Keith Gessen and Bryn Rosenfeld on How We Should Interpret Russian Public Opinion Data About the War in Ukraine
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Welcome back. I'm Max Bergman, director of the Stuart Center and Europe-Russia-Eurasia program at CSIS. And I'm Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia. And you're listening to Russian Roulette, a podcast discussing all things Russia and Eurasia from the Center for Strategic International Studies. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Russian Roulette. I'm your host, Maria Snegovaya, recording solo today while Max is on the road.

Today we are joined by two excellent guests here to help us dig into the question of Russian public opinion towards the war in Ukraine, along with the broader question of the ability to research public opinion more broadly inside Russia today. First, we are joined by Dr. Bryn Rosenfeld, Bryn is a fantastic scholar and associate professor of government at Cornell University and the co-principal investigator of the Russian election study. Welcome, Bryn. Thank you so much, Maria.

Excellent. Additionally, we're thrilled to have Kit Gessen on the show. Kit is a renowned journalist and author and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Additionally, Kit teaches magazine journalism at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Welcome, Kit. Thank you for having me.

Excellent. And today's topic is one which is very dear to my heart personally. Just as a full disclosure to our audiences, I should note that today's topic is something that I explored in particular in my report that was published with the Atlantic Council at the end of the last year, titled The Reluctant Consensus, War and Russia's Public Opinion. Somewhat unexpectedly, the issue of measuring our ability as

scholars, as journalists, as policymakers to understand Russian public opinion has become quite a contestant topic at the start of the war, the first war in Ukraine in 2022. Many have raised doubts as to what extent Russians are being open and honest about the actual embrace of this war and whether we can trust public opinion.

I have aggregated information from multiple academic sources, including, for example, the work done by Green with co-authors, and concluded that on the whole, to the extent that one could trust the Russian polls before the start of the war in 2022, one can generally trust them afterwards with some reservations that are inevitable in this quarterly analysis.

However, in January this year, Keith published a piece in The New Yorker titled Do Russians Really Support the War in Ukraine? where he reports on the research of Russia's public sociology laboratory, among other groups, which argues that the picture of Russian support for the war is far more complex.

We linked all of these pieces on the show, so our audience is welcome to decide for themselves. But for now, Keith, let's start with you outlining key takeaways of your articles. So what do you find out about this contested topic of measuring Russian public opinion? Sure. Just to back up a tiny bit, I first started talking to the sociologists at PS Lab, Laboratory for Public Sociology, back in

closer to the beginning of the war, early 2023, late 2022, for a piece I was doing about regime stability and this question that people are having about, could Putin be overthrown? What are the ways in which that could happen? So I was talking to historians and political scientists about that question. And in the process, I started talking to sociologists and pollsters. And

It turned out, I knew this kind of peripherally, but then I started reporting on it, that there was quite a bit of dispute about the depth of support for the war. We have these Levada polls that have been pretty consistent from the very beginning, showing quite significant support for the war between 70 and 80% among Russians. And those have been quite впечатляющие. They've been quite impressive, right? It's consistent result. It's a very high result.

First person who kind of made me question that result was Yelena Konyova from Extreme Scan. And, you know, her position is, according to her polling and the way she reads the polling, in fact, you have a core group of war supporters, which is much smaller than 70%, more like 15%. You have a similarly small group of war opponents, maybe a little bit smaller, 10 to 15%. And then you have a large group

middle group of, Maria, I think in your paper you called them loyalists, call them sort of conformists, right? And they show up in the polling as war supporters, but that support is thin. And so what really interested me in the work of PS Lab was they, from the very beginning of the war, had been doing in-depth interviews with Russians about their feelings about the war. So not just a yes-no argument,

You know, do you support the war? Do you not support the war? But, you know, what are your feelings, you know, over the course of a long conversation? One of the things that they learned quite early on was that even people who show up as supporting the war had to go through a kind of, a lot of people had to go through a real sort of spiritual agony to come around to the war, right? So they show up as, yes, supporting, but initially they were shocked. They were dismayed. They were horrified. You know, one of their respondents said, you know, I didn't talk for three days.

I was in shock. I couldn't believe it. And then the interviewer asks, and then what happened? And then he said, well, then I started thinking. And the kind of process of his thinking was to start beginning to justify the war primarily to himself. But that person shows up as a war supporter, and in fact, you could argue that they're, you

you know, that's not an accurate depiction of their state of mind. PS Lab had been doing these long interviews with people throughout the war and then more recently when I was writing the piece they did this much more interesting, you know, very interesting extensive research in the fall of 2023 where they sent three researchers to three different regions in Russia, undercover essentially, and they were doing not interviews so much as just kind of talking to people in a natural setting about the war. And it

It further, the kind of results of that research, I think further complicated our understanding of what support for the war actually means. So people might say, yes, I support the war, but I don't want my son or my husband fighting in it.

It's a very complicated picture and I think a very interesting picture and in a way, a slightly more hopeful picture than that 70% figure that we get from Nevada.

Thank you very much, Keith. Beautiful description. Certainly any public opinion, right, is inherently complex and it's important to flag it. I wanted to, though, ask one particular question where I thought I may have come across a small contradiction, where specifically you are flagging this very interesting dichotomy of the Russians at the same time being critical of the war and young people, they call them kids, dying for no reason. They haven't even lived their lives yet.

Right, the very typical quote from a Russian from inside the country. And yet, once they actually asked about the actual decision that Putin made to go to start the war, they become very defensive.

And the article and citing the peace lab experts and researchers sort of explains that by this film of optimization, the isolation that these people won't be, they feel like they won't find support if they express disagreement with the world. Correct me if I'm wrong. That's how I understood. But the fact that they feel so eager to defend their,

collective Russian-ness, the Russians, from being inflicted in any crimes in this war, any wrong decisions. Don't you think if anything that actually exposes that they feel strongly that they belong to this community of Russians, that's why they feel so desperate to defend it, to stand up for its defense? Because let's face it, if I'm itemized and I don't belong anywhere, why do I care about Russians being implicated or not in the crimes?

That's a great question. I just, I think there's a lot of different things going on in that. So specifically, you know, they're having these long, intense conversations. In this particular case, this was a kind of besidielka, you know, like a little party with some women in the Sverdlovsk region that the researcher attended and as a kind of guest. And in the process, you know, they drink a lot and they start talking and they get into these kind of interesting conversations.

conversations. And so, yes, there's this weird phenomenon of, on the one hand, criticism of the war. Why are they sending our children to die? Specifically, my children, why are they sending them? On the other hand, if you say, well, why are we Russians murdering Ukrainians? There's a strong defensive reaction, right? So what's that about? And at this point, you record that

kind of statement or those series of statements and they keep coming up over and over again, according to PS Lab. And then after that, you interpret them. And I think the interpretation can be open to questioning as you question. A kind of another aspect of the theory of PS Lab going back, you know, more than a decade is about

what you mentioned, Rhea, atomization, demobilization, right? This is, I think a lot of people agree that the Putin regime has, you know, has worked pretty hard to kind of demobilize the population, right? To depoliticize the public space, right? So we, the regime, we take care of politics and you live your lives

and we won't bother you, you don't bother us. Under conditions of this massive war, you can't go on doing that. What happens under those conditions? The conditions change. One of the arguments of PS Lab, going back to the very beginning of the war is, it is impossible. This is something that said to me, he said,

As soon as I saw those first poll numbers of snogshabatsing support so large, it knocks you off your feet, right? He said, I knew that was impossible. I knew that was impossible because you cannot simply mobilize the population overnight to support this war when you have demobilized them over the course of two decades, right? And I think, so that's the kind of

perspective that he's coming to this with. And this kind of atomization, Aliag actually argues that under conditions of wartime, people seek some kind of solidarity. So they're arguing that people who were atomized now actually are seeking community

And, you know, because they are scared and don't feel safe, right? And one of the arguments about atomization, about this process that they make is that, well, you are going to go along with, most people are going to go along with the majority precisely because they seek this sort of solidarity and community, right? So if, as Alec put it, if you have three friends and two of them support the war and the one who didn't has emigrated,

you are probably going to go along with the war, even if you initially didn't feel that way. But this question of why people are critical on the one hand,

defensive on the other, I think is a complicated question. The theory that PS Lab has is one possible explanation. I mean, I think just one final thing that I'll say about that and about polling more generally, that PS Lab really emphasized to me is that in the absence of an alternative, right? You're going to have a lot of support that in the presence of an alternative,

might change, right? So when the main Russian opposition figure is not, you know, not in exile, and he's not simply in prison, right? This is a person who has

You know, been the victim of a genuine assassination attempt from the authorities who then put him in prison where he died. Right. So what alternative do you really have to saying, yes, I support the war? You don't really have an alternative. So I think that's a very important dynamic to keep in mind.

Thank you for explaining that, Keith. And I'm definitely bringing Bryn you in. Just a quick comment that the alternative was also not quite there even before, during the previous periods, right? The general support for Russian opposition, the liberal pro-Western position was actually very small at about 10% maximum in the previous periods, yet we did not question the data reliability back then. But again, this is just a small comment. Bryn, you are an established, well-published journalist

an amazing scholar of Russia who has done a lot of opinions tracking, specifically research on the Russian public opinion. And one of the more recent focuses of your work specifically is to try to understand whether the Russian general public opinion polling and the results

and surveys can be trusted. Could you please provide your perspective on the situation? We've linked to one of this, to our podcast, this one of your pieces entitled Curious What Russians Think About the War? Ask yourself this before you read the polls. But there's, of course, much more other works that you have published. What is your opinion of, first of all, reliability of the Russian polls in Ukraine?

this broader context in the post-war period and in general, perhaps you would like to respond to what Keith just said. Thanks, Maria. Great questions. So I think there's first, there's a natural inclination in communicating survey findings to the public. This is on the part of journalists, sometimes on the part of scholars and on the part of policymakers to focus on a particular question.

as a kind of leading indicator and often a single question from a single survey or single survey series. Okay, and so this is the case with the

Levada headline figure and others asked by different Russian pollsters. At the same time, there's another perfectly understandable tendency to give short shrift to choices about how the survey was conducted, to survey methodology. If this finds its way at all into the reporting on polling, it's usually quite marginal and brief information.

So I think, you know, it's really important that we pay attention to like a few key features of surveys as we try to interpret them. One is that we have to pay attention to who is asked the questions in the first place, right? Who's responding to the surveys, right? And a kind of crucial question here is whether Russians are more fearful and less willing to respond to surveys since the start of the war, right?

And for surveys where there's a pre-war and a post-war comparison, it's possible because there was a regular ongoing effort, such as Levada's regular omnibus poll. A really important fact that is often obscured in this debate is that response rates are not appreciably lower in

than they were before February 2022. One piece of evidence that is often pointed to in the kind of public debate around the reliability of Russian polling in wartime is a kind of trend of declining response rates since the start of the war. But we need broader context here because response rates are declining across all contexts. And particularly if we're thinking about

modes of interview like telephone surveys, the technical ability to block calls and response rates in that mode in particular, right, are declining everywhere. And so this trend in that broader context doesn't look so different. In our own surveys,

which re-interviewed the same group of respondents a couple times before the war, and then again after the war, we find that the willingness to participate in surveys changes very little in terms of the types of people who are willing to participate in the surveys before the war and after the war.

So to me, that's another really important piece of evidence that if one believes that people have become more fearful and that certain types of people with certain types of oppositional political attitudes

should simply be too afraid to participate in the polls after the start of the war. We should see very clearly in the survey research that we've done that those people drop out of the survey. They become less willing to participate in the surveys after the war. And that's simply not the case. And that points us to thinking more about

like what it means to participate in a survey and what it means to express one's opinions, right? And I think often we forget how meaningful it is to people to be asked their opinions and to have the opportunity to express them. In fact, people who hold oppositional views

often place an incredibly high value on being able to freely express their opinions. I think that that's important to keep in mind and also helps us to understand why it is that perhaps quite contrary to conventional wisdom and perhaps surprisingly, we find that people who were opponents of the regime prior to the war are actually, if anything, a little bit more likely to

to continue to be willing to be surveyed after the war. And I could say a bit more about that. It's a nuanced finding and I'm happy to elaborate. Another thing that we need to be paying attention to is whether people who agree to be surveyed are willing to answer potentially sensitive questions.

So this is the question of whether people are evasive and they're non-responding to survey questions, whether people simply say don't know when you get to the, because many sociological surveys cover a variety of topics and perhaps when we get to the really truly sensitive questions about political support or about war support, people are no longer willing to answer those questions.

And in fact, what we see is that non-response is quite low for many potentially sensitive questions. It continues to be quite low after the war. That's especially true for things like approval ratings of President Putin.

The level of don't know responding to war support questions is higher, and there have been lots of analysis of this, lots of reference to this in the public debate about the reliability of polling. But much of the evidence from analyses of these

don't know responses to war support suggests that these responses more likely reflect respondents' lack of clear opinions on the war rather than a fear of expressing opposition. So this is actually more consistent with what I take from

Keith's writing and the work of the PS lab about some sense of internal conflict or some sense of uncertainty or I'm an expert here or I'm not ready to hold sort of like a stable, very committed opinion.

Last, let me say that there's incredible importance to kind of how the questions are asked, right? The question wording itself, right, deserves attention, right? We've not mentioned yet in this conversation that the kind of leading indicator of war support that Levada uses is one that asks respondents their opinion on the actions of the Russian military forces in Ukraine, right?

Now, the reason, as I understand why the question is crafted in this way, is a desire to elide the fact that they can't legally refer to a war in the survey and putting respondents at risk.

And they prefer not to use perhaps the euphemism of a special military operation. And so this particular formulation does neither of those two things. But what it does is it focuses on support for the troops, the action of Russian military forces in Ukraine. And so it elicits a particularly high level of support.

And that's true also of question wordings that mention the decision to initiate the special military operation, a decision which everyone knows was Putin's. And so it kind of his authority attaches to responses to questions that kind of invoke him. So it's important that those measures come lead us to a slightly different

headline conclusion than other measures that are out there. For example, if one asks about the desire to continue

the special military operation stated levels of support are a lot lower and I'd be happy to talk more about that finding. So the polling, I think, aligns with the view that people's initial reaction was shock, was paralysis, was accompanied by a range of negative emotions,

right, including sadness and others, right, any of the things that Keith described in the qualitative work of the PS lab, right, but that many people came around to support that decision, right, a smaller group because it was, because they believed strongly that it was the very best option before Russia at that time, and continues to be, and a larger group because the war was

thrust upon them because it's important to finish what has been started because doing otherwise would be devastating for Russia and so on.

Excellent analysis. Thank you very much, Bryn. Just to your point that it's absolutely true that formulations do affect the results and not just the questions formulation, but also some of the polling companies create vary the number of options. So for example, if you add, I do not know, I don't want to answer as an option that you read out loudly to the respondents, you decrease the rate of support of the world, but that's

a trick because in most other that's not the conventional practice to do to do this pulling usually so

Yes, you can deflate the word support in the official responses of the Russian respondents. But the question is, what is an accepted practice across the scholars, which makes it more comparable? But altogether, to the extent there is a variation, I find it's about 10% points, depending on how exactly surveys run, face-to-face or phone, online, and depending on the question formulation. Bryn?

I just add that some of the lower estimates of war support also from questions that pose and have hypothetical scenarios to respondents. It turns out right in the survey research practices, this is very difficult.

for respondents to put themselves in these kind of counterfactual or hypothetical scenarios. If you could turn back the clock, what would you do? This sort of thing. And so that's another way in which low levels of support can be elicited.

simply because they tend to elicit higher rates of don't know responding. And one more question to you, Bryn, based on the common objection that I also hear from critics of the polls in Russia. It's an autocracy after all. How can we even think about running polls in autocracy? It's a closed off, controlled context, which is very unlike democratic settings where the notion of public opinion, actually something else.

Yeah, autocracies are a broad category. So in some autocracies, surveys have to be registered with the government.

before they're ever conducted. And it's interesting that I think, you know, many of us might have wondered if Russia was headed in that direction at the start of the war. And in fact, it's not implemented that kind of policy. You can also imagine cases where people face, uh, retaliation for participation in surveys, right? To the best of my knowledge, uh,

Russia has not been one of those cases. There are no examples of people being prosecuted for views expressed in surveys. Now, there is one example that is sometimes circulated as if it is one of those cases where there was a media company that was doing street intercept

So this is stopping people on the street, you know, on camera with no protection of the interviewees identity, none of the anonymization that is part of the ethical practice of sociological polling.

And in this case, there was a criminal case against the interviewee. But that's quite a different type of case. And I think that one reason why we've not seen in Russia cases of this type against people for their views expressed in surveys is that the Kremlin itself relies on these tools extensively.

It relies on these tools to test messages, to identify pockets of discontent. And so I think one of the reasons that they've not gone in the direction of more repressive measures is that they rely on these tools themselves. In terms of whether more broadly we can rely on polls and autocracies, I think we have to be careful and use the tools that we know are best suited to

um, eliciting valid and reliable responses, including in democratic contexts where we struggle with many of the same issues. Um, this is a continuum. This is not a clear cutoff, right? And, and democratic contexts, social desirability bias, right? The, the desire to conform, um, is on many topics of social and political importance, right? Quite strong. And, uh,

and in particular places and at particular times. And so we have to use the kind of the best practices that we have, which may include asking the most sensitive questions, not in the most direct ways or not only in direct ways, but in indirect ways that provide respondents an added degree of confidentiality, an added degree of anonymity, including from an interviewer,

and their responses by asking questions in different modes, those with an interviewer and without an interviewer and triangulating across and looking for kind of stability and the response patterns across these different approaches. So I think using the best techniques that we have, and not in every autocratic context, but in many of

many kind of competitive authoritarian or hybrid regimes, as scholars would call them, we can rely on Poles cautiously paying attention to some of the features that I highlighted at that outset. Thank you very much, Bryn. So to sum it up, in general, there are reasons to believe that with all the reservations, there is a degree of support for the war in Russia among the Russians. And the Poles haven't really, the polling

the quality of the Poland data has not fundamentally changed since the start of the war. There were some fluctuations, of course, but not to the extent that we can question the result. And the results show that the majority of Russians, perhaps unwillingly, perhaps without much enthusiasm, unlike what we've seen back in 2014, do tend to side with the official line on this war. The question then, Keith and Brent, both of you,

So I see the parallel and what you're saying is that there is this middle category, maybe conformist, loyal group that does not have very strong opinions about the war and maybe lacks of clear, to use your wording, lacks clear opinion, right? But nonetheless tends to side with the war. This is actually the category that is most debated among the analysts. Like do we, which basically, which box do we put it in?

Are they war supporters, war opponents? Are they just the middle ground we should fully ignore? So do we call this reality, this complex reality of the Russian public opinion, actual support, Keith? What's the label we put on it? Is it acquiescence, indifference? This is kind of an important question, right? Because partly from the policy perspective, it also helps us understand how long Russia can sustain this horrible war against Ukraine, right? The label in this sense matters. It's not just a word.

Well, I guess I have two separate answers to that. I think just to go back a second to what Bryn was saying, I mean, I think this sense of being conflicted is really important. One of the people that I talked to, Kadyl Rogoff, who's a political scientist, he said, "What you learn from reading the PS Lab reports is that we tend to think of public opinion as people 65 percent or

are for the war and 35% are against or 70-30. But actually, what you learn from PS Lab is that people are internally conflicted, right? So they're 65% for the war internally and 35% against it. So I think

That's how I now think of that middle category, right? They are people who are conflicted and, you know, given an alternative, then I think a little bit later, we'll talk about kind of peace scenarios, right? My understanding, maybe it's a hope, but my analysis is that those people would be very happy to have a peace scenario.

You know, and so if Putin comes back tomorrow and says, good news, we won the war, the war is over, we will now have peace. I think he will get majority, you know, overwhelming majority support. So what are those people? Are those people war supporters? Or are they, you know, I think, yeah, they're acquiescing and they're loyal and they're not going to stick their necks out. But they would be very happy if the war ended today.

And so I think that's, to me, that's maybe the most important kind of takeaway. And I do think that is quite different from the kind of message that we've gotten over and over from Levada, among others, that you have this, you know, zombified population that loves the war, is aggressive, wants the war to go on and on and on.

That's been the kind of reading of the Levada polling. How do you explain then, Keith, that it's been three years of the toughest war in Russian history since the end of the Second World War, about a million casualties on the Russian side alone, total restructuring of the economic, socioeconomic model inside of the country, and yet

No powerful anti-war movement has emerged even outside of Russia, where you can argue it's more safe to protest. How do you explain this reality? It seems to me that this framework that you propose does not really help us forecast the future very well. Don't you think? It wouldn't be possible to imagine such a horrible war not facing a lot of protests outside of Russia within this framework.

uh well i i disagree um i think the question of so right a minute ago you asked two separate questions i only answered one i think that in terms of looking ahead how long can putin sustain the war i think um from the findings of ps lab the answer is for quite a long time people have gotten used to the war it's become part of their everyday reality they talk about it

in terms of kind of like, well, who got the death benefit among our acquaintances because her husband died? And what is she doing with the money? It's no longer this kind of...

you know, war and peace, you know, good and evil conversation. It's kind of just a part of everyday life and gossip. And so to that question, I think the answer is, yeah, this war from a public opinion perspective can go on, I think, indefinitely. That's a separate question from what would happen if

if Putin were to decide for reasons of his own that he does not want to keep the war going, and would people welcome that? And again, I think the answer is yes. To the question of an anti-war movement, I mean, I think that's unfair. I think, you know, whatever we think of the value of polling or not polling, thousands of people have been imprisoned.

for opposing the war. If you go out and oppose the war, you will be hit with... What's the actual percentage of these opposition groups who are definitely extremely courageous people constitute in the overall size of the Russian population?

I think it's a small percentage, but I mean, you know, I think according to polling, it's 10 to 15%, right? Not 10 to 15% of the people in Russia are in jail, but it's just, you know, we over here, you know, we might be heading in that direction, but I think it's quite

For us to sit over here and say, you know, Russians should be going out into the streets more than they have. I wonder if that's fair. That's not what we're saying. It's not what I'm saying. I'm asking, what is the actual evidence that you rely on when you say that there is alternative Russia? Where do you find it?

And, okay, yes, there are definitely heroic Russians who have been arrested for posting something anti-war, say, on the social media, and they're extremely courageous and they deserve a lot of admiration and respect, but they're still a tiny little minority in the rural group, which we are discussing with the polling.

Right. So I think I, yes, I mean, that's historically, I think it's always been a small group. Right. And the question is, what about this group in the middle? And,

I mean, I think that's what we're talking about, right? These are not people who are going to go out in the street. They are going to go along with the war, but I also think they'll go along with the peace. It's this middle group, right? So we're not talking about a big anti-war movement. I think a big anti-war movement under the current conditions is impossible, totally impossible.

Thank you, Keith. I'm trying to understand where is the alternative data that tells us about the existence of this other Russia? Sorry, we're still in the thunder. Bryn, may I bring you in and get you, have your comment on this? Sure. So I want to go back to what I think is, again, kind of a misreading and a misreading that depends too heavily on

Again, this single indicator which has been taken as the leading indicator of the Levada polling. I find, as Keith summarized it, the zombified Russian public sort of a strange reading of the Levada polling since they've also long shown that around half of Russians favor negotiations over war continuation.

which aligns quite well with what I found in my own research with coauthors in the Russian election study. So to kind of return to Maria's question about kind of the nature of war support, let me first say real quickly what we did, which was in August and September of 2021, this was just before Russia's parliamentary elections,

did a large-scale nationally representative face-to-face survey in Russia. This is the kind of survey that tends to attract the broadest, most representative participation.

We then re-interviewed respondents for a second time prior to the start of the war in December, just after those parliamentary elections. And this was part of this Russian election study that Maria mentioned, which has covered every national election in Russia since the 1990s and is actually the longest running election study in a non-democracy.

And so we then re-interviewed the same respondents after the full-scale invasion. So we know a lot about the baseline political attitudes of the people we surveyed before the war, and we know how their attitudes towards the war changed after the full-scale invasion, okay?

What we find is that fewer than half of all respondents declined to express outright support for continuing the war. And in fact, among Putin supporters, only a bare majority chose the kind of fight on response.

So there is some nuance in the desire for continuing the war. So if you have kind of in mind the kind of war enthusiasm, a kind of propagandistic image that the Kremlin tries to project in its propaganda of an enthusiastic and kind of broad base of support, I think that's not the right message to take.

So why? Right. So a couple of things to back up. One step to remember is that we actually asked a question about sending Russian troops into Ukraine in December. So on the eve of the full scale invasion and support for that move was very, very low on the eve of the war. And that was true across Ukraine.

Russia's political parties. So that means it was true amongst people who identified with more right-wing nationalists of Russia's parties, but as far as the opposition goes, it was true also of those aligned with the Communist Party, it was true, obviously, who aligned with liberal leaders, and it was true of supporters of Putin's own party.

We also have to remember, it's easy to forget now, that support for Putin was near its historical nadir, just above 60% approval around this time. So Putin could expect to draw support for the war from some of his backers, but he could also expect at least some negative impact on the economy that would make that task much harder.

And so he needed to build support for the war beyond kind of his coalition and I use that term carefully, his coalition is not something cohesive it's quite heterogeneous but I mean people who express support for him or approval of him in office right. And he did this by linking the war with some themes that already had much broader resonance.

Patriotism is one, skepticism about NATO and Western intentions towards Russia is another, but there were also some less obvious themes that were chosen for their especially wide resonance, things like traditional values.

So then this becomes a war to protect Russia from the West's efforts to impose its nonstandard, nontraditional values on Russia. And I do believe that these are things that resonated with some citizens

values and predispositions prior to the war. It brought people who were disengaged from politics, people who disapproved of Putin as president on the eve of the war, and of course, many people who supported him but had long opposed sending Russian troops into Ukraine, were tired of the war in Ukraine, right, on the eve of the war, into the fold. So that's how I understand the group that supports the war as such in Ukraine.

in surveys today. Thank you, Bryn. Keith, I'd love for you to perhaps respond to these findings and also perhaps time for us to move to the questions of "so what?"

Okay, so we have this group that is conflicted, that sort of sides with the Kremlin goals, but they would also be happy to jump at the opportunity to start the ceasefire. Is there a particular way, Keith, do you see that we should focus in our policy analysis, perhaps structure and communication in a certain way towards Russia, or perhaps thinking about ways to outreach to these groups to show them an alternative, as you've flagged repeatedly, that they're currently lacking?

So how would you, what does this finding mean for us in terms of going forward, perhaps trying to destroy, undermine the support for the war that exists in Russia? That's a tough one. But I guess I would just go back to, I mean, something that Bryn said a minute ago that I did want to

kind of poke at a little is this, you know, do the Levada polls tell you that the Russians are zombified? If you look at them closely, perhaps they don't, right? If you look at them as Brynn looks at them or, you know, as Brynn looks at them in conjunction with her own polling, is that the message that we have had in the U.S. media for the last three years? I would argue yes.

And despite your good work to challenge that in various spaces. So I think we could start by just acknowledging that a lot of Russians, I don't know, what's 10% of the Russian population? That's several, that's some millions of people have been war opponents.

A lot of people left the country because they were so disgusted and horrified by the war, but the kind of plurality of people have gone along with it, which doesn't speak wonderfully of those people, but I think Bryn and I agree that, or Bryn's findings confirm that

are not supporters of the war continuing, right? So I guess just kind of having a public dialogue where we look at Russian opinion, Russian population as quite as heterogeneous of not having a whole ton of alternatives with regard to

at least their public position with regard to the war, that might be a start in just thinking through what a future relationship would look like.

Thank you. I will just flag that while they certainly, as I definitely have seen consistently in the polls, that many favor the end to the war, they also do not favor returning the Russian-occupied territories to Ukraine. So that's unfortunately a fine line to walk, that they will be fine with freezing the situation, but they will not be fine with returning the Russian-occupied territories.

I would say that I have also seen those and I think that they tell us something about where the Russian public is now with a desire to have achieved some kind of what they would recognize as victory and the war for it to have been for something, not for naught. But I also would say that

as I read the public opinion evidence, that in some respects it's quite malleable based on the cue that it gets from Putin and based on the explanations that are offered for what might be various post ceasefire status quos. Yeah, and maybe have some other things to say about kind of how the messaging might go. But let me stop there, Marianne, if you want me to come back in on that, I will. Keith, anything to add to that before I move to Bryn?

Oh, yeah, I agree with that. Mm-hmm.

And I also wanted to, perhaps as one of the last questions, to ask you to use some of the other findings from the work, say, for example, on the Russian autocratic middle class, which actually flags, correct me if I'm wrong, that contrary to predictions of modernization theory, middle class Russians do not necessarily become more supportive of democracy, right? Could you explain the reasons for it? And also, what sort of policy implications does it give us? For example, maybe...

The fact that they are dependent on the state makes them so likely to side with the regime, but maybe we need to work towards reducing the state resources that allow the state to co-opt those groups.

Sure. So the kind of status economy that Putin has built and built over now many years in power and many reconfigurations of the Russian economy includes lots of groups that are dependent on the state, that work in the state sector, that depend for their livelihoods and their status on the state.

And this group supported Putin. This group was more skeptical about democracy in Russia on the eve of the war. And during the war, they've been mobilized to help present the image of enthusiastic support.

They are both the supporters and they have also been used by the regime and they have been mobilized by the regime to present this image of enthusiastic support of people marching, of people lining up in the form of the letter Z. The image of people are crazy about the war and crazy about Putin. This group was easier for the regime to mobilize for that purpose because they were already aligned properly.

with the regime and saw its policies as benefiting them and their support is benefiting them personally. And then the war has had clear winners and losers. And if we think about the Russian middle class, as Keith was

discussing emigres, right? Many among Russia's middle class who were least dependent on the state and who were more democratic, more liberal in their orientations, right, emigrated after the full-scale invasion. So the war has only kind of exacerbated these tensions within the Russian middle class, you know, kind of

leaving behind and kind of increasing the status and influence of a Russian middle class, which the Kremlin, you know, which is loyal to the Kremlin and which the Kremlin now promises to expand even from the ranks of war veterans and their families and through this very sort of prioritization of them and its programs and policies.

The question is, what sorts of pressures do those promises place on the Kremlin in the long run? To what extent can it deliver on them or to what extent will those groups be patient, even if, as the Kremlin has in the past, made promises on which it's not been able to deliver? I think that that's the question. But in terms of policy prescriptions, Maria, I agree with you that in the longer run, a

reorientation of Russia's economy from heavily statist economy, which would help to provide broader prosperity in Russian society and would also to

reduce some of the pathologies that we see that come politically from heavily state-dependent economies in non-democratic contexts and not just in Russia would be the way forward. Fortunately, as you said, then Dan, given that so far what we've seen since the start of the 2022 war, the country was actually becoming more centralized state-controlled and renationalization is unraveled.

Unfortunately, we only have time for maybe one last question that I want to ask you both being cognizant of your time you genuinely shared with us. So imagine there are some progress in the ceasefire talks, unlikely at the moment, but things change quickly.

What do you think is the leeway available to Putin going forward to relaunch the war if he wanted to? Since we know looking at the military reconstitution, given that the overall orientations of the Russian elites and the Kremlin, that the ultimate goals in Ukraine have so far not been achieved. And it is likely that the intention to go after, say, Ukraine will remain there.

Having looked at the Russian polls and the contradictory, more nuanced dynamic of them, but also historical trends that we actually have seen very similar dynamic after 2014, Crimea annexation and the war in Donbass. And Bryn, to your point, we've also seen with the war in Syria that Russians were consistently opposed to sending a Russian army to Syria before the start of the war, but several weeks after it started, they actually

also embraced it. What do these findings tell us about Putin's ability to relaunch, restart another war in case the ceasefire talks succeed? Keith. I don't know. I mean, I suspect the answer is

that he can only zigzag so many times, right? And part of his clear current refusal to, you know, end the war, despite, you know, pressure from whatever pressure he's getting from the US, which is clearly not very much, is partly a cognizance of the fact that once the war stops, it'll be a little harder to start it again, right? He has...

He has gotten everybody, you know, worked up about it to a certain extent. And if he declares victory and peace, well, people will be quite relieved, I think. And yeah, it'll be harder to start it again. And that's a reason from his perspective not to stop. You know, I've thought about this a lot, you know, this sort of

The belief, the modernization theory belief that if we just, you know, if Russia just opens up to the world, if Russians achieve a certain standard of living, if Russians have access to information online, all of that stuff happened and we still, you know, got Vladimir Putin and we still got the war, right? It's certainly a challenge to what we at least thought, you know, would matter 30 years ago. I guess for me, the question is still, what's the alternative to

to some future form of engagement with Russia, right? I don't see one. So clearly, I mean, I think we all agree that the political situation, you know, the political mood has deteriorated in Russia since the start of the war, right? If there was some hope at the beginning that Putin had, you know, overplayed his hand, that we would get an anti-war movement, right? That finally Putin had gone too far, that has not happened,

In fact, Putin has consolidated his control of the country in all sorts of ways. So I think in terms of kind of what we can hope for is for the war to end sooner rather than later, and then for Putin eventually to leave the scene, and then for alternatives to emerge that will appeal to that kind of middle Russia that we've been talking about. And then we'll see what happens. At the moment, we're still in a very dark moment. Yeah.

Thank you, very deep thoughts Keith and unfortunately for all the sophisticated scholarly paradesis we also have no hope other than hoping for the natural causes to take the toll. Bryn? Yeah I guess I would go back to the point that I think Putin, the public opinion is quite malleable based on the cue that it gets from Putin and so I think the ability to relaunch the invasion

likely stands. Now, that said, I think kind of the dynamic that I would signal is that there's a tension between financing the war and financing social programs and paying attention to kind of domestic priorities. You know, most Russians prioritize the latter. They prioritize spending on

the well-being of citizens, on better health care, and on education, right? And, you know, we have to remember that the Kremlin has maintained its support for this kind of aggressive foreign policy in part because

because the war effort and labor scarcity have driven up salaries, and in part because it's been able to make very generous payments to volunteers, because it's paid out these very substantial death benefits, right? How long it's able to do that in the course of the zigzag that Keith described,

You know, is an open question. And, you know, if we could hope for, you know, an alternative Russia, I think it's down to Russians' desire to live well and under a government that engages in less self-dealing, that cares more for people like themselves and their children.

And I think that the game that Putin has been very successful at and that all autocrats play is in hiding the alternatives. So if those alternatives-- I mean, we remember how they kept an anti-war alternative off the ballot in the last presidential election. And I think the continued success

depends on keeping those alternatives out of sight. But politics have a way of being unpredictable there. And so we hope.

Absolutely. Thank you very much, Bryn. Just to add to that point that one of the reasons I believe that while the late Soviet-Afghanistan war has unraveled in a very different pattern was precisely the economic crisis that coincided with the horrible war, which really changed the societal attitude to it. And perhaps there is another policy implication of this analysis.

I thank our dear guests for really fascinating and depth conversation. We hope to continue at some point. Bryn and Keith, please continue your fantastic work. And I also wanted to flag the importance of bringing together the various perspective, like from the journalism policy academia that I feel strongly helped us enrich the understanding of the nuanced complex dynamic on the ground. Thank you so much for joining us, Keith and Bryn. Thank you.

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