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“a geopolitical disaster has unfolded. We didn’t get a say in it, but we have to do something” Eurasian Knot interview, Part II

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The second part of the interview. First part is blogged here. Transcript lightly edited for readability. Once again, a huge thanks to Sean and Rusana for the chance to talk about the book this is based on.

 Sean: Yeah. So let’s talk about these characters, other than Navalny and Putin, the protagonist and the antagonist of this drama. Let’s talk about your interlocutors. You treat your interlocutors as co-creators. You even revise the manuscript based on their comments. So can you tell us a bit more about them and their place in your book?

Jeremy: This book is full of very, very different people from different walks of life, and I, I hope that’s a strength of it. So I have people that I knew before I started doing ethnographic work who live in Kaluga region, people who work in factories, people who work just in the local authority, pensioners, students. And they gradually became part of my work. obviously the whole point of doing anthropology/ethnography is that you don’t hide the fact that you’re a researcher, although of course now I have to obscure things. You know, I can’t officially be doing research there. I would get into trouble for that, but there’s nothing to stop me talking to people, chatting to people and remembering what they’ve said to me. So there’s this kind of very difficult methodological dilemma going on, an ethical one as well. But largely, you know, I’m talking to people, some of whom I’ve known for 25 years.

They know that I’m gonna write something and that they may feature in that. And then there’s people in Moscow that are also part of this book in contrast to the previous book. and that was also important to kind of gauge the whether or not people in Moscow generally had different attitudes towards the war or not. And actually what I guess is surprising is that you find the same people in equal measures everywhere. You know, there isn’t this strong pro-war, bias in small, disadvantaged places where people think they’re gonna do well. There’s just as many “loyal xenophobes” in the upper middle class in Moscow, that are like, yeah, we like this war. We, you know, we’re gonna make Russia great again. You know, it’s a lot of stereotypes that we have to get over, get away from.

But when it comes to your question about including people In the research, this is what anthropologists are supposed to do. They’re supposed to have some kind of, reflexivity and feedback from the people that they are extracting resources from. I’m gaining things and I can never give back what I have got from these people. When it came to my previous book, I went around and gave people copies of this book and people translated it. and now with the internet and with AI, when I write something very often I say to people, look, you know, you told me about this ,Andrei ,working in a turbine factory making; you told me this right? I’ve written about it. I send them a link and I say, you tell me where, whether I was right or wrong. And sometimes they’ll say, “yeah, this is fine. sometimes they’ll say, that’s not what I meant. You got it completely wrong. You’re an idiot.” But that’s part and parcel.

And again, in this book, I have people that I wrote about before in depth, and I can almost do a kind of oral history of their life with them, because I’ve known them for 25 years or 15 years. And I could see how they’ve completely changed. And I document that in the book. People, especially people who have working biographies that I’m really familiar with. I talk a lot about their job prospects and how they feel about changing jobs and retraining and the opportunities. But also the risks that the war brings, particularly for blue collar workers, in these de-industrializing and now re-industrializing places. And I’m in a constant dialogue with many people about this. Now, of course, the war complicates that because some people are scared, rightly and wrongly about talking to me, whether it’s over Messenger apps or in social media, or even in person sometimes. So that complicates it. But still I’m trying my best to involve people in a dialogue. and that’s the best you can really hope for. And I would say that I’m probably the only person doing social research on Russia that is trying to do that.

Sean: since the war has come up repeatedly, let’s talk about that. ’cause that is one of the big questions that people who even pay attention to Russia are interested in. And you say that in response to the outbreak of the war, which you say was shocking to many people, and you have this concept of defensive consolidation. What does that mean?

Jeremy: It’s not a perfect formulation. I started with this very early in the war and I’ve adapted it and kind of tinkered with this term, but really it’s a response to what is very a Anglocentric imposition of the term “rally around the flag”.

So there’s all this work done on rally around the flag and how after 9/11 Americans rally around the flag and they strongly supported military intervention in Afghanistan. Iraq’s a little bit different as we know, but there’s this idea that there was a strong consensus, a rallying around the leader, massive increase in the popularity of Bush. And so, partly, rightly, partly wrongly, anglophone political scientists kind of impose this model on Russia because they see that Putin is super popular.

They also see that the annexation of Crimea led to a spike in his popularity and that his popularity supposedly is now also higher, as high as it’s ever been. Now, I think that’s misleading. I think that’s problematic on multiple levels, but defensive consolidation is my way of saying “Yeah, sure. When a country goes to war and it’s big war with a lot at stake, regardless of how people feel about the justifications and aims and the decision that the leader made, they fundamentally come to have to deal with that in their daily lives. But also they have to deal with that and thinking about the future of their society.”

And so defensive consolidation for me is a way that the war actually kind of makes people much more reflective on what they would like their society to look like in the long term, and indeed what is lacking and what potentialities are missing. and so here then defensive consolidation links back to history and all the lost opportunities of the last 37 years, back to the break up of the Soviet Union. And so it’s this longue durée: So it’s defensive because it prompts people to look to what they think the government could be doing and isn’t doing. And it’s consolidating also because they look to each other and they look to local sources of authority and leadership in this time of crisis as well. So it’s not rally around the flag. Because a positive sense of patriotism in the service of war is missing. That isn’t to say that people don’t become more patriotic, but as I’ve said, there’s a difference between nationalism and patriotism which goes back to George Orwell. There’s an essay by George Orwell on English patriotism where he, he tries to kind of, recover, recuperate patriotism in a non-aggressive way. I’m not saying that he’s totally successful, and I’m not saying that my concept is perfect, but it’s just this alternative to rally around the flag because fundamentally, I don’t believe, and the more I talk to people, the more I become, firmly convinced of this. I don’t believe that a majority support anything to do with the war. That is to say they don’t want to see more Russian people die. And they don’t want to see more Ukrainians die, actually.

I mean, I think we’re at the point now where most Russians would accept peace on terms short of the, the indictment of the leadership, the loss of territorial integrity of Russia as it was [after 2014], the loss of Crimea. They wouldn’t want that, but most Russians would accept a ceasefire. and that’s something, I mean, again, it, it’s a million miles away from I think what is still the dominant kind of paradigm, which is that Russians are enthusiastic for the war.

Sean: Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, they, they change all the time as we, as we know here too, Ana.

Rusana: I tell you this, I’m gonna borrow your term defensive consolidation for my work too, because I was doing field work during the war. So part of it was before the war, and then part of it was after the war started. And I also had a very acute sense of like, you know, I was trying to find like kind of a spectrum of opinion, even though like my work is not about the war at all.

But among the people I worked with, my interlocutors, I was looking for some sort of spectrum. And then I felt like after the war there was some sort of consolidation. You had to be, at least in the group of people I work with, you had to be pro-war, but not necessarily like you were saying because people felt like it was a good cause.

But more so in the face of this enemy, you kinda had to unite despite your sort of smaller differences in opinion, you had to unite because there is this kind of external threat.

Jeremy: And it could be both. It’s flexible. It’s what Sara Ahmed calls a sweaty concept. It’s emotional and it’s flexible, right? It’s, it, you could be pro-war and defensively consolidate. And I also document that in the book. You know, I know plenty of people that, again, they, they don’t like the war. They don’t want, they didn’t want the war, but it’s happened. And, you know, we’ve gotta do something to support Russian soldiers because actually they’re also the victims in the eyes of some of my interlocutors, they’re not seen as aggressors. They’re seen that way often especially if they’re mobilized and not volunteers. There’s very little sympathy and empathy for volunteers who are seen as kind of making a mercantile decision.

But there also is defensive consolidation around people adamantly opposed to Putinism and who who’ve been reinvigorated in a defensively consolidating way. They’re like, okay, this actually makes it even more important to think about making the future better for our country when peace comes and when there is a transition. And then there’s people in the middle,who again, it’s kind of trying to get away from this idea that they’re apolitical. So again, people much more willing to volunteer to get involved with things like ecoactivism. That’s also an example of defensive consolidation. Like we have to do something to make things better for our country because our country is in crisis and a disaster, a geopolitical disaster has unfolded. We didn’t get a say in it, but we have to do something.

Creeping Russian mobilization meets growing public knowledge of the horrors of war

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2022’s 9th May Parade and Immortal Regiment procession just outside Moscow.

Ilya Matveev and I were invited to talk about Russian responses to the invasion by Russia of Ukraine. We decided to use our six minutes of this experimental podcast platform ‘conversation six’ to talk more about Defensive consolidation. I use this phrase (here’s another take on it) to characterize the majority reaction to the war at home in Russia and here are my notes for the talk:

Why it’s still not a rally

There a low level of active patriotic responses to war (beyond symbolic Zedtivism), a lack of declaration, or effective framing, of war as an ‘attack on us’ – this is not what most people are ready to internalize, despite what the media says. Indeed, there’s a lack of unconditional belief in Russian state media – it’s gone too far in the direction of open propaganda and post-truth that there are signs people’s trust in it is going down. Added to that there are realities that are hard to ignore: Ukraine as an obviously weaker state than Russia – so why is it a threat? Culturally, politically, socially it really was seen (rightly or wrongly) as a ‘brotherly nation’. Zelenskyy as a puppet and ‘ukrofascists’ of course have some traction, but this is all pretty superficial because it has low salience to most people. And the absence of a real casus belli means that overall there’s far too much cognitive dissonance around for a majority, or even a big minority, to ‘rally’.

So, defensive consolidation is this highly ambiguous and contingent set of responses – it includes finding excuses to justify to oneself what’s happening, but which are logically very tenuous and even self-contradictory. To me what is noticeable among a lot of anti-Putinists is a kind of sunk cost fallacy – “Putin was wrong, but now we’ve started we see the world is against us, but precisely because of that we must go on regardless to the bitter end, because to lose will mean a broader disaster”. And even this is not necessarily an immediate geopolitical way of thinking (i.e. about NATO as threat) but tied to longstanding feelings of being a periphery and ‘other’ of the West.

Why is it consolidating? Because it involves a cleaving to forms of immediate authority but I don’t think that’s sustainable over time. So for example, people ask their village ‘elder’ what to do and he answers – collect diapers to send to IDPs. People do this, but already a wave of solidarity is passing for refugees. We see this at every level – ‘what can I do’? People genuinely of course have a desire as part of a socius to do something, but as Ilya says in the talk, the logic of Putin’s Russia is demobilization because of fear of any independent action and civicness. And in fact, when people ‘cleave’ they often find zero leadership and zero answers – authority is so very hollow in Russia.

So, will defensive consolidation break down and under what conditions? The consolidation will partly morph into new and emerging forms of microcivicness, because there is this huge pent up desire to improve Russia. Ironically, the war shows this more clearly than ever. People know they live in a country that lacks many of the goods others, including Ukrainians, take for granted or are willing to strive for. This is not sustainable. Right now I am tracking individuals and micro-associations that search for new forms of activism – from environmentalism to covert anti-war actions. Could this turn into a coalescence of diverse forms of social mobilization with time? Maybe not. How will Russia change? Probably in the least predictable way – in the first Chechen war, people could not have predicted Soldiers’ mothers at the forefront of resistance and protest. Now, who knows what the future catalyst would be to push elites to end the war? Could it be ethnic minority religious groups? Could it be militant unpaid workers? Could it be a consumers’ protest against rising prices?

Creeping mobilization meets hard limits in Russian state capacity

Some brilliant investigative journalism from BBC Russian Service and others has laid bare that the invasion was even more poorly planned and executed than we previously thought. Many soldiers were barely ‘led’ at all (in fact misled). And there are striking details in this long piece, from a lack of night vision equipment to descriptions of soldiers fending for themselves. Later the piece gives a lot of detail about the growing resistance among soldiers to continuing military contracts. Elsewhere the same author has given a good explanation of the war crimes in Bucha as stemming from the same problems of leaderless, drunk, desperate and brutalized-brutalizing troops.  Add into the mix doubts about whether the state will actually honour payments to wounded and provide even basic medical treatment beyond emergency care (which is woefully inadequate anyway). My favourite topics of stunted state capacity and the incoherence of governance meet up in this shitshow of a war. Any creeping ‘mobilization’ will be similarly incoherent – enlistment officers face even more obstacles than before because no one really wants to die for Putin (illustrated well in the BBC piece). Urgency too is always the enemy of this state’s machine. You screw up and the boss asks for it ‘yesterday’, even though he didn’t give you the tools to get it done in the first place. As with so much else, we end up with something worse than the previous improvised solution. It seems clear now that the Great Russian Army was an ‘improvised’ solution to the problem of force projection in a massively corrupt and cronyism-ridden Military Industrial Complex. We had a Potemkin village of an army, now with creeping mobilization we will get something ragtag that doesn’t even resemble a modern army. Like the Russian meme about IT projects – instead of good planning, testing and development, in Russia it’s ‘slap shit together and deploy’. We could call this the revenge of a century of ‘avral’ (rushing production targets).

Putin clearly does not want to declare a state of war – it brings too many uncertainties, and even personal risks to him. He doesn’t like that. His whole career has been about making short term, usually conservative decisions to avoid immediate risks, but which bring a huge long-term tail risk. Michael Kofman just wrote about how mobilization is a complex topic; although he emphasizes high manpower capacities on paper, I would emphasize that the state lacks capacity, political will, and actual popular support to translate that into reality.

Defensive Consolidation in Russia – not ‘Rally around the Flag’

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Yesterday we did a recorded talk with colleagues at Indiana University about what’s happening and likely to happen in Russia [will add a link when I have it]. We focused on these topics: ‘rally round the flag’ effect, pocketbook issues [‘bread and butter’, we say in UK English], and protest mobilization.

My interests are in the immediate responses to war among Russian people who mainly consume state-controlled media.

I characterized the response so far as

  1. ‘disbelief/denial’,
  2. different coping mechanisms with cognitive dissonance – mainly wishful or magical thinking,
  3. defensive consolidation. I will focus on the last one, which derives from the first two as both cognitive labour and practical action.

I will first mention ‘denial’. Someone reminded me of Stanley Cohen’s work on States of Denial, and I do think it’s relevant:

“denial is that peculiar mental state in which a fact or idea is simultaneously known and not-known. Known enough to know that further knowledge will be too difficult, and so must be avoided. He applies this to the micro problems of daily life (abusive relationships, alcoholism and addictions, etc.) and the macro problems of societies and large-scale atrocities, though the latter appropriately takes up the bulk of his focus and the book. It’s impossible to avoid, though, seeing the ways in which even the macro discussions apply to the micro.”

He explores the denial paradox at some length: in small doses denial allows us to have enough optimism to function in our daily lives. In large doses or about destructive enough problems, at any scale, denial kills. How to have enough denial to be in mental health while not so much denial as to contribute to mass atrocities and suffering is a conundrum he finds essentially unanswerable, suggesting that the answer is being aware of this dilemma.

If many Russians are still grappling with the idea of invasion, mass Ukrainian casualties, mass Russian military casualties, for those with more awareness or more instinctive grasp of the murderous capacities of their own state, the response is defensive consolidation. I’m sure there’s a better term, but that’s what I had in the moment. Maybe ‘involutionary consolidation?’ might be better – calling back to work by Michael Burawoy on Russia in the 90s.

I don’t call this ‘rally round the flag’ because it is not usually connected to expressions of patriotism, or nationalism, or enthusiasm for the campaign or for the Russian government. And partly the government are to blame, as they insist on a highly restrained media coverage and insist on calling it a ‘military operation’. Whether this will change when Russia goes to a war footing without a ‘war’, remains to be seen. And that’s my main point – ‘what war?’ people are still telling me.

The phrase ‘truth is on our side’ is used by a few in a kind of magical reactive desperation and is not said with any sense that the speaker believes in the ‘truth’ of a botched military campaign that even now could fail.

People say things like ‘we made our choice, we will accept the consequences. If people want to leave, let them. Maybe after all there will be opportunities for people like in the end of the 90s? Things couldn’t get any worse really, to be honest. The main thing is to hunker down until the spring. We’ll wait and see. Time will tell.’

Beyond the clichés, there are also powerful feelings of resentment that serve as a kind of social – not political – glue. I posted a long twitter thread of quotes from one person I know well yesterday and it got a lot of people responding that it reminded them of US responses to MAGA populism. Many were disturbed by it. [I’ll append it to the end of this post]

I think these are misreadings. What is dangerous about the current situation is that any actions from the West can be easily leveraged by Putin to stoke well-founded resentment based on a deep seated feeling of exclusion. Exclusion from the ‘fruits’ of change since 1991 in Russia. Exclusion from politics domestically (in that sense I do make a concession to populist readings). Exclusion in geopolitical terms (however understood, and however distorted). Note that I resist the interpretation that every Russian is a neo-imperial chauvinist.

The speaker talks semi-ironically about the myth of two Russias – the intelligentsia/elite and the ‘deep people’. But the understanding of ‘social racism’ is clearly expressed, and a long standing topic of this blog. You don’t have to call it by these words. There is also recognition that the Ukrainian national project since 2014 actually bore fruit. There is the savvy perception that any opposition mobilization in Russia has been very class based and ‘political’ in a way that excludes coalescence (a term I was much criticised for contemplating in the past).

Then there is the turn to ‘we will suffer and endure’, a cliché of woe-litany that many anthropologists have talked about. It isn’t necessarily reflective of reality, but it is an important performative, and socially-sticky trope. The point is that significant socio-economic suffering might well transform such discourse into a narrative that ‘consolidates’ the status quo – politically. So that’s why I used the term defensive consolidation. And I don’t think this is necessarily anything to do with propaganda, or even historical contexts. It’s just as valid an interpretation of ‘everyday politics’ as the one I have been making for a while on this blog about people’s views of Russia as an ‘incoherent state’ that cannot meet many of their material, cultural, social or libidinal needs. In fact, it correlates with that view. You will also detect a fateful resignation – even embracing of crisis, of the status of pariah, which, I’m afraid to say, comes through strongly among many people I talk to, even people who have more to lose than my informant. Some of this can be attributed to the genuine stagnation of Russian society since, at least 2011. It turns on its head the cliché about Russians’ conservative aversion to crisis.

It is ironic that just as we get cut off from reliable sources of information about what Russian people think, I more than ever encounter disbelief, and indeed outright hostility to what I write. All I can say is that if you know my work, you know I’ve got contacts (now 23 years plus) with people that trust me and are pretty open about what they say to me. Of course, there is ‘cautiousness’ now. Some of my people work for the state. But they’re no fools. We have ways to communicate. And people WANT to talk more than ever before with people ‘over there’.

András Tóth-Czifra responded to my thread and said this: Zubarevich said yesterday that the sanctions will likely hit the middle class harder. Do you think that considering these sentiments it’ll limit the extent to which the vocal anti-war constituency can grow?

I think the fact that middle-class people will be more hurt is significant. But from what we know at the moment all Russians will be enormously impacted by sanctions. The point is that this collective punishment both binds Russians in defensive consolidation. And reifies myths of ‘narod’ [note the scare quotes] v rest, Russian v. the West. So far I would not say this means ‘loyalty’ over ‘voice’ or ‘exit’, it means attending to one’s most pressing local concerns. There are both centrifugal and centripetal pressures. Which has more energy?

Today I had time and the wherewithal to ring around Russian friends and tell them to prepare for the worst. I told one person to buy up his medicine for a chronic illness. His response: ‘it’s all ok’. For my best friend it means going to his garage and cleaning a carburettor for his motorcycle. ‘In the summer I’ll give you a ride’, he ends.

  1. A response from # workingclass Russia: “Europe does not want to have anything in common in Russia except money. Never did. That’s why it can only ‘speak to us’ with the language of sanctions. They won’t hurt Putin and his cronies. What’s the point?
  • “Social racism – is the biggest problem in Russia (its intelligentsia) and in European society. Europe was ready to speak only with the intelligentsia, which showed and could simulate Europeanized public opinion. It was such a showcase.
  • “At the same time, the “deep Russian” is generally unknown to Europe – it was only visible in the fights of football fans. And Europe refused to look for words and understanding of ALL of Russia, and not just Lev Ponamorev, Parkhomenko or Albats.
  • “At the same time, Europe cynically accepted money from the oligarchs and Britain in the first place. The oligarchs fueled the economy of Europe by stealing money from the “deep people”. In fact, it was a double consensus of exploitation – first Russian oligarchs,
  • “and then through them European businesses, etc. Silent consensus. And so the leader found the ressentiment of the “deep people” in relation to everything European. And secondly, exactly the same “social racism” was inside Russia – the middle class, intellectuals elites
  • “as in the days of serfdom, they despise and do not want to deal with the “deep the people.” Not Navalny, no one was looking for a language and ways of speaking with this huge Russia. Everyone considered them obviously cattle and lost beggars. “Another Nation”
  • “In this sense, it was more convenient in Moscow to have real “strangers” with a foreign language and customs in hard city work in housing and communal services and at a construction site than an unstable drinking peasant from the Vladimir outback.
  • “The main difference between the protests and the unity in Ukraine (during Maidan 2014) was that the elites and intellectuals found an ideology, language and ways of communication with their “deep people” – a real national unity.
  • “And in Russia – the war has led to the fact that the split has become deep and finalsome are waiting for the victories of Russian weapons, others are buying up foreign currency and looking for Schengen visas. And even the anti-war movement has not found real mass support
  • “the anti-war movement lacks mass support so far, since it is made according to the patterns of dissident intellectual actions – there is nothing for the people. There is no understanding of it, no intelligentsia, as it turned out, knows the country in which they live.
  • “Everyone was thinking about how to “be European” in a wild country…. I talked with my parents – “we’ll live on buckwheat, we don’t need a foreign food” (they really are on dacha food, and things are at a minimum – dad wore my leftover military camouflage )
  • “everyone is watching and discussing the news, the men are looking at the sky – they are looking for strategic fighters and bombers – they seem to have flown by. The lower class of the older generation in the regions easily enters a state of military mobilization
  • “…and apparently their children from the same class will also enter this state of expectation – there is an external enemy, we have a war, we are waiting for the nukes (waiting!) – we are ready to endure to the last. These are general sentiments.
  • “But many ordinary people have relatives and friends abroad. They are personally writing that a wave of hatred has begun at the everyday level (Putin did not invent it), at the level of everyday communication with children, and so on.
  • “This is not the intelligentsia – but workers, small entrepreneurs, who live there. And personal letters – to relatives and friends to my mother. Everyone immediately tells about it and says – “Europeans have always secretly hated us, and now it manifested itself right away..
  • “I agreed today to go plant vegis in spring to help my father with the dacha. I had never participated since the 90s – he did it himself. Here’s your f**king anthropology for you. But you knew that already.” /ends

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