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’.