In the late Soviet era, only twice did Moscow’s military interrupt the daily lives of ordinary citizens. The first occasion was the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which went largely unnoticed by many Russians because few knew what was going on. The second was the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which had far greater consequences. For many people, the sight of zinc coffins being flown back from a distant southern country, even as Marxism-Leninism was losing currency at home, shattered the moral foundations of the Soviet project.
In 2022, Moscow’s military once again interrupted the lives of ordinary citizens with an invasion, and the result has been even worse than either of those previous events: Russia has just lived through the most terrifying year in post-Soviet history. Yet despite growing loss of life and stark moral defeats, there has been no shattering of national foundations. Sure, Russians are becoming divided, and their opinions polarized, as people grow tired of war. But far from weakening Putin’s hold on power, the “special military operation” has only strengthened it.
Those who fear Putin have either fled the country or are silent. The regime has a formidable arsenal of instruments to deploy against anyone who speaks out or otherwise expresses opposition. It has used the legal system to crush any dissent, handing down Stalinist prison terms to antiwar activists. It has invented its own equivalent of yellow stars to harass, threaten, and intimidate those deemed “foreign agents.” (I had the honor of receiving such a designation in late December.) It has closed down or blocked access to virtually all independent media. And it has pinned the unofficial label of “national traitor” on anyone who does not express delight at the state’s ramping up of repression, the war, and the increasingly personal military-police-state regime that is driving it.
And so, instead of protesting, most Russians have made clear that they prefer to adapt. Even fleeing the country is not necessarily a form of protest: for many, it is simply a pragmatic answer to the problem of how to avoid being killed or becoming a killer. It is true that the population is more anxious than ever. According to opinion surveys, anxiety among Russians reached new heights in 2022, although it returned to more or less tolerable levels when the threat of mobilization temporarily receded. But adaptation has become the overriding Russian trait. Where will it end? For the moment, it seems that there is no limit.
Putin is building a new empire, but it is not going well. People are fleeing it in droves. One of the mainstays of the Soviet empire was grandiloquent Communist building projects. But today’s emperor has set about restoring Moscow’s empire by destroying those same Communist projects with Russian missiles: a significant part of the Ukrainian infrastructure that Putin has been attacking was built by his own twentieth-century predecessors. Consider the TEC-5 power plant in Kharkiv. Built by the Soviets in the 1970s, it provided electricity to millions of people and became Ukraine’s second-largest thermal power plant. In September 2022, it was hit by a Russian strike, leaving a fire that raged for weeks and cutting off power to a large swath of the country. It is hard not to see the difference: the previous empire launched the first manmade satellite, Sputnik, and the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space; Putin launches deadly missiles into a neighboring country. This is the difference between soft power, which at a certain stage was characteristic even of the Soviet Union, and Putin’s power, which is not at all soft.
Still, 2022—a year of war, a year of permanent shock—has done little to change popular acquiescence for the regime. This is not just a defense reflex on the part of ordinary Russians—“My country, right or wrong” or “Our leaders know best, since they have more information than we do.” Instead, it is a double-edged response that seeks to keep reality at bay. On the one hand, it is expressed in desire for vengeance against the enemy, who are no longer even seen as human beings. On the other hand, it is grounded in the fantasy that normal times can continue in a country in which committing violence against outsiders and sacrificing oneself in a heroic death on the battlefield are becoming socially accepted norms.
This form of emotional protection explains why most Russians see 2022 as a very difficult year—but less difficult than the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic or the chaos of the early 1990s. According to polls by the independent Levada Center, by the end of 2022, fears of mass repression, arbitrary rule, and a government crackdown had actually receded from a few months earlier. All those tools of tyranny were used with increasing force during the year, and yet people said that they were less concerned about them than before. That declining concern is not only an effect of the pressure to sustain wartime unity; it is a conscious unwillingness to acknowledge that anything has changed—a desire for self-deception. Incidentally, according to polling data, the only major fear that people express at the same high level as previously is the prospect of another world war. That seems to be the only thing average Russians are not deceiving themselves about.
The previous empire launched Sputnik. Putin launches deadly missiles.
A significant part of the population has all but overlooked Putin’s violation of the very social contract that he laid down years before the “special operation” began. From the beginning, officials asserted that they were just military professionals doing their job and promised Russians that, as long as they supported the regime, basic needs would be met and normal life would continue. Now, of course, that promise can no longer hold. Putin requires the nation to share in what he has embarked on, and it turns out he needs the bodies of Russians themselves to offer up in sacrifice. This shift has been justified by the promise that death in this manner will eclipse all their earthly sins, as the patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, once said. Sometimes the more terrible the lie and the more outlandish the justification of horrors, the more easily the majority choose to believe it.
It helps that many Russians are utterly beholden to the state. According to official statistics, the proportion of social payments in the real incomes of the population is greater now than it was in Soviet times. Despite the emergence of a market economy and a significant class of self-sufficient people, Putin has done everything he can to ensure that the economic role of the state remains as large as possible. And he has used the influx of petrodollars to further that goal.
People who depend on the state are obedient, above all politically, and the direction of the Russian economy in recent years has reinforced that reality. Only a small percentage of the population gets its income from business activity, whereas salaries from the public sector and social payments command a large portion of people’s income. According to data from the 2021 census, one out of three Russians—33 percent—depend on social payments as a source of income. In addition, a quarter of all Russians are materially dependent on someone else. Even taking into account that the quality of the 2021 census data is the worst in the country’s post-Soviet history, these figures are shocking.
For the time being, Putin is making his new demands for cannon fodder against a relatively calm socioeconomic backdrop. But this could change as the economy plummets. Given the inevitable drop in federal budget revenues because of restrictions on oil and gas exports, fading economic activity, and significant spending on defense and security, the state will have fewer opportunities to buy the loyalty of the population in the coming months. Still, it is likely that Putin will pull it off. For one thing, security and law-enforcement agencies, from the army and police to the special services, will continue to be well funded, and it is they who will enforce loyalty. No one has canceled the carrot-and-stick method, but the value of the stick is increasing.
Russian prosecution data gives some indication of both the extent of overt opposition to Putin and the official response to it. In 2022, 20,467 people were detained on political grounds, mainly for expressing antiwar sentiment in public; and 378 people were criminally prosecuted for “discrediting or spreading fake news about the Russian army”—in other words, for taking an antiwar position. Of those 378, fifty-one have already been sentenced. Attracting the most attention have been the cases against Moscow municipal deputy Alexei Gorinov and liberal politician Ilya Yashin. In July, Gorinov was given nearly seven years in jail for spreading “knowingly false information” about the army. In December, Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison on similar grounds, in particular for mentioning the Bucha massacre. Also in 2022, 176 individuals and organizations were declared “foreign agents,” and the Russian parliament passed 22 new laws aimed at enhancing the state’s repressive powers. Among these were a new law targeting LGBT “propaganda” and one giving the state drastically expanded powers over so-called foreign agents.
Equally striking has been the growing use of censorship. In 2022, the authorities blocked more than 210,000 websites and Putin’s machine effectively silenced any remotely independent media left in Russia. Yet many of the media outlets that have been blocked or shut down are managing to do their job efficiently from outside the country (and sometimes even from within the country: Novaya Gazeta, for example, is trying to promote new projects, and the former Echo of Moscow radio broadcasts on YouTube partly from Moscow). Russians who want to watch, listen to, or read alternative information and opinions can use a virtual private network (VPN) to do so. Many exiled independent media also broadcast on YouTube, which the Russian government is reluctant to block for fear of invoking the wrath of the platform’s huge numbers of depoliticized users.
In fact, as high as these numbers are, the tally of political prosecutions and blocked websites reveals only what is on the surface. Anger at Putin and with the war is far broader. Many who remain in Russia are afraid to speak out; many have fled the country, voting with their feet against Putin. And still others have returned to the late Soviet–era practice of “kitchen democracy,” discussing and condemning Putin’s war at home or quietly in cafés. Notably popular in Russia right now are classic works of literature that contain subtle antiwar messages. The most read book at the beginning of last year was George Orwell’s 1984. Other books selling well include those about everyday life in 1930s Germany, in which people recognize themselves and their fears. Intellectual publishing houses are also reissuing antiwar books that are difficult for the authorities to object to, such as the 1945 lectures of the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers on the collective guilt and responsibility of the Germans and Leo Tolstoy’s blistering articles against war. These writers, too, are expressing sentiments that many Russians today can identify with.
Given the scale of the repression, it is unrealistic to expect a mass uprising against Putin, especially since most ordinary Russians prefer to bury their heads in the sand and find some bizarre rationality and truth in the regime’s logic. People do not want to be on the side of evil, so they designate evil as good, thereby forcing themselves to believe that Putin is bringing peace. As one Kremlin spin doctor put it, the president is launching “missiles of righteousness.” Otherwise, Russians tell themselves, NATO would crush them and dismember their country—even if there was not a shred of evidence of that happening before February 2022. Putin knows best.
Putin and his Kremlin ideologues love to talk about the West’s desire to wipe Russia off the map. For their part, they would like to see Russia take up a much bigger place on the map by building an enormous empire. They want a return to the distant past. The irony is that, as Russia has—at least in the Kremlin’s own imagined geography—expanded its physical extent in its brutal war against Ukraine, it has effectively disappeared from the political map.
The West once saw Russia as a country on the path to democracy. Now it regards it as an international pariah and a failed state. Russia’s former Soviet neighbors—members of the Commonwealth of Independent States—are frightened and have politely distanced themselves from Moscow; some of them are successfully exploiting the labor force that has fled Putin. (In 2022, 2.9 million Russians went to Kazakhstan alone, and nearly 150,000 obtained identification papers needed to work there.) China and India, while remaining on friendly terms with Russia at the rhetorical and economic level, have watched in disbelief as Putin descends into a vortex of irrational self-destruction, taking his nation’s economy, workforce, dignity, and soft power with him.
Russians’ acceptance of collective responsibility will have to come later.
In March 2022, 80 percent of Russians “definitely supported” or “mostly supported” Russia’s war, according to a Levada Center poll. To be precise, they supported “the actions of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine.” Back then, public opinion was not ready to consider it a “war,” and not only because people could be prosecuted for calling it that: they assumed that it would be a short military campaign. By December, the terms had changed. There was no longer any doubt that Russia was fighting a war, to the point that top officials, seeking to justify the army’s serial failures, were calling it a “war with NATO.” (They were not, of course, calling it a war with brotherly Ukraine, which was apparently being used by the West to destroy Russia.) By that point, whatever Putin was perpetrating still had the general support of 71 percent of respondents, but the portion of the population who “definitely supported” it had dropped from 52 percent in March to just 41 percent in December. Among those who are most dismayed by Putin’s bloodbath are younger Russians and people who get their information from the Internet rather than Russian television. In December, 50 percent of respondents favored peace talks, against just 40 percent who thought it was better to keep fighting. (Russian support for peace talks peaked, unsurprisingly, during Putin’s partial mobilization in September and October, when it reached 57 percent.) Society is divided.
But what about taking responsibility for Putin’s meat grinder? Around May 2022, when it became clear that the war would not be over as quickly as planned—and Russians themselves were not yet directly ensnared in the fighting—the number of respondents who expressed a sense of moral responsibility for the deaths of people in Ukraine briefly increased. After that, however, it stabilized as a marginal phenomenon: currently, only about one in four Russians expresses some degree of responsibility for the war, and just one in ten Russians consider themselves “definitely” responsible. By contrast, about six out of ten absolve themselves of any responsibility whatsoever for the deaths of people from a fraternal nation in which many of them have relatives and acquaintances.
When people are being killed and cities and essential civilian infrastructure are being razed, disavowing responsibility is both infantile and amoral. But Russians’ acceptance of collective responsibility, not to mention guilt, will have to come later—if at all. For the foreseeable future, the brutal authoritarian regime under which they live imposes certain norms of behavior and has no intention of disappearing, toning down its repression and propaganda, or bringing an end to the war. Of course the obedient, if weary, population will accept with gratitude whatever the autocrat gives—even peace.
Sometimes it seems as though Russia really has disappeared from the map or has been illegally annexed by its own government. In less than a year, Putin and his team have managed to discredit everything Russian, even Russian culture. Russia’s image has not taken such a battering since the days of Stalin. The Soviet Union in its later years had a lot more global respect than Russia does now.
In one sense, everything that happened since Russia invaded Ukraine is captured in the vicious circle of the country’s political history. My grandfather was arrested on political grounds in 1938, the year of the Great Terror, which meant that at the age of nine, my mother became the daughter of an “enemy of the people.” She died over 20 years ago, confident that her country was at last on the path to normal democratic development. She did not live to see her son labeled a “foreign agent,” for such was the state’s gift to me on December 24, 2022. Out of three generations, therefore, two found themselves enemies of autocratic regimes. Separating an “enemy of the people” grandfather and his “foreign agent” grandson were more than eight decades of difficult Soviet and Russian history, including three in which the country was liberalizing: under Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. Indeed, according to one version of the political proverb attributed to Pyotr Stolypin, the pre-revolutionary prime minister of the Russian Empire, in a year, everything in the country changes; in a century, nothing changes.
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