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--:-- Noel King: From the day Russia invaded Ukraine, people who think the war is unjust have hoped that ordinary Russians would turn against it. The West tried what it could, hitting Russia's economy and its wealthy oligarchs with sanctions. But polling data shows a majority of Russians still support this war. How is that possible?
--:-- Noel King: Russians are feeling the war now. For months, there have been drone strikes on Moscow. In June, there was a near coup by the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. It made Vladimir Putin, the man responsible for the war, look very weak. And yet there's been no uprising from the grassroots. There's been no Russian spring. Just life going on.
--:-- Noel King: At Today Explained, we spent the past few weeks tracking down two people to answer the question, will anything make Russians lose faith in Putin's war?
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. To understand why so many Russians support the war, we called Masha Gessen, a staff writer at The New Yorker. Masha recently wrote about Ukrainians who are fleeing to Russia and the Russians that are, for some surprising reasons, helping them.
--:-- Masha Gessen: There's a huge range of circumstances and of how people ended up going to Russia. So some of them were literally forced onto buses at gunpoint and taken into other Russian-occupied territories or directly into Russia proper. That's probably a minority. A lot of people were offered a choice that was not a choice, where they were basically told, OK, this place where you have been, say, hiding in a basement for three weeks or two months, this place is about to become scorched earth. You can get on a bus, we're going to evacuate you, or if you're staying in the city, you're on your own. And of course, if you want to go west, you have to cross the front line.
--:-- Masha Gessen: And then there are people who weren't affected by those kinds of evacuations, who weren't told to get on a bus right now, but who had reasons to head to Russia. Those reasons can be that their family members had already ended up in Russia, or they had family members in Russia before the war began, or they had needs that couldn't be met in the occupied territories, and that's primarily medical care, right?
--:-- Masha Gessen: So a lot of the people who are ending up in Russia now are people who are severely ill or disabled, who simply cannot survive or in some cases cannot die in comfort in the occupied territories and are going to Russia out of this absolute necessity. Strictly speaking, a lot of them are asking to be taken to Russia, are asking to be evacuated.
--:-- Masha Gessen: But of course, the circumstances that are moving them is that they're living in occupied territories where the infrastructure has been destroyed. I wonder if you can explain a dynamic that might seem complicated to some people. Russia invaded Ukraine. Why would Russia want Ukrainians coming into Russia?
--:-- Masha Gessen: You know, weirdly, that's not actually very complicated. This is a colonial war. So Russia's goal is to colonize Ukraine and to make Ukrainians disappear as a nation. And in that sense, it's very effective to move people out of occupied territories and to turn them into Russians, where that's possible.
--:-- Masha Gessen: But when people are moved, they can end up in places that are very difficult to get out of. Some people are moved to the Far East. Some people are moved to remote areas that are just removed from any kind of transportation network. And of course, people are traumatized. People are disoriented.
--:-- Masha Gessen: These are also people who, and this is something that I've sort of tried to reiterate in my coverage of war crimes, is that war crimes always happen to the most vulnerable people. War crimes happen to the poor. And so for them to try to get out requires almost sort of superhuman effort.
--:-- Masha Gessen: And this is where we get to the most interesting part of the story, which is this vast network of Russian volunteers, thousands of people who are risking everything to help Ukrainians in Russia.
--:-- Masha Gessen: Tell me about their motives. What are they thinking? Most of the people that I spoke to are moved in some way or another by the desire to oppose the war. One of them said, look, you know, protesting is futile. It just lands you in prison. There's this artist in St. Petersburg who changed out price tags in a store, changed them to little tiny information blocks on the war in Ukraine. She's been in jail for a year and a half, and she's facing up to 10 years in prison.
--:-- Masha Gessen: And so this person referencing this case said, okay, so obviously what I'm doing makes more of a difference. Another person said, I see this as paying reparations. So she feels, as a Russian, responsible for this war. And so she feels that she has to do something like pay reparations to its victims.
--:-- Masha Gessen: But some volunteers actually support the war effort. Russians refer to them as Z volunteers. And Z is the sort of Russian swastika. And Z volunteers often collect money or supplies for the military effort and also help, quote-unquote, evacuate Ukrainians and resettle them in Russia.
--:-- Masha Gessen: And so this volunteer effort creates unlikely allies, people who vehemently oppose the war and people who support the war. But people who vehemently oppose the war say that some of what they do cannot be done without cooperating with people who support the war.
--:-- Masha Gessen: For example, evacuating a bed-bound person from an occupied area involves negotiating with the military authorities, involves hiring an ambulance in a military-occupied zone, and only Z-volunteers can do that.
--:-- Masha Gessen: Okay, so the people helping Ukrainians have to work together, even if they disagree about the war.
--:-- Noel King: We find it mind-boggling that so many Russians still support this war, but we understand that Vladimir Putin has built a system by which he governs and speaks to Russians, and that system appears to be bulletproof. Can you explain how that system works on Russians?
--:-- Masha Gessen: So, you know, this is where language begins to fail us, because when we talk about Russians supporting the war, we use words that are not entirely appropriate to the situation in the sense that, you know, how do you measure public opinion in a country where there's no public and no opinion?
--:-- Masha Gessen: Yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, that's by definition what a totalitarian society is like. You are not free to form your own opinion. You do not have sufficient information. But also, the goal of totalitarianism is to prevent you from having your own opinion.
--:-- Masha Gessen: Hannah Arendt famously and brilliantly made that distinction between old-fashioned tyranny and totalitarianism, where old-fashioned tyranny demands a certain set of behaviors or statements, and basically otherwise leaves you alone. Whereas totalitarianism prevents you from forming an opinion altogether, right?
--:-- Masha Gessen: It's not a question of performance. It's that it demands that you belong to it entirely. What that means is that the psychic cost, even if you don't protest outwardly, even if you protest inwardly, the psychic cost of feeling entirely different from everyone around you is, for most people, prohibitive.
--:-- Masha Gessen: And that doesn't change as life gets worse, right? If you're more affected by the war, if you become much poorer, if life becomes much harder, if you don't have access to life-sustaining medication, if, God forbid, your child or your brother, your husband has been conscripted or killed, the psychic cost of protesting, even inwardly then, grows even larger.
--:-- Masha Gessen: Not only are you grieving, not only are you suffering, but you're also entirely alone in your grief and your suffering. And so, you know, when we imagine that the more Russians are affected by the war, the less they will support it, that's like the opposite of the way totalitarian society works.
--:-- Noel King: Where does all of this actually leave Russian people? If you're being consistently misled and there doesn't seem to be any way out of the misleading, where does this go for Russians?
--:-- Masha Gessen: Well, this is why I'm going to be a little bit of a contrarian. My sympathy for Russians is limited. People do have a choice. They have the choice to leave. They have the choice to get information.
--:-- Masha Gessen: And this is going to sound nuts, right? But Russian independent media is as strong, as robust as it's ever been. It's working from exile, but there are dozens of outlets that are doing extraordinary work. TV Rain, known as Dojd in Russia, has entered the world of streaming and is now on YouTube from Latvia.
--:-- Masha Gessen: That means with a VPN, Russians can once again access the very same coverage that government tried to censure. And the effort required to get their content is not prohibitive. You have to install a VPN and it's available to you. So Russians do have a choice.
--:-- Masha Gessen: Most people are incapable of making that choice because people are weak, because people have been beaten down, because a century of totalitarian rule with one short break is enough to destroy sort of people in ways that we still haven't really begun to understand, right?
--:-- Masha Gessen: This is the longest totalitarian experiment in history. But you see, right, I'm of two minds in being sympathetic. And I certainly have zero sympathy for educated Russians who are, you know, sipping cocktails in cafes in Moscow.
--:-- Masha Gessen: But yes, most Russians are living in a country where their life is getting worse. The economy is tanking, not as fast as everyone predicted it would tank as a result of sanctions, but it's certainly taking some very hard hits. Life for ordinary people has gotten a lot more difficult.
--:-- Masha Gessen: Ordinary people are increasingly affected by the draft. Russia keeps passing laws, for what it's worth, to increase the possibility of conscription. So I think within the next few months, we're going to see probably a majority of able-bodied men under 30 affected by the draft.
--:-- Masha Gessen: And people are being affected by the war physically. You know, I have a friend who lives in a building in Moscow that's been hit by a Ukrainian drone. Mind you, I'm not, you know, like, this is not a poor Russians kind of statement. Russia is pummeling Ukraine and killing civilians every single night.
--:-- Masha Gessen: The suffering of ordinary Russians does not begin to compare. But yes, life for Russians is getting worse and I think it's going to continue getting worse.
--:-- Masha Gessen: And what do you think will happen then? Well, you know, no regime lasts forever. I think this war is not going to end as long as Vladimir Putin is in power. Is he going to be in power for the rest of his life? Probably.
--:-- Masha Gessen: Is there a possibility that rather than allow him to die in office, a group of frustrated members of the elite will stage a coup? Yes, there's that possibility.
--:-- Masha Gessen: You know, I don't think that that's the most likely scenario, but I think it's distinctly possible. But, you know, in that case, we're looking inevitably at either a military-led coup or coup supported by the military.
--:-- Masha Gessen: Any kind of change of regime in Moscow is good news for Ukraine because nobody owns this war except for Vladimir Putin. So as soon as there's a change of regime, it's going to be possible for Ukraine to start negotiating with Moscow.
--:-- Masha Gessen: So in that sense, I really hope it happens, but not necessarily for the sake of Russian people, just because like all sane people in the world, I hope Ukraine wins this war as soon as possible.
--:-- Noel King: Masha Gessen is a writer for The New Yorker. Coming up, a Russia researcher goes looking for hard-to-find answers.
--:-- Noel King: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio? Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Noel King: Jade McGlynn took on the challenge. McGlynn is a researcher at King's College London, and she just published a book called Russia's War. It's about how ordinary Russians view the war in Ukraine.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: While I've always followed and done sort of large scale analysis of state media such as television and newspapers, for this book I also looked at Telegram. And the reason for that is that it's very popular. Russians use it on a daily basis, largely to get information about politics, what's going on in the world.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: But also because it's effectively uncensored in the sense that you can access opposition media there. You can access different types of views. And of course, I also looked at some polling data, admittedly with a lot of caveats, because you have to be very careful. Polling data can't really tell us what it means when somebody says that they support Putin or they support the war.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: On top of that, I also have a long established group of respondents, essentially of people that I get together with, reflective of different attitudes or trends that I came across during my time in Russia.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: We are told that Russians are broadly supportive of the war, and that's usually where it ends. You've been in WhatsApp groups and Telegram groups. What do Russians really think about this war?
--:-- Jade McGlynn: I don't think it's correct to say that most Russians actively support the war. What's more correct would be that they broadly approve of it. They broadly approve of the ends insofar as the ends mean to politically control Ukraine and to undo Western dominance, Western cultural influence, not just in Ukraine, but also in Russia.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: The active supporters, the people who are really sort of gung-ho for the war, the Kremlin is very nervous around them, and we can see the reasons why if we look at somebody like Yevgeny Prigozhin, because people who are true believers, they are the people who will then become critical of you because they genuinely believe in the conquest of Ukraine.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: In extraordinary scenes, Yevgeny Prigozhin demanded the downfall of Russia's defense minister and its chief of staff, accusing them of mishandling the war on Ukraine. Whereas everybody else, if you ask them, they'll say they support it, but they probably wouldn't come out into the streets to support it.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: Well, not everybody else. You do also then have, let's say, a 20%, well, 15 to 20% of the population who are quite firmly opposed to the war.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: I've been reading articles about how, if you're in Moscow, you might not even be aware that this war is happening. When we look at where the support is and where the support is not, is there a geographic bent to who's in favor of this and who is not?
--:-- Jade McGlynn: So you're quite right. In Moscow, it's very easy to forget or certainly not to feel the impact of the war, give or take a few sort of war recruitment posters. That said, there are also other differences.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: For example, for people who live out in the Far East or even, you know, in Eastern Siberia, for them, Ukraine feels, you know, very, very far away. Whereas, of course, for people who live in Voronezh or those areas in the sort of southwest of Russia, it's literally over the border.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: And although traditionally those areas have been some of the most supportive of the government, and often they're referred to, for example, as the Red Belt, because there's a lot of Soviet nostalgia, what we seeing in new polling is that among those populations who live you know who are more likely to be impacted by the war it is having an impact in terms of the support that they willing to voice for the war.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: And that also fits with other elements, such as, for example, the time when there was a big drop in the polls in terms of how much people supported what's called the special military operation. The biggest drop came last year in September when the Kremlin announced mobilization.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: Vladimir Putin's mobilization of 300,000 Russians to join the fight is already underway across the country. Video from social media shows families in the country's far east saying tearful goodbyes and men boarding buses.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: But not everyone is willing to submit to the draft. Cars lined up for as far as the eye could see at border crossings leading out of Russia and into Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Finland and Georgia.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: Because it's one thing to support a war that somebody else has to fight. And it's another thing to support a war that has direct consequences for you and that perhaps you or your loved ones could die in.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: Early on in this war, the West attempted to make it painful for Russia, right? So there were sanctions put on Russian officials. Now we've seen a development, which is that there have been these drone strikes in Moscow.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: And Ukraine is not claiming that it is responsible for the drone strikes, but that is a part of war that somebody is taking to the Russian capital. And then on top of that, you have this bizarre and very bold march by Yevgeny Prigozhin toward Moscow, where it almost seemed like Vladimir Putin might lose his grip on power.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: And of course, he didn't. But is any of this changing the way Russians think about the war? Are they starting to turn on it at all?
--:-- Jade McGlynn: So there's quite a lot wrapped up in that question. Are they starting to turn on the war? No, not in the sense of the underpinning ideas of the war that Russia is a great country innately special, a civilization that Ukraine should basically submit to if not be a direct part of and the West is constantly trying to destroy Russia and it's using Ukraine to do that and therefore Russia has every legitimate right to defend itself.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: No, I don't think it's changing people's minds. Sanctions in particular never have, pretty much never have that effect, not just in Russia, but perhaps especially in Russia. They will always make people feel under attack.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: And I think, you know, all of us can think how we would feel if a country decided to sanction us. It would make most people think, oh, OK, I'll do what they say now. Prices have gone up, but it's hardly noticeable. I think we'll feel it later.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: Are you afraid? No. No. We've gone through so many crises in Russia. What doesn't kill us only makes us stronger.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: So that's one aspect. The other aspect is about the war coming. No, I mean, what we did see shortly before and in the run-up to Prigozhin's sort of march on Moscow, which it must be remembered he insisted was not aimed directly at Putin, but rather at those who were managing the war, it's given rise to a sense that Russia could have taken Kiev in three days.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: The Russian army is full of heroes. Who are, you know, brave and incredible and technically capable fighters. And Russia is a great country. But it's those corrupt elites with their castles in the West who have undermined it.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: So in a funny way, even a lot of the criticism of the war that's swelling around actually reinforces some of the what we might call the Putinist worldview.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: And another aspect I suppose to keep an eye on is the longer that the war goes on, the more people are going to be personally bought into it. Of course, it's very obvious in Ukraine and perhaps less so in Russia, but it's still there.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: And it's just a human element. I mean, if you're a soldier, perhaps you don't know why you're fighting, but once they've killed several of your comrades in arms, you're fighting for them, right, to avenge them.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: And similarly, if you have a beloved uncle who goes off to fight because he's always been in the military, and then he's killed, let's say he's killed in a particularly unpleasant way, or you're unable to get his remains, it's quite a process to sit down and work out, okay, well, who is actually responsible?
--:-- Jade McGlynn: What are the different geopolitical structures that led to this when you could just hate Ukrainians? And so that's one of the, war is truly dreadful, but one of the dreadful things is how much it exacerbates and eternalises that hatred as well.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: One of the few things that really coheres the Russian people with the Russian elites who largely live parallel lives is that fear of state collapse. This is a country or a nation that has experienced two arguably free state collapses over the last, what, 110 years.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: And the memories of the 1990s, which many Russians view as a time of squalor, of poverty, of unfairness and of gangsterism, because that's how they experienced it, but which they also associate with democracy and capitalism and disillusionment with both of them.
--:-- Jade McGlynn: That is a very strong cultural and individual memory in Russia. And so the fear is that, OK, even if you didn't like Putin, Putin has a lot of people's lives did get better under Putin. He did restore a sense of pride. And many still feel that it's a lot better now than it was before he came.
--:-- Noel King: Dr. Jade McGlynn. Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and edited by Matthew Collette and Amina El-Sadi. It was engineered by David Herman and fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Serena Solon.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
