Many of you are asking this question and the answer is obviously complex. Russian society is not a homogeneous bloc: it was divided before the war, and even more so today. It’s just difficult to get exact figures, to understand the whole range of opinions.
Are the Russians who left the country after the announcement of the mobilization anti-war or in a simple survival logic? Are the people who were at the Luzhniki Stadium yesterday for a meeting in support of the government that convinced? The very first person I interviewed, a woman, said, “My business [MosEnergo] forced me to come I am against Putin and against the war. She didn’t want to let go of my arm, kept repeating these words and cried. As if for the first time in a year she could express herself and share her distress with someone…
The polls offer some clues, starting with support for “military special operations,” which remains in the majority. But it would be a mistake to trust them blindly. There is of course the fear of oppression, but also of more buried things, this very Russian (and before that Soviet) way of thinking that the state is always right, that politics is not a matter for the citizens. The polls show us that the same people would support both peace talks and a new offensive on Kiev. Above all, it is confusion that characterizes Russian society. And the Depression: the propaganda tries to portray the current phase as a vast national renewal; not many people believe it.
If we exclude those who have strong opinions (either way or another), I’d say the mainstream is very weak support. The sociologist Lev Goudkov speaks of an “absence of opposition”: one conforms to what the state says, one prefers to survive, one avoids painful questions, one does not come into conflict with one’s neighbors, one’s colleagues… Goudkov has another expression of what I’m finding. For him, society is in a “fetal position”: it doesn’t want to see anything, hear anything, and just dodge the blows.
Russian power is playing on velvet here: it has always accommodated the general political apathy, and even carefully forged it for years. This certainly has a downside at a time when society needs to be mobilized for victory. But here, too, we rely on well-known recipes: the creation of a powerful enemy, the West, determined to destroy Russia, no less; the notion that personal well-being is nothing compared to the power of the state; and oppression of course.
Benoît Vitkine (Moscow, correspondent)