The loneliness of the long-distance war supporter in Russia

8 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The loneliness of the true believer (in war)

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

***

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

***

rubble and ice-cream – the quintessence of Moscow summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red and White doorway with obligatory ad for workers

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

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

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

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

Comfort-class authoritarianism, not ideology, supports the status quo in Russia

3 Replies
A comfort class ‘uber’ type taxi in central Moscow, with a backdrop of boulevard bars and eateries.

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%.

Do economic transformations respond to the interests of the majority or not? Red: no; Blue, yes.

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.

The power of everyday politics in Russia: feeling for an absent presence

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From happiness to adaptation

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

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

Is Russian society ready for a ceasefire?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economic imperatives

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

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

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

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

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

Elite opinion on ceasefire

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 Reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing Everyday Russian Politics: 1. Entangled Activism and Agonism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Replies
A voluntary civic heritage protection group in Nizhny Novgorod

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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