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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

In the early hours of 24 February 2022, Russian forces attacked Ukraine. The brutality of the Russian assault has horrified the world. But Russians themselves appear to be watching an entirely different war - one in which they are the courageous underdogs and kind-hearted heroes successfully battling a malign Ukrainian foe. Russia analyst Jade McGlynn takes us on a journey into this parallel military and political universe to reveal the sometimes monstrous, sometimes misconstrued attitudes behind Russian majority backing for the invasion. Drawing on media analysis and interviews with ordinary citizens, officials and foreign-policy elites in Russia and Ukraine, McGlynn explores the grievances, lies and half-truths that pervade the Russian worldview. She also exposes the complicity of many Russians, who have invested too deeply in the Kremlin's alternative narratives to regard the war as Putin's foolhardy mission. In their eyes, this is Russia's war - against Ukraine, against the West, against evil - and there can be no turning back.

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Seitenzahl: 417

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

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Leseprobe

Cover

Dedication

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Prologue: Credence and incredulity

Notes

1. The bad Tsar

Our quarrel is with the Russian people

Pick your propaganda

Notes

2. Putin’s polls

Evidence of support for war

Measuring opposition to the war

Who is to blame?

Patriotism or leave me alone

Notes

3. How do you say ‘war’ in Russian?

Chaotic competition

Laying the ground work

Revolution or coup?

Media depictions of the ‘special military operation’

The Little Patriotic War

Russia as ‘misunderstood angels’

David versus Goliath

Fake news

Notes

4. Washing brains

Zombification

Pronouncing nonsense

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Prologue Credence and incredulity

Begin Reading

Conclusion: How Russia lost the war

Index

End User License Agreement

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Dedication

To my Ukrainian friends, colleagues and heroes.

Russia’s War

JADE MCGLYNN

polity

The right of Jade McGlynn to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2023 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5677-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022949945

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

On the 24th of every month, I take a picture of my baby daughter. But there is no photo to mark the day she turned two months – 24 February – because that was the day Russia invaded Ukraine. This was the day that meant Ukrainian parents, in their thousands, will never again be able to take a photograph of their babies. Because they have been kidnapped, deported or killed. This is a book about Russians – the people who committed, approved or ignored the kidnappings, deportations and killings – but Ukrainian resilience is the real protagonist. For this reason, as paltry as it is, I would like first to acknowledge the millions of personal tragedies happening to ordinary Ukrainians, who should be worrying about bad hair days, what to have for dinner or how to afford this or that item – not how to bury their son in the front garden, or where to scavenge for food, or what to do now their house is destroyed.

I am grateful I do not personally know such tragedy but also that I have Ukrainian friends and colleagues who have helped me to see through some of this privilege and to understand Ukraine, and how to help: Yulia Bidenko, Sasha Danylyuk, Aliona Hlivco, Olesya Stepanchuk, Dmytro Tretiakov, and many others who prefer to remain anonymous but who know who they are.

As is inevitable for a book written in five months, there are numerous people I must thank who made this possible. First of all, Altynay Jusunova, for her excellent research skills and assistance with the Telegram study, and Yanliang Pan, for his assistance across a bizarrely wide spectrum of activities and for making it possible for me to focus on this book. Beyond these two superstars, I would like to make special mention of the following people, all of whom supported me with time, advice, edits, discussions and inspiration: Lucy Birge, Thomas Brenberg, Ruth Deyermond, Clare Evans, Mark Galeotti, Polly Jones, Michael Kimmage, Ivan Krastev, Felix Krawatzek, Natasha Kuhrt, Marlene Laruelle, Adam Lenton, Aleksei Lokhmatov, Edward Lucas, Hennadiy Maksak, Daria Mattingly, Mira Milosevich, Andrew Monaghan, Jeremy Morris, Patrick Porter, His Excellency Vadym Prystaiko, Lena Racheva, Alan Riley, Issy Sawkins, Bob Seely MP, Ira Shcherbakova, Andrei Tsygankov, Pany Xenophontos, my students on the Monterey Trialogue, Monterey Summer Symposium and the Studienstiftung, Uilleam Blacker, Tim Frye, Ian Garner, Paul Goode, Anna Vassilieva, and my Russian colleagues who would prefer to remain anonymous.

I am grateful to my editor, Louise Knight, and to Inès Boxman for their support in making this an accessible book on a very tight deadline. The two anonymous readers also provided me with invaluable advice that greatly improved several chapters and the overall structure of the book. I would also like to thank all of my interviewees for agreeing to share their time and views with me during a period when that was either emotionally strenuous or politically inadvisable, to say the least.

Although this book is aimed at a non-specialist audience, it is inevitably informed by the two decades I have spent studying the history, politics, culture and languages of the post-socialist region in Europe. While I am originally a Russianist, I first started studying Ukrainian history, politics and language in 2014, when I was still living in Moscow. What was originally a knee-jerk response to Russian aggression (and public support for it), grew into a profound interest in Ukraine’s cultural nuances and riches. Russia’s invasions of Ukraine have long been a prominent feature of my research, from MA to postdoctoral studies, and I would like to thank my Ukrainian teachers – Olha Homonchuk and, later, Anastasia Ktitorova – for ensuring I could access the Ukrainian perspective, as well as the Russian.

Finally, I would like to thank my family. This list must start with my dad and nan for offering childcare, all sorts of toyand food-related assistance and for not questioning why I was always writing at 2am in the morning. For similar reasons, I would like to declare my undying gratitude to my husband, who has put up with me writing two books within the space of twelve months. Despite the incredible inconvenience this has caused, he has always been there to help me, read my drafts, and support my work. He has done this even as he juggles his own very important work and ceaselessly fights, by my side, a doomed battle to maintain a sense of authority over our rambunctious son and infant daughter. And so to the other two main protagonists in my life: my darling son Sasha possesses a rare kindness, sense of fun, and inquisitive character that have helped me maintain a work–life balance and rekindled my love of Thomas the Tank Engine. My beautiful daughter, Lara, has accompanied me to most of the interviews in this book, on work trips to California, Madrid, Warsaw, and to meet the Ukrainian Ambassador. She has never failed to bring light to even the darkest of days. Even though there may be many such days ahead, these three will always remind me of the goodness and wonder in life.

PrologueCredence and incredulity

There is a grave in Mariupol, overflowing with human bodies, murdered in cold blood by execution squads. None of the people had been properly identified, most never would be now. ‘We can already see that there’s quite a large number of corpses here. Locals say that uniformed soldiers came in cars and dumped the bodies into these pre-dug trenches.’1 The mayor, Konstantin Ivashchenko, frowns as he explains, in clipped language, that some of the corpses were not properly covered. When Mayor Ivashchenko, who is a local man, stops talking, his eyes are void. The television camera crew turn off their equipment and leave the ruins of a city stalked by cholera and crime.

The following day, this clip spreads across Russian mainstream and social media. It makes a strong impression on viewers, who watch it in horror. They feel the same revulsion as Western audiences do when watching footage from Mariupol. Some are moved to act, or to turn away, or to despair, or to take the fight to the monsters responsible. Almost all share a hatred of those who murdered these poor souls and glazed the traumatised eyes of the Ukrainian mayor. They share a profound sense of outrage at the foreign-backed criminals killing innocents in Ukraine: Zelensky and his Western-backed Nazis.

As a reader, you are probably thinking: Nonsense, the Russians killed them. I agree and there is plenty of evidence to support our assertions. And yet, we haven’t been to the crime scene, carried out a full investigation, or developed the expertise to assess when these people were killed and when their bodies were transported to the mass grave. Our knowledge that the Russians are culpable, rather than the Ukrainians, is based on informed assumptions and the wise decision not to give any credence to the claims of Russian news or collaborationist mayors like Ivashchenko.2 But Russians do give credence to these sources, or at least few give any credence to Western and Ukrainian views. For many of us watching the daily onslaught in Ukraine in horror, the Russian viewpoint is incomprehensible – as baffling as it is appalling. But if we look more closely at the powerful forces shaping those perceptions, the reasons why Russians back the war become much clearer, if no less disconcerting.

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a genocidal war against a peaceful neighbour. The violence the Russian Army has unleashed is calamitous for Ukraine, the world and Russia itself. There can be no justification for what Russia is doing now, or for what it has been doing in Ukraine since 2014. And yet many, many Russians do justify, even approve, the war. It is their war, Russia’s war, not Putin’s alone. I respect the brave Russians who have actively opposed the invasion and worked tirelessly to support Ukrainians in often unacknowledged ways. They possess unfathomable courage. But this book is not about them, nor is it about the true believers, the soldiers committing atrocities – neither are representative groups. Instead, it is about the Russians who acquiesce to the war, the ordinary people, the majority. I have zero hope of solving the Russia ‘enigma’ with a neat label but I do want to probe the complexities of the context through which these same Russians understand their war.

Russian approval of the war is honed by the paradoxical nature of Russian society, the mixture of militarised ritual and apathy that the Kremlin has sponsored and delivered through narratives that resonate in different ways with different groups. Since 2014, the Kremlin and its supporters have devised an entire strategic language around Ukraine, a story with familiar characters and events that play on people’s emotions, biases, hopes and fears – to encourage certain types of support, discourage others, and eliminate active opposition. These narratives are often co-creations, selected for their resonance, rather than artifice imposed from above. Just as with Kremlin-sponsored disinformation campaigns abroad, the Russian state-affiliated media, with its varied and competing actors vying for popularity and impact, is adept at identifying what resonates and using it to their benefit.

The war propagandists know how to attract a crowd and how to impress the Kremlin, they are story makers not messengers. In the coming pages, I argue that Russian media content is not the result of the Kremlin imposing a narrative but of various actors, including ordinary Russians, co-creating a more amenable version of the world around them. To do so, I draw on ten years of close analysis of Russian state media, data analysis of almost 75,000 posts on the Russian social media platform Telegram, interviews with officials, elites and ordinary citizens from Russia and Ukraine, and my own experience of living and working in Russia for long periods, researching Russian media, history and politics. There will be no grand claims about the Russian soul. My purpose in writing this book is to explain why Russians support the war and what that support actually means in a context (almost) devoid of political agency.

In my efforts to explain this support to the reader, I will use comparisons and analogies with other countries, especially in the West.3 These are not meant to relativise but to show where other peoples have faced the same choices and reacted in similar ways. That said, each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way. Russian society is haunted by its unresolved bloody history, the wounds of which the Kremlin reopens constantly, instrumentalising the trauma of twentieth-century terror, war and famine for political gain. Resistance is futile, given that the heirs of the men responsible for all of the terrors, most of the famines, and some of the wars still run the country and have instilled a cult of the perpetrator, reinforced by historical myth. Combined with continued authoritarianism lurching into dictatorship, Putin’s patrimonial power vertical has created the ideal conditions for a particularly diseased conception of Russian identity to flourish. Treating Putin as the symptom not the cause, I examine the myths, memories and myopia fuelling the country to disaster, keeping its people clinging to a juggernaut of resentment, insecurity and fear.

Notes

RIA Novosti, 25 March 2022, video archived. See here for further details on the graves:

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-mariupol-mass-grave-af9477cd69d067c34e0e336c05d765cc

The term ‘collaborator’ is used in conjunction with the designations of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine.

I am using the term ‘West’ here as an imperfect synonym for the EU, UK and North America.

1The bad Tsar

‘You will upset a lot of people.’ Vadym Prystaiko, former Foreign Minister of Ukraine and now the ambassador to the United Kingdom, supported my premise but had endured enough discussions of Russia’s war to forewarn me that my book title wouldn’t be popular. ‘Many Western policymakers want to paint this just as Putin’s war, it suits them better.’1 The notion that Putin invaded Ukraine despite the Russian people is often espoused by Westerners with a large circle of Russian acquaintances who all hail from an entirely unrepresentative sample of liberal Muscovites. The notion that just one bad Tsar is spoiling the barrel reinforces a reassuring sense that once Putin’s generation has died out, the Russian people will trot merrily onto the path of progress, steamrollered forward by a liberal youth who admire and envy the West. I understand the appeal of this narrative as I would like to believe it too but it has the disadvantage of being untrue. Russia’s war on Ukraine is popular with large numbers of Russians and acceptable to an even larger number.

Naturally, statements like ‘Russia thinks’ are inherently flawed: Russia is a diverse country, with diverse people holding diverse views. But most of these people do not oppose the war on Ukraine and they like Putin, or at least they like what he tells and sells them. To understand the roots of such approval, you need to place yourself in the context in and through which many Russians understand and experience the world. Their perspective is coloured by the trauma of the Soviet collapse, the country’s institutions’ and leaders’ refusal to recognise the crimes of the past, and several governments’ inability to embed the country within the ‘international rules-based order’. Together, these challenges have contributed to an identity crisis and resentment that Putin has been able to channel into a resonant political force. Based on atavism, aggrievement and aggression, this force acts upon the Russian people in diverse ways that serve the Kremlin’s needs. It leaves no space for hope, only revenge; no space for improvement, only redemption; and no space for the future, only a reproducible past in which people can take shelter from the present.

People without a past, or who are struggling with identity, often turn to genealogy, buying ancestral DNA kits to understand who they are, where they come from, and to reconnect with the culture of their ancestors. In their past, and in blood relatives whom they never knew, many find a more stable version of themselves. This turn to the past interacts paradoxically with the urge for reinvention or renewal: rather than embrace the human ability to grow, change and adapt, it is about finding an essence, the source from which we spring, proving we are not fully constructed or imagined. Nations who feel a need to prove their lineage can follow a similar path, tracking down their dead, metaphorically unearthing their forebears to understand ‘who are we?’ by answering ‘who were they?’ In honouring the dead, using traditions and rituals to connect to them and bring them back to life, nations affirm their own existence and future.

In Russia’s all-consuming identity crisis, politicians and ordinary people also raise the dead in their search for meaning. But the dead bring no closure, only more deaths. The historian and cultural theorist Aleksandr Etkind has argued that post-Soviet culture is ‘the land of the unburied’, a country where the events of the mid-twentieth century are still very much alive, and still contentious within the political present.2 Russia’s leaders are unable to make sense of the blood-drenched pages of their past, unable to assemble them into a positive story in a way that acknowledges the depth of tragedy. Instead, they ignore or externalise the tragedy, burying it in shallow graves alongside those murdered by the Russian state and its predecessors.

On top of these graves, Russian officials and secret services put memorial stones to mask the cause of death, passing off the victims of Stalinist purges as Russians killed by fascists in the Second World War, crudely appropriating the bodies of those they murdered to serve as falsified evidence of their own heroism and victimhood. Such is the process underway in Sandormokh, Karelia, where the local FSB (secret police) insists that the mass graves filled with Stalin’s victims, executed during the Great Terror, are actually mass graves of Soviet POWs slaughtered by Nazis. As well as pursuing local historians, such as Yuri Dmitriev, for providing evidence that disproves their claims, Russian officials are using these victims, many of them Ukrainian writers and artists from the so-called ‘executed renaissance’, as evidence in a campaign to recognise the Second World War as a genocide of the Soviet people.3

The use of corpses to assert rights over the living isn’t peculiar to Russia. When the Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito died, Serbs started to dig up relatives murdered in WWII. In many cases they hadn’t been able to mourn their loved ones or even acknowledge the ethnocidal nature of their killings. They had to repress their trauma in the name of ‘brotherhood and unity’, the maxim of the Yugoslav state. But the exhumations were a reliving rather than resolution of trauma, a grotesque carnival. All of a sudden it turned out those relatives weren’t dead at all, they had come back to life, possessing their children and grandchildren with all the unresolved tensions of 1941 to 1945, ready to refight past battles. In eerie echoes of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Serbia attacked Croatia and Bosnia, recalling their (admittedly more significant and recent) Nazi collaborator pasts to justify slaughtering erstwhile neighbours and annexing ‘historic Serb’ lands.

At the same time as Yugoslav television camera crews were fixing the screen glare on their film of disturbed graves, 800 miles away the Berlin Wall was falling. In 1989, Europe’s leaders celebrated this new era as a march towards liberalism; but they should have looked south, to see the return and revenge of history. Yugoslavia, so often orientalised as Europe’s subconscious or a backwards-looking harbinger of past hatreds, serves rather as a glimpse into Europe’s atavistic future. The region possesses histories that the West and Russia alike have preferred to ignore or to violently suppress. In this, Francis Fukuyama was more right than wrong, given that his End of History thesis did not suggest that the countries of the world would sail off into the sunlit uplands of liberal democracy but rather predicted that countries would find new things to fight over.4 In the absence of ideology, the source of conflict has become identity imbued with genealogical essentialism and historicism – a fight over the past for civilisations unable to imagine, let alone provide, a better future.

Nowhere have these tendencies been better exemplified than in Russia’s war on Ukraine – both the full-scale invasion and the ongoing conflict waged since 2014. It is obviously an existential war for Ukraine and Ukrainians – Russia’s leaders have openly declared their intention to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign entity and identity. The Russian government, having conflated itself with the nation, also sees the war as existential, even if the Russian people do not, on the whole, share this view. As described in the following pages, Russians occupy a range of positions on the war, with many viewing it as a far-away military operation of which they knew little – at least until the Kremlin’s announcement of ‘partial’ mobilisation in September 2022.

How to understand this paradox whereby a war is existential but ignorable? Squaring this circle is crucial to understanding how Russians have come to acquiesce in the crimes committed in their names. The apathy and the extremism stem from the same root of unresolved historical traumas in which the crimes go unpunished and the criminals stay in power. On its own, this state of affairs prevents the healthy development of society, as we see around the world, but the effect in Russia is exacerbated by the Kremlin’s use of historical and other narratives, which reinforces the inherent power and fear of memories for some sections of society as well as nodding to the resonance of these same memories among other sections of the Russian population. These two sections are not static or divisible. The same person can and often does belong to both, just as many of the NKVD officers who delivered the first waves of Stalin’s terror would be executed or sent to the Gulag in later rounds.

This indivisibility complicates a tendency in Western thinking to see people living in autocracies as heroes or villains, a binary that overlooks the corrosive nature of fear and how it encourages people to justify their actions. What is more, most Russians have no support structure through which to manage and overcome that fear. The closure of Memorial, a civil society organisation dedicated to human rights and the study of Soviet state terror, just a couple of months shy of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, feels retrospectively loaded with symbolism. It completed the state-sanctioned politics of selective amnesia. But fear, amnesia, and negative emotions are not the only drivers. Putin doesn’t shape Russians’ views on foreign policy or Ukraine so much as he articulates them. The Kremlin has used smoke and mirrors to encourage Russians to support the ‘special military operation’ – but the Russian people are co-authors of this deception.

In other words, the Kremlin’s sales tactics are heavy-handed, but many Russians are in the market for buying. As I show in Chapter 2, there is enough sociological research to confirm that a significant number of Russians approve of what they believe is happening in Ukraine. Russians aren’t the first nation to support a ghastly and unjust war,5 and nor will they be the last, so this book wants to look further, asking not if Russians support the war but why, what does support mean, and to what extent are these phenomena peculiar to Russians? Ultimately this war does not stem from some genetic Russian exceptionalism – although that would have made for a much easier book to write. It is a choice. From the outside it may appear a binary choice but that is not how it is perceived and experienced in Russia.

Our quarrel is with the Russian people

In discussions of the war on Ukraine, and why it is popular, there are two simplistic streams – and a third group of insights. The first categorises Russians as evil, we need to ban them, destroy their country and cancel anything they have ever produced. The second group tries to depict the war as Putin’s alone, an approach summarised by US President Joe Biden’s bizarre line that ‘our quarrel is not with the Russian people’.6 (Given how many lethal weapons the USA is sending to Ukraine, it would be terrifying to see them have a real quarrel.) The notion that this war is imposed upon the Russian people follows the rhetorical tradition in the West of characterising the Soviet regime as an evil empire but its people as long-suffering liberals chafing at the bit of autocracy. Policymakers may view this framing as politically expedient as if – or when – Putin, or Putinism, does fall, it allows Russians to externalise his crimes as something done not by but to them. In theory, this would more easily facilitate a move toward liberalism. But this approach didn’t work in 1991, nor would pretending Russians were in no way complicit be just and, as the title of this book suggests, it most certainly wouldn’t be correct. More importantly, it would reinforce a lack of responsibility and introspection that has contributed to many Russians’ inability to accept the truth of the war.

This is Russia’s war. The Russian people are largely complicit in the war’s launch and the way it has been waged, just as the US and UK populations have been complicit in their nations’ wars. This book wants to probe that complicity because it is an important part of why and how the war is fought: Putin banked on the population’s approval and he cashed it. Most people had a choice. Russia is an authoritarian country but until recently it would not have been correct to categorise it as a dictatorship; it is rather an autocracy that offers its citizens lots of carrots to avoid the stick, as the journalist Joshua Yaffa explains so eloquently in his book Between Two Fires,7 which spells out the many compromises liberal Russians made to live a meaningful and comfortable existence. It might be useful here to picture what choice you would make in the same position: would you speak out about a discriminatory company policy if it also meant losing the promotion that would help you afford your son’s healthcare? Would you insist on calling the war in Iraq a war crime even if it carried the threat of jail time? Do you care that much? It is only by posing these questions to ourselves that we can even remotely understand the context in and through which Russians understand the war.

Pick your propaganda

Each war-supporting Russian interprets the propaganda in their own way and approves of the war for their own reasons; very few people simply parrot copycat versions of Kremlin lines. In any country, the same piece of propaganda can produce varied results in audiences. It might mobilise support in some viewers, while in others it will simply spark what the anthropologist Jeremy Morris calls a ‘defensive consolidation’ – we’re here now so what can we do, let’s stick together.8 In others still, it will demobilise opposition, either directly through fear or indirectly by encouraging people to disassociate from the war. In research on China, the academic Haifeng Huang, found that heavy-handed, over-the-top propaganda actually backfired in the sense that viewers were less likely to trust and support the narratives and state media producing them. What it did achieve was to make those watching such extreme propaganda less likely to protest, because this propaganda did not – and was not trying to – demonstrate the trustworthiness of the Chinese state. It was a demonstration of the power of the Chinese state, such that it could confidently present such unbelievable lies as news.9

In other words, propaganda works but not necessarily in the way you think it does. This is markedly so in Russia where what one might term ‘support for the war’ is better understood as an acquiescence borne of many factors: apathy, lack of sympathy, self-interest, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, and so on. This is why, if the first half of this book examines what Russians are watching, then the second half switches focus to why they want to watch that in the first place, drawing in more detail on interviews and first-hand analysis of Russian society. Both elements are needed to make sense of Russians’ complicated consent to this war. Of the almost sixty interviews I conducted for this book, a discussion with a Russian friend from a normal middle-class Moscow family summed up the complexity for me. In his view, for most Russians, it is natural to ‘care more about a Pushkin statue than a dead Ukrainian child. My parents would say as much even though they don’t really engage with the war – such things help them to accept the war, it is like an attack on their very being.’10 But he also added that such attitudes were not dependent on age, insisting he had heard similar comments ‘from young people and from people who aren’t in Russia. I don’t think the location matters – it’s the question of belonging to a discourse, a discursive group. Here in Germany, I saw some demonstrations of the Alternative für Deutschland and some Russians with them bearing Russian flags and singing the Soviet war anthem Katyusha – it was the day after the discovery of mass graves at Bucha … I wanted to throw a stone at them.’ But there was no stone and so he walked on.11

This quotation visualises and groups some of the more prominent and frequent reactions of Russians to the war: those who don’t engage with the war, and sometimes may not even support it, but are emotionally consolidated around the Russian side; people who support it by performing certain rituals, albeit rarely with as much agency as the German Russians noted above; and people who are opposed but lack the tools to do anything about it, they have no stone to throw. As I argue throughout this book, one way to understand the difference between the groups – which are imperfectly drawn and in constant flux – is through the spectrum of allies model, used by pressure groups to change minds and influence people.

The original spectrum of allies comprises active support, passive support, neutral, passive opposition and active opposition. Pressure groups and political parties work on the assumption that movements seldom win by overpowering the opposition; they win by shifting support out from under it. Their hypothesis is that, rather than focus on active supporters and active opponents, to change views you need to acknowledge that most people are somewhere between these two points and try to nudge them further along the spectrum of allies: from passive opponent to neutral, from neutral to passive support, from passive support to active support. Likewise, there isn’t much point bothering about the active opposition – you won’t convince them. It is much more productive to work on moving people up into a more supportive, or at least more neutral, category.

The Kremlin’s spectrum of allies functions according to similar principles but with some adaptations: their spectrum comprises active support, passive ritual support, loyal neutrals, apathy and active opposition. Notably, in their version, the Kremlin doesn’t just ignore but sets out to destroy active opposition, or at least render them hopeless and apathetic. Then they nudge the apathetic into loyal neutrality (‘my country, right or wrong’), and loyal neutrals into ritual supporters. A further twist is that the Kremlin does not view active support as the ideal end result but as undesirable. Distrusting any freely made political act even if in support of the regime, the Kremlin tries to shuffle active supporters down into the ritual support category, creating clear boundaries for what is and is not an acceptable way to show allegiance.

In any authoritarian country with active censorship, ordinary people’s views are inevitably difficult to ascertain with full accuracy, which also complicates any generalisations. Whatever the Kremlin wishes to present, Russia is a country of atomisation, not of collective coming together. There is no society in the sense of a collective group of people made up of social relationships founded on solidarity or mutual interest without any sort of hierarchy. Consequently, it is much easier to explain why elites support or oppose the war because they care about rationalising and intellectualising – and because there are fewer of them. They provide more clarity of views, as you are much likelier to find active war supporters among the elites, intellectual or political, than among ordinary citizens. The spectrum of allies approach is of limited value in understanding their views, so it is worth briefly outlining them here.

First, you have people like Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, one of Putin’s closest advisers. Patrushev is representative of siloviki hawks who genuinely believe Ukraine shouldn’t exist and that the war was necessary, preventative and civilisational. Among this so-called ‘party of war’12 there are outsider political manoeuvrers such as Ramzan Kadyrov, leader of Chechnya, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group, who understand the popularity of pushing a more maximalist view of the war and how it ought to be fought. However, traditionally, most Russian elites are brutally realist, in that they want to maximise Russian power, which the war obviously has failed to do, bleeding its military and human forces, and making Russia much more dependent on China.

There are different groups of realists, including those who want to contain the West and those who are realist Westernisers, not in the sense of being liberal or anti-liberal so much as in the way they prioritise sovereignty and prestige. A typical example of the latter would be Andrei Kortunov at the Russian International Affairs Council, who has publicly criticised the war. Another group is the Eurasian regionalists, who believe Russia’s status as a major power must be based on its regional identity rather than any alliance with the West. The more extreme wings of this group, such as the nationalist and Eurasianist publication Tsargrad, funded by the Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, express a demand for more war and coalesce with figures like Kadyrov. Yet, on the more philosophical wing of this same group, where you will find academics and thinkers like Vadim Tsymbursky and Boris Mezhuev, there is a preference for reducing the war aims to creating a buffer zone of Ukrainian territory.13

Some elites are entrepreneurial in their approach to the war, such as Dmitrii Medvedev who was previously seen as a hope for a more liberal, democratic Russia during his brief stint as President, but is now a vehement supporter of the war. Among the foreign-policy elites, Dmitri Trenin’s transformation has been much discussed in the West. As the former Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, Dr Trenin might previously have been classed as belonging to the Westerniser realist camp. However, since the war began his position has shifted and he now outlines why a clear win for Russia, including inflicting serious damage on the Western ‘enemy’, is a matter of survival.14

Of course, most ordinary Russians have little time or energy to pontificate about Eurasianism or the merits of classical versus offensive realism as a way of explaining the world. As such, the narratives that resonate with them originate from different sources that are not always easy to identify, although I attempt to do so in Chapters 5–7. A team of Russian sociologists that has been collecting in-depth interviews with Russians has also tried, grouping respondents supportive of the war into five categories:15

State propaganda audiences: These people trust official sources of information, feel compassion for civilians, but ultimately believe that the Ukrainian army is responsible for the war and are ready to endure the consequences of sanctions.

Supporters of the ‘Russian World’: These people don’t trust propaganda, but have nationalist and imperialist sympathies. For them, the conflict between Russia and the Western world has been going on for a long time. The war is just an attempt to establish peace and order by Russia.

NATO threat group: These people don’t trust propaganda and criticise Putin. They didn’t want war but now they use NATO threat rhetoric to justify the war.

Personally connected with Donbas: These people are often critical of Putin and not interested in Russia’s march on Kyiv but rather hope the invasion might end hostilities in Donbas.

Incoherent attitudes group: These people don’t really think about politics or even the conflict much but feel confused and overwhelmed by conflicting narratives, meaning they acquiesce to the war since they don’t really understand what is going on.

These views will continue to evolve and to merge with one another as the war continues. A person’s reason(s) for supporting the war will rarely fit neatly into one group alone and even if they did, that could change over time due to a shift in relative importance. Moreover, people can be motivated by contradictory reasons, or might use a political stance to articulate a certain sense of fairness unrelated to geopolitics and instead linked to personal experience, e.g. if an ethnic Russian had a relative who ended up in Uzbekistan after the fall of USSR, and struggled to obtain a Russian passport, then they might be a strong supporter of the Russian World concept in a way that has nothing to do with Ukrainians. In other words, these groups are useful guides but must still be taken with a pinch of salt: they provide insights, not answers. As the Professor of Political Science at Columbia University Timothy Frye explained to me, ‘sociological polls are bad tools for working out why people do things – people rarely know themselves – but they can tell us lots of other things’.16

Notes

Interview with Vadym Prystaiko, London, Ukrainian Embassy in the UK, 21 June 2022.

Aleksandr Etkind, 2013,

Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Cultural Memory in the Present)

(Stanford University Press, 2013).

‘1111 zhertv Sаndаrmokhu: rozstrіl pіd rіchnitsyu bіl’shovits’koї revolyutsії’,

BBC News Ukrаїnа

https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/blogs-41734955

; ‘Anna Yarovaya: Rewriting Sandarmokh’,

The Russian Reader

(blog), 29 December 2017,

https://therussianreader.com/2017/12/29/anna-yarovaya-rewriting-sandarmokh/

Francis Fukuyama,

The End of History and the Last Man

(London, New York, Toronto, Dublin, Melbourne, New Delhi, Auckland Parktown North: Penguin Books Ltd, 2012).

‘Memories of Iraq: Did We Ever Support the War?’ YouGov,

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2015/06/03/remembering-iraq

https://twitter.com/abcnewslive/status/1493687915859386374

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/03/26/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-united-efforts-of-the-free-world-to-support-the-people-of-ukraine/

Joshua Yaffa,

Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia

, 1st edn (London: Granta Books, 2020).

Jeremy Morris, ‘Russians in Wartime and Defensive Consolidation’,

Current History

121, no. 837 (1 October 2022): 258–63,

https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2022.121.837.258

Haifeng Huang, ‘The Pathology of Hard Propaganda’,

Journal of Politics

80, no. 3 (July 2018): 1034–38,

https://doi.org/10.1086/696863

10.

Interview with Slava, via Telegram, 24 May 2022, pseudonymised.

11.

Ibid.

12.

Thank you to Andrei Tsygankov for our discussion and his help in outlining the views here.

13.

‘Filosof Boris Mezhuev o tom, chto Rossiya mozhet prinesti na osvobozhdennye territorii, Ukraina.ru, – 14.08.2022 Ukrаinа.Ru’,

https://ukraina.ru/20220812/1037583183.html

14.

‘How Russia Must Reinvent Itself to Defeat the West’s “Hybrid War”’, Dmitri Trenin,

Russia in Global Affairs

(blog),

https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/russia-must-reinvent-itself/

15.

Svetlana Erpyleva, ‘Why Russians Support the War against Ukraine’,

openDemocracy

, 16 April 2022,

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-ukraine-war-support-interviews-opinion/

16.

Interview with Timothy Frye via Zoom, 25 May 2022.

2Putin’s polls

Putin napav. Putin has attacked.

These are the words with which many Ukrainian mothers woke their sleeping children in the early hours of 24 February 2022. Nothing could have truly prepared Ukrainians or anyone with a connection to the region for the sight of the Russian Army bombing the place they proclaim ‘the mother of all Russian cities’. A new age of barbarism was ushered into Europe. Kyiv was under siege. Westminster was in chaos. Paris was trying to get its bearings. Berlin was in shock. And in Moscow there was a sneering silence. Where were the Russian people? Surely they didn’t want this? Did they even know?

Ira Shcherbakova is a brave and talented young journalist who was arrested for protesting the war in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. On her release from jail, she accompanied her family on a four-hour trip from Moscow to the house of her step-grandfather, to celebrate his birthday. In her interview with me, Ira painted a picture of gilded ignorance pregnant with imminent disaster – an image and setting worthy of a Chekhov play. ‘We were at this country house party and we realised that only those who were from Moscow knew that the war had started. Everyone else was coming up to us and asking “Why are you so sad? What’s wrong?” Just imagine, there was me, my mum, my stepdad all sitting there glued to our phones, anxious, almost shaking. But everyone around us continued to drink, to sing, to dance and to ask us “Why are you so sad? What happened?”’1

This phrase, ‘what happened?’ (chto sluchilos?) has become a meme on the Russian internet (RuNet). It is a mockery of the censorship but also of the way people are continuing their normal lives, moaning about the hindrances caused by the war without referencing the war itself. For example, headlines like ‘In 2022, record numbers of Russians have applied for passports’ or ‘Authorities are increasing the plots available at the military cemetery by 17 hectares’ are then followed by the ironic question ‘Oh, what happened?’ It draws attention to the way that for many Russians, unlike Ira, the war is everywhere and nowhere, like background noise. Or radiation.

Evidence of support for war

‘They use Putin as an excuse for why they can’t change anything. What Putin? Is Putin shooting women and raping our children? Is he? No, it isn’t Putin, it is Russians.’ Olesya Stepanchuk is a friend from Kharkiv, by way of Rivne. Her views are representative of many Ukrainians with whom I have spoken and this chapter will chart the extent to which this statement – ‘It isn’t Putin, it is Russians’ – is a fair assessment. After all, Putin is legally culpable for starting the war but Russian soldiers committing war crimes in Ukraine also carry both legal and moral culpability. The Head of the Russian Armed Forces, General Gerasimov did not give Russian soldiers orders to rape children; Minister of Defence Shoigu didn’t command an Ahmat Brigade fighter to castrate and then execute a terrified POW with a boxknife. Every war criminal has committed their crimes of their own accord, often while comrades-in-arms cheered.

Efforts to blame Putin alone are not credible, especially when his approval ratings are apparently so high. The most reliable polling available, from the independent Levada Center, puts approval of Vladimir Putin at above 82 per cent every month between March and September 2022.2 Putin’s post-war approval rating was almost twenty points higher than his pre-war numbers, a discrepancy Aleksei Levinson, head of the sociocultural research department at the Levada Center, sees as crucial to unpicking where exactly support for the war lies:

Sixty per cent of Russians almost always approve of Putin’s actions – he has had this level of rating since the first months of his presidency [in 2000]. One time it dropped to 59 per cent but generally it never really falls below 60 per cent. Whenever Putin starts a war, like in 2008 and 2014, another 20 to 30 per cent is added to this 60 per cent. We need to ask why this 30 per cent, who normally do not support Putin, mobilise towards support. We have to break down this scary figure of 88 per cent or 82 per cent by understanding that 60 per cent approval ratings are guaranteed, that’s not interesting.3

It may not be interesting to Mr Levinson but it is worth noting that since 2014, various academics have tried to gauge the reliability of Putin’s popularity, with the most methodologically robust study using list experiments to conclude that, yes, he really is very popular.4 This shouldn’t be surprising: it is easier to be an autocrat if you are popular, since you will still need to rely on millions of bureaucrats and citizens to get anything done. The alternative is to rule through the barrel of a gun but this is expensive and empowers your security forces, who could then overthrow you.

Since the full-scale war began, Putin’s popularity has increased, in Mr Levinson’s view, as ‘the military operation is playing a mobilisational role, just as any such campaign would in any country, because it is about marginal values, or whose side you are on? It overcomes any issues about liking this or that government policy, or about whether you are living well or badly. Existential questions overcome this sort of concern – this is not specific to Russia.’5 Following an invasion there is a tendency for populations to rally round the flag, an effect political scientists first documented in the USA but that has since been applied to numerous countries and contexts. Putin’s approval ratings in 2022 were indistinguishable from those seen in the aftermath of the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, when support for Russian aggression in Ukraine was incredibly high and people partied in the streets with t-shirts depicting Putin on horse-back. The similarities end there: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not been a bloodless annexation but a disastrous and largely futile bloodbath.

While support for the war and the regime are not identical, those who support President Putin are likely to support the invasion and vice versa.6