TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup
8 September 2024: Putin the meek, plus texts and tunes
I’ll be honest with you: I was beginning to think this was never going to happen.
One hundred and nineteen days have passed, by my count, since the last time I managed to write to you. There are a few good personal and professional reasons why — indeed, reasons why the newsletter was faltering even before I went AWOL — plus a few more less good reasons. If you know, you know. If you don’t, I can only apologize.
Either way, I’ve missed this, and I’m back. Writing this was important to me when I was able to do it, and it’s important to me that I’m able to do it again. I’m going back to the old format — thoughts, texts and tunes, each and every weekend (barring the occasional vacation or force majeure) — because it feels right. In a month or so, though, I’ll start experimenting with a bit more interactivity, including an “ask me anything” opportunity. As ever, the newsletter will remain free.
What I’m thinking about
We’re now one month and three days in to Ukraine’s Kursk offensive, one of the most surprising — and analytically vexing — episodes in this surprising and vexing war. I don’t pretend to know what the true objectives of the campaign are, or whether it is likely to succeed in the long term. (The best analysis of both of those questions, by Michael Kofman and Rob Lee in Foreign Affairs, also finds no clear answers.) As usual, however, a lot of people out there are trying to impose certainty on a fundamentally uncertain situation, with predictably parlous results.
Western punditry (and even some independent Russian punditry) about the Kursk offensive and its potential consequences for Russia divides more or less into two camps. One group, by far the larger, argues that Ukraine’s effective control of a swath of Kurskaya oblast in southwestern Russia is so politically disastrous for Vladimir Putin that it will either hasten the demise of his regime or send him to the negotiating table with cries of ‘uncle’; a structurally similar argument holds that the supposed difficulty of defending and attacking simultaneously will make Moscow’s overall war effort unsustainable. A second group, meanwhile, initially argued that we should expect a decisive and overwhelmingly violent response — including potentially the carpet bombing of Russia’s own territory — and then argued that the lack of a decisive response would signal weakness and sap support among Putin’s backers.
All of these arguments, I’m increasingly convinced, are more or less baseless.
Let me start with the first set of arguments, which hold that the Kursk offensive is both a military and a political debacle for Russia. For one thing, while it’s true that the offensive and the war are far from over, the present reality is that Russia is doing a reasonably good job of defending against further Ukrainian advances in Kurskaya oblast and at continuing to press its advantage in Donbas. For the time being, at least, the military challenge appears manageable.
The harder analytical pill for many to swallow is that the political challenge for Putin is no less manageable. The reasons why people think the Kursk offensive should be politically damaging — it brings a supposedly foreign war to Russian territory! it exposes the Kremlin’s lack of concern for its own citizens! it’s the first occupation of Russian territory since World War II! and in Kursk, to boot! — all have reasonably good grounding in the abstract. Yes, the Kremlin has consistently tried to portray this war as something happening far from home, and so the offensive would seem to puncture that narrative. Yes, a war that the Kremlin launched in the supposed defense of Russians has now put in peril Russians actually living in Russia. Yes, no narrative is more central to the Kremlin’s legitimation strategy than victory in WWII. Yes, the Kremlin is alive to symbolism.
The problem, of course, is that as much as people might want these assumptions to hold, none of them are actually grounded in anything that we know to be true about Russian politics. This is not the first instance when the war came home: drones have hit Russian cities, including central Moscow, for more than a year now, and Evgeny Prigozhin marched troops closer to Moscow than Ukraine is ever likely to get, all with no appreciable effect on public opinion. Similarly, Ukrainian shelling of Russian border regions has displaced thousands of Russian citizens for more than a year—again, with no appreciable effect. More to the point, the Kremlin has failed to show much concern for the lives of its citizens for decades, through natural and man-made disasters, without ever facing a major political challenge as a result. As for the symbolism of WWII, powerful as it may be for the Kremlin, it has never been used by the public or any political group as a club against the Kremlin itself.
Indeed, the supposition that a Ukrainian incursion — even a significant and protracted one — could set in motion powerful social forces in Russia ignores most of what we know about Russian society. Studies of Russian society in the 1990s focused on “involution” and “patience”, as people facing tremendous upheaval coped by turning inward and learning to live without the state. These same habits of thought and behavior carried into the 2000s and beyond, even as Putin built his regime and concentrated political and economic power, with the result that Russians remained prepared to see the state “as simultaneously dysfunctional and legitimate, unjust and yet worthy”, as I argued in a 2017 article in Daedalus. This extraordinary tolerance for dysfunction and even abuse may well have its limits, but we have not yet observed them, and no one — not me, not Putin, and not the Ukrainian high command — knows where they are.
Wherever those limits may be, there is evidence to suggest that the war, far from bringing things to a potential head, has pushed the breaking point even farther away. Levada Center sociologist Alexei Levinson summed this idea up best in a recent interview with The Bell (well worth reading in its considerable entirety):
The fact that society's reactions [during the war] have been less expressive than expected is linked to a state of emotional anesthesia or numbness, which has been noted for over two years. Researchers observe a low level of emotional response to events that, under other circumstances, might provoke strong feelings. Emotional reactions among the majority are not developing in either a positive or negative direction. Society has been reluctant to recognize the Special Military Operation (SMO) as a war (unlike the minority who chose to flee from it). The "special operation" can be perceived neutrally, while the actions of our armed forces are seen positively, simply because they are "ours."
The carpet bombing argument is a different and in some ways more complex story. The idea that we should expect a massive response with little or no regard for human life does, unlike some of the other assumptions dismissed above, have at least some basis in history. In particular, it appears to be grounded in the experience of two terrorist hostage situations, the occupation of a Moscow theater showing the Nord Ost musical in October 2002, and the occupation of a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in September 2004. In both cases, Putin ordered troops to raid the facilities, resulting in hundreds of casualties among the hostages. This, not entirely without reason, is taken as evidence that, when challenged, we can expect Putin to act without hesitation or remorse.
More precisely, to liken the Kursk offensive to the Nord Ost and Beslan hostage situations — leaving aside the very different facts of the matter — emphasizes the emotional aspect for Putin personally: a hated adversary strikes at Russia itself, seizing and claiming control over a piece of territory, embarrassing the state and making its leader seem impotent. In this view, then, Putin acted primarily to overcome this embarrassment and prove his potency in Nord Ost and Beslan and should have been expected to do the same in Kursk. This story, while compelling, is a misreading of the history and the contextualized logic that led Putin to do what he did in 2002 and 2004, and then to do something very different in 2024.
First, a caveat: I don’t know the extent to which Putin was then, is now, or ever has been driven by emotion. Because he is human, I assume it happens sometimes. But because I am not his psychotherapist, I have no knowledge of how he processes emotion and how emotion affects his behavior. As a result, I cannot rule out emotionality playing a role—but neither would I be justified in accepting the assumption that it plays a dominant role.
That said, the first place to start is context. In 2002 and 2004, Putin was still building towards what would become — but was not yet — a highly authoritarian regime. By that point, the Kremlin controlled much but not all of the television, and not much else in the media. Control over the political parties in the Duma and around the country was also very much a work in progress. The oligarchs, still quite powerful, were only beginning to learn the lessons of the downfall of Vladimir Gusinsky, Boris Berezovsky and, by the time Beslan happened, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin, meanwhile, was still trying to cement a military victory in Chechnya, without feeling fully in control of his armed forces.
The problem with both Nord Ost and Beslan, in this context, was that they were a distraction — and the kind of distraction that could have far-reaching consequences if not dealt with quickly. According to polling in 2002 by VTsIOM (then run by the team that would become the Levada Center, including Yury Levada himself), 83 percent of Russians felt that the authorities bore some or all of the blame for the deaths of Nord Ost hostages, and only 9 percent believed the state was telling them the whole truth about what happened. In 2004, Levada Center polling showed that 61 percent of respondents felt the storming of the school was a failure, and only 43 percent felt the state was motivated to save hostages’ lives. These views were formed as the result of tens of millions of Russian citizens glued to round-the-clock media reporting on active hostage situations. The raids, then, were likely designed first and foremost to get the crises off the air.
The context of the Kursk offensive is entirely different. By and large, Russian citizens know only what the state wants them to know, so complete is the Kremlin’s control over the media. While there is some evidence that Russians have been made a bit more anxious by the news that has reached them, there is nothing to suggest that the situation is having any measurable effect on Russians’ support for Putin or the war. A massive retaliation targeted at Russia’s own territory, by contrast, would put Kursk back in the news, and potentially not in a positive light. There is, as a result, little upside to such retaliation, and considerable potential downside. Whatever the emotionality may be, then, the same logic that made it “rational” for Putin to raid Nord Ost and Beslan makes it equally rational not to carpet-bomb Kurskaya oblast.
None of this is to suggest that Ukraine’s Kursk offensive is a bad idea. As I said earlier, I don’t know exactly what it’s meant to achieve, and I have no means for gauging the likelihood of success. If, as seems probable, Kyiv is looking for leverage in a rational negotiation with Moscow at some future date, or even simply to complicate the cost-benefit analysis involved in Russian force deployments, there may indeed be reason for optimism. Expectations of an emotional, irrational response, however, strike me as, well, irrational.
What I’m reading
Given how much time has passed since the last time I did one of these — again, apologies! — I’m assuming no one here is in the market for a syllabus’ worth of readings. With that in mind, just a few highlights:
On 5 September, Rose Gottemoeller — former Deputy Secretary General of NATO, former chief US negotiator of the New START treaty, now a fellow at Stanford, and my former boss at Carnegie — published a trenchant op-ed in the Financial Times reminding readers that the global strategic arms control architecture is on the brink of collapse, and making the counter-intuitive but in this case convincing argument that the best way to drive everyone back to the negotiating table may be for the US to start reinvesting in its nuclear arsenal.
On 2 September, Agentstvo published an analysis of yet more adjustments to Russia’s primary and secondary school curricula, which have seen the number of classroom hours devoted to outright propaganda increase from fewer than 500 in 2022 to more than 1,300 in 2024. Among the highlights awaiting pupils this year are an emphasis on the value of having large families, the destructive nature of Western ideologies, and “the Basics of Military Knowledge”.
Also on 2 September, Meduza and Sistema published a joint long(ish)-read and podcast on efforts by the Kremlin to stave off the political effects of aging — not by putting younger people into power, but by literally staving off the effects of aging. It’s so bizarre that I can hardly describe it here, even though many of the details (including investments in basic science moon-shot technologies) are seemingly mundane. It’s the fixation that comes through in the work by Svetlana Reiter, Sergei Titov and Valery Panyushkin, and it’s worth your time to read (or listen to).
On 1 September, the eminent Russian economist Konstantin Sonin (now at the University of Chicago) took to Facebook (of all places) to explain why those in the Russian opposition who may believe that more harm would be done to the Kremlin by allowing Russians to move their money out of the country are mistaken. In a nutshell, because economic value is created not by the production of goods and services, but by the trade of produced goods and services, forced autarky (even if only partial) limits the ability of the Russian economy to create value and thus impoverishes the economy as a whole.
On 28 August, the Russian political scientist Ivan Fomin (now at Charles University, as well as a non-resident fellow at CEPA) published an interesting piece in Ridl, delineating two strands of etatism in contemporary Russian ideology: one in which people adhere to the state because they believe in the moral value of patriotism, and another in which people adhere to the state because they believe it provides for the safety and welfare of its citizens. One strength of Putin’s ideological appeal, Ivan writes, is that he doesn’t force his subjects to chose between these approaches, allowing them instead to pick and choose the elements of the state that they find most compelling.
Earlier in august, Kathryn Hendley and Peter Murrell (she a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin and a leading scholar on the Russian legal system, he an economist at the University of Maryland and a big name in the study of economic governance) published a puzzling paper in Comparative Politics. Utilizing three rounds of a large longitudinal survey, they show two countervailing tendencies: on the one hand, older people in Russia are more likely to be law-abiding than younger people; on the other hand, the length of experience of life in Russia tends to decrease a person’s propensity to be law-abiding. On aggregate, they find, this means that at least expressed adherence to the law has increased, as Putin’s “dictatorship of law” rhetoric has taken hold among older generations. But if the ‘other hand’ trend holds, we should probably expect that effect to fade over time, and law-abidingness (is that a word?) gradually to decrease.
What I’m listening to
I waited a long time for this. When I first listened to Shirlette Ammons’ 2016 album Language Barrier, I was blown away. When news broke last year that another album from the Durham, North Carolina-based hip-hop-and-then-some artist was in the works, I was—like any music fan—equal parts excited and trepidations. Could it be as good?
I needn’t have worried. Spectacles, which dropped a couple of months ago, is spectacular. Each and every track rewards multiple listens. The fact that the album features fellow Durhamites G Yamazawa and Amelia Meath (of Sylvan Esso and Moutain Man), among others, is an added bonus. Songs like “Short” and “Delight” should be instant classics (though careful on that last one—don’t listen out loud at work). But because this is a family friendly publication, I’ll leave you with “Hello”.
Good to have you back, Sam, I’ve missed you!
You bring important perspectives which l have valued and appreciated. Other analysts that l also follow, clearly recognise your knowledge and experience.