Category Archives: Russia

Looking in the Crystal Ball, Shattering the Crystal State

I was in Rome listening to some expert takes on late Putinism last week. One presentation was memorable for its thesis that Putin himself is a victim of his own success in removing any possible successors and that as a result his ‘model’ does not have the capacity to ‘reproduce personnel’ who could step comfortably into a leading position when Putinism ends. The beginning of the end of Putinism occurs at the moment when the idea that he can no longer effectively moderate between elites starts to diffuse down the hierarchy and even enters the rank and file.

A second speaker pushed this further: the system enters a dangerous grey zone between personalistic rule and figurehead status; in navigating this zone, everyone must be mindful of frustrated security services actors who cannot be controlled post-Putin because there will be a vacuum of authority. Putin’s personalistic approach is unravelling because there are too many figures within the wider security services (as opposed to the FSO) who do not see a pathway to promotion or meaningful increases in their power while the leader focuses only on the loyalty of a few who guarantee his immediate personal security. This is a degrading of the regime, analogous to what anthropologists call amoral familism, at the expense of genuine corporatism (where a functionary’s identity is tied to his loyalty to an organization, but where he also has the knowledge that his organization has a recognized territory within the state).

These initial two presentations chimed with a third, even more pessimistic one, that saw the war leading to ‘Maduro-ization’ of the state – again, a form of degraded personalism where there can be no loyalty, only the division of a smaller and smaller pie.

Now, these were short presentations, so it would be unfair to accuse them of crystal-ball gazing. Nonetheless as I was listening, I was struck by how theory-light discussions can become. There was plenty of interpretation based on networks, functional organizational analysis, and so on. But what about reviewing some perfectly serviceable political theory of the decomposition of dictatorships that we have had lying around since 1978?

I wrote about Poulantzas’ relevance to Russia just before the invasion and made some quite decent predictions. In short, one insight is that under authoritarian statism, the executive is inevitably as much hostage to conflicting societal and political interests as it is an arbiter, especially when it doesn’t have a coherent or consistent ideology. As Stuart Hall pointed out in his review of Nicos Poulantzas in 1978, theories of ‘authoritarian statism’ need to be complemented by considering how a state works with ‘authoritarian populism’ – though the absence of the latter could explain the fundamental weakness of Putinism, and its rapid degeneration in wartime.

Strictly speaking, Poulantzas kept his analysis of the Greek junta and the Cinquième République apart: authoritarian statism was where the normal French capitalist state was heading, while the Greek junta was an ‘exceptional’ state, built once ‘normal’ forms of coercion had broken down. Putinism began in a situation not so dissimilar to ‘normal authoritarian statism’, and has been stumbling towards exceptionalism since 2012, and hurtling since 2022 – and this is what makes it brittle. Obviously, Russia in 2020, 2022, and 2026 is more like the junta than Cinquième République. And the junta fell in 1974’s Μεταπολίτευση, after factional splits and a counter coup by the military police. Open dysfunction and the Cyprus fiasco (foreign policy overreach, sounds familiar?) put the nails in the coffin.

Crystallization and condensation are key metaphors in Poulantzas. His study of the Greek junta and the French fifth republic taught him about ‘healthy’ re-condensation of forces in a capitalist state, and points of breakdown. Crystallization is not defined consistently but thinking about chemical metaphors we can propose it as a state of affairs where ‘re-condensation’ of forces is blocked. Putinism has crystallized so rigidly at the top that now any tensile application of real force to it will shatter it. Ian Bruff’s take on authoritarian statism was a Poulantzasian approach: beyond brute force against ‘dissenters’, institutional power is remoulded to insulate certain practices from critique or change (corruption, the war, austerity). Appeals to ‘necessity’ replace any kinds of ‘hegemonic aura’ (Ian Bruff’s reading).

Most scenario analyses of Russia like the ones I listened to operate with an essentially instrumentalist logic: the state is merely a machine to be operated by different agents, so the only important question is ‘who wins?’ Poulantzas would put it differently: what is the specific institutional form that has crystallized, and what are the objective contradictions within that form that make it vulnerable to decomposition/shattering regardless of who is at the top?

Russia is more like the Greek junta because the crystallization post-2020 is too unbalanced and too rigid: economic fractions have been completely subordinated, not ‘mobilized’ or used to reengine redistribution. The potential dominant bourgeois class is disorganized by the war. The military-security fractions are ascendant, but the balancing is gone; what were powerful state actors in their own right potentially crystallizing into firm institutional counterweights are now cowed by the actor-network effects of the FSB’s search for disloyalty and ‘corruption’. The popular classes are being told to suck up permanent emergency and isolation from the world. In turn, this signalling has feedback effects on all parts of the crystal – distrust, distrust and more distrust; no communication channels work for elites; stick your head up and the FSB will chop it off.

Poulantzas’ ‘isolation effect’ describes how the state turns the dominated into atomized individuals – voters, taxpayers, the little people – while organizing the dominant classes into a power bloc. That division of labour is rather the point of having a state. In Russia the atomization has boomeranging effects: it is now the elites who cannot talk to each other. Who is atomized now?

As the first and second speakers pondered – there is a Nazarbayev-with-Chekists option, but the window is closing. This is recrystallization as recomposition: Putin as symbolic arbiter, elite renewal, leeway to technocrats under the strict limits of an ‘FSB’-ization of the commanding heights of the state. The problem with this is that the ‘FSB’ (standing in for the security fraction as a whole) can only double down on neostalinist logic that results in ever-expanding circles of repression to ‘explain’ the broader political-economy failure of the Putinist model and its war. No coherent power bloc can exist in this model – which is why 1946-1953 was marked by paralysis.

Decomposition from within – an echo of the Greek junta model: internal contradictions among fractions became unmanageable. If the FSB, the military, Kiriyenko’s bloc, and the gerontocratic establishment cannot reach a new equilibrium, the system implodes under the incongruity of the state’s ‘relative autonomy’. As Carnegie wrote recently: Russia has “an operating apparatus without any internal autonomy”. The power blocs no longer recognize the state as something they answer for. The state bureaucracies no longer function as sites of delegated governance; they function as a threat to each fraction’s position. Security services demand wartime ‘discipline’ in the MIC which cannot be carried out. The military demands wartime economic rationing which the technocratic government cannot carry out. Moscow mayoralty demands exemption from martial law. And so on.

The Crystal shatters – unlikely but plenty of historical precedent and potential. The atomization of the population reaches a threshold where it produces spontaneous, non-organized resistance. Infrapolitics-to-politics of the street, uncivil society, Asef Bayat’s “non-movements,” etc. You don’t need a revolutionary subject to precipitate the transformation of a moribund system. For example, proximate causes might be groups of war veterans who see their benefits taken away and who constitute a new social force the state cannot incorporate into the existing hierarchy. The point is the initial trigger is not predictable and not even that important.

In a Poulantzas-inspired reading, a precondition for shattering would require much more naked repressive apparatus. Are we going in that direction? 2025 survey data (war exhaustion, majority favouring peace talks) is an early indicator: Isolation effects produce not compliance but a latent collective sentiment that the state’s institutional form has no channel to absorb. Detecting this ‘directly’ is difficult, showing the fundamental weakness in the interpretation of polling and one I rehearse a lot in my recent book. Whatever happens, events will ‘anticipate’, not lag, public opinion.

***

Sidenote: Previously in this blog, and in my writings on Russia, I have tried to think about state theory and political economy by adapting the ‘strategic-relational approach’ of Bob Jessop, which itself is an update of Gramsci and Poulantzas (contra Miliband): the state is a ‘social relation’ and therefore if we study ‘political society’ we should use a much broader perspective. In parallel to discussions about political society, there’s a strand of critical political economy worth mentioning that considers the compatibility of authoritarianism and neoliberalism. This links people working on Hungary, Poland, the West and Russia. These include Dorit Geva, C. B. Tansel, Ilya Matveev, Adam Fabry, Ian Bruff and Stuart Shields. It’s ironic that in a scholarly field dominated by crystal-ball gazing there’s a mismatch between a focus on elite actors and state practices that holistically theorize authoritarianism beyond adjectival prefixing (electoral, personalist etc). And as Julian Waller points out, few are even interested in investigating authoritarian regimes on their own terms, so to speak.

Talk your book, or ride the wave? On Russian public sociology and ‘invisible censorship’

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Should social scientists try to communicate their ideas to the public? Especially when what is ‘normal’ to a social scientist (critical and evidence-based thinking) is diametrically opposed to the need for journalists to trade in platitudes, sensationalism*, and an often-mistaken idea about what constitutes ‘common sense’?

Should scholars patiently, dispassionately try to stick ‘to the facts’, to their furrow? Or should they, on the contrary, ride the wave? Offer disruptive or sensationalist takes as a ‘weapon of the weak’? This question is key to the current conundrum of how progressive political actors can break through the wall created by the complete capture of the mainstream media by reactionaries. Should we be more like Mamdani?

This conundrum is not new of course. Sociologists were writing in the 1990s about the way media may serve to stifle substantive debate, marginalize critical perspectives, engage in ‘invisible censorship’ [opens as a pdf]. In the 2000s they discussed how to balance credibility and persuasive authority in public sociology with its commitment to progressive impact.

That said, we have two provocative examples of ‘public sociology’ this week which both show how much more interesting the (liberal) Russian media is than – for example – the moribund anglophone one. In one very long discussion, a sociologist talks at length about the complexities of how Russian people react to the war within Russia and the need to use embedded techniques of observation and interlocution to get at them. In the other, a ‘sociologist’ (I’d call him a political theorist) actively derails talk about the Russian elections to emotionally focus on a topic of interest to him – the question of collective versus individual responsibility within an aggressor state from the perspective of the history of international law. In both cases, what’s of interest to me is not so much the substance but the overall strategies and tactics of scientists in dealing with a hostile media.

Konstantin Gaaze chooses the maximally disruptive method – what if what happened to the Germans in August 1945 happened to Russia? ‘Being a citizen of the aggressor state makes you criminally liable for its crimes’. Journalist in response: ‘I don’t get it’. Gaaze (emotionally) – ‘ok, let’s try it without irony… being a citizen of an aggressor state comes with responsibility for that.’ I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the idea of the ‘provocation’ that Gaaze employs. Beyond the provocation, there are two further points of interest: elections as political theatre – meaning, that even sincere oppositional participation may inadvertently be seen as both irrational and complicit because no realistic political agency is generated through voting. Secondly, that focus on the elections distracts from the fact that shadow military mobilization is taking place in a political and institutional set of spaces completely disconnected from parliamentary and legislative activity. By focussing on the elections we are actively contributing to that distraction, distortion, misdirection (misinformativeness?). Why not use ‘theatre’ to try to counter this unhelpful media framing?

Cue a massive negative reaction to the ‘soundbite’ from Gaaze about ‘criminality’ of Russian residency in the broader online space. One person commented:

Konstantin may have been attempting to provide a legal basis for the concept of political guilt à la Karl Jaspers whereby anyone belonging to a political community bears responsibility for that community’s actions. However, according to Jaspers, this responsibility is not legal in nature; rather, it entails an inescapable obligation to face the consequences and participate in the process of rebuilding. The problem, it seems to me, is that Konstantin Gaaze appealed specifically to the legal aspect of the matter (labelling it “unlawful”), whereas international law does not support this view.

Another said:

Yet another attempt to shift the Overton window toward imposing collective guilt. At the same time, it is an attempt to absolve oneself of “guilt”- after all, if you shout loud enough, the pro-Ukraine crowd might not piss on you for speaking Russian. Then again, they don’t need a reason.

***

Oleg Zhuravlev – a member of Public Society Lab – offers an interesting contrast. He’s very used to trying to communicate sociological ideas to the public and policy audience. With Katerina Gordeeva on her YouTube channel (2 million subs), he has space and time to sketch out what his collective does: ethnographic engagement and observation within Russia which shows that most people lack a clear, consistent political opinion about the war, implying that traditional opinion polling is not very effective. Individuals oscillate between supporting and criticizing the war, often driven by personal and situational factors rather than coherent ideology. People tend to see the war as an external, almost natural disaster rather than a political event they can influence. Amid widespread uncertainty and fatigue, hope persists in powerful figures – whether Putin, Trump, or even divine forces – to end the conflict.

Is this approach more effective than Gaaze’s? Yes and no. The presumptions and world-view of the liberal upper-middle-class host dictate much of the direction of travel and the framing ‘guilt’, ‘regime legitimacy’, and so on. Having said that, just the addition of time-stamps in the video serve a counter-hegemonic role: somewhat reframing the discussion towards more productive sociological ideas: ‘no such thing as public opinion’; ‘people don’t see any truth in the war’; ‘public politics in Russia is destroyed’; ‘Bourdieu, or not Bourdieu?’ [self-promotion: opens as pdf]. On the other hand, as progressives have long pointed and experienced – trying to communicate through the channels of the mainstream liberal press comes with many problems and compromises. One ends up having to explain and justify alien terms – for example ‘hegemony!’ This looks wonkish and weak at best. It is easy to get derailed in side discussions – like about ethics – which is what happened here to Zhuravlev and co. [obv. Ethics are a really important issue]. And about researcher ‘neutrality’ – which is inconsistently dealt with here. This is always the ‘natural’ disadvantage when ‘soft’, qualitative approaches are being presented.

It’s also easy to get derailed into ‘simplifying’ or adapting one’s purpose to the perceived needs of the platform. So, for example, in this case, Zhuravlev talks about a shift among people from talking to war as unthinkable in 2022, to, now, repeating tropes about it being ‘inevitable’. (I said the same in my last blog). However, here it seems, Zhuravlev might be tempted to extrapolate from isolated examples to a larger sample, which is not what this kind of sociology can do. There are other quibbles one might have (about scientific solidarity, for example) – which is not to criticize Zhuravlev, just to highlight the difficulties in presentation.

Those who find either of the speakers’ personas or positions unpalatable will no doubt find their performances unconvincing. But it seems to me that Pierre Bourdieu’s lessons about a reflexive sociological practice are more and more visible in these kind of presentations – and that is always to be welcomed. For example, in 2022 and even 2023 people would rely on Levada unreflexively. At least now, in 2026, those relying on survey data tend to at least preface their remarks to talk about the problems of polling in wartime. But reflexive sociology is more than this: it avoids dealing with problems as mere abstractions, foregrounds to its audience the fact that science is not a unified creed, but in fact competing ‘spaces of points of view’. Furthermore, it is reflexive because it brings critique to the field of academic production itself. This is all more than dealing openly with questions of bias. To paraphrase the most famous public sociologist: by themselves, sociologists cannot fight a war of position; they need allies from the media classes.

*I linked to the Guardian article as an example of sensationalism, but in reality it’s actively harmful content where the author is not even aware of its harmfulness.

Why Russians Rarely Talk About Putin

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two Moscow ladies take a smoke break from not talking about Putin

On the nature of depersonalized authority.

When I sit in the kitchen of Nikolai Viktorovich the TV above the fridge is always on. It’s impossible to ask him to go to another room to talk because there’s a screen in every room of this unusually spacious flat in Kaluga region. It’s invariably one of the main state channels. He loves the Army channel best, but we often watch what his wife disapprovingly calls ‘the shouting shows’ in the evening. These are the well-produced rants by the chief domestic propagandists, like slimy former Lake Como resident Vladimir Solovyov, or ‘Iron Doll’ Olga Skabeeva. Nikolai is in his mid-sixties but has limited mobility because of multiple health conditions. He rarely leaves the flat: these screen people are some of his favourite parasocials. His wife can’t stand them and usually scurries away to watch Korean soaps in another room.

I’ve known Nikolai since 2009. I know his views on most topics and they’re pretty standard for a man his age: not so much resentment towards the West but a fierce sense of loyalty to the Big Idea: the recreation of a powerful, purposive state to rival the Soviet Union, whose passing he regrets. The war ‘was inevitable’, he remarks, long after the fact and forgetting that it was the last thing he saw coming. The West is obviously to blame, and the Ukrainians are (not particularly sympathetic, mind) victims of their own hubris. However, these projections are more recently adopted ideas. The capacity for forgetting one’s own opinion is a mark of the effectiveness of public propaganda. The TV has helped him rehearse these ideas as his own. Having said that, he’s hardly what I would characterize as a ‘hurrah patriot’ – an even narrow demographic that loudly declares its xenophobia and glorifies the war, while doing its best to avoid incurring any of the costs. While I’m family to him, in my presence, Nikolai has never once uttered the words ‘Putin’ or ‘president’.

This is not a personal idiosyncrasy of Nikolai’s. It is a phenomenon I’ve come to witness again and again and struggled to explain: that Putinism survives not because ordinary Russians feel loyalty to the man himself, but because it has built a system of depersonalized authority, one that routes blame downward: to ministers, governors, and an unaccountable, shapeless ‘They’, while Putin alone floats above it, untouched. Consequently, people have more of a feeling for Putin than admiration or trust: a negative identification forged against the trauma of the 1990s, rather than any positive attachment to him. That structure is now beginning to fail.

Why do so few people ever mention the chief architect of today’s Russia and its (self-)destructive war? I’ve made it part of my professional life to become taken for granted among my dozens of interlocutors. They don’t see me as an anthropologist but as someone they hang out with, someone who brings them groceries and discusses (Korean or Turkish) soap operas, the price of petrol. I might remain a foreigner, but I’m certainly an adopted local in the compressed social geography of two little towns and a village not far from Kaluga, three hours’ drive from Moscow.

One of the most misunderstood things about Russian society is seeing it as mute or passive, or even worse, approving of the politics of war. Young or old, rich or poor, almost everyone constantly bemoans the terrible governance on offer from the ruling party (from which Putin began distancing himself many years ago). No one ignores the high inflation the war has brought, nor the inadequate rises in wages and pensions that never keep up. They complain about it constantly. Everyone knows a relative or acquaintance whose children go to school in a dilapidated building where teachers work in double shifts because so many have quit, and where even basic educational equipment supplies – such as pens and pencils – ‘cannot be afforded due to budgetary restrictions in the region at this time’.

After more than four years of war, it’s also likely they know of a nearby neighbour in their housing block whose hapless son took the shilling and lost his eyes, or his legs, or his life. There’s little sympathy there, but there’s also a muttering and shaking of heads when they relate the follow-up story: some or all the pay-out money was ‘lost’ or withheld pending a protracted legal process to convert ‘MIA’ to ‘KIA’. Or the relatives of the disabled veteran discover they are at the back of the queue for rehab at a centre that hasn’t been built yet, if it ever will. Then there’s the never-ending stories of mid-level corruption, bringing home the realization that one is only ever a couple of degrees of separation from a functionary – be it mayor, police captain, or chief hospital surgeon – who has siphoned off many millions to fund an apartment in Dubai, or an increasingly conspicuous high-end German car.

But here’s the thing – Putin never figures here – even though it is calculated bureaucratic corruption and rent-seeking that grew to monstrous proportions – perhaps as much as the war – that his reign will be remembered for in the history books. People talk endlessly about the hopeless ministers, governors, and even local and largely powerless bureaucrats. But in the unlikely event Putin comes up (often prompted by me, acting as the ethnographic provocateur), ‘He’ is unaware. Or maybe He’s poorly advised. Maybe He’s just really, really, busy. He’s got a war to fight after all.

One of my other dearest interlocutors is a Klara, a woman in her eighties living alone in a well-appointed brick house in the village. She doesn’t drink coffee herself but likes to invite me over as an excuse to use the fancy beverage machine her mercurial son gave her (he lives in Miami now – ‘He had some problems with the tax authorities and then there’s this SVO business’). Klara remembers Stalin’s funeral and often repeats the same stories. Once, and once only, she remarked to me how concerned she was about the toll on ‘The President’s’ mental health from having the fate of the nation on his shoulders. Even this rare, unprompted mention of him personalizes Putin only as an object of concern, never of judgment – depersonalized affect is the only register in which he can be discussed at all.

The village is my favourite place in Russia – and not only in the summer when there are so many visitors from the Big City. Gosha is a self-made man who ‘imports equipment – you know – the things that are needed right now’. He bought a big plot near me a few years ago. There, he built a rather ugly disproportionate house ‘in the classical style’ (I don’t know what that means either). Like Klara, he often seeks out my company because he’s bored. He likes to cook pancakes for his whole family and drops me a text to come over. His wife is a child psychologist in Moscow and works according to the principle of exclusivity: a few ‘cases’ a year, word of mouth, money up front. These are perfect representatives of the demographically narrowly, yet aggressively successful, upper-middle class. Yes, they are ‘upper-middle’, because if you take into account the lower cost of living and low taxes in Russia then essentially you can compare their sense of where they sit in society to the top ten percent, if not five percent in the US.

I am not just an ethnographer though. I am a troll, especially to Gosha’s wife, Masha.

I noticed your Gosha had to text me by SMS rather than Telegram. Have you, Masha, downloaded the new messenger Maks? I hear it tracks you, records you and other things besides.

Masha is totally unfazed. To paraphrase her:

We need Maks for the school chat. Teachers refuse to contact us on other platforms now. We’ll keep Telegram for when we go to Bodrum though – it’s useful there for meeting up with all the compatriots. We’ll be there for nearly a month after all. ‘They’ want to keep us safe after all and ‘They’ must have their reasons for blocking things. It’s annoying that ‘They’ don’t want us to watch YouTube because there were so many useful furniture restoration and DIY videos there. But after all, ‘They’ must have their reasons – it’s not my business to tell them theirs.

I take another risk: maybe all this nonsense with the internet signal blocking is because the president himself has never held a smart phone in his hand? No – a disinterested look to the side – it can’t be because of that. There are very talented people in the [Presidential] Administration, after all.

This is Putinism in essence: the state becomes a diffuse ‘They,’ its logic assumed rather than questioned, while the possibility that Putin himself authored its more absurd decisions is waved away before it can even be entertained. A variation on this is the theme of incoherence of the state. Quite rightly, some of the savvier surmise that actively harmful policies emerge from the infighting of agencies. Here it is supposed that security hawks have somehow outmanoeuvred the technocrats in the Administration and that’s why Telegram – which serves as a major source of revenue via marketing for tens of thousands of businesses – is being blocked.

Are there exceptions? Of course, and a growing number. There have always been plenty of people in my circle who from the outset knew what a security man would do to the country’s constitution – one that was only six years old when he came to power. I tend to separate these folk from my ethnographic core of interlocutors because they are the small yet vocal minority. They often consider themselves to be ‘awake’ in a land full of sleepwalkers with heads of cottonwool. But they too have their blinkers, preferring to blame the ‘majority’ for a series of political decisions and backslides that the more privileged were the chief beneficiaries of – like Gosha.

scene of an unusually animated conversation about things going on but not about Putin

The success of ‘Putinism’ then, is that it operates as a system of depersonalized authority. The man himself sits apart. He still, broadly, enjoys the benefits of hovering above everything else. To be more precise – Putin does have a personal sense of authority, but the point is that actual responsibilities – for stuff the state does: build roads, fix up schools, shoot missiles at Kyiv – these are socially and politically distributed far and wide. This, along with the heavy-handed security theatre on display especially in Moscow, helps us understand why the system feels so unyielding.

One must also look at how Putin built such paradoxical authority – responsible for everything and for nothing. It’s something of a cliché that much of his legitimacy rests on negation rather than a positive vision. Putin may be (to put it mildly) unremarkable as a personality, but that blank canvas was always part of his attraction as someone who positioned himself – and got a supine media to work hard on curating this image – as (falsely in every case) the “anti-Yeltsin,” “anti-1990s,” “anti-oligarch” and now the “anti-West” incarnation of Russia’s pendulum-like political identity.

Many people felt Putin channelled their own minor or major resentments and so projected onto him their own psychological states which allowed them to identify with him – to feel for him – at least at a distance. It was always at a distance. Which is why there’s no need to mention him. Perhaps, after all then, it’s better to talk of a feeling for Putin, rather than his ‘authority’ or even legitimacy, let alone ‘approval’ – a largely meaningless artefact of polling. The feeling-in-common was there for many people, but it always rested on a kind of photographic negative – undeveloped, lacking warm colour, and predicated on assumptions of gradual amelioration through the 2000s of political and economic circumstances in the 1990s that almost all had experienced as dislocating, demeaning, and frightening.

There was a time (and that time was long ago) that even dyed in the wool opponents would, sitting at the dacha cottage over a beer and a barbeque, intone wistfully that ‘At least He knows what He’s doing, God help Him. Does He know where it’s going? He must do’. They would chide the killing of a journalist (committed as a birthday present to the man). They would lament the packaging of state tenders worth billions for his cronies. But overall, even they would hem and haw and consider that things could be much worse. Until they did get worse. For ‘stability’ and ‘order’ are not the same as economic growth and well-distributed prosperity.

The last time Russians actually experienced more than a fleeting experience of wealth trickling down from high hydrocarbon prices was 2007. Since then, it’s become harder to sustain the myth of Putin as the architect of a glorious revival and guarantor of order. Old habits of disassociating his authority from responsibility for the dysfunction of the state die hard. But die they must in the face of failure after failure. Today, we’re rapidly approaching an inflection point when Russians are more likely to associate him with stagnation, inertia and even social and economic ‘blocking’ of progress. The more engaged people, even back in 2020, were likely to guardedly talk about opposing the constitutional ‘corrections’ (not about Putin personally) that enabled his rule for life. Now there is danger for him, rapidly approaching, that the majority will start to ask the question: Whose war is this but his?

Few can yet allow themselves to ask that question – even to themselves. But silence is not consent. It’s pregnant with fear, foreboding, and imposed deference. People, little-by-little, trade it for cryptic remarks. I buy a new chain for a petrol saw and chat to the attractive late-middle-aged lady who owns the only DIY store in the little town. She recognizes me as ‘some kind of foreigner who used to come here with that strange plumber. Did he get your bathroom finished in the end?’ She is surprised ‘that you’re still coming here’. To her store? No, to Russia. ‘Let’s hope it ends soon. These circumstances affect everyone. I’m very sorry indeed about it.’ A masterclass of impersonal grammatical phrasing in which the Russian language excels. Once again, a mistake is to read this as cynicism, or a symptom social pathology. These kind of comments are almost the only politics possible for the majority, for the meantime.

Yet there is a paradox at the heart of this enforced political silence. The more a regime tries to maintain a voiceless endless present, the more it breeds an undercurrent of deep uncertainty, insecurity and quiet unhappiness throughout society. In a sense this is what makes a ‘regime’ authoritarian – a felt disjuncture between the shape of order and the flow of people’s needs and wants. The thing about Putinism – it’s strength and weakness – is that as the petro-wealth model started to fail, it has tried to populate the whole country with authoritarian institutions. These are the ‘They’ that give permission for people to normalize – if not consent to – the chipping away first at political, then social and now personal freedoms. But ‘institutions’ are not just government agencies; they also refer to particular workplace relationships (the boss is a dictator and unions proscribed), and, notably, families. It’s not for nothing that the leading ideological entrepreneurs are keen to decriminalize domestic violence, equate childlessness with psychological illness, and even propose denying women the right to higher education if they refuse to make babies first. The performatively conservative institution of parliamentary politics would like to silence them too.

How effective is this imposition of airless compulsion and mute submission? A new breed of researchers, such as Konstantin Gaaze and Anna Schwenck, in different ways urge us to examine authoritarianism ‘subjectively’. Through a lens of how it is actually lived and felt on the ground. Schwenck looks at why young people buy into the status quo: they understand its corruption but feel the only way to get ahead is to get on the ladder of state-sponsored ‘NGOs’ and entrepreneurial self-help ‘trainings’. Gaaze tries to break with historical and deterministic explanations about Russia by drawing attention to how autocratic rule is experienced as a kind of endless present, deferring any sense of future or alternative. And this can be internalized at a fundamental level of the personality by many people, even those who despise the regime.

Only by looking at these human element can we understand the fractures that prefigure and trigger political change. This sounds less radical than it is, but analysts often ignore it. After a regime collapses or transitions, pundits rush to blame grand structural forces. In the Russian case it would sound something like: ‘Russia’s history of political culture is inherently totalitarian leading to periodic overturn’. Or, more often, personalist perspectives crowd out everything: ‘Putin became isolated during Covid and went round the bend reading conspiratorial and messianic historical destiny literature and philosophy’. In choosing either of these media-friendly explanations, we miss the shifting tide of public sentiment, of feelings experienced by ordinary people long before the breaking point arrives. The danger for the Kremlin begins when people stop speaking about ‘the present state of affairs’ or ‘these circumstances’ and start speaking about Putin himself.

“For most people, Putin is like the weather”*, or, my Night of the Living Dead with the Russian opposition

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Look, I even screenshot the ‘wtf’ moment when Khod says there aren’t any oligarchs in Russia

It started inauspiciously – they were supposed to make common cause. To set out a unitied front that put democratic values first, for when the ‘political opening’ comes to Russia again. The format was not great – three speakers, a host, and a moderator/mediator: Yulia Navalnaya, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Sergei Guriev (moderator), Mikhail Lobanov.

The inheritor of the anti-Putin opposition’s mantle, the technocrat manager [sic], the liberal economist, the democratic socialist – these were some of the self-projections of the participants. What stuck out immediately here was Khodorkovsky’s waffly and curious pitch – I’m a ‘manager’ – upravlenets. It’s the manager’s job to reel in unrealistic competing demands and overcome Schmittian politics in Russia. The charitable interpretation was that he was all about building robust institutions, but less charitably, he channelled a depoliticized, technocratic take on the future hardly different from how the Russian government (under Mishustin) operates today. This intoning of ‘I’m a manager’ from the man worth at least 100 million dollars later became a rather spurious reason for an unedifying argument between him and Navalnaya. Overall, despite how dull the discussion was, Khodorkovsky’s performance was quite revealing because it was significantly at odds with the progressive and ‘left-friendly’ vision he has set out in writing in his Garðaríki writings. As others have remarked – he also sadly looked like he has no fewer health issues than his nemesis.

But back to the dingy Amsterdam studio: immediately discussion got bogged down (for nearly half of the allotted time!) because of a rather weird set of statements by Mikhail Khodorkovksy about young people being particularly pro-war in Russia. Cue a back and forth about surveys, evidence, and so on – the kind of arguments I rehearse on Twitter all the time. This derailed discussion so much that one of the audience later remarked – in really the only interesting point of the whole two-hours discussion – “It’s a great shame that the moderators allowed the interesting discussion about those responsible for the war to be diverted into discussion of some conspiracy theories about the guilt of young people.” The audience member then argued that banks enjoy record profits (elsewhere we find calculations that Russian billionaires increased their net worth by 50% thanks to the war); there has been a major redistribution of property; that a new clan of oligarchs has emerged (The Khod hated this comment!). It was a good point: various actors have accumulated resources that could obstruct socially meaningful reforms even in a best-case scenario of ‘transition’. In a related question, another audience member asked about the 1993 constitution and revisiting the botched privatization of state businesses in the 90s – the latter of which our liberal commentors rejected.

Let’s face it, none of these speakers are really ‘media-trained’ and that’s part of the charm. The majority of YouTube comments were critical of Yulia Navalnaya for her not coming across well. Part of which we can put down to sexism, but part to the light-weight approach she took: dealing in generalizations – platitudes even (“I want to be of use to the Russian people”), expressing open hostility and other negative emotions to the others. This roughness at the edges– on the part of all the speakers, made it captivatingly-dull viewing.

Then another set of unproductive discussions: ‘red lines’ (who should be allowed to take part in political processes in the new Russia), lustration. Things risked looking more and more ridiculous – The wonderful Russia of the future is La Fontaine’s bear hide. Lobanov was really the only person to offer much detail: on the need for things like worker control over labour processes, public (not state) ownership of enterprises, avoiding another oligarchic settlement as well as avoiding western capital capturing the Russian economy. A well-rehearsed set of democratic socialist demands including – again – some of the only concrete political proposals of any of the speakers – such as a solidarity tax on war profiteers like the one imposed on assets accrued during Vichy rule France.

Lobanov’s ideas get little but scepticism from the others. No doubt they and some of the audience see him as wanting to return to the bad-old days of Soviet state ownership. However, his ideas are close to the traditions of a perfectly reputable market socialism, economic democracy and workers’ self-management. There is also a substantial Russian intellectual history behind this distinction: scholarship on Russian democratic socialism has identified workplace democracy, worker ownership and economic decentralisation as an important alternative tradition to both Bolshevik command socialism and neoliberal transition.

Moreover, Lobanov highlights a problem the others are little concerned with: the transition itself will be a struggle over who controls the enormous wealth accumulated during Putinism and the war. For Lobanov and democratic socialists, neither institutional design to prevent the same disaster recuring (charitable reading of Khodorkovsky), nor simply free elections and robust political democracy with lustration (Navalnaya) is enough: unless ordinary people gain institutional power over economic as well as political life, the same concentration of power will reproduce itself under a different political regime.

*the comment about the ‘weather’ was from Lobanov – correctly restating the problem that at the moment this is the attitude people rightly have in Russia. You can’t change the weather; you have to wait it out. He made the point that it’s only economic crisis that will change this attitude.

Meanwhile the phony war Russians enjoyed for some years after the invasion continues to crumple a deflating balloon. This is just the beginning of the return of immiseration – real deterioration in the material conditions and wellbeing for millions. In rather different online space Oleg Komolov and Rafail Abdulov discuss the slow-motion stagnation of the economy and its effects: the juicing effect of increasing military spending is nearing its end. A key indicator is wage arrears – a phenomenon that almost everyone in the West overlooks, indeed, struggles to understand. “How can it be that people work when they don’t get paid?”, I’m continually asked by students and colleagues alike. The amount of unpaid wages has doubled in the last year but still looks relatively low: a lot less than 1% of GDP. In the 1990s this figure reached 3%. However, one needs to think about the cognitive effect of this; ‘at least this isn’t the 90s’, is pretty much the only legitimating rhetoric from the government that everyone can agree on. But what if it gets worse and involves not just blue-collars but white-collars as well?

Actually it already is. Wages stopped rising, indeed, even official statistics reports large, double-digit declines in the most vulnerable regions, while inflation remains high (10% on consumer goods, according to Rosstat). The leading indicator here is the not-so-slow collapse of the construction industry that in turn feeds into metallurgy. Even making a big war cannot save these sectors when their profits are mainly from building boxes for people to live in and shop in. If you lose 40% of production in these sectors because of high costs of investment borrowing, then, guess what – that’s 40% of a workforce you can’t pay anymore.

But that’s not quite right. Along with wage arrears, the classic Russian obfuscation of such economic pain is via forced reduction in working hours – a four-day week (and it will get worse than that). Which of course means a 20% reduction in pay (actually more). I personally experience this phenomenon in that ‘my guys’ generally have a lot more time to talk to me because they are working so much less nowadays. Komolov remarks that forced furlough has affected most vehicle producers, rail, engineering, machinery and loads of other industries. A perfect storm: demographic (aggregate) shortage of labour gets worse and worse at the same time as a large-scale destruction of ‘good jobs’ in both blue- and white-collar work, and among many self-employed (the Wildberries factor). Very old, yet familiar economic phenomena rise from the dead (not only from the 1990s, but all the way back to the 1930s): enterprise labour hoarding and labour immobility. The tradition of dead generations does not weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, but is more like in a George A Romero film: enterprises are like zombies stumbling through a waste-land in search of sustaining blood, in an ever decreasing pool of living humans.

When a Mutiny Becomes a “March of Justice”: The shifting boundaries within authoritarian media

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On the three-year anniversary it is pretty interesting that a piece about Prigozhin’s March is published by Fontanka. It’s an interview with Prigozhin’s former lawyer-troubleshooter who is pedalling his book. His clear message: “The leadership of the country fled like cowards when faced with the first hint of armed insurrection in June 2023. While Putin could do nothing, Lukashenka took a major role in staving off a civil war erupting in Moscow.”

Tl/dr:

the march is repeatedly called a “March of Justice” rather than a mutiny;
Wagner’s actions are framed as a reaction to MoD misconduct;
the downing of aircraft/killing of Russian soldiers is rationalized as self-defence;
senior officials are described as fleeing Moscow;
Prigozhin is presented as a patriot not a traitor;
the possibility that Wagner could have reached the Kremlin/MoD is treated as plausible;
corruption and elite decadence are presented as explanations for popular sympathy toward Wagner.

The key quotes that made me sit up straight:

“Высокопоставленные чиновники сообщили нам, что высшее руководство покинуло Москву…” (“High-ranking officials informed us that the top leadership had left Moscow…”)

and then:

“…в случае прямого столкновения ее будет не удержать, и ‘вагнера’ … зайдут в Кремль.” (“…in the event of a direct clash Moscow could not be held and Wagner would enter the Kremlin.”)

Fontanka remains of interest because before 2022 you could plausibly argue that it remained ‘critical’ but ‘system-tolerated’. If you were to categorize its evolution it would be a nice case study of what ‘investigative journalism within tightening regime constraints’ looks like. It’s in the top ten of ‘trad’ media webpages in the country – not just in St Pete. It’s got an extremely interesting history that mashes up the lines between the police, investigative journalism, and organized crime, but that’s for another time. Having said that, Fontanka has historically been seen as a reasonably safe place to push boundaries, with the understanding that they will back-pedal if needed and even pull stories after the fact. The interview thus maintains legal distancing from the interviewee.

In this article just the fact that they use ‘March of Justice’ in the title, even if in quote marks, is pretty glaring. It’s funny that Fontanka allows this. It even allows the speaker to legalistically say it’s not technically a coup according to the Criminal Code. Ok, so this is both an exculpatory piece from a lawyer who worked for Prigozhin, a promo for his book, and simultaneously conforms to the basic principles of ‘safe’ Russian journalism (‘we can’t really know the truth, but everyone’s intentions are patriotic until we hear otherwise after the fact’).

What’s interesting about this is that it can be interpreted as pushing boundaries of what can be said. There’s open discussion of the necessity of Russian troops being killed for resisting the ‘march of justice’ without further comment or condemnation. There’s general tone of displaced sympathy for Prigozhin now he’s safely dead, but even this is pretty unusual, I’d say, to see in print. It’s kind of projected onto the interlocutor to further diffuse its potential impact, but, nonetheless. Whether this reflects changing political winds or merely the safe rehabilitation of a dead actor remains unclear.

Most revealingly – and what steps over various ‘lines’, is the bit where the ‘bosses’ are described as fleeing Moscow because they believed that Wagner would be able to take the Kremlin. And that this would have been justified in the face of ‘the need for change given the facts of corruption and fat-cat officials which had pissed everyone off’. This bit isn’t even caveated by mention that it was the Ministry of Defence that was the main ‘baddies’ and not the Commander in Chief. Pretty remarkable.

As we get further on, the ‘voice’ of Prigozhin from beyond the grave is presented as a true patriot who was provoked into rational action against the defence establishment because of their incompetence and corruption. Also revealing: without caveats, Prigozhin’s military achievements are presented as being usurped violently by the army which was intent on screwing him and his men royally. His hand was forced – the army would have tried to physically liquidate him and his men. He didn’t want to overthrow ‘power’ but he could have. There’s a lot of puff, mythos, ‘mut’ i pizdezh’ as they say, and more self-exculpation, hemming and hedging – it’s not worth actually reading the thing. But the vibe. The ‘vibe is off’, as the kids say. Or maybe it’s ‘on’?

Meta: Obviously my whole schtick is that I don’t go in for ‘Kremlinological’ takes. But this was juicy and tells us something interesting about what’s going on in the Russian deep-state-media cesspit. The boundaries of what is ‘askable’ are not nearly as narrow as many would believe. It also comes hard on the heels of a number of Carnegie and other pieces by the looking-glass opposition that are equally self-exculpatory – only from the other end of the spectrum ‘Ru technical liberals were powerless, don’t blame them’.

Accordingly, we should treat takes by former functionaries and communicators from ‘inside’, but who are now safely in Berlin London or Washington, with the same critical analysis as we treat pieces like this. Everything published on Russia looks like what they used to call ‘article-to-order’ if you look at them hard enough. In short, what I’m labouring to say here is that sometimes – often even – things published within Russia, in conditions of high risk and self-censorship, can be much more use to our understanding than, say, Carnegie. Tolstoy’s unhappy families principle applies surprisingly well to Russia-watching. Fontanka, Carnegie, Meduza, and the rest all have credibility problems—but not the same credibility problems.

[Thanks to ‘Charlie Nail’ for his insights on the murky world of Russian mazhory and journalism]

Total Recall? How Russian Polling Manufactures Consent and Fools the West

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Is the firewall broken between unpopular decisions and Putin who in the popular imagination is a figure hovering above the political fray?

Andrei Pertsev’s analysis from April 17 is instructive: what seem ‘timid’ signals in his measured rating, are seismic if we really try to unpack them – a 50% rise in disapproval, and a similar rise in the figure for distrust in the president. 2026 is going to be the year of surprises in Russia…

Putin ended 2025 with an approval rating of around 85% which was close to the all-time high. His approval had surged in March 2022 from 71% to 83% and largely stayed above 80%. However, by early 2026, approval fell to 67.8% in the week ending April 5, 2026. These were rapid downshifts in the space of a few weeks. By contrast, United Russia’s approval is around 27%.

As readers of this blog will know, I’m a big sceptic about the value of political polls. Especially in Russia. In particular I’ve written on these pages about the deep biases and methodological flaws underlying Levada’s political numbers, but the same applies to the other two big players FOM and VTSIOM (essentially they all stem from the same Soviet intellectual stable and some figures there are either implicated with undermining democratic institutions since 1995 or have never hidden their reactionary views and cynical ideas about the necessity of political manipulation of populations).

To repeat myself, there are five overarching problems:

Social desirability bias. The accuracy of any survey depends on respondents having no fear of negative consequences and being able to regard their questioners as trustworthy – neither condition is a given in Russia. SDB is the pressure to say what you’re expected to say. This is a problem in democracies – think about how in Anglophone countries it’s socially unacceptable to say you don’t want your kid to be trans, or marry a black person. And yet many people hold these views but will rarely share them. I wrote about this in relation to Russia’s homophobia, by the way. There are attempts to measure SDB, but the take away is that this is very hard to do.

Biased question framing by state pollsters

Political questions in Russia are often structured with preambles that remind respondents they are disagreeing with the authorities. Questions are often framed with the idea that there is a consensus in society, or which reflects the ‘common sense’ as presented in the heavily censored media. I’ve also written about fraudulent and shady practices which permeate Russian polling industry

Fear of answering at all

A Levada Center survey found that 26% of respondents admitted being afraid to answer political questions.

Non-response, access bias, broader credibility problems

Independent entities like the Levada Centre, though seemingly more credible, face “foreign agent” restrictions and limited rural access, and their results should still be interpreted cautiously due to non-response bias. When they are questioned about this they avoid answering. Levada has consistently avoided any platform where their methods can be openly discussed.

The “depth of support” question

Questions about support for the war lack context. For example they are rarely followed by asking whether respondents would accept cuts to social spending to fund the military. Without ‘depth’ and context, knowledge about war support is very shaky.

How do pollsters ask about politics?

VTSIOM regularly conducts opinion polls Putin’s approval and war. Their polls are widely used by war supporters and opponents across the world and in Russia. These polls provide a sort of scientific justification for the Russian leadership’s decisions. Polls serve as a pillar of the intellectual co-optation of social scientists (including Levada) by ‘proving’ the existence of a collective consensus in society. In return, pollsters and sociological agencies get to present themselves as “social architects” and valuable assistants of the Russian authorities due to “a close contact with people”.

Recently, I received further direct evidence of how problematic polling in Russia is. This is because one of my research colleagues in Russia got contacted by VTSIOM for his opinion and was able to do a kind of ‘reverse’ sociological experiment by recording the interaction and analysing it. Here’s what he found:

First of all, a respondent’s anonymity is questionable. The VTSIOM interviewers call you on mobile numbers through which owners could be identified easily in the case of particular interest. An interviewer asks a respondent their name, age, and city. A respondent can hear how an interviewer types in these data on the end of the line. At the end of the interview, a respondent is asked to provide an email for further communication with VTSIOM. The interviewer informs the respondent about recording their talk. Of course, a respondent may stop the talk any moment or refuse to provide an email. But this approach to communication makes questionable not only anonymity but truthfulness of answers, even if a respondent decides to continue an interview. People are scared by long prison sentences for political actions and opinions in Russia. In these realities, some questions of VTSIOM look more like gathering data for potential political criminal investigation than for scientific scholarship.

Today as a respondent I was asked about different aspects of societal and political life in Russia. The set of questions is intended to reveal a respondent’s awareness about recent developments across the globe and in Russia. Notably, VTSIOM is primarily interested in three events in the world which attracted a respondent’s attention last week.

Other questions are related to approval of and trust in institutions, leaders and parties. The list of institutions includes the President, the Government and the State Duma (parliament). The list of leaders comprises Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Mishustin and the governor of the territorial subject where the respondent’s city is located. VTSIOM asks what party would the respondent to vote for if elections were held this week. The list of parties corresponds with the list of political parties registered in Russia at the moment. The answer ‘against all’ is not included on the ballot (removed from ballot papers more than 20 years ago).

VTSIOM is interested to know whether respondents trust Vladimir Putin, and do they approve of his recent activities. Only if you say you don’t then they follow up with open question which asks them to list three of Putin’s actions which a respondent disapproves of in the last week. As to the Government of Russia, VTSIOM inquires whether it manages well the challenges caused by sanctions, also asking on approval/disapproval of Mishustin’s actions (without listing them, however).

VTSIOM makes inquiries regarding the sources of information which their respondents use. They are asked about how much they watch TV and use the Internet (maximum choice is four hours or longer per day). Telegram is also in the focus as a source of information while other messengers are not mentioned at all, as if they do not exist.

At the fifth year of war, VTSIOM asks whether the respondent “approves the decision about launching the special military operation”. The respondent could choose to approve, disapprove or have difficulties answering. There is a question on the attitude of SMO-related information found by the respondent in Telegram: Does the information in channels you read there provide more positive, or more negative information, or both? [crazy phrasing throughout]. When you answer ‘both’, the interviewer gets a bit confused. It seems that VTSIOM is interested in exploring the structure of respondents’ information bubbles more than to assume that someone is capable of finding and reflecting on a variety of sources of information related to the SMO.

It’s somewhat remarkable that Telegram is considered the main source of information. This indirectly confirms the attempt to justify the continuation of Telegram for commercial purposes of propaganda by ‘responsible’ officers and pro-state bloggers; the large investments in propaganda will definitely come to naught if the authorities block both VPNs and Telegram. Small businesses and the everyday life of ordinary people suffer a lot from the blocking of mobile internet; the same is true for state-affiliated landline providers. So the next group of questions relate to the probability of mass protests.

Questions about a respondent’s attitude to mass protest in their locality is the most sensitive part of the poll. The authorities prohibit attempts to legally protest against their stupid policies, for example, on the basis of COVID-prevention measures. An illegal protest is treated as a mass riot with those found guilty of instigating potentially spending from eight to 15 years in prison, with penalties of from three to eight years for ordinary participants. Now, can you imagine your willingness to tell the truth if someone records your answer to the question “Are you ready to participate in the mass protests in your locality?” Obviously I said “no” to these questions.

The upcoming State Duma elections are in VTSIOM’s focus. But questions on the attitude to online voting obviously do not take into account how often and intensively the internet is blocked in Russia.

A question asks about the material situation in the respondent’s family as linked to the SMO. Has life become better or worse since the its launch, and how does a respondent estimate the family’s situation: as good, medium or bad.

The most manipulative question relates to “changes and stability”. VTSIOM asks whether a respondent prefers societal changes at the expense of stability, or stability without changes. This question reflects the dominant political discourse since the early 2000s when Putin justified his campaigns on the basis of ‘stability’: opposing the unpredictable changes since the mid-1980s and evoking the ‘stable’ Stagnation of the 1970s. However, the any respondent, the current times remind them much more of the 1980s than the 1970s. In any event, few can avoid the déjà vu effect mixed in with the plots of ‘The Running Man’ and ‘Total Recall’: stupid bans on accessing online content but which don’t apply to the law’s authors or business, an unpopular war where the recruits are the subject of trade and bonuses for the recruiters, and deepening privileges for those who serve the authorities at the expense of austerity politics elsewhere. All while life opportunities for the majority get narrower and narrower. Wartime Russia moves further and further from stability. Any option to change the situation positively is not considered in any meaningful way in these polls.

VTSIOM’s director started as a Komsomol activist, then became a ‘democrat’ and currently earns his keep though his work for this polling company and in two universities funded by the Government of Russia and supervised by the Presidential Executive Office. Wallowing in his ability to satisfy high-ranked clients, both he and his subordinates develop questionnaires that are intentionally based on both obscuring reality and reinforcing the impression among those who take them that the elite have lost any contact with reality. Think about that when you read in the Western press about how many Russians approve of Putin and the war.

Thanks to ‘Charlie Nail’ for his reflections!

“a geopolitical disaster has unfolded. We didn’t get a say in it, but we have to do something” Eurasian Knot interview, Part II

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The second part of the interview. First part is blogged here. Transcript lightly edited for readability. Once again, a huge thanks to Sean and Rusana for the chance to talk about the book this is based on.

Sean: Yeah. So let’s talk about these characters, other than Navalny and Putin, the protagonist and the antagonist of this drama. Let’s talk about your interlocutors. You treat your interlocutors as co-creators. You even revise the manuscript based on their comments. So can you tell us a bit more about them and their place in your book?

Jeremy: This book is full of very, very different people from different walks of life, and I, I hope that’s a strength of it. So I have people that I knew before I started doing ethnographic work who live in Kaluga region, people who work in factories, people who work just in the local authority, pensioners, students. And they gradually became part of my work. obviously the whole point of doing anthropology/ethnography is that you don’t hide the fact that you’re a researcher, although of course now I have to obscure things. You know, I can’t officially be doing research there. I would get into trouble for that, but there’s nothing to stop me talking to people, chatting to people and remembering what they’ve said to me. So there’s this kind of very difficult methodological dilemma going on, an ethical one as well. But largely, you know, I’m talking to people, some of whom I’ve known for 25 years.

They know that I’m gonna write something and that they may feature in that. And then there’s people in Moscow that are also part of this book in contrast to the previous book. and that was also important to kind of gauge the whether or not people in Moscow generally had different attitudes towards the war or not. And actually what I guess is surprising is that you find the same people in equal measures everywhere. You know, there isn’t this strong pro-war, bias in small, disadvantaged places where people think they’re gonna do well. There’s just as many “loyal xenophobes” in the upper middle class in Moscow, that are like, yeah, we like this war. We, you know, we’re gonna make Russia great again. You know, it’s a lot of stereotypes that we have to get over, get away from.

But when it comes to your question about including people In the research, this is what anthropologists are supposed to do. They’re supposed to have some kind of, reflexivity and feedback from the people that they are extracting resources from. I’m gaining things and I can never give back what I have got from these people. When it came to my previous book, I went around and gave people copies of this book and people translated it. and now with the internet and with AI, when I write something very often I say to people, look, you know, you told me about this ,Andrei ,working in a turbine factory making; you told me this right? I’ve written about it. I send them a link and I say, you tell me where, whether I was right or wrong. And sometimes they’ll say, “yeah, this is fine. sometimes they’ll say, that’s not what I meant. You got it completely wrong. You’re an idiot.” But that’s part and parcel.

And again, in this book, I have people that I wrote about before in depth, and I can almost do a kind of oral history of their life with them, because I’ve known them for 25 years or 15 years. And I could see how they’ve completely changed. And I document that in the book. People, especially people who have working biographies that I’m really familiar with. I talk a lot about their job prospects and how they feel about changing jobs and retraining and the opportunities. But also the risks that the war brings, particularly for blue collar workers, in these de-industrializing and now re-industrializing places. And I’m in a constant dialogue with many people about this. Now, of course, the war complicates that because some people are scared, rightly and wrongly about talking to me, whether it’s over Messenger apps or in social media, or even in person sometimes. So that complicates it. But still I’m trying my best to involve people in a dialogue. and that’s the best you can really hope for. And I would say that I’m probably the only person doing social research on Russia that is trying to do that.

Sean: since the war has come up repeatedly, let’s talk about that. ’cause that is one of the big questions that people who even pay attention to Russia are interested in. And you say that in response to the outbreak of the war, which you say was shocking to many people, and you have this concept of defensive consolidation. What does that mean?

Jeremy: It’s not a perfect formulation. I started with this very early in the war and I’ve adapted it and kind of tinkered with this term, but really it’s a response to what is very a Anglocentric imposition of the term “rally around the flag”.

So there’s all this work done on rally around the flag and how after 9/11 Americans rally around the flag and they strongly supported military intervention in Afghanistan. Iraq’s a little bit different as we know, but there’s this idea that there was a strong consensus, a rallying around the leader, massive increase in the popularity of Bush. And so, partly, rightly, partly wrongly, anglophone political scientists kind of impose this model on Russia because they see that Putin is super popular.

They also see that the annexation of Crimea led to a spike in his popularity and that his popularity supposedly is now also higher, as high as it’s ever been. Now, I think that’s misleading. I think that’s problematic on multiple levels, but defensive consolidation is my way of saying “Yeah, sure. When a country goes to war and it’s big war with a lot at stake, regardless of how people feel about the justifications and aims and the decision that the leader made, they fundamentally come to have to deal with that in their daily lives. But also they have to deal with that and thinking about the future of their society.”

And so defensive consolidation for me is a way that the war actually kind of makes people much more reflective on what they would like their society to look like in the long term, and indeed what is lacking and what potentialities are missing. and so here then defensive consolidation links back to history and all the lost opportunities of the last 37 years, back to the break up of the Soviet Union. And so it’s this longue durée: So it’s defensive because it prompts people to look to what they think the government could be doing and isn’t doing. And it’s consolidating also because they look to each other and they look to local sources of authority and leadership in this time of crisis as well. So it’s not rally around the flag. Because a positive sense of patriotism in the service of war is missing. That isn’t to say that people don’t become more patriotic, but as I’ve said, there’s a difference between nationalism and patriotism which goes back to George Orwell. There’s an essay by George Orwell on English patriotism where he, he tries to kind of, recover, recuperate patriotism in a non-aggressive way. I’m not saying that he’s totally successful, and I’m not saying that my concept is perfect, but it’s just this alternative to rally around the flag because fundamentally, I don’t believe, and the more I talk to people, the more I become, firmly convinced of this. I don’t believe that a majority support anything to do with the war. That is to say they don’t want to see more Russian people die. And they don’t want to see more Ukrainians die, actually.

I mean, I think we’re at the point now where most Russians would accept peace on terms short of the, the indictment of the leadership, the loss of territorial integrity of Russia as it was [after 2014], the loss of Crimea. They wouldn’t want that, but most Russians would accept a ceasefire. and that’s something, I mean, again, it, it’s a million miles away from I think what is still the dominant kind of paradigm, which is that Russians are enthusiastic for the war.

Sean: Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, they, they change all the time as we, as we know here too, Ana.

Rusana: I tell you this, I’m gonna borrow your term defensive consolidation for my work too, because I was doing field work during the war. So part of it was before the war, and then part of it was after the war started. And I also had a very acute sense of like, you know, I was trying to find like kind of a spectrum of opinion, even though like my work is not about the war at all.

But among the people I worked with, my interlocutors, I was looking for some sort of spectrum. And then I felt like after the war there was some sort of consolidation. You had to be, at least in the group of people I work with, you had to be pro-war, but not necessarily like you were saying because people felt like it was a good cause.

But more so in the face of this enemy, you kinda had to unite despite your sort of smaller differences in opinion, you had to unite because there is this kind of external threat.

Jeremy: And it could be both. It’s flexible. It’s what Sara Ahmed calls a sweaty concept. It’s emotional and it’s flexible, right? It’s, it, you could be pro-war and defensively consolidate. And I also document that in the book. You know, I know plenty of people that, again, they, they don’t like the war. They don’t want, they didn’t want the war, but it’s happened. And, you know, we’ve gotta do something to support Russian soldiers because actually they’re also the victims in the eyes of some of my interlocutors, they’re not seen as aggressors. They’re seen that way often especially if they’re mobilized and not volunteers. There’s very little sympathy and empathy for volunteers who are seen as kind of making a mercantile decision.

But there also is defensive consolidation around people adamantly opposed to Putinism and who who’ve been reinvigorated in a defensively consolidating way. They’re like, okay, this actually makes it even more important to think about making the future better for our country when peace comes and when there is a transition. And then there’s people in the middle,who again, it’s kind of trying to get away from this idea that they’re apolitical. So again, people much more willing to volunteer to get involved with things like ecoactivism. That’s also an example of defensive consolidation. Like we have to do something to make things better for our country because our country is in crisis and a disaster, a geopolitical disaster has unfolded. We didn’t get a say in it, but we have to do something.

The four big challenges in studying Russia since 2022

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A Birmingham sculpture. Credit: Oosoom – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7042851

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

Self-censorship in media and social media

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

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

‘You can’t go there!’

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

Media and social media are increasingly fractured and unrepresentative snapshots

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

It is impossible to anticipate ethical problems

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

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

More briefly, here are some other topics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is Everyday Politics when you’re speaking about Russia?” The Eurasian Knot podcast. Part I.

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Listen to the whole one-hour conversation here: https://www.euraknot.org/everyday-politics-in-russia/

But for those who would prefer to read or skim, here’s a lightly edited version of the first half of the conversation with the two hosts.

If you can, please support the podcast in a time when humanities and social sciences are being defunded in the US. https://www.patreon.com/euraknot

And of course, the first question I have is, what is Everyday Politics when you’re speaking about Russia?

Well, I originally wanted to use the term “micropolitics” but the publisher didn’t like that. So I compromised, but I figure it’s a good compromise. Everyday politics is a way of drawing attention to the way that it’s not just electoral politics, it’s not just NGOs that do politics, it’s not just politicians that do politics. It’s a way of really grounding the term and trying to give voice to people who may themselves say that they’re not interested in politics, that they’re alienated from politics, but by interacting with them, listening to them, talking to them, you kind of tease out what the content of their everyday life is, that is still political. What they’re unhappy with, what they’re satisfied with, their attitude towards what’s going on in the life of their country, even if they don’t recognize that as political.

I have asked, given that you brought up a challenge, maybe this is because I’ve been reading your blog for a long time, your social media interactions, but reading this book, I feel it comes from a sense of frustration on your part, in the way that politics, however we frame it, or the Russian people are understood. And it sounds like you’re trying to push back against a lot of our assumptions and tropes that we use, like around, you know, atomization and the apolitical and these types of things. Am I right with that sense?

We need to remember that most of what we read about most places in the world that are not the US, you know, they’re filtered through multiple layers. They’re filtered through the way the media decides to cover things, but even when it comes to scholarly research, there’s also a filter, you know, there’s kinds of truths, you said tropes, but we could also call them paradigms or truths that are widely accepted, particularly in political science, which is the big daddy of ways of looking at Russia. Although, you know, my book also responds, and tries to engage in dialogue with the dominant paradigms as they have been promulgated in anglophone political science. But absolutely, I’m also frustrated because, as I said, the whole reason for choosing the term everyday politics is that most of what gets heard and what gets visibility is this very top level of politics.

“Let’s try and work out what Putin is thinking, who has his ear, who he talks to in his bunker during COVID, was that why he started the war”; it can get to a point where it’s as if he’s the only political actor in the country, and obviously that’s not true, that’s kind of almost a caricature, but, you know, if you want to get a book published, you’ve got to have Putin in the title, and obviously I didn’t want to do that. On the other hand, obviously, there’s maybe an unhealthy obsession with the most visible liberal political opposition actors, including the late Alexei Navalny, who I have a lot of respect for, what he did, and I write about this in the book, but again, it is a bit unhealthy because it tends to crowd out other grassroots activities.

These things may not appear overtly political, but of course are. If I am sitting in my little town, deindustrializing town, my Rust Belt town, thousands of kilometers from Moscow, and some oligarchic forces in Moscow want to make money from dumping trash in my neighborhood illegally, and I approach my elected representatives, and I get pushed back, you know, the grassroots organization of opposition to that, which is also part of what I write about in the book, is political, and is generally neglected in the way that journalists and researchers write about the political in Russia, which is all the more surprising because, very often, these kind of local actions are successful because the whole political atmosphere in Russia is very brittle and febrile, and actually quite often elected politicians, if there is pushback, there is some kind of compromise or backing down for various reasons, which maybe we won’t get into now,

But there’s all kinds of political stuff going on in Russia, and then we can actually find out something that is surprising perhaps to some people, which is that even as the Russia state becomes more and more repressive, and tries to control all kinds of different things going on, you know, from what messaging app you use in your phone, to what kind of on-demand video you access, despite all of these things, people are not passive, and that’s a problem, again, if we talk about the word “trope”, there is an unhelpful, and I would say unhealthy trope even in scholarship, that is, Russians are depoliticised, atomised, and passive. Of course, there is something about that that’s true: people are quite scared often to get toe-to-toe with the powers that be because they have a huge coercive apparatus. But at the same time, that leads us down some dangerous pathways in assuming that Russians are not just coerced, but conformist, and coopted into supporting the war on Ukraine.

So let’s dispel some of those myths, and go down to the local level. You already mentioned the successful story, but at Archangelsk and the trash scandal, and people’s pushback against it, there was of course kind of couched in this, like, as an environmental issue, but we could say that it’s also a political, deeply political issue. Could you tell us some more of these successful stories? I just want to feel better about today.

This is really frustrating because I was pitching an article, to an American journal, of political science, and they were like, well, there isn’t really anything going on, you know, no protest is possible. And then I just opened a social media feed, and I see that in the Far East, there’s street protests by local residents in a small city against the local authorities because the local authorities are allegedly poisoning stray dogs. So again, is that political? Well, yes, it is because although it’s a little bit like your example of environmentalism in Arkhangelsk protecting the local environment there; maybe it’s a moral objection to what’s going on, but it is also inherently political because it’s showing that people are not only unhappy with what their local authority is doing, they are willing to publicly show up and express their political subjectivity. We might believe that we have very little say when it comes to elections and the cross that we put on our ballot paper may or may not make any difference. We’re not necessarily interested in a wholesale change of elected officials at national level, you know, you very rarely get people say, oh, well, you know, I want the whole system to collapse, right? Because the system, the system has offered relative economic and social stability.

If I then link it to my own work, so I mainly focus on two small towns in the Kaluga region and I pseudonymise them, I obscure exactly where they are, but it’s a little bit like the our Arkhangelsk case, but on a smaller scale, a trash disposal site was located in a very small village in a protected environmental area, close to a national park, and that was successfully fought against by local people. And that was relatively recent. That was less than 6 years ago, but that really culminated in them being able to use legal, protest, organisational, social media, social network, ways and means to push back And the private company and the Moscow government

that was backing the private company, they backed off. Not before trying to use the security services and the police to intimidate these local people. We’re not saying it’s all, you know, ideal and wonderful; it just shows that political power, sometimes we call it associative and structural political power, is there, even if it’s not visible, even if many Russians themselves don’t believe that they can do this. But once it starts, once they get involved, they often feel empowered by this and then go on to become much more politically radicalised. And that, again, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re massively anti-regime, but they become politically aware and politically empowered in ways that they weren’t before.

So, do you think that the invisibility of everyday politics in Russia is a result of certain, say, expectations coming from political science or Western observers more generally that say, politics or political action comes in this form, say, like a street protest or showing up at elections. So, I guess what I’m trying to ask is that, do you think that scholars and wider audiences sort of try to cast political action and the forms that are expected or are usual to them onto a different space and that’s where the invisibility is coming from? Or is it just a result of stereotypes about Russians as passive, more general?

I think that’s part of it. I mean, it’s multi-layered and that’s the problem with it because you start talking about this and people are like, well, you know, Russians don’t do this or Russians don’t do that. So, it’s multi-faceted, unfortunately, cultural stereotypes, pernicious cultural stereotypes of which I’ve mentioned, you know, passivity and atomization. And again, we should say that the protests in 2022 against the invasion of Ukraine were unprecedented. This is extremely repressive authoritarian regime and yet people still risked a lot to come out. And a lot of people were arrested and their lives were ruined as a result. And that then leads into these impossible expectations that we in the West often impose on Russians, taking a cue rightly from the extremely courageous and successful protests in Ukraine in 2004 and then 2013, 2014.

It’s almost like, you know, Russian society is almost the victim of Ukraine’s success in that, you know, the Ukrainians were able to do it. Why can’t the Russians do it? Well, you know, the Russians did what they could. And they live in a much more [repressive environment] even in 2022, even in 2014, even in 2004. They lived in a state which had a much higher coercive capacity. And yet, there are still protests going on. We won’t call them protests. They’re actions. They’re anti-war actions going on. They have to be clandestine. And that’s the next point, the third point, if you like.

The problem is with political science and just the media in general’s coverage of all processes. It needs something really visible and sound-biteable and newsworthy. So somebody risking it all to go out, night after night and graffiti, “I love Ukraine”, in their local environment. Okay, that might not mean very much to Ukrainians and I totally accept that. And they might say that’s totally inadequate. And I understand that. But it’s still political and it’s still something that is really important to maintaining a sense of purpose and solidarity among the many, many, many millions of people in Russia that do not support the war and feel a strong sense of shame and emotional hurt for what is being done in their names to Ukraine.

So there’s all kinds of stuff going on. Also, like I said, it’s not avertly about the war, but for example, these protests against dogs being euthanized. A lot of that just gets completely ignored. And I was saying just the other day when I was in Russia to an activist and I just was like, yeah, is anybody in Russia doing this collating and collecting this data and they’re like, “no, it’s up to you”. And I’m like, well, are we doing it? And no, we’re not. There’s not really as far as I’m aware, a good protest database.

And this then leads into the next point, which is researchers are really lazy. And I mean, I know journalists are lazy because they tell me that as well. And maybe researchers are almost as lazy as journalists in that they want a quick win. They want an off-the-shelf database or they want a pre-existing survey. Maybe if they get grant money, they’ll pay for a survey. But again, it’s also like, we’ve got these things set up to quickly gather data. So we can quickly gather data about this favourite subject of political scientists, “do Russians support the war?”

Something that I’ve kind of hooked on several years ago. And that is our as outsiders, and maybe even within Russia itself, but as outsiders, a lot of us, particularly those who have problems or against the Putin system, Putin regime, we’re looking for a revolutionary subject. We’re searching for that individual or social group that’s going to tip the scales against this system. And I remember just in my years of observing Russian politics, it was the middle class, and then it was the youth, and then it was…, it’s this constant, searching and searching and searching. And I think that’s another reason why we missed the trees for the forest, maybe, or however to put it.

I agree. And again, we can’t help here, but like call back to the life and death of Navalny, and how, as I said, I’ve got respect for what he did, especially the building of capacity and the training of activists. But his personality, again, was an example of that, you know, people pinned their hopes on him, as this revolutionary subject. And then that bias and that unhelpful kind of blinkeredness in coverage extends to these other figures.

Yeah, so let’s talk about these characters other than Navalny and Putin, other than the protagonist and then antagonist of this drama. Let’s talk about your interlocutors

[tbc…]

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 ,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.

Postsocialism

I write about how Russia has changed since 1991. If you want to read more, try the 'Research' page.

Category Archives: Russia

Looking in the Crystal Ball, Shattering the Crystal State

Talk your book, or ride the wave? On Russian public sociology and ‘invisible censorship’

Why Russians Rarely Talk About Putin

“For most people, Putin is like the weather”*, or, my Night of the Living Dead with the Russian opposition

When a Mutiny Becomes a “March of Justice”: The shifting boundaries within authoritarian media

Total Recall? How Russian Polling Manufactures Consent and Fools the West

“a geopolitical disaster has unfolded. We didn’t get a say in it, but we have to do something” Eurasian Knot interview, Part II

The four big challenges in studying Russia since 2022

“What is Everyday Politics when you’re speaking about Russia?” The Eurasian Knot podcast. Part I.

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