Andreas Umland, Professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and founder/editor of the book series on Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics published by ibidem-Verlag, just highlighted on Twitter a ’collective warning’ letter to readers of Ivan Katchanovski’s new Springer-published book: The Russia-Ukraine War and its Origins: From the Maidan to the Ukraine War.

The criticism was that Katchanovski blames mainly Ukraine and the West for conflict since 2014. Russia appears as more of a reactive force than an instigator. The letter says that “Katchanovski fundamentally misleads his readers when he explains Russia’s attack as the result of alleged Ukrainian transgressions against political pluralism. […] Whoever wants to understand the sources of the Russo-Ukrainian War should read less about Ukrainian domestic politics and international relations – the primary foci of Katchanovski’s book. Instead, Russia’s war was caused and is driven by Russian political traditions, ideas and interests.”

Full disclosure, I’m blocked by Katchanovski on Twitter for criticizing him. I think some of his claims are poorly evidenced and his arguments objectively ‘bad’. He came to my attention for his assertion that the Maidan snipers were part of a false-flag operation in 2014. Katchanovksi bludgeons the reader with analysis of ‘2000 videos… 6000 photos… 30GB of radio intercepts’ to give the appearance of objective sleuthing. However, a large part of his writing lacks direct relevance (e.g. going off on tangents about 1989 Romania), he does not consider the problem of testimony after the fact, its veracity versus hearsay. On careful reading the result is more an assertive interpretation which is not convincing as an evidentiary demonstration of a false flag. Its central weakness is not that it raises no legitimate questions, but that it repeatedly overstates what its sources can actually prove. On the sniper question and beyond, the evidence is presented in a way that is polemical, cumulative in appearance, and much less conclusive than the author claims. Confirmation bias, circular references, cognitive closure are just a few of the more general issues, in my opinion.

That aside, what this letter reminded me was that Altmetrics (internet-related measures of impact) is having a significant interactive effect with how AI answers questions. Just a few weeks ago I saw a student include Katchanovski on a literature list because AI had suggested him. There was no Andrew Wilson nor Sarah Whitmore on that list. Does the volume of Altmetrics create a feedback loop that AI then propagates?

…

What does this “J’Accuse…!” affair tell us about the state of academia? It doesn’t reflect well on publishers, but nor does it reflect well on ‘us’ as so-called gatekeepers of quality, sourced knowledge. There are some massively respected names on the list of signatures, but I would have expected more of them. What do they want? It’s not clear. Do they want the publisher to withdraw the book(s)? From a critical perspective, it might be more productive to investigate processes for selecting peer-review experts and those who supported Katchanovski’s efforts to publish. The elephant in the room is the low bar to scholarly publication.

What the broad public don’t realise is that academic publishing is extremely varied in its quality filter. I’ve seen terrible books published by the ‘best’ university presses in the world based on pure nepotism or name-value. Presses that pretend they have rigorous peer-review and editorial processes. At same time, small, indi presses are sometimes more engaged with writing and editing processes. Then there are essentially the Walmarts of academic publishing. Their oligopoly model passively and actively killed the mom-and-pop stores of academic publishing and also some medium-sized players. The accusation is that they tend to churn massive numbers of books with less regard to quality.

Academics who need a book for internal institutional reasons go there. Unlike the real Walmart, the profit is not in low prices and volume, but in high prices to the captive and uncritical academic libraries in Euroland. These ‘trade’ presses make a profit by publishing a lot of books seemingly without an editor even reading them, and depending on a light-touch rapid ‘peer review’. If academic libraries in Europe buy 200-500 copies in total, the publisher makes a small profit because the price is €100 for a hardback. No ‘real’ people buy the book (except for your mum – thanks mum!), but now with AI these books get more traction because somewhere an AI has ‘consumed’ them – often because their high prices allows them to be Open Access.

A book about George Soros was just published with one of these presses. There was a joke on Twitter that he was the only human to actually buy the hardback book when he was pictured reading a physical copy. That was because all academics know the ridiculous price of hardbacks (targeted at librarian buyers): that book cost €162.49! And yet just googling it from my workplace gets me to a free link, courtesy of the Royal Danish Library’s krone.

According to WorldCat (a database of thousands of university libraries) one of Katchanovski’s earlier books, published by Ibidem Verlag(!), is held in 773 libraries. Is that a lot? Well yes and no. In reality, with the advent of e-versions of books, it’s largely useless to use sold copies as an indicator of impact. Nonetheless, the fact is that many of these ‘churn’ books are subsidized for publication by European universities and that means e-copies can be downloaded for free while libraries buy a few hundred hard copies. The downloads of e-copies are part of Altmetrics. And these online copies are consumed and archived by AI.

Whether you agree with its contents or not, the letter by Umland et al. indicates a collective action problem I’ve talked about before in my blog – when the war started in 2022 all kinds of crazy texts emerged from marginal and not-so-marginal voices with dodgy claims. They got published in the biggest newspapers in the world. People’s reputations were cemented on outlandish claims about Russia and Ukraine. If scholars don’t like this kind of thing they should do something about it. Writing a long-winded letter that doesn’t even address the core criticism towards someone like Katchanovski is not going to help.

Two takeaways:

There’s no reliable ‘scholarly’ filter and reputations are no guide to ‘goodness’ of argument and evidence. This is normal and we should just admit it. There are disreputable and just downright poor scholars at all kinds of institutions. What I mean by that is that there are people just churning unevidenced (or massively over-evidenced non-relevant ‘proof’), poorly argued stuff that gets published because they are ‘academics’ in an institutional ecosystem. If it’s ‘timely’, contentious, it will get Altmetrics attention (basically media and social media mentions of ‘scholarly’ work).

Katchanovski’s most controversial article (which feeds into his book content) was published in a journal many people consider questionable in terms of reputation and ethical practices. His reviewing editor has no expertise or knowledge of Ukraine. [full disclosure: there is an editor there with Ukraine knowledge with whom I have worked closely] The article was quickly accepted for publication despite being a long piece with a lot of big claims based on footnotes with links to media. This journal was successfully hoaxed ten years ago by people trying to prove its poor peer-review and editorial practices. Others consider the outlet a ‘vanity or predatory journal’. It’s also a ‘pay-to-play’ journal. If you or your university has €2110. Some argue that this model encourages poor editorial filters. Anyway, the point is that this journal is only an outlier in a questionable system based on public subsidy of private profit. And the journal itself is owned by what is considered a solid publisher!

Second take away is the death of good, critical literature reviews. People knew about the controversial aspects of Katchanovski more than 10 years ago. To the qualified people who disagree with him, the problems with his reasoning, evidence, and research are very clear – pellucidly clear. There are dozens of respectable and tenured names on the letter criticizing him. But how many of them turned down the opportunity to write an excoriating review – if not in a visible academic journal – then in a public forum? According to my university library there are zero academic reviews of his recent books. If he’s so egregious, ignoring him won’t make him stop.

Here though the takeaway should not be that Katchanovski’s scholarship is bad or reinforces Russian propaganda (the accusation of the letter, which I agree with). The takeaway is that what makes it ‘bad’ is not so different from what makes much qualitative social science poorly evidenced! Too much is published that overly relies on piled up testimonies, media mentions, and reconstructed inferences while treating them as if they were cumulative proof, even when many are second-hand, self-reported, or produced in a politically charged, chaotic environment. I recently criticized a scholar of Russia on related grounds (that confirmation bias can easily be ‘supported’ by piled up ‘evidence’).

Many researchers start off with solid claims and carefully crafted arguments but then get into what we could call the xerox of a xerox problem in research. Doing archival work is expensive and unrewarding. Trudging around Kyiv to interview people is hard. Conducting your own in-person survey rare as hens’ teeth. The biggest problem then is gradations of dodginess emerging from second- or third-hand evidence in support of cognitively biased research.

What are the sources of social coherence and stability in Russia, three-years and six months into the invasion of Ukraine? This is the first of three posts (I hope) where I outline a theory of ‘soft authoritarian administration’: the ubiquitous intrusion into everyday life of securitized administration but which is not experienced (mainly) as coercive because the main vibe is the comfort and convenience it increasingly appears to provide to the majority of Russians. But this first post is preambular. I just finished reading the new book on elite ideology in Russia and I recommend it. However, at the same time, it for me, illustrates a lot that’s wrong with expert and academic commentary on what makes today’s Russian state ‘legitimate’ to many.

Despite many dissenting voices, too much attention is still afforded to the putative strength of a wartime ideological consolidation. And this is partly the fault of non-Russia specialists fighting Ukraine’s corner, for good reason. They need to paint a picture of brainwashing and and national accord in Russia to mobilize support for their cause. Less charitably, this position steers close to simple outrage framing for clout.

By contrast, there are professional observers steeped in political philosophy such as  Marlene Laruelle in her new book: an extensive history of, and conceptual guide to the ideas she sees as formative in Putin’s Russia. Ideas about a counter-hegemonic civilization that translate into a broad societal compact between elite and people. In my view, Laruelle, because she’s too good a scholar to give in to simplistic narratives, ends up somewhat undercutting her own thesis: civilizational tenets are a ‘repertoire’ of semantic elasticity and gaps, more ‘scripts’ than programmes or world views. If readers want, I can do a full post reviewing the book, because it’s well worth a read.

Serious works like Laruelle’s aside, it’s hard not to be incredulous when I read how much headspace ideology takes up among Western scholars. In a sense this is ironic because ‘we’ in the West treat it in many ways much more seriously than Russian regime intellectuals themselves. This approach has some serious limitations when it comes to doing adequate political sociology. Often a ‘values’ approach is not so far from the extreme positions of those like Timothy Snyder who propose – usually to the surprise of social scientists –  that Russia is a more or less fascist state.

The research agendas based on tracing how ideas influence populations are always attractive to scholars and activists alike because they’re simple to grasp. But they’re a poor substitute for sociology, and they too often reflect an outmoded view of how ideas circulate. Not only that, they are invariably a reflection of deep conservative pessimism among their practitioners. Essentially, they propose that most people are more receptive to negativity than a positive agenda.

‘We are for normalcy, the Europeans are not’, is the kind of negative conservative agenda I am talking about. This is hardly attractive when Russia remains a country of whopping corruption, precipitous demographic decline, terrible infrastructure like run-down schools and hospitals, not to mention extraordinary low salaries by global ‘middle-income’ standards and horrible labour relations. Europe has indeed become a useful distraction in discourse; an external, threatening other of moral relativism, sexual deviance, racial disorder and political deadlock in media and state discourse. ‘Things might be bad, but at least we’re not in France’, is a sincere, if unintentionally humorous phrase one might hear as a reflection in everyday talk of elite narratives. So, some of these ideological conjuring tricks gain traction then, especially as they are finessed into a biopolitical defence against moral decay. But if the regime is so bent on defence of tradition and the Russian people, why are social blights still rampant, and prenatal and profamily policies so mean and tokenistic? While there is support for neo-conservative ideas because of general fears and the legacy of the 1990s, there remain many concerns that far outweigh the propagandized issues on TV: inflation, impoverishment, fear of unemployment, economic crisis, and indeed, fear of armed conflict. Just in the latest Academy of Sciences Sociology Centre polling, these fears, over remain very high on the agenda.

Dashed expectations that the war might be changing the social compact in favour of better pay and conditions for the majority explains the most interesting May 2025 findings from the Russian Academy of Sciences Sociological Centre: a big rise, and then fall in the numbers of people saying that economic transformations have been carried out (when? The poll doesn’t specify) in the interests of the majority. This measure was notoriously low until the war began. Consistently, less than a quarter of respondents would ever answer in the affirmative. On the eve of the war, the number of people correspondingly agreeing that Russia’s political economic transformations served only the elite was the highest since 2011, at 60%.

However, since 2022, this indicator in particular has been extremely volatile. In 2023, for the first time ever, the indicators crossed over into a scissor formation – more people – 44% – agreed for the first time that the economy was being run for the benefit of the majority. However, things have ‘scissored’ again back to a position where the majority disagree that the economic regime serves their interests in 2025. This volatility is unprecedented and indicates deep-seated political frustrations that few other quantitative indicators can uncover. The economic consequence of war were – perversely – expected to provide not only relief from the neoliberal compact, but more than trickle-down prosperity – as production was to be reshored and incomes raised.

The burgeoning disappointment that there is no ‘war dividend’ let alone the prospects of a peace one, help us uncover the peculiarities of the actual politics of Putinism – the flip side of soft repression is one of providing ‘comfort’ and respite from harsh economic reality. And I’ll cover the ‘comfort-class’ soft authoritarian administration of Russia in the next post. For the time being, I have a little challenge to readers interested in Russian media: try counting the instances of ‘comfort’ in the coverage you encounter. Ekaterina Shulman interestingly refers to the discomfort (in multiple meanings) of losing access to YouTube for Russians in her latest interview. She examines the loss of YouTube in the context of what she sees as the ‘destruction of the fabric of everyday life’ [bytovaia zhizn] which in Russia provided a high level of comfort to the metro middle-classes unparalleled in Europe (in her view from Berlin). And it’s very present too in this tone-deaf piece on emigration by Kholod media, in which comfort and convenience, more than intercultural adaptation or integration are emphasized. [sidenote: there are plenty of French supermarkets in Buenos Aires and better choice of quality low-cost clothing stores than H&M]

Bytovaia zhizn – everyday life – as Russian Studies students should know – is a hard phrase to translate into English because of the connotations it carries, not least of which is the idea that the creature comforts of retreating into a private domestic life can ward off the scary reality beyond one’s front door. As Catriona Kelly wrote, in 2004, in a chapter on byt, ideologists of all stripes in Russia have always had a problem with byt. But what if material well-being itself as a direct result of authoritarianism could become a kinds of ideology? That question will be covered in a future post.

This is a longer summary of my new book written for Russia.Post. A version of it appeared there in May.

Twenty-seven years ago, I began visiting a small industrial town in Kaluga region and its rust-belt hinterland.  At first, I was just like any other visitor from Moscow; the town was merely a stop-off on the way to a more picturesque summer house.

Later in England I trained as an ethnographer. Ethnography is about long-term tracking of real people in their social context. It’s philosophy is also based on objective observation while still inside a community. Russian social researchers and journalists are often surprised or even incredulous that foreigners are able to conduct nuanced and insightful work from within Russia, but there’s a long pedigree to such research.

This doesn’t always get the attention it deserves from Russians themselves, but we can highlight the work of Americans some thirty years ago such as Dale Pesman and Nancy Ries, that of British researchers like Charlie Walker and Caroline Humphrey. Researchers with good language skills, contextual knowledge, and the commitment to prolonged periods of fieldwork in places many more privileged Russians are loathe to spend time in, have produced important historical documents about how society has changed. In 1991 the late sociologist Michael Burawoy even got a job in a Komi furniture factory to do ‘production ethnography’ – probably a first for a Western researcher in Russia.

Burawoy consistently showed in his career (he also worked in 1980s’ Hungary) that the disarming nature of an affable yet curious foreigner could be just as effective in getting to the nub of what was going on among the (post)-socialist working classes, as the penetrating and informed researches of a native observer, such as those of sociologist Alexei Levinson, for example, who also spent time visiting Russian factories in the 2000s.

I consciously followed Burawoy’s lead in 2009 and spent many months embedded in the industrial settlement I gave the pseudonym ‘Izluchino’. Like other sociologists and ethnographers I tried to live the life of those I was studying while remaining objective and as ethically transparent as possible. The result was a book published in 2016 about the long durée experience of decline and precarity among Russian workers.

The second long period of my fieldwork coincided with Crimean annexation and the Donbas war. It was then when was forced to confront the way fieldwork relations between a foreign researcher and Russian interlocutors inevitably would be overlaid by geopolitics. But at the same time many local people interpreted me as some kind of diplomatic sounding board for their own strong political feelings of both resentment and rejoicing. I became part of a conversation in anthropology about bridging insider-outsider identity and ‘intimate’ geopolitics.

Instead of seeing this as a danger zone and switching to ‘safer’ topics, I embraced the chance to develop an immersive political anthropology of my field sites, and, indeed, extend the scope of my research from the ‘district’ to the broader context of European Russia – after all, many of my interlocutors were engaged in vakhtovaia work – seasonal and periodic work mobility to Moscow, to Yamal, and even to Germany. In 2018 I decided I would be able to collect enough material to write an ‘alternative’ book-length study on Russian politics. And in 2025 the result is the work published as Everyday Russian Politics: From Resentment to Resistance.

For this book I went back to my workers, but also to middle-class Muscovites, Kalugan entrepreneurs, to my ex-peasants in the ‘back of beyond’ of Izluchino, and to ‘biudzhetniki’ workers in small towns who do the heavy and oftentimes thankless lifting of the Russia state’s rickety capacity.

At the beginning of the book, I spend time considering Russian responses to war as defensive consolidation. Prompted by the immediate disaster of war, defensive consolidation, while expressing fears of punishment and collapse, also attunes people to the long-term decline and aporia the political compact represents – that there has been neither socio-economic renewal, nor genuine promotion of a cohesive sense of what it means to be Russian in the twenty-first century. As Karine Clément has argued, consolidating feelings arise thanks to the perceived shortcomings of the social compact – and these are the ‘fault’ of both elites and ‘the collective West’ in the popular imagination.

The book opens in typical ethnographic fashion with extended vignettes. Vignettes are detailed personal stories observed at first hand. I use these to showcase how politics manifests in everyday life. They illustrate the diversity of perspectives on national identity, war, economic hardship, and state power: In a village in 2014 after the Crimean consensus has somewhat attenuated, I participate in a casual conversation with Lyova, a soon-to-retire plumber, his son Sasha, and his daughter-in-law Lena.

Their conversation is filled with mixed emotions about Crimea’s annexation. Lena expresses national pride, believing the event strengthens Russia’s global standing and offers young people something to be proud of. Sasha and Lyova are more sceptical, questioning whether ordinary Russians will benefit from the annexation or whether it will only serve the interests of political elites. Lyova, despite his scepticism, adheres to a resigned loyalty—a belief that criticizing the government is pointless, as it won’t change anything.

This ethnographic conversation offers an example of how engaged qualitative approaches, based on building trust in sensitive contexts can tease out the more complex and candid views of interlocutors over and above the often black and white findings from survey data.  They also, to some degree flatten the hierarchies that always exist between sociologists and respondents, affording more confidence to real people to express genuinely contradictory yet sincere positions.

While official discourse celebrated Crimea as a national victory, many Russians privately worried about economic burdens and worsening living conditions. They actively used irony as a form of political expression: Sasha’s sarcastic remark—“At least Crimea is ours, eh, Dad?”—captures a common way Russians cope with state propaganda: acknowledging it while subtly mocking its implications and focussing on the material repercussions that ‘working poor’ Russians have to face after the big elites have made their geopolitical plays. This is important in itself because political scientists tend to uncritically accept the idea that the Crimean ‘consensus’ was enduring and strong. In contrast to the ‘common sense’ of some observers, it turns out that the mask of loyalty is one that Russians are readily able to take off when their material interests are damaged by politics.  

Years later, in 2021, I talk to Tanya, a chambermaid working at a rural hotel, who has an ‘additional role’ (actually her 9-5 job) teaching patriotic education to schoolchildren. Tanya reveals her growing anxiety about a looming war, reflecting a widespread belief that major conflict is inevitable. Her son Dima, a teenager interested in military history and online war games, is drawn to nationalist discourse but primarily for pragmatic reasons—he believes serving in the security sector is the safest way to secure a stable career and avoid conscription into dangerous combat roles.

Tanya’s teaching of patriotic education is not necessarily a deep ideological commitment but a way to earn a salary increment and get recognition in her community. She also has a genuine commitment to inculcating in her wards respect for the sacrifice of local people in Kaluga during occupations of their district in WWII and actual historical knowledge.  Similarly, Dima’s interest in military service is driven by economic incentives rather than an abiding or coherent nationalism.

Ethnography like this, in dialogue with more statistically generalizable methods, shows how the state embeds nationalism in everyday life: Through education and employment incentives, the government fosters militarized patriotism. In the febrile intersection of economic insecurity and nationalistic rhetoric, people do not necessarily believe state propaganda but use it pragmatically to secure a better future and pursue their own interests and values.

In late 2022, at the height of Russia’s first war mobilization, I visit Alla, an IT specialist in Moscow. Alla and her son Gosha live in fear of conscription: Gosha, 27, refuses to leave his apartment during daylight to avoid being forcibly recruited into the war. The war disrupts families and social networks: Alla receives phone calls from relatives in Ukraine who are under Russian bombardment while also staying in touch with her daughter in Rostov, who complains about pro-government propaganda in her school. Young people push back against nationalist rhetoric: Alla’s daughter openly challenges a teacher’s homophobic and anti-Western rhetoric, highlighting a generational divide in political attitudes somewhat at odds with the picture painted of an apolitical and pliant youth.

Scenarios like this were plentiful in my fieldwork. The role of fear and uncertainty in shaping political behaviour is real. Even in Moscow, where direct enforcement is weaker, paranoia spreads through rumour and word of mouth. But there is also dissent in small but meaningful ways: Younger Russians, particularly in urban centres, are more willing to challenge state narratives. These three vignettes set the stage for one of my central arguments: political engagement in Russia is neither monolithic nor dictated by state propaganda. Instead, it is deeply personal, negotiated through economic pressures, social anxieties, and strategic adaptation to state power.

Building on interactions and observations like this, in the rest of the book I draw on the inheritance of cultural theorists like Raymond Williams and political thinkers like Jacques Rancière. These diverse sources help me explore the idea that people’s political orientations are shaped by underlying emotional and social currents just as much as they are by explicit regime-fed ideology. In particular, ethnography forces me to confront the actual meaning of political ‘resentment’ and I link it as much to social disconnection as to geopolitical confrontation: Many Russians feel abandoned by both the state and economic system, but this doesn’t always translate into active resistance.

People long for a sense of social belonging, but not necessarily for the Soviet Union itself—rather, for the stability and solidarity they associate with the past. I agree with researchers like Marlene Laruelle that there is popular support for a new ‘state’ ideology that is in some specific ways ‘conservative’. However, I bring to the fore the socialist legacy of incorporation into what Antonio Gramsci called a ‘national-popular’ project of collective will that overcomes class divisions. Soviet experience provided a template for imagining a different kind way of overcoming Russia’s challenges and backwardness – sometimes the effect this had on people has been called ‘deprivatization’ and ‘dealientation’ in more than just an economic sense, or ‘encompassment’ of values in an anthropological meaning.  And this template of utopian ideas endures as a ‘feeling’ for past, in the present, and as a possible future, however monstrous or abortive one might view aspects of the Soviet experiment in reality.

I am not the first to question way that people imputing a sense of Soviet nostalgia to ordinary people invariably forecloses any critical potential in the term. Long ago, scholars like Olga Shevchenko detected a ‘longing for longing’ that people believe the Soviet utopian project sustained. Like them, I emphasize the persistence of a common feeling for potentiality – ‘something was possible and then it was no longer possible’. I build on the theories of respected Russian anthropologists like Alexei Yurchak and Sergei Oushakine who write about the experience of disjuncture and loss at the end of the Soviet project to get at the social trace of how that loss might be recuperated. People say and do all kinds of things that pull them apart, that set them on tracks of debilitating subordination to the state, to the ‘market’.

However, the book is not just about micro-scale interactions but links these to bigger social and political questions – like how effective the Russian state is. The fuzzy incoherence of state institutions is more than just about ‘institutional failure’, ‘endemic corruption’ or ‘state withdrawal’. Without ignoring the ineffectiveness and poor quality of state services in Russia, their overall incoherence means that bureaucrats must exit their designated roles. They more often ‘lean across the desk’ in a gesture that coproduces the state with the citizen because of the contradictions of the law and its enforcement.

At the same time, they reproduce a moral relationship with the citizen in what are absurd and impossible situations. In a number of case studies, I dramatize up close how different layers of the state and society come together almost surreptitiously and conspiratorially to fix things like broken heating networks or to circumvent the rent seeking of bureaucrats looking to impose fines on the most innocuous activities.

In place of models of Russian state-mindedness as overwhelmingly paternalist I find practices of accommodation, co-production of governance, and a shared feeling for stateness. This traces back to the socialist era’s attempts as citizen incorporation in the big projects of the state. It is a mistake to see society as a passive receptor of the actions of state institutions and bureaucratic organizations. Especially in the Russian case, these pitfalls lead to overestimating the state’s coercive power and underestimating both bureaucracy and community capacity. In an uneasy concert, they contest or reshape regime goals.

Once again, I claim little outright originality here. Essentially this is the project of scholars such as Olga Moliarenko who shows the possibility of examining durable forms of ‘shadow governance’. Like her, I try to build a bridge away from politically-determinist accounts. Building on the exceptionally detailed scholarship on the workings of Russian courts and on property rights by Kathryn Hendley and Timothy Frye, I propose a reflexive, moral set of reasonings and historical impetus for state workers-citizen interactions in making the incoherent state at least sometimes respond to citizens’ needs.

There are a number of other themes in the book, from nomadic car culture and garage communities to the cultivation of craft and domestic production as both leisure and a form of political subject making. Towards the end of the book I remark on the similarly of the networks, motivations and commitment of both pro- and anti-war activists in Russia. On that topic alone I think that the book represents an important intervention and a unique one.

A tough task in this book was to draw on the new historical writings – many of them by Russian scholars who remain in Russia even after 2022 –  about the ‘socialist’ period and connect them to lived experience in today’s Russia. This is why I think my book is timely in a sense not just that it’s an ethnography made partly during war: many scholars are currently focussed on efforts to get at the complexity, and even normality of life in the late USSR. How was it possible to maintain belief and desire in an atomizing space? What links people in this book is a sense of striving: purposive desire and imagination that remains and which can be intergenerationally communicated. As in recent work by Alexandrina Vanke, I have tried to work in the tradition of Raymond Williams’ writing about how even ordinary people shape the shared sense of the meaning of an epoch. I use the term ‘feeling for an absent presence’ to emphasize how suffering and loss can be generative of possibility and the imagination of a better society. The content of this haunting feeling is an urge to (re)connect in some vital yet communitarian way that goes beyond the individual.

This is thrown into sharp relief against the relentless precarity of existence in contemporary Russia and the course of destructive transformations of the last thirty years. Some Russian thinkers themselves have talked about their country as a metaphorical ‘weapons proving ground’ or a space of techno-neofeudalism that anticipates a global dystopian future.

I end the book by considering Russia as a crisis heterotopia – a time-space containing what look like the most dysfunctional elements of contemporary capitalism and the authoritarian tendencies of the modern state. But Russia as heterotopia is merely one world within our world. Current crises there are played out in no greater relative dramaturgical intensity than in other societies.

Russia’s crisis is both banal, taken for granted, but also delimited – we can trace its edges. Similarly, heterotopias contain dual meanings; they are mirrored. They reflect crisis but also give glimpses of resolution. The quite often specific examples of ordinary existence in Russia can be instructive. Provisioning, informal governance, everyday politics, activism and solidarity show us how the small (and often quiet) theories of everyday political economy link up into the form of small lifeboats for the people. DIY Lifeboats are more than just a striking image. As metaphor they encapsulate both flight and permanence; inconspicuously they wait on deck. But they require people to work together at the oars; an individual can hardly manage alone.

Can we trust surveys? We once again were shoved as unwilling passengers onto this merry-go-round with the publication of a report by Maria Snegovaya entitled The Reluctant Consensus. In it, Snegovaya tries to put to bed many of the criticism I and (much better qualified) others have made of the usefullness of survey polling in Russia. She paints a depressing picture, arguing that young people increasingly align with conformist and conservative views due to exposure to propaganda and the normal process of ageing. Further, she emphasizes the view that alignment with regime narratives due to cognitive dissonance is the norm. She also argues for a strong ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect in Russia.

A lot of the report reads like a defence of Western-based academics reliance on Levada – a ‘foreign agent’ sociological centre that nonetheless is able to carry out research in Russia.  I am not going to rehearse the objections I have made in detail and based on good evidence: that methodologically and philosophically, political surveys need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Snegovaya in the report emphasizes that all kinds of polls beyond Levada (though revealingly, she relies almost entirely on their data-visualization) show comparable results, are representative, have acceptable response rates, etc.

Once again, as I have argued before though, this defence is itself reveals more about the ecosystem of knowledge among favoured Western expertise on Russia than it does anything about Russian societal mood.  That such a report was commissioned by Atlantic Council shows the cracks in the edifice of the construction of knowledge about Russia: that the artefact of public opinion is based on a narrow and opaque machine to produce sentiment as raw and binary numbers (and one that’s largely acceptable to the Kremlin). That at no point should we step back and show reflexivity that numbers are only as good as the honesty of those collecting and collating them. That ‘opinion-as-choice’ (between war and peace) is an absurd starting point to talk about complex societies subject to the kind of coercion, monitoring and conformism (‘social desirability bias’) that Russia is.

Alexei Titkov of Manchester University put together a summary of the subsequent discussion Snegovaya’s report provoked. While Titkov raises philosophical objections to polling, he also defends their overall objectivity. “The difficulty is that the meaning of these useful and objective data is not as obvious as we would like […] Of course, you understand the wording of the questions. But what the answers mean, what their distributions mean – is better seen as a black box in which the owls are not what they seem.”

Titkov (in seven posts to date, in fact) goes on to faithfully reproduce the essence of the arguments of both sides (Snegovaya subsequently joined in online debate with Aleksei Miniailo – associated with Khroniki). In his fifth post on the topic, Titkov contrasts the nitty-gritty of the technical-methodological debate (which I’ve edited here):

“the coincidence of values (across difference surveys showing high war support) gives confidence in Snegovaya’s argument that ‘something’ was measured, and not just a random artifact. Checking the results of different surveys for ‘convergence/non-convergence’ is a useful procedure. But there is a flip side, which is revealed by the episode with the Khroniki data. If the results can be distorted due to the wording of questions and answers, this is a systematic error and it does not depend on the number of times a poll is carried out.” I.e. if a department of cops use speed detectors that are all badly calibrated, should we be reassured they are all showing similar readings? Miniailo essentially comes along and says he’s got a better calibrated detector and the drivers were not speeding after all.  

Titkov in his sixth post: ‘Snegovaya suggests dividing into segments: “Hawks” (20%-30%), “Loyalists + Uncertain” (40%-50%), “War Opponents” (20%-30%). The dispute, she says, is about how to interpret the intermediate group, whether to add it to the “hawks” (“Support = Loyalists/Uncertain + Hawks”). Snegovaya explains why she adds it: the middle group “tends to support everything Putin proposes.”

But “Loyalists” do not coincide with Putin in their opinions and desires, – argues Miniailo. According to him, those who answer “I trust Putin” simultaneously want, for the most part, peace with Ukraine, normal relations with the West, and a redistribution of spending from the military to social spending. In this sense, “support” is not obvious.

However, Snegovaya does not argue that the mood of the “loyalists” is the same; she herself writes in the report that, according to polls, citizens are more concerned with the economy and social issues. She explains that by “support” she means not opinions, but practice. The idea is that Putin’s policy “does not meet resistance.” Instead of protesting, citizens remain silent and adapt, thereby “giving Putin the green light.”

Miniailo’s answer to this is that the “green light” argument does not take into account that today’s Russia is a consolidated autocracy, in which citizens have no leverage to influence policy. Accusations should be made to the political establishment, not ordinary Russians.

The conversation reaches a point where the details of the polling technique fade into the background. Political and ethical arguments begin. All the demons of hell are ready to flock to the favourite delicacy of “collective guilt and responsibility.”’

It seems like Snegovaya has the upper hand here: even if in private people have diversity of opinions, in public there is either approval or silence, and no public contestation. Miniailo’s short answer is simple: that in an autocracy, citizens know they have no leverage to influence politics, thus, Snegovaya’s implication of passivity or connivance is has no political or sociological value.

But here we depart from Titkov’s useful summary and try to zoom out – which is what Rossen Djagalov does: “I understand that positions like theirs (the latest iteration of Levada Center’s Homo Sovieticus thesis, i.e. Russia’s underlying problem is not Putin or his regime, but the Russian people, of which Putin and that regime are just an accurate reflection) can be psychologically helpful in washing one’s hands “from that,” appearing pitilessly honest, harshly prophetic. They find eager audiences among Western media and academic publics these days, facilitating publications, earning positions, etc. But in as much as politics is about constructing majorities, working with and winning over people outside of your narrow elite, offering the population visions beyond “you are not only dumb and poor; you are also morally deficient,” they also signify a principled refusal to fight Putinism, a refusal that has long predated the full-scale invasion and that in fact paved the way to Putin’s rise to power.”

Djagalov in turn cites Kirill Medvedev’s Despair and Civism Telegram channel. To summarise, Medvedev sees observers like Snegovaya as ‘radical pessimists’, wedded to an ideological position where, for various reasons, they find it necessary to prove that Russians fully accept Putin’s actions. Medvedev indicates an upward trend in polarization, where Russian liberals in emigration radicalize themselves into a position where they adopt absurd sociological contortions to fit all political events in the last 30 years to a simple narrative that hardly differs in essence to that of the Russian elite: ‘the wrong, bone-headed sheeple’.

However, as Medvedev points out, while we would be foolish to subscribe to unfounded optimism or pride, actual Russian politics over the Putin 2.5 decades are equally a progressive history: of antiwar and prodemocratic actions in the 90s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Of protests against the rolling back of the social state, against ecological degradation, and in support of the fundamental dignity of the people living in the Russian Federation. This is essentially the witness I bear in my new book, focusing on how much this everyday politics in search of dignity has been intentionally obscured because so many observers choose to use faulty instruments, or subscribe to the group-think of what Medvedev calls here the ‘demotivitors’: an infantile liberal tradition that devalues a genuine civics-from-below tradition among fellow Russian citizens.

[Russian version of this recent post]

Война подрывает академические рутины. И это неплохо. Она дает нам возможность переосмыслить экстрактивные практики, отменить (преодолеть) методологическую и дисциплинарную замкнутость, деколонизировать эпистемологические основания наших знаний. Война заставляет нас столкнуться с проблематичностью того, как знание становятся публичным.

Вот мой список этих проблем, дополненный рядом примеров.

1. Экстрактивные практики производства знания увековечивают несправедливость. Среди прочего я имею в виду невидимость труда местных экспертов, исследователей и партнеров. Как обеспечить равное внимание знаниям, производимым на местах?

• Ученые сплошь и рядом возделывают собственные делянки в науке. Внимание публик и медиа к войне заставило некоторых коллег освободиться от дисциплинарной узости, преследующей академию. Как закрепить и усилить этот тренд? Расширяя эпистемологическую палитру профильных журналов и демократизируя доступ к ним авторов из негегемонных сред?  Развивая научный активизм и осваивая соседние журнальные площадки?  Включаясь во все новые  научные ассоциации и поддерживая гетерогенные связи?

• Деколонизация» начинается тогда, когда парадигмы, спроектированные в соответствии с западными дисциплинарными традициями и структурами, ставятся под вопрос изнутри ключевых институтов производства знания на местах. Как поддерживать критические разговоры, стимулирующие развитие и расширение  интерпретативных перспектив акторов?

• Что делать с доминированием публичных интеллектуалов во взаимодействии экспертных сообществ с медиа? Могут ли они приносить общественную пользу  или для начала должны повысить свою квалификацию , чтобы не повторять банальности и дискредитированные истины? На что опираться для улучшения взаимодействия исследователей, еще не утрAтивших связи с полем, с медиа?

Используя эти положения в качестве отправного пункта для дискуссии, я бы хотел сделать ряд пояснений по каждому из них.

Инклюзивное производство знания взамен экстрактивного:

Этические вызовы, с которыми сталкивается исследователь и эксперт по Восточной Европе, нарастают по мере нарастания трудностей со сбором эмпирических данных в России (и Украине). В статье для PostSoviet Affairs опубликованной в 2022 году, я говорил об усилении невидимости местных проводников, фиксеров и сборщиков данных. В качестве примера я приводил случай исследовательницы из Центральной Азии, изучающей ‘contentious politics’. Ее знания локального эксперта были извлечены Западными коллегами, но ее саму так и не упомянули в качестве равноправной участницы процесса производства знания. Я сам вынужден признавать, сколь соблазнительно было бы представить полевые находки  как свои собственные достижения, тогда как на деле они исходят от моих собеседников, которых не принято рассматривать в качестве коллег. И хотя лабораторные естественные науки печально известны своей иерархичностью и автократичностью, почему бы нам – поинтересуюсь я провокативно – не перенять у физиков и химиков практику расширения числа соавторов за счет включения в их число широкого круга участников? Почему бы не позаботиться о систематическом выявлении оснований и обеспечении видимости органического интеллектуализма?

Освобождение заложников собственных делянок:

Недавно я мониторил последние выпуски профильных журналов, относящихся к трем смежным предметным областям, чтобы отследить, как осмысляется и контекстуализируется интересующее меня понятие. Тут я получил лишнее подтверждение тому,  что все осознают, но никто не любит говорить: допустимо не знать о параллельном рассмотрении темы или концепции в соседних дисциплинарных полях, а стимулы к выходу в эти области отсутствуют. Относительная восприимчивость профильных журналов по Area Studies, как мне представляется, недостаточна для того, чтобы решить эту задачу. Может, стоит объединять усилия для распространения информации способами, превосходящими и преодолевающими модель дисциплинарного журнала ХХ века? Или же проблемой становятся институциональные барьеры встающие на пути сотрудничества, выходящего за границы кафедр и факультетов?

Деколонизация как эпистемологически открытая исследовательская практика:

Деколонизация знания отчасти связана с отрывом от собственных делянок. Только через налаживание диалога между разными интеллектуальными традициями и эпистемологическими позициями мы можем избежать старых ловушек, когда исследование завершается эссенциализацией. Есть хорошие примеры междисциплинарных дискуссий, которые дают старт этому обсуждению. Но как их оживить и распространить? Я думаю о двух свежих примерах.

Майрон Аронофф и Ян Кубик описали ловушку, в которую раз за разом попадают социальные исследователи, когда приписывают местному населению цивилизационную некомпетентность в силу своей либеральной разочарованности результатами 1990-х На постсоветском пространстве.  Есть и другие примеры. Гульназ Шарафутдинова и Сэмюэл Грин, развивающие сходную критику, используют междисциплинарные находки в области социальной психологии для оживления политической социологии. К чему нам стоит отнестись серьезно, так это к вернакулярному знанию, позволяющему заполнить пробелы в социальной науке, которая все еще остается слишком натуралистичной (исходит из того, что мы все в игре), слишком позитивистской (утверждает, что большие данные генерируются на основе сведений от дезагрегированных единиц) и слишком однонаправленной (верит, что теоретизирование ведется сверху вниз – из перспективы глобального, национального, регионального контекстов (Aronoff and Kubik 2013: 281).

Более последовательную фокусировку на вернакулярном знании можно найти в работе Дэвида Оста (2018) о полупериферийных инновациях. Ост утверждает, что деколонизация означает дрейф исследователей от открытия Востока для себя к переосмыслению его происхождения как источника идей. Его примерами восточно-европейских инноваций стали бренды автономии  (рабочее самоуправление «Солидарности») и переизобретения гражданского общества В. Гавелом, вернувшим «активное гражданское сопротивление» Западу. Потом Запад теоретически осмыслил это сопротивление, исходя из того, что Восток еще может порождать инновации, но никак не систематизировать и теоретически осмыслять их. По мнению Оста, этот ре-импорт оживил антигосударственный здравый смысл на Западе. Здесь должны быть упомянуты два инновационных движка, доставшихся нам от Востока и  доминирующих сегодня в социальной реальности. Это консервативный поворот рассерженных правых радикалов и полигоны для испытания неолиберальных технологий. Ост размышляет о том, что если радикальные правые в конце концов одержат большую победу на Западе, то это произойдет отчасти благодаря работе, идущей на полупериферии.

Перспективные компаративные исследования (в отличие от исследований сопоставительных) избегают нормативного позиционирования «эта (политическая система) похожа или не похожа на ту (превосходящую политическую систему)» (Schaffer 2021). Сравнение – это инструмент натурализовать наши собственные категории, не признавая этого. Категории, которые могут ввести нас в заблуждение относительно уместности объекта в другом контексте. Классический пример – то, как антропология в 1970-е годы поставила под сомнение всю концепцию «родства», на которую прежде опиралась в сравнении политических порядков. Оригинальным перспективным компаративистом был Макс Вебер, соположивший капитализм и религию.

Работа по выявлению стратегических сходств может помочь нам в дальнейшем продвижении. Ее отражение можно найти в использовании мною Делеза для объяснения детерриториализованного политического активизма в современной России. Кажется, что подход, ориентированный на работу с гетерогенностями, едва ли прояснит что-то в политической жизни авторитарной России. Однако, делая ставку на перспективизм, я доказываю обратное.  

Содействие коммуникативному обмену

Ученые часто слишком заняты для того, чтобы общаться с журналистами, или избегают контактов с медиа из страха, что те опозорят их, переврав слова и выдернув отдельные цитаты. Исходя из моего опыта,  журналисты по большей части открыты для обучения и подстройки под эксперта из академии. На деле они куда менее экстрактивны, чем сами ученые. Куда более проблематичной представляется мне возросшая  самоуверенность публичных интеллектуалов, высказывающихся по вопросам, где не признают своей зависимости от источников, на основе которых они делают свою заключения. Здесь у меня есть не конкретные предложения, но наблюдение:  освещение войны, по крайней мере то, что ведется по-русски, приобретает все более узко конфессиональные рамки.

Возьмем, к примеру, международную конференцию «Страна и мир» в Берлине в ноябре 2024 года. В ней участвует несколько передовых ученых, но основную массу составляют эксперты, промышляющие аналитикой в медиа.  Некоторые из них делают большое дело, выступая в качестве популяризаторов. Однако докладчики, имеющие научно обоснованные подходы  к изучению современной России, остаются в меньшинстве и едва ли будут услышаны. Можно ли лучше вообразить актуальное состояние взаимодействия между учеными и журналистами? Как полагаете? Популярное знание сегодня необходимо, как никогда. Но должна ли политическая наука о России быть популярной и востребованной в силу того, что рассказывает нам то, что мы хотим услышать (и уже много раз слышали)? Или она все же должна содействовать становлению у аудитории альтернативного социологического воображения, не гарантируя эпистемологического (идеологического, аффективного) комфорта?