Since the onset of Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, one of the key questions discussed by academics, politicians, and the wider public has been whether Russians genuinely support their government’s course. On the one hand, President Putin’s approval rating surged after the war began, and many expressed declarative support for the war. This may indicate a sense of unity among Russians rallying round their flag and leader. On the other hand, this support is far from consistent; it is marked more by negative than positive emotions and lacks a clear image of the enemy, challenging the conventional “rallying round the flag” explanation for war support in Russia. Based on existing survey data and original qualitative research into how Russians perceive the conflict, this paper explores the complex nature of war support and critically assesses the applicability of the “rallying round the flag” approach in the Russian context.
This article analyzes the transformation of Russia’s social contract following the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Prior to the invasion, scholars characterized the Russian social contract as a mutual non-interference agreement or an authoritarian bargain in which economic prosperity or aspirations of national greatness were exchanged for political disengagement. In the aftermath of the invasion, however, the regime initiated a recalibration of this contract to preserve legitimacy under wartime conditions. While the revised social contract retained the core logic of exchanging loyalty for stability, the regime sought to sustain performance legitimacy by shielding the majority from the direct costs of war, while displacing its burdens onto specific marginalized groups, excluding them from the renewed agreement. The emergence of the “Put’ Domoy” movement highlights the fragility and exclusionary nature of this new arrangement. Ultimately, the revised social contract reflects a transformation in how authoritarian legitimacy is managed in times of war – less through shared ideological commitment, and more through a fragmented and selective distribution of costs, risks, and rights. This paper draws on existing surveys and secondary analyses of the effects of the war on Russian society, including three Public Sociology Laboratory studies based on an extensive dataset of in-depth interviews on war perceptions and resistance in Russia, collected between 2022 and 2024.
The 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia has had a significant impact on the various networks of Russian-speakers residing abroad, leading to the rise of distinct and even conflicting diasporization projects. In Germany, a diverse population of Russian-speaking migrants—including ethnic German resettlers from the post-Soviet space, Jewish migrants, new economic migrants, political migrants, and people who came via other trajectories—faced a pivotal moment that forced many of them, along with their descendants, to redefine their identities and affiliations, often within completely opposing political frameworks. In this paper, we focus on one of those diasporization projects that is intertwined with a politicized Russianness, aligned with pro-Kremlin and nationalist narratives, which draws on a mix of Soviet nostalgia, imperial aspirations, conservative values, and a reactionary stance against the West. We define this project as an illiberal one and maintain that this identity formation has been facilitated by hybrid media platforms like Telegram, where pro-war narratives are circulated and reinforced. By examining this pro-war diasporization project, the paper contributes to the broader discussion on how diasporas are constructed in the context of inter-state conflict, albeit at a distance. It reveals the active role the emerging communities play in shaping and sustaining hegemonic discourses that resonate with Russia’s current geopolitical ambitions. The findings provide insights into how diasporas are formed and transformed in response to critical global events, highlighting their role as both agents and arenas of political struggle, while paying attention to the agency of post-Soviet migrants in reshaping the diasporization projects.
Little is known about the processes affecting civil society in Russia since February 2022. Scholarly discussions of civil society in Russia have typically centered on protest activism. However, the wartime context reveals that civil society does not always manifest in oppositional forms. This article explores civic engagement in Russia that aligns with, rather than opposes, the state. The article adopts a framework of statism and anti-statism—not as doctrinal political ideologies, but as broader ideological formations in the Althusserian sense, embedded in everyday practices and identities. This article argues that statism, combined with dense grassroots networks, can foster active participation in the wartime economy, even among those who are politically disengaged. The analysis draws on ethnographic data collected by the author in the Republic of Buryatia in the fall of 2023. This fieldwork was conducted as part of a comparative qualitative study of three Russian regions organized by the Public Sociology Laboratory.
This article examines the dynamic of depoliticization among and between Russian and Ukrainian volunteers and the Ukrainian refugees they supported in Tbilisi, Georgia over three years following the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Drawing on Camille Hamidi’s observations on the depoliticization of interaction between disparate groups in NGO environments, the author identifies a similar process in a Russian-led organization which, despite its otherwise politically active volunteers, was distinctly lacking in polemicized debate. Interviews and ethnographic fieldwork uncovered a number of contributing factors, from explicit policies of the organization’s leadership to the sensibilities of the volunteers and refugees. In a departure from Hamidi’s findings, the article concludes with the observation that the depoliticization found in this NGO contributed to the frustration and degradation of interpersonal bonds within the organization in the long term, rather than a productive papering-over of differences.
This article concludes that NecroSpeak–an official euphemistic language used in Russian media since 2022-is rooted in a long-standing regime of informational favorability (rezhim informatsionnogo blagopriyatstvovaniya). Far from being merely a set of stylistic choices, it functions as a discursive and ritualised performance of civic loyalty. NecroSpeak not only obscures the violence of war through controlled vocabulary, but also contributes to political disengagement, helping to stabilise authoritarian rule.
Abstract:December 19, 2016, witnessed three tragedies that could not go unnoticed by the Russian media: dozens of people died as a result of a surrogate alcohol poisoning in Irkutsk, a Russian ambassador was killed in Turkey, and a terrorist attack took place at the Christmas market in Berlin. In this article, we use the network agenda-setting theory to analyze how these tragedies were covered by different types of mass media. We show that ties between the tragedy and a network of other acute issues are more important than objective circumstances, such as the number of victims or the geography of the event. The context in which the events were examined led to greater attention to the killing of the ambassador and less attention to the surrogate alcohol poisoning. We believe that the state can exercise indirect control over the agenda by creating a network of events that will correctly guide discussions about tragedies.
This article explores informal practices in the food sector. The practices of St. Petersburg consumers who buy food directly from local farmers via various short food supply chains (on-farm sales, collective purchasing, street trade, etc.) are analyzed in the framework of James Scott's concepts of everyday resistance and moral economy and Michel de Certeau's notion of tactics. Consumers' tactics are explored, and informants' attitudes toward conventional retail chains and state agencies are compared to their attitudes to local farmers.
Abstract:This article traces the transformation of informal relations between the government and big business due to the changing financial and administrative capabilities of the state, comparing the situations in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. The oligarchic capitalism of the 1990s arose when a weak state was forced to seek the help of those with financial capital in exchange for political rights. Economic development in the 2000s, the budget surplus, and Putin's policies changed the situation: "milking" the country's budget and arranging "payoffs" became the main forms of informal cooperation between the government and business. However, the economic difficulties of the 2010s sharply aggravated competition for access to budget resources. Under the slogans of legalizing the economy and fighting corruption, the administration found new informal ways to manage and control big business, assigning the "kings of government contracts" to implement projects as a marker of loyalty to the President's administration and a precondition for continued business success.
