A blind and militant attachment: Russian patriotism in comparative perspective

ABSTRACT

Much of the literature on patriotic sentiment in post-Soviet Russia leans on public opinion surveys administered exclusively to Russian citizens. Absent a comparison group, such evidence, while helpful, can leave one adrift in trying to assess the meaning of a particular polling result. Drawing on multiple waves of from the International Social Survey Program and the World Values Survey, we benchmark Russians’ patriotic sentiment to that of citizens in a diverse group of middle- and high-income countries. This exercise highlights that while Russians are not unusual in the degree to which they have a benign attachment to and/or pride in their country, they stand out for espousing a patriotism that has remained consistently blind and militant since at least the mid-1990s. We speculate as to the underlying cause and highlight a potential consequence: the nature of Russian patriotism has lowered the cost to the Russian leadership of military aggression.

KEYWORDS:

• Patriotism
• Russia
• post-imperial syndrome

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Noah Buckley, Ted Gerber, and Kathryn Hendley for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. They refer to the former as “patriotism” and the latter as “nationalism.” We steer clear in this article of discussing nationalism, understood as a sentiment linked to ethnic identity. Although the literature relating to Russian nationalism, so defined, falls outside the scope of our study, we engage with work on Russia in which nationalism is discussed as a variety of patriotism, shorn of its ethnic connotations.

2. Several articles carry out exercises somewhat similar to ours here. Kasianenko (2020), also using the three waves from the NI ISSP, charts changes over time in multiple measures of nationalist sentiment in a set of East-Central European countries, including Russia. Coenders, Lubbers, and Scheepers (2021, 485), using the NI ISSP, traces trends in “nationalism,” understood as “the view that one’s own country and people are unique and superior,” across 20 European countries, but not Russia. Also using the NI ISSP, Grigoryan and Ponizovskiy (2018) analyze Russians’ attitudes towards migrants as a function of three dimensions of national identity, including “political” and “cultural” patriotism. None of these NI ISSP – based studies draw distinctions between Russians and respondents from other countries with respect to patriotism. Sanina (2018) draws on cross-sectional data from Wave 6 of the World Values Survey to benchmark patriotic sentiment in Russia to that in China, Singapore, and the United States.

3. We supplement WVS data for 2017 with the European Values Survey that was conducted jointly with WVS and contains the same questions for additional countries and additional respondents in the same countries.

4. Although Russia is the least democratic country in this group, it was not truly authoritarian in 1995 and 2003. Moreover, as we will show later, although it became more authoritarian in 2013, its average blind and militant patriotism score declined somewhat relative to 2003. Therefore, it does not appear that Russia’s increasing authoritarianism was by itself affecting popular patriotic attitudes.

5. We use Stata’s factor command to create these variables, which have a mean of zero and standard deviation of one.

6. We standardize this variable in order to make the estimates comparable to those for dependent variables in NI ISSP.

7. The weights for combining these answers into a single variable are provided by factor analysis. We chose this particular subset of three from a longer list of government spending areas because factor analysis grouped them into the same principal component with military spending. Since healthcare, law enforcement, and retirement clearly represent domestically focused spending, the residual weight of military spending would likely be directed outwards.

8. Without controlling for other types of government spending, the coefficient of the Russia dummy is greater than with this control, although the difference is not statistically significant.

9. In this as well as in all other regressions, the within-country errors are likely to be correlated. Therefore, to avoid misleadingly high statistical significance of the estimates, we cluster errors by country. This makes our statistical significance levels quite conservative.

10. We note, however, that the results for this cohort are less reliable, as it has the fewest number of observations and it participated only in the last two waves of the survey.

11. Our data do not constitute a panel and so survey waves are not collinear with the respondents’ age. However, the respondents in each generational cohort become older, on average, with each wave. For example, the age of respondents born in 1966–1975 would range between age 20 and 29 in the 1995 wave, while in the 2003 wave, the age range for this cohort would become 28–37.

12. We note that the data on education, income, and urban-rural status are missing in some of the countries in the first wave. This makes the results less comparable across waves.

13. Because our main focus is on the coefficient of Russia dummy variable, we will present coefficient plots instead of regression tables. These plots help show whether the confidence intervals for these coefficients in different regressions intersect with each other. Also, since we focus on blind and militant patriotism and to save space, we do not present the regressions for benign patriotism for each cohort. As Figure 1 shows, the estimates of the coefficient for the Russia dummy in the benign patriotism regressions are almost identical in each of the three waves. In the regressions by cohort, the point estimates range between −0.229 and −0.289 without a particular trend across cohorts. These regressions are available upon request.

14. The WVS also has a measure of benign patriotism, which does not differ significantly between the Russian respondents and those from other countries.

15. As before, we do not show the results for benign patriotism by age cohort. In those regressions, the dummy variable for Russia is negative but close to zero and statistically insignificant. The results in Figures 4 and 5 are based on the countries that participated in all four waves that were conducted in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We include the full set of demographic controls. The regressions that include only the respondent’s gender as a control variable produce qualitatively similar results.

16. Russia also participated in Wave 2 in 1990. We will use this fact to show that the patriotic attitudes in Russia changed significantly between 1990 and 1995. These results are discussed below.

17. We stress that this is a relative preference. The unconditional top choice by far for both Russian and non-Russian respondents is economic growth.

18. It is noteworthy that while the overall average of blind and militant patriotism in the 15 countries in Table 4 increased slightly from −0.065 in 1995 to 0.06 in 2013, the post-Communist countries other than Russia experienced a much greater rise of this measure from −0.17 to 0.305. Meanwhile, the numbers for Russia remained relatively stable, and the difference between Russia and the average for the other post-Communist countries declined from 0.781 in 1995 to 0.724 in 2003 and 0.460 in 2013. As most of the increase in blind and militant patriotism in other post-Communist countries occurred between 2003 and 2013, we can speculate that this was a response to Russia’s aggressive foreign policy after 2003 and particularly, the invasion of Georgia in 2008.

19. Figures 6 and 7 show regression results without controlling for education level and urban status, because the data on both of these measures for the Russian respondents are unavailable for wave 2 of WVS.

20. Recent literature has identified interesting nuance in the “rally-around-the-flag” effect in post – Crimea annexation Russia. Hale (2018, 369), for instance, identifies the biggest impact on “Putin’s support among people who consume the least state-controlled television.” Somewhat similarly, Greene and Robertson (2022, 42) show that “the effect is in fact largest amongst those who may previously have not paid much attention to politics …”.