Alexander Titov. Political Insight. Volume 13, Issue 2. June 2022.
One country which did not expect the war with Ukraine was Russia itself. For months, Western warnings of an imminent invasion were dismissed by Russian officials and the general public alike.
So, when the invasion did happen on 24 February 2022, both the Russian public and elites were caught completely off their guard. The authorities framed the invasion as a limited ‘special operation’ (the word ‘war’ being proscribed from public use). Yet, as the initial plan of a swift victory over Ukraine failed and the extent of economic sanctions from the West have exceeded the worst expectations, the question now is how the war will impact Russia domestically.
There are four factors which will shape Russia’s domestic politics in the immediate future. First, is the conduct of the success or failure of the military campaign. Second, is the economic fallout of the war and the sanctions. Third, is the elites’ response to the crisis. The final factor is how the population at large will react to the fallout from the war. The home front will likely be at least as important for determining the way Russia will come out of this self-inflicted crisis as its success or failure on the battlefield.
Economy
Russia has been under some form of Western sanction since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. This has allowed it to prepare for a wide range of sanctions, not least in finance. What it did not prepare for is the scale and swiftness of Western sanctions, including the freezing of the Russian Central Bank assets held in the West and a de facto trade embargo in key sectors.
Yet, the Russian economy has not collapsed. The rouble stabilised through emergency measures, the panic passed, and the interest rates were lowered from a high of 20 per cent. The Russian budget is designed to break even at $47 per barrel; even with the current discount for Russian oil, it runs a surplus. With the Russian oil firms looking for new markets in China and India, it is unlikely to lose all oil and gas revenues in the immediate future, allowing the Russian economy to adjust to the new reality.
Yet, the impact will be huge. Most economists agree that Russia will suffer an economic shock on a par with the early 1990s. The fall in the GDP is estimated to be 8-12 per cent, inflation to hit 15-18 per cent, unemployment to rise from 4.4 to seven per cent, and real disposable incomes to plummet by 6.8 per cent.
Some hope that Putin’s regime would follow its Soviet predecessor. The key difference with the 1990s is that the Russian state in 2022 is in a better condition than the Soviet Union was in 1991. The Kremlin has waded into this crisis in a good shape domestically.
The reaction of the two key groups, the elites and general public, will determine whether it succeeds. Russian elites can be divided into four main groups: the state bureaucracy, the law enforcement agencies known as Siloviki, the big business, and media and culture establishment. Support of the first two groups, the Siloviki and the state bureaucracy, are essential for the regime’s survival.
Siloviki and state bureaucracy
Siloviki are the regime’s bedrock in turbulent times. There is no unified leadership among various security agencies in Russia, except for Putin. Instead, there is a systematic competition between different branches of Siloviki encouraged by the Kremlin.
Among the most powerful agencies is the FSB, the main successor to the KGB. It is headed by Alexander Bortnikov, an old friend of Putin’s from their KGB work in 1970s Leningrad. There are also smaller, more specialised security agencies. These include the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, headed by Sergei Naryshkin, another old friend of Putin’s from St Petersburg. The FSO, the Federal Protection Service, responsible for the protection of government offices and officials, including the President, is run by Putin’s former bodyguard Dmitry Kochnev.
The Ministry of Defence is a separate universe. Some parts of its giant structure have degrees of autonomy, including the military intelligence directorate known as the GRU, which has been implicated in recent scandals such as the Skripal poisoning. The MoD is headed by Sergei Shoigu, Putin’s close confidant who is one of a few officials Putin appears with in informal settings. The MoD leadership has the overall responsibility for the invasion of Ukraine and their fate is closely linked with the outcome of the war.
The Siloviki comprise many security organisations, often with overlapping remits, competing for power and resources. Ideologically and economically, they are most committed to the current regime as they focus on maintaining order and stability, and have more anti-Western attitudes than other branches of the Russian government. They see Putin as one of their own (which he is) and the top posts are held by his close friends. They also have the most to fear from a possible overthrow of the regime. Their support is crucial for the regime’s survival.
While Siloviki are a critical part of Putin’s power, their role should not be overstated. Russia’s power structures can be crudely summarised as a triangle between the state bureaucracy, the security agencies and big business, with President Putin presiding as the ultimate arbiter of the competing clans and lobbying interests.
The state bureaucracy is by no means a subordinate part. Russia has traditionally been a highly bureaucratised state. Like Siloviki, the central bureaucracy is divided into several competing and overlapping structures: the Presidential Administration (PA), the Central Government Apparatus, powerful Federal ministries and regional governors.
The bureaucracy responsible for economic policy is essential for the regime’s survival. The irony here is that the economic policy establishment is the most pro-Western part of Russian bureaucracy. The Central Bank of Russia, the Finance Ministry and the Ministry of Economic Development, have led efforts at constructing Russia’s modern, globalised economy in the post-Soviet period. By education, their outlook and policy preferences, they represent the bastion of neo liberal attitudes among Russian policymakers.
There were reports of a significant number of resignations at lower levels at the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry. Yet, the Central Bank has been successful in stabilising the financial system and the national currency after the sanctions.
Over the longer-term, the influence of the neoliberal policymakers is bound to decline. Their central goal of modernising Russia via integration into the world economy is no longer viable or desired either by the Russian leadership or the West. The quality of Russian policy is likely to decline as a new type of a closed economy, focused on mobilisation and autarky takes shape, with the military-industrial lobby and firms focused on the domestic market benefiting most.
Business elites
Big business, the so-called oligarchs, have played a number of important functions in Putin’s Russia: creating employment, paying taxes, sustaining economic growth, as well as oiling the greasy wheels of Russian politics with its nexus of state-private informal relations and corruption. Under Putin, the number of billionaires in Russia has grown dramatically, from just 17 in 2003 to 117 in 2021. But their lobbying power has been limited to economic matters and they remain politically insignificant. Now the oligarchs have been hit with a double blow from the West’s freezing of their assets, and by countrywide sanctions, which made the operation of business in Russia extremely challenging.
In some respects, the international clampdown on the oligarchs suits Putin. On his return to the Kremlin in 2012, he declared ‘nationalisation of elites’ as one of his top priorities. State officials and military personnel were banned from having dual citizenship or permanent residency permits in other countries. In 2020, Putin also proposed a ban on foreign property ownership for top officials. The ejection of the Russian business elite from the West is in a strange way helping Putin to achieve his long-term plan about ‘deoffshorization’ of the Russian economy.
Crucially, private big business has lost its key functions as a source of investment. The freezing of Russian oligarchs’ assets abroad means that neither their own wealth, nor access to international debt markets, are available. Russian business is now ever more dependent on the state support to survive. There is a reversal of dependency: now big business needs state investment, rather than the other way around.
The authorities still need business to manage the looming recession, in particular to sustain employment and adjust to the new sanctions regime. Yet, in the new economic and political environment, business concerns are secondary for the Russian leadership. National glory and territorial expansion have replaced economic growth as the main source of legitimacy of the regime now.
Media and culture
Media and culture has provided the main source of open dissent about the Ukraine invasion. Ivan Urgant, the anchor of one of Russia’s most popular talk shows, put a black square on his Instagram and left for Israel. His programme was suspended, although he is back in Russia now. Chulpan Khamatova, a film and theatre actress, has left Russia and publicly denounced the war. So did Maxim Galkin, a popular TV host and husband of Alla Pugacheva, Russia’s most famous pop singer. After a protest on live TV by Marina Ovsiannikova, a producer, a minute delay for all live broadcasts was imposed.
Zemfira, Russia’s leading pop singer, released an anti-war song from her base in Paris, while Oxxximiron, Russia’s leading rapper, was giving performances in support of Ukrainian refugees across Western Europe. In Russia, Yury Shevchuk, the leader of the DDT, one of the oldest Russian rock bands, was officially reprimanded by the authorities for making an explicit anti-war statement at one of his concerts when he said from the stage that ‘the old folk, women and children are being killed because of Napoleonic plans of another of our Caesars. Motherland is not the President’s arse.’
However, this dissent was by no means universal and the broadcast propaganda machine continues to operate unabated. This is key as the Kremlin has maintained tight control over television where two-thirds of Russians get their news from.
Still, the Kremlin felt it expedient to close down the few remaining independent news outlets. The iconic liberal news radio, the Echo of Moscow, was finally shut down in March 2022, as was the opposition TV channel Dozhd. Novaya Gazeta, the main liberal newspaper co-owned by Mikhail Gorbachev, whose editor Muratov was awarded the Nobel Prize only last year, decided to suspend its operation in Russia due to a new law requiring all news outlets to stick with the official account of the invasion.
The Russian authorities have also banned Facebook, Twitter and Instagram since the invasion. Russian users can only access them via VPN services. YouTube continues to operate in Russia as its alternatives, such as Rutube, cannot adequately replace it.
Wartime media control in Russia comes on the back of a long-established crackdown on independent media and the internet. Foreigners are banned from owning more than 20 per cent of a Russian media outlet. Anyone with foreign funding is required to designate themselves as a ‘foreign agent’. Popular Russian language media based abroad, such as Meduza, lost advertisement revenues from their Russian clients as a result, while the few remaining outlets in Russia were forced to flee.
After a decade of continuous pressure on free media in Russia, the mopping up of the few remaining media outlets was an easy operation for the authorities. Whether this will be enough to maintain control over the attitudes of the population as the economic and social impact of the war hits home, is a core question for the regime’s security. They certainly did their best to prepare for this.
Popular attitudes
The Russian public was not prepared for the war. The need to help the Donbas, which was one of the key reasons given now for launching the invasion, has consistently been low among the Russian public’s priorities, with only 10 per cent of Russians following events in Ukraine ‘very closely’ in 2016. In May 2019, only 27 per cent thought that the Donbas should become part of Russia, while 29 per cent supported its status as an independent state.
Yet, after the initial shock, a form of public consolidation behind the Kremlin seems to have taken hold. According to Levada Centre, Russia’s independent pollsters, 74 per cent of Russians support their armed forces’ operation in Ukraine in May 2022. The depth and sustainability of this consolidation is a different question but so far there’s been a boost for the Kremlin.
The diversity of the attitudes towards the war with Ukraine should not be underestimated, with important cleavages emerging between different social and age groups. In the first few days after the invasion, several anti-war petitions gathered thousands of online signatures, including one signed by more than 10,000 Russian academics and students. However, this momentum soon dissipated in the face of a swift crackdown on all open dissent. Around 15,000 protesters had been detained by mid-May (usually for less than 24 hours at a time).
A common response from opposition-minded Russians was to vote with their feet. According to some estimates, up to 200,000 Russian citizens have left since the invasion, although it is impossible to say whether it is a permanent move.
It is also important to note that anti-war attitudes might not be the dominant view in the first place. Opinion polls are not a fully reliable source for finding out what people think in Russia, particularly during sustained pressure from the authorities for people to hide their anti-war attitudes. Yet, a combination of the polls, interviews and personal observations do support a view that there has been some form of rallying around the Kremlin.
A supportive reaction is reinforced by the war not directly affecting most Russians. This is why the Kremlin is so insistent that no conscripts should be deployed to Ukraine; as long as Russian military engagement is limited to professional troops, the public will continue to see it as a distant war. This, of course, creates different types of problems for the Russian army which seems to suffer from lack of numbers. Yet, politically this is an important aspect of keeping the appearance of the war as a ‘special operation’ by a professional army on a foreign territory.
At a deeper level, the official narrative plays on the public’s negative attitude towards post-2014 Ukraine and on the strength of its anti-Western feelings. As social science tells us, it is much easier to reinforce people’s existing biases, rather than change their opinion.
First, there has been an historical scepticism on many Russians’ part about Ukrainian statehood and resentment towards Ukraine’s attempts to break away from Russia. The rise of Ukrainian nationalism since the Maidan Revolution of 2014, with its expressed anti-Russian focus, has reinforced Russia’s prejudices. In that sense, the Kremlin rhetoric about the need to ‘denazify’ Ukraine falls on fertile ground. More broadly, Putin’s 2021 essay on the historic closeness of Russians and Ukrainians, as well as his claims of unlawful incorporation into Ukraine of ‘age old’ Russian lands during the Soviet times, also chimes with a lot of the Russian public’s view of their history.
Second, the war in Ukraine has been used for anti-Western mobilisation. The portrayal of the war as a conflict with NATO and the United States, has been a core theme in Russian official rhetoric, starting with Putin’s speech on the day of the invasion.
The mixture of security concerns over NATO expansion, its military links with Ukraine and the widely shared resentment of the loss of the great power status, supports the official narrative for the justification of the ‘special operation’.
A united Western response in support of Ukraine, both in terms of unprecedented economic sanctions imposed on Russia, as well as growing military aid for Ukraine, helps to reinforce the Kremlin narrative of the war being waged against Russia by the West with Ukraine as a NATO proxy.
Outlook for the future
So far, the Russian state has coped with the pressure from the war. It has managed to consolidate both the elites and a significant part of the population behind it, some notable exceptions notwithstanding.
However, there are two main dangers to the Kremlin. First are the mounting military costs and a possibility of a defeat. Second, is its ability to cope with the economic fallout from the Western sanctions. Whether the Russian state will cope is an open question.
It is useful to keep in mind, however, that Russia has been living through a series of economic crises for the last 14 years: in 2008-9 it suffered a sharp contraction of 9 per cent; in 2014-15 it went into another recession due to Western sanctions and, more importantly, the collapse in the price of oil; in 2020-21 it suffered the fallout from the COVID pandemic. Now, it enters into another one, in a long series of crises, which it has always managed to muddle through.
Russia is entering this crisis on the back of a 20 years’ old consolidation of power by Putin. The challenges to the Russian political system are formidable. Yet, the momentum in domestic politics is behind a further repressive consolidation by President Putin as the regime goes into a full war mode.