How does Russia’s aggression against Ukraine transform Russian society? Existing research has focused on explanations for support of the war itself and on causes of lacking resistance – but the war’s broader social consequences so far remain unexplored. Building on a mixed-methods approach including surveys and survey experiments, in depth-interviews, ethnography, and text data, this project provides a comprehensiveunderstanding of social relations and public views of state power under the conditions of an increasingmilitarization of the public sphere. To this end, we structure the project along three tensions in the Russian authoritarian regime’s strategic approach to society: (1) Repression versus pacification, (2) mobilization and social cohesion versus demobilization and atomization of society, and (3) sowing confusion versus attracting people’s trust. Based on these tensions, we present an innovative and cross-fertilizing research design to study Russian society under the conditions of war in three densely connected dimensions: Violence, Solidarity, and Truth. Through these dimensions, we ask when and why citizens tolerate, support, or reject repression, how the war affects patterns of solidarity in society and collective action by various affected social groups, and how changing state narratives and truth claims are perceived, reworked, and challenged in the population.
We argue that analyzing these patterns is essential to understand Russia’s current trajectory. Depending on the degree of acceptance of state violence, the level of solidarity among social groups, and the way public information is perceived, we will be able to assess more general social change: towards a mobilized or a demobilized population, towards more totalitarian or authoritarian rule, and towards a more or a less polarized society. By unpacking these relationships, this setup is also crucial for the study of modern authoritarian regimes more generally, assessing the complex relationships between elements of “informational autocracies” (Guriev & Treisman 2022) and more classical authoritarian politics that depend on fear, ideology and coercion.
The project will produce seven articles in leading disciplinary and area studies journals, two PhD theses (one supervised in Fribourg, the other supervised in St. Gallen) and a co-authored monograph that will give a comprehensive overview of the prevailing attitudes and shifting value preferences in Russian society. Crucially, the team of researchers has protocols in place, developed and tested in many years of research experience in authoritarian contexts, to conduct the research in an ethically sound way while producing high-quality data.