The acceptance stage

Russian émigrés and the new social contract

Two decades ago, Alexander Auzan, the head of Moscow State University’s Economics Faculty, described Russia’s social contract as one in which the state permitted its citizens to enrich themselves as long as they accepted having no role whatsoever in political decision-making.

That deal, which at a time of desperate post-Soviet poverty held widespread popular appeal, has already cost Russia dear — in the form of the country’s global pariah status, the forced mass emigration of so many of its people and the tens of thousands of Russian soldiers killed in the war in Ukraine.

Of course, anyone who accepts the Kremlin’s social contract nowadays must in addition accept certain troubling false equivalences, namely that murderers are heroes, while peacemakers are enemies who can expect to be tortured and killed in prison.

The past year has seen major Russian retail chains open new outlets in far-flung Russian cities that have become noticeably richer over the past three years due to being centres of military manufacturing. While these new signatories to the Russian social contract may have forfeited their political rights, they can at least take solace in the high-end Chinese TV their well-paid jobs in the military-industrial complex allow them to buy.

As the year drew to a close, Andrey Kotov, a man who organised package tours for members of the LGBT community, was killed in pretrial detention, a clear demonstration of how the Russian state now operates, arbitrarily declaring a certain group of people to be hostile to the government and deeming their very existence a crime. In a matter of days, Kotov went from tax-paying entrepreneur to suspected criminal, cast into a prison cell.

For an openly gay man, spending any amount of time in a Russian prison, where the criminal codes that govern life on the inside have become an extension of state policy, poses an existential threat. Kotov was killed because human life is worth nothing in this system; an enemy of the people was simply destroyed by his jailers and fellow inmates because “all LGBT people are extremists”.

Therefore, as we inch ever closer to the third anniversary of the war, a new social contract has taken hold in Russia, one in which individual citizens are entitled to a private life only if they are willing to submit to arbitrary rule by the state. In practice, this means that you can hang onto your property if you keep quiet about what’s happening to your neighbour, and, equally, you can have a good career if you’re prepared to turn a blind eye to your colleagues being fired once they’ve been deemed “foreign agents”.

The Russian social contract of 2025 demands total obedience, which involves relinquishing the right to disagree with any action taken by the state, foregoing the right to privacy in the vain hope that you won’t be the next Kotov, and waiving even basic empathy. And that’s before we’ve even started on collective action or solidarity.

Social contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes argued that in ceding some personal power to the state, citizens were hoping to ensure their own security and their right to privacy. A consistent supporter of strong central authority, Hobbes nevertheless argued that too significant an encroachment by the state on the lives of its subjects would entail the breaking of the social contract.

A broken society already accepts all and any madness doled out by the authorities as it attempts to cling to what’s left of its familiar, comfortable life of the past.

But modern dictatorships have learnt to circumvent such pesky restrictions, allowing them to enjoy unlimited power. Indeed, if your neighbours suddenly disappear one night, you’re the lucky one — you’re still here and might even enjoy some additional opportunities in their absence.

According to Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev, economic factors will eventually force most recent Russian émigrés to return home. In his analysis, the slightest hint of normality — an end to the active phase of the war, the winding down of mobilisation — could lead to most exiles accepting the rules of the game devised since 2022. After all, in a society that has already given up its political rights, agreeing to also ignore any lingering moral qualms would appear a small price to pay for a comfortable life back in Russia.

A broken society already accepts all and any madness doled out by the authorities as it attempts to cling to what’s left of its familiar, comfortable life of the past. No wonder then that the latest round of terror unleashed by the Russian government focuses on seizing royalties due to foreign agents as well as any income generated by property they own in Russia. Doing this is designed to send a clear message to anybody still in doubt: either accept the state’s madness as the “new normal” or see your family ruined.

Russians living abroad, beyond the reach of the censor, have broadly speaking divided into two factions — one that favours understanding and forgiving “our boys”, reclaiming the Russian flag and taking the side of “the ordinary people living through such a difficult time”. The second assumes that the survival of Russian society is dependent on Ukraine’s ability to defend itself from Russian aggression, and therefore both moral and pragmatic arguments should persuade us to help Ukraine as a priority.

While they may seem poles apart, these two positions are not mutually exclusive, as a way out of the current catastrophe that benefits both Kyiv and Moscow still exists: the withdrawal of Russian troops from all Ukrainian territory, the democratisation of Russia, security guarantees for Ukraine, and the reconstruction of war-torn regions.

The problem is that for every day the new social contract exists, the further away and more unrealistic these scenarios seem. While the Russian opposition in exile continues to make its appeals to Russian citizens by means of thoroughly reasonable slogans, these inevitably look increasingly radical to those who remain in the country being fed an endless diet of state propaganda.

The cynical conclusion to draw from the acceptance stage is therefore that the most advantageous strategy both within and without Russia is to sit quietly and hope that you and your family won’t be the next Kotov. But do we have a sufficiently bottomless supply of cynicism to embrace such a life?