Why Do So Many Russians Support Putin?

Joshua Yaffa

In the month since Russia invaded Ukraine, public-opinion polls have shown a range of support among Russians for what Vladimir Putin and the country’s state media call a special military operation. In one survey, sixty-five per cent of respondents approved of Russia’s actions in Ukraine; in another, the figure was seventy-one. But one thing seems clear: the war, at least as sold and narrated to the Russian people, appears to be decently popular. Even independent polls show approval well above fifty per cent. But what does public support mean in a society with no functioning political opposition, a decimated free press, and a repressive regime in power?

“I don’t think we can say that, on the whole, people in Russia love this war—that they like the idea of going off in search of conquest,” Alexey Bessudnov, a professor of sociology at the University of Exeter, told me. “But I think it would be equally false to say it’s all the Kremlin, that they are simply inventing these figures, that they don’t reflect reality.” People are supporting something, Bessudnov said, but “we should remember what people have in mind when they say they support what is happening in Ukraine.” He pointed out that the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Centre used phrasing in its survey—“Do you support the decision made for Russia to conduct a special military operation in Ukraine?”—that mimicked Putin’s own. “First, this decision has already been taken, which is a kind of hint right there,” Bessudnov said. “And, second, it’s a ‘special operation,’ not an invasion or war.”

In the early days of the invasion, state television told viewers that the purpose of the “special military operation” was to protect Russian speakers in the Donbas, with little mention of the mass bombardment of Kharkiv, the barbaric siege of Mariupol, or the battles outside Kyiv. This messaging appeared convincing, at least to a point. According to the Athena Project, a collective of sociologists and I.T. specialists who have been conducting their own polling in recent weeks, thirty-eight per cent of respondents who view news on television identified the main purpose of the intervention as safeguarding the populations of the Russian-backed quasi-republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. Twenty-one per cent of TV viewers didn’t know the goal of the operation.

The Kremlin presumably knows that a full-fledged war with Ukraine would be a difficult concept to sell to most Russians. Even if the idea has imperial roots, the widely resonant concept of Ukraine as a “brother nation” means that few enjoy seeing its population actively suffer—hence, the government’s insistence on the “special operation” language and the portrayal of the campaign as a fight not against the Ukrainian people but, rather, distant NATO forces and the spectral, undefined threat of “Nazism.” Putin has repeatedly said that the Ukrainian units fighting back against Russian forces are not regular troops but neo-Nazi battalions. Russian state television blares from morning until night with talk of a quasi-holy struggle against Fascism. “Do you support a battle against Nazism?” Bessudnov asked. “I do, and I bet you do, too. Only you and I don’t think the Russian invasion of Ukraine has anything to do with a battle with Nazism—but plenty of people inside Russia do.”

On some level, the data likely reflect an impulse, whether born of fear or passivity, to repeat approved messages rather than articulate your own. “Surveys don’t show what people think, but what they are ready to say, how they are prepared to carry themselves in public,” Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Centre, the country’s premier independent polling and research organisation, said. Even before the war, Russia was not the kind of place where you willy-nilly shared your political beliefs with strangers, let alone with those who called out of the blue. That tendency, forged in the Soviet period, only intensified in recent weeks, with new laws that criminalised “discrediting” the Russian military, spreading “fake news,” and making any mention in the press that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was war.

The state’s intended message has not been lost on the public: speak of the special operation in pre-approved key words, or don’t talk about it at all. Tatiana Mikhailova, a professor and economist in Moscow, relayed how a pollster from a state-run agency had reached her by phone and said that, if she participated, her number would be recorded for “quality control.” As she put it, “any normal person would hang up.” Earlier this month, Maxim Katz, an opposition-minded politician in Moscow, and a team of researchers commissioned a poll on public attitudes toward the war; Katz reported that, out of the thirty-one thousand people who were called, twenty-nine thousand and four hundred ended the conversation as soon as they heard the topic.

In mid-March, Aleksei Miniailo, a former social entrepreneur and current opposition politician, oversaw another telephone survey with the aim of trying to capture the effects of fear and propaganda on survey data. He told me that, when researchers added the option “I don’t want to answer this question,” twelve per cent of those surveyed opted for this answer—a number that he presumed, given the atmosphere, was made up nearly entirely of those who opposed the war. And that figure came from among those who agreed to participate at all; Miniailo suspected that the polls were not capturing a majority of the real antiwar sentiment, whatever its size.

Even those who did agree to answer the questions in Miniailo’s survey displayed a heightened level of fear and discomfort. One man in his fifties said, “It is now prohibited by law to answer what you think about this topic. So I will refrain.” Another man said, “I will, of course, tell you this is a ‘special military operation.’ Any other opinion risks criminal punishment.” A woman living in a rural town said she was worried that the police would come and take her away the next day.

The research left Miniailo with little faith in polling about public opinion toward the war. The only real takeaway, he said, is that it’s impossible to say anything with much certainty about what Russians actually think about it. “Talking about whether the survey data is off by ten or even twenty per cent totally misses the point,” he told me. “What I think we’ve learned is that the numbers about support for the war are one hundred per cent unreliable—they tell us nothing.”

Polling on the war, then, is perhaps a better indicator of a person’s willingness to post antiwar content or to attend a protest rather than of what one might think privately or discuss at home. Given that public dissent, or lack thereof, matters for Putin’s ability to continue to wage war, not to mention his hold on power, this information, too, is important—it’s just a different question than whether Russians actually welcome the invasion. “The support picked up in polls is not deep or passionate, there is little emotional involvement, and certainly no euphoria,” Volkov, from the Levada Centre, said. “It’s more like tolerance.”

Yet Volkov added that this tolerance, however passive, is likely to remain quite stable, even strong. “People aren’t responding to the war so much, but, rather, looking to confirm an us-versus-them world view that was locked in place a long time ago,” he told me. “Russia is on the side of good and the West is against it.” During a focus-group discussion that the Levada Centre conducted earlier this month, a woman said that she supported the “special operation,” but acknowledged that if she got her information from, say, the BBC, she might think otherwise. “If I watched different channels, I would probably have a different opinion, but I don’t watch them,” she said. It’s not that she doesn’t know alternative information is out there, but that she doesn’t want it, lest her vision of the world come under threat. “It’s not about having to reconsider this one event but everything you thought and understood over the last ten or fifteen years,” Volkov told me.

In today’s Russia, there is also an overwhelming sense of distrust or disbelief in the very possibility of civic consciousness: that is, a near-total disengagement and alienation from matters of politics or public concern, of which war is the most extreme manifestation. “People are habituated not to stick their noses into politics, not only because it’s dangerous or unwise but because it’s silly—only a fool would think to do such a thing,” Greg Yudin, a sociologist and philosopher, told me. “People are trying to protect their own world, this personal space they built with a lot of hardship and difficulty, and now they want to defend it—and they’ve been told many times that any form of collective action could be the thing that makes it all come crashing down.” In a climate of wartime censorship and repression, the mere expression of an unsanctioned or a critical thought begins to feel like a protest action; that is, the very thing for a sane, self-interested person to avoid.

This has led to the most dangerous situation of all, Yudin fears. “The vast majority of Russians feel no sense of political responsibility whatsoever,” he said. “That means the state can do absolutely anything and people won’t think it has anything to do with them.”.

 [Written in March 2022 when the war was just one-month old]
[Source: The NEW YORKER]

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Vol 55, No. 36, Mar 5 - 11, 2023