustrating the ongoing sense of economic insecurity even for people like him who have good social, economic and other ‘capitals’ (he has a higher technical education in a good sector). I’ll merely highlight Russia’s “labour paradox” – workers can sense their structurally strengthening position – via falling demographics and specific labour shortages, while at the same time as suffering from the overall marginalized power in bargaining. In Russia, one can bargain only with one’s feet. This paradox, viewed in aggregate, suggests that workers may be able to demand more where they are in industries serving state demand, yet eventually as the overall position deteriorates further, their bargaining power may prove transient. Whether or not some kind of authoritarian corporatism is possible (where there are real concessions to labour led by political recognition of its need) remains to be seen.
Misha is as well-educated and ‘worldly’ as Gena. He is insistent that the ‘situation’ of workers has only deteriorated, even as he makes a careful distinction in terms of class (that he’s not a worker). He’s been monitoring the job boards because at the beginning of the war he was looking to move into a job that would protect him from mobilization – perhaps metallurgy (another informant successfully made such a shift). Downshifting of work, after all, is a political strategy that goes back to Soviet times.
Misha points out that drawing conclusions based on published wages is foolish. Nowadays you’d have to look even more carefully at the hidden conditions attached to the discretionary element of the wage. Like others in my sample, he has left jobs where the published wage was higher but it required much greater self-exploitation at work. He even gives an example of a forklifter in a cement plant. Your ‘norm’ might now be 50 tonnes a shift rather than 25 tonnes, while your pay has only gone up by 25% since the beginning of the war. Working much harder not only wears you out, it’s dangerous as the risk of accidents exponentially increases.
Then there’s the continuing significance of working-class male breadwinning in what is still a society where women are paid peanuts, even if they successfully undertake what Charlie Walker described as financial independence through leveraging service work positions. Misha’s wife is one such example and yet only earns half his wage, even though on paper her job (administrative) is actually more demanding in hours, skills, responsibility.
Misha, like most of my informants is incredulous as well as quite angry at the idea anyone could take seriously the idea that wages have outpaced inflation for anyone not a soldier or metropolitan executive. He’s not the only person to say: ‘100k’ (around $1000) a month for an average regional breadwinner’s job is the new ‘40k’. In other words, that 100 roubles only buys what 40 roubles bought a few years ago. And certainly, there are still many of his peers earning a lot less than 100,000 roubles a month in blue-collar jobs.
The official ‘subsistence’ minimum for a family of four is 70,000 roubles, leaving a paltry amount left over after basic food costs. And in any case, such measures are often based on absurdly manipulated calculations: like assuming someone can buy fresh fruit for 100 roubles a kilo in winter, or undercounting real heating and utility costs by around 50% because of the assumption that a person does not occupy more than an allotted 18 metres of living space.
Misha works. His wife works. They don’t have a mortgage but own outright a three-room apartment in a nice suburb. Misha has two cars (though he wants to sell one). He complains that real inflation is much higher than reported because even someone like him spends so much of his take-home income on staple food products. For the first time since 2009, Misha has bought 100kg of potatoes to store in his garage basement for the winter. Potatoes – the main source of carbohydrate for most since rice and pasta are often more expensive, have increased in price by over 100% in 2024 due to the poor European harvest. The ‘Russian salad’ basket of goods, is now around 40% more expensive than a year ago – and remember these are just the staples of poor people (carrots, cabbage, etc. )
Inflation in the ‘real basket’ of consumables is the dominant talk among everyone, even the wealthy Muscovites who shop in premium stores. One such informant points out that her favourite discount brand of wet wipes has tripled in price since 2022 and that this is a product made in Russia, not imported. Not only are there a panoply of online calculators for one’s personal inflation rate, people also read discussions in economic Telegram channels where more independent academic works on inflation and the cost of living are popularized.
Thus, one of my informants who lives on irregular freelance work and a disability pension pointed to the Russian household longitudinal monitoring survey (RLMS) published by the Higher School of Economics. He accessed its data via a Telegram channel. While the channel itself is sensationalist and firmly aimed at discrediting the Central Bank, the research from HSE is widely discussed by the channel members, including my interlocutor. Unlike official statistical services, the academic researchers are able to state things ‘as they are’, such as the fact that real incomes remain stagnant and indeed, have fallen in reality since the war thanks to tricks like lowering bonuses, not paying time off, etc. While RLMS confirms statistical facts like the long-term fall in poverty in Russia and even a fall in the GINI coefficient since 2022, the stark difference in measurements of real incomes stands out. RLMS records that average incomes are not higher overall than in 2013. Some of their calculations show real median incomes as less than half those recorded by Rosstat.
Tracking spending habits to calculate real inflation
Another way of looking at whether households are getting richer over time is to look at the proportion of incomes spent on different things. As people get better off they can be expected to spend much less of their income on staples and more on services and luxuries. Both Rosstat and RLMS look at this. The latter points to ongoing stagnation in services and non-perishable goods. Even today, Russians spend only 5% more on eating out than they did in 1994. By the same token, RLMS researchers point out that the sharp fall since 2020 of clothing spending is not due to a reduction in prices, but a sign of severe economic stress. Rosstat shows that households spend no greater proportion of income today on non-food purchases than in 2003. Even the richest 20% of households spend a whopping 26% of their income on food (in rich countries this figure is around 10%).
The main point of looking at the divergence in economic sentiment is to help understand whether war produces new social relations based on the relative shift in capital versus labour power. While people focus on real wage increases these need to be put in the context of the abnormally low wages in Russia, especially outside Moscow. We haven’t touched on household indebtedness and the cost of credit, the coming wage arrears crisis in multiple industries. Those are points to watch for. As mentioned earlier, for me of interest is the capacity (or not) of employers to turn to paternalistic reward as a way of dealing with the demographic-stagflationary crisis unfolding in Russia and which peace (at any price) will not solve.
“when leaving, turn extinguish everyone” – a play on ‘turn the light out when you leave’
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.
Война подрывает академические рутины. И это неплохо. Она дает нам возможность переосмыслить экстрактивные практики, отменить (преодолеть) методологическую и дисциплинарную замкнутость, деколонизировать эпистемологические основания наших знаний. Война заставляет нас столкнуться с проблематичностью того, как знание становятся публичным.
Вот мой список этих проблем, дополненный рядом примеров.
Экстрактивные практики производства знания увековечивают несправедливость. Среди прочего я имею в виду невидимость труда местных экспертов, исследователей и партнеров. Как обеспечить равное внимание знаниям, производимым на местах?
Ученые сплошь и рядом возделывают собственные делянки в науке. Внимание публик и медиа к войне заставило некоторых коллег освободиться от дисциплинарной узости, преследующей академию. Как закрепить и усилить этот тренд? Расширяя эпистемологическую палитру профильных журналов и демократизируя доступ к ним авторов из негегемонных сред? Развивая научный активизм и осваивая соседние журнальные площадки? Включаясь во все новые научные ассоциации и поддерживая гетерогенные связи?
Деколонизация» начинается тогда, когда парадигмы, спроектированные в соответствии с западными дисциплинарными традициями и структурами, ставятся под вопрос изнутри ключевых институтов производства знания на местах. Как поддерживать критические разговоры, стимулирующие развитие и расширение интерпретативных перспектив акторов?
Что делать с доминированием публичных интеллектуалов во взаимодействии экспертных сообществ с медиа? Могут ли они приносить общественную пользу или для начала должны повысить свою квалификацию , чтобы не повторять банальности и дискредитированные истины? На что опираться для улучшения взаимодействия исследователей, еще не утрAтивших связи с полем, с медиа?
Используя эти положения в качестве отправного пункта для дискуссии, я бы хотел сделать ряд пояснений по каждому из них.
Инклюзивное производство знания взамен экстрактивного:
Этические вызовы, с которыми сталкивается исследователь и эксперт по Восточной Европе, нарастают по мере нарастания трудностей со сбором эмпирических данных в России (и Украине). В статье для PostSoviet Affairs опубликованной в 2022 году, я говорил об усилении невидимости местных проводников, фиксеров и сборщиков данных. В качестве примера я приводил случай исследовательницы из Центральной Азии, изучающей ‘contentious politics’. Ее знания локального эксперта были извлечены Западными коллегами, но ее саму так и не упомянули в качестве равноправной участницы процесса производства знания. Я сам вынужден признавать, сколь соблазнительно было бы представить полевые находки как свои собственные достижения, тогда как на деле они исходят от моих собеседников, которых не принято рассматривать в качестве коллег. И хотя лабораторные естественные науки печально известны своей иерархичностью и автократичностью, почему бы нам – поинтересуюсь я провокативно – не перенять у физиков и химиков практику расширения числа соавторов за счет включения в их число широкого круга участников? Почему бы не позаботиться о систематическом выявлении оснований и обеспечении видимости органического интеллектуализма?
Освобождение заложников собственных делянок:
Недавно я мониторил последние выпуски профильных журналов, относящихся к трем смежным предметным областям, чтобы отследить, как осмысляется и контекстуализируется интересующее меня понятие. Тут я получил лишнее подтверждение тому, что все осознают, но никто не любит говорить: допустимо не знать о параллельном рассмотрении темы или концепции в соседних дисциплинарных полях, а стимулы к выходу в эти области отсутствуют. Относительная восприимчивость профильных журналов по Area Studies, как мне представляется, недостаточна для того, чтобы решить эту задачу. Может, стоит объединять усилия для распространения информации способами, превосходящими и преодолевающими модель дисциплинарного журнала ХХ века? Или же проблемой становятся институциональные барьеры встающие на пути сотрудничества, выходящего за границы кафедр и факультетов?
Деколонизация как эпистемологически открытая исследовательская практика:
Деколонизация знания отчасти связана с отрывом от собственных делянок. Только через налаживание диалога между разными интеллектуальными традициями и эпистемологическими позициями мы можем избежать старых ловушек, когда исследование завершается эссенциализацией. Есть хорошие примеры междисциплинарных дискуссий, которые дают старт этому обсуждению. Но как их оживить и распространить? Я думаю о двух свежих примерах.
Майрон Аронофф и Ян Кубик описали ловушку, в которую раз за разом попадают социальные исследователи, когда приписывают местному населению цивилизационную некомпетентность в силу своей либеральной разочарованности результатами 1990-х На постсоветском пространстве. Есть и другие примеры. Гульназ Шарафутдинова и Сэмюэл Грин, развивающие сходную критику, используют междисциплинарные находки в области социальной психологии для оживления политической социологии. К чему нам стоит отнестись серьезно, так это к вернакулярному знанию, позволяющему заполнить пробелы в социальной науке, которая все еще остается слишком натуралистичной (исходит из того, что мы все в игре), слишком позитивистской (утверждает, что большие данные генерируются на основе сведений от дезагрегированных единиц) и слишком однонаправленной (верит, что теоретизирование ведется сверху вниз – из перспективы глобального, национального, регионального контекстов (Aronoff and Kubik 2013: 281).
Более последовательную фокусировку на вернакулярном знании можно найти в работе Дэвида Оста (2018) о полупериферийных инновациях. Ост утверждает, что деколонизация означает дрейф исследователей от открытия Востока для себя к переосмыслению его происхождения как источника идей. Его примерами восточно-европейских инноваций стали бренды автономии (рабочее самоуправление «Солидарности») и переизобретения гражданского общества В. Гавелом, вернувшим «активное гражданское сопротивление» Западу. Потом Запад теоретически осмыслил это сопротивление, исходя из того, что Восток еще может порождать инновации, но никак не систематизировать и теоретически осмыслять их. По мнению Оста, этот ре-импорт оживил антигосударственный здравый смысл на Западе. Здесь должны быть упомянуты два инновационных движка, доставшихся нам от Востока и доминирующих сегодня в социальной реальности. Это консервативный поворот рассерженных правых радикалов и полигоны для испытания неолиберальных технологий. Ост размышляет о том, что если радикальные правые в конце концов одержат большую победу на Западе, то это произойдет отчасти благодаря работе, идущей на полупериферии.
Перспективные компаративные исследования (в отличие от исследований сопоставительных) избегают нормативного позиционирования «эта (политическая система) похожа или не похожа на ту (превосходящую политическую систему)» (Schaffer 2021). Сравнение – это инструмент натурализовать наши собственные категории, не признавая этого. Категории, которые могут ввести нас в заблуждение относительно уместности объекта в другом контексте. Классический пример – то, как антропология в 1970-е годы поставила под сомнение всю концепцию «родства», на которую прежде опиралась в сравнении политических порядков. Оригинальным перспективным компаративистом был Макс Вебер, соположивший капитализм и религию.
Работа по выявлению стратегических сходств может помочь нам в дальнейшем продвижении. Ее отражение можно найти в использовании мною Делеза для объяснения детерриториализованного политического активизма в современной России. Кажется, что подход, ориентированный на работу с гетерогенностями, едва ли прояснит что-то в политической жизни авторитарной России. Однако, делая ставку на перспективизм, я доказываю обратное.
Содействие коммуникативному обмену
Ученые часто слишком заняты для того, чтобы общаться с журналистами, или избегают контактов с медиа из страха, что те опозорят их, переврав слова и выдернув отдельные цитаты. Исходя из моего опыта, журналисты по большей части открыты для обучения и подстройки под эксперта из академии. На деле они куда менее экстрактивны, чем сами ученые. Куда более проблематичной представляется мне возросшая самоуверенность публичных интеллектуалов, высказывающихся по вопросам, где не признают своей зависимости от источников, на основе которых они делают свою заключения. Здесь у меня есть не конкретные предложения, но наблюдение: освещение войны, по крайней мере то, что ведется по-русски, приобретает все более узко конфессиональные рамки.
Возьмем, к примеру, международную конференцию «Страна и мир» в Берлине в ноябре 2024 года. В ней участвует несколько передовых ученых, но основную массу составляют эксперты, промышляющие аналитикой в медиа. Некоторые из них делают большое дело, выступая в качестве популяризаторов. Однако докладчики, имеющие научно обоснованные подходы к изучению современной России, остаются в меньшинстве и едва ли будут услышаны. Можно ли лучше вообразить актуальное состояние взаимодействия между учеными и журналистами? Как полагаете? Популярное знание сегодня необходимо, как никогда. Но должна ли политическая наука о России быть популярной и востребованной в силу того, что рассказывает нам то, что мы хотим услышать (и уже много раз слышали)? Или она все же должна содействовать становлению у аудитории альтернативного социологического воображения, не гарантируя эпистемологического (идеологического, аффективного) комфорта?
In 2016 I asked: what have Trump and Russia got in common? At that time there was a debate – still visible – about a revolt against ‘the elites’. But electorally, there has never been a consistent way for Russians to express similar sentiments – although in 2016 I tried to show how the many Russians still meaningfully cast ‘social’ protest votes. One observation at the time was the ‘insiderness’ of figures like Nigel Farage, Trump, and indeed Zhirinovsky, was irrelevant to voters. Such figures channelling of impotent and inchoate anger was much more animating. While Russians still have no meaningful way of expressing discontent electorally, surely, in 2024, emotional resentment as a global political vernacular fully come of age.
More than a few people note the misunderstanding about Trump’s undeniable ‘charisma’ among a swathe of people who’d like to stick it to the ‘man’. Or among those who misguidedly think he can improve their material lot by deporting illegals and imposing tariffs. What’s surprising was the number of observers puzzled by the Biden-Harris punishment for an economy than on paper is supposedly booming. This for me is indicative of the tyranny of ‘presentism’ as revealed in the pundit’s favourite type of analysis. We’ve had growing consumer spending, growing wages, falling inflation – surely voters would thank Biden-Harris for that? What this ignores is that people have a feel for the longer-term rises in inequality and increases in economic insecurity, the very real hollowing out of the middle-class, not to mention lower-middle. There’s good evidence that the latter are core to Trump’s support. Russian (not quite) parallels too: the big war spending by the government hardly fools people. They know that they are net losers from the war. And this sentiment is growing ever larger.
Another point of connection (between vernacular politics in Russia and America) is the substitution of muscular foreign policy in the absence of meaningful policies addressing domestic crisis. In the liberal Twitter bubble we see endless expressions that Harris lost part of her ‘base’ because of her business-as-usual attitude towards Israel. But more open-ended group studies have found that, unprompted, some opted for Trump because of anxiety about the USA’s loss of prestige and ‘face’ in the world. Rings any bells in the Russian context? Is this another ‘resentment’, or an ‘anxiety’? Is it a sublimation of domestic fears? Or deep-seated imperial thinking? It’s getting to the point where we might have to unpack these words a bit better.
In my 2016 work I pondered the paradox of ‘outsider-loyalty’ identity among Russian voters. This was my ethnographic version of the ‘Crimea consensus’ view among my political science colleagues. That people might harbour deep resentment about elite corruption, social decay, and the hegemonic discourse of social Darwinism that reigns in domestic politics, but that geopolitical victory over adversity had the potential to consolidate diverse people around the symbol of the leader. But this consolidation, like the current Ukraine-war-based one is hollow and brittle because it offers no satisfaction beyond the immediate distraction from worldly cares.
Another topic back in 2016 was that of competing ‘structuring feelings’. If the political histories weren’t so different, it might be worth comparing Russia to the Jacksonian world-view of middle- and lower-class Americans that is argued swung Trump’s 2016 and 2024 elections. Jacksonian tradition is not an ideology, but a political ‘feeling’ of self-reliance, opposed to big federal government and in favour of the 2nd amendment. It’s a ‘folk belief’ opposed to the other Jeffersonian and Wilsonian traditions when it comes to foreign policy, channeling atomized and lonesome feelings about a hostile world (of ‘chaos and darkness’) in which the US needs to act tough merely to maintain its position. If you object to this rather gauche characterization of Americans, pause for a minute to think about the broad strokes painted about Russian historical (or maybe even ‘genetic’) ‘disposition to tyranny’ that a respectable scholar near you is pitching as we speak.
But we can turn this around another way. Stories about national values are also about who has the right to tell them. And we’re all affected by the fact that Americans tell the best stories about themselves. Jacksonians are ‘rugged individualists’ and all about ‘self-reliance’. Surely that’s a good thing? Once again, turn that around and it maps uncannily on to a set of values that scholars have imposed on post-1991 Russians but negatively: focussed on a ‘cult of the winner’, ‘aggressive pursuing of self-interest’, seeing ‘personal independence as the new ideology’. Or, from a different school of thought, Russians are like Trump voters in another deficient way: they are ‘unable to adapt to liberal values’, lack empathy for those unlike them, are cultural incompatible with contemporary modernity and all its complexities. Does every (post-) imperium have its intersectional politics that allow domestic hurt to be sublimated into resentment of the Other? Or are so many of these deficiencies actually symptoms of our own search for a too simple answer to the question: ‘why Trump?’ Like in Russia, America must just have the wrong kinds of people (ne tot narod).
[I could say more about the Jacksonian tradition and foreign policy: skip this if you like. As one observer pointed out back in the Bush era: it is not so much that the US public takes pride in the overwhelming superiority of firepower at the disposal of the United States, it needs to see it demonstrated from time to time. ‘Realist’ emotion is also a thing. (Proxies in Isreal don’t cut it – if anything they make it seem like the MIC is not acting in the interests of the United States). If it’s not clear what the point of a digression about US ‘values’ is, then perhaps you haven’t been paying attention to what this blog is about.]
The inadequacy of an interpretation of Trump as ‘white working-class’ identity politics writes off more intersectional and structurally feeling-based approaches relating to resentment. Again, Arlie RussellHochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) should be getting renewed attention. Hochschild links anti-establishment voting and ‘deep story’ – internalised emotional value systems. Deep story for lower middle-class white Americans, for Hochschild, is a story of resentment of being overtaken by Others, of exclusion and neglect. Hochschild followed this up later with another book more squarely focussed on Trump voters.
To revisit a point made in 2016: whether we’re looking at Russia or the US, we must move closer to the social worlds that quantitative social science largely fails to adequately represent. How to plot the intersection of ‘unfairness’ and ‘prospectlessness’ as a representation of resentful values? These are, essentially, the Hochschildean ingredients for Trump’s (mercurial) popularity. Whatever else he is, he can channel dark desires of the moment.
Dominant narratives attempting to explain the war continue to focus binaries (pro- or anti-war) which continue the ‘pro or anti Putin’ tales we’ve been subject to for a long time. But thinking again about the adequacy of interpretation, unfairness and prospectlessness, the long-term structuring of feelings of hurt are intersectional ‘deep stories’ which animate the Russian people in my research. And war only exacerbates them. More on this soon.
This post summarizes a forthcoming talk at a roundtable on Russian civil-society/indi media/researcher dialogue.
The war disrupts academic practices and that’s a good thing. It give us an ‘opportunity’ to rethink extractive practices, to undo methodological and disciplinary siloing, to decolonise our epistemological foundations (how we know what we know). It forces us to confront problems of how knowledge is made public.
Here’s my summary of the problems and a set of examples follow after.
Extractive practices perpetuate injustice – these include the invisible labour of local scholars, researchers and ‘partners’. How to equalize the attention given to knowledge produced locally?
Siloing. Public and media attention to the war has jolted some colleagues out of the disciplinary narrowness that plagues academia. How to sustain this? Pluralising area journals? Activist scholarship (camping on lawns of other journals)? Entryism to scholarly associations?
‘Decolonization’ begins when paradigms produced to fit Western disciplinary traditions and structures are questioned by the those themselves who work within those core institutions. How to sustain critical conversations that promote insider interpretive perspectives?
What to do with the dominance of public intellectuals interfacing with media? Can they be leveraged for good, or do they require better ‘education’ to avoid them repeating banalities or discredited ‘truths’? What is a sustainable basis for better communication and learning between researchers – who may still have good contact with ‘the ground’ in Russia – and media?
The four points serve as a starting point for discussion, but here I offer some elaboration.
Inclusive, not extractive knowledge production:
This ethical challenge is made starker by the more difficult sourcing of empirical data from Russia (and Ukraine). In my Post-Soviet Affairs article from 2022, I talked about the invisibilization of local gatekeepers, fixers and data gatherers. I used the example of a Central Asian scholar working on contentious politics where her local knowledge was extracted, but she was not credited or legible as a producer of knowledge. Even in my own work I am forced to reflect on how tempting it is to present insights from fieldwork as spontaneously my own when in fact they come from interlocutors who are not ‘colleagues’. Provocation: while lab-based science is notoriously hierarchical and autocratic, why do we not adopt the practice of having more co-authors on papers? Why shouldn’t organic intellectualism be made more visible systematically?
I had an uncanny experience recently when I was reading back issues of journals in three related subject areas to look at how a particular concept is discussed and contextualized. It reinforced for me a topic no-one likes to talk about, but everyone is aware of: how publication practices in particular mean that one can be blissfully unaware of a parallel treatment of a topic or concept and that there are no incentives to engage with it. It seems to me that the relative receptiveness of Area journals is inadequate to the task. Is the answer to argue more collectively for dissemination solutions that surpass the twentieth-century model of the disciplinary journal? Is the problem deeper – in the institutional barriers to collaboration across departments, faculties?
Decolonization as epistemologically-open research practice:
Decolonizing knowledge is partly related to desiloing. Only by better dialogue between intellectual traditions and epistemological positions can we hope to avoid falling into the same traps where research ends up essentializing or emphasising deficiency. There are good examples of interdisciplinary discussions that kick this discussion off, but how do we invigorate these and spread the word. I’m thinking of two recent examples.
Myron Aronoff and Jan Kubik in 2013 wrote about how social science repeatedly falls into the trap of imputing civilizational incompetence to populations because of the intellectual bias in research due to the political disappointments of liberal researchers since the 1990s. There are plenty of other examples. Gulnaz Sharafutdinova and Samuel Greene have developed similar critiques and tried to use interdisciplinary insights to reinvigorate political sociology (they draw much more on social psychology). A common call seems to be for vernacular knowledge to be taken seriously as filling the gaps of a social science that is too naturalistic (supposedly we’re all game-players) too positivist (only the disaggregated individual builds bigger data), and too unidirectional (theorizing ‘down’ based on larger contexts: globalized, national, regional) (Aronoff and Kubik 2013: 281).
A more systematic focus on this kind of approach to vernacular knowledge can be found in David Ost’s writing (2018) on ‘semi-peripheral’ innovation. Ost argues that decolonising means research moving away from ‘discovering’ the East for itself, instead taking seriously its origin as a source of ideas. He notes also that semi-periphery is a nested concept – W Ukraine is semi-periphery for Poles, and so on. His examples of Eastern innovation are brands of autonomism (work self-management), the reinvention of civil society via Solidarność and V. Havel, who ‘returned’ ‘active civic resistance’ to the West, which of course then theorized it (because the East is allowed innovation but is not systematic or theoretical). In Ost’s view, reimportation reinvigorated antistate ‘common sense’ in the West. Relatedly there are twin innovation engines bequeathed to us from the East which dominate social relatiy: the radical-conservative resentful Right, and the spatial idea of neoliberal weapon-testing ground. Ost muses that if the radical Right eventually does win big in the West it will be in part thanks to the work of the semi-periphery.
‘Perspectival’ rather than juxtapositional-comparative research avoids the normative positioning of ‘this (political system) is like or unlike that (superior political system)’ (Schaffer 2021). Juxtaposition is to naturalize our own categories without admitting it. Categories that may end up misleading us as to the relevance of the object in the ‘other’ context. The classic example is how anthropology ended up questioning the whole concept of ‘kinship’ in the 1970s, even though it was the ordering concept of comparison of political orders up to that point. The original ‘perspectival’ comparativist was probably Max Weber on capitalism and religion. In short, analogical reasoning might serve us better moving forward. This is reflected in my own use of Deleuze to explain deterritorialized political activism in Russia today. This approach seems unlikely to elucidate the situation of Russian politics, but I argue it does so thanks to perspectivism. Schaffer’s example is instructive in Ost’s examples: political loyalty in the East is not just about transactionalism – that’s an American comparative imposition that ‘may not travel well’.
On furthering communicative exchange:
I’ve written before that academics are often too busy to talk to journalists or fear being misrepresented and that this is a shame. In my view, journalists are in general open to learning and adjusting. They are, in fact, less extractive than academics themselves. What is more problematic is the inevitable tendency of public intellectuals to become overconfident and start to hold forth on matters they are not qualified to comment on. Similarly, the extractive work is visible here too, when public intellectuals do not acknowledge their reliance on particular sources, especially when they themselves have no claim to knowledge in an area. On this last point I have no real suggestions, beyond the observation that war coverage at least among Russophones, increasingly looks narrowly framed. Take the example of Strana i Mir (Country and World) international conference in Berlin in November 2024. Now, a number of cutting-edge scholars, but the greater weight of analysis is unequivocally that of the entrepreneur pundit class. Some of these do a great service in popularising science, but the few speakers with evidence-based social science approaches to contemporary Russia will be hard-pressed to be heard. Could a discussion between scientists and journalists be better imagined? You tell me. Popular science is needed more than ever before, but should it be popular because it tell us what we want to hear (and indeed have already heard many times) or should it aim to instil an uncomfortable sense of alternative sociological imaginations in the audience?
March 1986. Revolutionary Guards celebrate their victory after capturing the al-Faw peninsula. One year later the Battle of Basra would end in a bitter Iranian defeat.
I’d been meaning to read this book for a long time and finally got around to it. I’ve repeatedly said that historical parallels are problematic, but what the heck, here goes. Iran-Iraq, from 1980-1988, saw a regional war between unequal powers threaten to spiral out of control, involved energy dependence as a weapon, a lot of miscalculations about opponents, ideological blinkeredness, swinging fronts and stalemate, and human-wave attacks after one belligerent’s technological base for waging modern war was almost exhausted.
Pierre Razoux’s 2015 book is really readable, though a little weaker on Iran because he focusses on the better sources about Saddam’s reasoning, thanks to the US-captured audio cassettes spanning much of his time in power. It’s genuinely refreshing to read an author who is not afraid of confronting his own country’s rapacious and cynical mercantilism in the war, and the horrible cost to French citizens. One can hardly imagine so penetrating an account from an Anglo-Saxon pen. Indeed, the Americans come out of it the worst – completely rudderless and reactive in their responses to Iraqi aggression, and also Iranian desires for recognition to cement their new revolutionary regime.
What else? While 8 years is a long time to be at war, Razoux is able to show how each side had to reinvent its approach to waging war again and again and that the technology, and also metis, of war had become unrecognizable by the end – not least thanks to the flooding of the battlefield with newer Western tech and newer aircraft. At the same time, the old chestnut of generals fighting the last war is given stark illustration in the way the Iraqis partially drew on a 1941 plan by the British as a model for their initial (not very successful) ground assault. So despite the war beginning as a poorly coordinated mid-20th-century regional conflict and ending as essentially a 21st-century war (because of the entry of modern aircraft and ballistic missiles) belatedness is a key experience: not being up to date on all the resources needed to fight a big war; not considering current economic reality; dismissing basic military theatre requirements like air superiority and logistics; not having the right weapons in the right place at the right time. Some of it does ‘recall’ the disastrous Russian improvision of 2022 after the rush to Kyiv had failed.
Along with belatedness (and attrition of capacity which led to devolution of the Iranian effort into human waves) there is incompetence and purposeful ignorance: failure to acknowledge on the Iraqi’s part the force needed for the task of invading Iran (a massive country with lots of natural obstacles like mountains), a lack of coordination (Iran’s obtuseness regarding its superior airpower), delegation in a negative sense by Saddam (‘just get on with it and bring me results’). Saddam was remarkably ignorant about how his campaign would destabilize the region and affect the US and USSR, even if he was smart in blackmailing and playing Arab countries. However, this ignorance pales in comparison to the Americans’ massive intel failure and woeful response: they were completely wrong in seeing Iraq as Soviet-aligned; the US had no Iranian expertise (no one with Farsi or knowledge of the revolution was allowed anywhere near policy) and misunderstood that the Iranian revolution was not just about religion (ideology) but about state-making and regional recognition. At every turn, Western powers made belated decisions based on poor rationalization, political expediency, and worse.
Like Putin, Saddam quickly realized he’d bitten off more than he could chew. His recourse to terror and war crimes backfired and the war ‘made’ the Iranian post-revolutionary nation and state. A state that is quite capable of reproducing itself today and still strongly shaped by the experience of that war. Of course, it would be a mistake to map Russia-Ukraine onto Iraq-Iran for many, many reasons, not least size, religion, geography, outside aid, etc.
Razoux concludes with something we should pay attention to much more than tech, strategy, tactics, esprit de corps, or demography. After 500+ pages of battles, intrigue and horrible accounts of child soldiers and chemical weapons, he curtly turns to the reader to say that what’s of cardinal importance is none of that stuff, but instead the economic war. Only when Iran’s capacity to make money from oil was significantly degraded (they had no access to credit), and only when Iraq was mortgaged to the hilt and also threatened with significant economic repercussions, did the conflict end. Pretty much where it started.
Once again, most historical comparisons are downright dodgy. However, the Iran-Iraq war certainly led to the destabilization of the whole region and untold damage to both countries whose societies became exhausted by war. Certainly, Charles Tilly was right: “war makes the state”. (what he actually meant was that war transforms states in quite unpredictable ways) But which one is Ukraine? Is it Iraq – which transitioned to a hyper-modern, and quite effective militarized state where even the leader was in some respects beholden to the army? [spoilers, the US couldn’t put up with that, even as it had recently turned a blind eye to Iraq committing some of the worst atrocities since WWII]. Or is it Iran? Steeled in blood, collective suffering defines national identity and leads to consolidation around what is a factionally-divided revolutionary government (and not universally legitimate at that). Iranian domestic politics today is still the politics of a war that ended 36 years ago.
Parents of quadrobers, ‘kvadrobery’, are to be fined according to proposed new laws
Another post this week reviewing some goings-on in the Russia-sphere.
Biopolitical entrepreneur Katya Mizulina and head of the ‘Safe Internet League’, who is the daughter of politician Elena Mizulina – herself a pioneer in socially conservative legislation – was asked at an event by a brave journalist why she rails against Western ‘child-free’ ideology while not having any children of her own. ‘Child-free ideology’ (sic) is just the latest addition to the not-very convincing attempt to consolidate Russian identity around the message that ‘we’re the protectors of the real Judeo-Christian tradition unlike the decadent Ukraine-nazi-supporting West’.
My new book (announcement forthcoming) opens with a look at the imposition of a new kind of civics lessons on school children. The very first ethnographic scene features a middle-aged male Life Skills and Personal Safety teacher who implores a room of teenagers to read the bible and recant of their pro-Western attitudes. Let’s just say these unwelcome distractions from the curriculum by unqualified and under-prepared instructors don’t go down very well with children and parents alike. Unlike the new social conservatism, there is an audience for patriotic education classes, where they are accompanied by genuine social and economic resources like preferential places at university. Young people are just as entrepreneurial as politicians in using political agendas in education to get ahead.
I’m not much of a fan of podcasts, but the Meduza Russian-language ones are often hidden gems. Like this talk with Maksim Samorukov about the informational isolation and blinkered world-views which ‘informed’ Saddam Hussein’s decisions to invade Iran and Kuwait. In making links to Putinism, Maksim stressed how subsequent endless uprisings were easily put down, even after military defeat… And that society’s dissatisfaction just isn’t part of regime calculus once elites get used to the idea of supposedly limited wars as a substitute for domestic programmes and legitimacy.
Maksim also emphasized the irrelevance of ‘new’ or contradicting information for these leader-types. Revelations that to you and me could challenge our priors (like the effect on US foreign policy of an election year – very topical) is merely incorporated into the existing world-view of the isolated person (Mr Putin, or Saddam). This podcast prompted me to finally start reading this book about the Iran-Iraq war. Some day I’ll do a post on the parallels between that war and the current Russo-Ukraine conflict. An interesting note about Saddam’s decision-making: some argue we have a really good idea of this because he recorded himself so much on audiotapes which were subsequently captured by the Americans.
There’s so much being written right now about the looming problems in 2025-26 for the Russian economy and I can’t fit it all into this short post. In 2019 I discussed neo-feudalization of Russia’s political economy (“people as the new oil”). Many others have takes on this, from the idea of a new caste-like society with state bureaucrats as an aristocracy, to a more nakedly transactional ‘necropolitics’ where blood is exchanged for money (death payments for volunteer troops). Nick Trickett’s piece in Ridl argues against the ‘hydraulic Keynesianism’: that military spending boosts economic growth. Demographic decline and war are like a Wile E. Coyote cliff-edge for growth, a precipice towards which the Russian war stimulus merely accelerates the economy. Monetary policy like a 20% bank rate, ‘cannot tame what’s driving inflation’.
One of my informants on a very good blue-collar supervisor wage played ‘jingle-mail’ recently and moved back in with his parents. He’s 39 with no children and working in a booming manufacturing sector. He’s also working double-shifts to keep up with demand, but there’s a human limit to over-working in place of capital investment. Nick’s piece points to the stagnation in productivity in Russia.
Another sign of the endless war to make citizens fiscally-legible to the state is this story about ratcheting up penalties for Russian drivers who obscure or hide their number plates. Traffic cameras are, to an absurd and unpopular degree, relied upon to raise tax revenue in Russia. I’ve written about this many times on this blog. The details this time are not so important, but the story illustrates a number of things – penalties are still pretty low for all kinds of avoidance and ‘resistance’; Russians are ingenious in making their fiscal radar-signature as small as possible; the technocratic approach (blocking an AliExpress webpage selling revolving number plates) of the government is wholly ineffective because the state is losing capacity due to the drain of the war.
Does this shorter and more frequent posting by me signal a trend (a move towards the style of Sam Greene’s excellent, short-form weekly posting)? We’ll have to see. Though the news from my Dean of Faculty that she proposes closing all language-based Area Studies degrees may indicate I will have more time on my hands in the future. At Aarhus University we’ve developed unique programmes where students attain a high competency in one language out of Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Brazilian Portuguese, and then can go on to a Masters degree where they are team taught by experts beyond their region. So a Russian student gets exposed to expertise in Chinese politics, Brazilian environmental studies, and so on, regardless of their continuing focus on a single language. We also just began to expand Ukrainian studies and have two Ukrainian scholars working with us now. ‘Dimensioning’ [Danish Orwell-speak for cuts to staff and student numbers] of Area Studies will likely mean no language teaching in these areas in the future. We live in a time of narrowing horizons for students, unfortunately.
I leave you with this advertisement for war-time intimacy from Rostov: ‘If you’re at war I can provide a service to support you. We’ll communicate as if we love each other and support each other. Photos and video for an additional fee. Agreement about price subject to personal negotiation.’
This will be a short review (well, actually not short) of some Russian media commentary (A. Pliushev, E. Schulmann, N. Zubarevich) and my reactions. If you think this kind of post is useful, let me know. It is often the case that informed discussion in Russian language on YouTube never really cuts through to anglophone audiences for Russia content. I don’t ‘endorse’ the persons or positions of any of these public intellectuals and journalists, but this kind of content is important for non-Russian speakers to get access to.
Virtual Autocracy?
At the beginning of September there were simultaneous elections of various kinds throughout Russia. The results were not very interesting but the strong push to ‘virtualize’ voting as much as possible is. Why not continue to rely on the physical and very visible power expressed in falsifying actual ballot papers and busing in people to vote on pain of losing benefits? The resort to a virtual electoral autocracy shows the authorities have a good idea of their genuine unpopularity and the continuing risks, even now, of all kinds of upsets. Not only that, they also understand the advantages of digitized authoritarianism (I’m hoping to do a big write up of this soon). You can geolocate voters in the app they use and this exerts a coercive power of its own.
But, as Ekaterina Schulmann pointed out in her review of the elections, getting rid of the spectacular in-person falsification reduces two powerful indirect effects: the visible demonstration of loyalty by voters to the state (which goes back to Soviet times) and which speaks to the main reason for elections in autocracies – the idea that legitimization still needs a public audience. Secondly, in the Russian case, virtualization means that the army of state workers – mainly schoolteachers and local council employees– are ‘let off the hook’ they’d previously been sat on: being implicated as ‘hostages’ in the falsification process as counters and electoral polling workers. Cutting out the middleman is interesting and perhaps reveals a real buy-in among the elite to the idea of “full-fat digital autocracy” maintained by technocratic management of populations. But, thinking sociologically, normalization of involving the morally-important category of teachers in illegal compliance with the diktats was the strongest spectacular effect of Putinism. Here, I’m also reminded of the big conflicts even now between parents and teachers over the disliked patriotic education lessons, with the latter stuck in the middle and largely unhappy at carrying out this task (more on this in my forthcoming book).
The election also revealed other indirect information about the emerging post-2022 Putinism ‘flavour’. There’s no sign of the much-expected ‘veteran-politician’ wave. Special Mill Op vets are not getting elected positions – many supposed examples of this in the media are just low-level bureaucrats who had to go to the ‘contact zone’ (frontline) to exculpate some disgrace and then came back. A big thing to watch for in 2025 also related to the war is the fact that on paper, the proportion of the national budget devoted to defence is due to fall according to the Finance Ministry. Watch this space.
The non-appearance of the Great Russian Firewall
On media use, Alexander Pliushev looked into VPN usage, and estimated that around 50% of internet users in Russia are now forced to use these services to access content, but probably not because they’re looking for subversive information. But there are plans afoot to root out VPN usage, along with the slow-down on services like YouTube. However, it is estimated to take years to root out VPNs, and this doesn’t take into account measures to develop new forms of avoiding blocks. Pliushev feels confident in this because while number of views of his content fell a lot from Russia, the overall picture is unchanged – meaning people just switching to VPNs. He should know: the ex-Moscow Echo journo has an audience of 300k viewers on Bild, and 700k viewers on his own channel. Already we see the emergence of IT service providers of ‘partisan’ packages to customers which improve the speed of YouTube.
Television as domestic wallpaper
A good accompanying piece on TV and media use came out in July by Denis Volkov of Levada. In this piece he claims TV as a source of information is still really important, and I have some questions about that. It’s true, as he says, that the TV news is always on in the background of people’s homes, but other sources have reported that TV ad revenue has ‘followed’ the decline in audiences since 2022 because people are generally turned off by the very visible war coverage on main channels. Indeed, at one channel I know intimately, worker’s contracts are not being renewed and people are not getting the pay increases they expect. What’s more interesting about the Volkov piece is how rapidly the coverage of social media has changed – the rise in Telegram: readers of ‘channels’ there (mainly news and current affairs) has gone from 1% to 25% of the population since 2019. This is a sobering reminder to be cautious about state’s capacity to control informational dispersal. The unparalleled rise in the onlineness of Russian means we should also avoid too many historical parallels (Vietnam war, Afghanistan, WWI, WWII). We really do live in a different age.
There’s a lot I don’t agree with in the Volkov piece, but it’s worth a read. As I’ve frequently written here, if you’re attentive then stuff like this from Levada people reveals deep-seated ideological assumptions about Russian society that can surely be questioned. I don’t agree with his insistence on uncritical media consumption and the simplistic ideas about how TV shapes views. Nonetheless we get more interesting points – like that 28% of people don’t watch TV at all, that the audience for Twitter and Facebook is tiny at 2%. Late in the article we get the statement that the share of television as a news source fell by 33% in the last 15 years, somewhat undercutting Volkov’s insistence on the relevance of TV as a regime-population conduit for propaganda.
“It’s the regional economy, stupid!”
Moving on to Natalya Zubarevich’s frequent and detailed online talks (with Maxim Kurnikov here in mid-Sept) about regional economy and demography in Russia, she lets slip some interesting observations beyond her usual scrupulous (and self-censoring) focus on the ‘facts and figures’ from official documents. She talks about how noticeable it is that in military recruitment in Moscow there are few young faces and a preponderance of ethnic minorities. She talks about the current ‘hostile migration environment’ led to harassment of gig workers in taxi-apps (Yandex). But not due to war-recruitment pressure, rather to increase bureaucratic monitoring of taxi drivers in the capital, reiterating the point above about the government staking more on digital control. She says we have good evidence for this squeeze because of the rising visibility of Kyrgyz drivers for whom there are fewer migration hurdles. (Gig workers from Kyrgyzstan represent a case study about the gig-economy in my forthcoming book).
Zubarevich makes the point that low paid blue-collar workers are being sucked dry by the war machine. If we accept the national soldier replacement rate target is 30,000 recruits a month then yearly Russia is losing around 1% of the available male workforce – but it hits harder in logistics, warehousing, manufacturing, and so on and hardly at all in, for example, local government. She also provides good examples of agency within the state: where the Agriministry was able to get the enlistment offices to back off men who work as mechanics for farms.
Some criticise Zubarevich for her insistence on talking only about published statistics. Here, without openly saying it, she pours cold water on the idea of sustained income rises keeping pace with inflation. She doesn’t believe the figures of high annual percentage rises in salaries as sustained or ‘real’ (net effects). She also points to clear slowing in wage inflation in 2024. This then allows her to demolish part of the military Keynesianism argument. Low incomes have seen big increases but from very low base starting points (an apple plus an apple is two apples for the blue-collars; but the people in white collar jobs were already earning 10 apples. If you given them one more apple do the blue-collars feel less unequal?). Periphery growth (in regions including war factory locales) is not significant because it does not begin to affect the overall level of inequality in society.
What conclusions do we draw from Zubarevich’s dry statistical analysis? It’s a paradox that in Russia’s ‘necrotopia’, where multiples of annual wages can be earned for surplus people by offering themselves as victims to the death machine, the overall value of blue-collar labour has increased to a degree that alters the bargaining power of workers who remain uninvolved directly in the business of dying for cash. Nonetheless, productivity, whether in military or other parts of the economy has not increased at all because of human and technological limits. You can introduce another shift, pay people 30% more, but that doesn’t mean that the output/hour of tanks, or washing machines or nuts and bolts (another case study in my book) goes up. Zubarevich comes around to a quite conservative position. It might seem like the war has the potential to break a pattern of decades of very high income inequality and massive underpayment of ‘productive’ people, but the inflationary effects of war are already bringing the pendulum back to ‘normality’. She also reminds us that inflation and the isolation of the Russian economy mean that ‘veteran’ incomes will never have significant levelling effects on inequality either.
On the Russian Defence Ministry shake out
Back to Schulmann in conversation here with Temur Umarov. The purges in the Defence Ministry are like the Malenkov-Khrushchev pact after Stalin’s death. A new deal: not only will you not be physically exterminated in the war-of-all-against-all where there are no institutions to regulate political life, we won’t punish your relatives either.
What’s happening in the Defence Ministry is a Putin-style purge: not based on ideology, one could even call them ‘nihilistic arrests’, supporting the idea of nihilism at the heart of Putinism. And as Schulman says, this only serves to destroy any idea of narrative structure to the war aims. Umarov: it is Stalinist in the one sense that it’s a structural process of social mobility: unblocking of avenues for advancement for sub-elites. This should also give us some ideas about ‘where we are’ in the maturing or even autumnal days of this regime. Are these arrests signs of sub-elite impatience for more radical regime transition (in terms of personnel, not necessarily politically)? Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev? It is probably a mistake to interpret this in terms of anyone thinking that these new faces will be ‘better’ at the job of war. Schulmann asks: are these repressions for the war, or repression instead of war? What she means is that instead of the fantasy that the overturn of corrupt military elites will allow real competence and patriotic leaders from the ‘ranks’ to emerge, in reality we just get new clients and relatives of those still at the top.
Schulmann reveals perhaps more than usual in this ‘academic’ talk setting. Her view now is that the core hawkish elite really did want to go to war in 2020 and only Covid intervened. There was a test run of an alternative ‘institutionalization’ of elite wealth and status transference in the 2020 constitutional amendment. It was a groping towards cementing the ‘rules of the game’ to lock in elite self-reproduction. But in reality few could believe that this this compact would survive Putin. For Schulmann the rejection of this compact as unworkable, and subsequent turn to war as a ‘solution’ for the problems of elite consolidation really, shows the genuine narrowness of political imagination in Russia – no one really believes institutionalization is possible, and that even in the West it must also somehow be a ‘show’ or ‘fake’.
Russians: We don’t know what the war is for
One final nugget is the latest Russian Academy of Sciences’ sociology centre monitoring report from April 2024. There are many surprises, but one stat stands out. People are asked, towards the end of a questionnaire containing sometimes absurdly slanted questions, about the Special Military Operations’ “solution”. They don’t get to choose their own answer, only pre-selected ‘options’.
Comparing the mid 2022 version with mid-2024, the results are interesting:
What should be the aim of the SMO on demilitarization of Ukraine and liberation from nationalists?
Liberate all Ukraine: 2022: 26%, 2024: 16%
Liberate Donbas: 2022: 21%, 2024: 19%
Liberate ‘Malorossiia’: 2022: 18%, 2024: 20%
Liberate UA minus west: 2022: 14%, 2024: 20%
Other opinion: 2022: 3%, 2024: 1%
Difficult to answer: 2022: 18%, 2024: 25%
There we have it: the plurality are ‘don’t knows’. The ‘other opinion’ includes the possible selections, destroy fascism, destroy Nazism, end Ukraine as a state, destroy Banderism, preserve Russian territory, keeping only Crimea. (A bit ambiguously worded, that. Did they mean to write: ‘keep Ukraine as it was, but leave Crimea to Russia?) Who knows. As my interlocutor writes: likely this document was heavily ‘curated’ and then the sociologists tried to rewrite it to make sense while not annoying the powers-that-be. Imagine a guy in epaulettes standing behind the bozo writing the report.
Postsocialism 