THE GATHERER OF LANDS
For Leonid Volkov, Crimea was a problem.
At 37, Volkov was the presidential campaign manager for opposition leader Alexei Navalny and himself an increasingly prominent politician from the Ural Mountains city of Ekaterinburg. On the face of it, as the 2018 elections drew closer, Volkov should have been riding high. The economy was a shambles: two years of economic contraction, four years of declining real incomes and a complex web of sanctions and counter-sanctions all meant that just about no one in Russia was better off than they had been before Putin returned to the Kremlin.
In short, grabbing the political sympathies of someone like Elena should have been easy. A 20-year-old film student in St. Petersburg, Elena told us she was looking forward to graduating, getting a job—something better than her part-time job in an elementary school—and moving out from her parents’ apartment. From where she and her friends sat however, the immediate future did not look particularly bright.
“Whoever you ask, everything’s bad—the wrong job, salary’s too small, no spaces in the kindergarten,” Elena said. “Ordinary people are dissatisfied, and it seems to me that our country’s policies are more oriented to foreign policy. They’re not that interested in the people.”
Indeed, the Kremlin and its friends on television and online worked hard to drown the economic sorrows in a sea of geopolitical glory. Success in Ukraine and in Syria—even the upcoming 2018 FIFA World Cup, for which stadiums and hotels were being built or refurbished across the country—were all proof of Russia’s hard-won geopolitical glory. As Kristina Potupchik would remind the okhraniteli, there was a price to be paid for these things, but it was worth it. The jewel in the crown, of course, was Crimea.
“There are good things and bad things about it,” Elena told us. “Of course, a whole lot of money is being pumped into Crimea from the budget, and again we’re forgetting about the countryside. And our country has this habit of focusing on one place. First it was Sochi, everything was pumped into that city [for the Olympics], and now it’s Crimea. All the money is just gone. . . . Well, most of the money goes there. On the other hand, it’s a good resort, and it will bring a decent income. And it’s nice that it’s ours now. . . . Crimea, for me, is close to my heart. So many movies were made there, it just seems like it’s our piece of land, which just kind of went away for a while.”
And that—the warm fuzzy feeling that Elena and tens of millions of other Russians got from Crimea—was Volkov’s headache. “Crimea is ours”—Krym nash, in Russian—emerged as such a frequently repeated mantra, that it has become something of a joke. There is a Russian saying, however, that there is a bit of truth in every joke. However much Krym nash might seem like a cliché, the sentiment is very much genuine, even for those uncertain about their economic future. Volkov himself likened it to the “magic bean” that a player in a video game might grab, prolonging his life and powers.
“Crimea, of course, was a real gift of fate for Putin,” Volkov told us, sitting in Navalny’s campaign office. “Just remember, when Crimea happened. In the fall of 2013, his ratings fell below 60 percent for the first time since 2000. It was 50-something, not 60-something or 70-something. And of course that was linked to our tremendous rise after the election in Moscow, when we showed ourselves to be the leading political alternative. . . . And then Putin grabbed that magic bean and ate it. And we can see how it galvanized his dead political system for another two to three years and gave his political corpse a little more life. And that’s bad, because for all these years—these extra years of Putin—we’re going to have to pay the bill. They’re not just sitting there, hands folded. They’re stealing, stealing. Stealing millions. But what can you do? That’s just the way it is.”
In this chapter, we unpack the “gift of fate for Putin” that was Crimea. We look at how television was used to build a simple, powerful and almost completely false narrative of the Ukrainian revolution and the annexation of Crimea. With the help of leaked emails, we see the efforts the Kremlin made to recreate the same narrative online, and the problems it faced in doing so. Then we see how that narrative resonated with the Russian public, binding millions of Russians to the regime with an emotional connection that arose from their sense of participation in the war in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. This deep emotional commitment lasted for years, making Crimea not just a gift for Putin, but a gift that kept on giving.
A LYING WORLD
Revolutions are complicated, and the revolution that took place in Kyiv and across Ukraine in February 2014 was no exception. The Revolution of Dignity, as some of its participants called it, was a peaceful protest asserting the values of civic participation against a corrupt and violent authoritarian president. Citizens gathered to express their contempt for their rulers and to develop programs for clean and honest governance. They endured the attacks of riot police and stood firm. In the end, the tyrant fled and the obscenity of his corruption and the rotten nature of the system were laid bare for all to see.1
While this heroic narrative is true, another version of events also contains some truth. The revolution was won in the end by an armed insurrection, some of whose participants used nationalist slogans and rallied under the image of World War II genocidaires. Mock lynchings of terrified public officials were held in Ukraine’s western provinces. In one particularly awful incident in Odessa, dozens of opponents of the revolution were burned to death in a building where people had sought refuge after a street fight. In two eastern provinces (Donetsk and Luhansk), citizens were organized in military units to oppose the revolution, often with the involvement of forces supported by—and possibly directed from—Moscow.
The complexity of the process divided even the most dispassionate observers. Bitter discussions broke out even in scholarly communities that pride themselves on civility and the importance of evidence over emotion.
Russian television viewers, however, were spared all this complexity. Instead, what viewers saw was a Western-backed fascist junta taking power in what was portrayed as a coup, threatening the lives of millions of Russian speakers living in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
In this context, the Russian response—the armed annexation of part of Ukrainian territory—would have looked entirely justified. The official narrative showed Putin’s flair for connecting together different strands of Russian history. The annexation was not a hostile act of territorial expansion, but the historic correction of a Soviet-era mistake that had estranged Crimea from its “rightful” place as part of Russia. Researchers who have studied the way Russian television covered the events stress what they call a “national irredentist” framing of stories that defined people according to the language they spoke rather than their ethnicity—the majority of people living in eastern Ukraine speak Russian but describe themselves as ethnically Ukrainian. Underlying this approach was an implicit claim that these territories rightfully belonged to Russia, not Ukraine. The coverage also sought to make a clear distinction between Russian speakers who should somehow be united, and Ukrainians and Europeans who were somehow different and should be opposed.2 Simultaneously, the land grab was presented as saving citizens from fascism, playing on a central narrative of Russian statehood since World War II. Moreover, the whole process was somehow miraculous. Crimea was won without a shot being fired.3 Putin, like his late medieval predecessor Tsar Ivan III, was righteously gathering together “Russian” lands under Moscow’s control.
This narrative—simple, straightforward and almost entirely false—was repeated over and over as state television breathlessly pushed the Kremlin’s story. News broadcasts were extended from thirty minutes to an hour and the Sunday news shows were extended from one hour to two. And it was all Ukraine, all the time. According to Russian media researcher Arina Borodina, the two most watched evening news shows—Vesti and Vremia—had an average of ten segments of seven to ten minutes each covering Ukraine. As Russian children discovered, nothing was too sacred to be moved in favor of coverage of Ukraine: one of Russia’s most loved traditions, a children’s bedtime show called Goodnight Little Ones (Spokoinoi nochi, malyshi) was even moved from its usual spot on Russia 1 to a completely different channel.4 Overall, ratings data show about a 30 percent increase in time spent watching television news compared to the year before.5
Moreover, television did not operate in a vacuum, but instead the narratives developed there reproduced themselves online. The “anti-fascist” and anti-Western tropes of television soon came to dominate cyberspace, too.6 Overall, Russia became afflicted by what political observer Kirill Rogov called “Crimea Syndrome” in which even staunch critics of the regime were caught up in the intensity of the moment.7
In her online work for the Kremlin, Kristina Potupchik found herself writing quite a bit about Ukraine. In its hottest phase at the time the reports in the Humpty Dumpty leak were written, the war in Ukraine features in virtually every document. In the recommendations she would write to the okhraniteli (“the guardians”) at the end of each report, describing the day’s agenda and providing guidance for spin, the okhraniteli were told to remember that events were to be placed in the context of a struggle against fascism. Fascism was important in two ways. By dismissing the post-Euromaidan government in Ukraine as a gang of fascist thugs, the okhraniteli would play their part in delegitimizing the revolution in Ukraine. Just as important, however, was that framing the struggle in Ukraine as a struggle against fascism linked the politics of the day with the glorious victory in World War II. Russia was not grabbing land from its neighbor for selfish reasons, but instead, Russia was once again taking on the historic struggle to save the world from fascism.
But the nationalists—even as they rallied to the Kremlin’s cause in Ukraine—were not easy allies for Potupchik and the okhraniteli. Yes, the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas had created common ground between the Kremlin and a nationalist constituency with which it had long been at odds. The nationalists were brought on board by a sense that the Russian state was finally doing what the nationalists had long been asking for: behaving more assertively internationally, building a bulwark against Western expansionism, and intervening robustly on behalf of Russian (or, at least, Russian-speaking) populations in the post-Soviet space. But the relationship was both conditional and uneasy: the Kremlin was skittish about a movement it had previously sought to suppress (and which had protested violently under the Kremlin walls as recently as 2010), while the nationalists were wary of the Kremlin’s own fickle loyalties.8
While Potupchik aimed to integrate the nationalists into the broader community of okhraniteli—and often referred to them as okhraniteli in her reports—the problem she faced was that the nationalists, fueled by their own passions and accustomed to having their own opinions, would react to events on the ground in eastern Ukraine in ways that were not always productive. An episode in early July 2014, after the Russian-backed separatist commander Igor Strelkov ordered his militia to retreat from the strategic town of Slavyansk, is illustrative. On July 6, Potupchik wrote:
It should be noted that the maneuver by Strelkov and his militia to abandon Slavyansk and retreat in the direction of Donetsk and Luhansk was received by the okhraniteli, who had earlier supported south-eastern Ukraine, in different ways. The spectrum of opinion ranges from sharply negative to positive, and the same goes for the related interpretation of Putin’s policies and support for his person. We need to develop a common position on the actions of the south-eastern militia, in such a way that these interpretations would be beneficial for Russia and would be in accordance with the actions of the Russian authorities. This would allow us successfully to resist the opposition in discussions.
By November, Potupchik declared victory, in a note that seemed designed more for her bosses than for the okhraniteli:
We have de facto captured the theme of support for Novorossia from the nationalist community. Moderate nationalists are essentially performing along okhraniteli lines, and their activity neutralizes the oppositional wing [of the nationalists], who are supporting Ukrainian neo-Nazis.
Spreading “Crimea Syndrome” throughout Russian society would, however, take more than just a concerted message on state television and on the internet. It would require clearing the field of competing voices.
In fact, the Kremlin had begun to move hard against independent voices even before Crimea. And Dozhd—the online and cable TV channel created and edited by Mikhail Zygar, whom we met earlier—was at the top of the hit list.
Zygar was—and remains—proud of what he and his colleagues had built. From their point of view, being independent wasn’t about being part of the opposition. As protesters filled the streets of Moscow, St. Petersburg and a few other large cities in 2011–12, millions tuned in to find both sides of the political divide represented on air. Alongside protest leaders like Navalny, Ksenia Sobchak and Gennady Gudkov, Zygar and his team brought in government minister Mikhail Abyzov, Russia Today editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan and nationalist cinema director Fyodor Bondarchuk, among others.
“That was a giant achievement, I believe, because no other television channel could allow itself to pose a question—in a live broadcast—to a government official or a Church leader on the topics that really mattered to people,” Zygar told us. “The opposition was something we covered, because the whole idea was that we didn’t place any limitations on ourselves. But we absolutely did not consider ourselves to be an oppositional channel. I had a mantra that I kept repeating to the journalists at the time, which was that we are in no way an oppositional channel: we’re a normal channel, which provides an opportunity for all sides to have their say. A typical, normal television channel, which has to follow the principles and standards of the profession. And that was what separated us from all of the state-run channels.”
The approach paid off. After Bolotnaya subsided—and even as Putin returned to the Kremlin and began his crackdown on the opposition—Dozhd continued to grow, reaching 20 million monthly viewers all across Russia by late 2013. In November of that year, the government announced a competition to select ten channels that would be included in the country’s first nationwide digital television service. When the jury from the national television academy voted, Dozhd came in eleventh place, losing by one vote to Muz-TV. Sympathetic (and incensed) jurors made it clear to Zygar that Vyacheslav Volodin—who was running domestic politics for Putin’s Presidential Administration at the time—had called in the fix.
The Kremlin, it seemed, had decided that Dozhd’s openness—regardless of its balance and objectivity—was oppositional enough. After locking the channel out of the digital TV package, the government pushed through legislation restricting the ability of cable channels to sell advertising. And then, in January 2014—a month before the Sochi Olympics and two months before Crimea—the Kremlin seized an opening. A history-focused talk show produced jointly with the monthly magazine Diletant posed a question to viewers: should the USSR have surrendered Leningrad to the Germans, to avoid the loss of life? It was a needlessly provocative and polarizing question, and blowback was inevitable, but Kremlin-backed media and talking heads fanned the flames. Within the span of a week, Dozhd was dropped from virtually all cable packages and became available only online.
Thus, with new allies on board and the decks cleared of opposition, the Kremlin was ready to ride the most powerful political wave it had ever faced. Neither Potupchik nor even Putin could have known, however, just how big the wave would get.
THE POLITICAL MIND
To understand the response in Russia to events in Crimea, we need to look inside the political minds of Russian citizens. We need to unpack the psychology of the experience, and consider the interactive, social, situational nature of what happened in Russian politics over the spring and summer of 2014. In other words, to understand what went on, we need to understand the politics of emotion.
Anyone who stumbled upon a recent issue of the leading academic journals on politics might be forgiven for thinking that political science has become a branch of applied mathematics. The pages are filled with impenetrable graphs, lemmas and calculations of equilibria from mathematical models. This comes as a surprise to most non-specialists. What has mathematics got to do with politics?
The answer is rationality. Political science, like economics, is fundamentally about what drives human behavior—a tricky question, but one that economists felt they had solved a long time ago. The answer was to assume that people were fundamentally rational—they prefer more money to less and less work to more. From that basic premise—and with lots of ingenuity—economists were able to construct elegant models of human interaction, from the “animal spirits” of financial markets to the careful calculations of marriage.
Political scientists—who had once cut their teeth on a combination of legal studies and moral philosophy—began to experience equation envy. While few would deny that political behavior was often irrational, perhaps it would be useful to follow the economists and also just assume that people were politically rational, with deviations from rationality averaging themselves out over time.
Assuming that politics was a rational pursuit turned out to be pretty useful. Armed with this assumption, significant progress was made in understanding issues such as how political parties position themselves with respect to one another, the conditions under which countries democratize, when people are likely to engage in political protest, and what conditions are more likely to trigger ethnic conflict. We also gained fascinating insights into particular historical episodes. One of the best analyses of the collapse of the USSR—an event that surprised almost everyone—was the product of modeling how rational people would behave if they worked in a bureaucracy where their bosses suddenly stopped monitoring their behavior.9
However, if the claim that rationality is the basic source of all human behavior sounds too good to be true—or too simple to be right—that’s because it is.
Economists had not so much solved the problem of understanding human behavior, as assumed it away. As critics pointed out, the rationality assumption was likely to fit some circumstances better than others. And, indeed, over the last decade or so, the tide of narrow rationality seems to have turned across the social sciences, in favor of a more sophisticated approach to human psychology. Economists, for example, have begun digging into the ways in which people actually make economic decisions, giving rise to the hot field of behavioral economics. Political scientists, in turn, have started to detail how “affect”—the way we feel—impacts everything from political attitudes and voting behavior, to terrorism and international relations. There is also important research on subjects such as violence, ethnic conflict and political protest that demonstrates the importance of understanding emotions.10
This emotional turn in the study of politics should not surprise anyone who has been paying attention to the world in recent years. If the global financial crisis was not enough to make people rethink assumptions about rationality, the political consequences of that crisis, in particular the return of far-right political parties in Europe, the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and the advent of Brexit in the United Kingdom, certainly should be. As a result, what were already developing but certainly not mainstream research programs on the psychological and emotional elements of politics have rather suddenly moved to a very prominent position.
Incorporating emotions in our analysis, of course, does not mean throwing out rationality. In fact, social scientists have been careful to recognize that while emotions and rationality are not the same, they are related. What’s important are the ways in which they combine and interact to shape our behavior.11
Originally, most scholars assumed that people make rational judgments about a person or a situation, and then later develop an emotional relationship—positive or negative—to that judgment. Evidence now suggests that this is not how the political mind works.12 Emotion often comes into play before a person has the chance to think through an issue. Indeed, experimental research suggests that some information about politics is seen primarily through an emotional lens, rather than a rational one.13 In fact, people are often able to express a view on a subject even when they cannot recall any information whatsoever about it.14 This, of course, does not necessarily mean that they are irrational. Instead, people may use emotion to substitute for information: they learn about something, develop an emotional response to the issue and even allow those emotions to be altered by new information, but what they remember is sometimes the emotion, not the information.15 Consequently, while people are often unsure of the details of a memory, they are rarely in doubt about how they felt about it.16
There is currently no consensus about how our “rational” and “emotional” thought processes interact. In fact, the very definition of thought (whether it needs to be conscious or not) is changing rapidly as neuroscience advances.17 What seems obvious, however, is that how people feel and how they think are inextricable from one another. And so, if we want to understand politics—and if we want to understand Russian politics in particular—we need to understand the role of emotions.
LOVING THE LEADER
The emotion that people most closely associate with dictatorship is fear. Popular depictions of authoritarian rule, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Mario Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat, show citizens caught in a terrifying world of violence and intimidation, designed to create obedience to the ruling regime and its system. And it is unquestionably true that fear is a major part of how authoritarian leaders stay in power.18
But fear is not the only emotion at work, and perhaps not even the most powerful. Russia’s Putin—like many other authoritarian leaders in the world today—is more likely to be embraced by his citizens than to be feared by them. There are, certainly, exceptions. But if we want to understand Putin’s power, we need to recognize that millions of ordinary Russians feel pride, trust and even hope when they think of the political leadership of their country. And we need to understand why.
When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, people all across the USSR fell into mourning. Indeed, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were crushed to death as crowds gathered in Moscow and other Soviet cities to mourn the passing of one of history’s most brutal dictators.19 For Svetlana Alexievich, the Nobel Prize-winning chronicler of the aftermath of Soviet totalitarianism, this was no surprise. As one of her interviewees told her after the demise of the USSR, “You forget about the long lines and the empty stores faster than you do about the red flag flying over the Reichstag.”20 Indeed, much of the attachment to Stalin and to his successors was built upon pride and patriotism over Soviet victory in World War II. Although Stalin’s leadership in the war is widely criticized in scholarly circles, the victory over fascism became one of the founding myths of the Soviet state—and of post-Soviet Russia, too.
Another chronicler of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, argued powerfully that it is fundamentally wrong-headed to see totalitarian rule as imposed by a runaway, terroristic state on a resistant society. A German Jew who fled during the war and eventually found her way to New York, Arendt devoted her life to the question of how tyrants like Hitler and Stalin were able to do what they did. Without absolving the dictators themselves of blame, Arendt argued that the system of rule in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was produced from within those societies themselves. In difficult political times, people looked for comfort to leaders who offered them certainty and a release from their responsibilities. People did not merely put up with despotism: many revered the despots.
Moreover, Arendt argued that “mass support for totalitarianism comes neither from ignorance nor from brainwashing,” nor from ideology nor people’s material interests.21 What wins the love of the masses, instead, are fictions worked up by the leadership. These fantasies do not even need to make sense. What matters is that they resonate in some vague but convincing way with the present experience of the populace. In this way, authoritarian leaders create “a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself,” enabling the regime to shut the masses off from the real world.22
The appeal of such fictions is greater when mainstream politicians struggle to create a realistic agenda actually capable of solving social problems. Societies are vulnerable, Arendt warns, when political parties and social groups have difficulty organizing and mobilizing people around a concrete policy agenda. In this context, the state appeals not to the material interests of particular constituencies and classes, but instead uses propaganda to create a largely fictional narrative in which individual and collective interests are submerged into a single national struggle. Creating that sense of national struggle—the myth that binds everyone together—depends tremendously on social norms and what people perceive to be the views of others. The more a citizen’s friends, neighbors, colleagues and relatives buy into the lie, the more likely that citizen is to believe it, too—and the less likely he is to ever see the truth. Sound familiar? It probably should to citizens of many countries today—including Russia.23
There are many differences between the societies that Arendt studied and today’s Russia. Putin is neither Stalin nor Hitler. Nevertheless, Arendt’s insights are powerful. The idea that what people believe depends in part on what they think others believe, that fictions can be more compelling than truth and that emotions may matter more than interests, guide our argument here. In the rest of this chapter, we will show how the Kremlin’s lies can have tremendous emotional power to change people’s views of the present, the future and even the past.
PREJUDICE AND PRIDE
To see how this works, remember Natalya, the 44-year-old enthusiastic Putin supporter from Yaroslavl whom we first met in Chapter 1. Despite her clear views, Natalya told us that her interest in politics is a relatively new thing.
“I never used to watch the news very much,” Natalya recalled. “But starting in 2014, I just got hooked on the news, I started watching it constantly. It was Crimea, of course! It started with that, in November, with that conflict in Ukraine, and I felt sorry for the Ukrainians, that they were going through what we went through back with the Bolsheviks.”
Given that Natalya’s political education came against the backdrop of Crimea and the Donbas, it is perhaps unsurprising that she is virtually a model Putin voter. She supports both the law on religious sentiment (“Well, if they’re going to go dancing in churches, then yes,” she says) and on LGBT “propaganda” (“Why are they even living in our country? They should leave, with those kinds of thoughts. Go to Europe”). She supports increasing restrictions on the internet, primarily to prevent terrorism, but also to clamp down on all kinds of foreign elements; she’s particularly upset about the presence of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Yaroslavl. (“What do we need them for? All these societies, saying people should be free, whatever their religion? They’re a bit aggressive.”) And, of course, she supports Putin.
To study the role of emotions, we did two things. First, in October 2013, we surveyed some 1200 internet users, with at least some post-secondary education, living in one of Russia’s thirteen cities with a population of more than 1 million. Following the revolution in Ukraine, we asked the same people the same questions again in June 2014, to see whose answers changed and how. Some 715 people answered questions both times.24 We complemented our survey with longer structured interviews, in which respondents are able to give lengthier, more elaborate answers to our questions.
In looking at the answers, it is striking how many of the elements of Arendt’s world can be seen at work—large numbers of people buying into the world of fiction created for them by state television and becoming increasingly emotionally attached to a leadership that provided a story of national, unifying struggle against a historic and largely confected enemy. Moreover, as Arendt stressed at the time, this is a collective process in which citizens’ emotions are reinforced by interacting with others and with the public sphere.
At the core of this process in Russia is television. Although there certainly were “volunteers” like Grebtsov, who experienced the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine in a very direct and personal way, for the vast majority of Russians this was a war experienced on television. According to data collected by the widely respected Russian polling company, the Levada Center, a majority of Russians get their news and information from one single source—television. The next biggest source people cited was “friends and relatives,” who presumably also got their news from television.25 So what was happening on Russian television? Precisely what Arendt would have called the creation of “a lying world of consistency.”
From our research, we can see how enthusiastically and widely Russians like Natalya were caught up in the moment. One indicator of this is President Putin’s popularity ratings, which soared from the mid-60s to the mid-80s. This included the recruitment into the ranks of Putin supporters of many who before Crimea had been quite critical. In our online sample of educated urban Russians before Crimea, only 53 percent had expressed approval of President Putin. But when we asked the same individuals again in June 2014, Putin’s approval had soared to 80 percent—almost the same as the population as a whole.
More significantly, though, this increased approval came alongside a major shift in broader feelings about the president. Before Crimea, we asked respondents to what extent they felt a feeling of pride when they thought about Russia’s leadership. The response was underwhelming, to put it mildly: only 15 percent expressed any pride at all. After Crimea, however, the numbers changed dramatically. Now fully 37 percent said they were proud of their president.
The same transformation was true of other emotions. Before Crimea, only a quarter said they trusted those who led Russia; after Crimea, about a half of those same people said they trusted Russia’s leaders. We asked, too, about whether the leadership inspired hope for the future. Before Crimea, only about one in five felt it did. After Crimea, that number was also nearly half. The same story can be seen in the negative emotions we asked about—anger and contempt. Before Crimea, fully 36 percent of our respondents said they were angry at Russia’s leadership and 22 percent reported despising Russia’s leaders. Afterwards, just 18 percent expressed anger and 11 percent contempt—half of the pre-Crimea numbers.
What was it about the Crimean experience that made Putin go from being tolerated to being an object of pride, hope and trust for nearly half of our educated urbanite population? Was it the very fact of the successful annexation of Crimea itself, or was there something else going on?
One element of the story was probably the straightforward fact that the demonstration of military prowess impressed many Russians, particularly given that Russia had been strategically on the defensive for most of the thirty years since Gorbachev came to power in 1985. Here was evidence of Russia’s turnaround that was hard for Russian patriots to ignore. Ever since his first years in the presidency, when Putin still cultivated his image as a pro-Western modernizer, Russian nationalists had treated him with suspicion. Yet, with hardly a shot fired and in a matter of days, a part of Ukraine that had been coveted both by ethnic nationalists and those who wanted to recreate either the Russian empire or the USSR (both kinds of people exist and they share a lot of goals) had been “returned” to Mother Russia.
Looking at our data, there is clear evidence that nationalists were more likely to feel emotionally closer to Putin after Crimea than they had before. And it does not matter much what kind of nationalists we analyze—those who feel strongly attached to the Russian state, those who identify very strongly with Russian ethnicity or those for whom Russian Orthodoxy is a big part of their identity. All were able to find in the Crimean annexation and the subsequent war in eastern Ukraine reasons to identify more emotionally with their president.
Interestingly, the data suggest that the Crimean annexation did not actually make Russians more nationalist, or at least not much more. In 2013, fully 38 percent of our respondents said that being part of the Russian state was a very important part of their personal identity. By 2014, this proportion had risen slightly to 45 percent. There was even less change in other measures of nationalism. The proportion saying that Russian ethnicity or Orthodox Christianity were a very important part of their personal identity was the same in both rounds of the survey.26
EFFERVESCENCE
Annexing Crimea and invading other territories in Ukraine was bound to be popular with Russia’s nationalists. But most Russians are not radical nationalists—and yet tens of millions of them became caught up in the Crimean “moment” and the ensuing war in Donbas. Even if their participation was mostly on the sofa, in front of a television screen or a computer monitor, many Russians felt an emotional pull, as if they had actually been there.
What happened to Russians as a result of Crimea—what others have called “Crimea Syndrome”—bears a striking resemblance to a phenomenon first described more than a hundred years ago by the pathbreaking French sociologist Émile Durkheim.27 Studying the religious rituals of Aboriginal groups in Australia, Durkheim noticed something fascinating. The key to making something sacred was togetherness: engaging with other people in the same unusual moment that transgressed the rules and tedium of everyday life. The euphoric feeling that this extraordinary togetherness causes—the same powerful emotional excitement that we get from being “in sync” with others, whether in a church pew, the mosh pit at a rock concert or in the stands for a football match—is what Durkheim called “collective effervescence.”
Born to a rabbi and a seamstress in the eastern French town of Épinal in 1858, Durkheim came from a line of rabbis and even attended rabbinical school himself, but he was of a profoundly secular turn of mind. For the young Durkheim, the key intellectual challenge of the era was to understand human beings and their interactions, and to do so in a way that was based not on the religious categories that had dominated thinking about society for millennia, but instead to take an empirical—what today we might call data-driven—approach.
Durkheim made many important contributions to our understanding of social (and anti-social) behavior, but the one that is critical in helping us understand the Russian experience of 2014 is a book he published in 1912, just five years before his death: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.28 Elementary Forms is an effort to understand the origins of religion and is primarily based on the study of religious rituals, which Durkheim understood as moments in which people step outside of the bounds of ordinary everyday life and embark together upon something extraordinary or sacred.
While his work on “collective effervescence” focused on religious rituals in Australia among small groups of participants, he was keenly aware of the larger context. Talking about the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the French Revolution and other such periods, Durkheim noted that there “are periods in history when, under the influence of some great collective shock, social interactions have become much more frequent and active. Men look for each other and assemble together more than ever. That general effervescence which results is characteristic of revolutionary or creative epochs.”29 For many Russians watching on their televisions and talking with their families and friends, the spring of 2014 was just such a moment.
Writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, Durkheim emphasized the importance of being there, of experiencing the moment yourself. More recent research, however, has shown that in the modern world of television and social media, people often have the sense of participation in events even when that “participation” is limited to watching television or discussing things online.30 A recent study looking at protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 after the fatal shooting by police of the African American teenager Michael Brown found that people on Twitter using the hashtag #Ferguson experienced a sensation of participation in the events even from afar. And, in a sense, they were right: tweeting and retweeting, watching live streams of tear gassing and arrests all offered these mediatized participants the feeling of collective engagement, of community, of Durkheim’s collective effervescence.31 In the twenty-first century, you don’t have to be there to be there.
The effects of mediated participation on emotional connections can be clearly seen in our data. Russians who watched more state television were substantially more likely to feel an increase in pride, trust and hope connected with their political leadership than those who watched less. Moreover, Russians who increased the amount of state television news they watched—regardless of whether they used to watch a lot or none at all—were even more likely to feel more pride, trust and hope. The same was true of Russian citizens who discussed politics frequently with their family, friends, neighbors and colleagues or who began to discuss politics more with those around them. Finally, another good predictor of increasing emotional engagement was interest in politics—people who either were more interested in politics or who became more interested in politics over this period were more likely to become increasingly proud, trusting and hopeful.
And this emotional engagement was extremely significant. With some further digging in the data, we found patterns that suggest that increasing emotional engagement with the regime has important effects on how people evaluate the political world they live in, the future of that world and, fascinatingly, even their estimation of their own past.
When we asked our survey respondents about their approval of Putin and their likelihood of voting for him in the future, we found that those who were more engaged in politics, watched more political news on television and discussed it more with friends were not only more emotionally attached, but were also more approving of Putin and more likely to vote for him. This effect was there, however, even for people who did not become more emotionally engaged but simply participated more than before.
However, we then asked some broader questions about how citizens understood the world in which they lived. Here we found change only among those who had become more emotionally engaged with the regime. And the effects of this emotional attachment were impressive. Those who felt more emotionally connected also reported that they thought high-level corruption to be less of a problem than they had done back in October. Given that it is unlikely that any of our respondents have personal experience of high-level corruption and that the Crimea annexation in itself vastly increased opportunities for high-level corruption, this is surprising.
Once we probed a little deeper, the power of emotional connection became even clearer. People who had become more emotionally engaged also thought that low-level corruption—the kind of petty corruption that many citizens of Russia experience and observe directly—had become less of a problem. This was true even though there are no objective data that show a fall in corruption in Russia between October 2013 and June 2014.
Higher levels of emotional engagement also made people more positive about the future and even, strikingly, the past. Survey respondents who reported more emotional engagement became more optimistic about the prospects for the Russian economy, even though experts, including those featured on Russian state television, felt that the Crimean annexation and conflict in Ukraine, not to mention international sanctions, were likely to be a significant drag on Russia’s economic prospects. Finally, those who were more emotionally engaged improved their recollection of how their families had fared during the economic crises of the 1990s: those reporting increased emotional engagement were less likely to report that the 1990s had been tough on their families and more likely to report that their families had done well out of the changes. The manufactured story that Russians consumed about Crimea and Ukraine made so many things better—the present, the future and, even, the past.
A VERY PLEASANT SURPRISE
Given how radically Crimea reshaped Russia’s political landscape—flipping Putin’s political fortunes virtually overnight—it is tempting to wonder whether it was all planned in advance. “Little victorious wars,” after all, are a tried and true part of the political arsenal in many countries. But as they made their preparations to seize Crimea, it seems unlikely that the Kremlin knew exactly how powerful the effect on public opinion would be. The Kremlin has always taken public opinion seriously, commissioning endless surveys and focus groups, trying to gain insight into risks and opportunities. The head of FOM—Russia’s largest polling agency—is among Vladimir Putin’s longest-serving advisers. But one doesn’t usually run territorial acquisition through a focus group.
“They didn’t know,” Gleb Pavlovsky told us. “They couldn’t have known. It was a surprise for them. But a surprise that they liked.”
A one-time anti-Soviet dissident, Pavlovsky rose through the ranks of Boris Yeltsin’s political advisers in the late 1990s and helped organize the rise of Vladimir Putin as Yeltsin’s successor. He went on to be instrumental in the creation of the United Russia party and in Russia’s initial reaction to the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. At Putin’s behest, Pavlovsky went down to Kyiv to support Viktor Yanukovych, the chosen successor of outgoing Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. Kremlin backing, stuffed ballot boxes and Pavlovsky’s advice were not enough to help Yanukovych withstand the popular uprising that swept Viktor Yushchenko and the so-called “Orange Coalition” to power. Pavlovsky was replaced shortly thereafter by Vladislav Surkov, after which he gradually reverted to outright opposition to the regime he helped create.
It is thus perhaps ironic that Alexander Dugin—the firebrand radical whose “Eurasianist” ideology found its greatest application in the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas—blames Pavlovsky for Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine. “Putin used to send oligarchs and liberals to solve the problem of Ukraine,” Dugin said. “There was Marat Guelman [a flamboyant and liberal modern art promoter and gallery owner], there was Gleb Pavlovsky, that pure globalist liberal, the other oligarchs, the corruptioneers, and so on, dealing with Ukraine and trying to bring back Ukraine to Russia. When Yushchenko came to power, before the Maidan, that was the major situation. At the same time, we worked with the patriotic wing, patriotic forces of Donetsk, of Crimea, of Kyiv, as well as nationalists in Ukraine, trying to find a way to understand. The majority of what was done was on behalf of the liberals. They didn’t make anything positive. They lost everything. And so in the end our plan was accepted.”
Whatever their ideological differences, though, Dugin agrees with Pavlovsky that the decision-making process that led first to the annexation of Crimea and then to war in Donbas was haphazard, driven more by ad hoc analysis than by grand strategy.
“Crimea wasn’t decided beforehand,” Dugin recalled. “It was one of many plans, and because all the liberal suggestions, liberal globalist suggestions around him, had failed, he took this plan. And then only part of it, because the plan was to liberate eastern Ukraine. Or the other version was to acknowledge Yanukovych as the legitimate leader, he would ask for our military intervention, as in Syria. In Syria, that was repeated, because Assad controlled only a small part of Syria and invited us, and little by little we have changed the situation. The same could have happened in Kharkiv, for example, or in Donetsk, with Yanukovych. To legitimize the Russian military presence, or the creation of a Ukrainian federation, to save Ukraine. There were many, many solutions, and there was no iron will to take Crimea and leave Donbas in an indefinite state, and to leave the other parts to Ukraine. It was a kind of result of a combination of these situational solutions.”
Putin is not the first world leader to benefit from a war. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s popularity soared after military victory versus Argentina in the Falklands War of 1982. So, too, did George W. Bush enjoy a huge bounce following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Indeed, these sorts of “rallies around the flag” are reasonably common.
But Putin’s rally is different, the clearest evidence of which is the fact that it has lasted so long. After soaring from the mid-30s before the war to 59 percent in June 1982, Thatcher’s approval rating had returned to the 40s by November of that year and continued to decline until 1985.32 In September 2001, Bush’s approval ratings rocketed from the low 50s to 90 percent, but by 2003—as support for the so-called “War on Terror” began to wane—he was back in the 50s again.33
Putin, by contrast, saw his approval rating go from 65 percent in January 2014—before the peak of the crisis in Ukraine—to 86 percent in June, three months after the annexation of Crimea. In April 2018, however, Putin’s approval was still running at 82 percent, according to reliable independent polling.34 Moreover, despite almost a decade of economic stagnation and increasingly severe Western sanctions, some 60 percent of Russians still felt the country was moving in the right direction. Before Crimea this number was only 40 percent. In other words, more than four years after the annexation of Crimea, Putin’s popularity continued to defy the usual laws of political gravity.
Undoubtedly, one important element is the role of the media. Russia is an authoritarian regime with a press and a parliament that consistently and almost universally support the president and his policies. The UK and the US are democracies (warts and all), with competing political factions that seek to undermine one another in the eyes of the public and, indeed, to gain control of the state. Studies of the Bush and Thatcher “rallies” generally find that this airing of public criticism by members of competing elites is one of the key factors that begins to bring approval ratings back down to earth. All politicians tend to rally to the side of the government in moments of national crisis like 9/11, but they return to their critical role as soon as they possibly can.
In an authoritarian regime like Russia’s, elite criticism of government policies is muted at best. There are few voices—if any—that criticize policy over Crimea or even explore the nuances of the policy, and those that do exist are not widely reported on. This lack of public political competition has to make a difference.
Nevertheless, the puzzle of the durability of the surge in support for President Putin and the overall direction of the country remains. Four years is a long time, and many things have changed in Russia over that period—but few things have happened that one would think would lead to increasing faith in the leadership. In this context, thinking about Crimea and Durkheim can help to solve the riddle.
One of the key arguments that Durkheim made about participation in collective rituals is that they create new identities and senses of belonging that outlast the act itself. Rituals—those acts of moving together—break down barriers between participants and create a new sense of solidarity. People are changed, transformed by the experience. Soccer fans know this well—the profound emotional arousal of watching a game live together, singing together, crying together and sharing symbols of a collective history creates lasting bonds that go well beyond any particular moment of any given match. Sociologists know about it too (in part from studying soccer fans).
The importance of the collective emotional experience we describe tends to be underappreciated by political scientists and has been largely missing from most analysis of the Crimean annexation and Ukrainian war and their effect on Russian society and politics. Yet, both our survey data and our interviews indicate that the experience of spring 2014 was for many Russians an identity-shaping moment, in which citizens began to think differently about their state, about Putin as a leader—and about their own role in the story.
In part this was because, from a foreign policy perspective, the annexation of Crimea represented the first time since the collapse of the USSR that Russia was not surrendering territory, but expanding. For the first time in thirty years, Russia appeared to be moving from playing defense to playing offense.
Moreover, this was not just any piece of territory, but a piece that could be reimagined as a crucial part of Russian heritage. In his presidential address on March 18, 2014, marking the “reunification” of Crimea with Russia, Putin argued that “everything in Crimea speaks of our shared history and pride,” noting that it was in “ancient Kherson” (on the Crimean peninsula) that Grand Prince Vladimir was baptized in 988 and so brought Christianity to ancient Rus, the historical precursor of both Russia and Ukraine.35 This theme was developed later in his state of the nation address in December 2014, when Putin went so far as to describe Crimea as having “invaluable civilizational and even sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.”36 The fact that polls suggest most Russians knew little about Prince Vladimir’s baptism (and even less about “ancient Kherson”) did little to dampen the fervor.
After all, there was a much more recent connection with Crimea in many Russians’ minds. The port city of Sevastopol has been the site of tremendous suffering and tremendous courage at least twice in recent history, first in the Crimean War and then, even more horrifically, in World War II. The resistance to the Nazis of this “Hero City,” as Putin reminded his citizens in his May 9, 2014 Victory Day speech, was a critical part of how World War II is remembered and commemorated in Russia.
The nightly ritual of hours of television news coverage of war and “liberation” helped to link the contemporary events in Ukraine to the great crises of the past, etching in turn the events of spring 2014 more deeply in the hearts and minds of many citizens. The more involved people became, either by watching television or by discussing politics with friends and family, the greater the effect. This was a collective moment of enthusiasm and patriotic energy—in other words, collective effervescence.
The consequences of this period have been profound. One consequence, as Durkheim would have expected, is that creation of a new sense of group identity. We see clear evidence of this in the much higher degree of emotional attachment between Russian citizens and their leaders. Another consequence, research suggests, is that once the initial moment has passed, it takes only mundane, ritualized reminders—Putin’s speeches perhaps, or the mantra of Krym nash—to reaffirm individuals’ sense of connection and well-being.37
There are other implications, too, for the relationship between Putin and Russian citizens. The Ukrainian crisis was the most serious faced by Russia since the end of the Chechen Wars of the 1990s. It was also a crisis with an extremely clear geopolitical context—Cold War-style (superficially at least) competition with the United States over the political orientation of lands historically and geographically close to Russia. Political science research has shown the importance of such crises in turning otherwise unremarkable political figures into charismatic leaders, beloved by their people. After all, for a leader to be charismatic there must be an audience willing to see them as such. Charisma is a relationship between a leader and a set of followers.38 As a result, charismatic leaders often emerge in times of crisis because successful management of a crisis turns formerly ordinary politicians into charismatic leaders. As our evidence suggests, this was certainly part of what happened in Russia during the spring of 2014. The Ukrainian crisis helped complete Vladimir Putin’s journey from gray KGB operative to the charismatic “gatherer of lands.” That mantle—once reserved for the fifteenth-century Grand Prince Ivan III, who defeated the Golden Horde and tripled the territory of Muscovy—was placed squarely on Putin’s shoulders by the likes of Dugin.
However, when we met Dugin—some four years after the annexation of Crimea—he was angry, but not at the West. Putin, he said, had betrayed the cause.
“To tell the truth, in Novorossia [Dugin’s term for eastern Ukraine] the revolt was much more popular,” Dugin told us. The Kremlin, he said, should have pressed the fight. Yes, he argued, there were achievements in Crimea, but “Crimea could easily be an integrated part of Ukraine, because of the passivity of the population. The real revolt, the real popular, anti-Kyiv, pro-Russian revolt was precisely in Donetsk. . . . Their referendum was much more legitimate than in Crimea, to say the truth. But the truth—this truth—was prohibited.”
Prohibited, Dugin said, by Putin.
Russia emerged from the crucible of annexation and war and global geopolitical confrontation a different country: one in which support for Putin would be based not on the fortunes of the economy or the successes of his policies, but on emotion, on pride and on a rekindled sense of Russian identity. But Putin, too, emerged from this conflict a new man. It was, to be certain, an empowering moment for the Russian president. But in bringing Russians together in a new sense of community, it would place upon him certain obligations: he could not, after all, risk alienating his newly galvanized nation. Being the gatherer of lands, it turned out, has its downsides.