Do Russians Really Support the War in Ukraine?

In the summer and fall of 2023, three researchers from a small Russian collective called the Public Sociology Laboratory, or P.S. Lab, travelled to three different regions across Russia, to find out what people thought about the war in Ukraine. A university lecturer whom I’ll call Masha went to Sverdlovsk Oblast, at the eastern edge of the Ural Mountains; a recent college graduate who goes by Aida went to Buryatia, on the border with Mongolia; and an anthropologist who goes by Marina went to Krasnodar, a southern resort region connected to Crimea by the Kerch Strait Bridge. The researchers stayed in these regions for about a month, talking to as many people as possible. They could not simply announce that they were from a sociology collective studying the war, so they were undercover, and they knew that there wasn’t much that P.S. Lab could do for them if they got in trouble.

The researchers had been galvanized by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022. Marina had met the group’s founders before the war, at academic conferences. Aida had studied under several of them when she was in college, in western Siberia. For Masha, a friend of one of the P.S. Lab founders, the work represented a return to political engagement, after years of inaction. In college, in Moscow in the early twenty-tens, she had attended protests against Vladimir Putin’s regime with her friends and kept up with the opposition media. Then, in 2014, Russia invaded Crimea and annexed it after a snap referendum. “It was a shock,” Masha told me. “Like, you can just do that? It erased all our efforts.” She applied for a doctorate in anthropology and spent the next five years researching religion, mysticism, gender—“basically anything, as long as it had no connection to politics.”

That changed after February, 2022. Masha wanted to do something. She wrote to her friend from P.S. Lab, Svetlana Erpyleva, who sent her transcripts of roughly thirty interviews about the war which P.S. Lab had collected in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. Masha’s assignment was to read and analyze the interviews, and she went into it with some trepidation. “You see these reports in the media,” she said. “People marching, lining up in the form of the letter ‘Z’ ”—a symbol of support for Putin and the war—“some nice old ladies making a portrait of Putin out of tin cans. You get this sense that people are crazy about the war and about Putin, that they’re zombified. That they have no morals, no empathy, no souls.”

The interviews told a different story. People were shocked by the war, incredulous, and grieving. “I heard somewhere that it was going to happen on February 16th,” one woman, a forty-year-old project manager, told her interviewer. “But everyone thought it was a joke, that it wouldn’t really happen, that it was American propaganda.” “It’s just surreal,” another woman, a thirty-year-old marketing analyst, said. “It shouldn’t be this way. The international community needs to find a compromise solution as soon as possible.” Masha was relieved. These were the Russians that she knew: deeply concerned with morality and ethics, but, at the same time, estranged from politics. She wrote a chapter for a report, “The War Near and Far,” which came out online in the fall of 2022, and then helped P.S. Lab do a second wave of interviews, shortly afterward, in the wake of the partial mobilization of military reservists.

By then, Masha and her husband had left Russia, worried that he’d be drafted but also worried more generally about the future. They wanted to start a family and felt it was impossible to do so under Putin. “It’s a situation where you can’t plan your life—where some guy in the Kremlin can decide one day to do this thing and turn your life upside down,” Masha said. She kept going back to Russia to do research. A few months after she finished work on P.S. Lab’s second report, “Resigning Themselves to Inevitability,” she travelled to a small town in the Sverdlovsk region for a different project, and while there she started thinking. There was a vast number of people who would never agree to sit down and discuss their true feelings in the form of a sociological interview. But might it not be possible to go out into the provinces and, rather than pose questions, just listen to people talk about the war?

A few months later, she was back in the same town, now as a P.S. Lab researcher. Just listening to people talk about the war turned out to be more challenging than she’d expected. The town of Cheryomushkin, as P.S. Lab pseudonymized it, had very few public spaces. People tended to mind their own business. One day, Masha noticed that the local movie theatre was premièring “Witness,” a new, big-budget propaganda film about the war. She stationed herself outside the theatre, waiting for possible pro-war interlocutors, but no one came. Other nominally pro-war events that Masha tried to attend were either cancelled, poorly attended, or, like one music concert that claimed to be dedicated to the war effort, not about the war in any meaningful sense. “If, as a thought experiment, we were to imagine a person who fell asleep on the night of February 23, 2022, and then suddenly woke up in Cheryomushkin in the fall of 2023,” she and her co-authors eventually wrote, in what became their third report, “it would be difficult for them to guess that a full-scale war had been going on for the last year and a half.”

Masha had better luck when she set up shop in a popular local café. She found herself sitting next to two middle-aged men who were drinking with some former classmates. After the classmates left, the men turned their attention to Masha. One of them tried to pick her up. Her first reaction was to tell him off, but then she caught herself: at least the men were willing to chat. She engaged them in a long conversation about life in the town, the state of the country, and the war. One of the men turned out to have previously worked for the F.S.B., and was a committed ideological supporter of Putin. “Victory,” he told Masha, “is when we take all of Ukraine back, and Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia—when we get everything back.” This was Masha’s first real discussion of the war with a randomly chosen resident, and it turned out to be atypical. Most other people in town had a much more complicated, and conflicted, view of what their country was doing in Ukraine.

Since the beginning of the war, there have been fierce debates among Russian scholars, and Russians themselves, over the nature and extent of support for it. One point of contention has been the polling data. The largest and oldest independent pollster operating in the country, the Levada Center, has, since February 27, 2022, been asking Russians once a month whether they “personally support the actions of Russian military forces in Ukraine.” Each time, a very large proportion of respondents—between seventy and eighty per cent—say they either “definitely” or mostly support them.

Critics of Levada argue that the very framing of the question, clearly intended to avoid government censorship that does not allow people to call the conflict a “war,” is a major problem. Another is the nature of attempting to poll people in an authoritarian state. “If you’re in Russia, and some stranger comes to your door asking questions, you’ve obviously got a mental illness if you’re telling them anything,” the British ethnographer Jeremy Morris, who has studied Russia for two decades, told me. But more than that, he said, even well-conducted polls were too crude for a situation as complicated as this one. “Polling data is fine for ‘Are you going to vote the Democrats or are you going to vote the Republicans?’ It’s about a onetime decision that is close to the present. ‘Do you prefer Pepsi or Coke?’ But, when it comes to horribly complex, painful things like a war, it’s not useful.” Nonetheless, Morris acknowledged the power of numbers: Levada’s seventy-plus-per-cent pro-war figure has framed a lot of perceptions, including inside Russia.

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.”