cont
P.S. Lab’s hope from the start of the war was to push back on those numbers. The group had been founded, in 2011, by Erpyleva, Oleg Zhuravlev, and Natalia Savelyeva, graduate students at the time, who wanted to practice an in-depth and theoretically sophisticated sociology in the tradition of
Pierre Bourdieu, who had subjected the French class system to withering scrutiny. They also took inspiration from Bourdieu’s students Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, who together wrote a book called “
On Justification,” examining how people explained their lives and ideas to others and to themselves. P.S. Lab expanded over time to include several more sociologists, a political scientist, and a cognitive psychologist who studied propaganda; the work was mostly on a voluntary basis, though occasionally P.S. Lab received small, project-based grants. In its first decade, the group conducted large-scale studies of people’s attitudes toward politics, labor movements, and, after 2014, the ongoing war in the Ukrainian east. The researchers wanted to know whether the protest movement that arose in 2011 and 2012 could credibly challenge the Putin regime, and whether Russians actually believed all the propaganda they were exposed to. (The answer was yes, but not very deeply.)
Zhuravlev said that, when he and his colleagues saw the result of the first Levada poll after the 2022 invasion, they simply couldn’t believe it. P.S. Lab had spent a decade studying the ways in which the regime had depoliticized the population; it was inconceivable that the Kremlin could mobilize people overnight in favor of an aggressive war of choice. A more careful survey might find that support for the war was less than it seemed. “Or we could see what lay beneath the support,” Zhuravlev said. They put out a call for volunteer interviewers and started speaking to people, many of whom they found through friends’ and family members’ networks, sometimes for hours at a time. “There was no opportunity for people to talk about the war,” Zhuravlev said. “So they talked with us.”
In the first set of post-invasion interviews, the P.S. Lab researchers confirmed their suspicion that, instead of demonstrating broad war support, as per Levada, Russians fell into three distinct groups: a small, core group of committed war supporters (around ten to fifteen per cent of the respondents); a similarly small group of committed war opponents; and a third, much larger group that was undecided or fell in between the two extremes. People who were undecided about the war repeatedly stated in interviews that they felt themselves to be separate from the leadership in the Kremlin. Putin’s decision-making process was opaque to them. Maybe he had his reasons? “People stressed their total alienation from the politicians in the Kremlin as a way of expressing their support for them,” Zhuravlev said. The final report, which came to three hundred pages, was written in an accessible style but with a great deal of both qualitative and quantitative detail. It was published in September, 2022—“Too fast for academia, but too slow for journalism,” as Erpyleva put it—and concluded that committed war supporters and opponents actually had a lot in common. They were politicized, rigid in their views, and intolerant of other opinions. The large group in the middle was more open to conversation, but they were becoming less inclined to discuss the war. In fact, this was true of all three groups: they increasingly wanted to avoid discussing the subject altogether. For P.S. Lab, the first round of interviews confirmed their initial impulse. “We realized that most people didn’t have a settled opinion of the war, and so our method was correct,” Zhuravlev said. “Polls can only measure opinions. If people don’t have settled opinions, you need to talk with them.”
P.S. Lab’s second report, based on interviews in the months after the partial mobilization, showed that the war-supporting and opposing groups had remained mostly stable (though some opponents had left the country), but the middle group was beginning to rationalize Russia’s actions. To Erpyleva, this was a matter of mental habit. “People who were politically active before February 24th were able to turn their negative emotions into a political position,” she said. They became war opponents. But those who hadn’t participated in politics before were unable to start now. “When the government tells you that the war is justified by reasons No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and that, if you don’t support it, you’re a traitor, then in order to say ‘I’m against it’ you must have the inner means to form a political position. Because your position is now radical.” And so, she went on, many people whose first response to the war was shock and even outrage began to justify it.
One man, aged sixty, recalled the day of the invasion: “One of my old friends and classmates called me from Crimea. She said that troops had been marching through the city for hours. And that her son was on the front lines near Belgorod. I was in shock. I probably didn’t speak for three days.”
“And then?” the interviewer asked. Then, the man replied, he started speaking again. His silence had been “irrational,” he said, and, after three days, he started “thinking rationally.” The content of his thinking, in the presentation of P.S. Lab, mostly was a repetition of the
propaganda on TV. He had decided to justify the war; after that, it was just a matter of finding the words.
For years, Zhuravlev said, sociologists had spoken of Russia as an atomized society—one where social bonds are thin, where people look out only for themselves and their families. In conditions of warfare, when fear is dominant, atomized people seek social cohesion. “If you have three friends,” Zhuravlev said, “and two of them support the war, and the one who opposes it moves to Georgia, you’re going to find a way to come around.”
In P.S. Lab’s third round of research, Marina, in Krasnodar, had, in some ways, the easiest assignment: Krasnodar is a resort region, on the Black Sea coast, where people tend to spend time outside, at leisure. In October of 2023, when Marina arrived, it was warm and sunny. She would walk down the main boulevard in the mornings; if she saw someone on a bench, on their own, she would strike up a conversation. She’d ask about
COVID, about local politics, and then about the war.
For the most part, Marina found, people did not want to talk about the war. When Marina asked whether they sensed its proximity—the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea, which had been badly damaged by a truck bomb the year before, was a three-hour drive away—they responded with incredulity. Maybe it was near Belgorod, they said; maybe it was near Rostov. But how could she say it was near here? Still, there were constant reminders. The airport was closed, groceries had become more expensive, and refugees were arriving from the war zone. One woman’s kids were being taught about the war in kindergarten. Were they too young for that, the woman wondered? But this was happening all over Russia, she said, so it was probably O.K.
Most of Marina’s conversations were friendly, but there were a few unpleasant incidents. At one point, Marina, walking by a day spa, was handed a flyer advertising a free massage. Marina felt that she could use a free massage. She went in and was immediately seen by a middle-aged massage therapist, who started working on her neck and shoulders. Marina engaged her in the usual conversation. The massage therapist, a war supporter, was happy to talk. She gave an interesting description of her media consumption. “On the Internet,” she explained, there are so many fakes: “You have to figure out that this is a fake, this is not a fake.” Whereas with the news on TV, “you watch it for the day and you’re done. No problem.” As for the war, it was hard for the massage therapist to say who started it and why.
“But we started it,” Marina said.
“Who’s we?” said the massage therapist.
“Well, I mean, Putin started it,” Marina said.
The invocation of Putin seemed to set the massage therapist off. She lost her temper and threatened Marina, saying that she would “call someone” who would come to straighten out Marina on the subject of Putin and the war. “They’ll tear you to pieces over Putin!” she said. Marina, frightened, fled the spa, almost leaving behind her shirt, and spent the next hour looking over her shoulder to see whether the woman had, in fact, called someone.
“A few years ago, if someone had said they were going to call someone because I’d criticized Putin, it would have been very odd,” Marina told me. “I’d have laughed. Whereas, this time, it really scared me.” Marina, who is still in Russia as of this writing, has developed a very keen sense of what is allowed and what can get you in trouble. Being detained at a protest is no big deal, unless it happens three times in one year—then you could be imprisoned. Marina is a soft-spoken academic, but she has been detained twice at anti-government protests: once in 2022, for a night, and another time last year, when she spent ten days in jail. “They can’t get me for ‘fakes,’ ” she said, referring to the law against “fake information” which has frequently been used to jail war opponents, “because I’m very careful about what I post on social media. But ‘promoting terrorism’—that one is very elastic.”
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