Dagestan and other events since the war indicate the futility of attaching cause and effect and predicting unrest. It is equally futile to extrapolate future scenarios from them.
Proximal causes might well be connected to media coverage of events in Gaza, local anti-Semitic entrepreneurs, and the conspiracy peddling that Jews from Israel were to be accommodated in Dagestan. But then we would have to account for differences between forms of “vernacular” and elite discourses of antisemitism within Russia and Dagestan (one of the most ethnically diverse places on the planet). This is hard to do, because social media research offers only a pale reflection of this reality. Then there is another factor: consumption of global media (including that sponsored by Ukraine and emirate states) which research usually fails to account for.
What’s missing is the deeper current of sociological examination. After all, if “Dagestanis” (an analytically meaningless definition) suddenly became virulent progromists against Jews, how have numerous communities of European and Caucasus Jews not attracted their ire until now? Russia across the board has deep currents of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, racial and political antisemitism going back to before the Soviet Union. But these are only weakly relevant here. (By the way, there are probably fewer than 500 Jews in the city of Makhachkala).
Yuri Levada, the ‘godfather’ of hegemonic social thinking on Russia noted in the late 1990s that organised and clearly addressed public protest was the exception not the rule. Whenever discontent (at social conditions) actually rose to the surface it was immediately revealed to lack any appropriate social or political language capable of expressing the meaning of such discontent. At the same time there was an absence of appropriate structures that might reroute such language into forms legible to the powers that be. This gave rise to the predominance of protest based on emotion and which then degenerates into primordialist and conspirological hijacking. – “We are poor and it’s the Jews at fault – after all they control the World Government”. (in fact World Government conspiracies is much more likely to be a hobby of the middle or upper classes)
Now the problem with Levada was that he was working with a functionalist set of ideas about social psychology. In the version applied to events like those in Dagestan this is often reducible to clichés about the danger of the crowd and maladaptive personality. Observers cannot imagine, indeed, they completely discount coherent protest action. There is only the mob. But this is not really how pogroms actually happen – historically they required coordination with authorities and were based on long-standing processes of othering and blame-shifting, which do not seem to be the case here. ‘Mindless’ or ‘duped’ crowd theory was passé generations ago in sociology. But for the inheritors of Levada’s tradition (social psychology neo-functionalists) – something beyond reactive or maladaptive ‘politics’ is hardly imagined. In my view the main problem with social science analysis of Russia in general is the legacy of Levadesque social psychology of the Soviet and post-Soviet individual (although he is but one of a number of influential authors who take a reductive perspective, but of them in another post).
The ’distal’ or indirect cause of protests like those in Dagestan is of course much more complex and we should be spending more time attending to the toxic cocktail of coercive military mobilization and failing social and economic life, and ‘colonial’ forms of governance. There are many excellent scholars and observers working on the N. Caucasus who show how Moscow’s attempt to exert control has led to governance failure after governance failure. Indeed, the defining book on the North Caucasus argued twenty years ago that you can’t understand larger flows of historical trends and social configurations without attending to micro-scale empirical situation. But while religion, unemployment, poverty, ethnic strife, climate change and territorial/land conflicts are a unique toxic burden on the life Caucasian, the rest of Russia is not so different in terms of the fundamental pressures of hopelessness and resulting impotent rage that require but a little prod (Ilya Ponomarev of course was just one of the Telegram tricksters inciting people) to provoke widespread unrest. Mark Fisher’s idea of the effects of a ‘slow cancellation of the future’ is featured extensively in my unpublishable book. (Running joke about my publishing problems).
***
Planning this blogpost I actually wanted to write about the ‘failure’ of military mobilization and its unpredictable social effects in Russia. I don’t have the space now to really pursue this, but I wanted to explore the falsity of the numbers that all ‘experts’ use when they try to understand mobilization/volunteers for the Russian army, etc. This recalls work like that of Martha Lampland on how ‘false’ numbers become embedded in formalized practices of expertise. A number can become ‘correct’ (useable, passable, acceptable), even if it’s fake. This is the ‘quantitative’ part of how we fool ourselves as ‘experts’ on the war, and it goes hand in hand with the ‘qualitative’ part of self-deception – as we saw with people rushing to judgement about Dagestan with zero-context takes.
Did you know that all the English-language sources which ‘count’ mobilized and other troops can be traced to a few uncheckable sources? Did you also know that many Russian sources refer back to the English sources as ‘authoritative’, but that these English sources merely cite (with caveats) Russian government ones? There is incredible circularity in ‘data’ which mainstream and even experts rely on when ‘reporting’ empirical reality. And then there is the problem of how fast this data ages. I reviewed various sources writing on mobilization one year ago in 2022 and pretty much all predictions (even those not based on extrapolation from official source) turned out to be wildly wrong (remember the 1 million army?).
Every day I read more sources about recruitment in Russia. As a result I do not become more confident, but less about our knowledge. I hate falling into the predictive/descriptive trap myself, but cannot resist it on this last point. Russia may be recruiting (not fielding) c. 15k troops a month (less than half of most estimates). This figure I get from drilling down various sources. Few have really paid attention to the actual composition of Russian forces – that the volunteer pool is small and shrinking, that the funnel from conscripts to contracted is extremely narrow (and yet is the main conduit), and that there is no adequate replacement of technical-specialist roles. Numbers are not enough by any measure. Enough for what? you ask. Well, instead of thinking about concrete military objectives like a ‘winter counter-counter offensive’, I prefer to think more globally about just sustaining basic functions of a modern armed force across a massive space. In a sense we are already seeing not an ‘army’ in any sense of the word, but a subnational set of fighting outfits – whatever you want to call them. These have competing aims and needs. I think Russian recruitment is key to various outcomes of the war and that it requires sociological examination (embedded knowledge and massive triangulation of sources which people are not willing to really countenance).
But even thinking in terms of numbers of people is not the most important thing. Maybe there are other numbers that are more important – numbers related to the material motivation – money numbers. I started to address this in a recent post where I argued that it is a classic liberal metropolitan mistake to think of money rewards on offer as offering the final word. I think this is a misunderstanding, and it is where ethnography has an important role. At the beginning of the war many of my interlocutors said: ‘this money is not worth killing and dying for’. Now the situation is much worse for many reasons. In the words of one, ‘I could understand greed as a motivator if it were real money, but it really isn’t. I’m sorry, 200k a month is not real money and for what? You can get snuffed out at any moment – in my mind it just doesn’t compute.’
The realm of recruitment and mobilization does not herald the coming of the Russian ‘necroworld’ that many distant observers have called it, but one of calculation and computation of real people and real possibilities.
Guest post translation of Oleg Komolov’s ‘Prime Numbers’ YouTube video channel. With thanks to him for permission to reproduce here.
What prompted the Russian state to launch a military operation in Ukraine? And, of course, what interests us is the true motives, not those contradictory and vague explanations which gullible people are fed by state propaganda: fascist drug addicts among the Ukrainian authorities, oppression of the Russian language, trampling on traditional values of historical truth. These political arguments can be juggled as much as one likes, revealing them from up one’s sleeve and then hiding them again, over and over for eight years. However, a scientific understanding of social phenomena and processes entails the search for material causes underlying them. It is economic prerequisites which set the vector of state’s conduct and that of classes and individuals. People then can act in one way or another to change or preserve the prevailing objective conditions they find themselves in.
I love watching Russian “guardians”: those who, whether sincerely or for a small fee, justify any action of the ruling class. Even the most cannibalistic economic reforms, draconian laws or political adventures will be explained to you as cunning plans of 5-dimensional chess, or as in the national interests, or as intricate pseudoscientific constructions. The purpose is not to simplify, so as to make social processes understood, but on the contrary, to confuse people. The ‘Special Military Operation’* is no exception. Watch what people do and not what they say.
Before the outbreak of hostilities, anyone who respected himself or herself as a propagandist-“patriot” had for years admired the successes of the Russian economy. This went along the lines of, “look at what’s made in Russia”, etc., and, “everything is thanks to Putin’s wise leadership and his team”. As a result, Russia rose from the ashes, got up from its knees, became energized and some kind of superpower. Construction, industry, agriculture: in all these areas Russia has already surpassed or is about to surpass the indicators of the USSR. And the country’s economy whether today or tomorrow was about to enter the top five of the world’s largest. And how else are corporations to develop not only the Russian interior, but initiate large projects abroad? The state helps friendly regimes by supplying them with the most modern military equipment.
A lot has changed since 2022, of course. But even today there are those who with foam in the mouth who will prove the greatness of the Russian economy and the invincible power of the second army of the world. However, such ideas are already no longer fashionable. Since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, state propaganda has found it necessary to retouch the aggressive nature of foreign policy and re-present it as if selfish, predatory interests were nothing to do with it. There is incredulity if anyone uses the term “imperialism”. Russia is, after all, a backwards and peripheral economy. The only thing its companies and oligarchs are capably of is to send abroad natural resources while doffing their hats obsequiously to the western buyers in return for the right to be admitted to respectable London society.
For such a ruling class there can supposedly be no imperialist ambitions. What’s the point in coming into conflict with the countries of the centre of the world economy? In short, the reason for the start of the special operation* was exclusively a humanitarian mission, initiated personally by the President. He is sincerely concerned about the fate of the inhabitants of Donbas and is doing his best to protect Russia from disintegration, which certainly would have happened otherwise. The oligarchs do not understand these threats or do not want to understand the power of their comprador nature, and that’s why they negatively reacted to the beginning of the SMO*. And then they lost money due to the arrest of Russian assets abroad. It’s a familiar point of view, isn’t it? I won’t even name those who actively promote it in the media field. I think most would recognize who it is disseminating these ideas. However, this is already part of the ideological mainstream, which of course has little to do with reality.
Who are the sub-imperialists?
However, there are still some points of intersection with reality. It’s possible to find simultaneously peripheral comprador features in countries at the same time as signs of aggressive imperialist behaviour. These components are mixed in different proportions and the formulation of this mixture is determined by the country’s place in the international division of labour. Here, Russia belongs to that group of countries where these contradictions manifest themselves in the most vivid way. South African Marxist Patrick Bond uses World-Systems Analysis to describe the contradictory nature of such countries. He applies the term sub-imperialists, revealed for example in the BRICS association, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. In the world capitalist hierarchy, they are below the imperialists, inferior to them in economic power and political influence.
However, they adopt practices very similar to those used by the imperialists. By exporting capital to backward regions, they get the ability to extract imperialist rent. That is, to appropriate free of charge a part of the surplus value created by the labour of workers in less developed countries.
At the heart of such a relationship of non-equivalent exchange lies the theory described by Karl Marx: value is created by labour but is distributed according to the power of capital. Meanwhile, the possibilities for the exploitation of poor countries by sub-imperialists is generally limited in comparison with classical imperialist predators. Therefore, they compensate for lost earnings abroad by harsher oppression of workers in their own countries. This phenomenon is called internal devaluation. It manifests itself in the consistent state-sponsored austerity policies which include high taxes on households and low taxes on business, reductions in spending on education and science, oppression of trade unions, artificial undervaluation of the national currency. All these purely peripheral practices coexist with extensive appetites beyond the national borders, and form the phenomenon of sub-imperialism. It probably sounds complicated, not every journalist will figure it out.
The main question is about what criteria there are for classifying a country as belonging to one or another group of imperialists. The easiest way is to assess with how much intensity capital is exported. That is, direct foreign investments with which multinational corporations penetrate peripheral markets. A reminder: direct investments are those related to the creation of new industries, as well as gaining control over existing ones. We can collate a ranked list of countries by calculating their cumulative net FDI as a percentage of their GDP. It is possible, to a certain degree, to call this an index of imperialism.
UK: 93%
Germany: 70%
France: 66%
Norway: 60%
USA: 47%
Japan: 41%
Italy: 35%
Brazil: 29%
Russia: 27%
Saudi Arabia 18%
China: 14%
Indonesia: 9%
Turkey: 6%
India: 6%
Ukraine: 1%
Bangladesh 0.2%
Congo: 0.1%
[figures from 2020 based on the World Bank and UNCTAD]
The top lines are, as expected, the biggest capitalist predators: European countries, the United States and Japan, followed by a group of sub-imperialists: Brazil, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey. At the end of the ranking are Ukraine, Bangladesh and dozens of other less developed economies which show almost no investment activity abroad. Thus, the larger the volumes of investment sent by a party to the outside world, the more effort in political, diplomatic and military relations will be exerted by their nation-states to protect their interests.
Foreign assets of Russian companies
The key regions for Russian capital are the post-Soviet countries. Companies from Russia sent several tens of billions of dollars in direct investments to the economies of nearest neighbours in various industries from mining to financial sectors. In the economy of Ukraine, before the Maidan period, about $17bn was invested. However, most of these assets were lost as a result of raider seizures, nationalization and forced sale. Western capital acting indirectly via Ukrainian officials, security forces and informal paramilitary associations ejected Russian business. Without having other ways to save a big chunk of its food supply, the Russian ruling class resorted to the argument of last resort: the application of armed force.
However, it would be a mistake to assert that the interests of domestic oligarchs are limited only to territories of the republics of the former USSR. Russian TNCs carry out direct investments far beyond the CIS, including in a number of developed capitalist countries. After the crisis of the 1990s, the rise in the oil price led to the saturation of the Russian market with foreign currency. Commodity companies were the main recipients and have become exporters of the oil and gas sector metallurgy and chemical industry The state abolished the requirements for them to sell foreign exchange earnings into the domestic market and did not interfere with capital’s withdrawal abroad. As a result, the net outflow of capital from the country has reached colossal scale: tens, and in some years, hundreds of billions of dollars. Approximately two-thirds of these funds went to offshores, and then turned into yachts, luxury real estate, football clubs, and deposits in Western banks. In short, it went into luxury consumption by the elite.
However, another third went to the economies of other countries in the form of direct investment, ensuring the promotion of Russian business abroad. Commercial expansion relied on the forces of private military companies, the most famous of which, PMC Wagner, has for several years expanded its presence in Africa, participating there in local conflicts and clearing the road for the investments of Russian oligarchs.
The geography of the business of the largest Russian TNC, Lukoil, does not end only within the post-Soviet space, but extends to Western and Northern Europe, Africa North America, Asia. Lukoil Group’s exploration, production, wholesale retail sales of gas, oil and petroleum products amount to about two percent of the world market. In the last years, the company owned large oil refineries in Bulgaria, Romania, Netherlands. And in Italy, the third biggest refinery in Europe was under the control of Russian oligarchs. Another international corporation based in Russia is Rosneft.
At its peak, the geography of its business included 25 countries: in Europe, America, Africa and Asia. In terms of hydrocarbon reserves, Rosneft has outstripped many large Western companies. In Germany, through subsidiary Rosneft Deutschland the Russian corporation owned significant shares, from 24 to 54 percent of three refineries. It controlled more than 12 percent of the country’s oil refining capacity and ranked third in terms of oil refining volume in Germany: 12.5 million tons of oil per year. In India, Rosneft owned half of the second largest refinery Vadinar, with a processing capacity of 20 million tons of oil per year. In Egypt, the company received ownership of 30 percent of gas development deposits in the Zohr field. In Venezuela, since 2008 Rosneft together with, BP, Lukoil, Surgutneftegaz and Gazprom oil, began to develop oil deposits, In Brazil, Vietnam, Mozambique, everywhere, Rosneft acquired large chunks of local extraction projects of natural resources. Until recently, the other energy Russian giant Gazprom controlled 40 percent of the gas market in Europe. Not only in the CIS, but also in Africa, in the Middle East, in Central and South America, Gazprom was engaged in the exploration of hydrocarbons, gas and oil production, and their transportation, refining process and sale, as well as the production of electricity and thermal energy. Gazprom oil is not far behind. The company is represented in 110 countries, including in Africa and Asia. Its extractive and productive assets are located in six countries. Russian transnational capital does not live by oil and gas alone.
RUSAL spread its networks across 13 countries across five continents. It owns aluminium smelters in Sweden and Nigeria. Bauxite is mined in Guinea and Guyana. Rusal owns aluminium production in Australia, Italy, Ireland, Jamaica. NLMK Group bought rolling assets in the United States itself, as well as in France, Italy, Denmark, and India. Finally, Norilsk Nickel opened a subsidiary division engaged in the sale of products in the United States Switzerland, China and in a number of other regions.
These examples, of course reveal only a small share of foreign assets of Russian transnational corporations. They grew at a particularly rapid pace before the crisis of 2008. Then the volume of accumulated direct investment abroad reached a maximum of $363 billion, which equated to 28 percent of the country’s GDP.
Losses of business of the Russian Federation abroad
But since then, world capitalism has transited from triumphant globalism to a state of deglobalization generated by uncertainty about the consequences of the global crisis. International economic relations stated to gradually reverse. States began to resort to protectionism more and more often in economic policy to administratively create favourable conditions for national capital. Sanctions became the most popular tools for the struggle for the redistribution of markets and property. Against Russia they were introduced for the first time after Crimea, and then tightened many times. As a result, the volume of Russian accumulated direct investment abroad in real expression, that is, adjusted for dollar inflation, fell by 2021 by a quarter. Many companies from Russia lost their foreign business.
For example, in 2020, Rosneft which had cornered the entire Russian share of the local oil production, left Venezuela. Though it sold its assets to another Russian company. But the production process was disrupted. A Rosneft geological exploration project has been frozen for several years in Solimões, Brazil. In 2018, Rosneft had to withdraw from work in Iran. Due to U.S. sanctions cooperation with local companies was also suspended by Lukoil, Gazproneft, and Tatneft. Lukoil withdrew from the development project of gas fields in Romania. The company had to leave the Black Sea. The same thing occurred in the Ghana Shelf Development Project and developments in Côte d’Ivoire, where the corporation had worked on deep-sea projects since 2006. Lukoil exited a project with Saudi Arabia. In addition, Lukoil completely lost its retail business in Eastern Europe, having sold 2,500 petrol stations in Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.
Gazprom under pressure from the authorities left the joint venture with Bulgaria’s largest company Overgas and lost its stake in the gas transmission network in Poland. And in 2018, Naftogaz of Ukraine in the course of a commercial dispute, achieved the freezing of Gazprom’s assets in England and Wales. And many such examples can be cited. The capital of the big imperialist countries in the struggle for the redivision of the world pushed out from the market weaker players: those whose economic development and political influence does not allow them to keep the prey between their teeth. The pressure from the outside has increased. Russian business lost spheres influences and as a result, profit. A successfully conducted SMO* in Ukraine was designed to show the world that no one messes with us. Russian oligarchs can take decisive action to protect their capital, not only toothless expressions of diplomatic concerns after the introduction of another portion of sanctions.
Under the pressure of military force, Ukraine was supposed to fall. As for the Western world, it was supposed to make any concessions just to calm down a raging bear. But these plans were not meant to be. The gestures of ‘goodwill’ by the Russian army in Ukraine showed that Western capital had nothing really to worry about. The degradation of all and sundry after the fall of the USSR and the destruction of socialism affected not only industry. The armed forces, intelligence agencies, public administration, diplomacy, the military-industrial complex: all degenerated together with the embedding of the Russian economy into the world economy as a raw material-supplying appendage.
Having been gifted with trillions of oil dollars in the 2000s, the oligarchiate decided that it no longer wanted to be a bunch of entitled nobles anymore. The nobles wanted to be the masters of the sea. Parasitizing on the Soviet legacy, they dared to bite the hand that had fed them, but clearly did not calculate their real strength. Imperialist ambitions turned out to be based on nothing, and now Western states have had a demonstration that in practice they may act more decisively. In this way, without hesitation, 300 billion dollars of government reserves were frozen in Western banks. Accounts and yachts of the Russian rich were seized. And their displacement from the world market significantly accelerated. Thus, in 2022, Germany nationalized the subsidiary of Gazprom, Gazprom Germany. And also three Rosneft refineries including a giant refinery in Sweden. In Italy, Lukoil was obliged to sell the ESAB refinery to an American energy company. Russian metallurgists also lost their European market and many assets abroad. The owner of Severstal Alexey Mordashov got poorer by a whole 11 billion dollars.
The conclusion is this. In conflict with the West, Russian business which lost out cannot be called in any way innocent victims of the imperialist aggression. Russian business itself was an active player in expanding the sphere of economic influence. However, ambitions do not always reflect capabilities. The raw material nature of the Russian economy, which previously allowed those close to the authorities to enrich themselves and become billionaires, led to the degradation of all state institutions. They turned out to be incapable of performing their key functions to protect and promote business interests. means Now, this task will be entrusted to you and me. So stock up on dry rations, army boots, bulletproof vest, helmet and preferably a Chinese drone. After all, the lost billions of Mordashov won’t return themselves.
*throughout, I reproduce the wording the author uses.
This post is a shortened translation of an interview A. Yurchak gave in April 2023 to Radio Svoboda.* Any mistakes of translation are my own.
The original is here. I mainly cut the interviewer’s text
Interviewer: I was sure that the Soviet Union would stand for another thousand years, but I was not at all surprised when it disappeared. I kept thinking that during the years of Brezhnev’s stagnation, disbelief was universal, and people pretended to be serving a number at meetings, rallies and demonstrations. In fact, the entire nation was a dissident. But you have a more complex theory. What was it, if not a pretence?
Yurchak: Let’s start with your term, “believe” or “do not believe.” As a social scientist, an anthropologist, it seems to me that, in principle, we should not start with this kind of description of the psychological attitude of a person: people do not believe in all this, everyone pretends. You yourself just described your family to me, which launched ships into space for the sake of all mankind. One doesn’t have to believe in the statements of the party, in communism, but some socialist ideas, values - they were certainly important to them. The point here is not faith, but the fact that the ethical, philosophical fabric of this society was arranged in this way, where people worked as doctors, teachers, engineers, mechanics or in the space field. They didn’t do it because they were forced to. They might not have been listening at the meetings to particular resolutions they then voted for, but that didn’t mean the vote was meaningless. The very process of voting allowed them to then participate in the life that made sense to them. And often this life was filled with meanings that were not completely controlled by the state.
That is, to say that everyone was pretending is wrong. In general, the concept of “pretence” […] Is it possible to describe the structure of some society in such terms – “everyone pretends”? Basically no. Because, of course, in our daily behaviour we manifest ourselves differently in different contexts, we have many different masks. This does not mean that we are more real in some of them, in some less. You will not say to your friend after a serious illness: “How terrible you look!” Maybe you will say in one context, but in another it will be completely inadequate. Not because you are hiding the truth, but because the meaning of your statement is not just how a person really looks, but that you need to support a person, preserve your friendship, your social fabric, in which you are woven together.
The same during voting, for example. The meaning of this act, the voting ritual itself, remained important in many respects, because it allowed people to reproduce their subjectivity. They understood that the statements “We will all live under communism” do not make sense, in principle, it was not even expected from the state that everyone would believe in it, but it was important to participate in the ritual, because it allowed the entire fabric of socialist society to be reproduced. Including quite important meanings, which afterwards lost. […] Secondly, it is trivial and wrong to talk about a democratic “normal” society as a society of some kind of truth, and the Soviet one as a society of general pretence.
Let’s start with the term “nostalgia” […] People have a certain emotional relation to the past, to the memory of what was, and this cannot be described in terms of their attitude to the entire Soviet civilization in a general sense, with all its slogans, with all its lies. Much of it was due to the fact that people had solidarity, they believed that they were doing some important things, a doctor in a hospital or your relatives at the cosmodrome. Accordingly, for many, and not only in the 1990s, as they say now, but in general throughout the post-Soviet period, this solidarity, the idea that something important must be done together, was destroyed. Maybe this was sometimes in spite of the party, completely without thinking about the slogans about communism, but it was part of the socialist existence. There were important moral values that people, when choosing their profession – maybe not all, but very many – really shared, without thinking too much about it. They reflected about it only in retrospect when they lost it.
What happened in the 1990s? It is often said that there was shock therapy, everything was privatized, everything collapsed – this is partially true, this is one feature, but at the same time there was the other side of the same coin – this is that there was a complete political deconstruction of what promised to be democracy. For the sake of not going back in time, let’s rig the 1996 elections. For the sake of not returning to the past, let’s shoot the Parliament. That is, your opinion is not important to us, it is important for us now to quickly pull some levers in order to simply create the impossibility of a rollback, and the mass shared agreement of people is not important. In fact, it was, of course, pure deconstruction, the dismantling of everything that was expected, of this entire democratic machine. Then Putin brought it to its climax with his centralization and verticality, but it started in the 1990s.
Accordingly, people can be nostalgic, perhaps without even realizing it for what exactly: for solidarity, for the community that existed after these Komsomol meetings were over. They then went back to work, had parties, they had normal institutes, laboratories, friends, and many of them did this, fully conscious of their existence as something important. Again, I can go back to your example of circles of shared interest and hobbies. The loss of this, the atomization of society, the loss of solidarity, the loss of an idea aimed at the future and that this was important for everyone, important for history. Someone was engaged in literature, space, physics, philology, someone, maybe, had other ideas. But then everyone was in a particular relation to moral and cultural values, which were not necessarily articulated by people on a daily basis. They could speak very cynically about “sovok” [typical Soviet person/way of living], but nevertheless, these values existed and there was solidarity. I call this in the book “communities of one’s own people.” There were a lot of such communities, I’m not saying that everyone, but a huge number of people. Accordingly, in the post-Soviet period, many of them were destroyed. And for people of the older generation, it is very difficult to recreate it.
We remember the 1990s very well. People lost friends, lost communication, lost economic and political opportunities, their world narrowed. For some, on the contrary, borders opened up, a cosmopolitan existence appeared, trips. And someone had such an emotion of some longing, directed to the past. This is not longing, as you put it, for “sovok”. By the way, I would also warn against this term, because it lets us know in advance that it was the wrong emotion, “sovok” is something bad, it’s not a positive term in principle, but something sneeringly bad. It’s best to approach this in a neutral way.
It seems to me there is not so much nostalgic for “sovok”, at least among the majority, but for those things that I described, which were lost by so many. And there was an idea that with the emergence of freedom and democracy, on the contrary, these things would flourish. But it turned out that the reforms in post-Soviet Russia were carried out in such a way that democracy was equated with a rather cynical version of the market. But they are not the same thing, often they are in conflict with each other. Accordingly, instead of blossoming, all these things were lost, crushed for many people. I think that’s where this longing came from, this emotion that we call nostalgia.
There are a lot of studies on nostalgia. Of course, I’m simplifying a little, because there are different types of nostalgia for the past, people have very different attitudes. In principle, I have described the general meaning of how to relate to this kind of memory. Nostalgia, in principle, does not mean a return to a specific past – it is a return to a past that you know and feel as impossible, you cannot return to it. This knowledge of the impossibility of returning in a certain way structures nostalgia. This is not a desire to return – this is a longing for what’s lost and for some elements of the lost that can no longer be recreated.
[…]
I have already spoken about social solidarity or about the idea that you are doing something that, in principle, has value in itself, because it has historical value. Not everyone will necessarily think in those terms, but it is a future-oriented value. For many, this has disappeared, business has appeared, for example, for people who are successful, but they are cynical about it. Some people like it, but for some it’s just a way to make money. They can be nostalgic for some philosophically global things, they can be nostalgic for communication until four in the morning in the kitchen with friends. That is, this emotion does not necessarily have to be manifested only in people who now live in the role of losers.
[…] one cannot reduce Soviet reality to pretence, and Soviet reality to ideological slogans. Soviet television, theater, all these performances – it was all part of the socialist project. Quite a paradoxical part. It often seemed that it did not coincide with what was happening at the political meetings, but in principle it was all part of the socialist project. Why didn’t I write about television? Because the task of my book was not and is not to create a portrait of late socialism. I wanted to find some changes within the system, some breaks, when you can participate in paradoxical things at the same time, change their meaning by such participation. Which ultimately led to the fact that, on the one hand, the collapse was unexpected, because it was impossible to describe such an expectation, there was no common language, there was no way to look at the system from the outside. On the other hand, it happened very quickly. In retrospect, it became clear why it happened.
I had to feel for the mutations within the system that were taking place before it began to collapse, which prepared this collapse in an invisible way. To do this, I had to collect a certain number of examples from different areas. I describe various circles there, I describe physicists, I describe Komsomol committees, I describe various official and unofficial artists, I describe various physical laboratories. Television is not important to me. You insist that it was an important part of everyday life, so I had to describe it. But I am not describing a portrait of socialism, I am groping for mutations inside it that prepared its collapse, but at the same time were invisible to those who participated. You can say the same about the theater, you can say: why don’t you describe mathematicians, and why don’t you describe the cosmos, why don’t you describe the kishlak in Kyrgyzstan? I do not describe, because I do not create an average portrait of a certain Soviet person. In general, I think that this is a completely absurd project – to draw some kind of portrait. It is not interesting for me, it is not my task. My task is to answer the question: why did no one expect a collapse, and yet everyone was ready for it, without realizing it?
You use the word “propaganda”. You understand it as some political statements: “we are building communism”, “they are rotting” and so on. Propaganda under socialism was a broader concept. It also included what you yourself are talking about – about the universal dimension. Let’s drop the term “believe” because it’s not about faith. This is also part of the socialist project. It’s not that other societies do not have this. But in socialism it was some very important part, it was talked about all the time. The comprehensively developed personality: one should have an interest in literature, one should have interest in science, one should have interest in space, and so on. Not everyone was interested, some were completely cynical about it, but a lot of people were doing it. Is this part of propaganda or not? Yes.
“Propaganda” is a bad word. If we discard the negative meaning of this word, then, of course, part of the propaganda worked well. It created a Soviet person […] who may have treated Leonid Brezhnev’s speeches on television cynically and with laughter, but this does not mean that they were not Soviet people. Therefore, if we talk about the language that I call “authoritative” in the book – the ideological language of editorials, slogans, speeches by various secretaries of the Komsomol, the party, and so on – indeed, it was transformed in the late period of the Soviet Union into a rather ritual language. It was necessary to reproduce it, and it was possible not to go into it too much, at least in most contexts, in the literal sense of these statements. So you could laugh at them. But at the same time, these ritual speeches, ritual elections, voting for some resolutions at meetings – these ritual actions allowed many other socialist things to continue to exist, which were also a part, a product of propaganda, but in a good sense.
All these little groups of yours that you went to, what you studied, the fact that your relatives launched ships into space, and so on – this is also part of the entire revolutionary project, which carries ethical values, this is not in spite of the party and Brezhnev. There was a huge distortion of everything through the party nomenclature, but to say that it was completely emasculated is also impossible. That is why these things were important to you.
The Putin system is fundamentally different from the Soviet one – in terms of the world order, the economic system, of course. It does not propose any ideology, it does not propose any project, it does not build any concrete future. Rather, it says that we must reconstruct something, return something, we must somehow feel offended. Even in this regard, if we start to understand, it turns out that it, this very large propaganda machine – television, telegram channels, a huge number of different other channels, various kinds of propagandists, various “troll factories” and so on – gives a lot of contradictory messages and meanings that are not built into one coherent ideologeme.
The task of Putin’s system is not to plant some coherent picture, but to create the impression that there is no truth at all, that any truth hides certain financial and power interests. In principle, it is impossible to believe in anything, it is impossible to fully understand anything. No wonder they keep throwing new versions of different events all the time. Remember the Malaysian “Boeing” in 2014. I was then amazed at how many versions there were of how he was shot down, and these versions contradicted each other. This is not a problem for such a propaganda machine, because here it is important not so much to describe what actually happened, but to give the impression that it is impossible to understand what actually happened. This is completely, radically different from the Soviet message, where there was a specific idea of a specific classless society. We can talk about how it was all completely distorted, completely cynical, and so on, the entire Brezhnev nomenklatura class no longer believed in it, but nevertheless the propaganda was built around this, it had a specific message, a specific orientation towards the future. And here, on the contrary, there is no specific message, there are a lot of contradictory things. The only thing that unites them is that they all together must reproduce a specific vertical of the Putin regime. Because the only way to bring all these different versions together is to have a centralized vertical.
Not without reason, by the way, one of the main mechanisms of this propaganda can be called a “troll factory”. This is a metaphor. It is not the only mechanism, of course, there are still all these propagandists like Vladimir Solovyov on television. “Troll Factory” is a good metaphor. What are these trolls doing? They sit in social networks, pretending that they are ordinary participants in the discussion, they share some memes, write some comments. If you look at the whole array of what they do, you will see that they write contradictory things. As we now know, Prigozhin’s “troll factory” in St. Petersburg tried to influence the American elections. They wrote from the far right of the Republicans, and from the position of Democratic Socialists, and BLM, and from the pov of those who are their opponents. Again, the idea was not to promote some true description, but rather to confuse, create the impression that there is no single picture, it is impossible.
How does television work today ? You look at Solovyov – it’s basically a talk show where there are a bunch of screaming people, they have different opinions, they don’t necessarily agree with each other. This is not like an analytical broadcast of the Soviet era: they describe to you specifically how you need to understand what is happening. But here, with Solovyov, outwardly everything looks like a struggle of opinions, but the main idea is that nothing can be trusted. A very important effect of this propaganda is not that it is believed. I think that people who are not fools do not believe, moreover: qualitative sociological, anthropological studies show that the majority is not sure, they do not believe anything, they are not fooled at all, they are just trying to protect themselves from all this. This is the main effect – the feeling that nothing can be trusted. Let’s see how this propaganda describes what is happening today regarding the war in Ukraine: either this is a special limited military operation, then this is the salvation of Donbass, then this is denazification, then this is a fight against the West, then it’s not about Ukraine at all, then Ukraine does not even exist. There are many different versions, they are constantly changing. It is clear to everyone that there is no single truth. This is very important, this cacophony is the main principle of Putin’s propaganda. that there is no single truth.
Now, moving on to the second part of your question: why are people fooled? They are not fooled by anything. I don’t know where we get this information from. If from some sources such as surveys, then I must tell you that these surveys are completely impossible to trust. Polls in which a person is asked a question that must be answered “yes” or “no” do not work well even in peacetime. It works well if you ask, “Who will you vote for tomorrow, this one or that one?” But when they ask: “How do you feel about the operation, do you support this war?”… Excuse me, first of all, today it is very dangerous. We know that recently the father of a girl who drew an anti-war picture was arrested, the girl was sent to an orphanage. Everyone knows about it, in all the news – “a traitor and agent.” That is, to answer the questions put by a person whom you do not know, who most likely represents a certain organization, and the results of the survey will then go to the media, to various bodies, and so on – how will you answer him? If you are not sure, you are more likely to say: yes, I support it. Interestingly, the vast majority of those approached say: sorry, I’m busy. They just don’t answer. And when they say “I am for”, it is very difficult to understand what it means. Most likely, this means: if I say that “I am for”, this is the same as voting “for” at the Komsomol meeting, then they will leave me alone, I will be able to exist inside the system and do things that are important to me, for my country the things that, thanks to this “I am for”, I am allowed to do. I can be quite independent of the state then. If I say that I am against it, I may become dependent on the state, I may be arrested, I may be exposed, who knows?
Second, people don’t really understand what’s going on. The vast majority of people are neither “for” nor “against”, they are somewhere “in between”. In principle, they do not really want to participate in thinking about how they should relate to this, because it is terrible for them. In principle, of course, they do not support the war, but it is difficult for them to say it out loud for various reasons. Firstly, fear, I have already said, and secondly, it does not lead to anything. People have been taught by long experience throughout the post-Soviet period, especially during Putin’s time, that any political activity does not lead to anything good. In addition, when you speak out against something, if you are alone, then this also does not give any result. If there was any opportunity to hear the opinion of others who are also against it, to come out with them, some kind of movement, then very many, who today say “I’m busy” or “I don’t know” would say “Yes, actually I’m against it.” But there is no opportunity to mobilize people for such an action, there are no mobilization channels, no people who would do it, no opportunity to be on the street – you will all be tied up and imprisoned. In such a situation, it is very difficult for a person standing in front of the one who asks him a question to answer “I am against it.”
In addition, everyone reads polls by the Levada Center and VTsIOM, which say: 80 percent of Russians, or 60 percent, support the war. Since they all support, if I now say that I am against it, then I am in the minority, no one will understand me. That is, polls carry a negative message in this sense – they support the system, they support Putin’s power, because people hear that everyone supports it, which is not true at all, but when they hear about it, they also don’t say “I am against”. By the way, the fact that Radio Liberty and all our independent media say that such a percentage of support the war is also bad. We need to be analytical, and not just repeat after them that everyone supports, because in this way we all pour water on the mill of the Putin regime, greatly simplifying the result. Social networks are not an independent platform where you can speak anonymously. You know very well that there is no anonymity there, you can be exposed in a jiffy. Therefore, it is also dumb to speak out there.
As for how to measure people’s feelings… Indeed, many, perhaps, in principle, support not a war with Ukraine, but the idea that NATO is trying to put pressure on us, that Russia has been surrounded, and so on. Thus, if you ask the question not “Do you support the war?”, but “Do you think that the West behaved incorrectly for a certain number of years?”, give examples, I think that the figure will be different. Many will say yes, I think so. If you ask the question: “Do you support the bombing of Ukrainian cities, the fact that Mariupol was razed to the ground, what happened in Bucha?”, the answers will be completely different, the vast majority will say no. In addition to these surveys, there are also so-called qualitative studies. They are also very difficult to carry out now, but there are people who do it, sociologists and anthropologists. I know two groups in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They have very interesting methods. They conduct hundreds of interviews. It is an interview where people simply begin to trust them, because they explain who they are and what they are. Not even an interview, but semi-structured conversations, not a “question and answer”, but a conversation with a person. And there are completely different numbers.
When a person can talk about what is happening, and not answer a question on the run in the street, the numbers turn out to be different, there is much less support for the war. There is a lot of confusion in these results, people are not sure what is happening, they just do not understand. Because no one can explain to them what is happening, I think that Putin himself does not know what is happening. He thought one thing, began to do another, today a third, and so on. The general idea of ressentiment, that we should punish everyone, they do not support. With a long, long tirade, I try to answer the question of why everyone is so fooled. No one is fooled, people understand a lot more than we think. You just need to understand the context.
It’s not my job to comfort you. In fact, this is a catastrophe, including a moral one, we are all participating in a moral catastrophe. The catastrophe is not that everyone in Russia is fooled and supporting the war, but that people are simply powerless, they cannot mobilize against it, at least not yet. I will tell you more: if there are changes at the top, if there is an opportunity, as it was in 1985-1986, of a mass movement for reforms in the country, for democratization, real democratization, for the decentralization of the country, then this will be a huge movement, there will really be the support of the majority of people. Now they can’t do it – that’s the catastrophe. The problem is that people are powerless now, or feel they are.
I write in my book that the term “internal emigration” is not entirely correct, because it means leaving for a completely different reality. It is impossible inside the country, you still remain in it. Describing the Soviet way of slipping away from state control, while remaining inside a completely Soviet person, I use the term “vnenakhodimost” – [outsidedness/exotopy]. You seem to be both inside and not inside at the same time – this is somewhat different than emigration. Internal emigration is a metaphor.
Of course, now the majority of people live in a state of outsidedness. The main message of today’s propaganda is: don’t interfere in anything, everything is incomprehensible anyway, they’ll figure it out up there. Accordingly, you need to take care of your life. The state has narrowed this field, before it was quite wide, you could go about your life, provided that you don’t delve into it, that you don’t go to any rallies, don’t participate in political movements. Not only is it possible – you are called upon to live like this today. This is a way to demobilize the population.
This way of living outside, inside and out at the same time, has political potential. Because it is precisely for this reason that if people do not fully understand the political agenda of the state then they don’t have to support it, and this is not required of them. They are required not to participate. They have the potential for political mobilization. When everything changes, it will turn out that this potential is very large, I think. It was the same during Perestroika: no one expected that the circulation of Ogonyok and other publications would grow a hundredfold in one year, that people would leave the Communist Party, that then there would be all these demonstrations, that people will participate in political discussion and so on. It seemed that it was such an amorphous mass, not interested in anything. But this was not the case at all. I think it will be the same now.
Alexey Yurchak. 11 April 2023
*At the time of the original’s publication I thought it was a really important contribution by an anthropologist to understanding Russia at war and thought it should be translated. In my commentary on Twitter I made a number of egregious mistakes and so this blogpost is in part my way of apologizing to Alexei.
What has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed about the state of Russian social science? Could scholars have better predicted – if not the regime’s decisions, then society’s likely responses? My argument is that while the war has significant implications for all disciplines and methods, the positive outcome for scholarship would be to use it to reflect on making new connections between researchers and ways of thinking about “entering the field.” I will focus only on useful exchanges between anthropology and political science, which have not had much impact on Russian studies.
Political ethnography, or an interpretive political science of Russia, is not just “ground-level techniques of data-gathering,” but a sensibility that considers “insider meanings and complex contextuality” (Schatz 2009, 316). The methodological shock may be the greatest: to the blunt and epistemologically unsatisfactory nature of a key instrument – survey methods. To put it mildly, surveying as a preferred entry-point to data collection – along with secondary analysis of publicly available datasets – has crowded out other approaches, even as more interpretive methods have become more widespread in political studies more generally. Polls – far from being a describing reality – are a “performative activity that uses representations strategically for the restructuring of the social field” (Yudin 2020, 5). The attention to polls indicating high levels of support leads to Western coverage of “bad and compliant Russians,” which in turn leads to a self-fulfilling prophesy of what I’ve called “defensive consolidation” – in contrast to “rally-round-the-flag” effects. As reliable and unfiltered access becomes a fraught issue, whether to survey responders, focus groups, or elite actors, the war presents scholars with an opportunity to reflect on questions of what data collection means, and on better communication between quantitative and qualitative scholars. Similarly, it forces us to confront the extractive and colonial nature of knowledge production; the war reveals how social science has always relied on, but not really acknowledged, the labor of native scholars, but can no longer ignore indigenously produced work, particularly qualitative research.
Rosenfeld (2023), comments that response rates to Levada have not changed since the war began. She cites Shen and Truex (2021), who examine non-response rates to sensitive questions transnationally and observe that authoritarian systems do not necessarily differ in response rate from democratic states. However, using the Levada data Rosenfeld refers to – the only publicly available data we have in Russia – response rates are only around 20–30%. Indeed, a recent report by Levada on survey methods during the war is itself a reactive publication, produced precisely because of widespread dissatisfaction with transparency in Russian polling, and the close relationship of most pollsters, even Levada, to the authorities. The point is that the war allows us to spotlight what have always been issues of representativeness and validity – the stubbornly low response rate: between 20% and 30% (a falling trend since the war began); that a significant majority refuse to participate (60%) in polls; that younger women are much more likely to refuse participation; and that nearly half of contacts would not even answer a poll about trust in the president prior to the war (Agapeeva and Volkov 2022). One could go on and examine the closed ecosystem of polling and academic survey administration and how it perpetuates a lack of transparency. Pollsters in Russia admit to tailoring results to client expectations (including, in academic contexts “data cleaning,” inconsistencies in panel composition). These issues are compounded by the dangers of organizational incest: all the big survey outfits contract out their work to a small set of field researchers whose field practices are open to criticism. Sub-subcontracting in data gathering for academic research whereby a commissioning academic takes on trust the collection and processing of raw data via an intermediary who in turn contracts out the work is a situation open to abuse and fakery for material gain.
…
The point of immersive “life-worlds” or “culturalist” approaches and methods is not to downplay or avoid theorization or generalization between cases, but instead anchor them to social reality. Can phenomena such as decisions to start aggressive wars and broad societal acquiescence to such decisions be explained by theories that are universally applicable? Are the mechanisms of consent and accommodation of a society to a ruling group possible to uncover using universal models of human behavior such as rational choice? These are the epistemological and ontological dimensions of studying Russia now that divide many political scientists from anthropologists. A version of this divide was described by Aronoff, Myron and Kubik (2013) in their call for a “convergent approach” between the two disciplines. Using the example of Homo Sovieticus, they demonstrated the value of ethnography to verify, or in their case reject, assumptions that sometimes guide entire research projects in political studies.
In justifying political ethnography, they drew attention to the need to balance materialist institutional perspectives with symbolic-cultural approaches – something that looks highly relevant to the current conjuncture. If politics is partly locally produced, requiring attention to concrete details of interaction, then political scientists, particularly positivist-oriented ones, should become “hungry” for more ethnography (Aronoff, Myron and Kubik 2013, 25) to triangulate their data. Process tracing – itself a positivist methodology – via long-term observation and immersion need not exclude the search for correlation; interpretation need not deny social modeling that accepts the existence of objective social facts. Ethnography is well suited as a bedfellow to game theory approaches, and the study of power and questions of structure and agency, but this requires political scientists to recalibrate some of their assumptions about the interplay between formal social structures and informal social organization (Aronoff, Myron and Kubik 2013, 33).
A sociological and anthropological imagination worth its name draws on the founding principles of embeddedness of observer and observation, but is not just “ground-level techniques of data-gathering,” but a sensibility that considers “insider meanings and complex contextuality” (Schatz 2009, 316). War and autocracy, along with the disturbing calls to “cancel” Russia, only intensify the need for the ethnographic study of her politics to avoid the simplistic condensation of polling artefacts we see translated into dangerous public discourse in the West about what Russians think about the war, Putin, and Russia’s place in the world.
Moscow, October 2022. Graffiti on fence reads: ‘There is always a choice’.
A curious fact: the most demotivated and depressed of all those opposed to Putin’s regime are among the formerly most politically-engaged activists. These are the people who devoted their lives to causes like labour rights, environmentalism, and socialist alternatives. The people I talk to for my latest book project.
I talk to them, in person, or now more likely on Telegram and they say things like: ‘Russia is now a fascist, or proto-fascist state. The only option is emigration. We lost the country.’ Most of all they fear not mobilization, although there is evidence forced mobilization is happening of oppositionists and that it has a high chance of resulting in death. They most of all fear the long prison sentences for anti-war speech and see no point in sacrificing their lives futilely.
Why are they so pessimistic? They believe public space is completely closed off. They feel risks now are too high ‘we are being hunted’, one said, and deleted me from their contact list. Perhaps most significantly, they believe they lost their networks – built up over decades of nomadic opposition. So much has been written about the potential of internet and smart-phone technology to facilitate social movements and change, but with the fast learning of the Russian techno-security apparatus (partly thanks to Covid – Galina Orlova and I wrote about it here), activists are often so paranoid they break all electronic contact with each other.
Delicate webs? Easily broken? But until the invasion of Ukraine they had survived the depredations of Putin’s securitizing efforts to break them. The open war against activists can be traced back to the authorities’ abuse of Article 228 of Russia’s Criminal Code to imprison journalists and activists. This anti-narcotics law was an undisguised weapon to imprison opponents. It is even known as ‘the people’s article’ because so many young people are imprisoned under it. Some examples here. But before the war, threats like arrest on planted drugs charges did not break activists. In my experience is was only after repeated arrests for protests that some activists stepped back, but even then they carried on in other ways.
So people are scared and demotivated. But broken networks are actually a sign of the relative success previously of decentralized and horizontal connections between people opposed to Putin; people who maybe met in person once a year could successful collaborate in opposition despite being thousands of kilometres from each other in Nizhnii and Piter, for example. I write about one case like this in a forthcoming book on activism, co-edited with my colleagues Andrei Semenov and Regina Smyth. Also, ‘weak’ netness, but strong ‘catness’ (strongly shared opposition) can mean that, like in the brain after damage, connections can spontaneously repair and reform. Everyone strongly anti-regime knows the half-dozen activists who were active in the places I did my research. They can find each other again – if they didn’t leave Russia. If they can come back. If they won’t be sent to prison. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world right now, than the end of Putinism. But we have to try. These are some of the questions my book project on micropolitics engages with – what happens when everything except the most micro of politics is impossible? How does netness sustain itself? How and why are Russian activists ‘nomadic’? Yes the nod to Deleuze is intentional.
Somewhere a meme worker is putting in a shift for the sake of us all
openDemocracy asked me to write a little piece on Gorbachev. So many ‘takes’ about Gorbachev are made through a distorted Western lens, so I tried to domesticate the reflections a little. Obviously, there’s a hard word limit and I’d have liked to say more about his contradictory implementation of economic reform at enterprise-level which was probably inimical to the aims of Perestroika – things like meaningful work-place democracy.
What’s less understood is that reformers around Gorbachev were not just ‘marketeers’, they understood that productivity rises could only occur at the smallest unit of production the ‘nizovoe zveno’, or brigade team of workers/factory unit. This, as Maxim Lebsky points out in his book, was at the root of the failure of previous reforms – insufficient resources to stimulate productivity. The new experiments in ‘cost accounting’ from 1985 were supposed to focus on freeing up more resources for factory-units, or sub-units, to put into capital investment and differentiated labour rewards. According to some, the tragedy of enterprise reforms from 1987 lay in their belatedness: effectively they’d been sitting ‘on the shelf’ since 1965 for all to see. Thus, more critical voices of Gorbachev see nothing really new in his ‘new thinking’, at least in the economic sphere. Furthermore, the laws on Cooperatives (from 1988) undermined efforts within industry, because the latter even when freed to reward workers more for productivity, could not compete with the higher wages available in the newly created private small enterprises (the ‘Coops’). Massive inflationary pressures (still mainly expressed in terms of goods’ shortages) were released.
As I have written about previously in this blog, the most interesting part of Maxim Lebsky’s book on the Soviet working class is his chapter on the ill-fated political role of STKs under perestroika – Labour Collective Councils. These included workers , administration and management. In reality, the STKs turned out to be mainly one more Soviet-style instrument of management diktat. As one eye witness wrote: ‘In place of industrial democracy, we got industrial populism’ with factory directors’ interests controlling STKs. During the period, republican STKs were on the side of preserving the Soviet Union, while Russian STKs assisted its destruction. This was not so much because of ‘all-Union’ class consciousness, but more to do with the enterprise-identity of workers. Something many scholars have discussed, including me. The nascent workers movement, structurally powerful in the late Perestroika period, could have been an ally to Gorbachev’s efforts to save the Union. His blindness to the potential political power of STKs to defend the Union, despite their flaws, led to the working-class falling prey to easy manipulation by nationalist-populist entrepreneurs, the chief of whom was Yeltsin.
Lebsky starts his chapter on STKs with this quote from a speech by Gorbachev:
“We want workers to understand themselves as real masters of their enterprises, to elect their managers, from the foreman of a workshop to the enterprise director; for them all to be united in a council which solves the questions of planning, defines the future direction of development, which participates in the division of profit; so that they may solve social issues. This is the direction we want to move the process of democracy in, to deepen it and expand it”.
The deepest irony of Perestroika then is this idea to use worker self-government as a tool of destruction of the planned economy in the name of the market. The second irony is the effective manipulation of collectivist ideas by nascent national elites in the interests of capitalist restoration (these are Lebsky’s main arguments).
Why does any of this history matter now? There’s probably little Gorbachev could have done after 1987 to correct the unintended negative political consequences of Perestroika’s industrial democratizing policy. And in any case, his heart was in the right (Leninist) place – a renewed socialist project could only have succeeded through work-place democratization. Probably in the Opendemocracy piece, I’m a little too hard on him.
Well, while not going through system meltdown, Russia is undergoing ‘restructuring’ because of sanctions and the war. Inflationary pressures erode wages, enterprises that ‘make stuff’ lose workers to other sectors and to the war itself. More importantly, as the economic effects mount, workers will more acutely feel the complete discrediting of the political project of Putinism (corporatist ‘never-never’*), just as they deserted Gorbachev in his time.
The industrial geography of Russia has not changed much – meaning there is much to be gained from local political entrepreneurs siding with disgruntled worker collectives, just like Yeltsin did to destroy Union solidarity. Now, unlike Gorbachev, Putin has significant resources to throw at this. However, like in my piece on Gorbachev, it’s worth emphasizing the power of ideas (and biases) in motivating elites. Like in the UK at the moment, the power of groupthink to allow such elites to ignore the obvious and immediate problems of their countries can be overwhelming.
There’s no indication that Putin’s anti-worker instincts would soften sufficiently quickly in the face of a series of cascade strikes to prevent significant social unrest. His instinct would be to pick off individually each enterprise using ‘manual control’ and even personal intervention. This would be too little, too late. His next instinct would be mass coercion. I’m optimistic that this would be a total failure given the size and location of big industries like metallurgy and coal. Stephen Crowley is the real expert here. Worth checking out his recent Ridl post.
*Russian corporatism: “buckle down workers, shut the f-up and wear this St George Ribbon. You’ll get your rewards later”.
The Borderguard Academy in Moscow. It’s motto reads: “We do not want a hands-width of foreign land, / But we will not give up our own inch”
How can it be that the war elicits near universal unease and fear, but at the same time, Russians continue to perform all kind of cognitive contortions to persuade themselves that they are the victims? A short update on some blog themes from earlier in the war.
Here we have two eye-witness reports, so to speak, from sociologists recently returned from Russia.
Tanya’s stories:
People say they don’t want to talk about it, but talk – even in the local shop – inevitably turns to it and people reveals all kinds of extreme agitation, unprovoked. It’s reigniting all kinds of traumatic memories – from their families’ history of repression (“did you hear the Ukrainian family bugged out last night, just in time too”), to the downward mobility and precarious existence of the 90s (a successful businessman says, “I fully expect to lose everything and go back to the potato patch”), to the grandma, who “never really liked Putin before”, but now feels his “pain, his burden. I think about our poor president. He’s doing everything to protect the nuclear plant in Zaporozhe. Fascism really is the scourge of our age.”
In more intimate settings, there is certainly plenty of angry defensive denunciation, especially among older people who daily consume TV alone, and for whom propagandists are a comforting kind of para-kinship presence. Tanya didn’t raise the topic with her mother=in-law, but soon enough they came to the topic after talking about the ‘backstabbing’ of multi-companies leaving Russia.
Tanya: “you know the sanctions – it’s for a reason! You can’t expect differently after what’s happened.
“What do you mean, it is preventative. They talk about war crimes? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s all faked. It just can’t be [straining in the voice] that children are raped. [collecting herself after a long silence]… You know, there’s far more diversity in our media, even if it is state media – they always have all kinds of voices on, presenting different sides. I remember you telling me yourself how biased the Western media are…. How are your TV journalists any better? How can you believe them when they talk about hundreds of thousands of orphans being kidnapped. It’s ridiculous.”
What scholar Sam Greene calls Russians’ typical need for social and political ‘agreeableness’ exists, but is strained at the seams:
The typical village barbeque draws fewer visitors this year. Gosha has gone to “stay” in Turkey; his Ukrainian housekeeper is left tending his enormous country pile. Lyova’s family are in the States, they say they’re not coming back. Sasha has quit drinking. Usually he’s the life of the party. Borya – the district ‘minister of culture’, drops by with a bottle of cognac: “why the long faces? [turning to Tanya] “so, my dear, are your precious Europeans ready to freeze yet over there? You wait until the winter, eh”, he says in a jolly manner.
Sveta, a local business owner, looks taken aback and frowns. She’s usually half-cut by this time in the evening, but she is only drinking wine tonight. “Come on Sanya, why talk like that?”. Sanya, though, has a ‘professional question’: “So you’re a sociologist, right? Tell me, do they really judge us over there? Can it be they don’t know their own history, or ours for that matter? Destiny… A word those Europeans have long forgotten it seems.” Tanya answers calmly: “mainly people judge the Russian government, but not the Russian people…” Sveta is less calm: “Sanya, maybe you should attend to your own duties and ‘destiny’: the district children’s library is in a sorry state. My neighbor told me you laid off the two remaining cultural workers from the Linen District…”
Tell-tale overcompensation:
Later, Tanya is approached by the wife of a well-to-do customs officer. She is engaged in much visible organizing of relief efforts for the ‘orphans of Donbas’, though the sum of her efforts are a little sketchy:
“I hope you’ve been able to see that regardless of events, people cannot stop loving their motherland. We support the military operation, but we do not support war. Tell them that. Turning us into outcasts will only make us stronger. We can give up all those baubles, no problem…. What has Europe ever done for us? I hope you are considering and weighing up your own options. For sure things will get better and maybe even you’ll see your way to coming back to your own country.” The woman smiles a little sheepishly, blinking. It’s hard to know what to say in response to this unprompted onslaught.
Emotional pressure cookers:
At the Estonian border is a Siberian woman in her 70s. She’s travelling to her daughter in Belgium:
“You’re looking at my bag? Yes, I always bring some stewed fruit with me – my grandchildren need the vitamins – none of the processed stuff they have over there. Yes, this is frozen mince. I want to make Pel’meny for them when I get there, like when my daughter was a child.”
She starts sobbing silently…. “I don’t know what came over me. I feel dazed all the time. It’s a kind of shock I’ve been in these months.”
Tanya: “It seems to happen a lot now. I often feel like crying too.”
Finally. There’s both paranoia at ‘traitors in our midst’ as well as an acknowledgement that anti-war activism is stubbornly making itself visible.
Auntie Musya: “We reported back in May that someone had cut up all the flags celebrating Victory Day. The same person pushed over the memorial in the next village to fallen in WWII. Then the Ukrainian ribbons appeared at night. We’ve asked the elder to check his CCTV…. I hope they increase the penalty for such disrespect to the army and to veterans
Tanya: “Isn’t it about opposition to the war, not to veterans, Musya? They want to show not everyone consents?”
Vanya the pensioned off cop: “There have been a lot of cases of flags appearing and disappearing. But you know… it makes you think. Keep your head down and your trap shut is what I say.”
____
Veronika’s more fleeting observations on the compensatory and justificatory lines of thinking and reflection from a southern Russian region. Veronika compressed the lines of argumentation of the people she talked to.
You take a train from Ivano-Frankivsk in the 80s, hear the conductors speak Ukrainian. That’s nationalism, isn’t it? Then forty years later you have to believe that your son died defending the Motherland, otherwise what’s left to believe?
You grow up in the early 2000s Moscow, watching Friends. You speak English so at some point you start hanging out with some contrarian Western leftists enamored with Putin and you end up thinking that it’s all have got to be the Western fault, right? NATO!
You grew up in the Soviet Union: “there is no truth in Pravda and there is no news in Izvestia”. But then those 90s… it was bad, wasn’t it? And Putin came and fixed it, so we have to stick with him, right?
You think that the Soviet Union was not bad, “such a great country was broken”. You used to a job and an apartment from the state. Ice cream was so much better! Why should we listen to the West now? This was part of their Dulles plan all along!
You are sure the Soviet Union was bad. Oh, the Russia that we lost after the Revolution. We need to go back to the Imperial times, maybe even bring the Romanovs back, but in the meantime let’s stick with Putin, he brought Crimea home.
You have no doubt that the Soviet Union was bad, but we won the war and Stalin was an effective manager. You march with every Victory day in the immortal regiment, and they have Bandera in Ukraine, so we have to be the good guys, right?
American-Japanese children interned during WWII – “the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century”
Yesterday the proposed visa ban on Russians to the EU was widely discussed. One Twitter user, responding to a criticism of it, wrote:
“But the proposals I’ve seen would only limit tourist visas. Doesn’t that mean that Russians would still be able to move to the EU for study and work, or to apply for asylum there?”
These kinds of responses reveal that people don’t seem to know that tourism visas are the only realistic and timely way of leaving Russia if you are at risk. What other possible visa would people be applying for – business? (Where’s your letter from your employer and permission for leave from them) Student? (see below). There really are very few grounds for Russians (and the majority of people on this planet) to claim the freedom of movement that we in Europe and NA take for granted.
Tl/dr – human rights orgs themselves highlight tourism visas as one of the most effective ways of getting to a safe place where claiming asylum is possible.
Asylum is not an option
Let’s quickly address asylum: you need a credible fear of persecution and this is almost impossible to prove or even document for the vast majority of even those who qualify. Just taking the US case, regardless of nationality 60-70% of asylum cases are denied outright. In recent years, Russians seeking asylum to the US via the southern border were more fortunate – only 30% were denied. In the US case, as in other jurisdictions, it may not be possible to even present oneself ‘non-adversarially’ to claim asylum (because of the Catch 22 that the border crossing to claim asylum from within the US was only possible to undertake ‘illegally’).
Once again, it still seems most people don’t understand that Russians cannot claim asylum by going to an embassy in Moscow and presenting themselves – a staple scene of many Cold War films. Other issues I won’t go into here: the shift to demanding written documentary evidence to support a claimant’s narrative; the disturbing cases of deportation (not extradition) of Russian nationals back to Russia from the EU even when they clearly documented high risk of harm (Chechen cases). In the one case of political asylum I was involved in (as a material witness) the case only moved forward because of written evidence from ‘figures of authority’ within the EU, and because of some institutional support from the EU colleagues – without an existing tourist visa (she previously had an academic one but it expired), this person would not have been able to claim asylum in the first place. Some good write ups here of the US process. Meduza wrote up here the sobering facts of how hard it is to get political asylum from Russia in the EU. It covers the case of trying to claim asylum without already having a visa (for example using a transit flight): in short there’s a high risk of rejection and deportation.
‘It won’t hurt genuine need for Russians to travel’
Again, this shows how little people understand. People travelling for non-tourist purposes make a lot of use of tourist visas for reasons that should be obvious, but clearly are not. You need to be in a privileged position in terms of professional network to qualify for an official invitation to get an academic visa – you need a cast-iron reason. A Russian scholar who wants to visit a UK archive to do ground-breaking research? Who’s your UK sponsoring institution? You don’t have one? Tough. You need a bilateral formal agreement between your Russian employer and the UK uni – things that are now largely impossible because of Russian rectors’ support for the war. Want to attend a conference to present important work? We will let you come – only you’ll have to pretend you’re not affiliated to a Russian university. However, without that official affiliation you won’t be able to prove to the embassy issuing the academic visa that you have a need to travel. You also will get in trouble with your Russian employer (who funded your research in the first place and expects you to acknowledge that support when you attend conferences – indeed it’s a condition of your employment) and won’t be able to get your trip funded (attending an international conference may cost over $1000 in out-of-pocket expenses). Finally, people seem to think ‘some kind of official visa’ would solve the problem of Russians fleeing – well again, even an official Schengen usually only covers 90 days. What about after that?
After the war started I followed the efforts of two colleagues who were openly anti-war, who were at risk of arrest and dismissal, and both of whom applied for academic visas to an EU country. One was able to get the visa, but only after pulling strings with the cultural institute attached to the embassy. The other, despite having all the necessary documentation, is still waiting for her application to be processed. ‘If I’d known, I would have just booked a hotel and got a tourism visa to Spain’, says that person.
What about student visas? Well yes, if you’ve got an unconditional university place (!) or you’re studying at a fee-paying private school, sure, no problem (we don’t want to upset those Rich Russians who already successfully laundered their cash through our banks). Oh, and you need to prove access to over £9000 cash.
Let’s be honest: this is about the enjoyment of punishment
So, of course to Ukrainians this sounds like ridiculous special pleading. By all means, if the EU or other states want to limit mobility of Russians they should make a blanket ban and just come clean – this is about collective punishment, not helping Ukraine, not security. Most of all, it is about making the handwringing majority feel better about themselves (‘our government is doing something’). I don’t want to resort to psychoanalysis, but those who propose such measures with gusto should reflect on how their need for fulfilment via punishment mirrors that of people engaging in hate speech – the frisson of hate, the jouissance that is more than satisfaction, but the erotic payoff element of aggression.
But surely governments could be doing something different – more constructive in aiding Ukraine and countering Russia? Indeed, the rush to impound yachts and immovable property owned by some of the most disgusting propagandists and two-bit thieves revealed that even after 2014, EU states were perfectly happy to allow these people to become residents and even citizens – as long as they laundered their money via local property markets.
‘Be careful what you wish for’
Or rather: what you impose on others, sooner or later gets imposed on you. One of the characteristics of deglobalization, or rather global segregation, is that liberal and authoritarian states are great at learning from each other. Migration rules start off as merely reciprocal between states, but soon spiral out of proportion and become the plaything of the bureaucratic logic of information and accounting bloat. Once again, those with UK, EU or US ones can be forgiven for remaining largely ignorant.
For a long time, the main barrier to Russians visiting the UK was cost – not just of the visa which could cost many hundreds of pounds, but the necessity to prove significant means well in excess of average wages. More recently both Russians and British people have been subject to an arms war in information harvested from them and torture by application form. Here’s just some of the information needed for a Russian visa:
your employer’s address and telephone number and your employment history; your parents’ dates of birth, dates of death, and place of birth; the exact dates of your previous visits and their purpose; your social networking account IDs; all other countries you visited in the last 10 years (dates and purpose); name of your bank; your national insurance number (perfect for fraud); all your expired passport details [here I personally have to give information going back to 1990]; the employment status and details of your spouse if they work for the state; the usual declarations about criminal convictions, crimes against humanity, terrorism, extremism, offenses within Russia, psychiatric or mental disorders ‘dangerous to society’, drug-use; children’s passport numbers and data along with addresses and dates of birth; information about relatives in Russia.
I would stress, most of these demands from the Russian state are due to mirroring UK demands from Russian applicants.
‘Be careful what you wish for’ because tomorrow it may apply to you, and populist migration laws can quickly spiral out of control. By the end of the year I’m sure we’ll be discussing internment of anyone who held a Russian passport after 1991. I didn’t even mention the propaganda victory a visa ban would hand regime ideologues like Soloviev.
Let’s step back: what would an anti-Putin response from the West look like in immigration terms? Well, while I’m personally against discrimination on grounds of education, wealth, and skills, why not offer incentives for Russians with qualifications (perhaps especially skills that otherwise would support the war effort in Russia) to leave?
‘Exit shows that the regime is vulnerable and that grievances are widespread, increasing “common knowledge” among citizens and setting off an “information cascade” that could increase protests. However, beyond a certain threshold, exit could drain the protest movement and depress voice…. Exit is anything but a “safety valve” for the regime.’
Alleyway in Tbilisi, Georgia, with graffiti saying ‘no Russians allowed’. August 2022
Even before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, people discussed the culpability of ordinary Russians for military aggression since 2014 (and in Georgia in 2008 too, presumably). Now today with the Estonian PM suggesting EU countries stop issuing tourist visas, the issue gains new visibility.
“when a new russia invasion of ukraine starts i will personally blame each and every russian citizen who is not on the streets right fucking now showing putin there are going to be severe consequences for his plans of a new ukrainian genocide. хватить молчать, гайз.”
Maksym Eristavi in January 2022
I criticized these comments, among other things saying, ‘individual people (who cannot influence politics or take decisions of state) cannot be held to account for state crimes. They can be held to account for their own crimes. Russian soldiers should desert and avoid service.’ To which an anonymous account on Twitter replied: ‘This is simply not true and you are well aware of this, if not, read some history. You are basically absolving everyone of any responsibility to promote change.’
If as a citizen of a country with a dictator you do nothing to change the situation but instead fulfil your part in society that allows the dictator to continue to build his power, are you partially culpable for the actions of the dictator?
Carl Jung’s writing popularized the term ‘collective guilt’ after 1945. Karl Jaspers thought that collective guilt applied to all Germans: not only those who actively participated in Hitler’s project, but also those who passively accepted their place in German society. A contrasting position is taken by Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl. “I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or a collective of persons.” Projection of guilt onto others as groups, according to humanistic thinkers like Frankl, is a barrier to our overcoming of suffering and may lead to ressentiment (suppressed feelings of hatred and revenge) – precisely the psycho-social state many accuse the Russians of. (Ironically, Frankl is central to the Russian psychology curriculum today.)
Jaspers would counter that only an acknowledgement of national guilt would allow victims of an aggressor to accept the moral and political rebirth of that nation. Moreover, the Jaspers argument would be that that no one escapes and that indeed, taking responsibility is part of moral growth. While those directly taking part in war crimes are morally guilty, those who offered no resistance are politically guilty – and share collective guilt.
So, what can we learn from the ‘global gold standard for guilt’: post-war Germany? Historians point out a more convoluted and complicated path – the political manipulation by both Israel and Germany itself of gradations of responsibility. Engert points to the long absence of public ‘confession’ in Germany even after 1951, about how political responsibility was questionably ‘decoupled’ from ordinary people, and how a reparations law took nearly 10 years to come to pass. Surprisingly, a full political ‘confession’ of German guilt, addressed to Israel, came only in 1979, and a plea for forgiveness only in 2000.
Other historians take issue with collective guilt on the grounds that resistance-collaboration is an impossible distinction to draw for the majority of citizens in an aggressor state or those occupied by it. Could Dutch railway workers have obstructed the transportation of Jews they knew were being sent to their deaths? What about actions where reprisals were out of all proportion (as they were in occupied territories in WWII)? Is the decision not to shoot a Nazi as good as collaboration?
Some would see further historical parallels: like in Germany, the active political opposition has already been destroyed and its leaders locked up or forced to leave. Nonetheless, like in Germany, many people of different political beliefs but united in opposition to the regime and war engage in small acts of defiance. Further, it is not enough to excuse the rest, who ‘did not keep their distance from the cheering masses’. While no one is free of scrutiny of the security services and coercion can be brought to bear at will, authoritarian ratcheting since 2018 does not explain the lack of active resistance today. We should not give anyone a free pass, the argument goes. ‘How can one imagine a “theory of small deeds,” say, in the Third Reich? All conscientious Germans left Germany in the 30s’. And this latter comment from earlier in the war seems to be gaining traction, even among some Russians. It’s supposedly black and white. Active or passive consent is enough to keep a regime going, and a ‘functionalist’ account (Fritzsche) of dictatorship makes everyone complicit.
Alasdair MacIntyre, my favourite living philosopher, attacks individualism and defends collective accountability in terms of ‘debts and obligations’. He goes on to illustrate with the argument white Americans are often confronted by: ‘I didn’t own slaves, how can I be responsible?’ In other words there is a healthy irony towards the liberal assumption that guilt is voluntary and based on individual actions. We can’t escape living in states and bearing some responsibility for the actions of the societies we are members of. However, others find this inconsistent pointing to the weak ascriptions of (morally significant) collective identity today. If we accept that nations are political entities and not real collective identities, then shouldn’t we reject collective guilt? Indeed, isn’t collective guilt the expression of the spirit of European totalitarianism itself: from its scapegoating of Kulaks to Jews. Other identities make claims to ‘cancel out’ the national-historical. Such that even discussing ‘apologizing’ for the Russian invasion strikes socialist unionizers there today as absurd and even dangerously misguided. Their socialist activism in opposing the Russian state ‘trumps’ their identity as Russian citizens. Is this identity splicing self-defeating?
Now, one of the few visible forms of self-defining ‘resistance’ among Russians is to emigrate, something they are being actively discouraged to do. Hence many people’s criticism of pronouncements like those of the Estonian PM (because tourism visas are the only realistic instrument for leaving permanently). Should collective responsibility be reserved for active collaboration with, and support for war-making regimes? Does signalling like that from the Estonian PM encourage Russians to reflect and resist, or does it make them ‘double-down’ on a victim narrative based on national identity as the ‘bad’ Europeans?
Jeanne Kormina wrote in March 2022 about how Russia’s invasion has forced anthropologists to rethink their work. Firstly, because the war makes sympathetic understanding of informants’ worldviews untenable. Secondly, because in Kormina’s view Russian anthropology has been politically apathetic – by which she means studies preferred to focus on what was reassuringly metropolitan and liberal in Russia.
When I read Kormina’s piece I identified strongly with her comment about the ‘class-squeamishness’ of scholars working on Russia. I’ve written about that many times on this blog and in my work. Many times in academic contexts I have been asked how I can study ‘monstrously alien people’, as Kormina puts it.
However, no sooner had I positively commented on Kormina’s piece, Sam Greene rightly took me to task. In his view, the problem is not a lack of social research that reflects the diversity of Russian society. Instead, Sam argued that there’s a gap between what is read and what is written; there has been plenty of qualitative sociological and anthro work well beyond Moscow and the middle class. Instead, Sam argued that there isn’t enough theorization that usefully incorporates non-elite people. Tomila Lankina and Maria Sidorkina also had some things to say on these points. Tomila said that survey research has become the go to way of studying #Russia because of supposed “rigour”, but that surveys are more problematic than ever. Maria commented that the problem is that not enough Russian elites read this research and thus change the way they address/talk to people in the general public.
If you don’t know Sam’s work, you should check it out, including the up-coming re-publication in paperback of his book with Graeme Robertson. Their work on social conformity and agreeableness is very relevant to understanding pro-war sentiment now. It also points to how quickly things might change.
Sam posted links to various recent publications; let’s review some of them.
First up is the Russian sociology journal Laboratorium. This journal is in good health, publishing many local researchers who employ qualitative methods like interviews and ethnography. Articles are in Russian with an extended summary in English, or vice versa.
Karine Clément, it’s fair to say, has been at the forefront of politically-engaged sociology about Russia. In the last years she’s published a lot on urban grassroots movements in Russia. She’s critiqued the idea of an ‘authoritarian personality’ among Russians and offered insights into the locally-rooted and everyday forms of civicness based on her reading of French pragmatic sociology. This has the potential to bring into dialogue different approaches – social psychology, political culture, and the phenomenological. Directly and indirectly the influence of Clément and others can be seen in the research agendas of two important young Russian sociologists Anna Zhelnina and Oleg Zhuravlev and their collaborators. Clément’s work is particularly important to me because she focuses on contexts of transformative experience that turn ordinary people into political subjects. She’s interested in how ordinary people learn, interact and invest themselves emotionally in civic and political causes. Charles Tilly meets Goffman meets Thévenot.
Some other very recent pieces were pointed out by Sam. I just highlight two of them that were particularly interesting to me:
“contentions over the city indeed seem to occur prominently in spatial forms such as sacred spaces, memorial statues, and public celebrations, and also discoursively in the city’s promotional materials and publications, as I outlined above. However, although the shifting political and cultural landscape likely played a part in the recent urban changes, I argue below that the seeming contestations should not be read as direct confrontations – or, as Breslavsky (2012a, 313] put it not as an “ethno-political” project – but should instead be seen in the local field of ideas and practices of coexistence.”
“Using original interviews and household survey data collected over nine months of fieldwork, this article offers a nuanced and empirically driven comparative account of how governance works in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia. Mitigating between accounts of a hegemonic state that has saturated public space and strong non-state actors that consistently organize parallel systems of governance, I demonstrate that residents identify a role for both state and ostensibly non-state authorities in governance…Following Ostrom’s (2010) call to examine the “wide diversity of institutional arrangements that humans craft to govern” at multiple scales, it highlights two main contributions. First, the paper demonstrates the need to interrogate the relationships between authorities when making inferences about governance rather than grouping them into dichotomous “state” and “non-state” categories. Second, the three cases demonstrate that conclusions about who governs and how are likely to be highly dependent on the domains of governance selected.”
Sam’s other comments were that “the problem, of course, is that most of this kind of stuff never makes it to Western journals, because it’s qualitative – and quantitative studies (despite attempts at representativeness) do tend to over-estimate the role of ‘elite’ constituencies. But that’s not because people aren’t doing the work. They are. It’s just that too few people outside Russia are reading it, and that the polisci establishment even in Russia is broadly not reading it.”
Does war mean making the case that – survey work aside – small-scale sociological work is more important than ever? Yes, it does. The kind of sociology that Clément proposes is useful because it helps understand that the politics of Russia – both ‘monstrous’ and mundane, find their origin in personal responses to, and forms of coping with, the big and imposing structures of society. These associated traumas and tragedies, resentments and revelations via a process of alignment with elite political expediency can crystalize into the forms we see before us today – among them, radicalized bitterness searching for political representation.
Postsocialism 