[this is an op-ed piece about op-ed pieces. It’s a long version of a newspaper piece for the Danish press]
Even as we move well into the third year of war in Ukraine, the media sphere, dependent as it is on the economy of attention seeking, is still pretty narrowly focused. I can read millions of works a week penned about military technology, grand strategy, geopolitics or even tactics, and much of it is good, informative and interesting. Yet, at least in English, I can read relatively little on the actual details of things like military mobilization in Ukraine and Russia. Or, for that matter, analytical summary of how the war affects the structure of employment, the relationship between war production and the rest of the economy, and logistics within the two countries. The fact that I know by name and even by sight the few people writing consistently well on these topics should itself be a cause for concern.
Now, that’s not to say that such analysis doesn’t exist or even that it’s truly in short supply. However, there are only a handful of organizations and individuals really putting resources into granular coverage of the political economy of the war and how it interacts with wider society. Usually we talking about lone researchers within organizations of a much larger staff, many of whom seem to be busy with little more than the diminishing returns of punditry on what Putin said or didn’t say in 2007, or what Zelensky ‘really means’ today. There is often great journalistic follow up on human-interest or human rights stories, but even these suffer from 1. Belatedness; 2. Distortion because of the way journalistic truth is produced in close contact with official sources, and 3. The Mutual-Distrust-distance between journalism and expert research.
One piece that got me thinking along these lines was an article with the click-bait title: ‘Ukraine is heading for defeat’. Of course, the author is not really arguing that. Now, I want to say right up that I think this is a decent enough article for Politico! (LOL to the folk who decided Axel-Springer Politico ‘leans left’). I think the journalist tries to cover lots of bases – breadth and depth that are often missing. Furthermore, it’s an opinion piece and pretty short. Let’s cut the guy some slack.
What exercised me though, and not only me, but more than one Ukrainian researcher, was the impression that only now can the media start ‘discovering’ stories for their readership like widespread draft avoidance in Ukraine and the gross human rights violations by the Ukrainian state in press-ganging. Once again, its unfair to pick on this one point in an article. The fact is, however, so much coverage is really not interested in the rights and opinions of Ukrainians, the social dynamic in the country. Which is a pity because attending to it might tell us more about the prospects for Ukraine withstanding Russian aggression than paying attention to prime ministers doing photoshoots with Zelensky sitting in the cockpit of a F-16 (this is Danish political snark).
The story of ‘draft-dodging’ is presented with a curious addition – that would-be recruits now spend their ‘afternoons’ in nightclubs instead of volunteering. Then there’s a few alarming quotes of key political figures in the war leadership. This, and other framings make it seem like the journalist is uncritically repeating the – frankly – political spin of the presidential coterie (Yes! Why not call it that!) in Ukraine. Spin: that there is a feckless youth that need to steeled by fire. Spin: that it’s not Zelensky who wants to mobilize more young people, but that his hand is forced. The fact is that those kids in nightclubs (in the afternoon!?) are there because they already paid off the commissariat or paid bribes for ‘medical’ exemptions. Conscript wars are class wars, after all. Even in a short article, a left-leaning journalist should be able to do better.
Whether we read something about Ukraine or Russia, the journalistic or think-tank product has been filtered through contact with various gatekeepers of knowledge. In this case it’s (too much) contact with people peddling the Ukraine president’s line. Once again, it would be better reader service to say that Ukraine is a complex political society and there are lots of competing centres of authority, interest and even ideology operating, regardless of war. I dunno, you could do a vox pop on what people think of press-ganging! (answer: it would cause cognitive dissonance among Americans, so we won’t do that). It would also be good to say that it’s normal in wartime for even most men to not want to die, even if their country is a victim. Someone commented on the forgotten history of draft avoidance during WWI. Journalism has to operate in tolerable frames of propriety – the idealised morality of the society it speaks to. Zelensky is the good tsar who cares about Ukrainians. The Russian General Staff are monsters shoving meat in a grinder. Both might be ‘true’, but does it aid understanding to rely so much on personalities and pretend we can have moral clarity by proxy?
The third point is my self-interested criticism as a person whose job it is to produce country-based knowledge (in Russian and Ukrainian). Journalists need an answer ‘now’, for sure, but don’t always make much of an effort to reach out to the genuine country experts for help. Here in Denmark, we have the luxury of a professionalized journalism. Most journalists actively seek out expert knowledge, accommodate the views, and even promote them, of scientists. Indeed here, the foremost Russian foreign policy expert won a public communication prize last year for his work with the press to bridge the divide between research and public.
However, we can always do better from both sides: open to the challenge of different kinds of knowledge. Journalists often have the multi-level connections that academic researchers can only dream of. After all, journalists can get up-close to powerholder much more easily. At the same time, academics often have the advantage of being able to devote time and energy in chipping away at issues in a holistic and systematic way – like social attitudes and responses to things like military mobilization in both countries. Furthermore, there’s a deficit of critical (in the sense of social scientific) Ukrainian voices in the press in the ‘West’. The fact that I’m writing this post stems from interacting with Ukrainians who just don’t feel comfortable with the future consequences of voicing these kinds of criticisms.
Finally, academics are more to blame than journalists. We still live in a world where academics are afraid of journalists (that they will distort things); are in a kind of dysfunctional envy-snobbery disposition towards them. We’d all love to see thousands read our work, to be able to make bigger knowledge claims with often less evidence, to get to travel to places more easily and report on them, to get to talk to powerful people and even just legitimately be present in ‘hot spots’.
A few final points about the vicious cycle of Ukraine coverage. This is itself a product of the interaction between simplistic media narratives and western elites who avoid confronting hard choices and instead flip-flopping on real commitment. Being Politico (Atlanticist, not left-leaning!), the piece can’t say out loud that US patronage is a zero-sum game. You want to sponsor Israel against Iran, sure: have some more Patriots. Ukraine comes to the window: ‘sorry, we’re out today, come back tomorrow.’ Now that the US military aid bill has passed, so many people are acting like we can breathe a sigh of relief and ‘move on’, yet, an attentive reading of even the Guardian reveals that only a fraction of the money ($8 out of $61bn) will go to Ukraine soon, and mainly to keep the state functioning. A lot of the rest will go primarily into the coffers of US corporations. And only much later materialize as materiel on the battlefield.
People can tolerate autocracy, but they can’t tolerate the absence of hope in the future
The Russian presidential election presents us with a paradox that itself is something of a sea change for the meaning of politics today in that country. There was a pronounced shift. The election was likely no more unfair than before, but this time it’s almost as if the riggers had clear instructions – don’t even bother to try to make it look like you’re not rigging it. Just write in unbelievable numbers – unbelievable even for loyalists. At the same time, people I know who had long given up voting, and who more or less openly had admitted the disaster that had befallen their country since February 2022, almost with a sense of comfort went to the polls to cast a ballot for Putin. And thus, you have three likely truths of the electoral process – 20 to 30 million of the 64 million votes for Putin were just written in; the true turnout was pretty low because with electronic voting you don’t actually need physically coercion of voters; perhaps many more apolitical people than before voted for Putin. Why the last one?
Precisely because of fatigue, anxiety about the war and the knowledge that the decision was his alone but that the whole country is hostage to it. So, in my sample it was notable that while there is a hard core of Left Nationalists and Right Nationalist voters (let’s face it, the names of the parties are unimportant now), many switched for the first time since 2004 to Putin. For me, it’s just a bit unfortunate that few observers ever really go beyond the “falsification yet genuine popularity” framing of elections in Russia. This means that in 2024 they are not really prepared to unpack the genuine consolidating effect of the war on voting. Once again, I have to choose my words carefully, but let me offer an illustration:
My good friend Boris* is 40 years old. He’s a metal worker in Obninsk, a town an hour and half from Moscow. He has a degree in marketing but can’t find a ‘white collar job’ that’s worth the hassle. He took this job in an aluminium factory as a hedge against being drafted to the war. He has two dependents and a wife who works for the state. He likes reading American self-improvement literature: ‘how to think yourself into getting rich’, and he mainly talks to me about how to trade crypto currency and neuro-linguistic programming.
He, like many, had a kind of mini-breakdown in February 2022, saying things like ‘now the Americans will destroy us – what the fuck was the old-geezer thinking?’ But now he generally communicates in a highly ambivalent way – in memes that are not pro-war, but which always indicate the double-standards of the West. He approvingly notes the jailing of regional businessmen who have resisted the nationalization of factories important for the war effort. Like many interlocutors, he’s rather keen on any news stories, even obvious hatchet jobs, which paint the Ukrainian leadership as cruel, evil, or mad. One could say he’s ‘indignant’, rather than ‘resentful’.
He’s not upset though, that drones are falling close to his house. ‘What did people expect? It’s a war, you know?’ Later, he comments at length on the parade of religious icons to protect Moscow and about the satanism of the Ukrainian leadership: ‘It’s hard to tell whether they [propagandists] are telling on themselves with this or not. Certainly they are smoking a lot of good quality marijuana in the church these days’.
Or, reflecting on a TV programme about Ivan Ilyin as the ‘most popular Russian philosopher today’, notes that ‘as they say, the past really is unpredictable in this country. An openly fascist thinker [the favourite of the President] gets rammed down our throats. Who has the good fascists? Us, or the Ukrainians [despite what you read on Twitter, almost no one uses derogatory terms for Ukrainians in real life]?’
One of the underappreciated aspects of so-called ‘public opinion’ is not the capacity for people to hold contradictory opinions about it and the Russian leadership. There is very limited open talk among people with different opinions about the war and it’s quite varied: despair at destruction, ridicule of propaganda, anger at the incompetence of the army, disgust at the ignorance and indifference of most, resentment of the West’s support for Ukraine, longing about the end. But seemingly regardless, for most, their talk about the war itself is sublimated into a form of consolidation using double-meaning, humour and irony.
Boris never voted for Putin before. Like many younger people, he did not vote in 2004 (the first time anyone had the chance to judge at the ballot box the performance of Putin’s policies). He voted Right Nationalist as a kind of protest in 2008, because he liked the (duplicitous? distracting?) populist social messaging of Zhirinovsky, and because of the general dissatisfaction with the government that had made little to no progress on improving the prospects of younger people. We should note that both his parents – well educated Soviet technical intelligentsia are hardcore Putin voters – loyally they articulate that ‘there is no alternative’. However many such ‘loyalists’ are also an overdue disaggregation by observers. Some will break quite soon, I think. Many of Boris’ friends would vote Communist – or we should say ‘Left Nationalist’.
Boris didn’t vote in 2012 and observed from afar the For Fair Elections protests in Moscow. He did pay attention to things like local trash protests, strikes in the car factories locally. He signed petitions, he went to public meetings. He put up flyers made by a local group called the People’s Front that protested corruption in his town.
In 2018 he didn’t vote again ‘why would I? I’m not a stupid person’ – once again this ironic comment works on three levels – liberals are stupid, loyalists are stupid. Even the question reveals a tiring sense of naivety. But in 2024 he did, and for Putin. Why? Putin is the war candidate, but also the only peace candidate. Boris sent me a meme shortly after the election [actually it’s an old meme]: A ballot paper is depicted. There are two choices: ‘Are you not against Putin becoming President?’ The two boxes say: ‘Yes, I’m not against’. And ‘No, I’m not against’. There are multiple negative reasons not to be against voting for Putin.
*** [academic parts incoming]
For me, the focus once again on electoral politics, and plebiscitary indicators more generally reveals a fundamental problem with the framing of the political in Russia, the misleadingness of the term ‘authoritarianism’, and other analytical terms to describe regime types. Karine Clément in 2018 wrote that the presence of authoritarianism in places like Russia, from the perspective of ordinary people is not so obvious and almost undetectable in everyday life. She pointed to the way that civil liberty restrictions and control over the media, undeniably harsher under such regimes than in other types of state, were way less important to most people than the legitimate grievances they had with social and economic policies. As Tom Pepinsky wrote about Malaysia – ordinary and everyday authoritarianism is ‘boring and tolerable’ to the vast majority. Does that mean these same people support authoritarian rule (in the sense of giving up voice)? Absolutely not.
The authoritarian personality type was strongly critiqued in sociology forty years ago. This is an idea from the 1950s that there’s a socially significant sadomasochistic disposition that emerged and thrived in authoritarian societies and which then maintained them. However, it’s still overlooked that the ‘original’ theory of authoritarian personality was developed to explain how people in capitalist societies in the West sustained a broad submission to authority, emotional identification with leadership, belief in the naturalness of hierarchy, esp. in organizations, the heredity of natural differences between persons, the fusing of legitimate authority and tradition, and so on.
Later in the 1970s, the ‘Western’ variant was refined to refer to ‘rigid conventionalism’, where different social anxieties can be overcome by conformity. However, even supporters of the ‘type’ complain that psychologization becomes meaningless without attending to the social conditions which would produce them. Indeed, the whole psychological basis of authoritarian values when tested experimentally, tends to fail when presented with groups who hold even mild political convictions. ‘Ideological’ belief itself serves to reduce anxiety – and these may be ‘right wing’ or ‘left wing’ values. Furthermore, the development of authoritarian personality to talk about more or less ‘pathological’ types prey to demagoguery completely inverts the original concept, which, after all, was developed to explain why all of us, generally, are ‘normal’ and ‘well adjusted’ when we defer to authority, as this is how our (capitalist) society is structured and functions. Even today, to have a problem with legitimate authority is a sign of ‘maladjustment’ (Oppositional Defiant Disorder can be diagnosed in children who ‘are easily annoyed by others… excessively argue with adults’).
Back to Russia, Clément notes, perhaps even too mildly, that ‘Russians are quite critical thinkers’. She rejects stereotypical ideas about the ‘Putin majority’ and says this is partly an artefact of misinterpreting opinion polls where people answer as they are expected to. Like my own work using long-term and in-depth interviews, she finds that the vast majority are highly critical towards the state, in a sophisticated and reasoned way, in a way that connected from local and personal issues to broad social problems which affect all. ‘People make great claims against the state, and the first of them is its dependence on the oligarchy and independence from the people’.
Does the war change this? Hardly. Clément’s other point was that, by and large, people are able to exercise a sociological imagination about their own society – that it is not all about ‘Putin the tsar’. Indeed, one of the sources of support for the status quo is the realistic and relatively sophisticated conclusion that Russia is a pluralistic state with lots of competing interests and that if anything, Putin’s ability and power is quite circumscribed. And the war would only underline such a view. And this is not the same as the old saying ‘the king is good, the boyars are bad’. It’s a much more sober assessment. Clément concludes by saying that the most pertinent authoritarianism-from-below is the call for ‘more social state’, ‘a less rapacious financial elite’, and, we can add, today, ‘defence from the effects of war, and of ‘peace not on Ukrainian terms’, whether we think that is callous or not.
If there is not much ‘authoritarian’ in the values of Russians to distinguish them from the inhabitants of states where people have little access to power or voice to change things, then what is the value of the term?
***
Is Russia authoritarian because of the lack of accountability of the elite? Because elections don’t matter (actually, they do). Because the press is controlled by the regime and dissent harshly punished? Professional political scientists usually refer to the lack of free elections, but that does not generally extend to the evaluation of the responsiveness or not of leaders to populaces. This is Marlies Glasius’ argument (2018), to which he adds that the three main problems with “authoritarianism” is that
1., It’s overly focussed on elections
2., the term lacks a definition of its own subject at the same time as
3., it is narrowly attributed as a structural phenomenon of nation states.
Lack of accountability of bureaucracies, the lack of choice in elections, and the impact of globalization as a disciplining mechanism means that the differentiation between authoritarian and democratic states is overstated.
(sidebar: a Danish colleague the other day said: ‘where else but in Denmark is social conformity enforced more fiercely than by citizens themselves, with an internalized snitch culture?’ Where the state tax authority can use your mobile phone location data to check you’re paying tax right. Every day British newspapers run stories of women jailed for not paying TV licenses, disabled people forced into homelessness for being paid 30 pence too much through a state error, or, indeed, the complete untouchables that are state-sponsored corrupt oligarchs).
If Russia is now a personalized dictatorship, as many would assert, why is Putin so hesitant, distant (and even scared of being seen as responsible for) even from decision-making? Why does he appear wracked by indecision and inconsistent in his war aims? Why is the state so poor at carrying out adequately even basic logistics in the war? Further, following Glasius, to really evaluate authoritarianism in Russia we would need to look at disaggregated practices of the state structures: social policy, the courts, regional authorities.
Is accountability in these milieux sabotaged in a way that sets them apart from democratic states?
Are authorities of any kind able to dominate without redress?
Is meaningful dialogue between actor and forum prevented by formal or informal rules?
To what degree are there patterns of action embedded in institutions which infringe on the autonomy of persons?
These are much clearer definitions of authoritarian and illiberal practices, consistent over time, and which are easily documented in the Russian case. However, as Glasius points out, free and fairly elected leaders, from Modi, to Trump, and also parliamentary governments in Europe, also engage systematically in such authoritarian practices and increasingly so over time as national authority is diluted by transnational forms of power.
To turn finally to a very recent critique of authoritarianism by Adam Przeworski, he complains that existing models ignore the provision under authoritarian regimes of material and symbolic goods that people value. Przeworski says that we should pay attention to ethnographic accounts such as that of Wedeen’s work on Syria where peoples strongly denied (in the 1990s) they lived in an authoritarian regime and deployed rationalizations that were not ‘duplicitous’. Further, Przeworski argues that:
autocrats can enjoy popular support
it is difficult to interpret elections
often internal repression enjoys broad support
actual performance of economies matters and provides a real base of support
manipulation of information is never sufficient to compensate for poor performance
propaganda is an instrument of rule in every regime (including democracies)
censorship does not fundamentally provide a test of whether preferences are genuine or not.
Further, the psychological processes of people in authoritarian regimes cannot be explained by game-theories about belief. Enforced public dissimulation presents a challenge to both the regime but also to scientists in discovering ‘real’ attitudes. Further, a lá Wedeen, performance of belief might become a comfortable and natural disposition to the degree that deviance from this norm is socially disruptive but without implications for the ‘real’ attitudes of persons engaging in ritualistic performance. We get a sign here of what’s missing, the social life of authoritarianism may be more relevant and powerful than the cognitive feedback by people to all the signals around them. Many critical assessments of society and processes in Russia, as Clément notes, are not visible at all in the public sphere, and yet are universals in interviews, especially when there is less or no prompting from the researcher. The social prerequisites for positive change are always there, and people are ‘keyed’ to respond to them by human (social) nature. By the same token the desire to cleave to authority is characteristic of the most ‘democratic’ and liberal groups throughout history. The resort to social psychology models of dispositions according to a legacy of regime types is as open to criticism as it ever was.
*Obviously Boris is not a real person, but an ethnographic composite of real interlocutors.
Two recent sets of interactions with people got me thinking about we’re still in the calm before the domestic economic storm in Russia –
‘it’s all stable here, things are ok. We got a pay rise, it’s not indexation, but we have everything we need’. From a metal turner in a provincial city. He’s a smart lad and there’s always an element of irony about even his more ‘sincere’ comments. This is a case in point of such double-talk. Reassuring oneself; expressing genuine dispositions about the world ‘right now’; reflecting on how ‘it’s much worse for you’ (because of the harder to hide energy inflation in Europe); super-heating irony to manage the hegemonic narrative of Russian TV at the same time. Especially noticeable given that, after the Moscow Crocus City Concert attack, it’s obvious that things are not ‘ok’ and ‘stable’.
In turn I talk to my tame middle-class apolitical professional. His firm has a new contract with a state enterprise. Things are also looking up. A nice new income stream to diversify after the loss of business with Westerners. But at the same time grumblings: ‘it seems like sanctions will start to do their work soon, nonetheless. The authorities can’t go on indefinitely defying economic gravity.’ Generalities, vague ones. It’s hard to know whether people are referring to actual economic issues like inflation, actual shortages through the failure of some aspects of autarky or import substitution, or something else.
As Nick Trickett wrote in December 2023, we’re looking at a third of state spending going on the war in 2024! Substitution can only replace Western imports in specific and limited ways in the middle term (i.e. to 2025). A weakening ruble means that from the state’s perspective they need fewer dollars as these ‘buy’ more state spending in rubles. However, the reality is that devaluation plus hard constraints on output in Russia will lead to galloping inflation by the second half of 2024, especially after the summer. At the moment, forcing exporters to convert $ into rubles, is delaying the inevitable (these are in effect capital controls). Will hoarding by individuals of hard currency come back? There is already a climate where no one can make capital investment without state guarantees. Stanimir Dobrev is great on this: last week he pondered the question of how logistics firms can renew their trucks when they are paying 24% interest on their leases for inferior (economically) Chinese fleet.
Back to ‘my guys’. They’re still partially in denial about real inflation on staples (aren’t we all?). The situation is somewhat similar to the UK and parts of the EU – double-digit official inflation on food in 2023, and more on some products. Once again, shortages are just inflation by other means – like the situation with eggs right now (the government was forced to suspend import duty on 1.2 billion eggs because of the 40% inflation on them – incidentally I wonder if people are studying closely the effect of long-term loss of access to Ukrainian food imports – eggs are a big asset for Ukraine). ‘Capital outflows’ because of feared inflation also take place in miniature. Often my interlocutors ask me for investment advice in crypto and bullion (another indication they don’t really believe the Russian press hype about ‘stability’). In my unpublished book on the war I write about drug dealers and crypto bros trying to hedge the war.
‘We want more State in the socially-significant spheres of life’ is the kind of citizen message after the ‘deal’ of the 2024 election that, having echoed around after the Global Financial Crisis from 2009 in Russia, is back in the room again. If ‘massaged’ inflation is likely to show rises of 8-10% in 2024 that’s a remarkable return to the bad old days of the 2010s when Russians first fell out of love with Putinism, whose best years could be summed up as ‘Botswana incomes rising slightly higher than inflation’ (turns out to more apt a comparison than one might think). As the Central Bank will need to keep hiking, the 16%+ rates on servicing debt will feed through hard on the costs of living.
What about the ‘regionalka’? Natalia Zubarevich reflects on the trends today beyond Moscow and Petersburg – money goes on beefing up Far East transport and real estate to pivot to China, to Rostov region, the logistical entry to Ukraine, and of course Moscow. But revealingly oil and gas can’t be squeezed any more and in some areas output is declining. Logistical constraints still affect the output of fertilizers. Most hit by sanctions? Timber processing (“forest-industry”). Will there be a boom in Russian domestic furniture? Russian IKEA? I remember a turn to domestic production around 2010. 10% of petrol output are likely affected by drone strikes on refinery. But remember that 10% of petrol was exported anyway and 50% of diesel. Main issue is logistics again with the railways jammed with ‘other priority traffic’. Taxes on petrol are pretty low by international standards and the price for consumers is effectively controlled for political reasons, but still a hit to the pocket-book.
Agriculture: 2023 was a good year for soy, but not for grains profits. In 2024 an indicator of vulnerability is that 30% of grain is produced by smaller farmers, not agroholdings. The former don’t have any financial buffers. Will cooking oil scarcity be the next egg panic?
Will they bring wage incomes of 1 million rubles ($10,810) into the new, higher income tax bracket – something of a shibboleth for Putin’s ultra-neoliberal approach from two decades ago? (now it’s 5 million rubles). More important are taxes on enterprise profits and VAT. Are people the new oil, again?
Zubarevich forecasts a gladiatorial fight in the population for benefits – especially those available to families for children. Fictive self-employment, fictive divorces – all for the sake of accessing social subsidies. Back to the past? In 2000, Moscow incomes were composed of only 20% taxable ‘white’ wages, the rest were murky. Will this repeat? Zubarevich says it’s unlikely because of good digitalization and tax capacity. Nonetheless in North Caucasus even Rosstat acknowledges that no one, apart from municipal workers, actually pays taxes. (Informal economy is 60% of activity).
Growth areas are construction of residential in medium sized cities with arms factories and also in oil and gas regions.
Will there be new impetus on military mobilization. How can there be when there are record shortages of labour? Inward migration is falling, a lot, possibly by 50%. A real indication of the value of the ruble. Not to mention the fact that immigrants are effectively treated worse than indentured servants – a bigger indicator of racism’s destructive effect on the moral fabric of society and one that makes it clear why so many people are indifferent to the treatment meted out on those suspected of involvement in the Crocus attack.
Overall, a ‘lot of trends are going to be broken’. Zubarevich ends her interview focusing on the effect of the war on income inequality – a decline that’s small but significant because of the 11 million children getting state support, and the 5 million workers in ‘proper’ industry, along with 2 million direct ‘beneficiaries’ of the war spending.
So are ordinary folk leading or lagging indicators? It would seem, like here in the EU and UK, that people’s economic sensitivities are very much summed up by the term, ‘The old is dying and the new cannot be born’. State capitalism on a war footing is a contradiction without someone taking the pain. And morbid symptoms appear in great variety, as Gramsci noted.
A comment to a previous post asked the question: “Could you please indicate 10 or so best anthropological and/or sociological books which explain the current state of affairs in Russia?”
The question implies a need for books with political insight, which is a matter of debate. In this post I’ll stick to books in English since 2005, and which had a considerable amount of fieldwork behind them (broadly understood). In my view there many other deserving recent books that could make this list. There are also many which are not in English and not characterized by significant fieldwork but which are equally important; they might appear in a further post. The aim here is just a quick and dirty list for readers unfamiliar with this terrain. All these books are, in my view, interesting and accessible to educated general readers and give a diverse flavour of engaged and embedded research carried out in (and sometimes before) the ‘Putin era’.
Derluguian, by force of intellectual personality, manages to combine micro-level insights with ambitious theorizing and historicizing. Today, his book seems prophetic because it warned of the effects of a dangerous vacuum after the curtain fell on the ‘most successful example of a state-directed effort to industrialize in order to catch up with the West’. After 1991, two reactive strategies were unleashed – corrupt patronage that defeated and demoralized groups who sought to develop civil society and democracy, and secondly, the mobilization of ethnic and religious solidarities as forms of ‘resistance’ from below.
The blurb for this book is unusual for an academic tract in that its promise of a ‘gripping account of the developmental dynamics of Soviet collapse’ is no exaggeration. While ostensibly telling the story of a prominent leader in the Chechen revolution, its portrait of the overlooked underclass of the Soviet project is memorable. Correctly emphasizing the role of employment-related benefits as socially-cohesive in Soviet times, Derluguian details the subproletarians ‘exit’ from society. Rather than take ethnic strife at face value, the author sees this third class as opportunistically mobilized to fight in the many conflicts of the post-Soviet space. At the end of the book he writes:
“How does one operationalize in research the residual category of “no-longer-peasants” that variously goes by the names of “Street,” “marginals,” “subaltern peoples,” “crowds,” “underclass,” “adolescent gangs,” “lumpens,” or, very broadly and negatively, “de-ruralized populations”? Bourdieu’s discussion of the Algerian sub-proletariat demonstrated ways of meaningfully incorporating in our analyses this most awkward of all classes – a class that is increasingly important, both numerically and politically, in the contemporary world.”
For Derluguian, the theory of so-called “ethnic conflicts” formulated in the book centres on class, state, and social networks rather than nationalism or identity: ‘the revived evocation of traditional moral communities tends to scapegoat competing ethnic groups, weak and corrupt local governments, and, increasingly, the common enemy that is American “global plutocracy.”’
This is a book my students read, and I would recommend to anyone who really wants to get a feel for the sense of insecurity experienced in the 1990s and how it was formative of so many currents in today’s society. Shevchenko’s work is universally praised for capturing a genuine ‘zeitgeist’ of insecurity and uncertainty. ‘Crisis’ is a governing and everyday feeling about life in late 1990s Moscow. Like in Walter Benjamin’s Thesis on the Philosophy of History, the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. One of the first metaphors used by residents is that of ‘living on a volcano’. Shevchenko focusses on continual efforts of people to cultivate practical autonomy and independence (from each other and from the state). Crisis becomes a symbolic resource for people who default to cynicism.
“one’s capacity to disengage oneself from all things public became a value in itself, a value manifested not only in practical actions of economic self-provisioning, but also in the position postsocialist subjects took on a variety of issues, from media to voting to history. It was through stating this detachment that one could provide evidence of one’s personal evolution by juxtaposing it to one’s substantially more engaged and idealistic reactions a few years earlier”
It’s easy to see how the ‘deterioration’ discourse had long-term effects that are still operative – inhibition towards forms of civic involvement and ‘defensive’ institutions anathema to the ideal of the public sphere; the strength of the message from the centre that only a ‘power vertical’ can ensure a hard won ‘stability’. The book should really be read alongside Shevchenko’s penetrating shorter pieces on post-Soviet subjecthood: “Resisting Resistance” (on internalized neoliberal ideology), and “The politics of nostalgia” (with M. Nadkarni) both from 2015.
Rogers is something of an undersung hero in Russian Studies because his work is so broad-ranging and interdisciplinary, while retaining an uncompromising anthropological sensibility. In his book on Ural oil companies and the local and regional state, Rogers admits that his story of the success of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as part of neoliberal governance will ‘horrify many proponents of civil society building’ because it will be read as ‘co-optation’ and ‘hijacking’ of NGOs into the service of the Putin-era centralization of state building (grant-giving as ‘infrastructure’, the state as a ‘social customer’). Far from accepting this normative framework and interpretation, Rogers provokes the reader to think anthropologically about social organization beyond ‘civil society’ as a loaded and sometimes meaningless symbol. Corporations and state are interpenetrated nowhere more effectively as in social responsibility work by big oil. CSR serves in Russia as a powerful multidimensional metacoordination of society and state, while retaining the informal elements of network clientelism that typify political relationships.
Rogers’ book is also of interest to those interested in the history of Sergey Kiriyenko’s emerging reputation as a so-called political technologist. His success in ‘remaking the policies and procedures of Russian governance for a new, more centralized time’ were laid down during his time as plenipotentiary of the Volga Federal District (which includes Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, and Perm Krai) and are now on display in occupied Ukraine.
How does the state co-opt and incorporate youth in Russia? It must involve more than deception or simply better social advantage for youth participating gin state youth projects. The value of Hemment’s ethnographic engagement with students, educators and project leaders lies in the challenge it presents to binary oppositions like ‘oppression/resistance’, ‘truth/lies’, ‘authentic/inauthentic’ as it pertains to the social and political life of young people.
Projects mobilizing young people and sponsored by the state link to a genuine appeal around reviving the Soviet past, democratic initiatives in the 1990s, and global forms of youth projects today. The book is also a model of the collaborative method between western researchers and Russian colleagues, something that regrettably remains overshadowed by a publishing model that hides, as much as reveals, the dependence by Western-based researchers on Russian academic partners.
“Rather than docile subjects that follow the state line, young people emerge as active agents that adapt participation in these projects to their own ends, showing a range of various motivations to participate and engage with them.” – one review wrote.
Urinboyev, in this short book covering the period 2014-2018, achieves many things much longer and laborious works do not: he creates an enticingly vivid ethnographic portrait of Central Asian workers’ lives in Moscow in their interactions with each other and Russians; he undertakes an all too rare ‘translocal’ and transnational research project by following money remittances back to Uzbekistan and showing the social, as well as economic consequences of them there, as well as a boomerang effect back to Moscow.
Moreover, the book is also about the gradations of migrant legalization and ‘adaptation’ in Russia, with lively portraits of the difference between ‘fake’, ‘clean fake’, and ‘almost clean’ residence registrations and work permits, as well as the trade in passports. Migrants are co-producers of new forms of legal order and informal governance in Russia – they are not passive. Weak rule of law and corrupt police provide opportunities as much as obstacles. Urinboyev gets up-close and personal to his research subjects and his book is full of humour and humanity.
Charismatic and intelligent. But too keenly aware of himself as both these things. Angry, frustrated – for good reason. Perhaps reckless, lacking strategic thinking. Narrow-minded and naïve. Who could better represent an entire group? The bright and irrepressible liberal middle-class.
Yes, more than all the other things, Navalny was a talisman – he had magical powers over his people, but was hardly stimulating to others. To some he represented hope for a different Russia. He represented incarnate individual responsibility, competition (‘fair’ elections are ‘competitive’ ones), self-actualization. A personal antidote to apathy. He was in earnest, fired up – something to aspire to. An anachronism ( ‘out of time’) in a system designed to disempower and demotivate, close ranks and watch your back… in the end he transcended his actual views to become a symbol of Russia’s inability to find a way out of personalist politics.
Martyrdom was a choice. People won’t say it – but he would have been better off saving himself. His was a stance both more principled than many others, but which also reveals the personalized nature of his appeal and his politics – he was ‘anti-Putin’ and positioned himself that way on purpose. And clearly Putin felt personally challenged on some level – hence his refusal to even name him.
But the anti-Putin contains many ingredients of Putin himself – as numerous people point out (privately, of course) even now. The style over substance. The cultivated charisma which stems from a rather overweening masculine pitch to authority (very, very few feminists are given any airtime to express their deep-seated discomfort with his language). The temporary and fickle try-out of different ideas and slogans. The super-narrow political imagination – one might even say ‘anti-political’ imagination (anti-corruption is not politics).
After building his career as a blogger and activist, in 2013 Navalny stood for mayor in Moscow (he could have won in a fair fight). Less internet savvy Russians were barely aware of him at this point, beyond a name. A measure of how the ratcheting up of repression makes time elastic in Russia is that it feels as though 2013-2020 (to his poisoning) was a short period, but that an absolute age elapsed between his return to Russia in Jan 2021 and his death nearly exactly 3 years later.
People in the West paid oversized attention to Navalny because they believed he captured a kind of Russian ‘zeitgeist’ in the 2010s. But the true zeitgeist was a general misrecognition on the part of that liberal middle-class: they were just as invested in maintaining the unequal system of crony networked capitalism as the elite. Navalny campaigned against electoral and political corruption and his fatal success was investigating the personal self-enrichment beyond measure of the leaders. But his most ardent supporters were also among the main beneficiaries of the system.
It is a misunderstanding to think that his (anyone’s) ‘liberal opposition’ excluded nationalism, chauvinism even. A model of individualism in a hostile environment, a self-made man who believe in the invisible justice of the market makes one myopic and prone to blame others for their misfortune. Here in Russia, liberalism is about protection from the rapacious state and personal responsibility for one’s actions. But being for ‘fair competition’ can also code as protecting ‘ethnic’ Russians from ‘immigrants’.
Navalny was pointedly hostile to people who have every right to live and work anywhere they like in Russia – Russian citizens in fact, who happen to be Muslim and racialized as such. It’s mistaken to see him as ‘cannily’ channelling nationalist sentiment in an acceptable way to urban Russians. Instead, we should read this as an essential script of liberal failure; in a country with millions of Muslims and rich diversity – and where inequality and ethnicity go hand-in-hand – playing the race card shows political immaturity at best and was ominous.
Thirdly, he was lauded for his supposed turn to ‘social issues’ (sic) in 2018 as if this was a smart pivot. In fact, it was years too late, and because it was too late it failed to resonate. The ‘social sphere’ for Navalny was hardly visible except in a negative sense – that corruption makes the state and the individual poor. He represented everything that is naïve about liberals in Russia – ‘if only we could just get on with being a normal country like the USA, everything else will fall into place’. In a sense, he traces an ideological line back to the Komsomol boys who privatized opportunity in the late Soviet Union and deluded themselves they were building a market where all would prosper.
His honest and principled disgust with corruption never led to diagnosis of root causes. Corruption was a byproduct of total social transformation that the elite and a large part of the Soviet nomenklatura had actively chosen and supported since 1990. Corruption exacerbated inequality, but the original sin of economic looting and wholesale destruction required more radical politics to mend. Way back in 2009-11, I did many political interviews with ordinary voters. They really disliked Navalny because of his naivety and smugness (seeing the problem as merely replacing ‘crooks and thieves’ with ‘honest’ representatives). His achievement in mobilizing the middle class to actually try to do politics was laudable but also doomed to failure. It should be seen in the light of similarly well-meaning people in democratic societies who think they can break cartel politics from the inside, through the ballot box or a more appealing offering in electoral politics.
Navalny as a political phenomenon is a warning. Like any charismatic project it shows that without a movement that can connect different kinds of people and show them that they have common material interests, clever slogans, social media, and urban youth organizing isn’t enough. The media write ups (just like the exaggeratedly glowing scholarly accounts) showed what an exceptional individual he was and how an individual can become symbolic of change for many people… but exceptional people do not really change history – despite what a popularized view of “great men” pretends to show. Churchills, Stalins, Trumps are ultimately just part of the structures of feeling that dictate their eras. Navalny was, despite everything, an anachronism not so different to Putin: out of step with what most Russian people want.
*title partly stolen from the genuinely great A.A.
Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, a military reenactor, monarchist, and probable ex-security officer held by many to be responsible for escalating the Donbas war in 2014 was sentenced to 4 years imprisonment today, not for shooting down the Malaysian airliner MH17 but for “extremism” (specifically, for complaining about incompetent Russian military and political leadership).
Unlike the ever-increasing numbers of political prisoners serving time for actions against the regime, Girkin will have quite a lot of freedom in the so-called ‘zona‘ as an inmate in the ‘general’ category of prison. In fact he is not going to prison, more like a guarded dorm/hall of residence in a kind of camp. He will get lots of time outside the shared dorm, walking around in the grounds and he will probably get nearly unlimited access to postal services and relatively unrestricted ability to spend money. I would take a bet that he could be transferred to a ‘colony-settlement’ where he’s effectively free to leave during the day. Some of my informants from my 2016 book were ‘colonists’ – i.e. on day release from prison. Formal and informal rules meant they could in reality spend loads of time in my little town of Izluchino. They used to ask us to buy them vodka and some of them were harmless while others scared the life out of me.
Meanwhile, the hapless Daria Trepova gets 27 years for the bomb murder (‘terror attack’) of blogger and pro-war activist ”Vladlen Tatarsky” (a name originally coined by author Pelevin). If you don’t know the case, Trepova bought a statuette as a gift to Tatarsky at an event in a cafe. It blew up and killed him. She will go to a stricter regime of prison colony than Girkin, as one would expect given the more serious charge.
I am still baffled by this case and whatever explanation you choose to believe is just bizarro-land. Estonian sim cards, the video of her close to the blast, the networks of people involved…. it’s just a gift to conspiracy theorists the world over. You can comfortably subscribe to a set up by the Ukrainians or the Russians. Then there’s the narrative account heard in the courtroom: that Trepova was very nervous herself, and that she and Tatarsky had a joke about a bomb (Tatarsky’s venue security had halted the statuette in the cloakroom)!
But the version of her knowingly bringing the bomb is then undermined – pretty comprehensively – by her own actions then and since. In the video she’s a few metres away from the bomb!
If you believe the version heard in court in Russia – Trepova is instructed by journo-cum-revolutionary cosplayer (coincidental link to Girkin!) now in Kyiv, but he in turn is linked with a pretty non-descript Ukrainian operative. It’s ironic that while the Girkin case gets some coverage today in Ukrainian media, Trepova gets none (which is only partly understandable given the Belgorod Ilyushin shootdown, which Russia alleged killed Ukrainian service personnel).
BBC Russian Service have a good write up. There’s no coverage on BBC Ukrainian service, despite them covering Girkin. Anyway, one take-away is: if you’re an antiwar liberal in Russia, be careful and don’t be naïve! Trepova might have gravitated to ‘anti-war’ action because of her sympathy with the liberal cause and then been exploited for it.
Why draw attention to Trepova case? Because it does rhyme with some allegations about the academic spying case in Estonia (inadvertent recruitment, exploitation for other purposes). I commented a few days ago on the generalities of that case and the missing links – I will write these up when we have more information. There are also big differences of course. The take-away from Trepova case, and also recent Insider interview with Bellingcat associate Grozev is that the Russian security services (and Ukrainian side, it would seem) are more likely to target the liberal-activist universe, not academics. These are largely separable spheres, even if individuals straddle them.
Once more, I’m not (yet) commenting on the Estonian case, but if you look at the logic of recruitment it is connected to accessing networks that are of immediate relevance to the aims of Ukraine/Russia and using ideological commitment of dupes as leverage.
Does that mean academics are not useful? No, I’m not saying that. Does that mean academics cannot be dupes or even willing accomplices. No, of course not. But it indicates the relative priority of targets. Academics are low down on that… Except, perhaps when intel services actually misunderstand the academic world (as having more influence and access than in reality) – as is clear from the Estonian interview from a few days ago. Perhaps the majority of academics even (outside tech/mil) are targeted in “error” (considered more useful than they could ever be).
Christo Grozev shows how much more useful/interesting is the activist diaspora community. He says that of 70 operatives, one targeted Russian human rights diaspora orgs, including the Sakharov Centre and Free Russia Foundation. The operative had been invited and attended many of their events. Grozev: ‘he had infiltrated and attended one of the important committees of these organizations on sanctions’…And was particularly interested in G. Kasparov. In that interview Grozev emphasises that, yes Russian foreign operations are still stupid (their documents are easily tracked), but so are Western organizations – allowing Russian agents unfettered access to the West on fake passports for years and years. It’s hard not to see the enthusiastic McCarthyite attacks on my colleagues in the past week as absurdly misplaced given the complacency of Western states in the face of what they now acknowledge as a major security threat – actual operatives bent on infiltrating and killing ‘enemies’.
A plume of water vapor from a failed heating line in a Russian city, 13.1.2024
The framing of the catastrophic failure of heating/electrical systems in Russia as inevitably a Ukrainian plot perfectly underlines the ‘pundit problem’ coverage of Russia, which I recently tweeted about to the complete misunderstanding of most people.
Gonzalo Lira’s book collection, from the Ukrainian raid on his flat in July 2023
I tweeted a picture of the reading ‘desk’ of the deceased YouTube grifter-cum-incel-coach Gonzalo Lira – there were three books – two of them very person-focussed (with ‘P’ in the title). The point is not that those authors were ‘bad’ or part of the grifter universe of Gonzalo, but that they set the frame of reference for 95% of the debate on what is going on in Russia/Ukraine. It’s all about personal history, personal ideology and animus, personal networks of the elite, dodgy social psychology and even dodgier personal psychology.
That the central heating grids of many towns and cities in Russia are not fit for purpose has been written about endlessly in sociology and anthropology. Someone attending to even this narrow ‘sociology of physical networks and infrastructure’ might learn a lot more about the war, about Russian politics, about Russian people’s preferences, than a zillion more books about a wimpy lad from Leningrad who’s resentment and greed propelled us to the brink of WWIII (parody).
To summarise, the seemingly too-coincidental-to-be-accident-failures of the heating network should be viewed in the context of the multiple social factors at play – far more likely than sabotage (in this particular case). First there is the privatization of a critical and vulnerable network. Heating plants feed communal hot-water pipes just below the surface which then have a single ingress to housing blocks – in a severe frost which penetrates the ground up to two metres, these can fail and effectively shut down the whole grid. Privatization, as has been demonstrated again and again, while not the proximal cause, leads to the sweating of former public assets and inadequate investment in long-term upgrades and even basic repair (in the UK where against the advice of most, water was wholly privatized a similar cascade of failures is occurring right now). Where assets at municipal owned, the starving of local authority financing has the same effect.
Then there is human capital “depreciation”. One thing preventing the catastrophic failure of networks like town heating systems was the intangible knowledge and good-will of former Soviet-era managers. These are dying off now leaving a hole in the metaphorical fabric of post-socialist governance. This was in any case a patchwork of personalized relationships between these non-political ‘specialists’ and politicians. The former often continued to work for the common good (a complex relationship I go into in my new book) after being excluded from the corrupt compact between local and federal elites. In my 2016 book, I undertook participant observation (anthrospeak for following someone around and working with them) of a heating network technician in Kaluga region. Without this 50-something guy working almost for nothing and effectively ‘managing’ the town’s heating supply the residents would have experienced annual outages of hot water. Most importantly, this man was only informally in charge and at any moment could have left or retired (which he did eventually). Yet the municipality gave him access to a car, driver and assistant.
There is loss of such human capital, but also general labour shortages – long a problem before the war. It’s not so much that the war drew down ‘low-skilled’ men away from maintenance (as many people argue), but that, as in line with the generally punitive and neoliberal labour compact in Russia, there has been mass flight away from poorly-paid municipal jobs like those maintaining essential infrastructure. Even the ‘well-paid’ gas and oil industries struggle to fill roles (for details, again, see the article linked below and my new book). Pay is woefully inadequate and conditions terrible. It’s also true that the war accelerated austerity policies sucking money away from infrastructure, but again, that’s the proximal, not main cause. As scholars like Ilya Matveev have been pointing out for years, Russia is an austerity state on steroids.
There is something to this point, it’s true:
Add to all of this climate change. I remember harsh winters in Moscow in the 1990s, but Russians have got used to much milder winters in the last twenty years. This, like so many ‘freak weather’ events was just a return to what used to be normal winters with prolonged temps below minus 20 in European Russia. Except there’s been 20+ years of looting and neglect in the meantime.
Finally, overlaid, but not overdetermining, is the centralized, reactive nature of Federal governance – content to let the country rot, only effective in extracting and lifting rents upwards towards the cosseted world of Moscow – which is not Russia. I address this as part of this piece I wrote a few years ago on ‘capitalist realism’ (doffs cap to Mark Fisher) – an argument that also features in my new book.
Back to punditry. The problem is not authors like Galeotti or Belton (though there are legitimate gripes with them), but the obsessive media attention to a super narrow framing, reductive to absurdity. Galeotti is a great example of a capable, seasoned and expert researcher (on organized crime and security studies) structurally trammeled by the war (and before) into providing ever more commentary to serve demand by the whole media assemblage of Russia coverage. People misread my tweets as equating grifters like Lira to specialist pundits. There’s a gulf between them, but their output inevitably ends up serving the same media ‘interests’/: obfuscation of complexity in cause and effect, preventing sociological understanding, ‘orientalization’ of the subject matter (making it exotic instead of what it really is – mundane).
To go back to my January 2022 post about the problems of punditry before the war, the issues I sourced there from various colleagues about Russia coverage remain the same going into 2024 (scroll to the bottom of the linked post to see these topics unpacked):
Structural weaknesses in Russian journalism and Western coverage.
Putin-centric coverage the tells us nothing (led by publisher and editor demand)
Detachment from in-country knowledge (our man may be in Havana but he rarely leaves the bar)
Presentism (as we see now on the war – endless mind-numbing takes on weapons and lines on maps)
Gresham’s Law (bad punditry drives out good, bad think-tanks out-compete good ones, bad scholars outcompete good ones)
Absolute paucity of non-metropolitan coverage, whether of Ukraine, or Russia.
Summary: Larger-scale mobilization after the Presidential elections will not break a so-called social contract because informal forms of avoidance and negotiation of directives from the centre still trump state capacity.
Analysis of the war does not pay enough attention to the elective affinity between informal institutions and many people’s resistant agency towards the war. Draft avoidance is a long-standing informal institution (including openly corrupt practices, but not only those). There are openly advertised paid services for the middle-class to get their sons’ documented draft deference – rather like the story of Donald Trump’s ‘bone spurs’. What’s missing is that mobilization develops its own informal institutional arrangements. Given their scant resources, there is evidence of commissariats targeting only the socially most vulnerable, and not even bothering with those likely to be harder to find or catch. In my own research I have many examples of young, healthy and active men with vitally needed military experience who have not been mobilized and indeed, do not fear this risk. The promise of digitizing military records and creating a live database remains a pipedream.
Some talk about luck, but many make informed calculations and gather knowledge of who is being targeted, what informal quotas are being fulfilled, and even how reliable commissariats’ information about them is likely to be. Paper records are hard to keep up to date over decades, and smaller firms do not always observe the requirement to inform the commissariat about their employees. Similarly, given the massive labour shortages in precisely those demographic categories where the most ‘soldiers’ might be found (manual and skilled labour), there is evidence of informal agreements of regional politicians protecting local firms. Important Stories published a leaked spreadsheet in November 2023, drawing together data from different ministries and agencies, presumably as a way to try to enforce quotas for each region.
Targets and indictors are counterproductive and lead to fake numbers
But as the report indirectly indicates, the method – a top-down ‘command’ approach to recruiters – is a copy of all the other not-very successful performance indicator systems (‘palochnaia’ ) that the government has been developing in the last two decades. The centre is beholden to information collected via crude spreadsheets and methods open to fraud and fiddling. The recruitment method is a tortuous multichain form of governance. At many links in this chain the information may be manipulated or outright faked. While there are more or less competent managers capable of interrogating dodgy figures, the overall result is that people can connive to produce what sociologist Martha Lampland calls ‘false numbers as a formalizing practice’. Numbers that are ‘good enough’ to please superiors but which have scant relationship to reality. The practice of recording false numbers as ‘true’ is a universal in all complex societies, but in Russia, the obsession with manual control quickly bumps up against physical and organizational impossibilities and so results in an acute case of creative accounting at all levels. Lampland is an expert on Stalinist Hungary and emphasises the incentives in authoritarian systems to fudge the numbers.
Then there’s ordinary people’s agency to content with – also overlooked because of the influential voices insisting that Russian society largely supports the war and so there are allegedly social sanctions in avoiding mobilization. Nothing could be further from the truth in my considered view. While most attention was paid to the hundreds of thousands of men who left Russia, those of mobilizable age who remain are not just fatalistically waiting to be snatched off the street (indeed this practice has been much more widespread in Ukraine than Russia). Physically moving is not particularly difficult so that one cannot be summonsed by post or by commissariat visit. Among the target group there is a well-documented but not widely known phenomenon of mass seasonal migration. This means many ordinary people have good knowledge of potential domiciles far away from their home region. Then there is the long list of reserved occupations from which mobilization is not allowed. There is also evidence of collusion between low-level bureaucrats and locals – prior warnings of potential raids by commissariats and up-coming targets. In my quite broad group of informants and the wider circle they inhabit accessible to me, no one has been mobilized, despite most men having served in the past. Similarly, no one has volunteered or signed a contract. Quite possibly this is because they have some meaningful social capital, however meagre it might appear to the outside world. Without romanticizing as ‘grassroots resistance’, which would be wide of the mark, insurgent social capacity increasingly comes from below, not above. This includes many groups directly or indirectly helping Russian soldiers wage war on Ukraine. But equally this capacity is not under the control of the state’s aims (or should that be aimlessness) in the war. That is why it is increasingly useful to compare to the scholarship on insurgent citizenship from other parts of the world. This is a point my co-authors and I make more generally about Russian society in our recent work on Russian activism.
As a result, the Russian state shows how weak it is by relying on a lumpen mercenary solution, but these are no Landsknecht, despite coverage misreading brutality as effectiveness. As ‘Important Stories’ reported in November, the spreadsheet refers to more vulnerable categories: people with criminal records and similar, debtors and bankrupts, unemployed, those who recently acquired citizenship and migrants. All these groups could be pressured and blackmailed with some evidence of police raids on groups of migrants for this purpose. This tactic is a sign of desperation and unlikely to be effective. For a start the lumpen category is finite and unsuitable as soldiers. The geographical quota system imposed from on high is counterproductive because concrete localities are forced to compete with each other, or even fight for bodies who are highly mobile (living in one place, working in another, registered domicile in a third place). Important Stories emphasises the power of coercion among agencies to get people signed up on a military contract, but they are less attuned to the way dysfunction and overlapping jurisdiction can lead to powerful incentives among even loyal functionaries to mislead and trick their superiors. Faced with impossible targets, multiple layers of bureaucracy connive in ‘fixing’ things so that paper and reality strongly diverge.
We don’t know whether there will be a stalemate on the battlefield moving into 2024, or more dramatic changes in the frontline like we saw in May and November 2022. It remains to be seen whether a more ambitious mobilization campaign will be attempted after the presidential elections in March 2024. It would face the same problems as those I have described here. Utter lack of capacity and resources among the commissariat, informal institutionalized ways of avoiding or undoing the will of the centre to recruit. Massive labour shortages which make industry hostile. A counter-productive administrative system of coercive command. Active and passive agency of the vast majority to avoid the draft. There are various indirect signs that the authorities collectively fear the results of having to implement further mobilization.
The botched first mobilization created an atmosphere of bitterness, fear and hostility to the state’s conduct regarding the war. It would be a mistake to say that mobilization in 2022 broke the social contract between state and people, because there was none to begin with. If the war continues, Russian society will become ‘insurgent’. Not literally, but figuratively, people will become more actively resistant to recruitment to the meatgrinder. No monetary offers, nor spreadsheet autocracy will be effective.
Catching up on the impossible-to-keep-up-with output of Russian journalism and punditry in emigration, I was reminded by Ekaterina Shul’man [Schulmann], speaking in her inimitable soundbite machine-gun style that Putin’s elite does not have an ideology but merely a collection of memes. Shul’man made this comment as a kind of rebuke to the idea that the conservative ‘trad’ politics of the elite are more than skin-deep sentiments. This was on the eve of the events of this last week where Russia’s top court effectively banned any visible LGBT identity expression from public and discursive space. Since then, police have raided the numerous gay-friendly clubs in Moscow. The real and lasting damage to the lives of LGBT people should never be downplayed, but I found myself agreeing with Shul’man that the apparent obsession with deviant sexuality on the part of the Russian elite is more a reflection of their own homosocial and homoerotic projections and denialism, than a broad social conservative consensus or homophobic collective consciousness.
The idea that elites may think they are ‘leading’ when in fact they are quite distant from the (low) salience, or indeed relative unremarkableness [read: ‘social liberalism’] of the majorities’ sexual and gender politics, is at the heart of a number of research writings I’ve published in the last few years – see the end of this post for details.
It is nice to see a mainstream liberal commentator like Shul’man agree with what actual sociological research and opinion polls taken together indicate: that if it were not for the endless homophobic, anti-trans, and gender-conservative messaging from the centre, Russians would barely give a thought to these issues and would likely score lower on scales of traditionalism/social conservativism than the US, Poland and even Ukraine. It is also good for such a visible commentator as Shul’man to imagine a near future when both elites and ordinary people might quickly ‘forget’ the recent past of active homophobic state policy. After all, as I have argued, that is precisely what Western societies have been good at doing since the 1990s. In fact, despite ‘forgetting’, real episodes of hate-crimes against visible others continue to blight ‘liberal’ countries.
However, when it comes to parsing ‘values’-orientations for a general audience, Shul’man is less confident, and her own biases become visible. She can almost never complete an interview without revealing her stark disdain for Soviet culture and society which goes beyond any reasonable sociological critique. She correctly diagnoses homophobia as a symptom of the authoritarian repressed personalities of the elite (clearly some little Soviet boys growing up in the 50s never got past their anal-fixation stage). But she herself exhibits an unhealthy disgust with all things ‘Sovok’. We won’t go into the ‘why’ of this now – but I’ve written plenty about this as projection of status anxiety and overcompensation (guilty conscience) among the liberal intelligentsia.
Shul’man quickly gets on to her hobby-horse about the emptiness and down-right harmfulness of Soviet culture/society because she subscribes to the idea that Soviet and Post-Soviet people were damaged goods thanks to the values they internalized in the USSR. These usually include low social trust, an orientation towards survival over self-expression, a lack of a firm sense of the self in society, ingroup conformity, etc. And, as usual, the evidence for this is pretty unconvincing to anyone who wants to look at a range of indicators beyond the ubiquitous Inglehart–Welzel cultural map which divides every nation into a plot on an pair of axes measuring ‘survival-self-expression values’, and ‘traditional versus secular values’.
We are also on familiar ground when Shul’man bemoans the lack of genuinely cohesive or ‘healthy’ national identity values beyond the Russian language (a rather weak post-colonial glue), the myth of WWII (we saved the world), the anchor of the president as national authority (we know his name and face and he exists). This follows in the footsteps of authors like Vera Tolz who really brought this argument to prominence in the English-speaking academic world 25 years ago, with her question of whether these national characteristics were enough to sustain a civic sense of Russian identity (reader: the jury is still out). However, in Shul’man’s case I would argue we have projection once again: if only Russia could become a normal post-imperial country like the UK or France! I would really like to know how she thinks those those civic ideals are doing in France – famous for its nonracist policing, or the UK, famous for its healthy relationship to its myths of WWII and Empire (irony off).
The other problem with an obsession about Russians lacking so-called liberal or democratic civic values is that we get lost in the weeds of a normative ranking of populations (Russians are supposedly still beholden to authoritarian or populist demagoguery, but Americans are not!) instead of at least tempering a discussion of values with material interests and, frankly, experience of, and reflection on the real world. Now, to be fair to Shul’man, she again makes a positive contribution, saying that any maladaptive Soviet personality is on the wane – Russians are no different really from any other Europeans in their values because of the 30 year-experience of the market economy (and ‘neoliberalism’ – a word she would never willingly utter). She even says later in the interview that she really disagrees with Levada’s framing and agenda (that Russians are dysfunctional maladaptive post-Soviets).
From here we get some better analysis, albeit cloaked in Shul’man’s continued bias towards a narrow understanding of ‘value’ categories over material interests and experiences. Before the war, Shul’man was good on reminding people that even official polling shows that Russians were most concerned with social inequality. In the context of nearly two years of war she again insists that ‘national-patriotism’ is not really a strong, or motivating value, rather that (social-ist) ‘justice’, order, human rights, and peace, are most important. Here she even pauses on the word ‘socialist’ values for emphasis, knowing how discomforting/surprising this notion is to her audience. The interviewer here cannot contain himself, implying that ‘freedom’ must therefore be somewhere lower down in the order of preferences. To give her credit, Shul’man again shows the perspicacity to remind him that freedom is an element of human and particularly social rights. For example the right to be free of fear of poverty in a socially democratic state.
Overall then, we can see the uses, but also limitations of applying a ‘values’ prism to examining Russian society. I recommend the full interview to Russian speakers, whether they like Shul’man’s output or not (she can be a bit Marmite). For me, it’s useful to see how when intelligent observers really drill down they can’t help starting to examine material interests which in turn reveal the real woes of Russian society – not gays, but GINIs.
My only major objection is this continuing reluctance to take the socialization of the Soviet period seriously as productive of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ instincts and feelings (can we stop saying ‘values’ now?). One could therefore say that the liberal discourse Shul’man so expertly deploys ignores the insistent legacy of ‘popular socialism’ produced by the USSR experience (whatever we think of the Soviet reality itself), as well as its grave contribution to today’s Russian-imperial chauvinist complexes. In some respects you cannot have one without the other. Nor is it necessarily the case that social change (read: people becoming more socially liberal) will shift people to make them more economically liberal or geopolitically post-imperial.
Some self-promotion (readers can always email me if they want pdfs):
ABSTRACT: An understanding of gendered homophobia in authoritarian states like Russia provides insights into intolerance as a function of propaganda. What is the effect on ordinary attitudes of “political homophobia” (Boellstorf, 2009) disseminated at fever pitch by state-controlled media intent on dividing the world geopolitically into debauched gay-friendly states, and those willing to defend “traditional Christian” values? Despite authoritarian societies appearing very different from pluralist ones, attitudes are plastic, diverse views possible, and survey polling unreliable. The ethnographic materials presented here show the need to meaningfully engage with vernacular prejudice and differentiate it from regime and media messaging. Everyday forms of homophobia and heterosexism have their origins in complex social phenomena and historical legacies beyond geopolitically-motivated hatred.
Morris, J. B. (2022). »Har vi nogensinde været europæiske?« Hverdagsrefleksioner fra Rusland om køns- og seksualitetskulturkrigen. [‘Have we ever been European?’ Everyday reflections from Russia on gender- and sexuality culture wars] Nordisk Østforum, 36, 103–120. https://doi.org/10.23865/noros.v36.3384
ABSTRACT: Whereas the influence of Russia’s state-led policy of conservatism is reflected in everyday talk – especially in relation to the idea that Euro-American values of permissiveness and ‘tolerance’ are misplaced – the findings reveal more nuanced ideas ‘from below’ about cultural differences between Russia and the putatively ‘other’ Europe. The article further notes the volatility and variance in survey methods that seek to measure ‘intolerance’ and cultural difference. They can exacerbate what, as Katherina Wiedlack and others have pointed out, is a colonial and orientalizing discourse that features an ‘enlightened’ West and a ‘passive, backward’ East. This article shows how ‘intolerance’ and acceptance of non-normative sexuality in Russia do not differ greatly from the situation in comparable societies of the global North.
Jeremy Morris & Masha Garibyan (2021) Russian Cultural Conservatism Critiqued: Translating the Tropes of ‘Gayropa’ and ‘Juvenile Justice’ in Everyday Life, Europe-Asia Studies, 73:8, 1487-1507, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2021.1887088
ABSTRACT: the essay argues that vernacular social conservatism re-appropriates official discourses to express Russians’ feelings towards their own state. Intolerance is less fuelled by elite cues but rather reflects domestic resentment towards, and fear of, the punitive power of the state, along with nostalgia for an idealised version of moral socialisation under socialism.
Dagestan and other events since the war indicate the futility of attaching cause and effect and predicting unrest. It is equally futile to extrapolate future scenarios from them.
Proximal causes might well be connected to media coverage of events in Gaza, local anti-Semitic entrepreneurs, and the conspiracy peddling that Jews from Israel were to be accommodated in Dagestan. But then we would have to account for differences between forms of “vernacular” and elite discourses of antisemitism within Russia and Dagestan (one of the most ethnically diverse places on the planet). This is hard to do, because social media research offers only a pale reflection of this reality. Then there is another factor: consumption of global media (including that sponsored by Ukraine and emirate states) which research usually fails to account for.
What’s missing is the deeper current of sociological examination. After all, if “Dagestanis” (an analytically meaningless definition) suddenly became virulent progromists against Jews, how have numerous communities of European and Caucasus Jews not attracted their ire until now? Russia across the board has deep currents of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, racial and political antisemitism going back to before the Soviet Union. But these are only weakly relevant here. (By the way, there are probably fewer than 500 Jews in the city of Makhachkala).
Yuri Levada, the ‘godfather’ of hegemonic social thinking on Russia noted in the late 1990s that organised and clearly addressed public protest was the exception not the rule. Whenever discontent (at social conditions) actually rose to the surface it was immediately revealed to lack any appropriate social or political language capable of expressing the meaning of such discontent. At the same time there was an absence of appropriate structures that might reroute such language into forms legible to the powers that be. This gave rise to the predominance of protest based on emotion and which then degenerates into primordialist and conspirological hijacking. – “We are poor and it’s the Jews at fault – after all they control the World Government”. (in fact World Government conspiracies is much more likely to be a hobby of the middle or upper classes)
Now the problem with Levada was that he was working with a functionalist set of ideas about social psychology. In the version applied to events like those in Dagestan this is often reducible to clichés about the danger of the crowd and maladaptive personality. Observers cannot imagine, indeed, they completely discount coherent protest action. There is only the mob. But this is not really how pogroms actually happen – historically they required coordination with authorities and were based on long-standing processes of othering and blame-shifting, which do not seem to be the case here. ‘Mindless’ or ‘duped’ crowd theory was passé generations ago in sociology. But for the inheritors of Levada’s tradition (social psychology neo-functionalists) – something beyond reactive or maladaptive ‘politics’ is hardly imagined. In my view the main problem with social science analysis of Russia in general is the legacy of Levadesque social psychology of the Soviet and post-Soviet individual (although he is but one of a number of influential authors who take a reductive perspective, but of them in another post).
The ’distal’ or indirect cause of protests like those in Dagestan is of course much more complex and we should be spending more time attending to the toxic cocktail of coercive military mobilization and failing social and economic life, and ‘colonial’ forms of governance. There are many excellent scholars and observers working on the N. Caucasus who show how Moscow’s attempt to exert control has led to governance failure after governance failure. Indeed, the defining book on the North Caucasus argued twenty years ago that you can’t understand larger flows of historical trends and social configurations without attending to micro-scale empirical situation. But while religion, unemployment, poverty, ethnic strife, climate change and territorial/land conflicts are a unique toxic burden on the life Caucasian, the rest of Russia is not so different in terms of the fundamental pressures of hopelessness and resulting impotent rage that require but a little prod (Ilya Ponomarev of course was just one of the Telegram tricksters inciting people) to provoke widespread unrest. Mark Fisher’s idea of the effects of a ‘slow cancellation of the future’ is featured extensively in my unpublishable book. (Running joke about my publishing problems).
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Planning this blogpost I actually wanted to write about the ‘failure’ of military mobilization and its unpredictable social effects in Russia. I don’t have the space now to really pursue this, but I wanted to explore the falsity of the numbers that all ‘experts’ use when they try to understand mobilization/volunteers for the Russian army, etc. This recalls work like that of Martha Lampland on how ‘false’ numbers become embedded in formalized practices of expertise. A number can become ‘correct’ (useable, passable, acceptable), even if it’s fake. This is the ‘quantitative’ part of how we fool ourselves as ‘experts’ on the war, and it goes hand in hand with the ‘qualitative’ part of self-deception – as we saw with people rushing to judgement about Dagestan with zero-context takes.
Did you know that all the English-language sources which ‘count’ mobilized and other troops can be traced to a few uncheckable sources? Did you also know that many Russian sources refer back to the English sources as ‘authoritative’, but that these English sources merely cite (with caveats) Russian government ones? There is incredible circularity in ‘data’ which mainstream and even experts rely on when ‘reporting’ empirical reality. And then there is the problem of how fast this data ages. I reviewed various sources writing on mobilization one year ago in 2022 and pretty much all predictions (even those not based on extrapolation from official source) turned out to be wildly wrong (remember the 1 million army?).
Every day I read more sources about recruitment in Russia. As a result I do not become more confident, but less about our knowledge. I hate falling into the predictive/descriptive trap myself, but cannot resist it on this last point. Russia may be recruiting (not fielding) c. 15k troops a month (less than half of most estimates). This figure I get from drilling down various sources. Few have really paid attention to the actual composition of Russian forces – that the volunteer pool is small and shrinking, that the funnel from conscripts to contracted is extremely narrow (and yet is the main conduit), and that there is no adequate replacement of technical-specialist roles. Numbers are not enough by any measure. Enough for what? you ask. Well, instead of thinking about concrete military objectives like a ‘winter counter-counter offensive’, I prefer to think more globally about just sustaining basic functions of a modern armed force across a massive space. In a sense we are already seeing not an ‘army’ in any sense of the word, but a subnational set of fighting outfits – whatever you want to call them. These have competing aims and needs. I think Russian recruitment is key to various outcomes of the war and that it requires sociological examination (embedded knowledge and massive triangulation of sources which people are not willing to really countenance).
But even thinking in terms of numbers of people is not the most important thing. Maybe there are other numbers that are more important – numbers related to the material motivation – money numbers. I started to address this in a recent post where I argued that it is a classic liberal metropolitan mistake to think of money rewards on offer as offering the final word. I think this is a misunderstanding, and it is where ethnography has an important role. At the beginning of the war many of my interlocutors said: ‘this money is not worth killing and dying for’. Now the situation is much worse for many reasons. In the words of one, ‘I could understand greed as a motivator if it were real money, but it really isn’t. I’m sorry, 200k a month is not real money and for what? You can get snuffed out at any moment – in my mind it just doesn’t compute.’
The realm of recruitment and mobilization does not herald the coming of the Russian ‘necroworld’ that many distant observers have called it, but one of calculation and computation of real people and real possibilities.
Postsocialism 
