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ABSTRACT
This study distinguishes and challenges three main assumptions/shortcomings regarding the silent majority – the majority of the ‘ordinary’, ‘simple’, ‘little’ people, who are the main supporters of authoritarian populism. The silent majority is commonly portrayed as (1) consisting of ‘irrational’, ‘politically short-sighted’ people, who vote against their self-interests; (2) it is analysed as a homogeneous group, without attempting to distinguish different motives and interests among its members; (3) existing studies often overlook the political economy and structures of domination that gave rise to authoritarian populism. I address these shortcomings while analysing the political behaviour of rural Russians, who are the major supporters of Vladimir Putin. I reveal that the agrarian property regime and power relations in the countryside largely define the political posture of different rural groups. Less secure socio-economic strata respond more strongly to economic incentives, while better-off villagers tend to support the regime's ideological appeals. Furthermore, Putin's traditionalist authoritarian leadership style appeals to the archetypal base of the rural society – namely, its peasant roots – and, therefore, finds stronger support among the farming population. Finally, this study reveals that collective interests prevail over individual interests in the voting behaviour of rural dwellers, who support the existing regime despite the economic hardship it imposes upon them.
Acknowledgements
This paper was written during my fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies ‘New Europe College’ in Bucharest. I am very grateful for the Institute's financial support, which allowed me to carry out the most recent round of fieldwork in Russia and to write this paper. I also would like to thank my colleagues from the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Utrikespolitiska institutet) for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of my paper. Furthermore, I am very grateful to the colleagues from Levada-Center in Moscow, who shared with me the results of their public opinion survey. I would like to thank the Russian studies scholars Dr. Greg Yudin, Dr. Alexander Nikulin and Dr. Svetlana Basukova for their valuable comments and feedback on my ideas for this paper. And, finally, I thank Prof. Jun Borras and other colleagues from the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) group for initiating the research on authoritarian populism and the rural world, of which this paper is a part.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The contemporary literature uses a variety of terms – ‘authoritarian populism’, ‘populist authoritarianism’, ‘right-wing populism’, ‘national populism’ – to describe the ongoing political processes. However, as Borras (Citation2018) rightly noted, most of these populist movements have a strong tendency towards authoritarianism, it is just matter of degree. The present study uses the term ‘authoritarian populism’ to emphasise the authoritarian character of this movement, which is especially pronounced in present-day Russia.
2 The term is borrowed from Richard Nixon's populist speech during the Vietnam War.
3 The turnout is significantly higher for presidential elections than for regional and parliamentary elections.
4 With some exceptions such as Mamonova Citation2016a, Citation2016b, Mamonova and Visser Citation2014.
5 The state-controlled media (primarily, federal TV channels) is the main instrument of state propaganda. Russian rural dwellers watch television for an average of 246 min per day, which is 20 min longer than inhabitants of small cities, and 30 min longer than residents of large cities (Poleekhtova Citation2010).
6 It should be noted that the Moscow region is not a typical Russian region. Its proximity to Russia's capital leads to higher living standards for its residents and better access to alternate sources of information. However, the support for Putin in the Moscow region is in line with the national average, as shown by the results of the 2018 Presidential Elections (Golos Citation2018). The fieldwork sites were selected in the most remote areas of the Moscow region to lessen Moscow's impact on rural lifestyle. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to argue that the findings of this qualitative study are generalisable to the entire country. Instead, the goal of this analysis was to depict the variety of motives, needs and incentives that determine villagers’ support for Putin in one particular place. However, I believe that many detected trends could be found in other villages across Russia, as supported by the results of my previous fieldwork in the Vladimir and Stavropol regions. Furthermore, the primarily qualitative data was complemented with the public opinion survey data of Levada-Center. This survey was carried out among 1600 people in 136 localities of 52 of the country's regions, in order to guarantee the representability of the sample.
7 Transformism is Gramsci's term for the process when, in order to create or sustain a historic bloc, the dominant class has to make concessions to the subordinate social forces, giving them a material interest in its maintenance.
8 Inclusionary populists describe ‘the people’ as everyone within the national borders who is not part of the elite. Exclusionary populists define ‘the people’ as excluding not only the elite, but also other groups of people – i.e. ethnic and cultural minorities, immigrants, etc. – who are portrayed as ‘anti-national’ or ‘alien’ (Margulies Citation2016).
9 Some Russian scholars argue that class analysis is inappropriate for studying post-socialist transformation, because social stratification cannot be adequately explained by relationship to the means of production (i.e. Clark and Lipset Citation1991). New forms of social stratification are now discussed: emerging elites (or the ‘top 1 percent’), the lower class (or ‘precariat’), and many strata in between (Stenning Citation2005). I partially agree with the existing critique of the class analysis in the Russian context. Therefore, I discuss different socio-economic groups (not classes!) in the empirical sections of my study. However, in this section, I follow the class-based approach of Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (Citation1992) that explains how the political economy and structures of domination influence the democratic development in the countryside. This helps to define the material base of democracy in rural Russia (even though class structure is not transparent and rural groups do not share a particular class consciousness).
10 Commercial family farmers produce about 10% of gross domestic agricultural output.
11 There are longstanding debates on the persistence versus disappearance of the peasantry under capitalism. Marxist thinkers argue that peasants tend to differentiate into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and, therefore, disappear as a class. Agrarian populists, on the contrary, argue that peasants preserve their mode of production and lifestyle, and, thereby, provide a sustainable alternative to capitalist agriculture (see Mamonova Citation2016b for a detailed discussion of these two approaches). Russian scholars traditionally follow the disappearance thesis because of the socialist history of collectivisation, expropriation, and forced industrialisation that aimed at the erosion of the peasantry as a class. However, recent research has demonstrated that many peasant features were preserved and even reinforced by the capitalist developments in rural Russia and other post-socialist countries (Mamonova Citation2016a; Dorondel and Şerban Citation2014).
12 Interview conducted on 09-11-2017 in the Gravornoe village, Istra district, Moscow region.
13 The advocates of ‘sovereign democracy’ challenge the applicability of the western liberal type of democracy in the Russian context. They believe that the ‘democratic tradition is not something that can be introduced to Russia from abroad; rather, it is a value hard won by our people [that reflects] national values and traditions […] on par with such values as freedom and justice’ (Kokoshin Citation2006).
14 Interview conducted on 10-11-2017 in the Sumarokovo village, Ruza district, Moscow region.
15 Interview conducted on 10-11-2017 in the Sumarokovo village, Ruza district, Moscow region.
16 The word ‘khozyain’ was first mentioned in the Domostroy (Domestic Order) – the 16th-century Russian set of household rules, instructions and advice pertaining to various religious, social, domestic, and family matters in Russian society. According to the Domostroy, the main qualities of a good khozyain were discernment, knowledge of the practical side of the matter, and concern for the material and especially moral position of subordinates.
17 Interview conducted on 11-11-2017 in the Sumarokovo village, Ruza district, Moscow region.
18 Interview conducted on 09-11-2017 in the Gravornoe village, Istra district, Moscow region.
19 Interview conducted on 20-07-2014 in the Rasshevatskaya village, Novoalexandrovsk district, Stavropol Krai.
20 More than half of the Russian workforce experienced some form of interruption in the payment of wages during 1994-1997.
21 Interview conducted on 10-11-2017 in the Sumarokovo village, Ruza district, Moscow region.
22 In this context, the respondent refers to western countries / countries’ leaders.
23 Interview conducted on 09-11-2017 in the Gravornoe village, Istra district, Moscow region.
24 Russia's food sanctions have been in force since 2014. They were initiated in response to the Western sanctions over Russia's annexation of Crimea and military interventions in Eastern Ukraine.
25 Interview conducted on 08-11-2017 in the Gravornoe village, Istra district, Moscow region.
26 Interview conducted on 30-05-2013 in the Purschevo village, Balashikha district, Moscow region.
27 Interview conducted on 12-11-2017 in the Sumarokovo village, Ruza district, Moscow region.
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Natalia Mamonova
Natalia Mamonova is a research fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI) in Stockholm and an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) of Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research interests primarily focus on contemporary rural politics in Russia and Ukraine. She studies rural social movements, food sovereignty, everyday (hidden) resistance, authoritarian populism and state-society relations in the post-socialist countryside. Natalia received her PhD degree in 2016 from the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University, the Netherlands. Since then, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford, the New Europe College in Bucharest, and the University of Helsinki. Email: [email protected]