RUSSIA’S PUTIN
After leaving Dozhd and publishing a best-selling book, All the Kremlin’s Men, Mikhail Zygar was bored. We spoke with him the day after one of Vladimir Putin’s marathon “Direct Lines” with the nation, when the president speaks—usually for three to four hours—on live television, taking carefully curated questions from generally fawning elites and ordinary citizens alike.
“All of the Russian media spent the day covering Putin’s direct line,” he said, smiling broadly. “I felt like the happiest man alive, because I didn’t have to watch that bullshit. It bears no relation whatsoever to reality. Not one word that was said yesterday shed one bit of light on anything at all.”
It was a symptom of a larger problem: after the excitement of 2011–12, when ordinary Russians rose up and forced the Kremlin to react—in effect, dictating the political agenda from the streets, if not necessarily in the way many protesters would have hoped—the Russian mainstream media had gone from talking about everything to talking about nothing.
“At some point around 2015, everything just stopped,” he recalled. “After Crimea, after Ukraine, Russia just totally froze.”
If arguing about the present wasn’t working anymore, Zygar thought, maybe debating history would do the trick. Throughout 2017—to mark the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution—he and a team of programmers and writers produced a blow-by-blow social media feed of the run-up to and aftermath of the February and October Revolutions, replete with Tweets and Facebook posts from poets, revolutionaries and royals alike. It was a smash hit, engaging more than 100,000 readers by the beginning of the year.1 In 2018, he and the team turned their attention to doing the same for the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, including the uprisings in France, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, the United States and elsewhere, which so radically changed the face of post-war politics.
His focus on yesteryear, though, doesn’t mean Zygar has given up on tomorrow.
“That the majority of Russian society doesn’t believe in politics, that’s one fact,” he told us. “But on the other hand, in my view, society is becoming more responsible, somehow. It is beginning to believe in its own strength more than before. There are a tremendous number of charitable organizations, volunteer groups. The way people are solving important social problems, for example the problem of orphanages, which the state is never going to solve, is pretty powerful. More than ever before. And that’s exclusively down to the efforts of society.”
It can be difficult to be optimistic about Russia. In part, this is because putting a good spin on all the bad news—the repression and human-rights abuses, the economic malaise, the geopolitical isolation—is the stuff of propaganda, not of analysis. And the forces arrayed against the people in whom Zygar has placed his own hopes are so tremendous that one despairs at their prospects.
Indeed, in all of the interviews we conducted for this book—and, in fact, in most of our daily interactions with our friends and colleagues in Russia—it is hard to find much optimism. Desperation is more the order of the day. Take, for example, Galina, a 30-year-old market researcher in Yaroslavl. It’s her parents who are mostly on her mind. Her father is retired and collects a modest state pension. Her mother still works—albeit as a junior nurse by rank—in a local hospital. She’s had a raise, but her weekly paycheck is still only in the range of 1200 rubles (around $20). Galina herself has been lucky enough to get a raise in the past year, which allows her to help her parents make their meager ends meet.
“It’s just crazy,” she said. “Given the resources in the country, we could live better.”
Or take Marina, the 54-year-old office worker from St. Petersburg, whom we first met in Chapter 5.
“Prices have gone up for everything,” she complained. “I mean, what I paid for my apartment [utilities] five years ago was a fraction of what I’m paying now. And naturally my salary hasn’t grown by anything like that much. And it’s not just me—everyone I know is in more or less the same situation.”
Marina paused.
“I really hope things don’t get worse,” she continued, with a resigned laugh. “Honestly, I don’t want them to. But I don’t think they’ll get better. At least, I find it hard to believe that they would.”
And yet almost all of the people we interviewed in early 2018—including both Galina and Marina—told us they would vote for Putin that March. Looking ahead to those elections, Marina had told us that she would vote for Putin in large measure because she saw no other option—at least, she said, “not yet.” Galina told us she was swayed by her boyfriend, whom she described as an entrepreneur and an assistant to a regional parliamentarian.
“He’s always watching the news,” she said. “Well, he’s a patriot. Very strict about it. Not me.”
That, in many ways, is the central conundrum of this book. Galina, Marina and tens of millions of other Russian citizens know that the system is broken. That it is rigged. That it delivers them neither prosperity nor security. And yet, like the greengrocers in Václav Havel’s Communist-era Czechoslovakia, they toe the party line. Why?
FIGHTING FOR AUTOCRACY
The wrong answer to this question is the conventional one. Most journalists and many academics approach Russian politics by asking how a powerful and often brutal state apparatus controlled by a relatively small group of KGB officers and billionaires has succeeded in imposing and maintaining power over a hapless and oppressed Russian citizenry. Emblematic of this thinking is a commonly referenced joke Putin made in a speech to his Federal Security Service (FSB) colleagues just before becoming president. “A group of FSB operatives, dispatched under cover to work in the government of the Russian Federation, is successfully fulfilling its task,” Putin deadpanned. As is so often the case with Putin, it was hard to tell where the joke ended and the reality began. But for many commentators, journalists and scholars these remarks captured the essential reality of politics in the country: the Putin regime represents the revanche of the KGB, once again dominating and policing a subdued population.2
To think this way is to misunderstand how power is produced in Russia and how it is exercised. It is critical, as we have argued in this book, to understand that power is not only imposed from above, but is shaped by the demands of Russian citizens and by a competition between the state and its challengers for the support and allegiance of those citizens. The Kremlin works to mold what Russians want through many means, particularly through its monopoly on television. But Russians in turn affect what the Kremlin does. In fact, for many Russians, Putin is a useful part of the political landscape, someone who reflects their values and rules through the kind of policies that they would like to see. Moreover, to a very significant extent, Putin’s authority within the elite is a function of his popularity in the country. Putin needs support from the Russian people, and he works intensively to identify how to win and retain that support. In other words, while it is true that Russia is shaped by Putin, it is no less true that Putin is shaped by Russia.
Let’s take one of the central claims of the Putin administration, and one that you hear frequently from people in Russia: President Putin “raised Russia from its knees.” He forced the world to reckon with Moscow once more. He stuck it to the West. We could debate whether this claim is in fact true. What is not in doubt, however, is that it is a politically powerful claim, earnestly believed by many millions of Russians. And in prioritizing an aggressive foreign policy, Putin is responding to—and seeking the support of—a large constituency within Russia itself. According to surveys conducted by the American sociologist Theodore Gerber, opposition to foreigners “sticking their noses” into Russian domestic politics is very strong.3 This is probably true in all sorts of countries around the world—it is certainly true in both the United States and the United Kingdom, as allegations of Russian support for Trump and Brexit will witness—but in Russia a personal sense of attachment to the state and to the nation seem especially important.
In our own surveys, even before the annexation of Crimea some 43 percent of our respondents reported that being ethnically Russian was very important to their own personal sense of who they are, and 49 percent felt that way about Russian culture. A similar 38 percent reported that belonging to the Russian state was very important, while slightly lower numbers said the same about Russian Orthodox Christianity (25 percent). While we do not have comparable identity data from other countries, these figures indicate between a quarter and a half of Russians look directly to the state and nation when forming their own sense of personal identity.
What is striking, though, is how little these proportions changed in our sample after the annexation of Crimea. As we argued in Chapter 4, this suggests that the key point about the Crimean annexation and war in eastern Ukraine was not that they led to a huge upswing in Russian nationalism, but that these actions played into themes that were already strong in Russian society before the annexation. This was not Putin controlling Russia and moving it reluctantly in an unwanted direction. However deplorable it may appear to foreigners, the annexation was highly popular.
Moreover, as we showed in Chapter 3, there were many nationalist groups within Russia that had previously been skeptical of what they saw as a Western-oriented President Putin. For these activists, the fate of eastern Ukraine and the Russian speakers there had been neglected by successive Russian presidents. With the annexation of Crimea and pursuit of the war in Ukraine, Putin was finally getting on board with what the activists wanted, and they were ready to lend the force of their arms both on the propaganda front, and on the actual front lines.
Indeed, many Russians still think Putin is not doing enough to assert Russia’s views. When we spoke to Marina—even as she complained about the economy and fretted over the lack of political alternatives—her mind was on foreign policy. It was just a matter of weeks before Russia’s team was due to head off to Pyongchang for the 2018 Winter Olympics, and Marina was concerned. International sporting authorities pursuing anti-doping allegations were threatening to bar large numbers of Russian athletes from competing, while requiring those who were allowed to go to South Korea to fly a neutral flag.
“We’ve lost our position, our authority,” she said. “Every year they just keep pushing us down, down, humiliating us. It’s offensive. From the point of view of an ordinary citizen, well, I just think we have the wrong foreign policy. I mean, in some areas we need to be more firm. Look at the Soviet Union, for example, which I remember, I’m of that age. Because they may have called us the Evil Empire or whatever, but when it came to our athletes, they were always protected and nobody would dare to say a word against them. It was simply unthinkable, even though, I’m sure, they were taking those drugs back then, too. So something’s wrong with our foreign policy.”
This is not to say that Russians were of one mind on the conflict in Ukraine, or that they are of one mind when it comes to the future direction of Russian policy. There clearly are different views on what represents the right path for Russia. While some favor a European path, others maintain that Russia should follow its own road. This is, of course, a longstanding difference of opinion among Russian political thinkers, dating back as far as the early days of the Muscovite principality. The differences of opinion on this question are even physically manifested in the buildings of the Kremlin itself, with Western-influenced, Italianate architecture sitting right alongside buildings constructed in the eastern Orthodox style. The very crenellations of the Kremlin walls are copied from the citadel of Milan.
A distinct path, of course, does not necessarily mean an anti-democratic path. Nor does the belief in a particular form of exceptionalism tell us much about the particulars of the path; after all, American, British and French politicians have all touted various forms of exceptionalism over the years. While many fear the consequences of such attitudes in those countries, the belief that a country has its own path and destiny is probably not incompatible with democracy. Nevertheless, the credit he gets for putting Russia back on its feet and standing up to the West is a key part of what makes Putin so popular and, consequently, so powerful.
The relationship between many Russians and Putin also seems to have changed qualitatively since the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. The crisis generated a sense of emotional engagement between many Russians and the regime that had been missing before. This emotional surge at the time of the annexation had profound effects on how Russians perceive politics and the world around them, creating a sense of well-being that extended to areas that were completely divorced from the actual politics of the moment. The crisis also elevated Putin’s status to that of a charismatic national leader, who has been held above politics by millions of Russians.
Domestically, too, Putin’s policies have also tapped into important forces within Russian society. A key building block in Putin’s coalition are people with a conservative and/or authoritarian orientation. Although he may have begun his presidency as an economic liberal, Putin has constructed his current political powerbase as a conservative leader, promising to protect Russia from decadent Western values, as we documented in Chapter 2. People supported his anti-LGBT legislation and his laws against criticizing the Orthodox Church in part as a bulwark against expanding European influence—a threat powerfully projected by the Kremlin itself.
AUTHORITARIANISM FROM BELOW
Our argument, however, is not simply that the behavior of the Russian state is shaped by the preferences of important sections of Russian society. This is true, but our argument is larger. Our point is that much of the power of President Putin comes from Russian society—that power in Russia is co-constructed.
Co-construction happens in a number of different ways. At its most basic, some of Putin’s power lies in the willingness of members of the state apparatus and ordinary citizens alike to follow instructions and anticipate his desires. This means other members of the elite, whether in politics, the security forces or big business circles, currying favor and seeking approval. More broadly, though, it means pensioners and low-level civil servants willing to attend “Putingi”, or youth activists harassing foreign government officials, “guardians” trying to shape the public narrative online or activists volunteering to join up and fight in Ukraine, bikers riding to Crimea or assassins eliminating political opponents.
In the co-construction of authoritarianism, the whole is considerably greater than the sum of its parts. All of these individual actions give rise to a social consensus around the inevitability and righteousness of Putin’s rule. As our interviews show, while there are plenty of convinced and intense supporters of the Russian president, there is no shortage of people with discontents and grumbles. And yet, these people vote for Putin, too. The social consensus makes it hard to think about alternatives. It also makes it costly to be critical. Supporting a presidential candidate other than Putin means more than bucking the Kremlin and the television. It means going against the supposed majority, contradicting friends, family, neighbors and colleagues. This is a step few are willing to take, and so the consensus goes unchallenged.
Most of the time, this consensus is broad but thin. As we showed in our pre-Crimea surveys, very few people considered the opposition to be a real alternative to the ruling regime, but that did not mean there was too much genuine love for the ruling United Russia party or even for Putin himself. In fact, many supporters were very passive in their orientation toward the president and his government. The events of history, however, can have unexpected consequences. The annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine turned passive acquiescence into pride, hope and trust. Many Russians’ views of the present, of the future, and even of the past, were transformed—not forever, of course, but on a mass scale and for months, if not years. The consensus spread to include even those who had been skeptical, and so the voices of opposition grew even more isolated.
All of this was based on shared lies and shared delusions—from the supposed righteousness of the annexation of Crimea, to the notion that Russia is under threat from domestic and foreign enemies. Social consensus, of course, is not some naturally occurring phenomenon, but is actively constructed in a variety of ways. The most obvious tool for building consensus is the media, and, in particular, television. As noted in previous chapters, the world as seen on Russian television looks quite different from the world most Westerners see on their screens. Consolidation of the media sphere in general and television in particular is in some ways the most significant “achievement” of the Putin years. In the 1999 parliamentary elections, Russian television channels presented sharply contrasting views of the world, as their competing owners battled to influence the succession to Boris Yeltsin. Once the Putin side had won, the next two decades saw the gradual elimination of distinctive points of view, and their replacement with a single Kremlin-approved message.4 By 2018, only two of twenty-two television channels were not closely under the control of the Kremlin’s information policy.5 As a result, Russians who choose to get their news primarily from state television—and that’s still around 70 percent of the population—are subjected to an almost constant campaign of patriotic and pro-Putin messages. Russia is presented as a besieged fortress, with Vladimir Putin as its savior on the ramparts.
In the aftermath of the conflict in Ukraine, the Soviet-born American satirical novelist Gary Shteyngart imprisoned himself in the Four Seasons Hotel in New York with nothing but four screens showing non-stop Russian television and a well-stocked minibar. For the author of books including Absurdistan, the idea was to experience first-hand the joys of brainwashing—and then write about it for The New York Times. What he got was a relentless barrage of propaganda, punctuated by aging singers crooning classic hits.6
“I came out of this experience feeling there was another reality,” Shteyngart told us later. “I knew the reality was false, but it was so omnipresent that it was impossible to deny its existence and its power over many believers. It was almost like being exposed to another religion.”7
Shteyngart’s resistance was sorely tested, but for the tens of millions of Russians living outside of the comforts of the Four Seasons, this kind of propaganda was a key part of the creation of the emotional environment around the annexation of Crimea. As we discussed in Chapter 4, it is also a crucial element in normalizing support for Putin within the population and introducing them to the appropriate attitudes that upstanding citizens are expected to hold.
Fortunately, most people are condemned neither to watch state-controlled television, nor to believe it. Instead, people select media according to their tastes and political preferences, and they are guided by their social circles. We tend to watch things that we enjoy, that chime with our worldviews, and that keep us on the same wavelength with our friends. As a result, those who watch more state television are not only more likely to be fans of musical variety shows, they are also more likely to be supporters of the regime. Those who avoid state television and who use alternative online media are more likely to be regime opponents and to spend their time with other regime opponents (and perhaps have better taste in music, but that’s another book). This means that the effect of “brainwashing” is not to convert the skeptical, but to further convince and radicalize the faithful, building their sense of identity and community and marginalizing and delegitimizing everyone else.8 (Shteyngart, for what it’s worth, was not converted.)
Furthermore, in Russia (as elsewhere) there is good evidence that people engage in what social scientists call “motivated reasoning” with regard to politics.9 In other words, people are more likely to believe things that fit in with their preexisting worldview, and less likely to believe things that challenge that worldview. This partially limits the “brainwashing” effect, but it makes polarization worse. In the United States, where there is considerable choice in media sources and where “fake news” comes in many different flavors, the combined effects of media selection and motivated reasoning contribute to increasing division. People with different prior preferences start to experience different worlds and experience different realities. The US case is bad, of course: the dangers of sorting society into ideologically homogenous echo chambers are clear. But what happens when news and information are largely monopolized, as they are in Russia?
If the majority of citizens are willing to consume state-sponsored news—and if they are open to the messages that they receive—then the propaganda can create a consensus that is largely detached from reality, even without the existence of extensive censorship. And in Russia, this is clearly the case. Although a broad range of sources of information is potentially available to most Russians online, the reality is that the lion’s share of people willingly consume state television news and are open to the messages it pushes. As a result, they are effectively cut off from reality as the rest of us understand it and left with a geopolitics largely created by the Kremlin.
To make matters worse, propaganda can work even on those in the fuzzy middle, who support neither the regime nor the opposition, mostly because they are not that interested in politics. In authoritarian regimes, only those with the clearest and most convinced anti-regime principles tend to be able to resist constant pro-regime messages over time.10 In Russia specifically, there is experimental evidence that shows state-sponsored documentaries smearing the opposition can have an effect even on citizens who are opposed to the Putin administration.11 The social science corroborates the stories we hear from opposition-oriented Russians, who report their formerly “normal” but mostly apolitical acquaintances being transformed into regime supporters following the annexation of Crimea.
This is dangerous. The impulse toward the collective creation of a fantasy world—more or less completely disconnected from reality—is precisely what Hannah Arendt warned us about in The Origins of Totalitarianism. People who are willing to believe what they are told, provided that it chimes vaguely with their own suspicions, and who are surrounded by people with similar tendencies can end up very far from reality indeed. For example, in a poll by the highly respected Levada Center in early March 2014—just after the revolution in Ukraine—more than 70 percent of Russians believed that ethnic Russians and other Russian speakers in Ukraine were under threat from the new government in Kyiv, even though there was little real reason to believe such a claim.
But the construction of consensus and unreality in Russia is not limited to television. In an interview in April 2018, Lev Gudkov, a leading Russian sociologist and director of the Levada Center, underlined the importance of the broader society in the manufacturing of consensus. Consensus, he noted, is created across a range of institutions—in the army, in churches and, increasingly, in schools. This is done precisely by presenting the Kremlin’s view as society’s consensus, weaving it into the fabric and ritual of daily life, in realms supposedly far removed from politics. In recent years, schools have been increasingly incorporating patriotic “moral” education alongside mandatory religious education, spreading the influence of the Kremlin-approved consensus well beyond the television screen itself.12 Our own research provides solid data to back up Gudkov’s intuitions. Television is critical in normalizing the regime and its policies, but so are other institutions in Russian society, including the Church.13 The result, as we noted in Chapter 4, is what Hannah Arendt warned us about—the creation of “a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.”14
Convincing large numbers of people to believe things that are without foundation in reality, is, of course, far from just a Russian problem. Despite a much broader range of available media, despite much stronger political institutions and despite decades of democratic experience, the power of so-called “fake news” has been on display across the world in the last decade. Some of the factors that make Russia vulnerable to the “lying world” are the same as those that make the West vulnerable. Economic dislocations resulting from the global financial crisis of 2008–09 and the inability of establishment political parties to formulate a coherent response have reshaped politics in many countries, detaching the debate from clearly articulated interests and policies. In the absence of a coherent policy response, fringe politicians appeal to values, to exclusionary notions of community, and to patriotism. The ability of such appeals to sway millions in the United States, the UK, France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere is clear. Nevertheless, in the absence of a diverse media environment and without competitive electoral politics and independent institutions, Russia’s case of fake news fever has been far worse.
Of course, not all people are caught up in this process of consensus-building. As we have seen in repeated anti-corruption protests in Moscow and around the country, there is a slice of society, and of young people in particular, who reject the consensus around them. Often these people inhabit a largely different world from the mainstream, adopting ideas passed on by critical parents and peers.15 For most of these citizens, news comes not from the national television channels at all, but from opposition-minded online news sources like Meduza and Republic, and from their friends on Facebook.16
In fact, there is a vigorous online public sphere in Russia, where everything from corruption at the highest level, to fraud in the presidential elections of 2018, to casualties among Russian contractors in Syria are discussed, analyzed and debated. At the time of writing, a video created by opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation that presents evidence of vast corruption on the part of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has had almost 28 million views. Certainly, many of these will be repeat views and many others are likely to be from people not living in Russia. But even so, millions of Russians are likely to have watched this extraordinary video.17 Clearly, there are places in Russia in which discussion can take place and issues can be shaped. Nevertheless, the cumulative effects of control of the media and the artificially enforced and constructed consensus in the broader society means that room for maneuver is very narrow and constricted.18 Equally crucially, the debate in this online public sphere and the official conversations often feel like two different worlds, each aware of the other only so as to despise it.
One of these spaces for free debate and discussion remains Dozhd, the online television station formerly run by Mikhail Zygar. Despite the corner into which his former station has been pushed, Zygar remains convinced that these divisions can be overcome. Hardcore believers on either side are difficult to shift, but the “soft middle” of Russian society, which is currently influenced by the pro-government media, could have their eyes opened by what Zygar calls “quality media”—by which he means media like Dozhd. He has in mind people like Galina, the market researcher from Yaroslavl, whom we met earlier. Neither of the Kremlin’s two wedge issues—the law on religious sensibilities, and the LGBT “propaganda” law—registered on Galina’s radar screen. When we asked about them in early 2018, she had heard about them only, as the Russians say, “by the edge of her ear.” In both cases, though, she was opposed, despite the opinions of her patriotic boyfriend.
“Usually, I’m for strict laws,” she said. “But in this case, probably not. Faith is a personal thing. Everyone has a right to say what they believe. . . . And I hadn’t really heard about [the LGBT law], but I think that’s also a personal thing.”
For Zygar, hope lies in reaching people like Galina.
“Quality media are for those people who haven’t yet formed their point of view,” Zygar explained. “The sense here is that people who have a fully formed set of values aren’t going to be remade. There is, so to say, one minority in society with liberal values, which is the core audience of quality media. And there is another minority with imperial values, which is the core audience of state TV. And there’s this amorphous and indifferent majority, which, in fact, can watch both or either, depending on what’s trending. Because they’re not really interested in politics and prefer to be left alone, they keep their distance. And then there’s the younger audience, which still hasn’t formed their value system yet. Those are the audiences that everyone’s competing for.”
For the time being, though, the Kremlin is winning.
IT’S NOT HISTORY OR SOCIETY . . .
There is a saying in Russian, which holds that each of us understands the world through the lens of our own depravity. Without wishing to accuse our critics—or, really, any of our readers—of depravity (or to claim that we are not guilty of our own), it is a sentiment shared at one point or another by every author. At the end of the day, the meaning of what we write is generated less on these pages, than in the minds and interpretations of those who read them. Generally, this is an excellent thing; indeed, it is the miracle of literature. But it also has its pitfalls, among which is the virtual certainty of being misunderstood. With that in mind, it is probably worth taking some time to clarify what we are not arguing.
The first thing we are not arguing is that Russia—having no history of democratic governance—is doomed to eternal autocracy. This idea is so commonly asserted that it often passes for conventional wisdom. And like most pieces of conventional wisdom, it is not entirely without foundation. Russia has indeed been an autocracy for most of its history as an organized state, and history does do a lot to shape the paths countries are likely to take in the future. For example, it is true, as some point out, that after Communism fell in eastern and central Europe, the countries that transitioned most quickly and successfully to democratic politics were those that had had some previous experience of democracy, typically between the two world wars. It is also true that countries like the United Kingdom or the United States, which gradually evolved into what we recognize today as democracies, did so in part by building upon institutions, like parliament and limited suffrage, that existed in pre-democratic times.
However, the view that Russia has always been, is now and will always be an autocracy is mistaken in very important ways. First, all democracies that exist in the world today have a history of non-democratic, monarchical, oligarchic or exclusive politics. Democracy is a product of the modern era. Every country that is now a democracy used to be something different.
Skeptics might reply, of course, that recent history suggests that the prospects for transition to democracy in Russia are not very bright. And again, there is something to this argument. The dominant narrative on Russian history stresses an absence of strong institutions independent of the imperial throne, ruling out a British or US-style path (though a different telling of that history could point to many examples of such institutions at some times and in some places in Russia). Russia is also a state that depends heavily on the export of oil, gas and other natural resources for its revenue, and states like these (what political scientists call “rentier states”) tend to have stable political systems. They are democratic if they were already democratic when they struck oil—think Norway—and they are durable autocracies if they were already autocratic when the natural resources came—here think Saudi Arabia. One other way in which democracy can come is through foreign pressure. The influence of the European Union, for example, has been powerful in pushing a pro-democratic agenda in many of the former Communist Bloc countries. But there is not much reason for optimism here either. Russia is large and more than capable of providing for itself economically and militarily, so it is only weakly affected by Western connections or foreign inducements to take a more democratic path. (It is also worth noting that some of the post-socialist countries most directly influenced by the West—including Hungary and Poland—have undone much of their democratic transition in recent years.)
Yet, there are also many factors associated with democratization that Russia does possess and that make Russia a very promising candidate for transition. Most importantly, perhaps, Russia is a very highly educated and reasonably wealthy country, traits that generally augur well for democracy. In 2016, the World Bank calculated income per capita in Russia at $9,720, making Russia what the Bank calls an “upper middle income” country. This placed Russia at number fifty-two in the world rankings of states by per capita income. Of the fifty-one states above Russia in the rankings at that time, only five—the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Turkey—were not democracies.
Moreover, Russia’s wealth and high levels of education reflect deeper structures in society that are usually thought to be supportive of democracy. Even though Russia has become highly unequal since the end of Communism, the incidence of poverty has fallen considerably. By 2016, the proportion of the population living in what the World Bank defines as poverty was 13.4 percent, down from a massive 29 percent in 2000. This means that Russia possesses a large middle class—even if that middle class is much more tied to state employment than in most democratic countries—and a large middle class is seen by many scholars as a key driver of democratization. Relatedly, Russian civil society, which played an important role in sweeping away the Soviet system, has also continued to grow over the post-Soviet period. While challenges to civil society in the country are well documented, the intelligence, wit, creativity and bravery of Russia’s active citizens are clear to anyone who spends time in the country.
Consequently, the basic structure of Russia’s society and economy makes democracy neither impossible nor overwhelmingly likely. Russia could go either way, becoming much more democratic or remaining heavily autocratic. In the medium term—the next ten years or so—deep social, economic or historical factors will neither drive Russia into the democratic camp, nor preclude the development of democracy. It is politics that will determine the outcome.
. . . AND IT’S NOT CULTURE . . .
The second argument we are not making is that Russians themselves are somehow predisposed—culturally, psychologically, genetically or otherwise—to rule by a strong hand. As we discussed in Chapter 5, earlier generations of researchers sometimes argued that Russians (or Soviets) were collectively and individually anti-democratic in orientation on an immutable, fundamental level. To be clear, this is and always has been a myth, and the arguments and evidence in this book do not support such a claim. This is not to say that all Russians are keen democrats. In fact, as in most countries, attitudes to democracy vary from person to person and people express different opinions at different times, depending on the circumstances. But there is no reason to believe that Russians are fundamentally different in this respect from Americans, Western Europeans or anyone else.
There have been dozens of studies of Russian attitudes toward democracy over the decades, by both Russian and foreign scholars, and, as is often the case in academic research, there are almost as many opinions as there are studies. The research paints a complex picture, with more support for some aspects of democracy than others, and substantial differences between individual citizens. In other words, the extent to which one supports different elements of democracy is a political question in Russia—just as it is pretty much everywhere.
To illustrate this, consider one of the most interesting studies of attitudes toward democracy in Russia. In 1990, two (then) Soviet researchers—Maxim Boycko and Vladimir Korobov—began a collaboration with the American economist Robert Shiller (he of “irrational exuberance,” the Case–Shiller index of house prices, and the Nobel Prize), to trace the evolution of views among Muscovites and New Yorkers across a quarter of a century. The idea was to dig into people’s attitudes toward democracy as they actually experience it. This meant avoiding abstract questions—do you support democracy?—and focusing instead on concrete questions about things like a free press, how tolerant people are of minority political views and of political protests, and how they view trade-offs between order and freedom.
Boycko, Korobov and Shiller’s findings are stunning. Despite all the turmoil and changes that have taken place over the last twenty-five years in Russia, attitudes have changed relatively little: support for freedom of speech, fair courts and a free press was high in Moscow in 1990 and it remains high today. Only 6 percent of Muscovites disagreed with the statement that “It is necessary that everyone, regardless of their views, can express themselves freely.” In 2016, this number was little changed—8 percent—and was similar to the number of New Yorkers who disagreed in that same year (4 percent). On courts, 18 percent of Muscovites in 1990 thought it acceptable to imprison someone for a serious crime without a trial. By 2016, this number had fallen slightly to 15 percent and was very close to the figure for New Yorkers—19 percent. Where there was movement in the Moscow numbers was on attitudes to a free press. In 1990, only 2 percent of people in the Moscow sample did not think that the press should be protected by law from government persecution. This figure had ballooned to 20 percent in 2016. Yet, it was still well below the 27 percent of New Yorkers who opposed legal protections for the press.
This is not to say that all opinions are the same, however. Big differences between Muscovites and New Yorkers emerge when questions are framed in terms of an explicit trade-off between order and freedom. In 2016, fully three-quarters of the Moscow sample thought that “it is better to live in a society with strict order than to allow people so much freedom that they can bring destruction to the society.” That was more than double the proportion of New Yorkers agreeing with the same statement. Back in 1990, Muscovites viewed the trade-off much less negatively. Similarly, nearly 60 percent of Muscovites in 2016 thought that radical groups should not be allowed to protest, because such events lead to disorder and destruction, up from 37 percent in 1990 and double the proportion of New Yorkers. Clearly, while support for the basic institutions of democracy remains high, the fear of disorder in Russia is higher now than it was in 1990—a shift created not by some innate feature of Russian culture, but by the politics of the past thirty years.
Similar conclusions can be found in other studies. Henry Hale of George Washington University, a leading Western scholar of Russian politics, argued in an influential essay that, while Russians differ greatly from one another in their attitudes to democracy, there is broad support for elections and political competition in general. However, support for the “liberal” elements of democracy is substantially lower. What matters to most Russians, according to Hale, is being able to elect leaders. What those leaders then do in office is a secondary matter. This basic structure of support for what political scientists call “delegative democracy” is different from the democratic ideal most Western scholars have in mind, but this combination of attitudes is actually pretty common around the world.
Indeed, three decades of political science and sociological research have given us no reason to believe that Russians are inherently anti-democratic. Moreover, researchers have long known that citizens tend to judge the importance of democracy by their own experience, looking at how well democracy performs in providing economic opportunities and security. In that sense, the 1990s, when Russians had something called democracy but suffered economic hardship and substantial social breakdown, were a setback for the country’s democrats. Nevertheless, as our own surveys and interviews suggest, despite that experience most Russians still value the freedoms and rights that democracy represents.
That said, we should avoid phrases like “Russians think X.” The survey data make it abundantly clear that not all Russians think alike. There are different camps within Russia on major issues and, as we have shown in the different chapters of this book, real evidence of political competition and polarization. Consequently, trying to identify a distinctively “Russian” style of politics is a fool’s errand. Different Russians think different things, and the best way to understand politics in that country is not to seek to tap into some deeply mystical “Russian soul,” but to do what we have attempted here: to use the concepts and tools of social science that are applied successfully around the world.
. . . IT’S POLITICS
In March 2018, Vasily, the 41-year-old St. Petersburg factory worker we met in Chapter 5, planned happily—even eagerly—to vote to reelect Vladimir Putin to another six years in office. But even as he declared his loyalty to the Kremlin, he seemed upset at the lack of a real opposition.
“I don’t see anybody,” he said. “Nobody at all. Not in the least. Regardless of everything, even if there is criticism, it is measured. The guy will immediately be shown his place. Yes, we have freedom of speech, everything is allowed. But all the same, at the right moment, you’ll get a hint: take it too far, and you’ll go to jail.”
And what of Alexei Navalny?
“I have nothing to add,” Vasily said. “I think he criticizes exactly as much as he’s allowed to.”
Navalny, of course, would reject the idea that he’s muffled by the Kremlin. But in the end, of course, he wasn’t allowed to contest the presidential election of 2018. In the months that followed, Navalny, Leonid Volkov and the team—when they weren’t serving short prison sentences for involvement in one protest or another—worked to maintain the energy of their new network of volunteers. The goal, they told us, was to turn it into a dual-purpose structure: to be ready and able to contest formal elections when the opportunity arose, and to support local protest movements around the country in the interim.
“Regimes like Putin’s aren’t rare,” Volkov philosophized. “There have been a lot of them, and they’re all more or less the same. But human history has chewed through all of them. It chewed through and outlasted Pinochet and Suharto and Franco and so on. None of them were able to pass power on to the next generation. For a regime to be able to pass on power, its people need to be eating grass, like in North Korea. . . . So Alexei loses the election. We’re not going anywhere. We haven’t stopped being right, and they haven’t stopped being wrong.”
As history rolls forward, Volkov and his comrades—unsurprisingly—find the pace of change agonizingly slow. Corruption, Volkov likes to say, devours 12–15 trillion rubles a year. That’s about $200 billion, and so each extra year of Putinism comes at a high cost.
“They’re stealing our children’s future,” Volkov says, echoing every reformist politician to run for office in every country around the world. “That’s why we want to win as quickly as possible.”
But when Volkov talks about the challenges the opposition faces, Putin isn’t among them.
“Our biggest enemy is the lack of belief that something can be changed,” Volkov said. “That is undoubtedly our biggest problem. People have this really deep-seated sense that nothing at all can be changed. That is truly our biggest problem. Abstinence. A kind of self-isolation from everything political. . . . But that’s also an opportunity. If we can wake these people up and explain to them that things depend on them, the situation can change very quickly. . . . Yes, on the one hand there’s this idea that ‘nothing can be changed,’ but on the other hand there’s ‘we can’t live like this any longer.’ . . . We have been all over the country, and we have seen the people. There are people out there living in truly hopeless circumstances, earning 20,000 rubles with no prospects, no chances or hope for anything to improve. Absolutely desperate people, and there are a lot of them. And in this situation, yes, on the one hand, nothing can be changed, that’s been beaten into people for twenty years. But on the other hand, something has to change. At some point, the latter will outweigh the former.”
To a great extent, our findings support Volkov’s analysis. Support for President Putin is interdependent: some people support him because of his policies and the direction in which he is taking the country, but many more support him because it is the socially acceptable thing to do, because the media they access is extremely propagandistic, and because, as a result, they see no alternatives. This equilibrium is politically constructed. It is strong because there are few incentives for people to switch from it unless other people start to defect from support. Yet, in this strength lies the source of Putin’s weakness. The construction of the regime depends upon a social consensus that will one day unravel. And when it does, Russia’s own experience suggests it will happen quickly.
The Kremlin understands this, and it has reason to worry. In the summer of 2018, just as the rest of the world was congratulating Russia on a well-hosted World Cup, alarm bells were going off in Kremlin offices. Despite the resounding success of the global showpiece that Russia had hosted—even the usually dismal Russian football team had exceeded expectations—domestic politics had its own logic. Perhaps hoping to use the cover of the World Cup to divert attention from unpopular policies, the government announced an increase in the pension age for both men and women in June 2018. Russians were furious, and the response was almost immediate: tens of thousands protested in dozens of cities across the country. Polls suggested that only about 9 percent of Russians supported the proposed reforms.19
The initial protests were followed after the World Cup with large rallies across Russia at which hundreds were arrested. The streets, though, were the least of the Kremlin’s worries. In local elections that same month, the ruling United Russia party actually lost a string of gubernatorial and mayoral elections and was forced to concede that its victory in one strategically important part of the Russian Far East was generated by fraud. Worst of all, the difficulties created by pension reform were not limited to the ruling party and its candidates. President Putin himself saw a large and sudden fall in his popularity. The Levada Center reported a fall of fifteen points in Putin’s approval rating between April and July 2018, and these falls were visible too in other polling agencies. In fact, the Kremlin’s own favored pollster, the Public Opinion Foundation, reported that the proportion of people telling them that they would vote for Putin if an election were held dropped thirteen points to only 49 percent that same July.
The response was quick. In an extremely unusual step, President Putin made a thirty-minute televised address, explaining to Russians that pension reform was not just an economic policy question, but a matter of national security. Without pension reform, he said, Russia risked collapse. At the same time, Putin announced concessions, moderating the impact of the reforms on women in particular. Although it was too little and too late to save United Russia’s fortunes at the ballot box, Putin’s efforts seemed at press time to have staunched his own bleeding. At the end of September 2018, the Levada Center reported a twenty-point fall in the proportion of citizens saying they were ready to protest against the reforms—though about a third of respondents still said they would.20 More importantly, Putin’s popularity seemed to have at least stabilized at around 67 percent, according to Levada. As we write, it is too early to say how the pension reform will end. In fact, part of our argument is that making such predictions is inherently fraught. We will understand how Putin’s popularity unraveled when it actually does, but predicting when that will happen is more guesswork than science.
BETRAYAL
The liberal opposition represented by Navalny, however, is only one of the Kremlin’s headaches. There are the nationalists to think of too. Alexander Dugin, the nationalist ideologue who helped push Russia into war in Ukraine, is unhappy. Very unhappy. You might think that with Crimea annexed and large chunks of eastern Ukraine effectively under Russian control, he would be riding high, but he isn’t.
“Now I see the results of my work, and I’m absolutely not satisfied,” he told us. “I consider what is going on in modern Russia as a caricature of my ideas. Eurasianism is accepted, patriotism is accepted, anti-Western rhetoric is accepted, anti-liberalism is . . . Everything is almost how I wanted during the 90s, but at the same time I see I don’t like it. It is a perversion, I would say. A caricature.”
There was a time, Dugin said, when he would have blamed Vladislav Surkov, the éminence grise who ran the political block of Putin’s presidential administration. Surkov, in Dugin’s estimation, was a “trickster,” playing the various factions of Russian politics off one another, seeking advantage always for himself, and sometimes for his employer. But then Surkov was fired, replaced first by Vyacheslav Volodin, then by Sergei Kirienko, and nothing changed. The problem, Dugin concluded, must be Putin himself.
Understanding Dugin’s dissatisfaction with Putin—and, indeed, the dissatisfaction of Russian nationalists more broadly—is crucial. Many readers of this and other books about Russia are centrally concerned with Russian foreign policy and its direction, and here too our analysis has important implications. As highlighted in our argument, the narrative of “lifting Russia from its knees,” whether it be in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria or in the rearming of the military has been a major component of the appeal Putin makes to Russians. This is unlikely to change while Putin remains president. Nor is it likely to change if someone else became president, especially if that president were to be democratically elected. The constituency supporting a strong, assertive Russia is simply too large and too important to be ignored. Put another way, no one is going to win a free and fair election by telling the vast majority of Russian voters that they’ve believed a lie.
Nevertheless, again it is important to be clear what this does and does not mean. One long-term goal of Russian policymakers has been to reassert Russia’s status as a great power. This means having privileged influence over international affairs within what Russia considers its sphere of influence—essentially the former Soviet Union minus the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—and being consulted on broader issues of international concern. This is bad news for those Ukrainians who want to establish an independent pro-Western policy in their country. Russia will do what it can to make life difficult.
However, an assertive Russia does not mean we should expect open-ended, indiscriminate military confrontation with Russia’s neighbors or the West. Russian capacity to challenge the West remains very limited, and so has to be used selectively. Moreover, the Crimea effect we analyze here is quite idiosyncratic. Neither northern Kazakhstan, nor eastern Estonia, nor anywhere else has the status of Crimea in Russian popular consciousness. As a result, we should not expect “Crimea syndrome” redux any time soon.
And this is where Dugin’s irritation is important. From his point of view, Putin’s confrontation with the West is situational and pragmatic, rather than ideological and profound. The nationalists’ reading of the aftermath of Crimea and the Donbas is one of betrayal: what could, as Dugin told us, have been “the moment when Russian civilization should acquire its proper dimensions” turned into a quagmire precisely because Putin would not take it to its logical conclusion.
“Crimea was the culmination point, the last stop before changing absolutely the logic of the development of modern Russia,” Dugin exclaimed. “But it didn’t happen. I don’t know why. . . . It was a betrayal. For the patriotic group, it was a betrayal by Putin of our awakening. And for liberals, it was a betrayal by Putin of globalist rules. So, Putin has betrayed both parties. . . . And it is the worst that could possibly happen, because we have committed half the crime, but paid the full price.”
Dugin’s geopolitical analysis aside, his political interpretation reflects that of an important constituency, both within the masses and the elite. His summary of the liberals’ frustrations is also accurate: while they would not dare say so publicly, the leaders of Russia’s banks, major corporations and even economics and finance ministries are clearly aghast at the road toward isolation from the world economy that Russia has taken. Putin cannot choose one side without alienating the other. As a result, he chooses neither—and risks alienating both. The only thing holding the ship together is his popularity.
THE END
We have tried to present in this book a different version of Russian politics than most people will have seen before. Our story is not about Putin’s Russia—a country whose politics would be best understood by analyzing the actions of its seemingly eternal leader. Our story is instead a study of how a people and its politics interact with one another to create and sustain a system built around one highly popular, yet highly polarizing, personality—one who aggressively asserts conservative authoritarian politics at home and Russia’s role in international affairs abroad. The two sides—the regime and the people—interact with each other, and it is on that interaction that anyone trying to understand where Russia is going must focus.
One way to think about the future of Russian politics is to recognize the transformation of Putin himself. He has gone from being a leader picked by the oligarchy as a tool to defend their interests, to being a “father of the nation,” a president who is no longer a politician in the normal sense of the term but a national leader largely immune from the everyday problems that attach themselves to those below him. As we have argued in this book, this status was not achieved by fiat, or even by the considerable formal powers invested in the presidency by the Russian constitution. Instead, it was achieved through the support and emotional commitment of millions of Russians, who responded positively to the central axes of policy. This consensus around Putin and Putinism, in turn, is itself partly the product of aggressive propaganda on television and the ubiquitous reinforcement of the Putinist worldview across Russian society.
One conclusion from this analysis is that such a person is hard to replace. Even if, as seems likely, Vladimir Putin himself is a relatively ordinary person (albeit leading a rather extraordinary life), a person around whom such a following has been built cannot be succeeded quickly or easily. This is part of the reason why Putin has hung around so long, and why the decision was made to have him return to the presidency after the short dalliance with Dmitry Medvedev. If Russia were simply a KGB state or mafia state, or even a strong-man dictatorship, replacing Putin with someone else would potentially be much easier.
Take, for example, the late presidents of two other former Soviet states, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, and Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, better known as “Turkmenbashi,” or “Father of the Turkmen.” Although both men had ruled their lands since even before the breakup of the USSR and were thought to be “indispensable,” their deaths in fact brought remarkably little disruption. Both constructed highly repressive, highly personalized dictatorships and seemed completely essential to the systems they created. Both developed major personality cults—though Niyazov took the cake, installing a giant rotating golden statue of himself in the capital and renaming cities and even months of the calendar after himself and his mother. In both countries, there was tremendous anxiety about what would happen after the two great dictators departed the stage. And yet, when each man died, there was a highly orderly transition to an anointed successor, outside of the family of the former leader. In each case, the successor rather seamlessly took the reins of the existing machine and chose a new course of action, with little real change in the system of power. Nobody asked ordinary Turkmen and Uzbeks what they thought, of course. The key to the peaceful transition of power was elite consensus.
By contrast, in the model of Russian politics that we have described here, it would be hard to simply replace Putin with some less prominent figure from the existing elite, as happened in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Doing so would require a period of political rebuilding that would be risky and costly. The godlike leaders in Central Asia were in fact replaceable because both Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are hardcore autocratic regimes, in which the elites make the decisions and the citizenry are very far from being a factor. Russia is different. In Russia, public support is an important resource in politics, and the charisma of one leader cannot so seamlessly be passed on to another.
This factor helps to explain both Putin’s longevity in office and his apparent freedom from threats from within the ruling elite. Factions can emerge around the president, but no one has the public standing to be a credible challenger. Putin’s perceived role as a national figure, above the grit and grime of day-to-day politics, is a bedrock both to himself and to those around him.
However, as we have noted throughout this book, Putin’s position is not created simply by the rules or by elite consensus. Rather, it relies upon very active political work by the administration, by television and by the actions and interactions of Russian citizens and major social institutions, like schools and churches. Vladimir Putin does not own politics in Russia. Even he has to play to the gallery.
As we noted in Chapter 5, this sense of Putin’s inevitability—and the importance of maintaining that sense—is a source of great strength, but it is also potentially a source of weakness. As Václav Havel pointed out decades ago, writing about “the power of the powerless” under Communism, maintaining the façade of unanimity requires many people to play their role. Once people begin to change their minds and refuse to act as expected, things can change extremely quickly.
This was indeed what happened with the fall of Communism both in Eastern Europe and in the USSR. In Eastern Europe, Communist countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia, which had been quiet for years, suddenly fell to massive crowds. The sense of inevitability—of the impossibility of any other future—was shattered by the victory of Solidarity in Poland, and by Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika. As the political scientist Timur Kuran famously argued, authoritarian rule depends very heavily on what citizens think others are likely to do.21 Once citizens’ expectations of how others are likely to behave change, whole regimes can crumble overnight. For decades, the smart greengrocer knew that it was best to cooperate with Communism. In the fall of 1989, it was smarter to rebel.
A similar phenomenon took place in Russia and the rest of the USSR once Gorbachev introduced competitive elections for political office. Ambitious politicians, public officials and even factory managers no longer had to look only to the Communist Party hierarchy for promotion. Their options multiplied, but there also arose a new necessity: looking below, to garner popular support. Previously loyal Communists from the Baltic states to Uzbekistan refashioned themselves as nationalist leaders. In a matter of a couple of short years, a superpower went from being unchallenged to being unsustainable. In the words of the American political scientist Mark Beissinger, “the impossible became the inevitable.”22 Or, as the Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak put it, the Soviet Union “was forever, until it was no more.”23
The lessons for Russia’s Putin are clear and ominous. When position and power depend heavily on the citizens—on their reading of their social surroundings, their sense of consensus, and the breadth of their imaginations—this support can disappear almost overnight. Putin’s power will crumble when we least expect it. And yet, looking back, we will all have seen it coming.