Ten years and a few days ago, on September 21, 2014, Moscow took place March for peace and against the war in Donbass. Among other things, this was the last mass protest in which Boris Nemtsov participated: in February 2015, he was shot dead. In its material, Meduza recalls the photos of that day in Russia, when a person could still walk on the streets of Moscow with a Ukrainian flag. And he asks the question why even when the war is already in Russia, literally two months already on the territory of the Kursk region, no one cares.
During the two and a half years of the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine, one of the main mysteries remains the attitude of the majority of Russian citizens towards it.
Some, in a patriotic impulse, rushed to the military registration and registration office or devoted themselves to helping at the front. Some actively protested and went to jail for it. Some emigrated because they didn't want to have anything to do with what was happening. But both the one and the other and the third are a minority.
And for the majority it is extremely difficult to say anything definite. Is it for the war or against the war? In the conditions of military censorship and repression, neither journalists, nor sociologists, nor political scientists can confidently answer this question.
But everyone is unanimous in one thing - both the supporters of aggression and its opponents: the majority of Russians try to live as if there is no war. They are not emotionally involved in it - they are neither for nor against. And so far, nothing has seriously shaken this apathy: neither the death of a huge number of people, nor the mass of evidence of war crimes, nor the sanctions, nor the seizure of part of the Kursk region by the armed forces of Ukraine.
Even when it became known that Ukraine will soon be able to attack with Storm Shadow and ATACMS missiles deep into Russia (they reach, for example, the million-strong city of Voronezh), this news was met for the most part in the same way - with indifference .
Meduza writes material about this strange apathy - an apathy that Russian activists, the Ukrainian army, foreign governments, and the Kremlin alike are trying to overcome in their own way. But no one succeeds.
Apathy
The very word "apathy" dates back to the ancient Greek Stoics and literally means "dispassion". For the Stoics, this had a positive meaning: a sage is one who is not subject to passions and is in complete control of himself.
"Apathy" in the modern sense - as a psychological and psychiatric term - was established already in the twentieth century. Initially, this was explained as a reaction of the psyche to overload: when there are too many external stimuli or they are too strong, a person simply stops reacting to them.
The latest International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization (WHO) classifies apathy as a symptom of a mental or behavioral disorder and defines it as "a reduction or absence of feeling, emotion, interest or concern; a state of indifference." It can occur in depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.
Since at least the 1960s, American sociologists and political scientists have used the psychological term "apathy" as a metaphor in his own research. This they called indifference to politics, which was most clearly manifested in the low voter turnout in the elections. This is one of the first examples of the use of psychological language to describe phenomena that are not directly related to the sphere of individual psychology.
In Russia, allegations of "political apathy" and "social apathy" became commonplace in 2010. And it wasn't just about the election. Russians, for the most part, showed no enthusiasm for any kind of collective social action: they did not engage in activism, volunteering, charity, and avoided talking about politics and political news. Outbursts of civil activity were rare, brief and mostly local.
It is precisely apathy that many publicists and even politicians themselves have identified as the main problem in Russian political life. But almost everyone agrees that the Kremlin is trying in every way to achieve apathy and depoliticization: it limits political pluralism, deliberately makes all elections meaningless, does not allow more than three people to gather in a public place, declares them to be "foreign agents" etc.
If so, then Russian rule under Vladimir Putin has been surprisingly effective in this regard. Society is so apathetic that even the war did not bring it out of this state. Few people have succeeded in this, even among the harshest dictators.
But is it really primarily about what the authorities do?
How did they try to get the Russians out of apathy?
No matter how hard they tried.
In September 2012, Alexei Navalny said: "We will go to rallies as if we were going to work". By then, the biggest protests in the history of Putin's Russia were already behind us: hundreds of thousands of rallies, "occupations" of public gardens and parks, "the Bolotnaya case". In the midst of this "feast of defiance" opposition leaders did not want to escalate the confrontation with the authorities: they did not call for violent resistance and mass civil disobedience. But no one responded to Navalny's call to turn this "holiday" in a routine. The wave subsided and apathy reigned again.
Strictly speaking, it wasn't exactly apathy. People continued to feel outrage, anger, inspiration and other strong emotions. But it was impossible to express them in any action that would in any way affect the situation. Expressed in the same psycholanguage, it was disappointment - a feeling when desires do not match possibilities.
Most Russians did not perceive either the annexation of Crimea or the 2014 conflict in Donbass as the beginning of a war. There really wasn't any mass movement - neither pro-war nor anti-war. The infamous "Crimean Consensus" - an increase in support for the authorities, noted by all sociological services - did not transform society and did not lead to collective action. By 2018, the "consensus" fell apart.
And just then, right after Putin's next election, it was announced that the retirement age would be raised. In the summer and autumn of 2018, various political forces united against the reform: communists, liberals, the "systemic opposition" and the "unsystematic" an opposition led by Navalny, who saw in these protests an opportunity to expand their supporters. But this time it all ended the same way: the reform was carried out, the protests gradually died down and disillusionment and apathy spread again.
The nullification of Putin's presidential terms in 2020, according to Levada, is approved by 48% of Russians against 47% disapproval; 31% express positive emotions about it, 36% - negative, 23% say they do not feel any special feelings. That is, there were still some emotions, but they again led to nothing but disappointment.
Then came 2022. In the first three months of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, over 15,000 people were detained for anti-war protests. There was a feeling that a pure-blooded pacifist movement had emerged in Russia. But some were imprisoned, some emigrated on their own, some were forced to emigrate, the rest calmed down - the movement turned out to be frustrated and practically disappeared.
When Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia, one of the stated goals was for ordinary Russians to feel the destructiveness of Putin's policies, wake up from their apathy, and start protesting against the war and the regime that started it. It didn't work.
This works in the opposite direction as well. For the entire two and a half years, Z-journalism, from Zakhar Prilepin's columns to the anonymous Telegram channels, was primarily devoted to the fact that the majority of citizens are indifferent to "SVO" and the country stubbornly refuses to mobilize.
Sociologists working directly for the presidential administration confirm: "This is indifference and apathy. Nothing inspires, nothing pulls forward. Just leave us alone, don't interfere with us."
Sociologist Natalia Savelieva and political scientist Kiril Rogov wrote in July 2023 that Russian authoritarianism, which for the previous twenty-something years was based on depoliticization and the retreat of the "mass man" in private life, changed his phase in 2022: now he wants the exact opposite - hyper-politicization. If so, it does not work: the mass person passively but very persistently resists excessive politicization.
Sociologist Denis Volkov and political scientist Andrey Kolesnikov compare Russian society to Dr. Strangelove, who "stopped worrying and fell in love with the bomb". They write that "dominant public opinion is formed by supply": citizens do not show enough mass demand for one ideology or another, but only "consume" the ideology offered by the state.
Sociologists Vladimir Ishchenko and Oleg Zhuravlev emphasize that the supposed mass support for the war in Russia is not due to a sincere attachment to imperialist ideology. Quite the opposite: the emergence of support is a consequence of "deep depoliticization", a stubborn reluctance to formulate one's own political position and a persistent idea that politics and everyday life are unrelated.
Can political apathy be overcome?
There is no one way or way. The fact is that political and social apathy is not one phenomenon, but many different ones. Everyone has their reasons and ways to overcome it.
Scholars have studied political apathy mostly in democracies. And when they write about feeling powerless as a cause of apathy, they mean a very specific powerlessness. One voted for a politician who lost the election; he does not see politicians in power who represent his interests; reads political news - and it turns out to be quite different from what worries him. This is the powerlessness of a person who feels marginalized, and his apathy stems from this very feeling. Such a person can consciously avoid participation in political life - this is political apathy in the narrow sense. He can also vent his frustration through a protest vote.
Many researchers talk not about political apathy, but about political alienation - this is a narrower term that does not have psychiatric connotations, but means essentially the same thing: lack of interest in politics. The American sociologist Marvin Olsen distinguishes between two types of alienation: powerlessness (when the alienation arises from external circumstances such as poverty or discrimination) and grievance (when the alienation is the result of one's own choice).
Political scientist Ada Finifter found five main manifestations of political alienation. She has been working on American materials since the 1960s, but all these manifestations are easy to detect in Russia in the 2010-2020s - about the feeling of powerlessness - "learned helplessness"; the sense of meaninglessness of political decisions - "We will not know the whole truth"; the feeling that there really are no rules - "Gangster State"; the feeling of isolation - "The majority of Russians" (an artificial construct invented to convince dissenters that they are marginal); the disappointment - "Give without politics." And as a general consequence: "I am out of politics", to such an extent that even if rockets fly at me, I will not deviate from this position.
Political and social researchers proceed from the fact that political apathy in authoritarian states (for example, in Putin's Russia) is induced: people do not fall into it themselves, but the government immerses them in it, purposefully suppressing any civic activity and repeatedly frustrating them .
The implicit assumption here is that there is a certain normal state of society - say, moderate politicization: people are interested in politics, but not so much that it occupies all their thoughts. Deviations from this norm in democracies arise from imperfections in the political system that need to be eliminated from time to time: to revise the electoral law, to create new parties, to respond more responsively to citizen initiatives, etc. Well, autocracies purposefully violate this norm, achieving either complete depoliticization or hyperpoliticization.
If so, then, firstly, we have to give Putin his due: even Iran's ayatollahs failed to plunge their country into such political apathy as he managed to do to his people. And secondly, the recipe for overcoming this apathy is not so simple, but it is generally clear: regime change, democratization and the development of political pluralism.
But there are doubts that this "norm of politicization" is universal - and in particular that it applies to Russia. At a sociological conference in Moscow in May 2023, Lyudmila Presnyakova from the "Public Opinion" foundation, speaking about Russian political apathy, formulated a hypothesis: "This is not a psychological state, this seems to be a political value of our society: we do not interfere in your games, you don't interfere in our lives.
That is, "the mass Russian" he needs a country that can just be forgotten and politicians who won't drag him to the barricades or the trenches.
In other words, the indifferent majority of Russians are stoics, for whom apathy is the highest wisdom and virtue.