Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with a soldier at a military training centre for mobilised reservists. Photo / AP
OPINION:
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, an old English proverb says. Its Russian counterpart advises you to count your chickens in the autumn.
In Russia, autumn starts looming in August and is often revelatory. The August 1991 putsch burst open the cracks within the Soviet elite, accelerating the country’s implosion, and the August 1998 financial crisis exposed the bankruptcy of the new Russian state. Terrorist bombings in 1999, the Beslan massacre in 2004 and even the revolution in 1917 all took place in the autumn — as if not only nature but also social and political forces ripen and bear fruit this season.
In the autumn of 2022, Russians have been forced to face the reality of war. Vladimir Putin’s decision in September to mobilise Russians lifted the final flimsy veil from what the government continues to call a special military operation in Ukraine. Many Russian families, after months of detachment, have had to confront the ugly face of war, a full 210 days into the full-scale invasion. Almost half of Russians felt “anxiety, fear and horror”, while 13 per cent were angry, according to surveys conducted by the independent Levada Center after the announcement. A bitter war of revenge, borne with stunning resilience and moral courage in Ukraine, has been further underlined by Russia’s escalatory assault on civilian targets.
Yet for all the emotion it has inspired, the escalation hasn’t seemed to affect most Russians’ views of the war. According to one recent study, 43 per cent of Russians support the bombing of Ukrainian cities and overall support for the war has not changed much. Given the parlous state of the country — internationally isolated and economically precarious — and the dawning realisation of what the war in Ukraine entails, such a sturdy bank of support for the Kremlin’s actions might seem surprising. But it emerges from a deep well of collective feeling, nurtured in recent decades, that conflates individuals’ interests with those of the state, embodied by Putin. That support may dim, but it won’t disappear.
When the war started, hopes that Russians would rise up and challenge the senseless cruelty of their country’s leadership were quickly disappointed. Some courageous Russians, often from younger generations, took to the streets or engaged in more clandestine opposition to the war. But the protests, while attended by thousands in the initial days after the invasion, never really snowballed to a grand scale. The main factor was fear. After the Kremlin made criticism of the war punishable by up to 15 years in prison, protests understandably dropped away. After all, people have one life and want to live it, rather than spend it being tortured by a police officer and left to rot in jail.
If a minority of Russians were roused to anger by the invasion, the majority were in a state of shock. In days, Russia had become a pariah, cut off from international travel and targeted with deep sanctions. It was profoundly disorienting. To navigate this uncharted territory, Russians in the main reached for familiar moral ground: collective national identity. “My country, right or wrong” was the default reaction. One message from a popular movie star resonated intensely: “You don’t criticise your own folks in war, even if they are wrong.” Instead, people blamed President Joe Biden, Nato expansion and the West, as well as Ukrainian nationalists.
As time passed, many Russians distanced themselves. They lived the summer months as if nothing was happening. The Russian state took note of public disengagement and at the beginning of September state-controlled media moved away from the style of coverage that characterised the early war, with its emphasis on the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine, and toward infotainment, with new historical television series and late-night shows with familiar hosts. For a while, soccer results and House of the Dragon trended in Google searches in Russia. Putin’s mobilisation order, in response to the military’s difficulties on the battlefield, shattered this equilibrium. As men were called up to fight, Russians’ attitude toward the war was once again tested.
Mobilisation was a second shock that was, once again, internalised by society. Despite instances of unrest and disquiet in some regions, the Russian public broadly acquiesced. The more educated and well-resourced Russians looked for ways to circumvent the potential draft; exit options ranged from leaving the country to obtaining official paperwork to avoid conscription. But the duty to the state and to their own folks is seen, by many ordinary Russians, as an unavoidable obligation.
This ought not to be too surprising. War, after all, magnifies the role of collective identity — itself the primary standpoint from which many Russian individuals understand their reality. This isn’t just a matter of propaganda, though it’s true that the majority of citizens take their cues from government-controlled media. It operates at a deeper level of perception and interpretation, where citizens shape their opinions on the basis of what they know — or imagine — are the dominant, socially desirable views.
This reflex explains seeming contradictions thrown up by polling. A recent poll revealed that almost 40 per cent of Russians were hypothetically ready to support any of Putin’s decisions, whether he were to sign a peace agreement or march to Kyiv. The paradox of support for these antithetical strategies dissolves once you grasp that people respond to these surveys not individually but collectively — they support whatever is thought to serve the collective interest, expressed by their president. In wartime, with the nation pitted against a range of adversaries, these dynamics are only intensified.
Rallying around the flag at times of war is not unique to Russia, of course. The uniqueness of Russia today is in the symbolic merger of its national identity with the figure of Vladimir Putin. This strange conflation is the fruit of a two-decade-long process of depoliticisation, in which the Kremlin encouraged people to trust Putin — conceived as a uniquely heroic figure who saved the country from the wild and painful 1990s — while sowing a deep distrust of all other politicians.
In the 2000s, this largely successful strategy depended on rising living standards. In the past decade, as economic growth stalled and discontent broke out, it has taken the form of national identity politics. Patriotism, veneration of state symbols and admiration for the glories of Russian history and the country’s recent successes have become a burnished mirror in which citizens see themselves. At the centre of this national idea sits Putin, the embodiment of a stronger and more successful Russia.
Awakening from this illusion will be nothing if not painful and prolonged. As of now, like their leader, many Russian citizens are invested in victory in Ukraine — whatever that is deemed to mean. Yet this autumn, though it may take some time for Russians to admit it, has been similarly revelatory. It marks the point at which Putin started to slide, slowly but surely, from Russia’s national pedestal.
- Gulnaz Sharafutdinova is a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London and the author of The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Gulnaz Sharafutdinova
Photographs by: Nanna Heitmann and AP
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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