Patriotic disunity: limits to popular support for militaristic policy in Russia

ABSTRACT

This article considers the pervasiveness of military themes in the state’s framing of Russianness, and explores the strengths and weaknesses of militaristic means to enhance social consensus. Based on existing research and new survey data, it emphasizes the stratification of support for militaristic policy in the Russian population. The author argues that militarism cannot alleviate the growing dissatisfaction with the Putin regime in major cities or among youth. It also fails to unify Moscow with the countryside. Women are more sceptical than men, and higher education seems to undermine supportive attitudes. In consideration of this stratification of support, militaristic policies may in fact underscore important social and ideological cleavages in Russian society, rather than bridging them.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• patriotism
• militarism
• patriotic education
• public opinion

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Erling Overå for his contribution to the quantitative analysis of this article.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the strong military connotations of the Russian (and Soviet) concept of patriotism, see, for instance, Rapoport (2012) or Bækken (2019). In Russia, patriotic activities are sometimes divided into military-patriotic and civil-patriotic subcategories. When used alone, however, patriotic education is strongly infused with military themes, and even civil-patriotic activities are often indirectly related to the military or war commemoration.

2. This statement was first voiced in 2016, then repeated and justified in 2020. See, for instance, TASS, 3 February 2016 (https://tass.com/politics/854250) and 10 May 2020 (https://tass.com/society/1154865).

3. For discussions on the definition of militarism and its relation to nation-building, see, for instance, Bækken (2019), following Vagts (1959). The term has different connotations in Russia, and is often rejected. For the claims made in this article, militarism must necessarily be understood as operationalized in the questions of Table 1, and to a certain degree in other questions mentioned in the article.

4. Patrioticheskoe vospitanie in Russian. The original Russian term vospitanie could be translated as both education and upbringing, relating to a dichotomy in Russian educational science, in which education is divided into academic (obuchenie) and moral-spiritual (vospitanie) counterparts.

5. Russian attitudes toward the military can be described as dual, reflecting widely diverging views on the military as an abstract idea and a cultural phenomenon on the one hand, and the military as a real and practical institution on the other (see Novik and Perednia 2008; Danilova 2015).

6. The elevated levels of support were on most accounts maintained until 2018, when they dropped again in relation to the controversial pension reforms. The Levada Analytical Centre regularly posts approval ratings on its webpage (https://www.levada.ru).

7. Levada reports to have “anecdotal evidence” that those refraining from responding to polls tend to be the same who can “expect problems” (Gudkov 2018).

8. Instead of measuring effect, the target goals mostly measure production of material, activities, conferences, research articles, and so forth. Many target figures seem to have been set down more or less at random, or simply to increase 10% within a given variable every year. Furthermore, the process of defining and measuring the completion of goals has not been transparent, and goals have rarely been followed up or adjusted in light of previous achievements (see Sanina 2017, 51–58). To complete the picture of a sloppy measurement regime, the targets consist of a curious mishmash of absolute and relative figures whose rationale is never clarified (Pravitel’stvo 2015). Many central aims of the policy, including the goal of enhancing social unity and reducing ideological discord, have not been operationalized for measuremen.

9. The survey was conducted from 2 to 18 April – a few weeks after the March presidential election and well before the May holidays, the celebrations of which are saturated with military-patriotic content.

10. The dataset contains no data pertaining to ethnicity or citizenship.

11. The sample includes equally sized samples from 10 localities spread across the Russian landmass: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Pyatigorsk, Rostov-on-Don, Khabarovsk, and two village clusters in the countryside of Sverdlovsk Oblast and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. Seventy percent of the Russian population lives in small or large cities, so the sample is biased toward larger cities. The two samples of rural populations from the Central and Urals federal districts cannot be seen as representative of the entire rural population of Russia, as they are drawn from only two regions and populated mostly by ethnic Russians.

12. “Russia needs a military visible in society, through education, parades, mass media, etc.” (Rossii nuzhna armiya, zametnaya obshchestvu, predstavlyaemaya v protsesse obucheniya, na paradakh, v SMI i t.d.).

13. Armiya – neot 'emlemaya chast’ natsional’nogo samosoznaniya Rossii.

14. According to self-reported change in the 2018 survey.

15. For technical reasons, these figures on self-reported attitude change are not weighted, but I would not assume this to have considerable impact on the result.

16. As fully or partly agreeing to the statement: “Russia needs a military visible in society, through education, parades, mass media, etc.” (Rossii nuzhna armiya, zametnaya obshchestvu, predstavlyaemaya v protsesse obucheniya, na paradakh, v SMI i t.d.).

17. One could hypothesize that a lack of progress in part stems from the strong scepticism toward computer games among Russian conservative policymakers (Goodfellow 2016b).

18. Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo obrashchaet slishkom mnogo vnimaniya na slavu armii i nedostatochno – na podvigi grazhdanskogo naseleniya.

19. One should also note that the Russian Orthodox Church is heavily involved with the military (Adamsky 2019), and also an active participant in military patriotic activity by supporting museums, publishing patriotic educational literature, and participating in military patriotic clubs (Laruelle, 170–175; Rousselet 2015). The remarkable Cathedral of the Armed Forces that opened in 2020 inside Park Patriot is a striking symbol of the alliance between the Church, the army, and patriotic education programs.