TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

26 January 2025: All's quiet, plus texts and tunes

“The Morning of the Streltsy Execution,” Vasily Surikov, 1881

This edition of TL;DRussia rounds out an inadvertent three-piece series on Russian public opinion. The first, published 15 December, focused on the political distance between the Russian state and its citizens, and “the fact that most Russians—whether of the mass or elite variety—do not believe their lives and livelihoods to depend very much on what the regime does”. The second, published 19 January, focused on Russia’s wartime “rally ‘round the flag” and the politics of what I called “collective avoidance.”

This week, I’ll try to look a bit further down the line, and in particular at the role that the Russian public may—or may not—play in shaping the Kremlin’s approach to a putative ceasefire in Ukraine. (For thoughts on a ceasefire itself, please see the 5 January edition.)

I’ve been accused in the past of writing things that are too complicated or arcane, and I’m afraid that some of all three of these discussions of Russian public opinion have fallen or will fall into those categories. For that, I can only apologize for indulging a fascination of mine that others may not share, and promise that I’ll return to issues a bit less abstract from next week. And on that note, please use the button below to join the TL;DRussia chat and suggest topics you’d like to read about!

What I’m thinking about

In the 15 December 2024 TL;DRussia that kicked off this current discussion looked at some Levada Center data that have consistently shown that most Russians do not believe the state is governed in their interests. At the time, I noted in passing that this that trend had begun to shift and promised to return to it. Thus, in the 19 January 2025 edition I did exactly that, suggesting that the a “rally ‘round the flag” effect, driven in this case by the peculiar politics of collective avoidance, had led to a generalized uptick in Russians’ sense of connection with their state and one another.

In the process, though, I kicked down the road an obvious follow-up question: if Russians have suddenly started to believe that Putin represents their actual interests, what happens when they stop believing that? That, then, is the focus of this final installment in the TL;DRussia public opinion mini-series.

As the kerfuffle over Maria Snegovaya’s Atlantic Council paper on Russian public opinion laid bare, the popular and political discussion of what Russians think and whether it matters what Russians think is fairly dysfunctional, descending easily into acrimony and name-calling, and shedding precious little genuine light on the matter. This dysfunction stems, in my view, from the fact that the loudest voices in this discussion belong to people whose views are based on ideology, rather than analysis. On the one hand, you have those who believe that Russian opinion polls showing consistent support for the war are an accurate reflection of reality not because they have delved deeply into the data and the methodology, but because they are convinced that ordinary Russians are committed imperialists and/or fascists. On the other, you have those who reject such survey results out of hand, likewise not because they have delved deeply into the data and the methodology, but because they are personally and professionally committed to the belief that Russians’ expressed views are more or less exclusively the result of propaganda and repression.

Before I go any farther, a couple of caveats are in order. First, I do not intend to rehash here the question of what Russians actually think about the war. I’ve dealt with that question in this newsletter repeatedly (including in the 15 December 2024 and 19 January 2025 issues), and I’m certain I’ll come back to it in the future. That is not the operative question here, however. Second, I don’t rule out that either of the warring camps on Russian public opinion described above are wrong (though my own analysis falls somewhere in the middle). Even if one of them is entirely correct, however, everyone would be better off if that correctness rested on a more solid foundation.

Putting our analysis on a stronger foundation, meanwhile, requires us to have a theory of cause and effect when it comes to the opinions that Russian citizens have about politics. In other words, what do we understand about what makes Russians lend their support to to their leaders, and what makes them withdraw it? And what does that understanding tell us about how and when Russian citizens might seek to resist their rulers?

Broadly speaking, there are three competing rules of thought on this subject: the “authoritarian social contract” hypothesis, the “passive adaptation” hypothesis, and the “aggressive immobility” hypothesis. If you bear with me, I’ll take each of these in turn.

The “authoritarian social contract” hypothesis takes the traditional idea of a democratic social contract—in which politicians deliver security and welfare, and citizens deliver support in the form of votes—and adapts it for the Russian setting. In a nutshell, the idea is that Russia’s rulers offer stability and increasing prosperity, and demand in return that citizens stay out of politics. This idea, to be sure, has tremendous currency. It is probably the model that I come across most often when talking with policymakers, who almost uniformly assume it to be true, and it shines through in the work of most of the Western pundits who write from time to time about Russia.

Moreover, it has some serious academic backing. Indeed, the idea of a social contract of this variety underpins the work of Sergei Guriev and Dan Treisman on “informational autocracy”, aka “spin dictatorship”, in which 21st-century autocrats such as Vladimir Putin are argued to maintain support not predominantly through repression and fear, but by manipulating the information space to convince their citizens that they’re doing an excellent job. And when Peter Pomerantsev wrote in Foreign Affairs late last year that support for Putin can be undermined by making him look incompetent and not in control, it was this idea of a social contract he had in mind.

If this hypothesis is correct—if Russians trade their political voice for governance—the logical implication is that Russians would withdraw support if they came to see the government as incompetent or not in control (hence Peter’s proposed line of propaganda warfare against the Kremlin). The biggest fly in the ointment, however, is that while we have seen periods of significant economic upheaval under Putin (such as the financial crisis of 2007-9, or COVID) and periods of severe instability (such as Evgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny), none of these have led to much of a drop in support.

The “passive adaptation” hypothesis originates with Lev Gudkov, the former director and current research director of the Levada Center, Russia’s leading independent polling agency. Gudkov rejects the “social contract” hypothesis, largely for the reason I described above, and suggests instead that Russian citizens, having learned more or less successfully to adapt to large-scale social and economic change throughout the late- and post-Soviet periods, habitually choose to continue to adapt, rather than to resist.

This “inertia of passive adaptation”, Gudkov argues, has its origins in the scale of dysfunction and socio-economic transformation of the late Soviet Union and early post-Soviet Russia, which were of such vast proportions that adaptation almost inevitably seemed a better strategy than resistance. Even after institutions began to become more predictable, however, and the pace and scope of socio-economic change slowed, the habits of adaptation have prevented the emergence of meaningful political engagement. This is a powerful riposte to the “social contract” hypothesis, and one that is influential among many Russian sociologists, particularly of an older generation, including Gudkov’s late co-author Boris Dubin and, to a lesser extent, his Levada Center colleague Alexei Levinson.

If the “passive adaptation” hypothesis is correct, we should only expect to see resistance emerge when the resources of adaptation—i.e., the ability to use informal relationships and close-to-hand material resources to solve the problems that Russian life throws at you—run dry. And therein lies the rub, or rather the two rubs: first, the theory doesn’t give us a threshold against which to measure the available adaptive resources, and thus it is difficult to falsify; and second, it doesn’t account for the myriad instances of local and, occasionally, national-level resistance we have nevertheless seen over the years in Russia.

Enter, then, the “aggressive immobility” hypothesis. At the risk of self-aggrandizement, this one is mine, though it resonates to a great extent with the work of Oleg Zhuravlev and a younger generation of Russian sociologists. Like Gudkov’s “passive adaptation” hypothesis, the idea of “aggressive immobility” rejects the idea of a social contract, for largely the same reasons. It also, however, rejects the “passivity” of Gudkov’s argument, finding more agency in the adaptive processes. Put succinctly, having gone through all of the dysfunction and dislocation Gudkov describes, Russian citizens have expended considerable effort building the coping mechanisms that have allowed them to maintain a reasonable degree of prosperity and security. Having done this, they are then loath to see these mechanisms impeded or made obsolete.

As a result, as I argued in Moscow in Movement, Russian citizens are actually reasonably quick to rise up when the state does something to challenge those coping mechanisms (and the Russian state is reasonably quick to back down). But when faced with even the potential of pushing for political change writ large, aggressively immobile people are likely to balk, out of fear that change could disrupt their ability to keep relying on the individualized coping mechanisms that had gotten them through thus far. In other words, while passive people are easily moved, aggressively immobile people cling purposefully to their positions. And that, in turn, suggests that Russians will remain inert until the state infringes on their concrete lives in a coherent and concerted manner.

What do these competing hypotheses tell us about the role public opinion might play in a ceasefire? While there are no points for guessing which of these hypotheses is closest to my own heart, I am not going to argue here for the merits of one over the others. Instead, I’ll spend a little bit of time dealing with the implications of each hypothesis in turn.

If the “social contract” hypothesis is correct, a Kremlin that perceives a looming crisis of confidence, perhaps driven by difficult socio-economic policy decisions, might decide to reduce irritants by bringing the fighting in Ukraine to a stop. While anything is possible, however, evidence to date suggests that the irritants would have to become much greater than they are now, or at least would have to seem considerably greater to the Kremlin, before they begin thinking that a ceasefire is needed. After all, the war has already imposed tremendous and mounting difficulties on ordinary Russians, in the form of persistent inflation, soaring borrowing costs and more. The government, meanwhile, has struggled to maintain control (see the Prigozhin and Wildberries stories, most sigificantly), and no one seems to care very much.

If Gudkov’s “passive adaptation” hypothesis is correct, then we would likewise need to get much closer to economic collapse before the public became enough of a factor to overcome the Kremlin’s own ingrained assumption that the public doesn’t matter. And regardless of what some observers may think, there is no evidence that such a collapse is close at hand.

Finally, if the “aggressive immobility” hypothesis is right, then it’s a question neither of blame nor of hardship, but of the stuff Russians’ lives are made of. The Kremlin’s abortive attempt to mobilize men into service in the autumn of 2022, and its consistent unwillingness to repeat the experiment, would seem to reinforce the notion that Russians value their autonomy as the key resource with which to solve the problems the state throws at them. Broadening the aperture a bit, then, what the government cannot do is deprive people of choice, or of the belief that choice (or more choice) may be available in the future. Thus, the most dangerous thing for the Kremlin might not be a war that goes on forever (because even a forever war can be imagined to end at some point), but a war that ends without bringing a peace dividend. Whether that kind of a deal is on the table, however, is anyone’s guess.

What I’m reading

It’s been a bit of a busy week, so the reading list this time is a bit shorter than usual, and perhaps a bit more haphazard. The three main pieces of news that caught my attention all concern ways that the war is coming home to roost for ordinary Russians, albeit not in the volumes that would be needed to trigger a change in their political behavior (regardless of which of the hypotheses you most subscribe to).

• A report in Meduza on the deepening crisis caused by the wrecking of oil tankers in the Black Sea. While teams of volunteers are mostly dealing with the on-shore impact, the Russian state appears to have signally failed to contain the oil at sea, with the result that the damage is continuing to mount.

• Meduza likewise reported on the large-scale layoffs among IT staff at Sberbank and some of its digital economy subsidiaries, likely with more to come. Take this as your regular reminder that while the Russian job market is overheated, the boom is not evenly spread, and white-collar workers may end up being hit particularly hard.

• iStories reported on Telegram about the “We Are All Sudzha” movement, a group of residents of the largest Russian town occupied by Ukrainian forces. As Moscow continues its attempts to retake territory, with the aid of North Korean fighters, movement activists are asking both the Russian and Ukrainian governments to spare civilians. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they feel ignored by the Kremlin.

In addition, a couple of recent academic papers may be worth your time:

• I missed this when it came out in October, but Anton Shirikov had a paper in the Journal of Politics showing that authoritarian state media—and Russian media in particular—build their audiences by seeking to resonate with the beliefs those audiences already hold. And that, in turn, means that even the Kremlin needs to build its propaganda out of the raw materials given to it by the Russian public. (This is all additional evidence of the “co-construction of authoritarianism” thesis Graeme Robertson and I put forward in Putin vs the People, so it makes me particularly happy.)

• Veering away from Russia, but still relevant, Alex Yates and Aurelien Mondon published a study in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations on how populist leaders who hail from the same economic elites against which they’ve rallied their voters manage nonetheless to convince voters to support them.

What I’m listening to

For no good reason whatsoever, this song—which hasn’t been on my playlist for years—popped into my head this week and won’t leave. Yes, it’s French, and yes, it’s off key, but, I don’t know, it just works. For me, at least. And hopefully for you, too.