War and propaganda: the thoughts of the 'majority' of Russians in Putin's service
An in-depth analysis by Meduza's Signal column assessed the real level of popular support for the war. The “majority of Russians” and poll respondents in polls are not the same, and the sample is becoming less and less credible. Surveys are a means of “manipulation” and “information”. The "average Russian male", who repeats patriotic slogans, is an example.
One of the most shocking aspects of Russia's great war against the world is the support of the population for the imperial instincts of the Kremlin elite, which is hard to understand and unbearable to accept. Is it possible that only a few dissidents oppose state violence, victims of harsh repression, including death in concentration camps, amid the total indifference of most Russians?
Meduza's Signal column focused on this, trying to go beyond certain stereotypes about the apathy and passivity of the people living in Russia today and in the past.
If official polls are to be believed, 70 per cent of Russians enthusiastically support the need for military parades on Red Square, 56 per cent are against any social and economic change, and all sorts of negative or absurd sentiments are attributed to this mythological "majority," from allergies to medical tests to support for the death penalty.
Most are Orthodox Christians, even though they go to church only for the blessing of Easter cakes.
Of course, state sociologists say that the vast majority of Russians approve of the "special military operation" in Ukraine, but the litany of official polls about what people think is rather puzzling.
The more widely shared opinions crystallise, the more they contradict those that are expressed in daily life by relatives and friends on the streets and at home, raising the suspicion that, beyond the propaganda by the top and the repression of the marginalised, there is broad manipulation of what is called "the majority" of the Russian people.
As Signal put it, "when we talk about the majority of Russians, we mean the majority of respondents in the polls, and there is a big difference between the two.”
Even the landslide victory in the presidential elections that consecrated Vladimir Putin is rather dubious, both in terms of turnout and votes cast.
When Russians are said to be against energy drinks for children, we are referring only to users of the SuperJob website, and customers of the "Local Cuisine" chain present in many cities bake Easter cakes to be blessed in church, not all Russians. Like in other countries, journalists who comment on polls extrapolate data and answers in a very arbitrary way.
An iron rule of propaganda in all its forms is that if one does not convey “the opinion of the majority” no one will read the article or report related to the topic of interest.
Polls are less and less credible, despite being supported by increasingly sophisticated algorithms and analytical criteria. Respondents do not say what they think, but what they think it is necessary to say publicly, and this self-censorship is often more effective than any repression.
“Public opinion” is something very different from people's opinions, in a world in which every "public" statement means "alienated", belonging to other spheres and other structures, based on power and monopoly, or more generally on a hierarchy of social interests.
Obviously, in times of war, the mechanism of mistrust and distancing prevails; people say only what must be said to avoid involvement.
Pollsters are well aware that a large majority of people refuse to answer; on average, to get a thousand answers, one has to go through 20,000 refusals.
In Russia, at most 5-6 per cent of people participate in surveys, slightly more than those who attend Orthodox religious services; with such low percentages, it is almost inevitable that those who respond are mostly people whose opinion is expected to be consistent with the purpose of the survey.
People avoid expressing their thoughts for fear of consequences, or for total disinterest in politics. This is certainly a global trend and is not limited to Russia, as people do not believe in the possibility of influencing situations based on opinions.
Russia's main sociological institutes operate under the strict control of the Kremlin. The country’s gest known institute, the Levada Center, has been registered as "foreign agents" since 2016, and does not have much room for manoeuvre to show its analytical capacity.
In Belarus, President Aleksandr Lukashenko solved the problem in a radical way by banning polling after the 2020 unrest, including the Internet. He allowed on “official survey” in 2021 that indicated a high level of support (66.5 per cent) for him in the population; more or less underground, independent polls suggested that support is as low as 24.1 per cent.
In sociological surveys, the methodology with which the questions are proposed, which often concern the opinions of others rather than those of the people interviewed, matters a lot, as a way to avoid compromising them.
In measure people’s view about torture for example, the question is not direct, but rather centred on the permissibility of torture of those who abduct children or carry out serious attacks.
This leaves a lot of room for manipulation, so that surveys are not primarily used to get the opinion of respondents, but rather to inform respondents about issues that they may never have asked themselves. Asking people “Did you know that candidate X has legal problems" is a way to undermine X's chances of getting elected. And this works its way into summary comments about “poll results”.
People are asked what they think about Red Square parades, not about war or sanctions, inflation, or repression; people are pushed to respond according to societal parameters already known. More than an expression of what people think, surveys become an "ideological training", as Signal suggests.
If you ask Russians "what do the majority of Russians think?", they will hardly say anything that distinguishes them from the thinking of the majority of Russians.
Manipulating public opinion is easier than it might seem. This is well known in both Russia and the rest of the world, regardless of the regime in power or its more or less autocratic or democratic nature, as evinced by the wave of blind anti-Semitism growing everywhere in the context of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
The "confidential polls" on the willingness of Russians to sacrifice themselves for victory in Ukraine allow Putin to triumphantly reiterate that "the absolute majority of Russians first identify with Russian society, the Russian state, rather than their ethnic background, as he explained again recently to dismiss autonomist tendencies among smaller nations.
As he says: “I note in particular unprecedented support from our people; the vast majority of the citizens of our country are driven by a clear patriotic ideal," he told a Ministry of Defence committee. This is one of the things that he has repeated since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, with no need to cite statistics or sociological analyses.
No need to cite data to back another piece of propaganda, namely that the absolute majority of those who have lived in Ukraine, and even more of those who have lived in Russia, believe that the two are the same country, boosted by Soviet nostalgia about an ideal community, recycled in the mythology of current events.
In 2017 the RBK news agency published the "average portrait" of a resident of Russia, describing her as 40-year-old woman named Elena Smirnova. The Tinkoff Zhurnal recently did the same, presenting a “average citizen", named Aleksandr Ivanov, age 37-38 years, a driver by profession and loyal to the government, with an average income and some savings, who "loves the Motherland and does not trust the Americans", and listens only to Russian singers.
These predictable characters, increasingly acting like puppets created by artificial intelligence, do not represent the real Russians, but only puppets useful to the ruling caste.
A perfect example of the "average Russian male", who repeats second-rate patriotic slogans, is the Minister of Culture, Valery Falkov. In 2020 the 46-year-old former rector of Tyumen University in Siberia replaced Vladimir Medinsky, who is now Putin's aide and author of the "revisited" manuals of Russian history.
The "Siberian male" is the Kremlin's preferred model (summing up various ethnic groups united with ethnic Russians), such as the Mayor of Moscow Sergei Sobyanin, who was also brought from Tyumen in 2010, the year when Putin turned authoritarian and militaristic.
When he was still a student in 2003, Falkov wrote in his thesis that “agitatsia (propaganda) is an ideological tool of totalitarian regimes, to cultivate the values most convenient to it, and control society.” Now he is the minister of state agitatsia.
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