 John Reuter is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research focuses on the politics of authoritarian regimes with a focus on Russia. He is the author of The Origins of Dominant Parties, Building Authoritarian Institutions in Post-Soviet Russia and is the author of numerous scholarly articles on elections, parties, public opinion and political economy in Russia. So let's give him a welcome and thank you. Thank you. Yes, thanks for having me and it's it's very heartening to see such an engaged crowd here and I'm glad that you're all interested in Russia. I mean it's no surprise giving current events I suppose but but I'm glad to see it nonetheless. So my talk today is going to be on the topic of public opinion and regime stability in Putin's Russia and so that the central guiding question for us today is how stable is Putin's regime and we're gonna look at that question through the prism of popular support for Putin. Now I should say at the outset I'm happy to answer any of your questions in Q&A about the war or US policy towards the war although I'm not an expert on US policy I'm an expert on Russian domestic politics but I'm happy to conjecture on that if you'd like and we are gonna talk a good bit about the war in this presentation today but we're gonna talk about it through the lens of how it affects public opinion in Russia and think about what it means for the future of Putin's Russia. So what I'm gonna start to do start by doing is we're gonna talk about what kind of regime Russia is and we're gonna do this not just for academic purposes but because the type of regime that Russia is determines the role the public opinion plays in Russian politics and then we're gonna spend some time talking about why Vladimir Putin is so popular and he is in fact popular as far as we can tell from public opinion polls and we're gonna examine those underpinnings because what we really want to do where things are gonna get good is at the end of the talk where we think through whether the war is going to eventually erode public support for Putin and therefore erode the stability of the regime. I should also note in my it didn't wasn't mentioned the introduction but this is this is what I do in my actual research most of my research now is doing public opinion polls in Russia my colleagues and I we run the longest running election series of election polls going in Russia done by at least done by Westerners and so I'm active in doing polling in Russia we have polls in the field right now and so that's what I'm mostly what I want to share with you. Okay so let's start with some preliminaries in terms of what type of regime Russia is. Russia is what political scientists call an electoral autocracy and so what that means is that Russia has in fact all the institutional trappings of democracy if you look at Russia's constitution it it's gonna look like a democratic constitution there's elections, multi-party system, a legislature, an independent judiciary, human rights enshrined in the Constitution. So it appears like a democracy but incumbents in Russia they take advantage of their privileged position office to tip the electoral playing field in their favor to bend the rules of the game so that elections in Russia are not considered free and fair. It's important to note a very important feature of these electoral autocracies which is by the way the most common type of electoral authoritarian regime in the world today there are very few of these old style single-party communist regimes left there are very few military regime left most of the authoritarian regimes that exist in the world today have multi-party elections they just manipulate those multi-party elections so that outcomes are in the incumbents favor. An important feature of these regimes is because they because they have these democratic leaking constitutions the leaders of these regimes like Vladimir Putin they base their legitimacy on winning elections so that may seem obvious but think about how the leader of a monarchy a traditional monarchy bases their legitimacy well they they derive it from their their divine right to rule let's say or or deep traditions right I the king of Oman had the right to rule because it's so set down in our traditions and because I have special relationship with God or if you're already on top if you're the Soviet Union the leaders of the Soviet Union they didn't say that they had the legitimate right to rule because they had won some multi-party election they said they had the legitimate right to rule because they were building a better society or building socialism and that's in order to build socialism we had to have a one-party state that was going to we're going to guide the working class towards this better future so in electoral authoritarian regimes though rulers say that they have the right to rule because they win the win these elections and so this gives us an insight already into why public opinion is important in these regimes because leaders say that they have the right to rule because the public supports them just like leaders in democracy say they have the right to rule because the public supports them so research and political science shows that these electoral autocracies like Putin's Russia are much more long-lived when the leaders of these regimes are popular being popular helps these regimes win elections without having to resort to massive ballot box fraud which it turns out people don't like and if you use massive ballot box fraud people tend to pour under the streets and protest it legit as we just talked about being popular helps legitimate the regime it prevents social unrest one of the greatest threats to authoritarian rule is mass revolution breaking out so if you're popular for obvious reasons it's less likely that a mass revolution is going to catch on and popular leaders are less likely to suffer from elite defections they're less likely to have their lieutenants and their their advisors and legislators and governors defecting from the regime challenging them in elections criticizing them in the media so so i'm quite certain that the regime in Russia is very concerned about what the public thinks of thinks about it the regime in Russia is obsessed with polling they engage in a lot of polling internal polling to try to always keep tabs on what the public thinks of them they watch election outcomes in Russia especially the local and regional level to figure out you know where there are grievances and and where there are underperforming governors or where there's some social problem that needs to be addressed we have lots of other evidence of instances in Russia where the regime has changed course on this or that policy measure clearly because it was unpopular so one one example this was a pension reform in 2008 the regime was proposing to raise the pension age eight years by eight years from from 58 to 65 and there was this mass public outcry against this and they they backed off and they lowered it and they only raised it by five years and there's several other examples of this in fact as we'll talk about in a second I think if we have time we're seeing an example of this right now in Russia with the public backlash against conscription which they call mass mobilization in Russia which has caused the regime to change course on who they're conscripting to fight in Ukraine okay so that being said okay it's it's popular it's important for these regimes to be popular and luckily for Putin his regime Putin has always been very popular in Russia so this is just his popularity rating over time and when he came into office in the early 2000s he was very popular routinely polling about 70 percent this his popularity is kind of oscillated bounce around since then but that's kind of not the main story the main story here is it's never dropped below 60 percent and it's usually made remains somewhere around around 70 percent so why why is this well I think we can explain Putin's popularity as a product of what I'll call five pillars so the first pillar we might call his intrinsic popularity or something that's just a type of popularity a source of popularity we will be familiar with in a democracy which is simply that many voters like Putin as a politician and they like his policies so on this first point about views of Putin's character surveys show that voters view Putin as smart professional competent honest strong leader serious but that's not to say and actually what I'm about to say I think gives these these survey results more meaning that's not to say that people just like everything about Putin so they actually don't find him particularly charismatic they don't think he's empathetic if you ask people do you think Putin cares about people like me majority say no he's not viewed by russians as a type of politician that you want that you would like to have a beard they instead well not all of them but many russians tend to think of him as like I said smart competent professional a strong and effective leader and we should also note that many voters certainly not all but there's a large chunk of voters in Russia that like Putin because they like his centrist policy course we don't need to talk a lot today about what exactly Putin's policy course has been but he occupies this kind of centrist maybe center right position on the economic spectrum it's become somewhat more culturally conservative over time but generally speaking in any political system it's it's beneficial electorally to be situated in the center of the political spectrum and that and that's where Putin has positioned himself ideologically the second pillar and this is a really big one it's very important and very important for the main message and stays talk is performance evaluations lots and lots of russians support Putin because they think that he has made Russia better off so the big one here is economic performance and this chart is just showing you GDP per capita in russia over time most of you are probably aware that in the nineteen nineties in Russia Russia was experiencing a very severe economic crisis much more severe for instance in the great depression in the united states but coincidentally and i do mean coincidentally i don't mean that ironically after Putin came to office russia experienced a rapid economic rebound and russia's economy has grown a pace since then it's slowed down somewhat in the past few years but the general story of Putin's rule in the mind of many voters is one of economic resurgence voters also credit Putin with restoring what they view as stability and political order after a time of law lawlessness and chaos during the nineteen nineties and they also credit Putin with restoring russia's rightful place as a major player in world politics which many russians felt had been lost in the nineteen nineties so that's the second pillar the third pillar maybe a little harder to get our heads around but let's let's go through this is what i would call political disengagement so um Putin's support so right now it's sitting at about 75 percent if you just ask russians do you support Putin or not support Putin 75 percent it's very wide that's three quarters of the russian public says they support Putin but when you dig in advance you find out that that support base is very wide but it's actually quite shallow and true believers people who very strongly support Putin their strong idea ideologues for Putin in his policy course are rather few maybe 20 to 30 percent of the electorate a large share of those who support Putin they're more politically disengaged they're politically apathetic and they're just kind of going along to get along and they kind of support Putin uh because for a variety of reasons many of them because they believe there's no credible alternatives or maybe because of social pressures or because they think it's the politically or socially desirable thing to do to say so but the general point is that one of the things that undergirds the regime's stability is that they that the regime has not asked a lot of its citizens typically ideologically doesn't ask them to be invested in politics doesn't ask them to be ardent supporters of the regime this is in stark contrast to communist regimes right which very much did ask their supporters to be ardent supporters asked them to be engaged in the ideological struggle against as it was capitalism another key pillar of support for Putin is what i'll call elite unity and this is simply the notion that um uh all almost all important political elites in russia support Putin so there aren't a lot of influential opinion leaders in russian society who are out there going on television criticizing Putin or influential governors who are going to their constituents and saying oh Putin's doing a bad job everyone is on the same page they're on message about supporting Putin and then of course that kind of creates a feedback loop such that because everyone supports Putin it's very politically dangerous to oppose Putin and therefore um this equilibrium of elite support for Putin is sustained the final pillar that i presume and hope have you've already thought of it is is the fact that russia is an authoritarian system and so uh there are limits on competition limits on uh the opposition limits on free speech and so of course Putin is portrayed by media in a much better light than he would be if russia were a democracy and because there are limits on the opposition he doesn't suffer the same criticism that a politician would in a democracy there are limits to this authoritarian control there are limits to the extent to which the narrative about who can be controlled information about the government and its actions can be controlled um and so we don't want to overstate the extent to which the state can just shape public opinion to to its will okay um now now what i want to do is i'm actually going to um talk a little bit about support for the regime uh on the eve of the war so in december and january 2021 2022 because i think this is important because this is kind of a snapshot of what the status quo was like before we had this highly irregular event happening we have this rally around the flag effect and this upsurge of patriotism that i'm going to talk about uh in a second so um one thing we should note even though the that putin's popularity is consistently high is that it was at its historically lowest point right on the eve of war it was kind of settling out here around 60 percent um and so at least in terms of of uh uh putin's popularity it was not um at um not at its highest point and more importantly and very worryingly for uh the authorities in russia performance evaluations of the regime have begun to decline now there's a lot of numbers here so i'm going to walk you through what's important to look at so on uh i think in surveys that that um my colleagues and i have conducted over the past several years and were conducted by our credits researchers prior to that uh we ask respondents um since putin came to office in 2000 have the following things increased decreased just stayed the same and we'll just focus on the red numbers uh for a moment and first here let's look at the standard of living as your standard of living uh gotten better or gotten worse or stayed the same and so uh far less than the majority of voters think that their standard of living has now gotten better under putin this was not the case so we don't have the survey data here but this was not the case 10 years ago or 15 years ago under putin but increasingly the regime was not getting high marks for uh economic performance similar with responsiveness of government corruption almost almost a majority said that corruption had increased actually uh inequality large majorities thought that inequality had increased under putin now russia's influence in the world this is one area the two areas where putin does do well among voters is that uh people thought that russia's influence in the world had increased but note that this share was decreasing over time in the years leading up to the war and the same thing for those who said that political stability in russia had increased uh that share of voters was uh decreasing in the years leading up to to the war so the point here is right before the war starts the regime is on probably a shakiest ground in terms of public support since uh 2000 so that's a backdrop now let's let's pivot and talk about the war and how it's affected public opinion in russia but before we do that i do want to set the stage by discussing what public opinion toward some hypothetical war was or so the public opinion towards ukraine and confrontation with the west was before the war because this is going to um play an important part in our story uh when we note that well i'll save that for later but um first of all russia's attitudes towards ukraine and their attitudes towards towards um uh relations between russia and ukraine so in november 2021 this this particular poll asked respondents whether they thought ukraine russia should be one state and very few russians thought that was the case the vast majority of russians thought that ukraine should be an independent state and we get these same responses going back in time all the way back to the 1990s the vast majority of russians think that ukraine and russia should be one should be uh separate states ukraine should be independent interestingly before 2014 a larger share of ukranians thought that ukraine and russia should be one state uh than russians did that changed of course dramatically after the war in the donbass the war opinions on the conflict in ukraine um so this question is asked in december of 2021 and the question was what what should russia do about the war in ukraine so remember before the current war started there was already a war going on in the donbass region of ukraine and this question that we asked asked respondents what do you think russia should do about this war and only a tiny share of russians thought that russia should engage in some sort of armed conflict to help the separatists in the donbass and fight against the ukrainian government a little bit more thought that they should maybe arm the separatists but the vast majority of respondents thought that the government shouldn't either shouldn't be involved in all or just offer some humanitarian resistance or moral or moral support so the very important point here is that this war that is going on right now wasn't called for by russian society it wasn't if russian society wanted war in ukraine at least before the war started in december january of last year similarly in terms of confrontation with the west i think there's a misperception especially now that the war started that the russian public kind of views the west as an enemy or as a rival but that's not the case at all polls before the war started consistently showed that large majorities of russians did not want confrontational relations with the west so in this question there are different opinions about the type of relations that russia should have with the west what do you think how should russia relate to the west so a sizable majority because we add these two up that's going to be close to 70 percent of russians said that we should think that the west is either as a friend as an ally and a very tiny share of respondents about eight percent said we should think of the west as an as an enemy so this is a very you know this this is from december 2021 and now we're already in this you know swept up in this rhetoric about nuclear holocaust and confrontation between the west and russia so again the point being the point i'm trying to drive home is that this confrontational relationship with the west was not necessarily called for by wasn't demanded by the russian public this wasn't a sentiment that was pre-existing in russian public opinion okay now let's come to the actual war so after the war starts there is a rally around the flag effect in russia an opinion poll showed that sizable majorities of russians supported the military operation now they did this both because you know rally around the flag effects they don't just happen in autocracies they happen in the united states most of y'all know in all democracies these things happen in time of war people tend to support the government in power but these types of rally around the flag effects are of course accentuated in authoritarian regimes where the state controls the media controls the narrative and therefore people are able to consume a lot of propaganda and television is heavily censored in russia and so they don't aren't exposed to alternative viewpoints and so in that backdrop there was strong but not overwhelming strong but not overwhelming support for the military operation in russia and in concert with this prudent's popularity also spiked up so back to its historic highs people like i said rally around the flag and and supported uh said they supported the government more after the war started however support for the war has been declining since then and now this latest poll which is just two weeks old this is not my poll by the way it's some colleagues who do this work in russia it's sitting just above 50 so this reached its lowest point since the war began and this this tick downward that you notice here is almost certainly although it's only three percentage points but i think it's going to grow is almost certainly in response to the russian government announcing mass mobilization they're going to be conscripting soldiers into the army and sending them to ukraine prior to this con there have been some mistakes but conscripts were not for the most part fighting on the front lines uh in russia i mean sorry in ukraine now interestingly so support for the war is at its lowest point and if you phrase the question differently uh you you you uh um you begin to see that support for the war is on pretty shaky ground so i meant to translate this for you but anyways this question phrasing says uh what do you think should we start from the or should we should the russian government continue its military activities in ukraine or should we start peaceful negotiations and so the orange lines are start peaceful negotiations the blue lines are continue with the military operation and so it's about even if you add these two up about 48 to actually the start military start peaceful negotiations group is a little bit bigger than the continue the war uh group so support for the war as it stands right now in october 22 into about 50 50 but a very important uh thing has happened in russian politics that's completely novel and that is that there is very high levels of polarization over the war so we're in this country we're very familiar with polarization this is you know something that is is uh everyone's talking about because we have the highest levels of political polarization in the united states since the civil war right now but in russia actually prior to the war there wasn't very much political polarization society wasn't drawn into two ideologically opposed camps people who supported Putin didn't really most people who support Putin didn't really hate people who support the opposition and most people who who supported the opposition didn't really have very strong negative feelings towards people who support Putin they're like okay fine most people are kind of apolitical and even if they were involved in politics they kind of you know understood that if whether friends or family members supported the opposition or the opposing party but what happened with the war is that society started to polarize around the issue of the war and in particular on a generational dimension so support for the war among uh older generations is much much much stronger than is among under generations so among among younger generations it's fair to say i think that more people are opposed to war than support the war and the obverse is definitely true for older generations and you see this same thing if you stratify that other question that i've put up there by age group that younger voters those under 40 are much more likely to say again this orange is saying that they prefer to start negotiations they're much more likely to say that they want the regime to start negotiations okay and i'll interpret this in a second this this is very important for our for our final conclusion but i'll say more about that in a second the final thing to note this is just important context for our discussion is that the war of course has put the russian economy into economic crisis and this is at a time this is very important to note when most other economies in the world are growing very rapidly right so you have this every country in the world goes into a recession because of covid and then almost every country in the world is bouncing back right they're economy are bouncing back rapidly after covid russia's go in the opposite direction because of the sanctions because of the business uh the the business of voluntary business withdrawals um so you have a five percent drop in quarter on quarter drop in gdp and q2 and inflation at high levels and uh public opinion polls bear this out that russians are feeling this pain 56 percent say they've had to be more frugal because of rising prices 39 percent say the income has been affected in some way uh by the war and as you might expect though those who are have suffered economic consequences during the war uh survey show they're less supportive of uh the war and so given that we expect um we don't expect russia's economy to improve so long as the war is going on it's going to continue to be in recession or at least stagnation one would expect these numbers to grow and one would expect this to eat away at support for the war and i would say that this is particularly problematic for the regime given that on the eve of war back in 2021 russians were less and less likely to approve of the job that putin was doing in handling the economy so okay so let me sum up some of these points i see what i which points i have made and haven't made so i made the point that war this war wasn't um wasn't fueled by a demand from society i've also made the point that current levels of support are really mostly of a function of this rally around the flag effect that's manufactured by propaganda censorship there wasn't strong support for such a war before the war started um and then those who support the war and therefore putin are made up of two two groups i would say one is vigorous supporters and then the second group are those who are kind of passively acquiescing to what the government is doing but what's precarious for the putin regime is that we know from political science that these patriotic rallies around the flag effect they can be very intense in the moment but they can also very dissipate very quickly because they're often founded on what are at the time like i said intense emotions but they're not rooted in strong ideological convictions and so as these emotions fade away they can dissipate very quickly and that is a particular danger for the regime and also one of the reasons i think that the regime is often ratcheting up its rhetoric and ratcheting up its um uh uh uh the the rhetoric around confrontation with the west in order to keep fanning the flames of this rally around the flag effect because if it dissipates the regime collapses that's the final point is about polarization so as i said before prior to the war russia was really a mostly an apathetic deep politicized society people just didn't follow politics care about politics and they definitely apologize now for the first time in post-soviet history we have people that are really angry and engaged with politics specifically on the issue of the war so you know 29 percent of respondents say that they've stopped speaking to a relative or friend over the war um that's not something that that would be unheard of you know not speaking to a relative friend because of something political prior to the war and so what the concern here for the regime would be that now you have a sizable share of russians young russians it turns out who are who have very strong negative attitudes about the regime they're very angry about it they're not apathetic anymore and so if that rally around the flag effect starts to dissipate you're going to be left with some core of people who are actually quite motivated angry and politicized and that could be very perilous i think for the machine all right so i'm going to leave it there and i very much look forward to hearing your questions and comments you talk about pudin being so popular and not having anybody that is opposed to him what about the gentleman i mean if you were opposed to him you were thrown in jail what about the gentleman that was poisoned i can't think of this saying came back nevolny is he still in jail just that he have followers what is his situation politically how was that resolved great yeah so the person you're talking about is alexa nevolny so alexa nevolny is the most staunch opposition figure in russia opposition in russia is a complicated entity there are some parts the opposition that are kind of co-opted by the regime and and work with the regime somewhat temper their criticism of the regime in exchange for access to policy and then there are there is the parts of the opposition that's headed by mostly alexa nevolny who don't temper their criticism of the regime and are very very staunch critics of the regime and they call openly for the removal of the regime and you know would support they do support mass street protest as a potential way to to remove pudin from power and uh yeah so alexa nevolny the leader of this he was put in jail he was first poisoned by the fsb incontrovertible evidence of that and then he's since then he's been in jail um i mean uh very tragically in macabre in macabre fashion that he was put in jail for violating his parole he was supposed to check in because he was already he had already um had been convicted of another crime and he was on parole and he was supposed to check in with his parole officer while he was abroad but he could not check in because he was in a coma from being poisoned and then they put him in jail for not checking in with his parole officer so yeah he's in prison but he still has a following his support base was unfortunately never very wide before this part of that of course is due to russia's authoritarian system and the fact that his megaphone was stifled right he could only speak to his supporters through the internet he wasn't allowed of course on state television but at the same time he is a very for many russians he's kind of he's too hardline of a political figure he's a very he's a very um for some he has a very grating political presence and he's not he doesn't he turns off some russians and so that also limited his um his ability to expand his support base this is very common in in closed authoritarian regimes where dissidents the type of person who has the kind of courage courage and strident personality to become a dissident is often not the same type of person who's a good politician in democratic politics and that's what we are observing with the let's see where do you get your list of respondents or how do you contact them to get all of your information for these polls right so um we work with a survey company in russia that has been doing surveys in russia since the soviet period actually and they they draw representative samples so they have survey teams in scores of russian regions and you first draw a sample of regions and then within each region you draw a sample of settlements there would be cities and villages you do that randomly at both those stages and then within those settlements let's say it's a village you're going to randomly select households to interview and then within each household you're going to randomly select to respond and so it's done just the same way that opinion polls are done in the united states or any other country except in russia the quality of opinion polls is actually a lot higher than in the united states because they're still done face to face and that's possible in russia because the cost of labor is much lower so you can actually go into someone's home make tea sit down at the kitchen table and do an interview with them and it's not these annoying things you all get on your phones where you're trying to do a survey over text or someone's calling you and in a robotic voice doing a poll so i think she's in charge um with the polling and you mentioned the regional is there any polling i don't know the population distribution of russia i'm assuming western end of russia's the majority of population how it is out on the hinterland the other factor is as i understood a lot of the recruiting in the army is from the rural areas in the western for the eastern part of the state and promises of money and i'm wondering how that works into the polling i'm going to throw one more if putin suddenly should have a heart attack or fall from a building and die what's the power of white who's next in line nabali's in prison he doesn't sound like much but is there any group that would come in and fill that boy okay your first i got i remember the second one the first one was can you remember the regional distribution how the polling does any polling indicate eastern russia or western russia versus eastern i don't know the distribution of population in that country it's huge right i know the eastern st petersburg and but well in terms of drawing a sample it would be done in a representative fashion so the areas that are less populated where you'd have less respondents from there and moscow would have more respondents because there's more people from there so it is it is nationally representative if that's our situation the farther you get away from moscow house of reliance on the party out of the moscow the central so i mean yeah in terms of regional distributions of support for putin which i guess maybe you're asking about so like it is true that uh in cyberia and the far east they traditionally have lower levels of support for the authorities it's kind of cyberia the far east is kind of the wild west of russia they fancy themselves as being more free thinking and more independent than the western parts of russia so you do see those patterns in public opinion polls your second question uh was well now i've already lost that one you have to avoid oh that's okay i can do the void yeah so um what we don't know and that question's impossible to answer because and it relates to what i was saying in response to her question the type of people who are going to be effective politicians in a democratic system are the not the same type people who are effective politicians in an autocratic system and that goes for dissidents but it also goes for politicians within the regime some of the people who are close to putin within the ruling party let's say they have made their careers within this autocratic system and they know how to advance their political careers in that system but that doesn't necessarily mean that if tomorrow the whole thing collapses and we have free and fair elections and the tv lights are on and they're having open debates that that's going to make them into good politicians so we've seen this happen over and over and over again in countries that transition from authoritarianism to democracy and oftentimes totally new figures emerge that people didn't predict would emerge would emerge beforehand okay so the why my republic couldn't result that the backlash was hitler the same thing is coming going on in this country right now it's going to lead to an economic collapse and it might lead back to what we had before i wonder what happened in russia in the 90s that led to putin right well i mean uh so there's an argument out there that there's that um many people supported putin because they saw him as uh rectifying many of the social ills that had existed during the 1990s so in the 1990s in russia there was this collapse in state capacity there was this breakdown in law and order there was this economic crisis the state that the so the the social safety net that existed in the soviet union collapsed um and so much of russian society was adrift in the 1990s and uh it's unclear how much putin is responsible for this more likely it's just due to the fact that oil prices went up in the early 2000s but whatever the reason putin comes to power and a lot of these problems begin to be fixed and so putin is very lucky to be coming to office during this period i think when uh the russian economy and the power of the russian states and and russia's foreign policy influence were all being restored i'm just wondering if it was the same as like the one we already talked about like it's broken but in the early stage of that it's going to lead to an economic collapse well you know i mean it's a good point i mean it's a good it actually right now the crisis in russia isn't nearly as bad as it would have been under weimar germany right so they're in a recession they're in a recession but it's not a deep depression yet in terms of drop in output i'm at the 90s hmm yeah well we're 30 years away from that or yeah 30 yeah 30 years away from that it's a long time so i do have a question what is the average standard of living for most um russians and how does that play i mean do they get are they allowed to travel i mean i've heard that they've gotten they've been allowed enough for the western kinds of things just to keep them peaceful and happy is there any truth to that um well russia's not a closed society in that sense i mean before the war i mean before the war in the the 30 years after the collapse of communism like um people are allowed to travel freely um russia has a middle class many people go on vacation abroad um i think the latest polls suggest over half of russians have traveled abroad probably more than americans traveled abroad um and uh now that doesn't necessarily mean that their standard of living is higher than the united states of the average income in russia is much lower than the united states and the median income is even lower so it's very high inequality in russia there's there's there's a lot of very rich people and then a lot of very very poor people so inequality is high in the us as we all know but it's even higher in russia i'd be interested to hear your comments about putans rattling his atomic weapon threat yeah i mean i think um uh i hope at least that this is um a bluff you know he's so what's happened is like the battlefield situation in ukraine is not going in russia's favor um and they're outnumbered on the battlefield in ukraine because ukraine declared general mobilization of all able-bodied men and even many women uh and so and ukraine's not necessarily that small of a country right it's about 40 million people russia's about 145 million people and russia is fighting there just with primarily contract troops so professional soldiers and so they're currently outnumbered on the battlefield and so they're losing ground right now um and um so you know i think hopefully putan is using this nuclear threat to try to get the west to back off and not provide more weapons uh to ukraine the reason why i do think that's right and he's not just crazy and going to use nuclear weapons is because there are a lot of levels of escalation i think that russia could engage in short of using nuclear weapons there will be no reason to escalate all the way to nuclear weapons at this point and and by the way to the extent anyone's discussing nuclear weapons i think most people are talking about tactical nuclear weapons battlefield nuclear weapons not launching icbms against the united states and um and so there you know uh uh there's a lot of things russia could do to escalate bombing more civilian infrastructure bombing government installations in Kiev which they've which they've avoided doing thus far destroying the ukraine electricity grid which they've avoided doing thus far they may have started doing just yesterday in the day before but there's a lot of things they could do before they get to nuclear weapons so i think it's a bluff and i think you know but i mean we have to hope it's a bluff because if it's not a bluff we're all screwed there's no point in analyzing anything anyway do you have any statistics on uh voting how many people vote do they have confidence in voting or the younger generation the older generation yeah so um uh rates of voter turnout in russia are about the same as they are in the united states roughly speaking however um and and a lot of people who who participate in elections probably about 70 75 percent they think that elections are more or less free and fair these are people who support the regime and so you know they engage in motivated reasoning or motivated skepticism and they are like well you know more or less elections are free and fair or this isn't that bad fraud's not that bad i go i vote for united russia i vote for putin i get on with my day um there's also a large chunk that are kind of coerced into voting um so something that's very common in russia is what's called workplace voter mobilization and so uh a lot of votes are mobilized in russia through the workplace you're the boss at your factory says okay it's election day we all have to go vote and everyone goes out and vote and so a lot of those people they're not that jazzed about voting they're just doing it in a perfunctory in a perfunctory manner um but um but yeah but that leaves i mean for context you know rates of voter participation in the u.s i compare it to the u.s and i said it's about the same as the u.s but rates of voter participation in the u.s are very low relative to other democracies and so there's a lot of people in russia just like in the u.s who don't vote and don't think that elections are worth participating in and they're completely uh disaffected from electoral politics and don't believe in it that's i just got a quick um thought i'm just kind of curious about the their gross production their economy um how much is their gross production output and balancing with what they need to potentially suppress their population i mean what's the spending cost militarily and in contrast to that military budget what is their budget for social suppression for lack of a better term i guess when you say social suppression do you mean like repression or do you mean like spending on social services to keep people shaping happy popularity staying in power you know you have a certain amount of that in china the spending there is getting higher and higher and higher and i would say in russia they have to spend quite a bit on their budget yeah going towards policing and making sure the population stays in check well i wouldn't put it that i actually don't think there's a very large share of the budget that goes to domestic repression that's probably just not a major line item what's it what is it the two huge line items are actually the same in russia as they would be in the united states or almost any country which would be military spending and social spending so spending on pensions that's the big government expenditure and and health care and wealth what we would call welfare support so i guess maybe i'm looking at the budget to shape popular opinion you know he is not going to necessarily let the shine come off his image so the cost to the people to keep his ego going for no other way of putting it how is that sustainable in the long run you know economically before it begins to fade in that you know he cannot sustain this he's age 70 right now well i agree let that support this yeah well that that's the point is that like primarily he's generating support to primarily the regime generates support by uh demonstrating that's able to provide adequate standard of living for people so that's what's expensive is maintaining spending on social services maintaining spending on pensions in russia just like in any country in the world it's the older generations that vote more and so they're the ones that are politically relevant and important and so pensions are the main thing that they care about because pensions are state provided in russia there's almost no almost no private pensions whatsoever and so yeah so you're right in that a constraint for the regime is how in the face of economic crisis it can continue yeah spending on social services such that people don't get upset with their standard of living i guess that's it then how important are the oligarchs to put in keeping him in power and supporting him yeah that's a really good question because the traditional belief among russia watchers is that they were absolutely crucial that they were kind of one of the legs of his regime and by oligarch she means these group of people who became fabulously wealthy in the 1990s because of their close ties with the state but also because they were able to accumulate a large amount of economic assets in russia during the transition from communism to capitalism and so these are big businessmen we would call them in the US captains of industry except for in russia they have very very close ties to the state all of them and certainly when putin came to power he was very reliant on the support from the oligarchs and he made a deal a very famous deal with the oligarchs when he came to power when the deal was you get to keep everything that you took control of or stole or whatever it may be the case during the 1990s but but you don't the deal was you get to keep that and you but then you don't support the opposition you have to support me and so everyone believed that their support was very important the war comes along and many of these oligarchs not all of them they lost almost everything because a lot of their assets were in the west and these were of course among the first individuals that the west placed sanctions on so all these stories you read about yachts being seized and bank accounts frozen these are the oligarchs right and so everyone thought aha well this is going to impale his regime and they're going to you know tell putin to take a hike because what's the point of supporting putin if i can't have a yacht in monaco right and uh but it turned out that in 2022 their support wasn't as important anymore or that's you know they didn't have the same influence over putin that they once did and the security the support of security services the fsb the army the other security services it seems to be more important for putin than supporting oligarchs our sanctions really effective against russia because you hear that for instance india is getting their oil now from russia china is uh dealing with russia the western world needs uh the oil from russia as far as europe is concerned how long can we in your opinion can we stay united right so well yeah and the first point about how effective sanctions are well uh they're both effective and ineffective they're effective in the sense that the russian economy is in recession and they've lost a lot of government government revenue because of you know western oil embargoes and because of uh sectoral sanctions and and more actually the largest part actually of the recession in russia is not so much uh government actions it's the informal business withdrawals because after the war tons and tons of western corporations just took their business out of russia preemptively maybe some were concerned about later getting sanctioned for doing business with russia others were concerned about problems um financing their operations in russia because there were sanctions in the russian banking system and still others were concerned about the what the the pr consequences of continuing to do business in russia whatever the case may be like almost all russian businesses withdrew from russia and that's really the big thing that's causing recession in russia but to the the second point about there being ineffective of course sanctions against a country is big and um pivotal in the global economic system as russia are going to be less effective than would be sanctions against north korea or venezuelan uh because well a russia is just a big economy in its own right it's better able to kind of better able than many other countries to provide for itself um but then also as you're alluding to uh a lot of russia's market for its products and of course its primary product is is hydrocarbons a lot of that market is not in the west it's actually china and india and turkey the middle east and and so on and so forth um but that being said i mean the west is still a crucial market especially for gas and that's why you know most of europe is still buying gas from russia oil is a different story from gas i'm talking about natural gas natural gas west a lot of europe not so much western europe but central a lot of central europe is still very dependent on russian gas and there's they're still buying it for that reason yeah i would say these sanctions have been very ineffective i mean what good did good did they do with ukraine i mean they're just practically level to thousands dead i don't see where it's healthy korean at all i mean we've heard russia but how's it healthy korean there's a comment more than anything do you have any comment on the relationship of the russian orthodox church and putin's regime i've read things heard things about a a tightness there and almost a complicity well yes this is a tradition in russia that the orthodox church is much more closely tied to the state than would be churches in the west to to the state i mean of course this wasn't true during the communist era which was of course an atheist regime but during the czarist era the the the the church was very closely tied to the state and the czar was was you know by official church doctrine that god's representative on earth and and so in the in the in the post-soviet era at least in the putin era yeah the the russian orthodox church is very closely associated with the state and very supportive of of the state and they've been very vocally supportive of the war that's that's for sure but the russian orthodox church doesn't have as much kind of influence on public opinion as do churches in the united states i mean church attendance is very very low many people many russians report well first one levels of religiosity in russia are much lower than the united states but then levels of church attendance are much lower still in orthodox christianity church attendance just doesn't have the same meaning you know there's not like sermons in the same way there are in protestant religions um so so orthodox priests don't really have the same opportunity to influence public opinion they can't on sunday give some political sermon it's all in these you know yeah any other questions absolutely any other questions no does your work have any predictive value well i don't know i guess we'll see right i asked god a lot of studies in psychology say that the masses are always wrong at critical turning points you can use our stock market as an example and when everybody goes right i'll be better off to go well and that's right is any of this use for predictive purposes i mean it seems to be very interesting but the figures aren't showing any type of correlation to change i could say that huh yeah i don't know i guess well i guess my point is we'll see right i mean so that uh sure yeah i mean that's you know like that's what i was saying earlier like you can you can definitely see evidence that the regime responds to changes in public opinion they do things in response to to changes in public opinion so yeah is that it then for everybody nope it's okay if you say the the regime will respond to public opinion everything that i've read about the current situation is very very volatile and since the conscription announcement over 700 000 men have tried to flee and get out of the country that has to have some public repercussions um and in the whole issue about the threat of nuclear war and the kind of deranged speech that putin just gave uh but the sense at least as i read western media is that it's a very very volatile and do you think that the russian people understand that kind of voluntary volatility or what do you think the response eventually will be uh so do they what i think um oh okay let me put it this way so polls indicate the russians are very concerned and anxious more so than americans are they're very worried about nuclear war they're very worried about being nuked by the west they think most russians are most but the same numbers of russians that i put up here to support the war most of them also think they really do think that the west is trying to destroy russia and that the west is you know intent on wiping russia off the face of the earth so they're very anxious about this they're very concerned about this happening um so yeah if that answers your question about like they're concerned if that's what you meant by volatility