Do Russians Really Support the War in Ukraine?

In the summer and fall of 2023, three researchers from a small Russian collective called the Public Sociology Laboratory, or P.S. Lab, travelled to three different regions across Russia, to find out what people thought about the war in Ukraine. A university lecturer whom I’ll call Masha went to Sverdlovsk Oblast, at the eastern edge of the Ural Mountains; a recent college graduate who goes by Aida went to Buryatia, on the border with Mongolia; and an anthropologist who goes by Marina went to Krasnodar, a southern resort region connected to Crimea by the Kerch Strait Bridge. The researchers stayed in these regions for about a month, talking to as many people as possible. They could not simply announce that they were from a sociology collective studying the war, so they were undercover, and they knew that there wasn’t much that P.S. Lab could do for them if they got in trouble.

The researchers had been galvanized by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022. Marina had met the group’s founders before the war, at academic conferences. Aida had studied under several of them when she was in college, in western Siberia. For Masha, a friend of one of the P.S. Lab founders, the work represented a return to political engagement, after years of inaction. In college, in Moscow in the early twenty-tens, she had attended protests against Vladimir Putin’s regime with her friends and kept up with the opposition media. Then, in 2014, Russia invaded Crimea and annexed it after a snap referendum. “It was a shock,” Masha told me. “Like, you can just do that? It erased all our efforts.” She applied for a doctorate in anthropology and spent the next five years researching religion, mysticism, gender—“basically anything, as long as it had no connection to politics.”

That changed after February, 2022. Masha wanted to do something. She wrote to her friend from P.S. Lab, Svetlana Erpyleva, who sent her transcripts of roughly thirty interviews about the war which P.S. Lab had collected in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. Masha’s assignment was to read and analyze the interviews, and she went into it with some trepidation. “You see these reports in the media,” she said. “People marching, lining up in the form of the letter ‘Z’ ”—a symbol of support for Putin and the war—“some nice old ladies making a portrait of Putin out of tin cans. You get this sense that people are crazy about the war and about Putin, that they’re zombified. That they have no morals, no empathy, no souls.”

The interviews told a different story. People were shocked by the war, incredulous, and grieving. “I heard somewhere that it was going to happen on February 16th,” one woman, a forty-year-old project manager, told her interviewer. “But everyone thought it was a joke, that it wouldn’t really happen, that it was American propaganda.” “It’s just surreal,” another woman, a thirty-year-old marketing analyst, said. “It shouldn’t be this way. The international community needs to find a compromise solution as soon as possible.” Masha was relieved. These were the Russians that she knew: deeply concerned with morality and ethics, but, at the same time, estranged from politics. She wrote a chapter for a report, “The War Near and Far,” which came out online in the fall of 2022, and then helped P.S. Lab do a second wave of interviews, shortly afterward, in the wake of the partial mobilization of military reservists.

By then, Masha and her husband had left Russia, worried that he’d be drafted but also worried more generally about the future. They wanted to start a family and felt it was impossible to do so under Putin. “It’s a situation where you can’t plan your life—where some guy in the Kremlin can decide one day to do this thing and turn your life upside down,” Masha said. She kept going back to Russia to do research. A few months after she finished work on P.S. Lab’s second report, “Resigning Themselves to Inevitability,” she travelled to a small town in the Sverdlovsk region for a different project, and while there she started thinking. There was a vast number of people who would never agree to sit down and discuss their true feelings in the form of a sociological interview. But might it not be possible to go out into the provinces and, rather than pose questions, just listen to people talk about the war?

A few months later, she was back in the same town, now as a P.S. Lab researcher. Just listening to people talk about the war turned out to be more challenging than she’d expected. The town of Cheryomushkin, as P.S. Lab pseudonymized it, had very few public spaces. People tended to mind their own business. One day, Masha noticed that the local movie theatre was premièring “Witness,” a new, big-budget propaganda film about the war. She stationed herself outside the theatre, waiting for possible pro-war interlocutors, but no one came. Other nominally pro-war events that Masha tried to attend were either cancelled, poorly attended, or, like one music concert that claimed to be dedicated to the war effort, not about the war in any meaningful sense. “If, as a thought experiment, we were to imagine a person who fell asleep on the night of February 23, 2022, and then suddenly woke up in Cheryomushkin in the fall of 2023,” she and her co-authors eventually wrote, in what became their third report, “it would be difficult for them to guess that a full-scale war had been going on for the last year and a half.”

Masha had better luck when she set up shop in a popular local café. She found herself sitting next to two middle-aged men who were drinking with some former classmates. After the classmates left, the men turned their attention to Masha. One of them tried to pick her up. Her first reaction was to tell him off, but then she caught herself: at least the men were willing to chat. She engaged them in a long conversation about life in the town, the state of the country, and the war. One of the men turned out to have previously worked for the F.S.B., and was a committed ideological supporter of Putin. “Victory,” he told Masha, “is when we take all of Ukraine back, and Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia—when we get everything back.” This was Masha’s first real discussion of the war with a randomly chosen resident, and it turned out to be atypical. Most other people in town had a much more complicated, and conflicted, view of what their country was doing in Ukraine.

Since the beginning of the war, there have been fierce debates among Russian scholars, and Russians themselves, over the nature and extent of support for it. One point of contention has been the polling data. The largest and oldest independent pollster operating in the country, the Levada Center, has, since February 27, 2022, been asking Russians once a month whether they “personally support the actions of Russian military forces in Ukraine.” Each time, a very large proportion of respondents—between seventy and eighty per cent—say they either “definitely” or mostly support them.

Critics of Levada argue that the very framing of the question, clearly intended to avoid government censorship that does not allow people to call the conflict a “war,” is a major problem. Another is the nature of attempting to poll people in an authoritarian state. “If you’re in Russia, and some stranger comes to your door asking questions, you’ve obviously got a mental illness if you’re telling them anything,” the British ethnographer Jeremy Morris, who has studied Russia for two decades, told me. But more than that, he said, even well-conducted polls were too crude for a situation as complicated as this one. “Polling data is fine for ‘Are you going to vote the Democrats or are you going to vote the Republicans?’ It’s about a onetime decision that is close to the present. ‘Do you prefer Pepsi or Coke?’ But, when it comes to horribly complex, painful things like a war, it’s not useful.” Nonetheless, Morris acknowledged the power of numbers: Levada’s seventy-plus-per-cent pro-war figure has framed a lot of perceptions, including inside Russia.

P.S. Lab’s hope from the start of the war was to push back on those numbers. The group had been founded, in 2011, by Erpyleva, Oleg Zhuravlev, and Natalia Savelyeva, graduate students at the time, who wanted to practice an in-depth and theoretically sophisticated sociology in the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu, who had subjected the French class system to withering scrutiny. They also took inspiration from Bourdieu’s students Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, who together wrote a book called “On Justification,” examining how people explained their lives and ideas to others and to themselves. P.S. Lab expanded over time to include several more sociologists, a political scientist, and a cognitive psychologist who studied propaganda; the work was mostly on a voluntary basis, though occasionally P.S. Lab received small, project-based grants. In its first decade, the group conducted large-scale studies of people’s attitudes toward politics, labor movements, and, after 2014, the ongoing war in the Ukrainian east. The researchers wanted to know whether the protest movement that arose in 2011 and 2012 could credibly challenge the Putin regime, and whether Russians actually believed all the propaganda they were exposed to. (The answer was yes, but not very deeply.)

Zhuravlev said that, when he and his colleagues saw the result of the first Levada poll after the 2022 invasion, they simply couldn’t believe it. P.S. Lab had spent a decade studying the ways in which the regime had depoliticized the population; it was inconceivable that the Kremlin could mobilize people overnight in favor of an aggressive war of choice. A more careful survey might find that support for the war was less than it seemed. “Or we could see what lay beneath the support,” Zhuravlev said. They put out a call for volunteer interviewers and started speaking to people, many of whom they found through friends’ and family members’ networks, sometimes for hours at a time. “There was no opportunity for people to talk about the war,” Zhuravlev said. “So they talked with us.”

In the first set of post-invasion interviews, the P.S. Lab researchers confirmed their suspicion that, instead of demonstrating broad war support, as per Levada, Russians fell into three distinct groups: a small, core group of committed war supporters (around ten to fifteen per cent of the respondents); a similarly small group of committed war opponents; and a third, much larger group that was undecided or fell in between the two extremes. People who were undecided about the war repeatedly stated in interviews that they felt themselves to be separate from the leadership in the Kremlin. Putin’s decision-making process was opaque to them. Maybe he had his reasons? “People stressed their total alienation from the politicians in the Kremlin as a way of expressing their support for them,” Zhuravlev said. The final report, which came to three hundred pages, was written in an accessible style but with a great deal of both qualitative and quantitative detail. It was published in September, 2022—“Too fast for academia, but too slow for journalism,” as Erpyleva put it—and concluded that committed war supporters and opponents actually had a lot in common. They were politicized, rigid in their views, and intolerant of other opinions. The large group in the middle was more open to conversation, but they were becoming less inclined to discuss the war. In fact, this was true of all three groups: they increasingly wanted to avoid discussing the subject altogether. For P.S. Lab, the first round of interviews confirmed their initial impulse. “We realized that most people didn’t have a settled opinion of the war, and so our method was correct,” Zhuravlev said. “Polls can only measure opinions. If people don’t have settled opinions, you need to talk with them.”

P.S. Lab’s second report, based on interviews in the months after the partial mobilization, showed that the war-supporting and opposing groups had remained mostly stable (though some opponents had left the country), but the middle group was beginning to rationalize Russia’s actions. To Erpyleva, this was a matter of mental habit. “People who were politically active before February 24th were able to turn their negative emotions into a political position,” she said. They became war opponents. But those who hadn’t participated in politics before were unable to start now. “When the government tells you that the war is justified by reasons No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and that, if you don’t support it, you’re a traitor, then in order to say ‘I’m against it’ you must have the inner means to form a political position. Because your position is now radical.” And so, she went on, many people whose first response to the war was shock and even outrage began to justify it.

One man, aged sixty, recalled the day of the invasion: “One of my old friends and classmates called me from Crimea. She said that troops had been marching through the city for hours. And that her son was on the front lines near Belgorod. I was in shock. I probably didn’t speak for three days.”

“And then?” the interviewer asked. Then, the man replied, he started speaking again. His silence had been “irrational,” he said, and, after three days, he started “thinking rationally.” The content of his thinking, in the presentation of P.S. Lab, mostly was a repetition of the propaganda on TV. He had decided to justify the war; after that, it was just a matter of finding the words.

For years, Zhuravlev said, sociologists had spoken of Russia as an atomized society—one where social bonds are thin, where people look out only for themselves and their families. In conditions of warfare, when fear is dominant, atomized people seek social cohesion. “If you have three friends,” Zhuravlev said, “and two of them support the war, and the one who opposes it moves to Georgia, you’re going to find a way to come around.”

In P.S. Lab’s third round of research, Marina, in Krasnodar, had, in some ways, the easiest assignment: Krasnodar is a resort region, on the Black Sea coast, where people tend to spend time outside, at leisure. In October of 2023, when Marina arrived, it was warm and sunny. She would walk down the main boulevard in the mornings; if she saw someone on a bench, on their own, she would strike up a conversation. She’d ask about COVID, about local politics, and then about the war.

For the most part, Marina found, people did not want to talk about the war. When Marina asked whether they sensed its proximity—the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea, which had been badly damaged by a truck bomb the year before, was a three-hour drive away—they responded with incredulity. Maybe it was near Belgorod, they said; maybe it was near Rostov. But how could she say it was near here? Still, there were constant reminders. The airport was closed, groceries had become more expensive, and refugees were arriving from the war zone. One woman’s kids were being taught about the war in kindergarten. Were they too young for that, the woman wondered? But this was happening all over Russia, she said, so it was probably O.K.

Most of Marina’s conversations were friendly, but there were a few unpleasant incidents. At one point, Marina, walking by a day spa, was handed a flyer advertising a free massage. Marina felt that she could use a free massage. She went in and was immediately seen by a middle-aged massage therapist, who started working on her neck and shoulders. Marina engaged her in the usual conversation. The massage therapist, a war supporter, was happy to talk. She gave an interesting description of her media consumption. “On the Internet,” she explained, there are so many fakes: “You have to figure out that this is a fake, this is not a fake.” Whereas with the news on TV, “you watch it for the day and you’re done. No problem.” As for the war, it was hard for the massage therapist to say who started it and why.

“But we started it,” Marina said.

“Who’s we?” said the massage therapist.

“Well, I mean, Putin started it,” Marina said.

The invocation of Putin seemed to set the massage therapist off. She lost her temper and threatened Marina, saying that she would “call someone” who would come to straighten out Marina on the subject of Putin and the war. “They’ll tear you to pieces over Putin!” she said. Marina, frightened, fled the spa, almost leaving behind her shirt, and spent the next hour looking over her shoulder to see whether the woman had, in fact, called someone.

“A few years ago, if someone had said they were going to call someone because I’d criticized Putin, it would have been very odd,” Marina told me. “I’d have laughed. Whereas, this time, it really scared me.” Marina, who is still in Russia as of this writing, has developed a very keen sense of what is allowed and what can get you in trouble. Being detained at a protest is no big deal, unless it happens three times in one year—then you could be imprisoned. Marina is a soft-spoken academic, but she has been detained twice at anti-government protests: once in 2022, for a night, and another time last year, when she spent ten days in jail. “They can’t get me for ‘fakes,’ ” she said, referring to the law against “fake information” which has frequently been used to jail war opponents, “because I’m very careful about what I post on social media. But ‘promoting terrorism’—that one is very elastic.”

Aida, in the Buryat capital of Ulan-Ude, had a more difficult assignment. Buryatia is on the border with Mongolia; it is about one-third ethnically Buryat, and has occasionally sought its independence from Moscow. As a result, its people have been imprisoned, exiled, and murdered. Before travelling to the region, Aida had been warned that the F.S.B. kept a close eye on visitors there. Her first interviews were all with opponents of the war, people she could trust. They seemed demoralized and frightened. One man spent much of their interview, in a café, worrying about another man sitting nearby, who he thought was listening in. He then told Aida that she was crazy to have come to Buryatia. “It was like I’d gone to the Mariana Trench,” she told me, “this dangerous place from which no one returned.”

Buryatia is very poor, and it had sent more people to their deaths in Ukraine, per capita, than all but one other region (Tuva, right next door). At the time Aida did her fieldwork, in late 2023, a man from Buryatia was roughly thirty-five times more likely to go and die in Ukraine than one from Moscow. And yet, even here, people didn’t want to talk about the war. “On the surface,” Aida told me, “everyone is pretending that it’s not happening. But, if you dig a little deeper, you see that Buryatia is a place where there probably isn’t a single person who doesn’t know someone who’s been sent to the front.” People were now in a different stage of grief. “This sorrow, these losses, have become almost routine,” she said.

Aida decided to volunteer at a center in Ulan-Ude where women made and gathered supplies for the war effort. She spent several days there, sewing camouflage nets and talking with the volunteers. Most of them had sons or husbands at the front. At one point, a more experienced volunteer explained to Aida that she was using too much white in her net. “Try to make it more neutral, so that a sniper won’t stand out from his surroundings,” she said, then added, “See! Your work is very important. Depending on how the net is colored, a person’s life will be saved, or not.”

Aida was stunned by the remark. Here, at last, was the civil society for which so many Russians had long hoped. But it came in the form of sewing nets for snipers so they could more effectively murder Ukrainians. On another day, one of the women remarked, with curiosity, “You know, there are probably women in Ukraine right now doing the same thing as we are.” This was true. But a nearby volunteer disagreed. “No,” she said, “they don’t have to. The Americans give them everything.” Aida told me, “I just stood there for two minutes, frozen.” She felt that if she reacted, it would give her away. “It was this constant dissonance,” she said, “between, on the one hand, these regular people, who look like your grandmother, your friends—and then suddenly, without any context, they can say something like that. Sometimes even without any emotion, just repeating an ideological cliché.” But still they had said it.

Masha’s assignment was neither near the front lines nor in an ethnically distinctive region that had seen much bloodshed. The small town of Cheryomushkin was a typical Russian town: poor, politically demobilized, a little depressed. One of the few interesting things about it, with regard to the war, was that there was a prison colony nearby, from which the Wagner Group had recruited men.

Masha had the advantage of already knowing someone in Cheryomushkin: a local business owner and war opponent whom she called Tonya. Tonya was eager to help Masha do her work. Tonya was the one who suggested, for example, that Masha go to the café where she went on to meet the war supporter from the F.S.B.

More often, Masha found herself talking over beers with Tonya’s friends and colleagues. In those conversations, the war came up occasionally as a subject of gossip. Friends discussed a woman who’d struck up a correspondence with a local prisoner, married him, then watched as he went off to war with Wagner and was killed. The woman received his entire death bonus, around a hundred thousand dollars, no strings attached. This was considered a pretty funny story, and not really objectionable. Another woman, deemed much less admirable, had bought a new car with the money her husband was sending home from the front, and was recently seen around town, in said car, with another man. Somewhere between these two cases was a woman whose husband, a schoolteacher, had died at the front. She, too, had bought a new car with the money sent by the government after his death, and a month later was seen dancing “joyfully” at a night club, according to several witnesses. Some residents found this reprehensible. Others felt that it was O.K. for her to go on with her life.

One night, Masha went to a small party that included Tonya and two of her colleagues, Alyona and Lyuda. As the women drank, they chatted about work, their friends, the town. Tonya, knowing that Masha wanted to talk about the war, kept trying to turn the conversation in that direction, but the other women didn’t take the bait. “Let’s not talk about politics,” Lyuda kept saying.

Finally, Tonya mentioned that one of their friends had lost a relative at the front. “Boris’s cousin died,” she said.

Alyona: In what sense?

Tonya: In the war.

Alyona: Really?

Tonya: Yes. It’s very sad.

Tonya ventured that it was terrible that these young men were dying. It was the older men who started the war. Shouldn’t they be the ones fighting and dying, instead of sending young men?

Lyuda [suddenly emotional]: Children!

Tonya: They have their whole lives ahead of them.

Lyuda: Children are sent to fight. For what?! Why are they dying? [To Tonya] Explain to me why they are dying?

Tonya: I don’t know why, Lyu—

Lyuda [interrupts, loudly]: These motherfuckers are fucking dividing the spoils! And our boys are just fucking dying.

Tonya: I’m telling you the same thing. I don’t understand it either. In general, I think—

Lyuda [interrupts, loudly]: I cannot understand—what do they want from all this?

Having been the one in the room most reluctant to talk about politics, Lyuda now couldn’t stop. It turned out that she had a draft-aged son. She desperately wanted to prevent him from going to the front. But, when asked if the war should end and whether Russia should withdraw its troops, she suddenly changed her perspective. She said that she’d been watching all the media channels and knew for certain that the United States, not Russia, was the one killing civilians in Ukraine.

Masha said that the conversation was one of the most intense that she had experienced, though also very typical. “This was something I saw constantly,” Masha said, “this switch from criticism to justification.”

To her, people’s contradictory reactions were an outcome of their disengagement. In order to oppose the war, she said, you have to believe that you have some say in it—that you could vote out of power the people who started it or at least express your dissatisfaction by voting for someone else. “But people in Russia do not believe in democracy—not because they want to live in a dictatorship but because they simply don’t believe that democracy exists,” Masha said. “They laugh when I tell them that Ukrainians elected Zelensky. They laugh. They don’t believe that anyone, anywhere, can choose their leaders. They think it’s a fairy tale.”

According to Masha, people’s inability to imagine a way to replace their leaders makes these leaders seem more permanent. Therefore, all of Russia—that is, the people themselves—was being accused of killing innocent civilians. And it was very important for them to prove that they were not responsible for those crimes.

This summer, P.S. Lab published its third report, “We Need to Carry On,” as a PDF on the group’s Web site. (The English translation was released last month.) It included chapters by Masha, Marina, and Aida on their findings, and several essays by other authors, on topics such as propaganda narratives and how they work. As with the previous reports, excerpts appeared in independent Russian publications, mostly working in exile: Meduza, Holod, and Re: Russia.

Kirill Rogov, a political scientist now based in Vienna and the editor of Re: Russia, said that he found P.S. Lab’s reports electrifying. “We always think that public opinion surveys are supposed to say how many Russians are for the war and how many are against it,” he said. “Sixty-five per cent are for it, thirty per cent are against it. Or seventy per cent are for it, twenty-five per cent are against it. But here we see that, inside most people, there is that same division. They’re sixty per cent for the war, and thirty per cent against. Someone else is fifty per cent for the war and fifty per cent against. And we see in these portraits how people wobble inside themselves.” P.S. Lab’s work, he added, was a powerful addition to mass polling about the war. “It’s really clarified our view of the public opinion polls, and what people could and could not express in them.”

Rogov compared P.S. Lab to the Prague Linguistic Circle, founded by Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetskoy, among others, in the nineteen-twenties, after they left Bolshevik Russia—a small, self-contained research unit of extremely devoted people whose work on the structure of speech changed the way we view language and the self.

The Russian government has also noticed P.S. Lab. Earlier this year, the collective was designated a “foreign agent.” During the summer, not long after the group’s third report was published, the Russian communications authority asked Tilda, the Web platform that hosted P.S. Lab’s Web site, to take it down. Tilda complied. P.S. Lab spent several weeks migrating their content to a different host.

For Marina, two years of doing interviews has diminished her opinion of the Russian people. During the first wave of research, in the spring of 2022, she’d started reaching out to old friends from her home town. She was shocked to learn how many of them supported the war. “These people used to be hippies,” she said. “They were boys with long hair. They listened to Western music. Now they tell me that the West wants to impose nontraditional values on us. I think, My god, what’s happened to you?”

For Aida, the experience of Buryatia was powerful in another way. Her parents are war supporters. The past three years have tested her bond with them, though when we spoke recently, over Zoom, she was home for a visit. Spending time with the friendly women sewing camouflage netting for Russian snipers made her think more deeply, she said, about the nature of evil. “I very often see people whose views are horrible, whose views make me want to throw up, and I don’t understand how a person can talk that way or think that way. But they turn out to be absolutely ordinary people,” she said. What to do with this observation is something she’s still pondering.

Masha told me that travelling to central Russia and talking with people there “rehabilitated” her sense of them. Early in the war, she had been appalled by what seemed like people’s willingness to accept it. She was even ready to believe that Russians were, as she put it, “uniquely horrible.” “But I knew, as a researcher, that a hundred and forty million people who all happen to live in the same space can’t be uniquely anything,” she said. She found herself moved and baffled by and, ultimately, deeply connected to the people she met in Cheryomushkin, in all their confusion and terror and anger.

And they were not, she thought, incapable of change. When confronted with Russian war crimes, they recoiled and became defensive. But when Masha spoke to them about how they were also victims of the war—not at the hands of Ukraine but of their own government, which was sending their sons and husbands to die, and expending treasure that could have been used for schools and roads and hospitals—people responded. “It makes people in a number of situations start doubting the war,” Erpyleva, Masha’s old friend at P.S. Lab, said. “These conversations often end with them saying, ‘Who needs this? What’s it for?’ ” What people like Lyuda from Cheryomushkin are so far unable to do is take the next step: to actively put themselves in opposition, to speak out. It would require a change in mind-set—a change that their government has done everything in its power to prevent.

Most of the sociologists of P.S. Lab are now out of the country, but they remain hopeful. They are finishing a report based on conversations with wives of soldiers who are at the front. The war will not last forever, and afterward it will be necessary to live with and talk to people who did not oppose it.

As for Masha, though abroad, she continues to think and dream of Russia all the time. She very much hopes to return.“After doing all these interviews, my feelings for my homeland have deepened,” Masha said. “Not in the sense of it’s a wonderful country, and I’ve started thinking better of it. But in the sense that it’s mine.” ♦