Tag Archives: mobilization

A Savage Sorting: spread-sheet autocracy meets insurgent citizenship

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A park in Russia with various prohibitions

Summary: Larger-scale mobilization after the Presidential elections will not break a so-called social contract because informal forms of avoidance and negotiation of directives from the centre still trump state capacity.

This post is a much-shortened version of this article written for Ridl and published a few days ago.

Analysis of the war does not pay enough attention to the elective affinity between informal institutions and many people’s resistant agency towards the war. Draft avoidance is a long-standing informal institution (including openly corrupt practices, but not only those). There are openly advertised paid services for the middle-class to get their sons’ documented draft deference – rather like the story of Donald Trump’s ‘bone spurs’. What’s missing is that mobilization develops its own informal institutional arrangements. Given their scant resources, there is evidence of commissariats targeting only the socially most vulnerable, and not even bothering with those likely to be harder to find or catch. In my own research I have many examples of young, healthy and active men with vitally needed military experience who have not been mobilized and indeed, do not fear this risk. The promise of digitizing military records and creating a live database remains a pipedream.

Some talk about luck, but many make informed calculations and gather knowledge of who is being targeted, what informal quotas are being fulfilled, and even how reliable commissariats’ information about them is likely to be. Paper records are hard to keep up to date over decades, and smaller firms do not always observe the requirement to inform the commissariat about their employees. Similarly, given the massive labour shortages in precisely those demographic categories where the most ‘soldiers’ might be found (manual and skilled labour), there is evidence of informal agreements of regional politicians protecting local firms. Important Stories published a leaked spreadsheet in November 2023, drawing together data from different ministries and agencies, presumably as a way to try to enforce quotas for each region.

Targets and indictors are counterproductive and lead to fake numbers

But as the report indirectly indicates, the method – a top-down ‘command’ approach to recruiters – is a copy of all the other not-very successful performance indicator systems (‘palochnaia’ ) that the government has been developing in the last two decades. The centre is beholden to information collected via crude spreadsheets and methods open to fraud and fiddling. The recruitment method is a tortuous multichain form of governance. At many links in this chain the information may be manipulated or outright faked. While there are more or less competent managers capable of interrogating dodgy figures, the overall result is that people can connive to produce what sociologist Martha Lampland calls ‘false numbers as a formalizing practice’. Numbers that are ‘good enough’ to please superiors but which have scant relationship to reality. The practice of recording false numbers as ‘true’ is a universal in all complex societies, but in Russia, the obsession with manual control quickly bumps up against physical and organizational impossibilities and so results in an acute case of creative accounting at all levels. Lampland is an expert on Stalinist Hungary and emphasises the incentives in authoritarian systems to fudge the numbers.

Then there’s ordinary people’s agency to content with – also overlooked because of the influential voices insisting that Russian society largely supports the war and so there are allegedly social sanctions in avoiding mobilization. Nothing could be further from the truth in my considered view. While most attention was paid to the hundreds of thousands of men who left Russia, those of mobilizable age who remain are not just fatalistically waiting to be snatched off the street (indeed this practice has been much more widespread in Ukraine than Russia). Physically moving is not particularly difficult so that one cannot be summonsed by post or by commissariat visit. Among the target group there is a well-documented but not widely known phenomenon of mass seasonal migration. This means many ordinary people have good knowledge of potential domiciles far away from their home region. Then there is the long list of reserved occupations from which mobilization is not allowed. There is also evidence of collusion between low-level bureaucrats and locals – prior warnings of potential raids by commissariats and up-coming targets. In my quite broad group of informants and the wider circle they inhabit accessible to me, no one has been mobilized, despite most men having served in the past. Similarly, no one has volunteered or signed a contract. Quite possibly this is because they have some meaningful social capital, however meagre it might appear to the outside world. Without romanticizing as ‘grassroots resistance’, which would be wide of the mark, insurgent social capacity increasingly comes from below, not above. This includes many groups directly or indirectly helping Russian soldiers wage war on Ukraine. But equally this capacity is not under the control of the state’s aims (or should that be aimlessness) in the war. That is why it is increasingly useful to compare to the scholarship on insurgent citizenship from other parts of the world. This is a point my co-authors and I make more generally about Russian society in our recent work on Russian activism.

As a result, the Russian state shows how weak it is by relying on a lumpen mercenary solution, but these are no Landsknecht, despite coverage misreading brutality as effectiveness. As ‘Important Stories’ reported in November, the spreadsheet refers to more vulnerable categories: people with criminal records and similar, debtors and bankrupts, unemployed, those who recently acquired citizenship and migrants. All these groups could be pressured and blackmailed with some evidence of police raids on groups of migrants for this purpose. This tactic is a sign of desperation and unlikely to be effective. For a start the lumpen category is finite and unsuitable as soldiers. The geographical quota system imposed from on high is counterproductive because concrete localities are forced to compete with each other, or even fight for bodies who are highly mobile (living in one place, working in another, registered domicile in a third place). Important Stories emphasises the power of coercion among agencies to get people signed up on a military contract, but they are less attuned to the way dysfunction and overlapping jurisdiction can lead to powerful incentives among even loyal functionaries to mislead and trick their superiors. Faced with impossible targets, multiple layers of bureaucracy connive in ‘fixing’ things so that paper and reality strongly diverge.

We don’t know whether there will be a stalemate on the battlefield moving into 2024, or more dramatic changes in the frontline like we saw in May and November 2022. It remains to be seen whether a more ambitious mobilization campaign will be attempted after the presidential elections in March 2024. It would face the same problems as those I have described here. Utter lack of capacity and resources among the commissariat, informal institutionalized ways of avoiding or undoing the will of the centre to recruit. Massive labour shortages which make industry hostile. A counter-productive administrative system of coercive command. Active and passive agency of the vast majority to avoid the draft. There are various indirect signs that the authorities collectively fear the results of having to implement further mobilization.

The botched first mobilization created an atmosphere of bitterness, fear and hostility to the state’s conduct regarding the war. It would be a mistake to say that mobilization in 2022 broke the social contract between state and people, because there was none to begin with. If the war continues, Russian society will become ‘insurgent’. Not literally, but figuratively, people will become more actively resistant to recruitment to the meatgrinder. No monetary offers, nor spreadsheet autocracy will be effective.

Pogroms, social psychology, and the falsity of numbers

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Moscow flea-market trader

Dagestan and other events since the war indicate the futility of attaching cause and effect and predicting unrest. It is equally futile to extrapolate future scenarios from them.

Proximal causes might well be connected to media coverage of events in Gaza, local anti-Semitic entrepreneurs, and the conspiracy peddling that Jews from Israel were to be accommodated in Dagestan. But then we would have to account for differences between forms of “vernacular” and elite discourses of antisemitism within Russia and Dagestan (one of the most ethnically diverse places on the planet). This is hard to do, because social media research offers only a pale reflection of this reality. Then there is another factor: consumption of global media (including that sponsored by Ukraine and emirate states) which research usually fails to account for. 

What’s missing is the deeper current of sociological examination. After all, if “Dagestanis” (an analytically meaningless definition) suddenly became virulent progromists against Jews, how have numerous communities of European and Caucasus Jews not attracted their ire until now? Russia across the board has deep currents of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, racial and political antisemitism going back to before the Soviet Union. But these are only weakly relevant here. (By the way, there are probably fewer than 500 Jews in the city of Makhachkala).

Yuri Levada, the ‘godfather’ of hegemonic social thinking on Russia noted in the late 1990s that organised and clearly addressed public protest was the exception not the rule. Whenever discontent (at social conditions) actually rose to the surface it was immediately revealed to lack any appropriate social or political language capable of expressing the meaning of such discontent. At the same time there was an absence of appropriate structures that might reroute such language into forms legible to the powers that be. This gave rise to the predominance of protest based on emotion and which then degenerates into primordialist and conspirological hijacking. – “We are poor and it’s the Jews at fault – after all they control the World Government”. (in fact World Government conspiracies is much more likely to be a hobby of the middle or upper classes)

Now the problem with Levada was that he was working with a functionalist set of ideas about social psychology. In the version applied to events like those in Dagestan this is often reducible to clichés about the danger of the crowd and maladaptive personality. Observers cannot imagine, indeed, they completely discount coherent protest action. There is only the mob. But this is not really how pogroms actually happen – historically they required coordination with authorities and were based on long-standing processes of othering and blame-shifting, which do not seem to be the case here. ‘Mindless’ or ‘duped’ crowd theory was passé generations ago in sociology. But for the inheritors of Levada’s tradition (social psychology neo-functionalists) – something beyond reactive or maladaptive ‘politics’ is hardly imagined. In my view the main problem with social science analysis of Russia in general is the legacy of Levadesque social psychology of the Soviet and post-Soviet individual (although he is but one of a number of influential authors who take a reductive perspective, but of them in another post).

The ’distal’ or indirect cause of protests like those in Dagestan is of course much more complex and we should be spending more time attending to the toxic cocktail of coercive military mobilization and failing social and economic life, and ‘colonial’ forms of governance. There are many excellent scholars and observers working on the N. Caucasus who show how Moscow’s attempt to exert control has led to governance failure after governance failure. Indeed, the defining book on the North Caucasus argued twenty years ago that you can’t understand larger flows of historical trends and social configurations without attending to micro-scale empirical situation. But while religion, unemployment, poverty, ethnic strife, climate change and territorial/land conflicts are a unique toxic burden on the life Caucasian, the rest of Russia is not so different in terms of the fundamental pressures of hopelessness and resulting impotent rage that require but a little prod (Ilya Ponomarev of course was just one of the Telegram tricksters inciting people) to provoke widespread unrest. Mark Fisher’s idea of the effects of a ‘slow cancellation of the future’ is featured extensively in my unpublishable book. (Running joke about my publishing problems).

***

Planning this blogpost I actually wanted to write about the ‘failure’ of military mobilization and its unpredictable social effects in Russia. I don’t have the space now to really pursue this, but I wanted to explore the falsity of the numbers that all ‘experts’ use when they try to understand mobilization/volunteers for the Russian army, etc. This recalls work like that of Martha Lampland on how ‘false’ numbers become embedded in formalized practices of expertise. A number can become ‘correct’ (useable, passable, acceptable), even if it’s fake. This is the ‘quantitative’ part of how we fool ourselves as ‘experts’ on the war, and it goes hand in hand with the ‘qualitative’ part of self-deception – as we saw with people rushing to judgement about Dagestan with zero-context takes.

Did you know that all the English-language sources which ‘count’ mobilized and other troops can be traced to a few uncheckable sources? Did you also know that many Russian sources refer back to the English sources as ‘authoritative’, but that these English sources merely cite (with caveats) Russian government ones? There is incredible circularity in ‘data’ which mainstream and even experts rely on when ‘reporting’ empirical reality. And then there is the problem of how fast this data ages. I reviewed various sources writing on mobilization one year ago in 2022 and pretty much all predictions (even those not based on extrapolation from official source) turned out to be wildly wrong (remember the 1 million army?).

Every day I read more sources about recruitment in Russia. As a result I do not become more confident, but less about our knowledge. I hate falling into the predictive/descriptive trap myself, but cannot resist it on this last point. Russia may be recruiting (not fielding) c. 15k troops a month (less than half of most estimates). This figure I get from drilling down various sources. Few have really paid attention to the actual composition of Russian forces – that the volunteer pool is small and shrinking, that the funnel from conscripts to contracted is extremely narrow (and yet is the main conduit), and that there is no adequate replacement of technical-specialist roles. Numbers are not enough by any measure. Enough for what? you ask. Well, instead of thinking about concrete military objectives like a ‘winter counter-counter offensive’, I prefer to think more globally about just sustaining basic functions of a modern armed force across a massive space. In a sense we are already seeing not an ‘army’ in any sense of the word, but a subnational set of fighting outfits – whatever you want to call them. These have competing aims and needs. I think Russian recruitment is key to various outcomes of the war and that it requires sociological examination (embedded knowledge and massive triangulation of sources which people are not willing to really countenance).

But even thinking in terms of numbers of people is not the most important thing. Maybe there are other numbers that are more important – numbers related to the material motivation – money numbers. I started to address this in a recent post where I argued that it is a classic liberal metropolitan mistake to think of money rewards on offer as offering the final word. I think this is a misunderstanding, and it is where ethnography has an important role. At the beginning of the war many of my interlocutors said: ‘this money is not worth killing and dying for’. Now the situation is much worse for many reasons. In the words of one, ‘I could understand greed as a motivator if it were real money, but it really isn’t. I’m sorry, 200k a month is not real money and for what? You can get snuffed out at any moment – in my mind it just doesn’t compute.’

The realm of recruitment and mobilization does not herald the coming of the Russian ‘necroworld’ that many distant observers have called it, but one of calculation and computation of real people and real possibilities.

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.