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It’s Victory Day – but most Russians feel anything but victorious [1]
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Date: 2023-05
How has Russia changed, more than a year after its invasion of Ukraine? Has it become a fascist state with soldiers in the classroom, and people afraid to express the slightest doubts about the war? Are Russians consenting to be mobilised, to kill and be killed on the front? What do ordinary people really think about Ukrainians, the West and their own government?
At the beginning of last year, I spent time trying to answer the question of how war would change Russia – my hunch was “the same, but worse”. I continue to ask that question, both of myself and the dozens of Russians I work with.
I’m the only foreign anthropologist to have carried out fieldwork in Russia since the war began. I’m also (probably) the only researcher with long-term contacts from all walks of life, who can get reliable responses and avoid many of the biases those studying Russia are unavoidably subject to. Explaining the war means that many contradictory things need to be said. For many Russians, the conflict is traumatising yet normalised at the same time.
As I wrote in openDemocracy shortly after the invasion, when people are presented with potentially traumatising information, their cognitive coping mechanisms include denial and avoidance. As time goes by, they gravitate to more ‘sophisticated’ ways of dealing with the disturbing idea that their country is responsible for mass death and destruction, war crimes and worse.
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They consolidate defensively around ideas that justify or explain the invasion, and allow them to continue their lives in as mundane a way as possible – that it’s the West who is the aggressor, or that Ukrainians are dupes of their own “fascist regime”.
These are not really ideas, but feelings that tap into deep-seated historical processes and unfinished questions about the nature of Russia and, before it, the Soviet state. These include misplaced and inaccurate perceptions of the Soviet order’s benign governance of Ukraine and elsewhere, as well as accusations of imperialist sins by the West while denying Russia’s same sins.
Geopolitical and historical resentment about the loss of the Soviet project are felt deeply by many Russians. Like all things that people believe about their own countries, these feelings are amplified in a crisis. But even this is not the main thing.
My job as an ethnographer is to observe and record, hopefully seeing through people’s guile and denial. This applies to perspectives in the West too, where we have just as many biases as those in Russia. As someone who has dedicated his professional life to the study of Russia and the broader context of life after the USSR, more than ever I ask this question: what are your claims to knowledge and what biases do they reveal?
I don’t pretend to analytical wholeness, but I do have confidence in my sources and (in the parlance of social science) their ‘reliability’ and ‘validity’. So much of what we see about the war from both the Ukrainian and Russian perspective is filtered heavily. Often what we see is secondary data that has been manipulated, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Four common misconceptions
Let’s take four broad categories of misconception (intentional in some cases).
Active misconception 1: Russians actively approve of the war and the regime’s conduct. A variation of this is that a majority (or large minority) of Russians are animated by nationalist fervour. Those, like me, who question this – whether we’re critical of survey data, or cautious about using samples of social media posts that express genocidal or other enthusiasm – generally get drowned out.
Reality: If you’d asked Russians before the war whether the Kyiv regime should be replaced in a military coup by Russian forces, those answering ‘yes’ would have been a tiny minority. The idea of a full-scale invasion was unthinkable. Ukraine, Crimea, the Donbas are not salient issues to most Russian people, even now. What matters are jobs, benefits, inflation, corruption, law and order, and other material concerns.
As I have written, survey polling in Russia is an imposition of the norms of the powerful upon the subordinate. It is true that people will readily repeat propaganda tropes about President Zelenskyi being a drug addict, about NATO mercenaries and depleted uranium. But only if you really prompt or push them.
Although people are looking over their shoulders when they speak about the war, they continue, online and off, to openly criticise the conflict, albeit with increasing risks. There are few “hurrah-shouting patriots” to be found. To most people, the regime’s national chauvinism is not an acceptable mobilising ideology.
The evidence for this is clear if researchers are honest about how anti-Ukrainian sentiment, patriotic symbols and ‘wartalk’ are not voluntarily present in everyday life. That’s not to say there isn’t an imperial residue, unpleasantly sticky and hard to wash off – but in this respect, are Russians very different to other post-imperial peoples? It’s unpopular to say so. But while there are some shared feelings between Putin and the Russian people, there is a gulf when it comes to the genuine revanchist and neocolonial intent of the regime.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-ukraine-war-misconceptions-victory-day/
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