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

Is Russian society ready for a ceasefire?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economic imperatives

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

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

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

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

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

Elite opinion on ceasefire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing Everyday Russian Politics: 1. Entangled Activism and Agonism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A voluntary civic heritage protection group in Nizhny Novgorod

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unmaking the Ukrainian working class Part III

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The location of the future city of Kryvyi Rih on a 1769 map

This is the final post about Denys Gorbach’s new book on Ukraine: The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class. The first post is here. The second post is here.

In the previous post I focussed on how Gorbach treats populism as merely a ‘morbid symptom’ and distracting to the purpose of getting into the vibrant ‘everyday politics’ of Ukrainian cities. Gorbach early in the book shifts to ‘ordinary’ political actions and talk of Ukrainians as codetermining the scope and contours of ‘big’ politics. Using the example of the German tradition of microhistory allows Gorbach to stake a claim for the very ‘apolitical’ withdrawal from the public sphere and ‘familism’ in Ukraine and Russia as deeply political phenomena because they are a collectively shared and reflected upon. Gorbach doesn’t go quite that far here, but we can add that the often bemoaned ‘privatism’ is often misunderstood. Withdrawal provides space and time for alternative forms of organization and world-making to emerge – something I expand on in my book.

The summary of ‘moral economy’ is rather perfunctory here, although in a footnote Gorbach provides the nugget that after Tilly and Thompson, the ‘moral economy’ frame shows that claims-making from below implies the recognition by elite actors of the legitimacy of non-market-based rights. Furthermore claims are inherently political in terms of recognition – as when, for example, property laws are enforced or not enforced (e.g. as forms of recognition of customary rights among peasants and working-class folk). Wartime nationalization – even when it tends to prebendalism is also genuinely popular for the same reasons.

Gorbach gives more room to the breadth of ‘informality’ as applied to Post-Soviet politics – from Hale’s patronalism, to Matveev’s bureaucratic neopatrimonialism developing into Bonapartism. Here, Gorbach criticizes the application of Weberianism to the Ukrainian state, which can only result in seeing it as a ‘backwards’ essentialized ‘uncivilized’ polity and, indeed, plays into views that bifurcate into ‘good Ukrainian’ values (of and emanating from the West), and Bad Soviet values in the East. This will be a major target of Gorbach’s work and one that won him numerous enemies among established mainstream liberal scholars embedded in the West for whom it is beneficial to maintain this fiction.

Like in my own work, however, Gorbach insists that informality in the microscale of people’s lives is just as important as patrimonialism. This is because the informal pacts and agreements, including the invisible ones like turning a blind eye to informal employment, represent a key political arrangement of life in contemporary Russia and Ukraine. These include ‘paternalism’, a key referent of Gorbach’s book. His overview is helpful in thinking of paternalism, clientelism and patrimonialism as all nested concepts (Gorbach credits me with coining informal ‘imbrication’ but others have found this term a bit pretentious). Forms of informal obligations comprise an overall mutualist web. Importantly there are coercive, exploitative but also solidaristic, empathetic and – as I expand in my book – fictive kinship relations which may be more or less enduring and binding. As Gorbach mentions – this perspective offers a sharp critique of rational actor/methodological individualist economy and political science approaches.

Chapter Two asks: Why does awareness of inequalities and class domination not prompt workers to contest this through collective political action in Ukraine? One answer is the informal alliances of old and new elites, and at first the Ukrainian nationalist project was weak. Here we have a great breakdown on the legitimation of the ‘fatal civilizational divide’:

The failure of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism to muster its case outside its Western heartland led to its radicalization as documented by Andrew Wilson. The heterogeneous Ukrainian elites trod a fine line and their attempts to achieve social peace contributed to ongoing proverbial state weakness. Symbolic capital of the ‘national democrats’ competed with the ‘clanlike’ structural capital of the industrial cluster elites. I’m not going into detail about this part of the book, but it represents a welcome corrective to the usual blinders that pass as political history on 1990s Ukraine, notwithstanding the more impartial work done by scholars like Wilson and D’Anieri. Shout out to the use of the Marx’s ‘potatoes in a sack’ metaphor to describe the fragmented-yet-tied bloc of budget workers and city-making enterprises. What follows is a good account of the Orange Revolution, coming on the back of the rise of the resources of the ‘second-rank bourgeoisie…which grew strong enough to dare challenge the “closed access order” controlled by oligarchs’.

Gorbach ends this chapter by showing how political changes reflected economic ones – the failure of Euromaidan was mirrored by the downgrading of the Ukrainian economy from higher value chains to commodity export.

In the next chapter Gorbach masterfully recounts the actual colonial history of the steppe country around his city. In Chapter 4 he expertly uses the example of mass transit to illustrate the maintenance of moral economic regimes and the unwilling acquiescence by elites to the expectations of ordinary people. This chapter is about both the ‘privatization’ of minibuses but also the ‘resovietization’ of residual ‘public’ transit as a social good. Later Gorbach also identified three property regimes around housing: personal property where state intrusion is seen as illegitimate; private property where capital accumulation is seen as legitimate (here drawing on C. Humphrey’s work); and public property whose poor state is a result of normalized austerity. Finally, Gorbach talks about the moral economy of heating provision.

In chapter 5 – on Informality and the Workplace, Gorbach argues that instead of succumbing to anomie, Ukrainian workers implicitly gravitate towards a residual social project that owes a lot to Stalinist modernity, built upon the ultimate Fordist principles of enterprises as nodes of civilization. If this is so, the shopfloor should be a privileged fieldsite, likely to shed light on non-verbalized shared assumptions about hierarchy and social order. Of course researchers like me bemoan our marginalization as our colleagues focus on much more ‘sexy’ projects. Gorbach continues this focus in the follow chapter 6 on Paternalism in Decay. “Unable to accomplish the real subsumption of the labour process, the enterprises remain stuck in an extensive mode of economic development instead of a Toyota-like intensive mode based on technical innovations. However, such a shift would entail risks, costs and disruptions that are unacceptable to new enterprise owners. Instead of launching classic neoliberal managerial transformations, they chose to tacitly introduce new power configurations that ensured a residual paternalist consent, an undisturbed production process on the old technological and material basis, and the extremely low costs of capital upkeep. These low costs allow owners to preserve the machinery of the social wage and thereby help to protect their property rights in the case of a politico-corporate conflict.”

In Chapter 7, Gorbach looks at politicized embeddedness and disembeddedness in two profoundly different, yet quite typical business outfits in the post-Soviet city. “For Charles Tilly (2007: 78), authoritarian patronage pyramids are an important medium through which subaltern groups can be involved in macro-level political processes and discussions. This is one of the possible developments for the neo-Fordist factory regime. However, the atomized nature of these configurations in Kryvyi Rih, which remain more individualist than classic patronage politics, lead to a different kind of politicization: passive resentment, politicization of identities or striving for individual distinction.”

In Chapter 8, Gorbach shifts to a focus on everyday politics beyond the world of work, looking at strategies of self-valorization via class distinction. Here, he references Andrew Sayer, Bev Skeggs, Don Kalb, and of course Olga Shevchenko and Oleg Kharkhordin.

Chapter 9 maps Lay Virtues on the National Political Landscape. While in places like France and Britain, working classes have (more or less successfully) made use of ‘national(ist)’ or indigenous capitals to promote their marginal social position, things in Ukraine are different because of the valorization of particularized Ukrainianness after 2014 (and before).

At the end of this chapter, Gorbach makes the comparison of ‘internal’ orientalization, like that observed in Turkey and elsewhere.

In the final empirical chapter 10, Gorbach applies the findings of Nina Eliasoph’s well known ‘avoidance of politics’ work to the Ukraine context. To be ‘authentic’ in lay discourse is to devalue what is seen as ‘ideological’ as dishonest. It’s ok to be a ‘volunteer’, but it’s important to mask one’s politics. There is ‘frontstage’ avoidance of ‘politics’. There are also ‘cynics’ who have strong and informed opinions but who cultivate disengagement. All of these positions are recognizable in postsocialist contexts. As in Don Kalb’s pioneering work, this reasoning produces the ‘neo-nationalist’ outlook well-known in other contexts.

What follows is a useful discussion of the Zelenskyi phenomenon explained as a the outcome of this structural situation in Ukrainian lay politics. Gorbach is refreshingly balanced, not willing to preach to the choir, as other treatments of the ‘Zelensky effect’ have.

Subsequently, Zelensky’s channeling of the desires for ‘technopopulism’ and ‘valence populism’ (rejecting consistent ideologies in favour of vague overtures to morality, transparency, etc), sustained him nationally up the invasion in 2022, after which Zelensky successfully transitioned as a war leader.

In the last twenty or so pages, Gorbach concludes with a discussion of the ‘incomplete’ hegemonic rule in Ukraine. This is the same case as in Russia – but there we have the unambiguous move towards Bonapartism. What remains in Ukraine is the inability of national elites to claim moral leadership and the growing distance between subalterns and the institutions of representative democracy. So far, so Gramsci. But beyond that framework, Gorbach makes space for looking via the lens of Uneven and Combined Development.

And on wartime mobilization, Gorbach asks:

Unmaking the Ukrainian working class Part II

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This is the second post about Denys Gorbach’s new book on Ukraine: The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class. The first post is here.

In the period between writing the first post and this one, Michael Burawoy has died. Burawoy was one of the formative influences on both Gorbach and me. Here’s a short excursus on how he influenced our approaches to writing a novel (in the Ukraine and Russia contexts) form of political-economy-ethnography. I hadn’t intended to focus on Burawoy (because there’s so much else of interest in the book), but here goes.

Both Gorbach and I try to synthesise our cases from what Gorbach calls ‘participant truth’ and ‘sociological truth’ – and here he cites Burawoy’s 2017 piece. Burawoy there argues that ethnography needs to be liberated from the naïve empiricism that still plagues anthropology and sociology and which is continuously re-invented by scholars unwilling (or afraid) to confront the political implications of their own work. Burawoy uses this opportunity to make the case again for bringing structure and comparison to any micro-level work. Only by linking specific ethnography cases to the broader structural constraints (oligarchic capitalism in Ukraine/authoritarian neoliberalism in Russia) can research do justice to the ‘common sense’ of interlocutors. This is what Gorbach and I attempt. The social ‘facts’ of cases do not speak for themselves. And this, via Bourdieu, is a point Burawoy hammers home in his robust writing. At the risk of overshadowing the discussion, it’s worth citing Burawoy further (here reviewing contemporary ethnography of Wisconsin):

While there’s much more to say about Burawoy’s influence, I want to turn to Gorbach’s very extensive discussion of politics in his second chapter (and the empirics of Chapter Nine). As I wrote previously, Gorbach makes a pitch for those interested in Ukraine to take more seriously ‘everyday politics’ and ‘moral economies’. Having said that, he starts off with a welcome ‘intervention’ – one highly topical to the ascent of Trump 2.0: to paraphrase – to take populism seriously we need to move beyond discourse analysis (MAGA, get rid of woke, etc), and use empirical tools like ethnography to uncover the material basis for populists’… popularity. I’ve mentioned in this blog many times Arlie Russell Hochschild who wrote two books on the Tea Party and Trumpism, but it’s indicative of the timidity of indigenous US political sociology/anthro that this barely scratches the surface and does not qualify as ethnography in way that Gorbach’s or my work does. Gorbach has lived and worked with his interlocutors, as have I. One can barely imagine this possibility in the class-fractious society of the USA. Yes there are some exceptions, but they still amount to general handwringing, or poverty porn. The truth is, an intersectional yet working-class ethnography is just not going to be interesting to the scions of Anthro in the US who get to do PhDs by virtue of precisely that privilege that would make it unthinkable for them to do the necessary work. (For a good general anthro account of Trumpism, see Gusterson who rightly says it ain’t all about class, yet…. ‘Trump’s victory confronts US anthropology with an incompleteness in the project of repatriated anthropology. While anthropologists of the United States have been busy studying scientists and financial traders at one end of the social scale and crack dealers and immigrant communities at the other, we have not had so much to say about the middle ground, the people who supported Trump—people we tend not to like.’ Shout out here to someone who HAS done this work, only in the UK context: Hilary Pilkington. Shout out to, to Christine Walley

Gorbach reminds readers that the best work on postsocialist populism emphasizes its shadow relationship to democracy, avoiding the normative stance that opposes democracy and populism and which is so frequently deployed to show how ‘defective’ Eastern Europe is by mainstream observers. Gorbach, following the work of Tarragoni and Canovan, argues that populism, while expressing a crisis of representative liberal democracy, is not a ‘thin ideology, but contains a radical democratic critique of representative government. But what’s missing is what Gorbach and others aim to provide – the material basis of populism’s rise which ‘aspires to distribute income and, nourishing illusions about the function of the state, is politically disorganized (Boito 2019: 135.)’. In an abrupt turnaround though, Gorbach’s innovation is to relegate populism as just a Gramscian ‘morbid symptom’ of the crisis of capitalism. Parapolitical processes that themselves are generative of populist ‘supply’ are more important to look at and these are perfectly adequately grasped using the long-standing terms ‘moral economy’ and ‘everyday politics’. The ‘crisis of representation’ that populism reflects is then doubled in scholarship: mainstream liberal political science has no tools with which to move towards a diagnosis of the disease (it ignores those that Gorbach offers here), instead offering ‘game theory’ or the pseudoscience that is ‘mass’ social psychology and which includes bizarre claims about whole ‘national groups’ on the basis of dubious experiments conducted on American undergraduates which cannot be replicated and remain ‘WEIRD’.

Gorbach returns to his problematizing of ‘populism’ in the empirical chapter on language politics in Ukraine. There’s an enlightening discussion of how pro-Ukrainian language narratives align with upwardly mobile citizens after Maidan, how the far right may find allies in LGBT organizations in opposing ‘vatniks’. A ‘thin patriotic identity’ (before 2022) emerges that papers over deep ideological differences among liberals and nationalists (p. 224). Uniquely in Ukraine, language affiliation plus civic involvement then serves as a way of denying (or exiting) a stigmatized working-class identity. But, as Gorbach continues:

At the end of the same chapter, Gorbach shows how ‘East Slavic’ Nationalism acts no less powerfully (and does not necessarily conflict with) the ‘ethnic’ Ukrainian model. Indeed, in a place like Kryvyi Rih (recall, Zelensky is from this city), Gorbach uncovers an inversion of the ‘vatnik’ theme – ‘stupid nationalists’ and ‘civilized Soviet-type people’.

After a long discussion of the mayorship of O. Vilkul who would later become a key figure that confounds stereotypes about the political views of Eastern Ukrainians, Gorbach concludes this section:

However, ‘One must take seriously the words of many adherents of both camps when they say they are not ethnic Ukrainian or Russian nationalists. The root of the political cleavage is the perceived moral difference between the self and the other rather than ethnic animosity.’ And in a subsequent final post about this book we will return to that topic of moral economy how it expresses everyday politics.

Unmaking the Ukrainian working class, Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postsocialism

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

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Is Russian society ready for a ceasefire?

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

Introducing Everyday Russian Politics: 1. Entangled Activism and Agonism

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

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

Unmaking the Ukrainian working class Part III

Unmaking the Ukrainian working class Part II

Unmaking the Ukrainian working class, Part I