Russia Refracted
The Russian–Ukrainian war has turned Russian society into the subject of heated political discussion and much speculation. Does “society” support Putin and his war? Does “society” share the Kremlin’s imperialism? Are Russians simply conformists? Or are they resisting militarism on an everyday, rather than openly political, level? At bottom, the war raises an awful question: what kind of society would allow such a conflict to occur?
Today there are two popular images of Russian society. One, drawn by the Kremlin, presents a people united around the state, supporting the “special military operation,” demanding victory over Ukraine, and proclaiming the advent of a new era and a new world order. The other, deriving from the most radical part of the liberal class, depicts a fragmented and intimidated population mired in cowardly opportunism. Both images allude to totalitarianism, which is characterized by mobilization and atomization, bloodthirstiness and conformism.
Neither depiction is wholly accurate. Society in Russia is made up of different groups with different interests, values, and expectations. While many feel lost, disillusioned, and alienated by the war, others welcome the force of wartime change, imagining that they themselves are at the center of it. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Russian society today is that it includes groups of people who cannot be called supporters of the war but who have not lost themselves during this extraordinary time. Far from it: through the war, they have even found themselves by discovering a new civic agency.
Studies of Russian wartime society by the research groups Public Sociology Laboratory (PS Lab) and Alameda have made it possible to see how the middle-class beneficiaries of war are changing. Managers, IT workers, business owners, engineers, and creative workers who have benefited from both the Kremlin’s new economic policy and the withdrawal of Western companies from the Russian market tell sociologists how the war years are shaping how they see themselves. They’ve begun to think more about their homeland and to love it more dearly—they’ve decided to “be with their country,” as the phrase goes, in difficult times rather than abandon it entirely. These same people actively participate in pro-war civil society by making donations, contributing humanitarian aid to the front, and weaving camouflage nets for the military. This is a nationalist awakening of the conventional middle class.
Although opposing the liberal pro-Western view that sees it as little more than a cowed population, the nationalist middle class is not a violently mobilized people demanding absolute victory over the enemy while promoting the Kremlin’s imperial ideology. The unexpected conclusion of PS Lab’s sociological research is that we are not dealing with a right-wing radicalization of the middle class, but with the politicization of a rather moderate, bourgeois agenda unfolding in a situation marked by economic development, friendly competition with the West, and the rise of a “soft” patriotism for Russia, which is seen as a modern nation-state rather than an expanding empire. This is not an ideological conversion to an imperial ideology, but a profound intensification of the old liberal-conservative agenda promoted by Putin in his early years in power and later by the protest movement of the 2010s that was led by Alexei Navalny.
Soft patriotism and economic development
In interviews with sociologists, financial winners from the middle class talk about economic stability and development as significant achievements of wartime Russia. In their view, the war is a tragic and unjust event that, at the same time, has led to booming economic progress.
As a 30-year-old engineer working at a state corporation in Siberia stated: “Electronics plants are being built, metallurgical plants are being built, new ones are being created from scratch.… Coke and chemical plants of all sorts… I see every year how our country is blossoming.” Regarding his patriotism, he went on to explain: “About the state—I have doubts. But the motherland and family—yes, it is necessary to protect and love them.” This exemplifies the prevalence of “soft,” everyday patriotism rather than the “hard” form that would be expected of a society mobilized for a total war.
Soft patriotism is usually framed around how well the authorities demonstrate their care about the economic and social wellbeing of citizens—not the Kremlin’s imperialistic claim that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” or the idea that Russia has the right to intervene in Ukraine’s affairs since it’s not a “real country.” For instance, a realtor from Krasnodar, a Russian city not far from the Ukrainian border, emphasized that, “For me, Russia is Russia, and Ukraine is Ukraine—I have relatives there who hated us before [the] military operation: they already didn’t want to communicate with us. That’s a fact.” Regardless of whether Ukraine is presented as an enemy or a victim, whether it evokes aggression or sympathy, most interviewees think of it as a separate, independent state.
Many Russians we interviewed told us that their patriotism had strengthened by participating in volunteer movements to help refugees and the frontline troops. But even this form of participation is often circumspect in its attitude toward militarism. A journalist from Moscow told sociologists that her brother signed up as a volunteer and started traveling to the front “to help people.” He was horrified when he heard about war crimes committed by the Russian soldiers, but claimed that these atrocities were not an essential aspect of this war. For him, the more important factor was that the war forced many people to stop being indifferent. Formerly apathetic citizens now became volunteers or otherwise tried to do something to help their compatriots. Such sentiments are paradoxical: he condemned the war crimes of the Russian army while simultaneously believing in the soft patriotism of wartime society as a driver of care and solidarity. This is how normality is affirmed these days.
In the minds of many people, this emerging civil society, despite its direct contributions to the war, is something fundamentally separate from the state. Beneficiaries of the new economic reality are forming new social groups in Russia. With this development, Putin’s regime, in the absence of political democracy, might be in the process of achieving what many dreamed of in the post-Soviet period: the long-awaited transformation into a “normal country.” Economic beneficiaries are becoming active civilians committed not so much to war as to a new wartime socio-economic order, and this order is thought of in terms of the economic development and progress of the beloved motherland, understood as a nation-state—not a great imperial power.
Сultural responses
What is the culture of this emerging nationalist middle class? The most pro-war and ideologically charged part of the cultural establishment is urging the state to invest as much as possible in ultra-patriotic and imperialistic art. But while the establishment demands movies and books that push an aggressive agenda, the actual popular demand for it is very small. For artists, the conclusion is clear: in order to appeal to the masses, one should try to reduce the degree of hard patriotism while preserving and humanizing the soft patriotic component.
Experiments in this direction can be seen in the TV series “The First Issue,” released in 2024. The main character is a famous writer who experienced great success ten years ago, but today leads a life full of debt and degradation. Unexpectedly, he’s offered the post of editor-in-chief of a glossy magazine owned by someone from the West. Will he be able to save the magazine on his own? The new editor-in-chief believes that the magazine must respond to the spirit of the times, though what exactly that consists of is not quite clear. What is clear, however, is that several developments open up new possibilities for the magazine: the war (which always remains off-screen), the rejection of liberal, pro-Western dogmas, and the growth of a novel patriotism. The editor proposes to make the publication “about ordinary people” and struggles with the staff, advertisers, and investors to make it a reality. After many twists and turns, the first issue of the magazine is a success: patriotism and sovereignty win!
True, the show’s heroes turn out to be migrants and sex workers, people who do not represent decent society for a large number of Russians, to put it mildly. Much else is uncertain. The viewer doesn’t see or understand why exactly the new format of the magazine is so beloved by its usual middle-class audience. The series is filled with nods toward a changing society (at one point, the protagonist mysteriously says, “It’s 2024, you know”—meaning that the past liberal era is over). But what exactly these political and ideological changes actually are remains unknown. The show’s primary evil, however, is not the absent Western bosses or the pro-Western fem-queer youth on the editorial staff. It’s the amoral characters from criminal and business circles with roofs in the Kremlin and the Lubyanka who are engaged in scams in the spirit of the 1990s.
Regardless of the show’s many mysteries and contradictions, it’s an interesting attempt to meet the demand for a new patriotism in mass art. It surely won’t be the last.
Intellectuals going deep
Some people who are regarded as serious intellectuals decided to remain in Russia after the war began. Like the middle-class participants in our sociological interviews, they do not support the war or the Kremlin’s imperial ideology, yet they feel a sense of connection to the changes taking place in the country. They frame these changes not as strictly political, but as existentially significant. They see both good and bad in these developments, but as producers of contemporary culture, they respond first and foremost to the existential dimension of these changes in their art and work.
Alexander Ivanov, the editor-in-chief of Ad Marginem, the highly intellectual independent book publisher, put it succinctly: “The point is that there are two possible types of behavior: to stay or to leave.” There are many different reasons why individual Russians took a particular path. For those who left, it was a visceral reaction to the authorities that made the decision to start the war, as well as an opportunity to realize a long-planned emigration. The reasons for staying are also complicated. It could be the desire to “be together with their country”: a sense of duty to stick with the motherland. And there are more practical reasons, such as a desire not to abandon those whom they teach or care for. There is also the possibility of career advancement at home, as qualified specialists—that is, competitors—found themselves abroad.
Ivanov explained that “The situation that started with the pandemic and radicalized with the outbreak of war says to me, ‘Let’s go deep.’” This is a recurring observation among those that have chosen to stay. “Going to the depths” is a common declaration that understands war as a great spontaneous event that changes everything. It makes impossible the routine discussion of news and the realities of current politics that speakers in exile engage in.
In an interview, the art historian and curator Nadezhda Plungian criticized the 2010s as an era of “neo-modernist normcore, in the format of ‘cards,’ ‘keywords,’ and ‘socials without sharp angles’…. The period of the noughties and tens was for me a space of total censorship in culture. My peers who wanted to work on original scientific or artistic tasks met with constant refusals and closed doors.” Plungian believes that since February 24th, 2022, a new era has begun that promises the development of a new artistic style. Today may be the time for a refashioned mysticism, for messages that cannot be formalized, cannot be processed in the form of “cards.”
Plungian is the author of many books and the curator of exhibitions dedicated to the Soviet woman—which prompted us to ask her about the question of feminism’s prospects in wartime Russia. “Now the world is experiencing a geopolitical split,” she replied, “Moving towards a new distribution of forces. Russia’s place in this picture of the future is being determined before our eyes, and it depends most acutely on comprehending and revising the Soviet political legacy, where the women’s issue is fundamental.”
Plungian believes that “Soviet women had inalienable political rights, but also political responsibilities, which perhaps distinguished them from Western feminists.” Commenting on the blogger and Duma Member Oleg Matveychev’s demand to ban feminism as an extremist Western ideology, she said that he “still sees between the lines the outline of a socialist program: women in Russia should fight not for abstract values, but for concrete political rights, professions, positions—with a full understanding of the internal structure of their state.” Plungian’s activities raise the question of whether feminism can become influential in a Russia that constantly promotes “traditional values.”
The discourse of “traditional values”—through which the establishment justifies the confrontation between Russia and the West—is essentially based on the gender issue. This is not without its oddities. The aesthetic values of late-Soviet countercultural intellectuals, artists, and politicians such as Eduard Limonov, Aleksandr Dugin, and Sergey Kuryokhin once allowed for homosexuality as a form of transgressive anti-normative behavior. It supposedly challenged the spiritually emasculated Brezhnev epoch, and later the liberal years of the 1990s, with their cult of the market, private property, and traditional bourgeois family.
This trend was most clearly expressed in the Leningrad group of artists called the New Academy, which combined the promotion of same-sex love with celebrations of classical antiquity and imperialism. Of course, these fragile combinations quickly fell apart, and homosexuality became unequivocally associated with the decadent liberal order. Limonov even blocked the reprinting of his novel “It’s Me, Eddie,” in which a Russian immigrant in New York City finds happiness through sex with other men, and Dugin, who had previously been married to the openly lesbian human rights activist Yevgenia Debryanskaya, retreated into orthodox traditionalist positions.
The volatile question of whether a sovereign feminist and LGBT tradition in Russia is possible independent of the Western tradition arises again. Some well-known feminists who have remained in Russia, such as Bella Rapoport, have declared a break with the liberal opposition that emigrated, including its feminist wing—this is a question that aligns strongly with the split between those who stayed and those who left. Of course, it is difficult to build a feminist and queer discourse while ignoring the fact that both communities are harassed and repressed by the far-right. But if this effort is to continue, it may be along the same lines as those of the early 1990s, which would view queerness as a challenge to liberal-bourgeois normativity. The critique of feminist and queer discourse, including the critique of its claims to universality, which is presumably used to justify humanitarian interventions and other dominant Western strategies, can also be of great help. There is also another way: the development of the (90s-era) idea that for the sake of self-preservation in a conservative country like Russia the queer community should not insist on its public representation or open political struggle. All the more so, this line of reasoning usually goes, because a closed, private life has its own depth and its own freedom.
There are common features among the priorities and declarations of prominent people who stayed in Russia. They often romanticize the meaning of the ongoing war as a profound event that recreates the world as it unfolds against the background of silence about its concrete and catastrophic effects—a silence justified by security considerations. They have often tried to carve out a middle ground between the emigrants and the right-wing fanatics. In order to do so, they tend to ignore or dismiss the news in the name of deepening their artistic commitments.
Another, simpler form of patriotic depoliticization is the attempt to integrate contemporary art with ethnic traditionalism. The exhibition “SWOYASI: The Way of Contemporary Russian Art” was held earlier this year at the Historical Museum near Red Square. Apart from the hint in the name (“SWO” stands for Special Military Operation), there are no references to military aggression. The show is instead devoted to Russia’s ethnonational heritage and its interpretations in contemporary art. All this is conceptualized through the notion of the “cultural code”—the set of cultural characteristics, images, and ideas that are presumably inherited from ancestors—which is extremely popular in the official traditionalist discourse. An indispensable part of the cultural code is the image of the traditional house (izba) as a reflection of the cosmos. Engagement with the ethno-national heritage and its modern interpretations is a project socially approved and potentially even demanded by the soft-patriotic middle class.
In connection with the ethno-national component of exhibitions like SWOYASI, it is important to mention that, according to the findings of PS Lab, the demand for a nationalist project (clear borders coinciding with the situation before February 24; a common identity; the government primarily solving internal economic problems) is much higher than the demand for an imperial project in vocal support of the war.
Eclecticism instead of radicalism?
Alongside the ethno-national trend, which helps people separate “their own” from the “foreign,” there are projects that present contemporary Russian culture in the spirit which we can call “traditionalism without borders.” This applies, for example, to the Voznesensky Center in Moscow. The exhibition “Dark Ottepel [Thaw],” put on at the beginning of 2025, presents the mystical underground of the 1960s as the flip side of the Thaw’s mainstream, full of bright humanism and progressive hopes as the country underwent de-Stalinization and loosened censorship. The Voznesensky Center, which hosted this exhibition, provided visitors with a moderately patriotic narrative capable of responding to the demands of the most educated part of the new middle class—demands that overlap with the priorities of some progressive left and liberal intellectuals who remained in Russia and continue to engage in their previous projects without speaking either for or against the war. It is noteworthy that the programs of the Voznesensky Center are supervised by none other than the artist Dmitry Khvorostov, also known as Artur Dugin, the son of the ultranationalist Aleksandr Dugin.
In his 2021 manifesto named Speculative Traditionalism, Khvorostov writes that modernity is obsolete. It is “calculable … accountable … completely captured by politics and permeated by political anxieties,” transformed into a “quasi-religious secular doctrine.” He projects these properties of modernity onto the contemporary art scene in Russia:
“Institutions, museums, dependent and independent spaces, galleries and prizes support the One Course. A friend of mine calls it the ‘Pillar Road’. The road there—to the world where all is well, to the evening star, there, to the source of modernity. And there’s pandemonium on this road, everyone is trampling it in an endless line. They trample it so persistently that it has long since gone underground, turned into a quarry, into a pit. This is the sin of the mainstream.”
Khvorostov sees this as “a provincial complex of Russian culture.” However, unlike the orthodox adherents of traditionalism, those opponents of modernity, Khvorostov professes a kind of humanized version. He sees in the past sterilized by modernity, “a space of free speculation … easy and carefree, unrequited and therefore free.” He goes on to write:
“Traditionalism has done much to describe and process ancient traditions and ways of doing things, but has spoiled everything with its political and ethical conclusion. I do not share the ethical imperative of traditionalism because it has a high degree of aggression in my eyes, the same as any ideology of modernity. It doesn’t matter who they propose to put on the altar of victory: class, race, religion, the majority, the individual. There should be no more sacrifices!”
The message of the Voznesensky Center’s programs is that contemporary Russian culture is not reducible to ethnonational traditionalism, nor to the glitter of the monarchy, nor to the USSR, nor to liberalism, nor to a vulgar Z-agenda. It includes everything, including its own counterculture. One of the Center’s recent exhibitions (alongside “Dark Ottepel”) is dedicated to Boris Usov, a musician and artist, and one of the foundational figures of Russian punk.
We can imagine a representative of the new patriotic middle class who, in an effort to pursue accessible cultural activities, moves from the cozy ethno-archaics of SWOYASI to the almost-imperial and blossoming complexity of the Voznesensky Center, from the events at VDNH (Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy) glorifying Soviet cosmonauts of the 1960s to an exhibition of artists aestheticizing that era’s dark side and undermining its historical optimism.
There will soon be more work that strongly expresses the worldview of soft patriotism that sociologists are just beginning to document. But all this is possible only if normality returns at the end of the war, when Russian society could gradually reemerge from the state of emergency. If the war really does represent an unbridgeable rift and the advent of a new epoch, however, then it is easier to imagine developments in the form of dictatorship or revolution, a radicalization of politics rather than a withdrawal from it “to the depths.”
For cautionary reasons, the authors are writing under pseudonyms.
