In this episode of the Democracy After 2024 series, Denys Tereshchenko hosts Margarita Zavadskaya to discuss the asymmetries of power between the state and civil society in Russia, public attitudes toward the full-scale invasion of Ukraine among Russians inside and outside Russia, and the reasons behind the failure of anti-war protests.
The year 2024 was meant to be the year of democracy. In the largest election year in the history of the world, nearly half of humanity, some three and a half billion people, were able to cast votes in 72 countries. As the year progressed, commentators pointed out that an unusually high proportion of incumbents were removed from office and that voters tended to shift to the right in numerous countries.
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Denys Tereshchenko
Hello everyone, my name is Denys Tereshchenko, and I am a PhD researcher at the European University Institute in Florence. Here with me is Margarita Zavadskaya, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and a researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute. Margarita holds a PhD in social and political sciences from the European University Institute and specializes in the role of elections in authoritarian states, mass protests, and public opinion under authoritarianism.
We are going to talk about the Russian opposition, and I have several questions prepared. I will start perhaps with a question that has bothered many Ukrainians but also people in the West since day one of the 2022 invasion. The question is seemingly very simple. Why did the anti-war protests in Russia fail in February and March 2022?
Margarita Zavadskaya
First of all, it is a great pleasure to be here on this podcast, and I am more than enthusiastic about covering challenging topics. I think it is important to ask, especially as academics and scholars, questions sometimes we just really want to avoid.
Here, I think what would really help us is to rely on academic concepts and theories, what to expect if we just take a step back, because for both of us here in this room, it is very personal what is going on right now. If we just take a step back and look at this from the social movements theory point of view, for example, and the dynamics between the opposition and the government, the answer is quite simple.
The regime was stronger. Sometimes, as in a biblical battle between Goliath and David, it is not always David, the good one, who wins. Sometimes good ones lose. To provide you with another reference, which is also very familiar to our region, unfortunately, is the Belarusian protest in 2021.
In terms of numbers, I think it would not be an exaggeration if I say that the majority of the population just stood up for themselves, and they were quite vocal about what they wanted and what they did not want. They did not want Lukashenka to be the president. We had plenty of evidence that clearly the elections were fraudulent, so these protests were absolutely genuine, and these were peaceful protests.
I may say probably that was the part of the explanation why they failed. I am not advocating for non-peaceful protests, but the regime, especially with the help of Russia, just got much stronger. There is a disparity in terms of power and in terms of resources and coercive capacity.
In the case of Russia, there is another component at play compared to Belarus. In the Belarusian case, it is also a part of nation-building. I do not want to draw clear parallels to Ukraine, because it is a very sensitive thing, but for Belarusians, it is important to protect their own language, identity, and claim the historical memories to show that they are a separate society with their own culture.
It was also part of the very flag that was chosen to support the protest effort. It was basically going back to an early stage of nation-building. In the Russian case, there was no such thing. I am not saying that it should have been that, because any kind of Russian nation-building around the Russian nation would not sound like a particularly good project.
But apparently the failure to assemble different groups of the population was a real challenge. Most of the protests we observed were very capital-based, based around educated, urban upper middle classes, so inequality is another factor.
Denys Tereshchenko
By 2022 and maybe even earlier, it was pretty late for the civil society in the Russian Federation to bring up anything against the very powerful state police reform, reinforced with all the petrodollars coming from the exchange with the Western economies as well, but not only.
When do you think were these turning points or the critical threshold after which the state became significantly stronger than civil society or any potential resistance to it?
Margarita Zavadskaya
This is an excellent question. I would say in terms of organizing protests against the regime, things were a little bit lagging behind on the opposition side.
That is quite clear. The regime would just turn out to be way more successful. Obviously, the economy was on the regime’s side. They were early on capitalizing on the extra income, especially international markets helped a lot for Putin’s regime to succeed. Of course, Putin, is not like a genius or a congenial ruler, no.
There is a beautiful study by Daniel Treisman, who brilliantly proved that if Yeltsin had had the same kind of economy, he would have been also more successful in terms of popular support and in other ways. It is not about Putin, it is about the international economic situation back in the early 2000s that clearly boosted the regime and its capacity to coopt.
Usually for a protest to be successful, part of the political leadership elites have to lead the cause. It is a myth that people just take to the streets because they feel something with their hearts. No, there must be an infrastructure that supports protests and some kind of logistics behind it. It is a myth that people just take to it on their own.
Denys Tereshchenko
To bring in the comparison with Ukraine, people in Ukraine would sometimes say that we managed with the Maidan, but why did they not manage with the Bolotnaya or at any other stage, could you please maybe go on there to any possible explanation for this difference?
Margarita Zavadskaya
It is important to note that I come from political science, and we usually focus on more contingent factors that are at play, so please take my explanation with a grain of salt.
The first explanation is that Ukrainian regimes back in the 1990s and early 2000s under Kuchma can be described as pluralism by default. Here, I refer to international scholars like Lucan Way.
What really served as a safety valve for the Ukrainian regime to fall back into the consolidated authoritarian basket? It was basically this pluralism by default. There has always been the situation of different interest groups: oligarchs, politicians, and classes that were competing.
There has never been a situation of certain groups dominating 100 or even 90 percent over the whole territory of the country. I think that has served as a safety valve, a safety belt for the regime not to fall to something that is not unlike the case of Belarus, Russia, or Kazakhstan.
Denys Tereshchenko
In the Russian Federation, this consolidation happened quite early on, in the early 2000s, with the elimination of all these oligarchic structures, which could exercise potential resistance to the centralization of power by Putin. Probably, the economic growth of the 2000s could provide the resources to increase the “siloviki” of the coercive apparatus.
Margarita Zavadskaya
Again, I already may have said the name of Lucan Way, but his argument is a little bit different. Again, was it about oligarchs who lost to the regime and the Russian state? Or is it something else? I think Lucan Way and other political economists, whose position you basically nicely laid out earlier, state that yes, it was a coercive apparatus and the state just won the battle with alternative economic interests.
There was always competition, even in North Korea. The question is whether this competition is happening according to the rules of the game or legally transparent rules and what are the checks and balances? and accountability mechanisms? This regime is competitive, but not in the sense that this competition is visible to us, happening by the rules, and is transparent.
Denys Tereshchenko
Perhaps one of the factors that helped Putin and his clique to sustain power throughout so many years was also the support from some share of the population. What do we know about that? There is also a persistent discussion of what we can know about public opinion in authoritarian regimes. Could you please tell us more about that in Russia?
Margarita Zavadskaya
Whoever supports any regime, including authoritarian regimes, they still have their constituencies.
It is a myth that Putin’s regime occupied its own territory and has no support. It does have its own supporters, and it is an unpleasant truth for the Russian opposition. Who are these people? They are middle class but often they are referred to as the authoritarian middle class. What we know from Barrington Moore and other scholars is that middle class bourgeoisie is a precondition for democracy but not necessarily. There are some studies about the Nazi Germany that show how the middle class and urban population supported a fascist regime. Bryn Rosenfeld, an American scholar, wrote a brilliant book about the Russian authoritarian middle class that is very complicit towards the regime. It is not like they ideologically support the regime, but they economically benefit from the current constellation. Some of them are employed in the public sector or in the companies that profit from cooperating with the public sector. It creates a huge infrastructure. It is similar to Hungarian case in this sense, but it is 10 steps ahead in terms of proliferation in the society. So, economy matters, and it is clearly one of the pillars.
The second group, which is clearly relatively new, is the “Z” ultrapatriots, people who actually are driven by ideological interests. They used to be a minority, because Russian nationalists back in the late 90s and early 2000s were suppressed by the state. Then, all of a sudden, this agenda was hijacked by some parts of the Russian state apparatus. These groups were perceived as mavericks for a very long time, even between the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the full-scale invasion. But apparently these groups actually got amplified by the Russian propaganda.
The current regime was a result of the merge of these opportunistic middle classes and whoever benefits from state revenues and petrodollars, and smaller groups of ideologically driven people. This set the ground for what we are observing now. I am laying a very simplistic picture now, but I think it is helpful.
Denys Tereshchenko
The second part of the question was about the support, what is the real percentage of people who are supporting the regime now and how do we know that?
Margarita Zavadskaya
I try to summarize all the different question lists, including my own. Basically, the core of the support of the regime is around 20 percent core supporters, meaning those who support Putin and the war effort, and who are pretty happy with what is going on. There are some odd groups, for example, people who do not like Putin but support the war effort.
Again, even those who are even further to the right. There are people who do not like the war, but they tag along with what is going on, because there is very little they can do about it, and they are still okay with Putin. It is not a middle finger in the pocket, but it is tagging along.
It is similar to democratic politics when there are republicans and democrats, when it comes to US politics, and there are people in between, swaying constituencies. This kind of majority that we get, 80-70 percent, is the core. Then there are these odd groups, like pro-war against Putin, for Putin against the war, and then there are people in between that sort of tag along and replicate the pro-Kremlin people, but they are largely passive. On the other side, there is a very consistent core of around 20-25%, depending on the timing, because it also fluctuates, of people who are consistently and still openly against Putin and against the war. That poll is more coherent ideologically, but at the same time. vis-a-vis the rest of the constructed majority, it keeps on losing.
Denys Tereshchenko
Political science and sociology know the concept of a spiral of silence. I am not sure whether it is legitimately used now. The idea is that the people who are a minority in terms of their opinions are more likely to suppress their opinions when asked or when present in the public sphere. This happens in democracies, but what happens in autocracies? Do we observe a similar phenomenon? If we do, how do we find out what people really think about the war or the regime?
Margarita Zavadskaya
The very concept of a spiral of silence originated from non-democratic, very censored, and closed political environment. It supposes that we have an opinion. All these models about preference falsification (which is not the same as peer pressure, so there is nuance to it), assume that people believe in something. But what if a person does not have an opinion, or does not care? This was the major gap in that literature that presumes that people are either here or there. Actually, when it comes to marketing research, like what kind of soap you prefer to use, the majority of people have no idea.
In the best-case scenario, these people would say, I do not know, or I do not care. But if they just want to tag along, it is a conversational situation with an interviewer, you just need to say something. What people would say would be something they heard in the media, or from their relatives, or from the environment they live in everyday. Here comes this artificial amplification of certain opinions. That is one mechanism.
Our task as sociologists or political scientists is to make sense of public opinion in closed societies. This is how we differentiate these two groups from each other. Those who actually have no opinion or do not want to have the opinion and people who do have the opinion, but do not have the opportunities to demonstrate it.
This is why in our surveys we use different techniques, including the so-called list experiment, when we provide our respondents with an opportunity to avoid topics. We see that they are doing it on purpose. It is one way, and the second way is to explicitly provide respondents with an option to say, “I do not want to discuss this.”
We are not asking why, but we can spot that. Then we see how actually our distributions change, depending on the phrasing we use. Again, to make a long story short, Russian respondents mostly do not lie about their preferences, so we do not really see a strong presence of preference falsification in a sense when I say: “I support the regime, but in the reality I do not.” If we give them an opportunity to wink at us, they use it, they take advantage of that. That is (so far) the main finding we have at the moment.
Denys Tereshchenko
Thank you. Here we are talking about people who are remaining in the Russian Federation. These are the ways to go around this more complicated situation within political environment. Then a small, interim question, who has left Russia? If there are still people who are against the war or do not clearly explicitly support Putin’s regime, then why would they stay? Probably not only the anti-war activists left the country after 2022.
Margarita Zavadskaya
So far, I also was part of another big project: a land panel survey of the Russian emigres with my colleagues from the European University Institute. It is a truncated sample, first of all, because we were talking to people who really wanted to talk to us. There was a lot of self? selection going on. This is why please take my comments with a grain of salt, because there is so far no comprehensive study about who decided to leave and who decided to stay.
If we really want to stick to the highest standards of academic research, we can not really tell. Of course, we have some strong evidence. First of all, these are people who are better off in terms of money, education, and civic skills. For example, these people left because of the economy, or because they wanted to save their economic assets.
Or these were people genuinely driven by support for Ukraine, that is what they were saying: “What is going on is just morally wrong.” I can say both answers are true. We observe different groups of Russian emigres: from leisure tourists, honestly speaking, doing yoga or camping, to people who are still 24/7 activists. There are people who got tortured in the detainment facilities and who shared something close to a Belarusian experience in their life. There was a huge diversity of people and their stance. This variety is enormous, but we also asked a question: “How did you vote in the last election?” In the first wave of the survey we conducted in March, before the horrible news from Bucha, we were receiving these figures and only three of our respondents voted for Putin out of around 3,000 respondents. If it gives you any idea of the distribution of their political, at least declared political values, that is the answer.
Denys Tereshchenko
Do people who have left Russia organize? Do you know something about their networks? Because there had been a huge pre-existing diaspora of people who had left probably more the Soviet Union than Russia. Do these groups merge? Do they get into conflict? Is there active self-organization among the newcoming Russian immigrant people?
Margarita Zavadskaya
Yes, absolutely. Again, if we look at the tip of the iceberg, among those who want to stay vocal and who still remain politically and civically engaged, there is a whole infrastructural source of civic projects helping Ukrainian refugees. Still, it is one of the most alive parts of the activities among the Russian population, because it is very clear who the target is, and it is also morally rewarding. This is why these kinds of projects stay alive. There were several projects launched in Georgia and Germany, and probably Germany provided the most vibrant landscape for such environments and projects to exist.
Also, there were some cautious attempts to add cooperation. Of course, most of this cooperation with Ukrainian organizations either happens through some intermediaries or is based on personal contacts, because it is also a question of trust.
There are projects devoted to the political cause. For example, Feminist Sunday War Resistance. I have my biases, obviously, but I admire what they do. They somehow managed to embrace the post-colonial criticism. At the same time, they are still active and still try to engage with both Russian and Ukrainian communities through this overlapping agenda of feminism and helping women.
There are some other projects, of course, like the Anti-Corruption Foundation, but they do not orient their operation work to help Ukrainian refugees. It is not part of their agenda. They also do not explicitly help their own compatriots in exile but target all their resources back to Russia. They are very explicit and vocal about that. What do they do with those resources? I think, media effort and investigative journalism constitutes a huge part. They want to create an alternative media environment and put a lot of effort into that. They have very few people working, and this is why probably they do not engage in alternative directions of helping their own compatriots in exile or doing some advocacy. They do not have resources and prioritize something that is more important given their political goals. All of them want to go back to Russia. It is crucially important for them to keep contact, first of all, with Russian nationals inside Russia. All other people are not that important.
Denys Tereshchenko
Turning to the Russians staying in Russia, what do we know about the resistance of Russians against the regime in Russia?
Margarita Zavadskaya
I will not say any names or organizations, because sometimes when things are ongoing, you need to be strategic when it comes to these kinds of things. The short answer is yes, there are resistance initiatives.
I am first-hand familiar with at least two of these initiatives. One initiative is basically the framework under which Russian activists were cooperating with European activists and Ukrainian activists trying to locate and track Ukrainian children who were kidnapped and abducted. Basically, they were trying to provide as much evidence as possible to track kids and return at least some of them back home. This cooperation was necessary.
There were similar efforts, for example, targeting people who had to go through the filtration camps, especially for Mariupol. There was also the whole volunteering network that was heavily understaffed, overworked and burned out. It is extremely dangerous to operate. This network might also be infiltrated, but so far, my short answer is yes, they exist. Unfortunately, we have very limited information on how far their networks actually travel. Finally, there were also anarchist groups—not very numerous, but they proved to be successful in sabotaging the militaristic network inside Russia.
There were cases of undermining rail tracks, for example, that provided supplies to the front lines. For example, my Finnish colleagues made a brilliant story about that. They even made an interview with those people who they had to meet somewhere in the forests.
Why do we not know much about these initiatives? First of all, they operate in Russia. The majority of exiled media lost access to the locations. The correspondent network suffered enormously from the ongoing situation. Also, Russian media do not really cover incidents like that because the more they cover them, the more panic it is going to cause domestically.
Denys Tereshchenko
I think we have some time left. I would like to ask one more question for the purposes of advertisement. Could you please tell us more about your own research and the projects you are working on?
Margarita Zavadskaya
First of all, now we are writing a book with two colleagues of mine, Regina Smyth, a professor of political science at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, and Andrei Semenov, a professor of political science at the Nazarbayev University, and, in a sense, an academic refugee. It is a crossover book—a mixture of academic research based on the 600 semi-structured interviews we have conducted in six countries that turned out to be the most popular destination for Russian exiles: from leisure tourists to 24/7 political activists. We covered this diversity of people who left the country with all the uncomfortable tensions and the uneasy connections and the relationship with the Ukrainian communities and the Ukrainian refugees. It is still a work in progress, but hopefully it will be published in 2026.
Denys Tereshchenko
Thank you, Rita. This has been a great conversation. Thank you for a lot of interesting information and data that you have summarized for us.