Category Archives: Russia

Is Russian society ready for a ceasefire?

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workers dismantle the motto of the Russian Borderguards Academy which reads ‘We do not desire even an inch of another’s land’

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

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

What’s more helpful is tracking over time the proportion of people who answer that they would support withdrawal from Ukraine without reaching Moscow’s military goals. Especially important are those findings, such as those of Chronicles, which recently show a higher percentage who say they would support a ceasefire without achieving these goals than the percentage who oppose such a decision – Chronicles recently measured this as 40% versus 33%. Significantly, the latter figure has fallen quite quickly from 47% previously. Chronicles overall thinks that the implacable pro-war cohort, or ‘maximalists’, is only 12% of the population. I would agree overall.

We can compare these kind of findings to research undertaken by American political scientists on the structure of Russian society in terms of types of popular conservatism. In a recent article, Dekalchuk and her coauthors argue that there are four clusters of non-conservatives in Russian society and five clusters of distinctly conservative groups. The latter are a majority of the population at 60%. The number of ‘die-hard’ conservatives who align with cultural and military patriotism is 15%, whereas the number of loyal and agreeable authoritarians is around 25% combined. Now, I should say I have some criticism of the overly complex methods of Dekalchuk’s study, but it serves as a complement to other approaches. Importantly, it shows that a similar number c.20% of ‘conservatives’ are not aligned with the authorities, or are even opposed to them, or have interests diametrically opposed to the elite.

At the same time  there is a big core of people who are essentially liberally-minded – perhaps 40% (and in reality if the winds changed, this number would easily be a majority). Thus, if we discount liberals from consideration the die-hard conservatives who are highly trusting in the authorities but not even particularly xenophobic, and then count them together with the group of agreeable authoritarians at 25% we can see that any decision about ending the war is not likely to have any problems justifying itself to these cohorts. Indeed, the paper in question argues that the core conservative groups have relatively weak value systems and can quickly adapt to new geopolitical circumstances.

I would add to this my own observation from polling done before the war on the salience of Ukraine to most Russians. It was very low to be almost statistically insignificant – meaning that if the elite want to drop Ukraine down the agenda this could be achieved almost without political costs among the Putin constituency. Finally, I would mention longitudinal monitoring carried out by Levashov and others at the Russian Academy of Sciences. This shows aggressive forms of patriotism to be extremely low in the general population: ‘patriotism’ as meaning the readiness to take up weapons is measured at only 25% by his team in 2023. A remarkably low number if we consider that this polling was conducted a year after the beginning of the full-scale invasion. In the same survey conducted in June 2023, only 4% of respondents named ‘patriotism’ as a source of national pride in Russia. 13% named the army. And 27% could not answer the question. The highest scoring answer was ‘The Russian People’ at 16%.

Economic imperatives

Deteriorating macro-economic situation is a major factor which will become more salient in the course of 2025 and 2026 regardless of any decision about a ceasefire. The increasing economic costs of the war for ordinary Russians was possible to offset or hide for much of 2022 and 2023, but the cumulative effect of inflation on basic foodstuffs has been relentless. Even where workers have received indexed pay increases, if we take a longer-term view, living standards for the majority have stagnated since at least 2013. It is important to remember that regime legitimacy has been primarily based on economic stability. Defence spending rose by 30% in 2022. For 2024 military spending was nearly 7% of GDP which accompanied the first serious deficit spending by the state of around 2-3%.

Wartime spending has boosted the apparent size of Russia’s GDP relative to other economies but what many observes fail to account for is that most of this spending has little multiplier effect in the economy outside military cities (which are small and isolated) and that given the grave infrastructural deficiencies in the economy and poor level of social protection spending, the decision to cut budgets that would actually improve life for Russians is an increasingly visible political choice by the elite that cannot be hidden even from notionally loyal citizens. The majority of people are less than enthusiastic about seeing a further reduction in living standards like that experienced after the integration of Crimea in 2014. People have economic ‘memories’. People often talk about their grievances about paying pensions to people in Crimea and now in the occupied territories of E. Ukraine to people who did not contribute to the Russian economy and so have not ‘paid their way’. This sense of undeservingness among new Russian citizens is a factor few have discussed.

To reiterate, one of the current major failings in analysis is the attention paid to the apparent growth and robustness of the Russian economy. With or without a ceasefire – the shift to military spending stored up major pain down the line for the main Putin constituency – state workers – in the forms of eroded purchasing power, deterioration in the quality of public services and reduced state capacity. (I will post later on the much commented-upon findings about a rise in life satisfaction among Russians)*.

Furthermore poor choices will only become more apparent as part of a conscious zero-sum policy choice as things like water infrastructure and public transport are characterized by breakdowns which are impossible to hide. Coupled with the plan to abolish the lowest level of municipal governance in favour of clusters of urban forms and the accompanying pressure this will bring on the performance of regional governors, it is highly likely that social strife will be an ever present political risk outside the 10 biggest cities – particularly in the rust belt and secondary cities, even in cities that have been the beneficiaries of military spending like Nizhnyi Tagil.

This is because the multiplier from higher military industrial salaries is much less than people in the West appreciate. If you go from earning 40,000 roubles to 100,000 roubles, that is still a drop in the ocean, especially when the real level of inflation is around 20% for wage-earners. For Russian military spending on soldiers salaries to have a significant impact it would have to change the share of national income accruing to labour. And Russia remains a country where despite very high human development, the share is around 10% less than in other highly developed countries. Consequently while there is an inflation shock, this is not primarily due to increased discretionary spending, which remains low even by East European standards. Similarly, soldiers salaries certainly have an impact on the family fortunes in the short term of the 500,000 -plus service personnel who have received them or who have received injury payouts or death benefits, but again, in the perspective of an economy of 140 million people, this impact does not scale, while it certainly does act as a drain on spending on other social priorities like child benefits, school budgets and hospital maintenance.

Elite opinion on ceasefire

What about elite attitudes? We can take a metalevel perspective on the information they receive about social mood. Likely, because of the ideological positioning of sociologists working for the regime, they get relatively good answers to questions they might ask. But we should be cautious about the quality of the questions they are willing to ask. We see the problem with this in wording of questions that sociologists ask in opinion polls: these are generally quite narrowly worded and focussed on identifying consent among people for decisions already taken or likely. Furthermore, we should recall that there is evidence of conspiracy theory belief and mindsets focussed on the possibility of betrayal by Western interlocutors.

As many have pointed out, the Russian leadership craves, almost pathologically recognition by the West more than anything else, and in the Trump leadership, it is clear they believe it may be possible to get some kind of recognition for Russia’s Great Power status and also carve out at least most of the territorial gains they have captured from Ukraine. It was interesting to observe the recent comments by Trump concerning American recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea. It’s quite possible to imagine that this is a kind of psychological priming or imprinting originating from the Russian side. Recognition of Crimea by the US would be a significant win worth having in exchange for even a relatively long ceasefire commitment. It would also be more realistic than trying to get acceptance of recognition of 2022-2025 territorial gains.

It seems very unlikely that any Ukraine government would agree to giving up more territory that would include the other parts of the regions partly occupied by Russia. The only other area under almost complete control is Luhansk region. Thinking back to how unworkable Minsk Agreements proved to be for both sides, it’s not likely that even after a prolonged ceasefire that the Ukrainian side would agree to any withdrawals. This means a frozen contact line and militarization of the existing contact line as a new border for Ukraine. This is far short of the maximalist aims of Russia, but Crimean recognition would easily compensate for this in terms of justifying a long-term ceasefire to the population. After all, there is significant war weariness, economic fatigue, a lack of belief that Russia can win in the long term, a lack of interest in the territories of Donbas, in comparison to broad and strong belief that Crimea is historically part of Russia.

This kind of ceasefire could easily be sold to the population along with the narrative that Russia can now rearm and regroup – take a breather, so to speak, that Russia has effectively held off the combined power of the collective West, and that it has saved those “Russians” who were in Donbas. Furthermore regime intellectuals can spin a tale of how this agreement effectively means recognition of Russia as one of the three great powers and having surpassed her European peers.

*I’ve been asked multiple times to write about rises in life satisfaction and will do when time permits. In short, the war has led to people focussing on small things of satisfaction and fragility of existence. Furthermore, people express satisfaction with less, as if they are ‘grateful’ the state has protected them from the dire prognoses of ‘blockade’. I would also say that the coverage of the report in question tends to gloss over the fact that the life satisfaction levels are still not that great! Where do they define happiness? What does it mean, cross-culturally, ‘to be happy’? There’s a massive anthropological lit on this, and I’ll unpack that in a future post, but one thing to consider is the extent that cross-cultural ‘contentedness’ derives from the ability to adapt to disappointment and frustration.

Everyday politics in Russia, Part III: Ressentiment and social striving

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This is the third post about my book. The previous post is here.

That politics in Russia is mostly ordinary and local and insidious is an observation that partly builds on the insights of scholars like Samuel Greene and Alexandrina Vanke. One of my additions is that such a politics can contain traces of a social, and indeed, communitarian political drive. If we don’t like communitarianism then we can think of a more amorphous idea of social recovery, in particular the idea that a meaningful role in society should be available and that this in turn links to the idea of building and striving towards common aims for society made more or less explicit by state ideologies.

I avoid the term utopian, and I spend a lot of time arguing against the idea that this is a form of Soviet nostalgia, or that this impetus masks imperialist and great power instinctual needs among the majority of Russians. At the same time, I do take seriously that minority who express full-throated enthusiasm for maximalist war aims and for the Russian state-regime as it is presently constituted. But I only afford them the attention they deserve. What’s more striking are the common aims and desires of the majority. And this social-striving towards a common purpose (which contains different ideas of ‘the good’) is what connects both eco protestors and people like Felix. Felix is a composite of what are usually considered passive regime or war supporters. In a dramatic finale in the book, I represent the dialogue that is still possible today between those ‘patriots’ who collect aid for Russian soldiers and the people like Polina who are seemingly implacable opponents. In subtle and not-so subtle ways, their political articulations intersect in a defensive consolidation around recovery of the nation from social injury.

Defensive consolidation (author copy here) is a response I started writing about almost immediately after the start of the war. The potential stakes of the war bring into focus longer-term feelings of loss and hurt – glossed in the book as post-Soviet ressentiment. These include the loss of a master code, or Russian project, to replace the Soviet one that stood in for the absence of a meaningful Russian national identity. So, consolidation is this spectrum response, from pro-militarist *literal* defensive consolidation that is pro-mobilization, aggressive, to almost Tolstoian – the idea that the only viable social response is a return to rural forms of disengagement with the state which now have a quite a following in the form of eco-settlements, but which are no less a form of grassroots patriotism and striving for the social good than that of the jingo-patriots.

Much more typical is how the war pushes people to consider how to reignite the social imperative to care for Russia and Russians in the immediate now and here. And once again, modestly, I must say there’s nothing new in this argument – it is essentially derived from Samuel Greene’s insights about ‘aggressive immobility’. Nonetheless what I try to tease out is how the war pushes people together and then into forms of collective action – some of which become political demands – whether around receiving entitlements, to better infrastructure, to public safety, to environmental security, to socially-reproductive dignity. And of course, it’s not that the war suddenly means an uptick in visible politicking. Not at all. The point is that the war intensifies these socially-striving feelings that simmered away in hurt for a long time, particularly after the disappointment of the misnomered “Crimean Consensus” in 2014.   

‘Okay’, I hear a thousand Russia watchers object, ‘but how can you make these claims that seem so far from what we hear from other researchers?’ That brings me full-circle to the initial purpose of the book as I had been planning it since 2018 – to give voice to the inherently and intensely political talk and action of ordinary people in Russia. Time and again, the level of the ordinary and the political were mutually exclusive zones of scholarly consideration of Russia. People were seen as cynical, apathetic, atomized, traumatized into consent, willing accomplices, imperialists, civilizationally-incompetent, harbouring nostalgic false consciousness, or at best authoritarian personalities. But so often these theses about Russian political values were detached from the reality I observed in the 16 years of fieldwork relations and the ten years prior to that that I lived among people who would later become some of my informants. And that’s not to say that any of these theses are entirely wrong or not based on empirical evidence. Just that that evidence was mainly second-hand and very often informed by an out-dated common sense. Proactive, prefigurative, personally and locally networked negotiation around political issues of all stripes is present in Russia, even since 2022. Most of the book is about the period from 2014 onwards, but wherever I talk about events before the invasion of Ukraine, I try to update and fill-out the picture without romanticizing and without omission.

So, a book about politics in Russia is itself political in how it decides on what counts in the representation of public values, political action, and scientific knowledge about a society. Big politics is never divorced from small or quiet politics. The political content of ordinary people’s lives can have a huge influence on so-called big politics. Just look at failed military mobilization in 2022.

But with my political decision to give voice to small politics with big resonance, comes difficult ethical decisions. Even before the full-scale war I knew that I would have to obscure the identity of some interlocutors. This means that some of the evidence I present has to be schematic, superficial even. To try to address this problem I created composites – combinations of real people and real interview materials and observations. This means that individuals themselves cannot easily be identified. This is especially important because the majority of people I talk to remain active doing what they do in the book – antiwar activities, municipal political campaigns, eco and labour organising. Nonetheless, I do my best to give extended interview excerpts, and a lot of observations taken from the field, not only in Kaluga region where I focus on a few villages and towns, but also Moscow and my very diverse set of interlocutors from further afield.

To conclude, I argue for better and more serious attention to the ordinary and the micro-scale. Even in a high compliance regime like Hafiz Al-Assad’s 1990s Syria, Lisa Wadeen was careful to put ‘authoritarian’ in inverted commas – why? Because performative support never equated to belief or action on the part of Syrians. Just as authoritarianism needs ‘peopling’ if we are to understand today’s limits of consent to rule and tomorrows possible refusals, so too does a critical political economy, and that is also part of the book though beyond the scope of any short introduction. So, in concluding I argue that politics can’t be fully grasped without the inclusion of the people-scale, and the same is true of the economy. So important to understanding sources of support and opposition to the war, the economic needs an ‘everyday lens’, as various feminist and critical scholars have proposed. Following on then and acknowledging once again the work of others on these topics, there are chapters in the book about municipal infrastructure renewal and the right to the livable city, labour migration and garage economies. I  aim to bring to the fore the way economics and politics can’t be disaggregated when it comes to the kind of active, striving life observable, even if it is played out in a landscape dominated by a feeling what Alexander Vorbrugg has described as Russia’s ‘slow violence’.

Everyday Politics in Russia 2: How do we know the ‘average wage’? Plus: the bits of the book that engage with social movement theories

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In the last post I mentioned….polsci. I don’t talk about much contemporary political or sociological theory in the book, but I am interested in a moment from early 2000s where Douglas McAdam and his co-authors Tarrow and Tilly appear to countenance a ‘poststructuralist’ way of looking at social movements

Following Tilly et al, I pick up on the call from more than 20 years ago by these authors to better integrate cognitive, relational and environmental factors pertaining to the submerged reality of political movements and networks. To reiterate – we’re looking at sums of effects of the flattened public sphere by criminalizing protest, the beheading of movements’ charismatic leaders. This, I argue, forced on activists a more democratic and grassroots focus; Putin’s 2020s Russia produces a new and in some respects dynamic activism, as much as activists’ ideological commitment or material resources do. This is the conundrum of social movement studies – the gap between foundations of action and action itself – how does a ‘process’ of activism occur or not occur in the presence of network and commitment? Again, this is something I started exploring in a direct response to Tilly’s work in my previous co-edited book. In this new book, I look more broadly at how much in common anti-war activism has with labour organizing, ecology work, and even grassroots patriotic activism in support of Russian soldiers. What I find are related processes of dispersed, nomadic activism. But there is a long gestation and formation of political positions that then informs action. Once again, that is the value of a ‘submerged organizational level of analysis’ (Tilly) – and one I aim to provide.

I follow a detailed process-tracing of anti-war stickering in 2022 in the case of ‘Polina’ in my book. To do something like this, most researchers need to start with the formative experience of 2011-12 around Bolotnaia, but also acknowledge the ambivalence of that experience. It has an affective hardening effect against Putinism, but also set up tensions around the question of electoral v. other politics, committees v. charismatic leaders, the centre v. periphery, talk v. action. It would be culturally reductive to say Bolotnaia radicalizes, or sets in motion a series of learning points in a predictable way that results in where we are now. Just to take the composite characters again from my book: ‘Polina’ becomes attuned to a genre of public protest opposition despite Bolotnaia’s failure, and despite the inflation in repression after 2018. Indeed, she goes against the advice of her allies among Navalny organizers when she stages a spectacular protest with others about Shiyes and gets her second arrest. At the same time, the stratum she ‘represents’ learns a lot from Navalny’s electoral strategy and how it involved regional capacity building: essentially, political education in organizing. But this for Polina occurs in parallel with her learning from socialist labour union work that’s mainly ‘indigenous’ to her locale.

But contrary to what you might expect, this is not taking place slowly, or gradually because it is occurring at the same time as an explosion of private (not public) social networking capacity. This means temporary alliances are possible between regional Navalnyites and ecologists and labour/socialist organizers. And these alliances are horizontal and nothing to do with the actual leaders of the Navalny movement. Indeed, it was funny when I interviewed a prominent person formerly connected to FBK and they had no idea of the capacity they had really built regionally because it was invisible to their own, centre-focussed and civic-electoral political aims.

In a sense, this process is frustratingly fuzzy to the social scientist; it remains very contingent, situational, refutes to a degree simplistic findings about the driving forces of identity politics or rights-based discourses for the emergence of social movements.  In that sense, my argument is not novel. Activism is opportunistic and, indeed, in a marginalized positioning. At the same time, the relative field of possible causes/actions/political orientations with which to align or ally expands in a noticeable ecumenical and pluralist manner – even to a degree which people are uncomfortable with in reality – like in joining members of the (regional) Communist Party in actions despite their prior mistrust and continuing unhappiness with the leadership of that party. As a result, there’s certainly merit in thinking about activism in Russia as an example of dispersed, pluralistic, and flexible political contestation.

But there’s also merit in thinking about how to put the ‘social’ back into the idea of social movements. Alain Touraine in the early 1990s remarked that post-social movements were heralded by consumerism and individualism and the abandonment of grand political aims based on class-consciousness. Movements base on identities threatened to pacify ‘social’ claims like a greater share of national wealth. But now we can think of the socialness of activism in a different way. What was interesting to me is how the actual differences and relations in communities of action are naturally visible and reflected upon by participants. And this carries over into relations between activists – so it was telling that while Polina didn’t like Navalny’s politics (too metroliberal and cryptonationalist) – she recognized the importance of her relation to the former Navalny organisers. At the same time, she didn’t like the anticapitalist socialist position of some unionists, but admired their actionist stance and picketing tactics. So, in a sense what I’m arguing for here is that the ‘social’ after the virtualization of opposition remains an important part of political engagement. The social as solidary and mutual learning still serves as glue and trumps political differences. Of course, the extreme turn of Putinism only helps this.

However, it’s also not that simple as having a common enemy. The war has forced people to confront the necessity of engaging with, or just listening to, those who support minimizing the damage to the Russian Federation while still broadly opposing Putinism. And in the last part of the book, I show this drama play out. Died-in-the-wool anti-war people are forced to acknowledge the legitimacy of activists who want to protect Russian soldiers even while those don’t support the actual war aims. Just a few days ago there was the case of a prominent anti-Putin socialist activist who was killed fighting in Ukraine. Oppositional activism is really only a small part of the book, but the tectonic social impulse that allows me to legitimately compare anti-war and patriotic activists is a recurring theme that provides the master theory underpinning all my ethnography. I turn to that in the following post.

Coda: What’s in the news? I read this article today about how only 10% of men in Russia admitted that they would feel awkward if a woman earned more than them. A linked article notes that the general gender pay gap in Russia is 43% (average salary for men 1000 USD and for women 720 USD). In turn this reminded me of a chart that Maria Snegovaya and Janis Kluge posted on social media showing a strong uptick in ‘real wages’ since the war began. Snegovaya sees this as support for the idea that the ‘population is loyal’. Kluge wrote that it shows why the war has been a ‘golden era’ for many. People assume that when I criticize these stats I am saying that they are ‘faked’. I’m not saying that, though I do think out of desperation at the poor quality of data they get that people in Rosstat have to process it a lot and that this alone is ‘dodgy’ – but something all statistical agencies do. What I’m really saying is: how reliable are the sources of this data in the first place when we know that what people actually get paid in Russia is one of the most notoriously opaque and painful data points in any statistics.

Anyway, to illustrate how silly it is to rely on one dataset like this (which in the original has no explanation of source), I just posted another graph from the same source. This is ‘real incomes’ (red line) and real disposable incomes (blue line). Details aside of the difference between incomes and wages, what’s perhaps most remarkable is the incredible stagnation of incomes between 2014 and 2023.

Axes of evil, or just normal chart crimes? The discussion in Russian to M. Snegovaya’s post is interesting. As is a follow-up post by Nikolai Kul’baka. He gives details on how wage data is collected from firms. As one can surmise, such data is not collected from small and most medium businesses. State enterprises we know do not reliably report salaries. A few v. high salaries distorts the average. The methods of calculation have changed a lot. Kul’baka: ‘there’s no major rise in salaries in Russia’. He also notes that protest frequency and changes in wages have no statistical correlation, something Sam Greene and Graeme Robertson explored many years ago in this excellent article.

Introducing Everyday Russian Politics: 1. Entangled Activism and Agonism

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A very unlikely and unnoticed (by the media and scholars) mobilization by untypical activists against the expansion of a polluting factory

In a series of narrowly-focused posts I will talk about three aspects of my new book – 1., the use of up-close methods of long immersion – I argue there’s analytical power in ethnography to show the broader significance of neglected aspects of Russian social and political reality, 2., the part of my argument where bring together three interacting concepts: ressentiment, defensive consolidation and social striving. And 3., the evidence in the book of deep and enduring political engagement and practices which are underappreciated in a lot of coverage on Russia. In the last four chapters of the book, but also in my coverage of municipal politicians earlier on, I make claims relating to the idea of micropolitical content as it emerges in articulations and actions on the ground, and largely aside electoral politics (in a parallel relationship). (The relationship to ‘the political’ of Chantal Mouffe’s work, I defer to the end of this post as most readers are less interested in the theory stuff).

This post, though, is mostly about ‘activists’ and broadly from around 2018 to the present.

One claim is about a particular form of learning and reorientation by self-consciously ‘politically-active’ people, but also by people who deny they are political, and yet engage in ‘civicness’ nonetheless. The continual reinvention and recasting of activism is like different forms of movement – movement from electoralism to environmentalism, from in-person to online, from parties and groups to cells. This is maybe one of the most interesting ‘lessons’ of the ‘Russian case’.  Without longitudinal ethnography (which after all is just a form of immersive process tracing) it’s easy to accept the common sense that the centre has defeated nearly all forms of politically conscious actions not under its control. And I reject that. Why? Because in my book and elsewhere, I show that the gains of electoral organizing by people who were inspired by people like Navalny (but also by others) are not lost, but even now have been transformed several times over. This transformation occurs when they come into contact with new causes like environmental degradation, new conjunctural situations like military mobilization, and new situations of repressiveness, and that includes economic exploitation.

Just to unpack for a moment, I can give the example from my interviews of how Navalnyite electoral administrative ‘capacity’, for want of a better word, even after 2020, was partly resynthesized by people interested in more agitational orientation in labour activism: picketing tactics, political education through literature distribution and even just online ‘slacktivism’. People internalized lessons from one context and applied them in another. Or, more typically, the lessons ‘transmutated’ themselves. Another time this meant lessons drawn from ecological actions relating to tactical victories like Shiyes – the opposition of garbage transport to the north – were carried over into anti-war activism (decentered and devolved tasks with precautions taken to protect those on the edge and firewall them from hardcore activists).

This unpredictable and dynamic process was also shaped by the authoritarian push to remove activists from public space. As personal, but also semi-public Telegram channels and many group chats, became the only fora available for the discussion of causes, this repressive escalation actually did activists favours because it attracted a broader ‘insulted and injured’ audience, and enabled reflection and discussion on a wider range of political causes and possibilities. The irony is that ‘flattening’ the public sphere in Russia actually facilitated more intense and more fruitful sharing of experience among political actives – albeit online and in private.

But what is private? People I talked to often spoke of living the struggle as ‘more real’ even in the virtual sphere because it was experienced more intensely and with more solidarity and less loneliness. Over time this online response to repression then translated into better organized, more mobile, and more targeted and strategically-considered action – from the aforementioned Shiyes, to anti-war stickering, to small-cell sabotage (full disclosure – I have NO informants who do this nor knowledge of them).

Using my own fieldwork interviews with diverse activists, most of whom remain in Russia, I build on the empirical work by other researchers like Tereshina, Slabinski and Kuzmina. They emphasise how Shyies 2018-2020 heralded a shift towards more affective connection – catalysed by exclusion from electoral and public protest in cities. A mobilizational imperative that drew a broader group of activists together from across the country and across the political spectrum. Looser politics, yet affectively closer-knit, became a widely experienced paradox. I call this ‘experiential entanglement’ and I started to explore it in my previous co-edited book with Regina Smyth and Andrei Semenov.

One of my own case studies relates to a modest campaign of opposition to rubbish dumping in Kaluga region. But in terms of organizing, and also in terms of affective connections between activists of different stripes, people reference the lessons of Shiyes, and of the success of Navalny’s electoral clusters to train and bring together activists. They even refer to Shiyes as a kind of Russian Maidan – but more narrowly in terms of how it showed to activists a glimpse of the horizontalist, accretionist, triangulatory forms of contention – and here I purposely avoid the normal terminology of political opportunity structure. At the same time, I remain mindful of the lessons from political science of how dynamic the mechanisms of contention can be. Activists are not just subjects of collective action, but the products of unpredictable combinations.

It’s worth quoting at length a rather rambling talk from the field to show the complexity of what I mean by unpredictably combinations. Polina is speaking in 2022:

As this post is already long, here I want to return to the use of the term ‘the political’. This term for me levels the ground to look at the political content of people’s lives as equal in significance to just ‘politics’. And how I use this term relates to Chantal Mouffe’s criticism of overly narrow conceptions of political relations. If ‘politics’ is institutional practices and discourses – realms from which almost all Russians are excluded, ‘the political’ is a dimension of antagonism inherent in all human society. The war on Ukraine only makes more intense Russians’ deliberations about what kind of ‘good’ society can be imagined. ‘Political’ discussions about the good are part of everyday experience, even in ‘post-democracies’, even in militarized dictatorships. Like Pierre Clastres’ (1977) classic critique of Western notions of politics, I insist that contention and negotiation, along with conflicts about the meaning of the ‘good’, can be grasped beyond the normative frames of formal politics in the public sphere. Politics exist beyond a narrow idea of ‘hierarchical subordination’ of the individual to power.

If you recall my recent review of Denys Gorbach’s work, I agree with him that an updating, or correction, of Mouffe’s concept needs to ground ‘everyday politics’ in material processes – like the experience of workplace exploitation, the broken infrastructure of towns, the way economic rents are now extracted directly from citizens via utility bills, the learning experience of people engaging with the state’s monetary offering for soldiers. From these experiences, many demands remain unsatisfied, and a chain of equivalence can be traced towards populist politics from everyday politics. Whether critical of Mouffe or not, most agree that her work should be read as a call to look more carefully and seriously at the construction of counter-hegemonic politics, and its potential for building left populism. Furthermore, Mouffe’s contribution should be a cornerstone of any critique of depoliticization, whether in the USA or Russia.

In the case of Russia, most scholars referencing Mouffe do so from the assumption that the hegemonic project of ‘strong Russia’ above all, is the successful culmination of the first two Putin terms. Nonetheless, even among those few who think seriously about the discursive construction of the new Russia note how ambiguous it is in practice: ‘shot through with intense doubts and misgivings about the very possibility of a strong Russia’ (Müller 2009). Olga Baysha implies (albeit indirectly) that discursive domination in Russia comes up against hard material limits in the miserable lived experience of so many millions of citizens and the ‘loyalty’ of citizens was mainly based of fear of losing minimal benefits rather than positive identification. In other words, like in Ukraine to 2014, the complete ‘normalization’ and naturalization of the regime remained quite weak. The liberal opposition undermined itself in 2012 when it pursued an exclusivist progressive discourse in the electoral protests against Putin (Baysha’s point, which I agree with). They were afraid of popular mobilization, not in favour of it. On the stability of the hegemonic order since 2012, people tend to forget that while the Russian constitutional arrangement has been successful in acting as if the interests and values of diverse parts of Russian society have been rationally reconciled, massive social conflicts simmer away on so many backburners that the roles of ‘chefs de partie’ (regional governors) are now a pretty thankless political posting in the Russian Federation. Too many pots are boiling over and the restaurant kitchen is open-plan. The point of my book is to say we should look at the various pots and why and how they’re simmering, rather than just looking at the rotating chefs.

The Micropolitics of Desire: Small Acts of Civic Engagement in Dark Political Times

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A voluntary civic heritage protection group in Nizhny Novgorod

This is a slightly different version of a piece written for OVD-Info and published here. Many thanks to this important human rights monitoring and advocacy group for publishing it.

The election of Trump might seem very distant from the realities of Russian society at war, but the reaction of many Americans to his immediate moves to take control of (or even dismantle) parts of the US state he doesn’t like speaks volumes. What should ordinary people do with their feelings of despair and helplessness in the face of naked power grabs supported by cynical figures? This is an emotional experience familiar to civic-minded Russians.

There are also dangers in these feelings. It’s easy for Americans to react further in two unhelpful ways: either the system will be robust enough to stop the descent into a kind of oligarchic dictatorship, or that the actions of individuals don’t matter, or can’t change things, so it makes no sense to put one’s head above the parapet. Often this leads to the worst kind of ‘internal emigration’ where people detach themselves from any and all forms of social solidarity or civic work, retreating into the husk of the individual.

As a Russian interlocutor put it to me about a month ago, ‘since 2022 I have benefitted from trimming my exposure to people. To stabilize myself personally, I’ve learned by heart something I say over and over to myself: that it’s purposeless to speak of politics and current events.’ And this from a formerly civically-active person in a large Russian city.

But not everyone has the luxury of turning to personal problems as a way of avoiding the social. Indeed, one of the ideas at the heart of my forthcoming book about politics in Russia is that the human drive or desire to connect to others and work on a common task is hard to fully suppress. Many researchers focus on questions of ‘legacy’ and how much the idea of what is possible or impossible for individuals in Russia is determined by their experience of the last 30+ years, by their interactions with the Russian state, and by their disillusionment with electoral politics. As a result, increasing numbers of Russians when polled express preference for a social and political system resembling the Soviet one.

In my book I talk to people from all walks of life about this problem (how the past should inform the future). But I do it indirectly. I talk to older people about what is missing from their lives now, about their ideals for the lives of their grandchildren. I talk to workers and thinkers about what kind of ‘good’ society can be imagined. Even in the darkest of times the stories mainly resemble each other: having a role which is meaningful in improving one’s social environment, enriching the lives of those around us, and having a political referent that sees the possible future as better than the present. These are all remarkably unremarkably things. Moreover, while I talk to self-avowed ‘activists’, and ‘politically-minded’ people, they are the exception to the rule of the ethnographer, who aims to capture as much as possible the socially typical, the everyman and woman depending on the time and place of the research.

However, much of the time in media and scholarly commentary on Russia, the inheritance of the period before 1991 and in the interregnum of the 1990s, is cast as providing antimodels: that it forced people into double-think, subjected them to meaningless ritual political talk turning them into cynical individualists, or on the economic level forced them to engage in corrupt or illegal forms of survival strategies, often at the expense of the weakest in society.

Perhaps some of the most dominant ideas about the social legacies operative in Russia propose a powerful framework about what 70 years of communist rule did to the Russians – they maladapted to survive, but in doing so remained civilizationally-incompetent when presented with the choice between autocracy and democracy, the liberal market economy and insider rentier capitalism. The danger here is obvious but rarely acknowledged. The maladaption frame allows all structural and complex failings in a society to be downplayed in favour of channeling guilt towards ‘the masses’; it tends towards simplistic technocratic solutions, and is profoundly anti-democratic in nature. To be fair, this anti-populist thinking is operative in most societies faced with extreme problems and rapid change. And that’s the point of rejecting the ‘maladaptive’ essentialization of national groups. Histories of countries may be more or less ‘lucky’ (Russia’s history is both!), and more or less affected by human and physical geography. But there’s little particularly unique to the political quandary of Russia, nor in the responses of mostly powerless people that would warrant the degree of exceptionalism ascribed.

If the possibility of imagining the ‘good’ as socially-connective is a powerful legacy even now, then what effects does this have beyond just an unrequited desire for change? By treating seemingly ‘apoliticals’ and ‘activists’ are equally capable, I try to give ‘noisy’ and ‘quiet’ or even insidious politics equal prominence. There are tireless yard-improvers, something quite a few researchers have written about from Riga to Vladivostok. Often conducted locally by older women, why shouldn’t beautification practices which include urban gardening, be viewed through the same political lens as the ambitions of opposition electoral work? Often the results are more successful for communities. While this is perhaps the most banal example of political virtue, it serves as a strong reminder that by taking constellations of micropolitical life seriously, we can anticipate changes at the macro level that otherwise defy explanation to those observers satisfied only with the actions of elites or the self-anointed.

My book reiterates an insight of political anthropology – that the separation of the political from the social is itself an ideological construct of mainstream social science. Nonetheless, as an ethnographer I also track down and follow many political activists who even today devote themselves to both anti-war activism and ecological projects. Indeed, the term ‘horizontalism’ is more important than ever before. Shared experiences of the repression and shrinking opportunities for openly public opposition in the last years only intensifies emotionally the ‘experiential entanglement’ of activism, as I call it.

While there are only a few who risk anti-war graffiti or even sabotage (and for ethical reasons researchers cannot engage with the latter), there are many who actively seek out niches to expand into – from therapeutic communities embracing holistic ecological and ethical ways of living in harmony with nature, to labour organizers who prefigure a future when associational protection of workers may again become possible. Through force of imagination for that future they agitate even now to protect dignity in work, and fight for better wages. Young people through collective practices of art, and even of leisure, continue prefiguring the better world they deserve: coming together to sew, paint, or just tinker with things. For some young people the most important ‘patriotism’ today is working together to care for one’s local environment, for example by taking collective hikes along river valleys to pick up litter. Even people who maintain constructive ambiguity around their loyalty to the state, are able to do meaningful civic work that is not recuperated by the regime. There are two major case studies in my book that relate to the latter: one on municipal government, the other about a group of motorcyclists. All the other examples here are taken from the book.

To return to the problem of powerlessness, Americans who feel despair at the prospect of Trump-Musk dismantling the Department of Education, or enabling the targeting of undocumented migrants (or indeed the repression of legal residents for ‘anti-american’ activities), or transgender youth can learn much from the civic and political flames that burns on despite darkness. Just look at the response to the environmental disaster in the Kerch Strait. Knowing the inadequacy and corruption of the state, ordinary people came out en-masse to clean up beaches and rescue wildlife. They did this without the prompting of charismatic leaders, without a ‘robust associational life’ of NGOs, and without a free media or ‘public sphere’: the open domain of social life where collective aims and action can be articulated.

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

Three years after the disaster: mourning and melancholia, but we should look to everyday politics and civics-from-below

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Today, on the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, my institution asked me to write about how my research helps provide perspective on the war. Here’s an edited version of what was posted in Danish here.

What are you researching?
My area of specialism is Russian and Global Studies – my research areas are political anthropology, working life, the informal economy, social trust and the welfare state, with a particular focus on Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe. I use ethnographic methods to examine everyday life and personal experiences in post-socialist societies. My book on Russia at war will come out with Bloomsbury Press in a month. In the book – the only book since the war based on first-hand and in-depth fieldwork, I look at the contours of society – both the longterm tendencies as people adapted to ‘Putinism’ and the immediate responses – often of shock and fear, since the full-scale invasion in 2022.

What perspectives does your research on the war provide?
In both Russia and Ukraine, we see that the conflict after three years of war has been normalized and incorporated into people’s life strategies in ways that are similar to each other. After the initial shock, people come to terms with the great changes that the war brings, typically in ways that try to distance them from it, even close to the frontline in Ukraine. Surveys in both countries show political support for their leaders, but at the same time there is a strong depoliticization and attempts to avoid the war and its longer-term consequences. Denial and fear are still, for me, the most important emotional contours of how people in Russia talk about the war (even when they say they don’t talk about it – which is of course a lie).

In Russia, it is becoming more and more difficult to find volunteers, and the government now has to pay huge sums of money for what are essentially modern-day condottieri: mercenaries with no ideological skin in the game. Most men of fighting age seek to avoid mobilization or volunteering for the fight, and the majority of the population does not contribute directly to the war effort even while looking for outlets for defensive consolidation of society. In Ukraine, the government avoided mobilizing young men with good reason, and after three years, war fatigue is high in the general population. As in Russia, there are major problems in finding willing soldiers.

While major wars only slowly destroy the economies or the other capacities of highly developed countries, this apparent societal resilience masks a strong aversion to wars of attrition. Those looking for parallels to the patriotism and commitment to a long-term slog evident in the two great European wars of the twentieth century should look elsewhere. Even after years, Americans, Soviets, British people and even Germans knew more or less what they were fighting for. That’s not true today. Even many Ukrainians today find it hard to articulate what (an eventual and realistic) victory would look like.

How does the war affect everyday life in Russia and Ukraine?
While taxes and other costs have risen and inflation is a significant burden, many in Russia can still turn their backs on the economic costs of the war, at least for now, and focus on their private cares, or local causes. While great emphasis was placed on the hundreds of thousands of more economically privileged Russians who chose to emigrate at the beginning of the war, their choices did not differ significantly from the majority of Russians who stayed at home. Both groups have largely tried to avoid the war – either by leaving or by remaining passive. On the other hand, many forms of grassroots civic activities continue and even grow in their significance as the state capacity of both countries is degraded. The massive volunteer-coordinated and para-state response to the oil spill in Kerch is a great example of this – very visible, but merely the tip of the iceberg. This is a major theme in my book of ‘civics from below’ – for want of a better term.

At the samet time we should be sensitive to how much cynicism there is in Russian and Ukrainian societies – towards elites, towards the ‘winners’ and the shallow self-promoters around the war efforts. In Russia there is a tendency to avoid the relatively shallow and symbolic elements of militant patriotism – most people find the endless aggressive propaganda shown on television repulsive. Apart from a few public events and locations, there is no spontaneous celebration of the armed forces or the Russian military. The minority that actively supports the war complains about the indifference and even hostility of the majority to their efforts to help the war effort.

This is why I sometimes criticize the BBC for its silly focus on militarism when its capable of much better, more human coverage (thanks to Mediazona and Chronicles). Nonetheless, any sociology of Russia should look at who and why they actively support the war, but this requires going beyond opinion polling and actually talking to people about why they knit camo nets or send donations to the front. And this is something only people like Public Sociology Lab and Aleksei Miniailo’s colleagues at Chronicles are doing – along with the interviews and observations in my own book. Chronicle’s latest field research shows that 54% of Russians are willing to admit the war negatively affected their ‘everyday lives’ and we know this is an undercount. Only 9% agree that the war improved their lives.

Of course, there remain important differences: for Ukrainians the future of their state is still immediately in question. But for Russians too, so much musing is about what started this war in the first place – the beginning of the end of Putinism. Despite what some people write about Russian war salaries, few have benefited materially from the greatest disaster of Russian statesmanship of the 21st century. Citizens of both countries feel inflation and the transition of resources from social to military purposes intensely – and with increasingly resentment. Indeed, different kinds of political resentment should be an important part of research for both countries.

If there is one insight from your research that should be clear to the public – what is it?

Despite war fatigue, and in Russians’ case, deep-seated unease about the decision to go to war, in both countries ordinary people are more civically active than ever as they try to make small changes to improve the lives of people and the environment around them. Without ethnographic (anthropological) research, it’s hard to dig down to uncover the strong forces of social connectiveness that have a life of their own beyond a focus on ‘big politics’. That’s why my book is called ‘Everyday Politics’ – because this term allows us to unpack the long-term, tectonic shifts in the social desires of people. They coalesce into small ‘intersubjective’ actions which exceed the sum of their parts and make people more than individuals or representatives of their respective nation-states.

Unmaking the Ukrainian working class, Part I

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Two days ago I joined a discussion of Denys Gorbach’s new book on The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class at University of Bremen organized by Seongcheol Kim. This post is one part of my contribution to the discussion. Gorbach’s book partly inspired my own forthcoming book, and here I focus on those aspects which are most relevant and interesting to me.

First off, Gorbach focusses squarely on a key question about class domination in Ukraine which is of relevance in Russia too: if enterprise paternalism – both materially and symbolically – is so decayed then why aren’t workers more militant? This is a question I also ask in my book and in a spin off article about Russia. While Gorbach’s book is not really about wartime Ukraine, the question of how to coopt or placate workers during a period of unprecedented social stress is even more relevant now than it was when he completed most of his fieldwork in 2019.

Gorbach’s book is unprecedented in its range, intellectual ambition and empirical quality. He manages to do a deep dive on the roots of populism, oligarchy, the misnomered language ‘divide’ in Ukraine and even has time for a pitstop in Russian imperial colonial history in his native Kryvyi Rih (a city of iron ore production formed by Belgian, British and French capital, Polish landlords and the power of the Russian imperial state). He looks at how today, organic intellectuals are made within the Ukrainian working classes and how this consciousness is mapped onto ethno-linguistic identity in often contradictory and unpredictable ways. He even shows how the war makes some into ‘East Slavic Ukrainian patriots’, and how people hold simultaneously incommensurate views about social democracy, private property and populist politics.

Gorbach starts off with an analysis of the 2017 coordinated yet wildcat strike in Kryvyi Rih around falling wages. He illustrates that regardless of the strength and weaknesses of alliances and leaders, strikes in the postsocialist world still have the potential to trigger broader protest and act as catalysts for change – coalescence and contagion are distinct possibilities for any future labour unrest as a result of war…. or peace. And a part of this is because workers themselves are increasingly able to access a sense of their demoralized place in society and experience historical learning. However, Gorbach also illustrates that the key paradox of labour unrest in such states remains operative:  one can find militancy and class consciousness at the same time as timidity, cynicism and distrust – the partial success of an ‘anti-politics’ hegemonic discourse (later Gorbach will critically discuss both Chantal Mouffe and Nina Eliasoph).  In this way, while not developing it fully, Gorbach explains how elite reshuffle to maintain domination, ordinary people get alienated from ‘big politics’ but intense political contestation and strife still occur. Indeed, both the Zelensky and Putin phenomena are end products of the exasperation and desperation of people in this situation, of course noting the fundamental differences between regime type and political system in Ukraine and Russia. This is my view, not Gorbach’s, as he is careful not to discuss Russia, which lies beyond his empirical base – his book is based on impeccable Ukrainian fieldwork which many would envy.

Gorbach is all the more impressive for having done ethnographic work on five different factory sites in Ukraine and charts informants living in three different ‘scales’ of existence in the post-Soviet city: individual life, their embedding in value hierarches, and their use of survival strategies. This is what makes the book so rewarding to a reader who wants to get a feel for the granularity of Ukrainian life beyond the redundancy of so many Ukraine politics books (even the few very good ones) or the political science literature focused on moments such as elite contestation, or voting, or the overall political relations of Ukrainian and Russian elites.

I preserve in full Gorbach’s key questions from the intro:

Gorbach then provides a reminder of the failure of both liberal and Marxist theories about capitalist transformation; both predicted their own normative versions of transformation and both were wrong. ‘Instead of capitalist and liberal democratic normalization of the local politico-economic field, the transition produced unorthodox polarizations and populist political templates that were later exported westwards, reversing the expected direction of the flow of ideas and models (Kalb 2015)’. This was also the subject of a post from a couple of months ago about David Ost and ‘semi-peripheral innovation’.

I will summarise more of Gorbach’s book in later posts. For the time being, its worth noting that point 3 above – about how ‘personal trajectories’ tell us a lot about political shifts and how worldviews ‘from below’ exert pressure upwards on the immediate urban context, on the formal economy (because of the availability of the informal economy as a material and symbolic source of alternatives). Various ‘moral economies’ (Gorbach and I prefer the E. P. Thompson pedigree of this term) coexist and influence each other – in particular around how people relate to property relations. They acknowledge as legitimate despotic behaviour by bosses in new businesses, but refuse to pay for a tram ticket because such transport is deemed part of the state, or pay taxes on their side hustles.

Divergent economic experiences of war: The rich get richer and the rest don’t

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This post was earlier published on Riddle: https://ridl.io/divergent-economic-experiences-of-war-the-rich-get-richer-and-the-rest-don-t/

Tupik – ‘Dead end’

Discussion of the inflationary side effects of war spending in the Russian economy has been inconsistent. Even when observers note how in the long term economic decisions store up trouble, many focus on a mistaken idea that a significant segment of Russians are feeling economic benefits, or that wartime spending means real gains (as a share of GDP) for labour (i.e. that gains are redistributive).

Now it’s true that the government did signal a willingness to depart from decades of austerity when it comes to funding the war, but as Nick Trickett points out, spending more to foster growth only works if productive capacity actually expands as a result. Historically, fiscal expansion has increased demands for imports instead of domestic output. Despite recent rises in GDP, a rebound from the  economic shock of the start of the war and indeed, the long recent history of Russian underconsumption and underproduction continues.

In the piece from August 2023, and in a recent follow-up piece Trickett offered a corrective to the idea that wages have seen a sustained outpacing of inflation.  Incomes are still probably lower in real terms than ten years ago, even accounting for a 9% rise in 2024 (these are the latest Rosstat figures. In 2022 real wages fell by 7% according to RLMS; in 2023 they rose slightly). In other words, Russia would need a decade-long shift in the share of income accruing to labour, and a similar period of real income (over inflation) increases to register. And the actual trend since 2017 is downwards.

The norm of low wages means that big percentage increases matter little to people

This point about the longer-term context is echoed by another granularly serious observer, economic geographer Natalia Zubarevich, who in every interview emphasizes the ‘law of small numbers’. Even a 20-40% rise in your take-home pay (which might well be experienced in well-placed blue-collar jobs over the period 2022-2024), does not mean very much if you’ve been working for subsistence wages for the last decade and set against high ‘real’ inflation.

Eurasianet discussed the manipulation of official inflation statistics in 2023, citing alternative sources which estimated real inflation at 20%. One of my better-off informants was called in to Sberbank for an interview in November. Her high level of rouble deposits was a concern for the bank worker who recommended she reinvest in gold and that the internal calculation by the bank, shared with high net-worth customers, of real inflation was 43% in 2024.

Widespread pessimism and dissatisfaction among wage earners, contrasting with optimism from business owners is what I find in my latest round of interlocutor interviews. These are taken from the same set of research participants I’ve been engaging with since 2009 in a well-placed part of Kaluga region – itself a ‘goldilocks’ zone of development near Moscow. Added to the mainly working-class men and women in my sample, I’ve extended my reach to new entrepreneurs who have expanded business since 2022, as well as more middle-class interviewees in Moscow and other large cities. Here, I condense around 20 hours of talks since early November 2024. For readability and ethical reasons, these are composited characters.

The view from the Kaluga-Moscow corridor

Gennady the small-business entrepreneur is ebullient. Patriotism and making money go hand in hand for him. The exit of Western companies allowed him to lever a wedge, going from importing and selling catering equipment via a US-based supplier to now dealing directly with the Chinese manufacturer. Gena is proud of his ability not only to markedly increase his profit margin this way, he has ‘onshored’ a small, but significant part of the production process involved. He now employs three times as many people as before and a third of those are in primary production – making components that are disposable parts for the Chinese equipment. Russians are like “sponges” when given the right opportunities to learn. They’re also like “mushrooms” – given the right conditions, they thrive and grow.

Gena likes his organic metaphors, but most of his talk is full of anglicisms taken from corporate speak. When we were chatting in Russian it took me a while to work out that when he was speaking about ‘khantil’ for able workers, he was using the Russified past-tense form of ‘hunt’: ‘I’ve been on the hunt for a good freight driver’.

At the same time, Gena says that reacting with resilience and entrepreneurialism is not about ‘patriotism’, but about the need to get ahead and make money. Nonetheless he makes it a point of patriotic principle to end our talk by saying ‘As you are recording this, let me say that we will win the war. Victory is ours’.

Misha is a technician in an industry that should have benefitted from spill-over of orders from the military industrial complex. I can’t be more specific than that, but I’ve never seen him so negative – and he is one of the classic ‘defensive consolidators’ who shifted from opposition to the war in 2022 to acceptance in 2024. Misha’s enterprise is affected by the shortage of workers. Because there aren’t enough workmen, he is not getting enough hours as a technician as not all the equipment can be utilized. The shortage of workers is not because of the war – few people in this region have volunteered for the front. The bigger picture is the one I highlighted at the outset – even with a wage increase of 60% since 2022, for many, the job is not attractive enough in comparison to lower-skill/stress/pace work in Moscow or elsewhere.

There’s also the major demographic squeeze in general – the c.1% annual fall in working people available nationally.  Misha talks to me a lot at the moment because even when his plant is up and running, his boss has to meet his demands for more flexible working hours, so sensitive is he to losing more workers. His micro-situation is a good illustration of broader processes – like the ‘work to rule’ in the Moscow metro because of a shortage of staff there but the inability to improve pay and conditions. This implies something of a negative feedback loop for productivity. The more an employer ‘sweats’ assets, be they labour or capital, the sooner they meet hard limits on increasing output, and even reversals.

Misha’s working biography features prominently in my new book, illustrating the ongoing sense of economic insecurity even for people like him who have good social, economic and other ‘capitals’ (he has a higher technical education in a good sector). I’ll merely highlight Russia’s “labour paradox” – workers can sense their structurally strengthening position – via falling demographics and specific labour shortages, while at the same time as suffering from the overall marginalized power in bargaining. In Russia, one can bargain only with one’s feet.  This paradox, viewed in aggregate, suggests that workers may be able to demand more where they are in industries serving state demand, yet eventually as the overall position deteriorates further, their bargaining power may prove transient. Whether or not some kind of authoritarian corporatism is possible (where there are real concessions to labour led by political recognition of its need) remains to be seen.

Misha is as well-educated and ‘worldly’ as Gena. He is insistent that the ‘situation’ of workers has only deteriorated, even as he makes a careful distinction in terms of class (that he’s not a worker). He’s been monitoring the job boards because at the beginning of the war he was looking to move into a job that would protect him from mobilization – perhaps metallurgy (another informant successfully made such a shift). Downshifting of work, after all, is a political strategy that goes back to Soviet times.

Misha points out that drawing conclusions based on published wages is foolish. Nowadays you’d have to look even more carefully at the hidden conditions attached to the discretionary element of the wage. Like others in my sample, he has left jobs where the published wage was higher but it required much greater self-exploitation at work. He even gives an example of a forklifter in a cement plant. Your ‘norm’ might now be 50 tonnes a shift rather than 25 tonnes, while your pay has only gone up by 25% since the beginning of the war. Working much harder not only wears you out, it’s dangerous as the risk of accidents exponentially increases.

Then there’s the continuing significance of working-class male breadwinning in what is still a society where women are paid peanuts, even if they successfully undertake what Charlie Walker described as financial independence through leveraging service work positions. Misha’s wife is one such example and yet only earns half his wage, even though on paper her job (administrative) is actually more demanding in hours, skills, responsibility.

Misha, like most of my informants is incredulous as well as quite angry at the idea anyone could take seriously the idea that wages have outpaced inflation for anyone not a soldier or metropolitan executive. He’s not the only person to say: ‘100k’ (around $1000) a month for an average regional breadwinner’s job is the new ‘40k’. In other words, that 100 roubles only buys what 40 roubles bought a few years ago. And certainly, there are still many of his peers earning a lot less than 100,000 roubles a month in blue-collar jobs.

The official ‘subsistence’ minimum for a family of four is 70,000 roubles, leaving a paltry amount left over after basic food costs. And in any case, such measures are often based on absurdly manipulated calculations: like assuming someone can buy fresh fruit for 100 roubles a kilo in winter, or undercounting real heating and utility costs by around 50% because of the assumption that a person does not occupy more than an allotted 18 metres of living space.

Misha works. His wife works. They don’t have a mortgage but own outright a three-room apartment in a nice suburb. Misha has two cars (though he wants to sell one). He complains that real inflation is much higher than reported because even someone like him spends so much of his take-home income on staple food products. For the first time since 2009, Misha has bought 100kg of potatoes to store in his garage basement for the winter. Potatoes – the main source of carbohydrate for most since rice and pasta are often more expensive, have increased in price by over 100% in 2024 due to the poor European harvest. The ‘Russian salad’ basket of goods, is now around 40% more expensive than a year ago – and remember these are just the staples of poor people (carrots, cabbage, etc. )

Inflation in the ‘real basket’ of consumables is the dominant talk among everyone, even the wealthy Muscovites who shop in premium stores. One such informant points out that her favourite discount brand of wet wipes has tripled in price since 2022 and that this is a product made in Russia, not imported. Not only are there a panoply of online calculators for one’s personal inflation rate, people also read discussions in economic Telegram channels where more independent academic works on inflation and the cost of living are popularized.

Thus, one of my informants who lives on irregular freelance work and a disability pension pointed to the Russian household longitudinal monitoring survey (RLMS) published by the Higher School of Economics. He accessed its data via a Telegram channel. While the channel itself is sensationalist and firmly aimed at discrediting the Central Bank, the research from HSE is widely discussed by the channel members, including my interlocutor.  Unlike official statistical services, the academic researchers are able to state things ‘as they are’, such as the fact that real incomes remain stagnant and indeed, have fallen in reality since the war thanks to tricks like lowering bonuses, not paying time off, etc. While RLMS confirms statistical facts like the long-term fall in poverty in Russia and even a fall in the GINI coefficient since 2022, the stark difference in measurements of real incomes stands out. RLMS records that average incomes are not higher overall than in 2013. Some of their calculations show real median incomes as less than half those recorded by Rosstat.

Tracking spending habits to calculate real inflation

Another way of looking at whether households are getting richer over time is to look at the proportion of incomes spent on different things. As people get better off they can be expected to spend much less of their income on staples and more on services and luxuries. Both Rosstat and RLMS look at this. The latter points to ongoing stagnation in services and non-perishable goods. Even today, Russians spend only 5% more on eating out than they did in 1994. By the same token, RLMS researchers point out that the sharp fall since 2020 of clothing spending is not due to a reduction in prices, but a sign of severe economic stress. Rosstat shows that households spend no greater proportion of income today on non-food purchases than in 2003. Even the richest 20% of households spend a whopping 26% of their income on food (in rich countries this figure is around 10%).

The main point of looking at the divergence in economic sentiment is to help understand whether war produces new social relations based on the relative shift in capital versus labour power. While people focus on real wage increases these need to be put in the context of the abnormally low wages in Russia, especially outside Moscow. We haven’t touched on household indebtedness and the cost of credit, the coming wage arrears crisis in multiple industries. Those are points to watch for. As mentioned earlier, for me of interest is the capacity (or not) of employers to turn to paternalistic reward as a way of dealing with the demographic-stagflationary crisis unfolding in Russia and which peace (at any price) will not solve.

Towards non-repressive research in Area Studies

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This post summarizes a forthcoming talk at a roundtable on Russian civil-society/indi media/researcher dialogue.

The war disrupts academic practices and that’s a good thing. It give us an ‘opportunity’ to rethink extractive practices, to undo methodological and disciplinary siloing, to decolonise our epistemological foundations (how we know what we know). It forces us to confront problems of how knowledge is made public.

Here’s my summary of the problems and a set of examples follow after.

  1. Extractive practices perpetuate injustice – these include the invisible labour of local scholars, researchers and ‘partners’. How to equalize the attention given to knowledge produced locally?
  2. Siloing. Public and media attention to the war has jolted some colleagues out of the disciplinary narrowness that plagues academia. How to sustain this? Pluralising area journals? Activist scholarship (camping on lawns of other journals)? Entryism to scholarly associations?
  3. ‘Decolonization’ begins when paradigms produced to fit Western disciplinary traditions and structures are questioned by the those themselves who work within those core institutions. How to sustain critical conversations that promote insider interpretive perspectives?
  4. What to do with the dominance of public intellectuals interfacing with media? Can they be leveraged for good, or do they require better ‘education’ to avoid them repeating banalities or discredited ‘truths’? What is a sustainable basis for better communication and learning between researchers – who may still have good contact with ‘the ground’ in Russia – and media?

The four points serve as a starting point for discussion, but here I offer some elaboration.

Inclusive, not extractive knowledge production:

This ethical challenge is made starker by the more difficult sourcing of empirical data from Russia (and Ukraine). In my Post-Soviet Affairs article from 2022, I talked about the invisibilization of local gatekeepers, fixers and data gatherers. I used the example of a Central Asian scholar working on contentious politics where her local knowledge was extracted, but she was not credited or legible as a producer of knowledge. Even in my own work I am forced to reflect on how tempting it is to present insights from fieldwork as spontaneously my own when in fact they come from interlocutors who are not ‘colleagues’. Provocation: while lab-based science is notoriously hierarchical and autocratic, why do we not adopt the practice of having more co-authors on papers? Why shouldn’t organic intellectualism be made more visible systematically?

Digging out the prisoners of Silos:

I had an uncanny experience recently when I was reading back issues of journals in three related subject areas to look at how a particular concept is discussed and contextualized. It reinforced for me a topic no-one likes to talk about, but everyone is aware of: how publication practices in particular mean that one can be blissfully unaware of a parallel treatment of a topic or concept and that there are no incentives to engage with it. It seems to me that the relative receptiveness of Area journals is inadequate to the task. Is the answer to argue more collectively for dissemination solutions that surpass the twentieth-century model of the disciplinary journal? Is the problem deeper – in the institutional barriers to collaboration across departments, faculties?

Decolonization as epistemologically-open research practice:

Decolonizing knowledge is partly related to desiloing. Only by better dialogue between intellectual traditions and epistemological positions can we hope to avoid falling into the same traps where research ends up essentializing or emphasising deficiency. There are good examples of interdisciplinary discussions that kick this discussion off, but how do we invigorate these and spread the word. I’m thinking of two recent examples.

Myron Aronoff and Jan Kubik in 2013 wrote about how social science repeatedly falls into the trap of imputing civilizational incompetence to populations because of the intellectual bias in research due to the political disappointments of liberal researchers since the 1990s. There are plenty of other examples. Gulnaz Sharafutdinova and Samuel Greene have developed similar critiques and tried to use interdisciplinary insights to reinvigorate political sociology (they draw much more on social psychology). A common call seems to be for vernacular knowledge to be taken seriously as filling the gaps of a social science that is too naturalistic (supposedly we’re all game-players) too positivist (only the disaggregated individual builds bigger data), and too unidirectional (theorizing ‘down’ based on larger contexts: globalized, national, regional) (Aronoff and Kubik 2013: 281).

A more systematic focus on this kind of approach to vernacular knowledge can be found in David Ost’s writing (2018) on ‘semi-peripheral’ innovation. Ost argues that decolonising means research moving away from ‘discovering’ the East for itself, instead taking seriously its origin as a source of ideas. He notes also that semi-periphery is a nested concept – W Ukraine is semi-periphery for Poles, and so on. His examples of Eastern innovation are brands of autonomism (work self-management), the reinvention of civil society via Solidarność and V. Havel, who ‘returned’ ‘active civic resistance’ to the West, which of course then theorized it (because the East is allowed innovation but is not systematic or theoretical). In Ost’s view, reimportation reinvigorated antistate ‘common sense’ in the West. Relatedly there are twin innovation engines bequeathed to us from the East which dominate social relatiy: the radical-conservative resentful Right, and the spatial idea of neoliberal weapon-testing ground. Ost muses that if the radical Right eventually does win big in the West it will be in part thanks to the work of the semi-periphery.

‘Perspectival’ rather than juxtapositional-comparative research avoids the normative positioning of ‘this (political system) is like or unlike that (superior political system)’ (Schaffer 2021). Juxtaposition is to naturalize our own categories without admitting it. Categories that may end up misleading us as to the relevance of the object in the ‘other’ context. The classic example is how anthropology ended up questioning the whole concept of ‘kinship’ in the 1970s, even though it was the ordering concept of comparison of political orders up to that point. The original ‘perspectival’ comparativist was probably Max Weber on capitalism and religion. In short, analogical reasoning might serve us better moving forward. This is reflected in my own use of Deleuze to explain deterritorialized political activism in Russia today. This approach seems unlikely to elucidate the situation of Russian politics, but I argue it does so thanks to perspectivism. Schaffer’s example is instructive in Ost’s examples: political loyalty in the East is not just about transactionalism – that’s an American comparative imposition that ‘may not travel well’.

On furthering communicative exchange:

I’ve written before that academics are often too busy to talk to journalists or fear being misrepresented and that this is a shame. In my view, journalists are in general open to learning and adjusting. They are, in fact, less extractive than academics themselves. What is more problematic is the inevitable tendency of public intellectuals to become overconfident and start to hold forth on matters they are not qualified to comment on. Similarly, the extractive work is visible here too, when public intellectuals do not acknowledge their reliance on particular sources, especially when they themselves have no claim to knowledge in an area. On this last point I have no real suggestions, beyond the observation that war coverage at least among Russophones, increasingly looks narrowly framed. Take the example of Strana i Mir (Country and World) international conference in Berlin in November 2024. Now, a number of cutting-edge scholars, but the greater weight of analysis is unequivocally that of the entrepreneur pundit class.  Some of these do a great service in popularising science, but the few speakers with evidence-based social science approaches to contemporary Russia will be hard-pressed to be heard. Could a discussion between scientists and journalists be better imagined? You tell me. Popular science is needed more than ever before, but should it be popular because it tell us what we want to hear (and indeed have already heard many times) or should it aim to instil an uncomfortable sense of alternative sociological imaginations in the audience?

What can we learn about Russia-Ukraine from the longest interstate war of the twentieth century?

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March 1986. Revolutionary Guards celebrate their victory after capturing the al-Faw peninsula. One year later the Battle of Basra would end in a bitter Iranian defeat.

I’d been meaning to read this book for a long time and finally got around to it. I’ve repeatedly said that historical parallels are problematic, but what the heck, here goes. Iran-Iraq, from 1980-1988, saw a regional war between unequal powers threaten to spiral out of control, involved energy dependence as a weapon, a lot of miscalculations about opponents, ideological blinkeredness, swinging fronts and stalemate, and human-wave attacks after one belligerent’s technological base for waging modern war was almost exhausted.

Pierre Razoux’s 2015 book is really readable, though a little weaker on Iran because he focusses on the better sources about Saddam’s reasoning, thanks to the US-captured audio cassettes spanning much of his time in power. It’s genuinely refreshing to read an author who is not afraid of confronting his own country’s rapacious and cynical mercantilism in the war, and the horrible cost to French citizens. One can hardly imagine so penetrating an account from an Anglo-Saxon pen. Indeed, the Americans come out of it the worst – completely rudderless and reactive in their responses to Iraqi aggression, and also Iranian desires for recognition to cement their new revolutionary regime.

What else? While 8 years is a long time to be at war, Razoux is able to show how each side had to reinvent its approach to waging war again and again and that the technology, and also metis, of war had become unrecognizable by the end – not least thanks to the flooding of the battlefield with newer Western tech and newer aircraft. At the same time, the old chestnut of generals fighting the last war is given stark illustration in the way the Iraqis partially drew on a 1941 plan by the British as a model for their initial (not very successful) ground assault. So despite the war beginning as a poorly coordinated mid-20th-century regional conflict and ending as essentially a 21st-century war (because of the entry of modern aircraft and ballistic missiles) belatedness is a key experience: not being up to date on all the resources needed to fight a big war; not considering current economic reality; dismissing basic military theatre requirements like air superiority and logistics; not having the right weapons in the right place at the right time. Some of it does ‘recall’ the disastrous Russian improvision of 2022 after the rush to Kyiv had failed.

Along with belatedness (and attrition of capacity which led to devolution of the Iranian effort into human waves) there is incompetence and purposeful ignorance: failure to acknowledge on the Iraqi’s part the force needed for the task of invading Iran (a massive country with lots of natural obstacles like mountains), a lack of coordination (Iran’s obtuseness regarding its superior airpower), delegation in a negative sense by Saddam (‘just get on with it and bring me results’). Saddam was remarkably ignorant about how his campaign would destabilize the region and affect the US and USSR, even if he was smart in blackmailing and playing Arab countries. However, this ignorance pales in comparison to the Americans’ massive intel failure and woeful response: they were completely wrong in seeing Iraq as Soviet-aligned; the US had no Iranian expertise (no one with Farsi or knowledge of the revolution was allowed anywhere near policy) and misunderstood that the Iranian revolution was not just about religion (ideology) but about state-making and regional recognition. At every turn, Western powers made belated decisions based on poor rationalization, political expediency, and worse.

Like Putin, Saddam quickly realized he’d bitten off more than he could chew. His recourse to terror and war crimes backfired and the war ‘made’ the Iranian post-revolutionary nation and state. A state that is quite capable of reproducing itself today and still strongly shaped by the experience of that war. Of course, it would be a mistake to map Russia-Ukraine onto Iraq-Iran for many, many reasons, not least size, religion, geography, outside aid, etc.

Razoux concludes with something we should pay attention to much more than tech, strategy, tactics, esprit de corps, or demography. After 500+ pages of battles, intrigue and horrible accounts of child soldiers and chemical weapons, he curtly turns to the reader to say that what’s of cardinal importance is none of that stuff, but instead the economic war. Only when Iran’s capacity to make money from oil was significantly degraded (they had no access to credit), and only when Iraq was mortgaged to the hilt and also threatened with significant economic repercussions, did the conflict end. Pretty much where it started.

Once again, most historical comparisons are downright dodgy. However, the Iran-Iraq war certainly led to the destabilization of the whole region and untold damage to both countries whose societies became exhausted by war. Certainly, Charles Tilly was right: “war makes the state”. (what he actually meant was that war transforms states in quite unpredictable ways) But which one is Ukraine? Is it Iraq – which transitioned to a hyper-modern, and quite effective militarized state where even the leader was in some respects beholden to the army? [spoilers, the US couldn’t put up with that, even as it had recently turned a blind eye to Iraq committing some of the worst atrocities since WWII]. Or is it Iran? Steeled in blood, collective suffering defines national identity and leads to consolidation around what is a factionally-divided revolutionary government (and not universally legitimate at that). Iranian domestic politics today is still the politics of a war that ended 36 years ago.