TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

19 January 2025: Public opinions, plus texts and tunes

“Manifestation. October 17, 1905” by Ilya Repin, 1907

If you follow the Russian-language exiled opposition social media world—and, let’s be honest, who doesn’t?—you will not have been able to miss the controversy caused by a short paper published by Maria Snegovaya in December. A fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Maria presented a paper titled “The Reluctant Consensus: War and Russia’s Public Opinion” on 17 December. It’s a good paper, short and thought-provoking, and I suggest you read it.

Unfortunately, however, what the paper provoked hardly qualifies as thought. In writing about Russian public opinion, Maria gave a brief overview of the potential reasons why one might not trust Russian polling data, and of the reasons why almost all such concerns are overblown—and it was that, that caused a squall of indignation. “Kremlin propagandist” is probably one of the nicer things Maria got called, during the ordeal. (It is also very clearly the most ridiculous of the things she was called.)

Vitriol aside, however, it reignited the long-running debate on whether or not we can trust Russian public opinion data. Regular readers will know that this is an issue on which I have opinions, given what I do for a living, including discussion in this newsletter in April 2022, December 2022, March 2023, April 2023,

As a result, I didn’t feel the need to intervene in the moment, but as I’m about to write about Russian public opinion, I thought it might be useful to re-establish some priors. The following maxims are from March 2023:

1. We do not know and cannot know the inner hearts and minds of the Russian public — not because of the facts of authoritarianism, or because of any inherent Russian inscrutability — but because surveys can only ever measure expression, and expression is a function of information, attitudes, psychology, perception and socialization. Experimental research designs and sophisticated statistical methods can help isolate some of these factors, but they cannot isolate attitudes as such.

2. The reason it is methodologically impossible to isolate attitudes as such is because attitudes are themselves shaped by the same factors that shape expression. The causal relationships that shape attitudes and expression are intrinsically linked and circular.

3. Given those two things, as I’ve written before, we are better off understanding public opinion not as a thing, but as a process — and so we should pay more attention to the processes of public opinion formation, expression and behavior, than to the numbers themselves, because where the process goes, opinions, expression and behavior will follow.

Full disclosure: I was on the panel for the launch of Maria’s report. If you’re curious, you can see the full discussion here.

What I’m thinking about

Back in December, while writing about (and largely dismissing) the prospect that Assad’s demise in Syria might undermine support for Putin in Russia, I noted and promised eventually to return to an interesting trend in Russian polling data. Specifically, when asked “whose interests does Putin serve”, the number of respondents answering “ordinary people” caught up with the numbers answering “the siloviki” and “the oligarchs” for the first time since the Levada Center began asking the question 25 years ago.

Here’s the chart again. The red line is the important one.

For decades, Russian citizens have been reasonably happy to put up with leaders who, they believe, do not govern in their interests. Indeed, that belief, grounded in generations of political dysfunction, has been one of Putin’s greatest political assets, ensuring simultaneously that voters do not punish him for poor governance, and that they do not seek an alternative who might govern better. So ingrained has this belief been in most Russians’ sense of political reality, that it has remained impervious to empirical reality: the number of Russians believing Putin governs in their interest did not go up when the economy was booming from 2000 through 2008, and it did not go down when the economy faltered in 2008-9. In fact, there is no discernible relationship between this particular trend line and any observable measure of the quality of Russian governance.

Given how fundamental this notion is to Russian politics, the fact that it seems to be changing is kind of a big deal—and it needs some analysis. On the surface, the explanation is clear enough: it’s part of Russia’s wartime “rally ‘round the flag”, which is causing Russian citizens to support (or at least say they support) their president with greater enthusiasm than they usually would, much in the way the Falklands War drove up support for Margaret Thatcher, or 9/11 boosted support for George W. Bush. And that is almost certainly true, I think. But to say that we know what is causing it is not the same as saying that we know how that causation functions, and it’s the how in this instance that is considerably more important.

Traditional explanations of “rallies ‘round the flag” have tended to concentrate on the political impact of war: faced with a crisis and a common enemy, opposing political forces tend to put aside their differences, at least temporarily; the opposition refrains from criticizing the incumbents; and elites and opinion leaders seek to communicate unity both internally and externally. That certainly happened in the US in 2001, for example, and it is true that rally effects usually begin to dissipate once politics return to normal and debate reignites, usually in fairly short order.

However, in a context like Russia—where there isn’t much overt criticism of the government even in peacetime—this kind of story makes less sense. That’s one of the reasons why Graeme Robertson and I decided to study the social mechanisms behind the Russian “rally ‘round the flag” triggered by the 2014 annexation of Crimea and advent of war in the Donbas. Through a bit of luck, we were able to survey the same representative sample of Russian citizens both a few months before and a few months after the annexation, allowing us to see exactly whose opinions shifted, and why.

Some of what we found was unsurprising. Across just about every imaginable social divide, support for Putin increased. Importantly, though, support became more emotional: people began not just to support Putin, but to feel proud of him. This emotional wave, however, was emanating from the bottom of Russian politics, not from the top. Yes, of course, state propaganda was trumpeting the Crimean annexation at every opportunity, and hailing the heroic “little green men” and “polite people” supposedly defending the rights of Russian-speakers. But the people most likely to take part in this emotion-laden rally were those who not just watched all of that propaganda, but who talked about it with their friends, colleagues and family members, and who came to see themselves as part of a community of pride and hope.

Similar to taking part in a charismatic religious celebration or cheering your football team to victory in the midst of thousands of likeminded fans, this emotional togetherness—something Emile Durkheim, one of the forerunners of sociology, called “collective effervescence”—creates a shift in a person’s sense of wellbeing that is divorced from objective reality. Those of our respondents who were caught up in this rally did not only express increased support for Putin. They became more optimistic about the economy, despite sanctions and declining incomes. They reported that corruption was less rampant than it had been only a few months earlier, despite the absence of any evidence to that effect. And even their memories of their families’ struggles in the 1990s improved; needless to say, there is no way in which an event in 2014 could have affected events 20 years prior.

In other words, the process that sent Putin’s approval ratings soaring in 2014—and produced a slight uptick in the number of Russians believing he governed in the interests of ordinary citizens, albeit nothing on the scale we’re seeing now—was grounded in the irrational exuberance generated by emotional togetherness, rather than a rational evaluation of competence. Continuously rekindled by the ritualized remembrance of the Crimean annexation, this emotional rally lasted for four years, until it was finally punctured by a deeply unpopular pension reform. In an authoritarian context like Russia, then, the evidence suggests that the emotional, social and political effects of a “rally ‘round the flag” may not dissipate on their own, but fade only when displaced by a significant negative event.

My sense is that what we’ve seen since February 2022 is similar to what we saw back in 2014, but not entirely identical. Yes, Putin’s approval ratings are stratospheric, as is the number of Russians who tell pollsters that they think the country is headed in the right direction. And expressed support for the war itself has remained irrationally impervious to the content and conduct of the war itself. All of that fits the “collective effervescence” model.

What might seem to fit a little bit less well is the fact that most Russians are doing their best to pretend that the war isn’t happening. Unlike in 2014, when “Крым наш” (“Crimea is ours”) was on the tip of millions of enthusiastic tongues, most Russians today appear eager not to talk about the war. Here, a major new ethnographic study by Russia’s Public Sociology Lab (in Russian and English) is instructive. So central is the war to life in Russia today, so mundane and yet so extraordinarily dangerous, that supporting it and ignoring it are effectively the same thing. To support it, after all, is to prevent its horrors from impinging on your life, and thus to ignore its reality. And to ignore the war’s reality is to prevent its horrors from provoking resistance, and thus to support it.

But if Russians’ engagement with the war in 2024 is avoidant, how can that create the kind of “collective effervescence” that underpins the evident “rally ‘round the flag”? The answer, I think, is that the process described by PS Lab is not an individual one. If you are going to express support for the war in order to keep it at arm’s length and ignore its realities in order not to undermine that support, you need to be surrounded by people who can be trusted not to poke at those expressions of support, not to bring those realities into your field of view, and not to draw you into places you’d rather not be. In other words, to be safe, you need to support the war, but in order to support the war, you need to be safe in the knowledge that those closest to you will help you keep the war at bay.

And so, if the events of 2014 galvanized a community of enthusiasm, the events of the past three years have galvanized a community of avoidance, but it is a community nonetheless. Without that collective element, without millions of likeminded Russians allowing one another to support the war and to hide from it simultaneously, none of this would be possible. None of them would be able to do it individually. While the emotions are different this time around, and less effervescent to be sure, they are no less collective—and that’s the part that matters when it comes to politics.

Moreover, if the wartime incentive is to prevent the war from disrupting your life not just by supporting it, but by helping to construct a social environment that is conducive to this kind of avoidance, then the construction (conscious or unconscious) of an encompassing sense of togetherness becomes a critical imperative. Simply put, now is not the time to accentuate differences. And that, I’d argue, is how a “rally ‘round the flag” built on a foundation of collective avoidance generates an increased sense that Putin represents the interests of the ordinary Russian.

But what do we do with the fact that Putin demonstrably does not represent the interests of the ordinary Russian? Let’s leave aside the abstract reality that Putin’s war has made Russians less safe and less prosperous, and that the next generation of Russians will pay an even higher price than this one will. Citizens in most countries, after all, tend not to fixate on abstractions. On a much more mundane level, the war is the proximate cause of a plane from Baku to Grozny being shot down, and of an increasing number of airspace closures around the country, of widespread environmental damage from oil spills in the Black Sea, and of significant financial volatility, to name just a few of the things that are causing real hardship for real Russian citizens.

If I’m right about the social underpinnings of Russian public opinion during the war, there does not have to be an objective reason for this shift in opinion. There doesn’t even need to be concerted Kremlin propaganda. The shared feeling of being all in it together—even if no one wants to talk about “it”—is enough. The credit being afforded to Putin, then, may have much less to do with how Russians feel about Putin, and more to do with how they feel about one another.

What I’m reading

I missed a week—and am still catching up from the holidays—so it’s a long list this time out!

• As we look to Monday’s festivities in the US, a number of preview and/or warning pieces are worth looking out, including:

  • Robert Kagan’s piece in The Atlantic on 7 January on what’s at stake for Trump in Ukraine;

  • A good essay in Le Monde on 11 January on the similarities in how Putin and the once and future US president think about power;

  • A report in Bloomberg on 16 January on sanctions measures being considered be the incoming administration in order to increase leverage over Moscow;

• On 5 January, Meduza had an intriguing—if somewhat opaque—dive into the Russian cultural phenomenon that has come to be known as the “new quiet ones” (новые тихие), which began as a cinematic movement some 20 years ago but have reemerged into the fore during the war in Ukraine;

• On 9 January, Meduza’s political reporter Andrei Pertsev had a look back at how 2024 dashed the hopes of some Russian elites for progress towards an end to the war;

• On 11 January, Novaya Gazeta Europe had a detailed look at new research from the Levada Center on how Russians are thinking about 2025. News flash: it’s the economy, stupid;

• Also on 11 January, Novaya Gazeta (not Europe) published an overview of the stresses in the Russian economy by Dmitri Prokofiev, drawing into sharp contrast the almost exclusive emphasis on the war economy, and a column by Andrei Kolesnikov on the nauseating scenes of a very different kind of Russian “rally ‘round the flag” in the French Alps;

• On 13 January, iStories published an investigation by Roman Katin into how a US flight-tracking app with access to personal data and airline databases ended up being controlled by the son of an FSB general;

• And on 16 January, Proekt published a major investigation by Mikhail Maglov, Iva Tsoi and Roman Badanin into two of Russia’s most influential wartime businessmen (I’m still avoiding the term ‘oligarch’), whose names you’ve probably never heard, but who control much of the country’s tobacco and alcohol markets and are spending their proceeds on Russia’s security state, all while enjoying access to the West.

What I’m listening to

Looking ahead to Monday and beyond—ahead, not forward—this song has been on my mind. On multiple levels.