Category Archives: Russia

The kids (if not all the teachers) are alright – watching the Oscar-winning documentary Mr. Nobody against Putin

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I had put off watching the documentary Mr. Nobody against Putin. Partly because of the feeling that I would find it annoyingly kliukva (sensational distortion of Russian reality for a Western audience that doesn’t know any better), and partly because it felt like taking a busman’s holiday – my ‘day’ job is talking to Russian people in ordinary circumstances, observing them, and then communicating a sense of the everyday experience to Western audiences.  

Then I made the mistake of reading a load of long-form blogs in Russian that really tore into it. Basically, those thousands of words boiled down to two objections. One: people in the film, especially the underage school pupils, were not treated ethically because Pavel Talankin, the teacher shooting most of the footage, did not have permission to use his footage in this way. Two: the director (American David Borestein) manipulated the footage and narration, and even got Talankin to stage some awkward and unlikely ‘political’ scenes that Western audiences would like for dramatic effect. As a result of the second point, the charge is that the film distorts Russian reality to such a degree that one cannot take the overall intention seriously. Positive reviews among public intellectuals invested in Russia – on the contrary – argued that the film faithfully showed the heavy weight of state indoctrination on children but also the value of everyday resistance against it (in the form of Mr. Nobody – Talankin’s efforts).

But what is the intention of the film? Leaving aside the ‘blurb’ and the pronouncements of the film makers and critics, my fellow podcasters and I discussed this at length [link coming] but even we couldn’t quite agree. Jonny’s point I think was strongest – that the ethical issue is really about how school children get exposed to unethical and manipulative behaviour by politicians and that’s the tragedy. In my view, the film is not really about ‘everyday resistance’, however much people would like it to be. It’s also not really about indoctrination. The best and ‘truest’-to-life parts of the film are about the difficult relationship between Talankin – who is unhappy about the war and the direction of the country – and his mother, colleagues and pupils. It’s a classic setting: the bloody-minded ‘free thinker’ unwilling to go along with the absurdity of the stupid system that is beyond his control.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest comes to mind on the dangers of institutional ‘violence’ to the individual. There are many precursors in Russian and Soviet cultural production too – which I’m not going to go into here.  The façade of patriotic education lessons increasingly dominate in a system which demands absurd rituals. This distracts (and emotionally is harmful) from the purpose of education – particularly the strong Russian tradition of whole-person ‘vospitanie’ – upbringing as an intersubjective experience which helps develop the moral, socially responsible, and intellectually curious-critical and knowledge-rounded person. This is a very Russian-Soviet version of the German idea of Bildung.

In a sense then, the film is meant to be about competing versions of political socialization through formal education. But the footage clearly is not enough to answer the question about the success or otherwise about the heavy-footed ‘patriotic’ and nationalist shaping of young minds. What’s good about the film is that there is enough to show how despite the best attempts of the state to deprofessionalize teaching, there remain adults dedicated to guiding and mentoring young people through the formal education experience in a status-quo-critical manner.

So for me, I could look over the clumsy attempts to make the film relevant and legible to a US audience (after all, how else is a film going to get an Oscar and festival showings?). The scenes with Talankin’s mother are an absolutely perfect encapsulation of the ‘anti-war’, versus ‘defensive consolidation’ difficulty inherent to the intersubjective situation in Russia. The scenes with the one-and-only absurd and caricatured ‘villain’ are perfect in showing the hollowness and intellectual bankruptcy of nationalist ideologues.

The person of Talankin himself (as a character) is perfect as a critically-thinking, professional, yet patriotic and caring person – a model of what a citizen should be.

People might object – why so positive when, after all, the teachers do comply with the patriotic education directives. The true-believer-teacher Abdulmanov does seem to get rewarded for his sycophantic transmission of regime messages to the kids. And this is a problem with a cursory analysis. That’s where the footage of the kids comes in and why it is so important. What the film actually shows is that there is no measurable effect of patriotic indoctrination. That the teachers don’t even understand what they’re being asked to do. The majority of the patriotic education reminds us more of Communist Pioneer marching and flagwaving for the hell of it, rather than having nationalist ‘content’. And Abdulmanov is not rewarded for his bizarre behaviour (even by nationalist pedagogue standards) in class.

Overall however, the question of ‘indoctrination’ is the biggest weakness of the production and editing because any actual effect isn’t spelled out or illustrated. There is also a bit of cheating here – as has been pointed out, the scenes about former students becoming soldiers are manipulated to conflate ‘ordinary’ conscription with being sent to fight in Ukraine. We’re left with narrative lacunae. There’s also obfuscation of the topic of patriotic education itself. We discuss this in the podcast, but essentially the editing and narration give a false impression that the nationalistic agenda has taken over the school (in terms of time devoted to it), when in reality it’s a small part of the curriculum. Even so, we do witness teachers push back against it. A nice touch that might make you think, is the lesson on the historical destiny of Crimea as part of Russia. If even this is having to be drummed into kids in the most egregiously ham-fisted manner, one wonders about the enduring strength of ideology.

The boys who had no sense of a future and who subscribed to traditional ideas about masculinity (a man must go to the army first) would have allowed themselves to be mobilized/conscripted/contracted anyway. The girls must suffer their boys to be sent to the meatgrinder. The mother-librarian must swallow her misgivings and tell her non-conformist teacher-son to be quiet or face the consequences. Essentially this is the story. Coming of age in a time of war.

It could be a very American film by just changing a few small circumstances (maybe it tells the future there too). Ideologies that the people in the film internalize are hardly to do with the Ukraine war itself, or the ‘regime’, or Russia’s Great Power status. They are much more insidious (you are powerless against the ‘system’). I wouldn’t want to push it too far, but essentially, a lot of the film is about the ‘idiocy’ of small-town and rural life – to paraphrase and misunderstand Marx at the same time. The ‘idiocy’ of having no choice other than exit (there being no possibility of ‘voice’ or ‘loyalty’), is compounded by the extractive, exploitative, and Darwinist nature of Russia’s political economy. But here you can see I’m talking my own book – if you’ll excuse the pun.

And the social context of the film once again should give pause for a more positive take – this is a tiny town 20 hours from Moscow (including plane journey). Yet it produced a ‘high cultural level of schooling’ that allowed Talankin’s mother to raise him. The kids, despite the reality they face are future-orientated and full of hope. It’s a human portrait –really of Talankin who is depicted as loving his job, his wards, and in turn is valued as a trusted adult of those who are coming of age. The school resembles a total social institution of the kind anthropologists described in Soviet times – but with as much ‘good’ going on in it, as ‘bad’. As such, it’s part of a bigger ‘island’, as Finn Sivert Nielsen described Soviet factory towns in the 1980s. There’s safety and some danger in the island. Now, as then, the island is also under siege from the other pressures in society. Eventually you must leave such islands and, if you’re like Talankin, become a nomad, even if such places offered you more good than evil.

The best book on Russia-Ukraine? On structural, proximate, and contingent causes of war

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D’Anieri on history, security dilemmas, democratization and European divergence after 1991

In this post I want to share with you why I think Paul D’Anieri’s updated Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War is the single best book you can read to understand the domestic and geopolitical causes of the current war. Originally published in 2019, he updated it in 2023. I’m not saying it should replace wider reading, and in this blog I have often made mention of other sources on both Ukraine and Russia which are indispensable – particularly to socialists. So, disclaimers: it’s not the only good book, but it covers most bases for the casual, non-specialist reader. I use it to teach an elective course, along with a long reading list of other authors.

It’s main merits are that it keeps sight of the actual relationship between Russia and Ukraine, the domestic and international factors, and the longer historical context. In the introduction, D’Anieri argues that the typical approaches to understanding the conflict contradict each other: on the one hand we have a focus on Russian revanchism. Others focus on the war as a result mainly of the domestic logics of autocracy. A third ‘school’ blames the West for expansion of NATO, and partly Ukrainian nationalism. We looked at the ‘West is to blame’ approach and its flaws in a previous post.

D’Anieri’s main strengths then are in looking at long-term trends as well as short-term triggers. These in turn can be explained as part structural and part ‘normative’. What would be a mistake is to focus too much on individual leaders who were always to an extent carried along by the underlying conflicts evident even in the early 1990s when mutual trust was still high. That isn’t, however, to let Putin of the hook. Ultimately the escalatory decisions in 2014 and 2022 were his alone. Would Medvedev, or Ziuganov, have acted differently? Maybe less so than people think. D’Anieri’s argument boils down to the contention that ‘as long as Russia’s definiton of its great power status included controlling Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine would be at odds’ (3). The ‘security dilemma’ meant that each action Russia and Ukraine individually took was perceived as undermining the or even threatening the ‘vision’ of each country’s future secure place in the world.

Secondly, processes of democratization, regardless of their real results, undermined Russian elites perceived national interest. This was a normative conflict from at least 1993 onwards, but especially after 2004. In the author’s view you cannot disaggregate NATO, European normative rules, and EU membership from this process of growing Russian ‘resentfulness’.  Without consolidation of democracy in Russia (which began to fail in 1993 accelerated in 1996, and became inevitable after 1999), and the embracing of a post-imperial idea of its relations with neighbours (arguably also unlikely after 1999, and especially 2008), it was increasingly likely that sooner or later Ukraine would be the unlucky territory upon which Russia’s unfinished normative and revanchist politics would meet in their final conjunction.

Loss aversion is better than blame

It might seem here, that D’Anieri is going to follow so many observers and assign blame – presumably to Russia, just as we saw with Sakwa the apportionment of blame mainly with the West. As the author notes, even ‘excellent scholars have resorted to simplistic renderings of blame: John Mearsheimer stated that “the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” while Andrew Wilson wrote that “the Russians went ape.” For D’Anieri though, this approach ignores all kinds of constraints and sets out further his focus: security dilemma plus democratization pressures, and the multiplier of domestic politics. Both Putin and Zelensky had much less agency than some observers would admit.

D’Anieri takes to task both ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ realism. The former can inadvertently lead to assigning blame to the West if an author is sympathetic with Russian perspectives. The latter sees the international system as inevitably riven by conflict. Here the author notes that even if you don’t see Russia’s concerns about Ukraine as ‘legitimate interest’, the latter’s gravitation towards even just an EU normative order would naturally be perceived as a loss. Loss aversion then while not inherently leading to aggression, has to be taken seriously as potentially leading to conflict. Furthermore, solely looking through the lens of realisms, ignores that international and domestic goals may reinforce each other – certainly the case for Putin who was coming under significant pressures at home by 2014 and again by 2018.

Domestic politics loom large

Along with the security dilemma and democratizing pressures, it’s important to remember that in domestic politics ‘there was almost always more to lose and less the gain […] from taking a conciliatory policy than from taking a harder line’. And this is true of the USA and EU. Furthermore, perceived state capacity is another variable – both in terms of real hard power recovery in Russia, and the wrong calculus, also on Russia’s part, that it could quickly decapitate a ‘weak’ Ukraine in 2022. Here we can make a minor concession to an idea that some kind of visionary leadership might have made a difference. But would it really? How could another version of Clinton/Bush, or Medvedev, or Schröder/Merkel really have overcome both structural inertia and domestic distractions to really change things? The end of the Cold War, ironically, reduces the likelihood for conciliatory policies to actually get traction beyond rhetoric and countries failed to account for the continuing gulf between their different understandings of what the status quo was.

Perhaps most importantly, we can look at the example of Crimea here for Russia. D’Anieri gives the examples of how even leading intelligentsia or ‘liberal’ figures, bitterly disparaged Ukrainian independence, or reiterated the ‘historical justice’ of returning Crimea to Russian control. The foundation myth that Russian statehood can be traced back to the Rus civilization inflected strongly part of Russian normative thinking in relation to Ukraine. Loss aversion again looms large in calculus. As is known from psychology, loss aversion leads to disproportionate risk taking even in supposedly risk-averse individuals. Crimea was invested with magical meaning for Russian statesmen in a way that gamblers think about good luck totems. Nonetheless, Crimea alone would never have become a sufficient factor for war to occur. Overall, D’Anieri here returns to his understanding of the particular security dilemma in play. Even at peace, unintentionally, action and inaction have the effect of increasing stresses between states. Concessions which could have been made, were not – for example, more forthright telegraphing by Russian elites to Russian constituencies that ‘Ukraine was lost’. Alternatively, EU calculus that would have acknolwedged Ukrainian and Russian economic interdependence and a modified form of Eastern policy was always missing.  

The dangers of democratic peace theory

Here D’Anieri takes to task the implicit assumption underlying democratic peace theory. War between democracies was supposedly impossible so expanding democracy promoted security. On this, realists and liberals could agree. In terms of their different normative assumptions, there was little different between the Clintons, Talbotts and the Brzezinskis and Kissingers when it came to resulting policy – a push to the East. Kennan of course is the usual exception. See the recent interesting article in NLR: “There was need for a realistic accommodation with them about the future of Europe,” (writing about how Containment after 1945 would also require a real engagement with the USSR afterwards).  What Westerners fatally downplayed were the geopolitical implications of democratization. They saw the implications of Russian objections as irrelevant and thought they’d found a magic elixir in the form of colour revolutions: isolate, support internal elite defection to democratic forces. Rinse and repeat. While Russia saw a democratic Georgia or Ukraine as inevitably rejection Russian control and therefore inadmissible to Russia’s own security and stability. From 2004 democratic overturn of regimes and geopolitical competition becomes impossible to separate for both West and Russia.

All of that said, we shouldn’t lose sight of Ukrainian agency. Any account of ‘cause’ that doesn’t foreground Yanukovych’s actions in precipitating internal and then external conflict is going to be suspect. As D’Anieri says, how ‘international factors interacted with internal forces within Russia, Ukraine… has been underemphasized in most analyses of the conflict.’ (17). Yanukovych is important because his government threatened to upset the three sources of internal balance in Ukraine: political pluralism through regional diversity, foreign policy balancing between Russia and the West, and oligarchic, or clan pluralism. All of these fulcrums that made Ukraine unlike Russia were under threat after 2010. His actions threated to autocratize Ukraine via presidentialism as had happened in Russia. In turn Ukraine might have gained an ascendent oligarchic elite group drawn from his particular regional clients. As it is, the Maidan led to a restoration of 2004 Ukrainian constitutional arrangements and free and fair elections – by post-Soviet standards.

On the Russian side too, D’Anieri notes provocatively asks – would a more democratic Russia have prevented a Russian president from opportunistically seizing Crimea in 2014? Trump 2.0 shows that this assumption is naïve. Furthermore, domestic politics in Europe and the USA are also important. A new ‘Marshall Plan’ was untenable politically in the US – Bush senior lost on the economy – how could he (or Clinton) have sold massive aid to Russia? Finally, the status quo in the 1990s of economic interdependence of Ukraine and Russia also prevented domestic developments that might have changed the later calculus. The Ukrainian state also remained remarkably weak and corrupt, just as the Russian state after 1999 regained some capacity. Why didn’t Russia attack sooner then? Because it took until 2022 for it to fully develop a sufficient number of battle tactical groups for the mission envisaged.

Overall then, one of the strengths of D’Anieri is to continually remind readers of the ‘underlying’ (historical/structural), ‘proximate’ and ‘contingent’ factors. Without all of them coinciding or reinforcing each other, ‘violent conflict was never inevitable’ (21).

Was full-scale war inevitable after 2014?

Fast forward to the conclusion of the book, D’Anieri starts by focussing on Putin’s echoing of George Kennan’s assertion in his June 2022 remarks about there being no ‘in-between, no intermediate state’ between sovereign power and colony. Kennan: ‘There is no border zone of Russian power. The jealous and intolerant eye of the Kremlin can distinguish, in the end, only vassals and enemies, and the neighbors of Russia, if they do not wish to be one, must reconcile themselves to being the other’ (308).

For D’Anieri, questions worth considering are: is 2022 inevitable after 2014 or was it always inevitable? In his view 2022 present greater challenges for interpretation even if the ‘causes’ look similar. Timing is one challenge, the other is rationalism versus the question of groupthink and personal traits.  

It could be that Russia only felt strong enough for all-out-attack in 2022, but that alone is likely an insufficient explanation, according to D’Anieri. Similarly, Ukraine’s reassertion of independence after 2004 and 2014 doesn’t necessarily mean compromise was impossible. What’s needed is a ‘historical’ and ‘conceptual’ answer rooted in the long-term driver of Russia’s relations with Ukraine: its elite’s opposition to Ukrainian independence dating to 1991 when Yeltsin believed that the creation of the CIS would tie the two countries in defence and economic matters and thus limit Ukraine’s sovereignty. This is ‘historical’ disjuncture number one. The second ‘disagreement’ was between Russia and the West. Thirdly, Ukraine’s consensus about independence regardless of varying relations with Russia was only cemented by a lack of conciliatory policies from Russia. Even presidents called ‘pro-Russian’ like Kuchma and Yanukovych strongly rejected formal integration with Russia.

Along with ‘historical and conceptual’ causes, there are ‘events’ – or contingencies. These span the period in question: from 1993 elections in Russia which had the effect of focussing the minds of Ukrainians about seeking alternative security arrangements,  to Kosovo in 1999, the financial crisis in Russia in 1998, and of course the ‘acrimonious’ relations due to NATO expansion. US invasion of Iraq was ‘aggravating’ and ‘corrosive’.  As were the Arab Spring and Syria. Efforts to improve relations were weak. Opportunities by changes in leaders were lost. Even sincere efforts like the deferring of a NATO action plan for Ukraine and Georgia – a major concession to Russia, was seen by them as a provocation, arguably leading to the invasion of Georgia that year.

These contingencies though, need to be connected to the underlying structural constraints: the security dilemma, democratization pressures, and domestic politics. D’Anieri writes that ‘while one can argue that the real problem was Russian imperialism, the security dilemma created problems independent of Russian imperialism. Russia’s dissatisfaction would have been easier to manage if every effort to insure against renewed aggression did not make Russia feel less secure as well as insulted.’ (314-15). But this works in reverse for Russian potential concessions to a Ukraine with some free trade with the EU. Russia could have continued with a friendly president in Yanukovych even if he’d signed the Association Agreement.

D’Anieri particularly emphasises Russian domestic politics, perhaps surprisingly given, as we’ve seen, some experts on Russia do the opposite – focussing much more on the security dilemma. He reminds us that looking weak in domestic politics on the ’national’ question was never going to go well for Russian leaders.

Was war inevitable then?

No, writes D’Anieri. The Cold War was more intense in terms of relations and yet was managed over four decades. Similarly, in the run up to 2022 it looked like Russia had time on its side to consolidate its power over Ukraine. It had choices and leverage. Thus the personal decision-making must inevitably come into focus. But nonetheless assigning ‘blame’ is probably not very useful for analysis of actual causes because it ‘obscures the extent to which leaders see themselves as having much less freedom of action than later analysts ascribe to them.’ (319).

The prospects for peace

Europe cannot have a high level of security if a state as powerful as Russia remains dissatisfied with the status quo, concludes, D’Anieri. Should it be accommodated or appeased? Russia wants a veto on European security affairs and some control over much former Soviet territory. Its regime also wants broad geopolitical recognition as legitimate by Western states. ‘It is hard to see most of Europe being willing to grant these things’ (320). But what if it had these things? Would that end conflict or aggravate it further? D’Anieri is pessimistic about resolution – both of the actual war and the broader conflict.  The relationship now ‘embodies both a conflict of values and conflict of interest’ (321).

The final part of the conclusion is understandably more sketchy – questions about Ukrainian devastation and depopulation, the decoupling of Russia from Europe both economically and existentially. The question of Russians’ support for the war and more importantly, the future foundations of Russian leaders’ legitimacy beyond war and petrorents.

Realists argue that the West ‘should not particularly care what happens to Ukraine’. But D’Anieri argues that  Russian control over Ukraine would not make Russia a ‘status quo power’. But this extends to the West too. It would be unlikely for the West to completely renormalize relations to a victorious Russia. Maybe there is no European order that is consistent both with western norms and with Russia’s great power aspirations, ponders D’Anieri. ‘In the absence of any better strategy, the West will likely be left with a policy of containing Russia, dissatisfying as many find that’ (331).

D’Anieri’s final paragraph: ‘To return to the book’s epigraph (Lev Tolstoy – War and Peace), “our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe.” We want Russia to be satisfied and Ukraine kept independent and whole. Achieving even one of these goals has proven elusive. Achieving both now appears impossible.’

My 2025 roundup  – The old world is dying; now is the time of monster posts

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random monster encountered in the Field

Blogging as ‘public dissemination’ for academics is largely a thankless task. Indeed, a blog like mine arguably brings more costs than benefits to me professionally, while to do it properly takes time. From early 2022 onward I blogged a lot more for obvious reasons and 2022 saw more visitors to this website than before or since. However, looking at the stats for 2025 has cheered me up as they are consistent with 2024 and only a bit lower than 2022 when I was arguably ‘overposting’. Certainly, with long-form scholarly blogging, less is more.

Late 2025 saw an interesting shift in my audience. China is now my secondary audience after the USA. In 2026 I estimate it will become my primary one based on current trends. For some reason unknown to me, in November 2025 I had three times the number of Chinese visitors as those from the USA. The last month (December) has been similar. By contrast, in June 2025 over 50% of my audience was in USA and UK, with 0.3% of readers coming from China. Russia is a tiny and waning fraction of my audience (1.6% in December), although many may be using VPNs there. Not sure what to make of all of this.

What is this blog for? I remain committed to writing things that are a mix of current affairs, more academic stuff, and promoting non-anglo writing/research about Russia. I do this not for any particular audience or for career purposes. In comparison to similar blogs, my audience seems healthier and bigger – the downside of WordPress versus Substack is that few people want to register for the former so my subscribers count is low on WP.

So what are my highlight posts of 2025?

I kicked off 2025 with a theme I would revisit in the blog and in other publications: the divergent economic experiences of the war within Russia. I feel like I’ve been repeating myself since then saying similar things to this:

“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).”

Since then, I have become a dedicated fan of Nick Trickett’s work. He features a lot in my writing about this and I look forward to his 2026 book.

obligatory shots of vodka prices feature in many posts

In January and February I summarised some of Denys Gorbach’s book on the Ukrainian working-class. I recommend this book!

Then in March-April when my Bloomsbury book came out, I made some posts about its content, reusing its original working title: the micropolitics of desire. Here’s the final paragraph of the first post:

“It turns out that the common assumption to dismiss small acts, incremental thinking, and prefigurative desires is self-fulfilling. If we don’t believe in even a small politics and changes, then there will be no change. At the end of my book, I visit a housewife in a small town in Russia. At Eastertime in 2024 she gives out to neighbours some home-baked cakes decorated with icing. The icing spells out the abbreviation “XB”, which can be interpreted as representing ‘Christ is Risen’, or ‘Fuck the War’. Some of the cakes were more explicit than others. Why did she did this? Because she needed to acknowledge others and be acknowledged by them as a political actor.”

In April I blogged about the possibilities of a ceasefire. Here’s the opening of that post:

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

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

What’s more helpful is tracking over time the proportion of people who answer that they would support withdrawal from Ukraine without reaching Moscow’s military goals.”

I made a conscious decision not to ‘liveblog’ my fieldwork* in summer 2025. But I did condense some of my experiences in three blogs in September and October about ‘comfort-class authoritarianism’, about the spiritual values of the booze shops, and about the loneliness of the long-distance war supporter. These were among my most read posts of 2025 – particularly the war supporter one. In that post I talked about how

“irritability should maybe get more attention as a social barometer in contexts like the one Russians are facing. Irritability pairs with cognitive dissonance, but in turn that dissonance expresses a form of knowledge and a rational reflection of (constrained) material circumstances. That things are not as they are presented. […] Normalization – even in a war – has to be reproduced (and become validated) socially somehow. But think for a minute and this isn’t really possible for a lot of people in Russia.”

*for legal purposes I must state that I did not carry out any employment-based or remunerated fieldwork in 2025.

There are many constituents of a national ideology. Some are more appetizing than others

I then in October and November posted a critically supportive review of Marlene Laruelle’s new book on Meaning Making under the Putin Regime. This review was informed by some of the fieldwork posts of the autumn where I argued that Putinist ‘ideology’ as legitimation is very much over-egged for structural reasons in the West.

But my most popular post published in 2025 was done as something as an afterthought. Not a week goes by without a colleague (usually one who has never conducted fieldwork) or journalist questioning my ‘intellectual credentials’ in a way that few other social scientists experience. I did a long (as yet) unpublished interview with one of the biggest broadsheets of a large European country and again, despite the very sympathetic journalist, I was required to rehearse an argument justifying ethnography, and anthropology, more broadly. This is tiresome. So I finally did a quick run down of why ethnography is a perfectly normal and respectable method in the social sciences. It really is something that in the year of our Lord 2025 I had to rehash some basic social research textbook stuff and even my own powerpoints from the 1990s on this. I guess I just interact a lot more now than ever before with folks for whom post-positivism never really happened, and of course with the mainstream in Russian social science which pines for the days of Talcott Parsons c. 1959.

not Talcott Parsons

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

In total I wrote 20 posts in 2025, including this one. A few posts older than 2025 remain more visited than ever. By far and away the most visited is a post from April 2023 criticizing the methodological nationalism, western-centrism, and blinkeredness of some ‘decolonizers’.

My favourite post of the last year was exactly a year ago today – 30.12.2024 – in response to yet another émigré researcher justifying survey methods – in my view because of the inherent methodological and political biases of many social scientists from Russia who are ‘radical pessimists’ and very comfortable in their new roles serving the neoconservative foreign policy community of the US.

“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.”

And now to what didn’t I post about (and no promises I will get to these topics in 2026, mind!). I didn’t post about how I tried to use AI to help my research and ended up with a completely hallucinated set of Russian scholarly and newspaper citations! I didn’t post about the cottage industry in research – one which I think is intellectually dishonest – which paints a black and white image of youth indoctrination in Russia (though I did podcast about it). I did not post about what the anglo-left gets right and wrong about the domestic causes of the war (basically a review of all the coverage in Jacobin and New Left Review since February 2022). I did not post about the best book on Russia-Ukraine politics in English (teaser).  I did not post about the three main emergent elite groups in Russian politics and their corresponding publics which will all outlast the war (teaser number two). I did not post a summary of the good empirical work being done in Russia by sociologists (feels bad). I did not post about many interesting fieldwork findings, for example regarding wartime corporatism. Maybe I will have time in 2026, or maybe not!

Finally, there’s the question of what platform is the future for this kind of ‘content’. Is it in the walled garden with maximum control on WordPress or is it on the new cool-kids’ Twitter: Substack? Is it in abandoning content based on the written word for the podcast or videocast world? Peer-reviewed scholarship is dying yet the new online world of research blogging struggles to be born. Let me know your thoughts so I can at least plan which extractive monster, I mean ‘platform’, to pay my rent to.  

Here’s the Substack, because some prefer that: https://open.substack.com/pub/postsocialism/p/my-2025-roundup-the-old-world-is?r=o206x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Here, have a meat pie to celebrate the end of 2025 – only don’t inquire too closely as to its ingredients:

Three interview commentaries: Schulmann, Zubarevich, Kagarlitsky

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the first in-prison interview of an AI-inoagent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Guess what schooner rewarded me after my long talk?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethnography (about Russia) is not anecdotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obligatory Oz picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C. Wright Mills – a powerfully thinking life cut short

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

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

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

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

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

Is ‘Putinism’ a coherent ideology? Do Russians identify with it?

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A new book by Marlene Laruelle seeks to answer the first question, if not the second. Ideology and Meaning-making Under the Putin Regime is just under 400 pages and is somewhat of a departure from the fashion in US-published books for slim volumes. A few people asked me to write a review of it after I mentioned it previously, but this post is not a real review, but just some reflections based on my interest in criticizing approaches to understanding ‘late Putinism’ that rely too heavily on coherent ideological explanations. Having said that, Laruelle is one of the scholars most careful and scrupulous in her research.

At the outset, Laruelle asks: ‘How did the Russo-Ukrainian war become possible, and what role did ideology play in enabling it?’ The Introduction goes on to argue that the ‘Russian regime does offer an ideological construction that has internal plausibility and coherence’. For Laruelle, and perhaps most political scientists, the regime uses three mechanisms to ensure hegemony: material, ideational , and repressive. The first two are ‘cocreational’ – meaning that people link prosperity with the general will of the regime and identify with it. At the same time, Laruelle admits, the vast majority of Russians sense a lack of a state ideology. Her jobs then is to try to reconstruct something resembling a coherent set of beliefs or a world view and show how it is shaped by the elite in a feedback system with intellectuals, the outside world, imagined history, and ‘the people’.

But before doing that, her intro is really effective at criticizing existing approaches – showing that they severely neglect the ‘ideational’. She confidently dispatches what we can call the ‘kleptocracy’, ’empty propaganda’, ‘totalitarian’ approaches. At the same time, Laruelle sets herself some limits – ideology is about meaning-making and not propaganda, and it’s not about doctrine but worldview. Most importantly, ideology is aggregated from multiple repertoires and may not always/even inform policy.

The rest of the book is smartly structured in four parts. Reordering Ideology; Learning and Unlearning the West; Russia’s Counterrevolution; Russia’s Geoimaginaries.

Part 1 tries to get away from the idea of ideology as imposed by coherent actors from above while emphasizing the general tendency of state ideologues to present the current social order as ‘valid’ and irreplaceable. Three elements of regime doxa were formed in the 1990s: anti-collapse; normative great power recognition; state over (and encompassing) nation. This develops into five strategic metanarratives which then dictate the content of much public speech: Russia as a civilization-state, Russia as katechon (holding back the antichrist), as anticolonial force, as antifascist power, as defender of traditional values. Laruelle argues that despite the ‘chaos’ of ideologemes one encounters, there is a coherence to public speech that adheres to a mental apparatus with ‘roots’ in these narratives (p.19).

All the ‘topoi’ that ever enter lay talk, like ‘Gayropa’, or ‘collective West’, can be traced back to the core metanarratives and then core beliefs. ‘Indeed, as in jazz, there is an established common theme or point, but each authorized player is allowed to improvise at will… There is both ideological opportunism… and stability in the core set of beliefs.’ (23) Perhaps feeling that this is altogether too neat, after some analysis of individual worldviews at the top of the elite, Laruelle acknowledges that various issues still can’t be explained by this framing alone. There are, after all, lots of intervening institutions and actors. ‘It is challenging to to decipher what is genuine cocreation from what is cueing’ (28), Laruelle remarks, before reminding us that very few security elites favoured an aggressive Ukraine policy before the war. Part of the answer is the tendency of authoritarian neoliberalism to produce ideological entrepreneurship, of which Z-patriotism is just the latest example. However, the regime itself is not the addressee here: ‘a vision of Russia that emerged in lived experience by Putin’s inner circles and more broadly the establishment… looked for intellectual soil and a better-articulated doctrine to justify and nurture itself.’ (37).

Part 2 traces the rejection of liberal internationalism since 2000. Analysing the use of the word ‘liberal’ in Putin’s speeches, Laruelle argues that ‘his self-presentation is purely situational, if not opportunistic or cynical… and [while he] has never totally abandoned references to universal values, the shift from supporting liberalism… to denouncing it wholesale has been a major change.’ From here its a short walk (to 2022) to an idea of recovering a ‘first modernity’ – an idea that ‘there exists a true Western heritage rooted in a rejection of some forms of modernity’ (92) and in this sense, Russia borrows from the US culture wars significantly. Partly because of this weak and reactive form of antiliberalism, ‘there is no consensus among the Russian establishment regarding Russia’s relationship to Europe identity-wise’ (96).

This Part also covers Byzantium and the ‘Pontic power’ shift after 2008 but which had weakened by 2022. There follows a chapter on patriotism as state-centrism – the idea that the only soveriengn actor can be the state. Over and above the usual argument about how empire, statism and statehood support each other, Laruelle discusses the discourse of ‘historical continuity’ (preemstvennost).

Throughout the book, there are author-calculated graphs of the rise or variation in the mentions of particular words. For example, on p. 113 we witness a striking rise since 2000 of the use of the term ‘patriotism’ in presidential speeches. Sometimes these figures speak for themselves and help support the main argument, but in other cases the ‘data’ looks noisy and too Putin-centric. On patriotism, it’s striking that Laruelle meticulously documents the spectacular and discursive promotion of pro-patriotic symbols and spaces, but, like the regime itself, emphasizes the closure of narratives, the narrowing of what can count as patriotism and how little ‘content’ the ‘spatial imaginaries’ and ‘uses of the past’ have room for. A genuinely productive and mobilizing deployment of Stalin, WWII, Lenin, Brezhnev is impossible because of the timidity and incoherence of the regime, while the celebration of Russia’s environmental diversity, modernization and ‘valorization of territory’, are notable for what they omit or would appear absurd in proposing.

Similarly, the reconstruction of Russia’s ‘Imperialness’ in the next chapter shows the regime is not without ambiguities and is even half-hearted. For example, rehabilitation of White ideology (the anti-Bolsheviks in the Civil War) is limited to the cultural sphere. Fully embracing it would mean devaluing useful elements of the Soviet heritage. Putin here emerges as a bit at odds with the rest of the elite – much more anti-Bolshevik and more pro-Tsardom. Laruelle gives us a neat overview of how Putin and Medvedev have referred to tsars, but this is a good example of the messy data – the graph is just a series of ups and downs, even allowing for the clear devotion of Putin to Peter the Great (136). This chapter also deals with the very real revival of antisemitism by regime insiders and the extreme anti-Ukrainianism of Timofey Sergeytsev, though none of the radical voices are quoted in the new ideological school textbook sponsored by the regime (144).

Part 3 opens with a chapter on Russian civilization as rejecting Western Universalism. Cue a journey through Spengler, Toynbee, Huntington, Eisenstadt, von Herder and a brief reiteration of the nineteenth-century Slavophilism and then the Soviet rehabilitation of Spengler through to the late Soviet and post-Soviet influence of Gumilev, Panarin and the replacement of Marxism-Leninism by ‘kulturologiia’ – an essentialist new superstructure explaining world history to Russian students. For example, A. Panarin links ‘Russia’s messianism to being a global safeguard of polycentrism: by its very existence, Russia demonstrates that the West is not the sole driving force of development’ (156). Here we get also a reiteration of Laruelle’s argument that ‘Russianness’ has been detached from ethnonationalism by Putin successfully, and a short discussion of three versions of Islamic civilizationalism that compete within Russia today (Slavic-Turkic fusion; Volga-Ural centrism; eclectic Kadyrovist loyalist conservatism).

Chapter 8 is perhaps the key chapter in some ways to the book – on Conservatism. Three sources inform today’s version: tsarist era, Soviet ‘social conservatism’, and the interest in ‘morality’ from the 1990s. Here I feel there are some stretches, or at least some grounds for more debate – as any of the three ‘sources’ here remain obviously open to interpretation. Nonetheless, Laruelle is willing to back up her argument with plenty of evidence, noting, for example, that the moral aspect of liberalism in the 1990s often goes unnoticed (173). Once again, in this chapter, a reader might get the impression that the resort to quantification of terms like ‘traditional values’ in speeches has little to add to the rich scholarship of the author.

Mentions of ‘tradition’ are pretty stable since 2005 (or rather the standard deviation increases for a while and then reverts to a norm when it comes to words like ‘spirituality’ – which is a notoriously empty signifier for Putin). We get intimations of the slippery, unconvincing embracing of conservatism when the author reveals nuggets like the fact that there is hardly any investment by the state in intellectual research on conservatism (186). This leads Laruelle to note that those conservative intellectual entrepreneurs who tried to work with the Presidential Administration were to be disappointed.

This explains why so many ‘entrepreneurs’ like Kholmogorov became more reactionary – not because of an alignment with the regime, but because of their frustration with it. Thus, it is surprising when Laruelle ends by arguing that conservatism really is the ideological backbone of the regime, and indeed, that it is a national conservative one, albeit that it is a national state form of conservatism. Coming away from this chapter I understood that a vague form of conservatism is an organic part of intellectual history in Russia and has a social content, but that has had almost no contribution to policy output directly (beyond contradictory tokenistic lawmaking by the ‘rabid printer’ that is the state Duma). On these terms one might argue that a country like Denmark or the UK is more consistently conservative – especially in terms of what the book proposes as a ‘cocreated’ hegemonic ideology.

In Chapter 9, Laruelle tackles the subject of Katechon as part of a reactionary tradition in Russia of millenarianism and eschatology. Russia, after Maria Engström, is the ‘gatekeeper of chaos’. In this logic, the Ukraine war could be seen as part of a Reconquista. Nuclear Orthodoxy, Soviet imperialism, mystical Stalinism, and my personal favourite – the legend of the City of Kitezh (which can autarkically submerge itself in the heartland to hide from the hostile neighbouring territories) all rub shoulders in a bewildering postmodern eclectic blend of religious inspiration. ‘Teach us to breathe under the water’, never sounded so apt.

In Chapter 10, the scholarly fashionable idea of identity as spatial imaginary gets a comprehensive treatment. Laruelle here reissues her own contribution: Russia as fertile ground for geographical metanarratives (212). Russia is (and can only be) Great because it is big and has expanded a lot. Eurasian destiny as teleology. Without empire, there’s no Great Power status. Cultural and political boundaries do not overlap with state borders – Franck Billé’s idea of ‘auratic bodies’.

But the notion of Eurasia remains horribly elastic and fuzzy, as Laruelle points out herself. A common destiny led by Russia? (remarkable to think about this given the admission by most Russians that they are completely dependent on the whim of China now). Eurasia as civilizational project which differs or competes from Euroatlantic ones (again, an empty signifier)? The book does show that at least performatively, Putin likes to play around with the the term ‘Euro-Asian’ from 2012 onwards. However, characteristic of his improvisation, this discourse drops off from 2020 sharply, perhaps because of the failure of the Eurasian Union. By the end of the chapter, the author admits to ‘numerous semantic gaps. No official text about the Eurasian Union mentions Eurasianism as an ideology’ (230). And the ‘founding fathers’ of Eurasianism enjoy cultural, but not political, prestige (with the exception of Gumilev, perhaps).

Because this is a v. long post already, I will skip the final Russian World and Anticolonialism chapters, though they are just as informative and well-researched.

In the conclusion Laruelle argues that Russia has moved towards a much more rigid ideological structure and has an official ideology (265), but at least to this reader, the book, with its repetition of the terms ‘repertoires’ and ‘plasticity’, seems to argue for something different – perhaps the word ‘ideology’ is inadequate here. Can an official ideology be entirely negative – based on resistance to the West, and promoting an all-powerful state? As Laruelle notes – Russian efforts to project soft-power have failed and ‘the state’s survival remains the main objective of the regime, and acquired territories are subordinated to this state-centric strategy more than having a value in themselves’ (266).

‘Typologizing … the Putin regime may be morally reassuring, but it does not automatically provide a heuristic approach for scholarship if the typology is taken at face value and not itself interrogated’ (269). Should we talk about Putinism? Only in so far as a collective Putinism expresses how all these historically determined discourses get more or less traction over time. ‘War Putinism was only one of the possible options of early Putinism…Ideology matters when it reinforces strategic goals, but not enough to force a decision solely on this basis’ (272). For Laruelle, the war forces the blending of formerly disunited repertoires – soveriengty, civilization, conservatism, traditional values, etc. ‘The war has provided internal coherence to this ideological puzzle’ (273). Manufacturing consent has its limits, but it is aided by depoliticization, dissociation, ‘consentful’ discontent, ideological passivity, and a shared ‘zeitgeist’ with the regime: that Russian society is superior (‘healthier’) to the West. Thus, in conclusion, Laruelle sides with quantitative surveyors in proposing a relatively coherent national-conservative majority, while leaving the future open to alternative reinventions such as cooperation with the West, or an ‘Asian’ model like Singapore, or even an illiberal grassroots democracy.

As regular readers might surmise there’s a lot here I both agree with and disagree with, but for anyone wanting a survey of all the genealogies and diversities of Russian national-conservatism, this book will not be found wanting.

The loneliness of the long-distance war supporter in Russia

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Russian street theatre performers rehearse in a public park in Moscow, August 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

The loneliness of the true believer (in war)

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

***

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

***

rubble and ice-cream – the quintessence of Moscow summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Spiritual values’ of the booze shops. Russia’s convenience economy as part of the soft administrative regime, Part II

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In contrast to discounters offering vodka for less than £2, the most dismal craft beer styles continue to do a roaring trade in central Moscow (note they’re more than double the price of vodka

This is the second post to look at the ‘convenience’ side of soft authoritarian administration: the comfort it increasingly appears to provide to the majority of Russians. Ideologists of all stripes in Russia have always had a problem with slotting in material well-being and the petite bourgeois life into a set of values that are supposed to be operative in the so-called ‘spiritual’ community of Eastern Slavic culture. But, as I asked in the previous post, what if material well-being itself, as a direct result of authoritarianism, could become a kind of ideology? To think about how authoritarian ‘comfort’ can become a source of public satisfaction (or ‘legitimacy’) we have to re-iterate some home truths about what kind of ‘realism’ most people confront daily. It certainly isn’t open repression or a sense of living in a personalist dictatorship.

A focus on political authoritarianism as all about coercion or about ideological differentiation deflects our attention from the discursive reality as experienced by most, if not all Russians: a kind of socio-economic Darwinism. This is a hegemonic ‘common sense’ that exhorts all to become self-governing atomized subjects – individually responsible for their success and failure in life. The first ‘common sense’ acts from above through dominant discourses and economic policies – the notorious labour code sets an example (making defending workers’ rights legally almost impossible), and the paltry social protections for vulnerable groups make sure they understand their position (‘the state owes you nothing’). Just as important is the response from below which internalizes and reacts – a ‘neoliberalism from below’. People adapt and even partly mould themselves to this unwritten compact. This is explored in part of my new book.

There’s nothing new in this situation since at least the early 1990s. Indeed the whole point is arguing for the timelessness of survival of the fittest as part of a dominant discourse of suspended modernity – ‘you can’t have nice things anymore: social democracy was a mirage’. The war makes things even more obvious and pressing at an individual level. Inflation means that a huge amount of labour market churn has been ignited in a system that was already suffering from labour shortages. Workers internalize the need to ‘hustle’ and be on the lookout for better opportunities. In turn, corporations and employers struggle to offer some kind of enhanced package – a ‘wartime’ deal, to bind workers in place. Ironically, this looks more and more like the Soviet deal: paternalist benefits like special medical insurance, kindergarten vouchers, enhanced holiday pay. That, in some respects, employers are on the back foot partly explains why some Russians consider there to be more opportunities today for them because of the war.

However, the ability to leverage an interest group’s structural power is limited. Pay at all but executive level is still extremely low by middle-income country standards, and physical mobility in search of jobs is hard because of the housing crisis, exorbitant commuting costs and poor infrastructure beyond the centres of large cities. The question of railway modernization came up the other day because of the announcement that the Russian government will invest in a massive high-speed rail programme. While a classic example of political distraction and reannouncing old news with no fiscal capacity to follow up on the plans, it’s also laughable to anyone who knows anything about RzhD (Russian Railways).

RzhD can’t even deal with the oversupply of empty wagons clogging up the creaking existing network and its structural problems as a state monopoly. The latter include extremely low productivity, the inability to cut waste and invest appropriately, being subject to political interest groups (wagon builders), and just not being able to attract skilled workers. Russia is short of 2500 train drivers and 3000 loco crews, and yet RzhD – which cannot go bankrupt because of the state’s backing offered its staff, wait for it, … a 1.2% pay rise earlier in the year. Military Keynesianism this is not. This is a harbinger. If the general crisis of stagflation in Russia becomes entrenched, and it looks that way, the realization of the structural power of workers of all types will become an important barometer. Just because striking and organizing is illegal doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Scholarship on labour unrest shows that when it comes, it is contagious and happens because of rising expectations.  

So far, so good (well, bad, actually). But the dismal reality of labour’s subordinate positioning is not the end of the story. That we can call the evolving regime ‘soft administrative authoritarian’ is because the reverse side of neoliberal austerity + surveillance and monitoring is the democratization of digital convenience, which in the post-Soviet context is often evoked as part of a narrative of authoritarian comparative advantage. Cue one of the endless social media posts of US ‘exiles’ in Moscow marvelling at its profusion of bars and stores, its cleanliness, order and whiteness. Any mention of Moscow should immediately give pause for thought, but sooner or later, innovations to make life easier there do diffuse to the margins.  And this is because an infrastructure of ‘comfort’ is inseparable from the forms of digital control.

hot dumplings from the mall dispenser. The selling point is speed and convenience

Realtime monitoring of people and vehicles using cameras and apps has dual uses – I can see on my state-controlled mapping app where my bus is in real time even in the sticks (something hardly possible even in most European cities). In Moscow, I still can’t get over the unemployed children of upper-middle class people ordering things like a single tub of ice-cream which is delivered in minutes for a tiny delivery fee. The courier is fed the address from that same smartphone that monitors one’s every move. The app prompts the user to feed the gate code to the courier when they forget to buzz him in. When on the move, people pay for little comforts, like a spiced latte, using ‘Facepay’. After all, what’s the harm when all the self-checkouts use face-recognition to prevent shoplifting anyway? Administrative security is built into everyday life like in no other European country, let alone the US where they have a banking system more fit for the 19th, than the 21st  century.

And the point is not to remind people that the security services have access to everything (and that even now, data in the Interior Ministry car owner database can be bought and sold for trifling sums), though they might well ‘remember’ that too. The point is that administrative security – including having everything the state provides on a single app (and soon, communication on a single state-messenger service: Maks) is a meaningful source of national pride – “look at what our programmers can do? You can’t even book a school place or doctors appointment online in the backwards UK”. The idea of technological progress in place of genuine progressive modernity (where rights and entitlements are advanced) renders the voices of those who urge to resist and imagine an alternative political or social order absurd and unthinkable. After all, Moscow is the most liveable city in the world, right?

At the same time, even as the population gets poorer by middle-income country standards (from formerly a position similar to Malaysia, to a position more like that of Mexico), the baubles of the comfort and convenience economy are rolled out even to the smallest humdrum towns like the ones I study. Amazon-type staffed collection depots are everywhere (there are four in the town of 15,000 people I work in). The Yandex taxi app extends its reach into the provinces, and actually has detrimental effects as it makes informal taxi-driving unprofitable for many middle-aged working-class men. But it’s more convenient for the middle classes of course, who can afford the higher fares.

A Russian sociologist who wished to remain nameless reminded me recently that real ‘moral code’ [skrepy] of Putinism for most people is the democratization and stratification of the consumption of alcohol. For every degustation spot for fine wines, or craft beer popups in Moscow suburbs, there’s a ‘Red and White’ booze discounter. Red and White has over 21,000 little stores across the country. That’s twice as many outlets as there are McDonalds in the US, which has more than significantly more than double the population of Russia. There are usually three stores within a ten-minute walk of even the most unfashionable location in Moscow (ask me how I know). There are stores in the Arctic circle and one on the tip of Chukhotka, facing Alaska across the Bering Straits. There is even an outlet in the ancient city of Bukhara in Muslim Uzbekistan.

Red and White doorway with obligatory ad for workers

The number of B&W stores has nearly doubled since the start of the war as has the net worth of its billionaire owner. The slightly seedy, cheap and not-very-cheerful pokey stores are reminiscent of the worst of New York bodegas or UK cornershops. Their explosion shows not only the abiding nature of self-medication with alcohol but the explosion in demand for ‘low-cost’ offerings (the Group owner has also expanded his holding of discount supermarkets which do a roaring trade now – the photo at the top of this blogpost is from one of these stores).

Pity not only those purchasing adulterated beers and nasty red wines, but the hapless Central Asian immigrants forced to work for a pittance in these dives, along with the 24/7 kebab joints that usually spring up next to the wine shops. Comfort is maintained by a neocolonial service class. It’s also about the ‘doxa’: the naturalized and inevitable order: everyone has their labour price, and if yours is low, it’s the Red and White for you.

“From the Barista: add a review in Yandex Maps so that my boss gives me my passport back”

Consumption according to station is a moral virtue – achieving some kind of comfort and habitability becomes an ethical marker, rather than a purely socio-economic one, as researchers Rivkin-Fish and Crăciun and Lipan have argued. How this interacts with the war economy more directly – in the form of creating categories of biopolitical waste, and helping middle-class people distance themselves from responsibility for the conflict – we’ll come back to next time.

‘Can you be happy in a Mercedes?’ – on the ludicrous optimism of minimal expectations

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The never-ending subgenres of ‘Russian girls pose with Mercedes’. Source: gtspirit.com

Long ago, anthropologist Jennifer Patico got the perfect quote from an interlocutor in St Petersburg during ethnographic fieldwork. Happiness was important, but it was better to be happy in a Mercedes! Another person cut in: ‘No, those who had Mercedes were not happy, because they “aspired” – they were never satisfied but were always aiming for more’. Patico then embarks on a wonderful analysis of the way the burgeoning consumer culture in 1990s Russia set up new forms of class-based distinction, and of course, deep unhappiness for those without the means to participate, and extreme stigmatization of the new ‘deserving’. Visible achievement of material comfort becomes a new marker of ‘culturedness’, to the exasperation of some. Thus, for Patico, consumption patterns and ‘happiness’ are more about how quickly value systems change during crisis. They then get deployed as ways of expressing social difference which is just as meaningful an expression of well-being than anything else. I’m satisfied because my neighbour’s car is Chinese while mine is Japanese. I’d be even happier if his house was hit by the falling debris of a Ukrainian drone.

The idea that well-being derives from legitimating social inequalities is probably as far as one could get from the well-publicized recent findings of researchers that Russians’ sense of stability and life satisfaction has reached its highest level since 2013. Meduza, along with The Bell, had a prominent write up in both English and Russian based on an interview with participating author William Pyle, an American economist. Unlike raw surveys, this study was based on long-term monitoring of household’s reported spending habits and self-reported subjective well-being. While the report itself is really interesting and I’ll get to in a minute, the Meduza write up suffers from some typical problems which happen when researchers and journalists talk.

To put it mildly, there are some big logical leaps in terms of cause and effect. At one point Pyle says it’s his ‘interpretation’ that recent ‘aggression’ gives (some) Russians a ‘positive jolt’. In isolation from the actual findings this feels like a bald statement.  Pyle follows this by summarising his main evidence: that by 2023 people have become more optimistic, more satisfied with economic conditions, and more secure about the future. Later in the write up, he notes that, surprisingly, perceived well-being was boosted more in regional cities than in the metropolitan centres – particularly in places like Penza, Perm, Tula and so on where some military factories are.

People often argue in this vein that war spending has had a measurable effect on all kinds of things. I always point out that most of this is wishful thinking or based on faulty reasoning. One reason is that people are indirectly influenced by the stereotype that Russia beyond Moscow is a bit like an oil refinery with a big tank factory attached. It doesn’t require much research to discover that in these so-called MIC regions, the actual numbers employed are smaller than expected. 15% of Tula’s economic output is in defence factories. In this ‘cradle of Russian arms’, less than 2% of the population work in defence industries. And mind, this is a well-placed, ‘affluent’ region with the highest concentration of weapon shops in Russia. (It’s true that in the Urals the picture is different and defence and chemicals industries do make up a significant proportion of employment).  A number of my interlocutors hail originally from Tula and it’s interesting that there is still out-migration from there to Kaluga because of the perception that MIC jobs just aren’t worth the candle: antiquated work practices, forced overtime, low pay and poor social infrastructure. That’s not to say that wages haven’t shot up in Tula, just that it’s just not the case that MIC factories demand has uniformly pulled away workers from other industries in such areas. It’s more that the demographic crisis in Russia is moving into its most severe phase just as significant numbers of young men are being taken out of the workforce and immigration is falling.  

Overall, comparing the Meduza interview to the actual report and other research we can easily detect the persistent bias of Russian media in exile and attendant punditry. It seems like so much coverage services to underline the already-existing “common sense” of the Russian liberal émigré mind: Russians prioritize material well-being over morality; they are callously indifferent even to their own countrymen’s suffering. They are, to quote Pyle, outliers on the ‘malignant patriot’ scale, and indeed, they have been that way since the 1990s (maladaptive thesis I’ve critiqued to death on this blog).

An aside on the ’malignancy’ thesis. This is largely based on comparing answers to two questions from the International Social Survey. In 2012, Russians were (rather?) more likely than other nations to answer ‘yes’ to the questions: ‘people should support their country even if it’s not in the right’, and ‘Russia should follow its own interests even if it leads to conflict with other countries’. In the same survey, it should be noted, Russian and US perceptions of the positive and negative aspects of one’s patriotism are statistically indistinguishable. It also turns out (natch) that Americans have pretty much the highest indicators of ‘benign patriotism’ of any country in the world.’ Who knew! Some scholars using this dataset compare more questions they think relate to bad forms of patriotism, and others focus more on particular questions they think express xenophobia. Conceptually, it’s a bit of a mess, with qualitative researchers perhaps not realizing they are not talking about the ‘same’ data points, even from the same survey.

Given the ideological sleight-of-hand in the Meduza and Bell coverage, it’s a surprise to turn to the actual research report. This paints a much more nuanced, and indeed, interesting and informative picture. It’s one where households’ resilience and adaptability emerges as possibly the ‘real’ social fact influencing forward expectations. Indeed, it might well be that a sense of: ‘fuck, things could have been so much worse after Feb 2022 and amazingly we’re still alive’, (a real quote from my research) is what’s really going on here. The happiness of relief.

What else is in this report? The authors acknowledge there that rises in GDP do not necessarily have anything to do with increasing in economic well-being. Real disposable income has stubbornly stagnated even if it is now on an upward trajectory. Spending on consumption is depressed while more people are putting away savings (for the inevitable rainy day?) and eating out (whatever that means). Centre stage in the report are two graphs – one showing a strong uptick in real disposable income since 2020, and another from Levada showing similar upticks in ‘social’ and ‘consumer’ sentiment since c. 2021.

Nonetheless, the devil is in the detail, as they say. The summary statistics in the report show only 51% of people are ‘satisfied with life’ and only 22% are ‘satisfied with economic conditions’. Kind of astonishing to contrast this with the spin by the media. Perhaps of interest too is the fact that (I think) most of the sample was collected in October and November in 2022 and 2023, meaning that seasonal factors may have distorted things (if anything downwards).

Putting into perspective the clickbaity (and perhaps unintentionally ironic) Meduza headline (‘a more joyous life’), the record high in reported subjective well-being is true, except that almost all the interesting contextual information is missing. This could be shorthanded as: Russians feel lightly less shit about life than twelve years ago.  We learn from the report that in 2016 there was a low of only 15% of people who reported they were satisfied with economic conditions. But even now there is only a 6% higher probability of a respondent answering ‘yes’ to being satisfied than before the war. As I’ve argued before, we should be wary of looking at increases from a very low bases. The spectre of inflation also haunts some of these statistics. Discretionary spending may increase now because of negative expectations about future affordability.

Then there’s the ‘ludicrous optimism’ of having low expectations (Bill Bailey on the British). A kind of pseudoscientific cultural trope applied to contexts as diverse as Nordic countries (well-being stems from the very fundamental and easily fulfillable needs) as well as certain anglosaxons’ and low-countries’ gallows humour (expect the worst so as not to be disappointed).  In the current Russian context though, there might well be some truth in this: the sky did not fall in. There is no wartime rationing. Most people did not get hit by Ukrainian drones. Sanctions did not break the economy, etc.  By most measures, Russia’s macro robustness and its translation into everyday life means that very low and pessimistic expectation in 2022 and even 2023 were not borne out.

Another aspect is one that’s central to my book (took a while to get to this plug, didn’t it?). The socially galvanizing effect of war short of rally-round-the-flag is what I call ‘defensive consolidation’. Fears and foreboding are real and remain massively underacknowledged in research, but the sense of ‘the world is against us, so we have to find sources of satisfaction in the now’ in consumption, in leisure, in socially meaningful work, in geopolitical resentment even, is also palpable. I’m also reminded of the ‘bloody-mindedness’ coefficient I often encounter in my work. An interlocutor of mine had to have a minor surgery last month and I was concerned about the dilapidated hospital he stayed in. After grumbling about the delay to treatment because of a lack of specialists, he said ‘actually the hospital is flourishing, in spite of the problems in the town. If it’s not perfect already. It WILL be good.’ The money he saw being spent on some beautification of public space meant he anticipated an improvement in patient care in the hospital (illogical and probably wrong). Certainly, such responses are complex and ethnography is useful here: the hospital has been starved of funds as political punishment doled out by the Region to the municipal head who opposes United Russia.

From happiness to adaptation

Subjective wellbeing is usually linked to three human qualities of experience: happiness, health and prosperity. But the kicker is that these three qualities or measurables may be inversely correlated or extremely ‘relative’. Many anthropologists critique a Western-centric idea of what pertains to well-being, instead focussing on culturally-specific notions of satisfaction, for example, deriving from immersion in a network of mutual social obligations; or from relations of recognition towards and from parents, to give just two non-Western examples. Social scientists also critically interrogate nations which attempt to claim the crown of happiest people, but which simultaneously have high levels of anti-depressants, interpersonal violence, discrimination, substance abuse, addiction, and other social diseases. They also note that people in rich countries might sometimes ‘lie’ to themselves about being happy because, why wouldn’t they, in such abundance, feel they ‘should’ act lucky?

People may want to ‘feel good’ as a universal, but to do justice to cross-cultural comparison it might be better to look at ways of interrogating how people respond to potential adversity. With the ‘adaptive potential’ measure, some researchers think that that the greater the score on adaptive potential to biophysical, interpersonal or symbolic adversity, the fewer the symptoms of physical and mental ill health and that this could have a comparative measure between societies.  Essentially, happiness does depend on a person’s intersubjective relations to her surroundings as much as objective measures such as material well-being. This goes for health (which may not be the absence of disease), happiness (which may well relate to overcoming or living with suffering), and prosperity (which may well be cross-culturally or historically unmeasurable). What the initial quote from Patico partly referred to was ‘lifestyle incongruity’ – where aspirations or expectations, and material resources available to a person do not coincide. Happiness lies at least in part in minimising such incongruities and this probably has a culturally-specific basis. Indeed, in some cultures it seems it’s possible to have a negative outlook, and even low self-esteem, and yet be highly ‘satisfied’.