Russian Society and the War: A strategy of collective avoidance and the illusion of normality

The political stability of wartime Russia, and the apparent equanimity of Russian society in the face of mounting material and human losses, are commonly attributed to the pro-war convictions of the Russian ‘majority’ and to ‘top-down’ influence — a combination of propaganda and repression. The heightened loyalty recorded in public opinion surveys is, in turn, often interpreted as a classic ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect.

However, from the very outset of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the public mood in Russia has been a far cry from the surge of political enthusiasm that accompanied the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Only a quarter of respondents in a recent survey express distinct positive emotions regarding the current political moment and firm support for the regime, while for roughly two-thirds, declarative support remains largely emotionally neutral.

Wartime Russia is characterised by a collectively sustained equilibrium, in which citizens simultaneously adapt to the war, distance themselves from its most destructive consequences, and reproduce the conditions that enable it to continue.

Explaining this equilibrium requires closer attention to horizontal social relations, through which citizens manage uncertainty, emotions, and the practicalities of coexistence. Its key mechanism is the pursuit of social ‘synchronisation’, that is, the need to find consensus with an imagined majority. This impulse is driven not by superficial conformism but by a deep-seated commitment to preserving social order and preventing social divisions.

The displacement of the war from everyday emotional life ceases to be an individual psychological defence mechanism and becomes a collectively sustained social practice, shielding the ordinariness of daily life from the extraordinary reality in which Russians actually live.

This state of collective avoidance, however, is not something fixed or immutable. The equilibrium of Russian public opinion more closely resembles a collectively reproduced state of deferred destabilisation than the mobilised authoritarian consensus that emerged following the annexation of Crimea. The balance may prove vulnerable to shocks capable of disrupting established social routines or altering expectations about prevailing public opinion.

Should Russians begin to sense that opinions around them are changing, or that the consequences of dissent are becoming less severe, the currently observed consensus of non-confrontation may dissipate. Public opinion may then coalesce around a different set of beliefs shared by the majority.

The Puzzle of Equanimity

How — and why — have Russians made peace with war?

The political stability of wartime Russia, its ability to maintain seemingly steady public quiescence in the face of mounting material and human costs, is most often ascribed to top-down factors. Many Russians are argued to have bought into an ideology of empire, chauvinism and civilisational exceptionalism that excuses or even necessitates war. Pervasive propaganda is presumed to bolster the martial spirits of those for whom ideology falls flat. And then there’s increasingly virulent repression to clean up the mess at the margins.

All of these things, of course, are very real factors in contemporary Russian political life. They seem manifestly insufficient, however, to explain why Russian public opinion — to whatever extent we are able to measure and observe it — has been so remarkably unmoved by the destruction of Ukrainian cities in which Russians have friends and relatives, the return of hundreds of thousands of Russian friends and relatives in body bags, the extension of the war into Russian territory itself, with sanctions, mutiny and various other inconveniences along the way. Maintaining that degree of equanimity takes work, and that work needs to be explained if we are to understand how and why Russians may eventually lose their desire to make the effort.

Russia’s Unusual Rally

Russians have, of course, rallied around the flag before, to the great benefit of Vladimir Putin. In 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and the initial invasion of the Donbas, Putin’s approval ratings shot up — but it wasn’t just gratitude for territorial acquisition that fed the surge. Rather, as our research showed at the time, increased public attention to the news fed increased conversation among friends and family about the news, which in turn fed a wave of positive emotion (→ Green, Robertson: Affect and Autocracy). People didn’t just support Putin: they began to love him and to take pride in him, but they also took greater pride in Russia itself, and developed a greater sense of optimism. Russians were swept up in a tide of genuine political enthusiasm, something Kirill Rogov described as the ‘Crimean syndrome’ (→ Rogov: Crimean syndrome). The Kremlin did not have to manufacture the ‘Krym nash’ moment — it just had to capitalise on it.

No such enthusiasm is visible now, nor has it been since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Rather, wartime Russia increasingly appears characterised by a socially sustained equilibrium in which citizens simultaneously accommodate the war, distance themselves from its most disruptive implications, and reproduce the conditions that allow it to continue. The war remains politically omnipresent but social backgrounded: pervasive enough to shape everyday life, yet sufficiently contained — materially and emotionally — to avoid generating widespread rupture. Understanding this equilibrium requires moving beyond top-down accounts of authoritarian control toward a closer examination of the horizontal social dynamics through which ordinary citizens manage uncertainty, emotion, and coexistence.

It would be wrong, of course, to say that Russians have simply withdrawn emotionally from politics. Evidence from recent surveys we have run in Russia (July 2025; online CAWI survey based on a quota sample, N = 2,000) suggests just over a quarter of our respondents have strong positive emotions about politics — emotions such as pride and trust — and that these people have high levels of support for Putin and for his regime’s policies and style of governance, as well as a paternalistic attachment to the state as a provider of material benefit.

A much smaller group, around 5 percent, have strongly negative emotions about politics and the Kremlin, including anger and contempt. These citizens, unsurprisingly, have very low levels of support for Putin, are not inclined to justify its policies, and do not harbour paternalistic attitudes.

It’s the middle — approximately two thirds of our respondents — who are most interesting, however. Without any significant emotional attachment to the regime, they nevertheless support the Kremlin and its policies. The question is why.

To be certain, it is not because these less emotional respondents are happy with the state of affairs in Russia. They are not. Fewer than a quarter of them are optimistic about Russia’s economic future, and only 18% had good things to say about their personal financial prospects.

Slightly more than half said they were happy with the state of democracy in Russia, compared to 77% of those who reported positive emotions, and fewer than half said they were satisfied with how the Kremlin was handling the war in Ukraine (compared to 71% of those in the positive-emotion group). Overall, these non-emotive respondents were also considerably worse off materially than those in the positive-emotion group, with 8% saying they were struggling to pay bills and 11% saying they struggled to afford medicine, compared to 5% in the positively inclined group reporting such problems.

Table 1: Political and Economic Sentiment by Emotional Cohort in Russia (% of Respondents)

As survey researchers, of course, we cannot know what people’s actual emotions are. We only know what they report to us. In that respect, however, we are similar to everyone else: people make choices about how to translate their inner emotions into responses visible to outside observers. In making those choices, truth is only one motivation. Another motivation is wanting to make sure that the emotions we show to others don’t make life more difficult, by causing discomfort or conflict.

That process — the decision about how to modulate the internal discomfort caused by politics, the economy and the war in a world of complex social relationships — is likely a large part of the explanation for why people who are not happy with the regime’s performance nonetheless support it in Russia.

Looking more closely at our data, while the non-emotive core of our respondents have political opinions that are far from positive and are somewhat less likely to support Putin himself or to believe that most Russians share their views on politics, they are just as likely as respondents with highly positive emotions to justify the regime’s grip on power, its use of repression, and even its corruption (something we refer to here as ‘system justification’, i.e., the tendency to accept an unfortunate political reality as not only inevitable, but desirable). And critically, they hold similar views on the importance of what we call ‘synchronisation’ — i.e., the need to find consensus with the perceived majority. And it is this synchronisation, we argue, that keeps these otherwise disaffected Russians from slipping into negative emotions and hardened opposition.

Table 2: Emotions, Politics & Socialisation in Russia

‘Synchronisation’ here should not be understood as conformity, obedience or passive submission. Rather, the underlying attitudes captured by our survey reflect broader orientations towards non-disruption: avoiding standing out, not placing oneself outside collectively recognised norms, accepting socially recognised authority structures, and maintaining forms of coexistence experienced as orderly and morally intelligible. These orientations are rooted not simply in political belief, but in deeper forms of socialisation concerning how one inhabits collective environments under conditions of uncertainty.

This distinction matters, because it changes how wartime compliance should be understood. The conventional image of authoritarian depoliticization imagines citizens retreating inward — emotionally detached, politically apathetic, and socially atomised. But wartime Russia is experiencing something different: a collectively organised mode of emotional and social management. The dominant middle cohort of our sample is not emotionally passive: they are actively engaged in regulating their emotions, while simultaneously participating in routines and social practices that contain the disruptive implications of that engagement. Political emotions persist, but their consequences are minimised through patterns of accommodation, synchronisation, and everyday coexistence that preserve ordinary life under extraordinary conditions.

The importance of social synchronisation in this process is particularly revealing. Under prolonged wartime conditions, conformity may function less as obedience than as a mechanism of social coordination. In uncertain environments, individuals rely heavily on socially legible cues concerning acceptable behaviour, emotional expression, and political positioning. Not ‘standing out’, maintaining collective normality, and avoiding socially disruptive differentiation become stabilising resources in themselves. Citizens need not enthusiastically endorse the war in order to reproduce the social arrangements that allow it to continue. They need only continue participating in forms of collective coordination that privilege predictability, coexistence, and manageable social continuity over rupture and confrontation.

This helps explain one of the more striking features of contemporary Russian public opinion: the coexistence of visible strain with persistent political accommodation. Many Russians appear neither fully persuaded by the war nor fully insulated from its consequences. As a result, uneasy questions may arise, regarding whether the benefits of the war — whatever they may be — outweigh the costs. It is one thing to allow these questions to create cognitive dissonance inside one’s own mind. It is quite another to allow those questions to create social dissonance, threatening to upset the very relationships of trust and solidarity that many Russians rely on for comfort and security. Collective avoidance becomes the socially rational response.

Russians seeking to avoid social dissonance seem to engage in forms of what Jeremy Morris has called ‘defensive consolidation’: preserving workable forms of social order by avoiding behaviours, discussions, and commitments capable of producing destabilising consequences for themselves or those around them (→ Morris: Russians in Wartime and Defensive Consolidation). The war becomes normalised not because it is universally accepted, but because ordinary social life increasingly depends on maintaining shared routines capable of coexisting with it.

The broader implication is that authoritarian stability during wartime may depend less on eliminating emotional tension than on regulating its social consequences. Citizens need not amputate their political emotions in order for political order to endure. Indeed, the Russian case suggests that emotional engagement and political stability may coexist precisely because social practices emerge that prevent emotional strain from crystallising into collective rupture. Stability is maintained not through emotional ambivalence, but through the vigilant social management of emotionally disruptive realities.

This also helps explain the peculiar quality of Russia’s wartime public sphere. The war is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere: omnipresent institutionally and symbolically, yet often displaced from direct everyday experience. Citizens encounter the war continuously, but mostly through routinised, mediated or socially regulated forms that limit the demands it places on everyday life. And conversations about the war run shallow: enough support is performed to ensure that follow-up questions about costs and benefits are not asked, and the avoidance of those questions allows support to be performed. Avoidance thus becomes less an individual psychological defence mechanism than a collectively sustained social practice that protects the ordinariness of everyday life from the extraordinariness of the reality in which Russians live.

What’s Next: Suspended destabilisation?

Such equilibria are durable precisely because they are socially distributed. They do not depend on universal belief, unanimous support, or total repression. They require only that enough people prize continuity and predictability over confrontation and disruption. In this sense, the equilibrium of Russian wartime public opinion resembles less a mobilised authoritarian consensus à la Crimea, than a collectively reproduced condition of suspended destabilisation.

Avoidance, characteristic of Russian society, does not imply permanence, however. This balancing act may be vulnerable to shocks that could disrupt social routines or shift expectations about social opinion. If Russians begin to sense either that opinions around them are shifting, or that the consequences of holding unorthodox opinions are softening, the consensus we appear to observe today could dissipate rapidly, or else coalesce around a very different set of shared certainties. Indeed, as we see Russians’ sense of how their country is doing tick downward persistently since late 2025 (→ Re: Russia: How Much Has The Bubble of Support Deflated?), some of that may already be happening.

Whatever happens next, the analysis here is clear: the degree to which Russian public opinion enables the Kremlin to prosecute its war in Ukraine relies less on the coercive capacity or propaganda prowess of the state, than on the social and psychological labour that ordinary Russians put into keeping the war at bay.