The well-known Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who presents himself as a member of the Russian opposition, has just published a Facebook post linking to his opinion piece in The Washington Post. In it he argues that there is a spectacular disconnect between Russian public opinion and the official results of the recent State Duma elections. According to him, the majority of Russian citizens want to end “the war in Ukraine,” yet this position is shared by none of the 450 newly “elected” members of the Duma.
At first glance this sounds like a courageous indictment of the Kremlin’s electoral theatre. On closer reading, the post is highly speculative and does not withstand criticism, for several reasons.
First, the language. The author speaks of “the war in Ukraine.” He avoids the only accurate formulations: Russia’s war against Ukraine, or better still, Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine. This is not a stylistic detail. “The war in Ukraine” presents the war as something that happens on Ukrainian territory, almost like a natural disaster or an internal conflict, with no named aggressor. When a Russian politician who claims to oppose the regime cannot bring himself to name Russia as the party that started and continues this war, he reveals the imperial core of his own political outlook. Words matter, and here they reveal more than the author perhaps intended.
Second, the “public opinion” invoked in the post is an abstract category. The post relies on no sociological data at all. It exists as a construct in the imagination of the so-called Russian opposition, and the author passes off the desirable as the real. Even where polls from Russia are cited in such debates, their value is limited: surveys conducted in a state that criminalises “discrediting the army” measure fear and conformity as much as opinion. More importantly, “wanting the war to end” is not the same as opposing it. For many Russians, ending the war means ending it on Russia’s terms, with occupied Ukrainian territories kept, Ukraine subdued and no accountability. That is not an anti-war position. It is a desire for victory without further costs.
In fact, one may seriously doubt that a genuine end to the war against Ukraine is what Russian society actually wants. A real end to this war would require recognising the imperial nature of the Russian state and renouncing the imperial policy that follows from it. That is precisely what neither the Russian majority nor large parts of the Russian opposition are prepared to do.
Third, the author ignores one simple fact. For roughly the last five hundred years, Russia has functioned as a carceral state, and Russian society has accordingly been shaped as a carceral society. The Russian Empire was built on colonisation to the East, North-East and South-East, and that expansion relied on armed force. This logic of armed expansion has cemented the Russian state throughout its history, continues to cement it today, and continues to inspire the very population that the author presents as a peaceful majority.
One does not need to be a sociologist to treat with deep scepticism the claim that most Russian citizens do not want war. If we believe the author, then the majority of those Russian citizens who launch Kalibr and Kinzhal missiles at Ukrainian cities do not want the war against Ukraine either – or, in the author’s terminology, “the war in Ukraine.” If we believe the author, then the Russian troops who occupied Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, starting as early as 2014, did not want war either. If we believe the author, then the Russian mercenaries who fought in Syria and who fight today across Africa did not want war in Syria or in the African countries they were sent to. And if we follow the same logic, then the Russian prisoners mobilised within the Wagner phenomenon and sent to the front did not want war in Ukraine either.
At some point this logic collapses under its own weight. A war waged for more than a decade, with hundreds of thousands of participants, with a functioning recruitment economy, with bonuses paid for killing and with regions competing to send soldiers, is not a war that society merely “tolerates.” It is a war that society reproduces.
Fourth, the author omits a basic paradox of Russian society that must be emphasised and constantly remembered. The Russian population is poor, yet this poverty does not produce a demand for peace and domestic development. On the contrary, the formula is: the poorer the Russian population is, the greater its imperial ambitions. Imperial greatness compensates for material deprivation. The war offers money, social mobility and a sense of belonging to a “great power” to people who have little else. Any analysis that ignores this paradox will keep producing comforting fictions about a silent anti-war majority waiting to be liberated from its rulers.
For all these reasons, Kara-Murza’s statement will remain a declaration, nothing more.
Finally, there is an irony that should not go unnoticed. The author appeals, among others, to a Russian audience. He tries to persuade Russians that, as it turns out, the lion’s share of them are against “the war in Ukraine.” Yet he does so on the pages of The Washington Post: in English, behind a paid subscription, however modest the fee, and in a publication that is objectively hard to reach for the ordinary Russian reader, both as a matter of fact and because of the paywall. An anti-war majority that must be informed of its own existence through a paywalled American newspaper is more than ironic. It tells us exactly who this message is really addressed to: not Russian society, but Western readers who would like to believe that the problem is Putin alone, and not the imperial state and the society that sustains him.
Ukraine cannot afford such comforting illusions. Neither, in the end, can Europe.
