Russian society and war: the strategy of collective avoidance and the illusion of normality

The political stability of a warring Russia and the ability of Russian society to maintain equanimity in the face of growing material and human losses are usually explained by the pro-war beliefs of the Russian “majority” and factors of “vertical” influence - a combination of propaganda and repression. And the increased loyalty demonstrated in surveys is a “rallying under the flag” effect.

However, from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the public atmosphere in Russia was a far cry from the surge of political enthusiasm that the annexation of Crimea produced in 2014. Only a quarter of respondents to a recent survey express clear positive emotions regarding the current political moment and strong support for the regime, while two-thirds of its declarative support remains uncolored.

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

Explaining this equilibrium requires closer attention to the horizontal social relations through which citizens manage uncertainty, emotions, and practices of coexistence. Its key tool is the desire for social “synchronization,” that is, the need to find consensus with an imaginary majority, behind which lies not superficial conformism, but a deep-seated orientation towards maintaining social order and preventing social splits.

Displacement of war from the daily emotional routine ceases to be an individual psychological defense mechanism and turns into a collectively supported social practice, protecting the ordinariness of everyday life from the extraordinary reality in which Russians actually live.

This state of collective avoidance, however, is not something immutable and unchangeable. The equilibrium of Russian public opinion does not resemble a mobilized authoritarian consensus, as in the case of the annexation of Crimea, but a collectively reproduced state of deferred destabilization. This balance may be vulnerable to shocks that could disrupt social routines or shift expectations regarding dominant public opinion.

If Russians begin to sense that opinions around them are changing or that the consequences of dissent are being softened, the observed consensus of non-conflict may dissipate and the general opinion may coalesce around a different set of shared beliefs.

The mystery of equanimity

How and why did Russians come to terms with the war? The political stability of warring Russia and its ability to maintain stable public calm in the face of growing material and human losses are most often explained by factors of “vertical” influence. It is assumed that many Russians have internalized an imperial ideology, chauvinism, and a sense of civilizational exceptionalism that allows war to be justified or even necessary. It is also assumed that widespread propaganda maintains a militant spirit in those for whom such ideology is not sufficiently convincing, and on the periphery of this social consensus, order is imposed through increasingly brutal repression.

Of course, all of the above - the ideology of exclusivity, propaganda and repression - are very real factors in today's Russian political life. However, they are clearly insufficient to explain why Russian public opinion - to the extent that it can be measured and observed at all - has proven so surprisingly unperturbed in the face of the destruction of Ukrainian cities in which Russians have friends and relatives living, the return of hundreds of thousands of these friends and relatives in zinc coffins, in the face of the transfer of war to Russian territory, sanctions, rebellion and other manifestations of abnormality and discomfort. Maintaining such a degree of equanimity requires effort, the nature of which needs to be explained if we are to understand, among other things, how and when Russians may eventually lose the desire to make these efforts.

Unusual Russian “rally”

Russian society was already experiencing a state of “rally around the flag” - to the considerable benefit of Vladimir Putin. In 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Donbass, his ratings rose sharply. And this surge was fueled not only by gratitude for the territorial acquisition. As our research at the time showed, growing public attention to the news fueled the intensity of conversations about it among friends and family, which, in turn, generated a wave of positive emotions (→ Green, Robertson: Affect and Autocracy ). People didn’t just support Putin; they felt love and gratitude for him, and with them a strong sense of pride in Russia as a whole and increased optimism. Russians were caught up in a wave of genuine political enthusiasm - what Kirill Rogov called the “Crimean syndrome” (→ Rogov: Crimean syndrome ). The Kremlin did not need to construct the “Crimea is ours” moment—it only had to capitalize on it.

Nothing similar is observed now - and has not been observed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In contrast, wartime Russia is characterized by a collectively maintained equilibrium in which citizens simultaneously adapt to the war, distance themselves from its most destructive consequences, and reproduce the conditions that allow it to continue. War is politically ubiquitous but socially relegated to the background: it is pervasive enough to shape everyday life, yet its consequences are sufficiently limited in material and emotional terms to provoke a shift in sentiment and wide divisions in society.

Explaining this equilibrium requires moving beyond notions of authoritarian control as a purely vertical mechanism and paying closer attention to the horizontal social relationships through which citizens manage uncertainty, emotions, and practices of coexistence.

It would be wrong to say that Russians have simply withdrawn emotionally from politics. Data from a survey recently conducted in Russia by the authors of this article (July 2025, online survey (CAWI) on a quota sample, N = 2000) show that just over a quarter of respondents experience strong positive emotions regarding the current political situation, including pride and trust in the Russian government. They also demonstrate high levels of support for Putin, his policies and management style, as well as a paternalistic attachment to the state as a provider of material goods. At the same time, a significantly smaller group—about 5%—experiences sharply negative emotions towards the Kremlin and its policies, even to the point of “anger” and “contempt.” These citizens, not surprisingly, support Putin extremely weakly, are not inclined to justify his policies and are not committed to paternalistic attitudes.

However, of greatest interest are the roughly two-thirds of respondents in between. Without showing any significant emotional attachment to the regime, they nevertheless support the Kremlin and its policies. The question is why?

The answer is definitely not that these less emotional respondents are satisfied with the state of affairs in Russia. Less than a quarter of them are optimistic about the country's economic future, and only 18% are positive about their own financial prospects. Just over half said they were satisfied with the state of democracy in Russia, compared with 77% in the group of respondents with positive emotions, and less than half expressed satisfaction with the Kremlin's handling of the war in Ukraine, compared with 71% of those in the group with “positive emotions.” At the same time, the dominant cluster of “non-emotional” respondents is also characterized by a slightly worse financial situation than the group with positive emotions: 8% reported difficulties paying bills and 11% with purchasing medications, compared to 5% facing such problems in the group with positive emotions.

Table 1. Political and economic attitudes of various groups of respondents according to the emotional state scale, % of the number of respondents

Mechanisms of social synchronization

Of course, we cannot know what people's real emotions are. What is known is what respondents report about themselves. In this respect, a sociological survey is similar to ordinary life situations in which people make choices about how to translate their internal emotions into reactions visible to outside observers. Moreover, the authenticity of emotion is not the only selection criterion here. Another criterion is determined by the desire to ensure that the emotions demonstrated to others do not complicate their lives or cause discomfort or conflict.

The features of this process - deciding how to regulate internal discomfort associated with politics, economics and war in the space of various social communications - in our opinion, provide the key to understanding why people in Russia, dissatisfied with the results of the regime’s actions, nevertheless support it.

A more detailed analysis of our survey data points to the following picture. Although the “unemotional” core of respondents has political views that are far from positive, and are somewhat less likely to support Putin himself or believe that the majority of Russians share their political views, they are just as willing as respondents with a positive emotional background to justify the regime’s retention of power (they do not seek to change it), and are tolerant of its repressive practices and even corruption. We call this “systemic justification,” that is, the tendency to accept an unfavorable political reality not only as inevitable, but also as acceptable. What is fundamentally important here is that they share similar views on the importance of what we call “synchronization”—the attitude of finding consensus with the “imagined majority.” We believe that it is the desire for such synchronization that keeps potentially dissatisfied Russians from moving to expressing negative emotional reactions about what is happening or obvious disagreement with the regime and its politicians.

Table 2. Public emotions and social attitudes

“Synchronization” should not be understood as conformity, obedience or passive submission. Rather, the underlying attitudes captured by the survey reflect a broader orientation toward avoiding social rupture with others, which defines their desire to blend in, their reluctance to go beyond collectively accepted norms, their acceptance of generally accepted structures of authority, and their need to maintain forms of coexistence that are perceived as orderly and morally understandable. These attitudes are rooted not simply in political beliefs, but in deeper skills of socialization in a collective environment under conditions of high uncertainty.

This difference is significant because it changes the understanding of the phenomenon of “military compliance” observed in Russian society—loyalty to the war and the regime leading it. A common interpretation of authoritarian depoliticization suggests that citizens “withdraw into themselves”—becoming emotionally detached, politically apathetic, and socially atomized. However, wartime Russian society is experiencing something different—a collectively maintained regime of emotional and social auto-moderation. The dominant “middle” cohort of the sample is not emotionally passive: its representatives are actively engaged in regulating their emotions, allowing them to restrain the destructive consequences of their own participation in routine social practices of wartime. Political emotions persist, but their social consequences are minimized through patterns of accommodation, synchronization, and routine interactions that maintain the emphatic “ordinariness” of everyday life under extraordinary conditions.

Social synchronization skills play a key role in this process. In a protracted war, conformity functions less as obedience and more as a mechanism of social coordination. In situations of uncertainty, individuals rely heavily on socially read signals regarding acceptable norms of behavior, emotional expression, and political positions. The imperatives to “not stand out,” to maintain collective normality, and to avoid socially destructive differentiation themselves become stabilizing tools. Citizens do not need to enthusiastically approve of war in order to reproduce the social arrangements that allow it to continue. It is enough to continue to engage in forms of collective coordination that prioritize predictability, coexistence, and managed social connectedness—as opposed to division and confrontation.

This helps explain one of the most striking features of contemporary Russian public opinion: the coexistence of visible tension with persistent political accommodation. Many Russians appear to be neither completely convinced of the justice of the war nor completely insulated from its consequences. As a result, they may have troubling questions about whether the benefits of war, whatever they may be, outweigh its costs. Allowing these questions to create cognitive dissonance within your own mind is one thing. Allowing them to create social dissonance that threatens to destroy the relationships of trust and solidarity that many Russians rely on for peace of mind and security is another thing entirely. Collective avoidance becomes a socially rational solution.

Russians seeking to avoid social dissonance appear to resort to what Jeremy Morris has called “defensive consolidation”—preserving workable forms of social order by avoiding behaviors, discussions, and commitments that could produce destabilizing consequences for themselves or their environment (→ Morris: Russians in Wartime and Defensive Consolidation ). War is normalized not because it is universally accepted, but because ordinary social life increasingly depends on the maintenance of common routines that can coexist with it.

The broader implication is that authoritarian stability in wartime may depend less on eliminating emotional tension than on regulating its social manifestations. Citizens do not need to amputate their political emotions for the political order to endure. Moreover, the Russian case suggests that emotional involvement and political stability can coexist precisely because social practices emerge that prevent the crystallization of emotional tension and its transformation into social cleavage. Stability is maintained here not through emotional ambivalence, but through tireless social moderation of the emotionally destructive potential of the surrounding reality

This also helps explain the uniqueness of the public sphere in wartime Russia. War is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere: it is ubiquitous institutionally and symbolically, but at the same time it is repressed from direct everyday experience. Citizens continually encounter war, but primarily through routinized, mediated, or socially regulated forms that limit its impact on everyday life. Conversations about war remain superficial: demonstrated loyalty is enough to keep subsequent questions about costs and benefits from being asked, and avoidance of these questions helps maintain the appearance of collective support for the war. Avoidance thus ceases to be an individual psychological defense mechanism and turns into a collectively supported social practice that protects the normality of everyday life from the unusualness of the reality in which Russians actually live.

What's ahead: delayed destabilization?

Such equilibria are stable precisely because they are socially distributed. They do not rely on universal conviction, unanimous support or fear of total repression, but only require that enough people value continuity and predictability over confrontation and rupture. In this sense, the wartime equilibrium of Russian public opinion does not resemble a mobilized authoritarian consensus, as in the case of the annexation of Crimea, but a collectively reproduced state of deferred destabilization.

The state of “avoidance” characteristic of Russian society, however, does not mean immutability. This balance may be vulnerable to shocks that could disrupt social routines or shift expectations regarding dominant public opinion. If Russians begin to sense that opinions around them are changing or that the consequences of dissent are being softened, the current consensus could quickly dissipate and the general consensus could coalesce around a different set of widely shared beliefs. Moreover, as Russians’ perception of the state of affairs in the country has been steadily deteriorating since the end of 2025 (→ Re: Russia: How much has the super-support bubble been blown away ), it is possible that partly this is already happening.

Whatever happens next, the main conclusion of our analysis is that at this stage the loyalty of Russian public opinion, which still allows the Kremlin to wage war in Ukraine, depends not so much on the repressive capacity or propaganda skill of the regime, but on the social and psychological efforts that ordinary Russians make to keep the war at bay.