For nearly a year now, Ukraine and the West have been waiting for an open rebellion from an abstract notion of the Russian people against their government. Yet there have been no major protests in Russia, never mind anything approaching a mass uprising, nor is there any sign of one on the horizon, despite a great many examples of individual resistance, as evidenced by the number of prosecutions for anti-war statements and activity. On the contrary, support for the country’s leadership is if anything becoming more aggressive, while people’s indifference and ability to adapt are increasingly striking.
Searching for the reasons for this passive acceptance of a vicious war against a neighboring country brings to mind an old Soviet joke in which the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev boasts to his U.S. counterpart that the Soviet people will put up with anything, and will never rebel against Communism. To make his point, he announces several unpopular measures to an accepting crowd, culminating in the announcement that they will all be hanged the next day. Finally, there is a reaction from the crowd, when a timid voice asks: “Should we bring the rope ourselves, or will the trade union provide it?”
Such is the reaction of a significant proportion of the Russian population today. During the partial mobilization last fall, which swiftly turned out to be nothing short of an invitation to the scaffold, those called up found themselves having to buy their own rope—in this case, body armor and first aid kits—due to army shortages.
It certainly might seem that in a modernized urban society that has not fought a war on this scale in many years, and has in three decades of a market economy acquired all the standard consumer instincts, any crude intervention by the state into the peaceful flow of modern life should surely provoke mass protest. But instead of protesting, what we are witnessing is people’s adaptation to their new way of existence.
Emigration can be considered a form of protest: people voting with their feet against the regime. But it’s also a form of adaptation. If people can’t change anything, they choose timeserving pragmatic strategies.
More than 40 percent of Russians have experienced shock, horror, fear, and anxiety over Russia’s actions in Ukraine, according to polls. Yet while cumulative levels of depression and fear have grown since the start of the “special operation,” they have not reached the levels seen in the mid-1990s, for example, or during the 1998 default. Judging by these indicators, the real shock was not the “special operation” itself, but the partial mobilization: during that period (in September), 47 percent of respondents said they were experiencing negative emotions, compared with 32 percent in March. As soon as it seemed to most people that the threat of mobilization had passed, those negative emotions, while not disappearing completely, stabilized at tolerable levels. Meanwhile, the suggestion that people bring their own rope had only a minimal impact on public support for the government.
This inherent submission is undoubtedly a consequence of pent-up fear, reluctance to acknowledge the problem, bewilderment and disorientation, and the inability to process the meaning and significance of this colossal shock: bigger than any the country has experienced in its post-Soviet period. At the same time, it’s a return to long-dormant habits of responding to violence and totalitarian acts by the state with herd-like obedience.
Feeling like hostages of the state and of Russia’s standoff with the “collective West,” Russians are falling victim to Stockholm Syndrome. They are convincing themselves that the actions of their head of state, who embodies the country itself, have logic and historical righteousness entirely on their side.
In addition, a false sense of duty toward the state is being resurrected. It’s telling that in response to a proposal to defer mobilization for entrepreneurs, State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin asked indignantly “And who will defend the Motherland?” Given the country’s demographic problems, it would have been logical to ask “And who will work for the country’s economy?” But there is no one to ask such questions.
The generational trauma that has also been rudely awakened amid the current shock teaches people that the basic behaviors of self-defense are silence and passive (or sometimes, the imitation of active) support for the political leadership. This was the dominant model of behavior for the generations who lived through Soviet times. According to the sociologist Lev Gudkov, in a situation of shock and danger, ordinary people assume the fetal position, trying to simultaneously disappear while inwardly preparing to be punched in the head.
Yet the hand that punches and robs is also the hand that gives and feeds. It’s not just fear, the return of totalitarian behavior, and awakening of post-traumatic historical experience that have given rise to this built-in submission. It’s also rooted in the extreme socioeconomic dependency of a significant proportion of the Russian population on the state.
One of the indexes that can be used to measure this dependency is that of people’s real disposable income: a figure that ever since the annexation of Crimea has been falling, stagnating, or growing slightly from a very low base level. Russia’s gradual isolation, life under sanctions, the encroaching of the security services into civic freedoms, and a refusal to take modernizing steps in the socioeconomic sphere have led to the country’s economic stagnation.
No less telling in this context is the structure of people’s incomes. The proportion of social benefits in people’s income remains high, having exceeded even Soviet levels four years ago. In the first nine months of 2022, they accounted for 21.7 percent of income (up from 19 percent for the whole of 2018).
The hand that feeds requires political loyalty in exchange. And at a time of turbulence and uncertainty on the markets, including the labor market, this loyalty manifests itself through large-scale support for the authorities: sincere or insincere, active or passive, as long as it is on show.
Research conducted by the Carnegie Moscow Center in 2018 showed that overall, Russians were not against the idea of running their own business, but that they understood that the conditions and institutional framework in Russia were not conducive to doing so, and so they preferred to be employed by someone else. It will be impossible to do away with this state-serving habit any time soon, and any new system will have to match the extremely state-controlled socioeconomic model that has formed in the years of Putin’s rule. It’s also worth noting that the socioeconomic dependence of the population on the state is not only and not always simply a combination of circumstances. Sometimes it is a conscious choice.
Economic determinism points to the unequivocal conclusion that financial dependence on the state leads to political dependence. Yet in authoritarian regimes, politics, psychology, and economics are all interconnected, and all influence each other. Psychological motives of submission, group narcissism (“we’re better than others”), self-identification with an autocrat leader, conformist aggression (“the whole West is against us, so we will stand with our leader, however he might act”), and paternalist attitudes, especially during a military conflict, also have a role to play. So do propaganda and prevailing ideas about the “correct” behavior of good citizens and patriots of their country.
In a wartime situation in which the leader is asking the nation to share responsibility with him via the mobilization, the instinct for what the German psychologist Erich Fromm termed “defensive aggression” is stronger than ever. In a situation of group narcissism, Fromm wrote in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, “One’s own group becomes a defender of human dignity, decency, morality, and right. Devilish qualities are ascribed to the other group; it is treacherous, ruthless, cruel, and basically inhuman. The violation of one of the symbols of group narcissism… is reacted to with such intense fury and aggression by the people that they are even willing to support their leaders in a policy of war.”
