Polls show that a majority of Russians support the war in Ukraine. These numbers are controversial: Who tells the truth in a dictatorship? And yet it is clear that Putin’s propaganda hits a nerve in Russia because it mobilizes historically evolved images of the enemy.
Since the beginning of the war, the West has been puzzled as to whether and to what extent the Russian public will support the invasion of Ukraine. The simplest answer to this question is that Russian society does not think and does not want to think at the moment. There is a hard kernel of truth behind this flippant statement. Large sections of Russian society have taken refuge in an apolitical silence. Neighbors and colleagues consider it undesirable to talk about the war, which may not be called that in public. The restaurants are full. The cinemas and theaters show programs. The shops are open. In Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sverdlovsk people live as if nothing has happened, although everyone knows that everything is different. Ukraine is a topic both through its presence in the public media and through its absence in mainstream conversation.
What is really being thought under this blanket of not wanting to care is hard to grasp. Impressions depend heavily on the point of view of the viewer. Those who associate with Moscow and St. Petersburg intellectuals often find that most Russians oppose the war. Those who have relatives or friends in the Russian middle class or contacts in the provinces have the opposite perception. Younger generations, connected via social media, speak with more critical voices. The older generation, for the most part, steadfastly relies on Russian television – and therefore on Putin. The picture in Russia is still heterogeneous. Lone warriors still dare to contradict. It even happens that recruitment offices go up in flames, apparently set on fire to make a mark. However, Putin’s following does not seem to be diminishing. A popular uprising against the government’s course is more than unlikely.
The hard numbers, with which one liked to measure social opinion in other times, only say something to a limited extent. Every month, the Levada Institute – a product of the reforms of the 1980s – publishes its figures on Russian attitudes to the war. But these numbers have themselves become a matter of conflict. How much can you trust the Levada polls? Are people still willing to speak their minds openly? And if so, are they telling the truth? And are those even the relevant questions? Do numbers even say anything about the views of people living in such a complex environment of prohibition and propaganda?
The discussion of the Levada numbers is based on the assumption that public opinion is logical and coherent. However, the results of the surveys themselves show that this is not the case. Last December, 71 percent of those questioned supported the special operation completely or mostly. At the same time, 44 percent were in favor of immediate peace talks, even though Russia has not yet achieved its goals. An internal-use-only poll conducted at the same time for Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the FSB, painted an even more striking picture: 55 percent of respondents are in favor of peace talks and only 25 percent are in favor of continuing the war. Levada figures for January 2023, however, show support for the war rising to 75 percent. The question of negotiations no longer appears in the new statistics.
What appears to be contradictory does not necessarily indicate errors in the surveys. On the contrary, conflicting opinions are not new (not only) in Russia. In late socialism, Soviet politics and reality were largely rejected and criticized by the population. However, work continued in this system, orders were carried out. The absolute majority of Soviet citizens would have called themselves patriots even then. And above all in war, patriotism means supporting the state, especially when the war is sold as a campaign against the West.
This is not to say that such devotion to the regime is free from criticism. In the documentary “Broken Ties” by Andrey Loshak you can see this lived contradiction very well. Despite her daughter’s attempts, the mother of a Russian psychologist living in London refuses to condemn the war. She is unconditionally for her President. At the same time, she is well aware that her own house on the outskirts of Kaliningrad, which has neither gas nor oil heating, is a failure of the system. For years, the state had sold precisely these resources to the West without paying much attention to the infrastructure and social conditions outside of the metropolis.
The Kaliningrad babushka is not the only representative of the older generation who sees it that way. Despite the high support for the war among those over 55 (82 percent in January 2023, according to Levada), one should not forget that this social group has also protested against Putin when it came to their own concerns in the past. In 2018, violent demonstrations against the lowering of the retirement age made headlines and poor poll ratings for Putin and Medvedev.
Such contradictions suggest that putting the numbers aside for a moment and looking directly at Russian society gives a better picture of the current Russian state of mind. Above all, one has to realize that the central pillars of Russian self-perception still come from the Soviet era and are therefore based on decades. Putin’s propaganda of a resurgent Russia comes up against a strong belief among his subjects that their happiness is intertwined with Russia’s power.
In other words, for many Russians, their own well-being depends on the size and status of their country. For that greatness one is willing to make sacrifices, both personally and socially. That is why a large part of the population forgives Stalin for his crimes, since he led the Soviet Union to victory in World War II. (Stalin has ranked first or second in polls of the most popular statesmen for years.) This is why Gorbachev was and is hated, for it was he who lost the empire. Putin’s campaign in Ukraine is also based on this idea of ??imperial greatness, which takes precedence over law and prosperity. He too, he believes, will be forgiven for the hundreds of thousands of dead Russian soldiers if he only makes Russia bigger and more powerful.
In the short term, however, Putin must also reckon with resistance – as he knows from the pensioners’ protests or the truck driver strikes in the Far East, sometimes also from parts of society that normally support him. Mobilization was therefore a risk, and there was no closing of the borders to prevent recruits from leaving the country. However, Putin’s last speech just before the anniversary of the invasion suggested that the government is preparing Russian society for a long and sacrificial war. A new mobilization is considered likely. The consequences of the sanctions will soon become more apparent as essential spare parts for cars, electronics, medical equipment and the like will soon run out. In exchange for the expected material and emotional damage, the government is offering a shared hatred of the West – and also of those who have chosen and fled to the West in recent months. Whoever is not with us is against us, was the slogan with which Putin invoked the unity of the Russian people on the anniversary of the invasion.
The narrative of the West as the seductive enemy of authentic Russia also has a long Soviet tradition. In fact, in the late Soviet Union, the West came right after Heaven – a forbidden land of plenty for consumption of all kinds. But the Soviet love of Levis, Wranglers and Burda fashions should not hide the fact that Soviet citizens are far superior to the West on an ideological and moral level felt and despised him for the very reasons they envied him. The West was materialistic, consumerist and spiritually impoverished. And as such it still exists in the minds of Russian society.
The West as the enemy, traitor, and seducer of its own people is an image that Putin only had to reactivate – and one that had the power to soothe all the negative feelings that the 1990s and its economic hardships aroused. The sociologist Gregori Iudin calls it the narrative of resentment. This narrative fuels a constant sense of falling short while claiming to be unique and supreme among the Russian population.
But it is also the case that in addition to resentment and contempt, there are other factors that determine the Russian worldview. Both the Soviet Union and Russia continually described themselves as peace-loving and even peace-making. Even from the communist times, people are used to thinking and acting internationally. What sounds like mockery at the moment has its own power potential. Just as the negative feelings and worldviews are mobilized by propaganda, established emotions and ideas could also be appealed to, which could initiate an end to the war.
Putin’s mass rally in Luzhniki Stadium in front of thousands of listeners shows the ambivalence that underlies even acts supporting the war. There was no doubt that the attendance and the applause showed approval, although the spectators were largely ordered to the event. Interviews with people in the crowd produced the standard rhetoric about Ukrainian “Nazis” and Western aggression. After the event, many of the guests, most of whom came from the provinces, boarded the metro to see Moscow. The Russian flags were piled at the entrance to the station. So they weren’t so attached to the symbol of Russian greatness after all. And you didn’t want to give up having fun entirely. But if you should have cheered Putin one more time the next day, you would have done it. And if Putin had then said that they were done in Ukraine and that they were withdrawing, then that would have been accepted by the vast majority of the Russian population. The anger, the resentment and the addiction to great power would then have been stowed away again until called.
That didn’t happen and unfortunately probably never will. Instead, the historically grown and propagandistically fueled negative feelings underpin the Russian opinion and deepen the defiance. A profound change in the attitude of Russian society will only occur when lived reality and emotional expectations diverge widely, for example when Russia’s losses on the battlefield also reach the population in the urban centers of the country’s interior or when victory becomes hopeless . The rhetoric in the ethnically non-Russian periphery, in the areas from which most soldiers are recruited, such as Buratia or Dagestan, is already different. Material reasons for going to war are often given priority here. The army pays well. The tale of the Nazis in Ukraine is only partially received here.
A year after the war of aggression it is clear that it is not only Putin’s war that is being waged. The polls among the Russian population speak too loudly for that. There is ample evidence of this on social media and elsewhere. But without Putin, this war would not be fought. Acceptance of the war rests in large part on acceptance of Putin’s interpretation of the world. There was and is not a large, fanatical movement in the population that drives the war. If tomorrow’s slogan were peace instead of war, the opinion of Russian society would probably swing towards it.
Juliane Fürst is a historian and head of the “Communism and Society” department at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam.