“The worst thing is the emergence of questions about the future of the country” - Layout

The Kremlin’s main instructions before the presidential elections for the regional elite: “The people are for the leader. There are no alternatives. And don’t rock the boat,” says sociologist Grigory Yudin. In an interview with Vorstka, the Shaninka professor commented on the main ideas that officials of the presidential administration shared with vice-governors before the upcoming presidential campaign. The key task of the campaign is to prevent any questions about the future of the country; their appearance is the biggest risk; “the desire to ask them must be knocked out from the very beginning,” says Yudin.

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Last week, “Verstka” talked about the instructions for holding the presidential elections in March 2024, which were given to regional officials by the leaders of the internal political bloc of the presidential administration. A seminar on the upcoming campaign was held in Senezh in early April. The AP demands from the regions at least 75% of votes for Vladimir Putin with a turnout of 70%, and the current number of the president’s strong supporters was estimated at 53%. The Kremlin saw the main risk in “angry patriots” and “Westerners,” whose total potential could be up to 35%.

— How objectively did the officials of the presidential administration study the audience before the presidential elections?

- This is not a study, but an installation. Yes, the population characteristics that are in the document are likely taken from real studies - focus groups or open-ended questions, for example. But they do not form its basis, but serve the purpose of the authors.

- What is the goal?

- Break the audience, in this case - representatives of the regional elite. From the very first page, one simple thought is hammered into her with a powerful blow: “The people are for the leader. There are no alternatives. And don’t rock the boat.” There are people and a leader, they merge in ecstasy. If you want, try to climb between them! Don't want to? Help demonstrate ecstasy. And do it with the simplest tools: coercion, pressure and aggression . The bureaucracy must be complicit in this great violence and thereby swear an oath of loyalty to the Kremlin.

— Don’t high-ranking officials understand this?

“I don’t see any empirical evidence that they are starting to scour their eyes for alternatives.” At the same time, the situation in the country obviously favors this. The entire system of power is under serious pressure, and there is no understanding of how to get out from under it. Those who are beyond its contours can still console themselves with the fact that “Putin will come up with something.” Those on the inside need to make much more effort to convincingly tell themselves this. In Russia, the understanding of what will happen next has completely disappeared. Expectations, no matter who you talk to in Moscow, are divided into two types. Or the bad ones: “We understand how we can lose, but we don’t understand how we can win.” Or good, but crazy: “Let's take London” and other similar nonsense. People in power are close to understanding that the country has reached a dead end.

- But understanding has not yet arrived?

- Not yet. Nevertheless, Kiriyenko has smart people who understand perfectly well that if such thoughts come to their minds, then so do the rest of the bosses. Therefore, you need to quickly make it clear that there are no alternatives. They are shown something like this: “Why did you come here, to find out about some options? Here's 84% ​​support for your forehead! Understood? Rest, next!” This is a standard scheme: to hit the audience with numbers . The ratings in the document are formulated in a manipulative manner - there is no 87% turnout, and refusals to respond are not taken into account . And any critically thinking official organizing elections cannot help but have questions about this. But there is no need to ask them; this desire is immediately suppressed by the “club of popular support.” The audience in this case, “political administrators,” are brought to their knees by this attack. And as a result, they themselves will bring the “target numbers” based on the voting results.

— The Kremlin divides those ready to support Putin into “loyalists,” “patriots,” “socialists,” and “progressives.” Why, then, a detailed description of groups of voters and how to achieve their loyalty during the presidential campaign?

— After the audience has been hit in the brains, they are given a manual on how to demonstrate the aforementioned ecstasy. What to say to which population group. The question of whether this attitude is adequate to reality is generally meaningless. This is simply the way the AP “chopped” groups of voters for this audience.

— They can’t make a mistake in their assessment?

- Of course not. Even if they made some completely crazy “cut”, who would challenge it? There will be no candidates who could do this in the presidential elections. At the same time, I am not at all sure that with the installations named in the document the system will “reach” until March 2024. I can well assume that by then other introductory notes will appear. For example, some kind of plebiscite about the return of the USSR, a new constitution with the death penalty, in general, about the announcement of a new country. The Kremlin isn’t risking anything: who can claim that they said different things in April 2023? The further the system degrades, the more morally knockout numbers of support for the authorities it will show . The document says so directly: the main point of the campaign is to provide the leader with legitimacy.

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— Does this look like a real assessment of the mood in Russia?

- This should not look like a real assessment. This document should not be approached as an objective scientific study. It has completely different goals, and it was made by experienced people who understand what they need. Of course, if you want, for example, to measure fatigue with Putin and his people, then you will use other questions and get other numbers. There are not 12% of such dissatisfied and tired people, there are more of them. After all, they haven’t gone away since 2020, when we saw before the constitutional plebiscite completely different numbers from those that were later released officially. But this document does not set such a goal. On the contrary, he must convince his audience that only a few can be against Putin today. Therefore, work with the critically minded part of voters should consist of demoralizing them. Including with the help of these calculations. Firstly, they help to ensure that opponents of the official course are perceived as marginal. So that a crowd of people doesn’t suddenly appear and break into these elections and change everything. Secondly, so that people who now fit their views into a framework convenient for the authorities do not begin to expand these views. For example, many Belarusians suddenly learned in 2020 that elections are not just a procedure for extending Lukashenko’s power, but a real political struggle with far-reaching and unpredictable consequences.

— Do you think the authors themselves believe in what they wrote?

— There is probably something of self-hypnosis in this document. They are used to living under a “lantern” that illuminates a place where “everything is fine.” And the goal is that nothing unpleasant crawls out of the darkness under this lantern. So far this has been successful. They risk that they will miss the formation of a real political subject outside the light of the “lantern”, who will burst under the lamp himself. Sooner or later this will happen.

— If even this document, addressed by Kremlin officials to “their own,” turned out to be something close to propaganda, then who owns the real sociological data?

- There are no “real numbers”. If, for example, the FSO conducts its surveys using the same methods as other sociological services, it receives the same results. Another important thing is that sociologists working on behalf of the Kremlin publish only what the customer wants to show . They get a lot of other numbers that the general public will never see. And in this sense, there are “secret” surveys: with other questions, other topics and other answers.

— Do you believe in the protest of “angry patriots,” which is presented in the document as the main threat ?

- In my opinion, this is nonsense. Protest is a political action, and “angry patriots” just sit around and whine. Their entire discourse, like a parasite, sits on the dominant state discourse. It is not clear how he can gain some kind of independence. More than a century ago, Russian society already went through this - there were numerous hordes of Black Hundreds who dissolved immediately after the fall of the tsarist regime and the disappearance of its narrative. The parasite died along with the host.

— The document does not formulate an image of the future—for what perspective Putin should be re-elected. Could this be a problem?

— This is not a problem for organizing a plebiscite. It was not there in 2018, during the last presidential elections. Now, as then, there will probably be a story about how life will be stable and smooth. You see, the document contains a minimum of war, despite the fact that it has been going on for more than a year. She is the source of problems, why talk about her? And how could the authors begin to articulate the image of the future? For them, it depends on the views of Putin, who has long had no ideas for the future. And it won’t happen anymore , as the authors of this “campaign program” know very well.

- And the Russians themselves, in such a vacuum, will not begin to think about the future?

“The document shows that the possibility of serious questions about the future of the country is the main fear of its authors. Therefore, the desire to ask them must be knocked out from the very beginning. For the country, and even simply for the mental state of the people in it, the absence of an image of the future is a disaster. They feel that he is not there, but they are afraid to admit it to themselves . Because after this you will have to ask, including yourself, all sorts of bad and scary questions. This feeling is already permeating the entire country - starting with high-ranking officials. In order for the Kremlin to confront these issues, there must be not a feeling, but an awareness of a dead end. It will come sooner or later, and will most likely be associated with external factors, such as defeat in the war. But for now we see preparations for the plebiscite, during which all participants are simply trying to ignore the absence of a future.

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