TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

23 March 2025: Sorry not sorry, plus texts and tunes

“The Apology”, François Dumont, 1873

Given that I missed a week in the life of this newsletter, I suppose I should start with an apology—and I am genuinely sorry! Last week just got away from me for a number of reasons, and I couldn’t quite pull an issue together.

Then again, I’m kind of in an anti-apology mood at the moment. I blame Donald Trump, of course. We learned on Saturday that he is demanding “a full-throated apology” from Maine Governor Janet Mills, on pain of the withdrawal of federal funding; this, after Gov. Mills confronted him in a conference of governors over a threat to withdraw said federal funding because the state government would not get in line with the White House on gender issues. This, of course, comes less than a month after the White House demanded an apology from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after the latter similarly confronted Trump in the Oval Office.

Were I someone who focused primarily on American politics, it’s possible I’d look at this and draw the conclusion that confronting the US president in his place of work—or potentially anywhere at all—is a bad idea. But as someone who focuses primarily on Russian politics, I have a very different take: I’ve seen this movie, it wasn’t very good the first time, and the remake is set to be atrocious.

It started with Chechnya back in 2015, when Ramzan Kadyrov got into the habit of demanding apologies not so much from his political opponents, but from anyone whose words or deeds could be construed to have caused offense to him, his regime, or, in his interpretation, the Chechen people. Academics, comedians, politicians and even ordinary citizens found themselves targets of a ritualized procedure designed to humiliate and demean. In time, however, the phenomenon spread, with demands for a public apology becoming a favored form of extra-judicial punishment for those who have spoken out against the war in Ukraine.

America might seem some ways away from that kind of thing, but the distance can be traversed with alarming speed. Once the extraction of public apologies becomes a favored tactic of hierarchical affirmation and power projection at the very top, others will begin to use it further down the food chain. Once that happens, the political landscape becomes divided into two increasingly distinct groups: those to whom apologies are owed, and those from whom apologies are demanded. Ruler and ruled, in other words. Lord and subject.

Generally speaking, I have never minded apologizing, even when I wasn’t sure I was wrong. Apologies, it seems to me, are usually cost free. But not in this case. In this case, turning the other cheek and apologizing—whether to defuse a conflict, or to be the bigger person—entrenches a deeply destructive political trend. So, while I am happy to apologize to you, dear reader, for missing a week, I dearly hope that Gov. Mills holds her nerve. The future of the republic may depend on it.

On a less strident note, if you’re interested in thoughts on the developments of the week—including the state of the Trump administration’s efforts to get a deal with Russia over Ukraine—and if you have about 30 minutes to spare, please do take a listen to my conversation with Gavin Esler;

What I’m thinking about

Back in November, I wrote in this newsletter about some polling results from Russian Field, suggesting, among other things, that there was more room for a diversity of opinions in Russia on the question of whether the country should seek a negotiated end to the war, than on the question of whether the war itself was a good thing. Thus, I wrote, the fact that a majority of respondents now say they would prefer that Russia negotiate rather than keep fighting most reliably reflects the sense among a majority of respondents that it is socially safe to say that, while it remains unsafe to speak out about the war itself. And then in January, I wrote about accumulating evidence of what I called ‘collective avoidance’—“millions of likeminded Russians allowing one another to support the war and to hide from it simultaneously”.

I thought back to both of those observations in recent weeks on two occasions, and they’ve been bumping around in my brain ever since. The first was in a conversation with a European diplomat, who asked how hard it was for the Kremlin to maintain this kind of consolidated public opinion on the war itself, particularly in the face of economic malaise, mounting casualties, and all of the other factors of fatigue. It cannot be easy, I replied, but the task is ameliorated by the fact that the hardest work is done by ordinary Russians themselves: that’s the point of the ‘collective avoidance’ argument, that the incentives to stay in line with your social circles are so powerful that people will go to tremendous lengths to reinterpret the realities they face and to tamp down their frustration (and not just in Russia, for what its worth).

If that’s right, then the key task for the Kremlin isn’t so much to communicate the right messages about the war, but to maintain the sense of social pressure that leads people to get and stay in line. And it was that task that came to mind when I was reading and re-reading some recent reporting from Vologodskaya Oblast, in Russia’s European north—the second occasion I mentioned a moment ago.

The story from Vologodskaya Oblast is as follows, in a nutshell: the regional governor, Georgy Filimonov, is a 45-year-old businessman-turned-politician who hails originally from the Siberian university city of Tomsk and who served as deputy chairman of the Moscow Oblast government before Putin sent him north in October 2023. Once there, Filimonov let his ideological colors fly, imposing a near complete legal ban on the sale of alcohol and a near complete extra-legal ban on abortions, recruiting women from around the country to give birth in the region’s hospitals (and then go home), erecting statues of Stalin and creating a youth group called Oprichniki, named after the violent force that served Tsar Ivan the Terrible. (For more details, see this report in Novaya Gazeta Europe, and this one in Meduza.)

Local residents are, not surprisingly, unimpressed, and that dissatisfaction is apparently making its way back to the Kremlin. Governors, after all, are tasked first and foremost with keeping the peace and ensuring that their populations duly vote for Putin and the ruling United Russia party in suitably extraordinary numbers. With that in mind, the usual response would be a combination of a public slap-down, some unsubtle indirect pressure, and, if all else fails, removal—and some of that is indeed happening. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov criticized the alcohol ban in a public statement in the fall of 2024. Some of Filimonov’s handpicked deputies are under criminal investigations. And yet, nothing seems to be changing.

Residents report that rather than getting a hearing, they are subjected to verbal abuse and harassment, bordering on intimidation, including from members of Filimonov’s family, who have been appointed to positions of power and privilege. All of the offending laws and restrictions, meanwhile, remain in place.

While the Kremlin would likely be happier if Filimonov dialed things back a bit, they are in a bind: Filimonov is doing what he is doing likely with the certainty that it’s not only allowed, but expected. Pro-natalism, after all, is a core Putin policy. So is anti-alcoholism. And what could be more Putin-esque than construing your opponents to be traitors? All of this stems not from instruction, but from a set of ideological precepts that are increasingly pervasive in the Russian political landscape. And it’s not just in Vologda. While officials in Surgut, for example, haven’t resorted to a formal or informal ban on abortion, they have started performing abortions without anesthetic, in an apparent attempt to drive down demand, to pick just one (egregious) case. Increasingly, Russian governors and other mid-level officials feel moved to impose ideologically driven restrictions on the ways people live their lives.

These are the kinds of things that my own research suggests should cause dissatisfaction, because they disrupt the autonomy of Russian citizens over the material content of their lives, and, indeed, that appears to be happening, albeit in an atomized and small-scale manner as of yet. Similarly, the social anthropologist Jeremy Morris finds that it is precisely on this ‘everyday’ level that frustration with politicians is greatest and, while physically removed from politics, most politically salient.

In the past, however, most of these kinds of disruptions in people’s lives were caused by the Russian federal government, and it was governors who would tend to intervene in ways that would shield their populations against whatever it was that was bothering them. Indeed, that pattern seemed sufficiently robust that I published a research article about it in 2018.

But what’s happening now is different. Governors, in an effort to please the Kremlin and conform with the prevailing ideology, are behaving in ways that potentially alienate voters both from the governor, and from the central leadership. And the federal government isn’t exactly stepping in to help. In fact, as Novaya Gazeta Europe also reported 10 days or so ago, local government reforms are set to give dissatisfied citizens even fewer opportunities to get genuine representation.

I’m not here to predict a revolution, or even large-scale social unrest. In the weeks and months to come, however, I will be watching intently to see whether this trend deepens and, as it does, whether any of the people in power pivot to reestablish traction with the population, or whether they double down on incrimination and control.

And another thing

In the 36 hours or so leading up to the publication of this issue of the newsletter, my social media feeds and professional group chats were captured by two rather startling interviews. One was by the Kremlin’s erstwhile éminence grise Vladislav Surkov in L’Express, in which he averred in multiple phrasings that Ukraine is an entirely artificial entity, whose fate is to be partitioned between Russia and Europe. The other was an interview given to Tucker Carlson by Steve Witkoff, the real estate developer named as Trump’s envoy to the Middle East who is for some reason leading the negotiating process on Russia and Ukraine, during which Witkoff claimed that the Ukrainian lands held by Russia will need to be ceded, because they’re populated by Russians who voted to join Russia (among other whoppers).

For anyone whose been paying to attention to Russia at any point since about 2005, Surkov’s statements should come as no surprise: he didn’t say anything he hasn’t said multiple times before. More surprising, I suppose, is the fact that he said anything at all, given how far from the limelight he has been of late. Witkoff’s statements are more jarring, although given the statements made in the Oval Office back in February, and the general understanding that the White House is pursuing normalization with the Kremlin, they shouldn’t be surprising, either.

But in looking at both of them—and at the apoplectic reactions of many readers—I’m reminded of something I wrote way back in 2019:

Surkov’s job … is and always has been to get people talking about everything except what’s real. He’s the bait in the bait-and-switch.

While Witkoff is a very different personality in a very different role, my sense is much the same: he’s out there to say what needs to be said in the moment, which may or may not reflect anything at all, but is designed to get people talking about the wrong thing.

To be clear, it is important to debunk Witkoff’s falsehoods, and to point out that they are an exact replica of the Kremlin’s most tiresome talking points. But if Ukraine’s supporters become too fixated on that debunking, they risk losing sight of the key fact: the White House is so fixated on attaining normalization with Moscow that it will have its representatives say anything at all—whether or not they believe them—if it helps make that happen.

What I’m reading

Given the lapse in publishing, there’s more than I can really cover, so here are the highlights—to me, at least.

On 6 March, Proekt published a video investigation by Alexei Korostelev into the efforts by the Kremlin to convince Russian citizens that Ukrainian troops occupying (until recently) a chunk of Kurskaya Oblast. Given that these accusations have evidently found their way into Vladimir Putin’s talking points with Trump, it’s useful to know where these stories are coming from.

While we’re on the subject of Kursk, Bumaga published interviews on 13 March with displaced local residents, who, given the poor treatment they’ve received to date, do not appear inclined to believe much of what the Kremlin has to say.

Another group who do not seem to hot on the Kremlin’s story are war veterans. Sofia Verba published a long piece, based on a three-day train ride with soldiers returning from the front, in Novaya Gazeta Europe on 14 March. In this war, they say, “everyone is meat.”

And while we’re on the subject of the Kremlin’s story, Agentstvo and True Story published on 21 March a new data analysis of news consumption patterns in Russia. In a nutshell, most people are still trying to avoid news of the war, as a result of which the Russian military bloggers that tend to be fetishized by many Western analysts remain deeply marginal, accounting for less than 1 percent of consumption. By contrast, consumption of independent Russian media is holding steady at about 21 percent, while consumption of foreign media has grown to 40 percent, as people look around for more reliable information.

Among other things well worth reading in the last two weeks were:

• Andrei Soldatov’s long read in the domestic Russian version of Novaya Gazeta on the historical roots of the current fascist turn in the Russian Orthodox Church’s Moscow patriarchy, published 12 March;

• Andrei Kolesnikov’s almost-as-long read in Kommersant on 18 March, chronicling the annual conference of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs—the country’s main business lobby, often referred to as the oligarchs’ union—at which Putin appears to have tried to dampen enthusiasm about any pending deal with Washington; and

• Also on 18 March, Zhanna Nemtsova published an excellent essay in Politico on the domestic causes of Russia’s war, and the consequences of allowing Putin to claim victory.

What I’m listening to

I need to spend some more time looking for and listening to new music. If you’ve got any suggestions, please post them to the chat! In the meantime: