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Russia’s last independent pollster tells me how Putin does it
How does Vladimir Putin manage to keep this up? For all the destruction he’s visited on Ukraine, his invasion has also inflicted so much damage on Russia.
There are the financial and economic costs. There’s the diplomatic isolation. There’s the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians who’d rather bet on a future abroad than support Putin’s war for the past at home.
But above all, there are the dead. The Kremlin doesn’t announce casualty figures, but a running tally by the BBC and the independent Russian outlet Mediazona estimates that at least 45,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine.
To put that in perspective, it’s triple the number of Soviets killed in the USSR’s decade-long invasion of Afghanistan, often described as the “Kremlin’s Vietnam.”
In fact, it surpasses the number of Soviet and Russian troops killed in the entire period between 1945 and 2022, a period that also includes the Kremlin’s hamfisted and initially disastrous bid to suppress Chechen separatists and jihadists in the 1990s. To put it in American terms, those 45,000 dead would amount to 100,000 flag-draped caskets in the United States.
And yet, there’s hardly been a peep from Russian society.
To find out why, I sent a note to Lev Gudkov in Moscow. Gudkov is the academic director of the Levada Center, Russia’s last remaining independent pollster. I last saw him in person in 2018, at his messy office on Nikolskaya Street – a ritzy pedestrian boulevard – that’s just a five-minute walk from the Kremlin, which has long considered Levada a “foreign agent.”
At 77, Lev has the weary, knowing demeanor of a man who has spent his life asking questions in a society that is increasingly wary of answering them.
The Kremlin has pressured Levada over the years but always seemed to allow it to continue its work. Even autocrats, after all, need to know what their people are comfortable saying to strangers.
“The people don’t know how many are dead and wounded,” he told me. More than 60% of Russians get their news primarily from state-controlled TV, which will shout at you about neo-Nazis in Kyiv, perverts who run Europe, or cats thrown from Russian trains – but will not tell you about the bodybags coming home from Ukraine.
People who do speak out about casualties are arrested, harassed or, on occasion, driven to suicide, which is what happened this week to a hawkish military blogger who suggested Russia had lost 16,000 troops in its recent campaign for a single Ukrainian town.
Another problem, to adapt a Vietnam-era protest line, is that the Russians dying in Ukraine “ain’t no Gazprom executive’s son.”
“The funerals are held by individual families,” says Gudkov, “and its overwhelmingly conscripts from marginalized social groups who don’t have the power to mobilize.”
A look at the casualty map bears this out. Young men in remote and relatively poor Russian provinces like Tuva or Buryatia, for example, are up to 45 times as likely to die as their counterparts in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
All of this makes perfect sense. Russians don’t know about the casualties, face huge consequences for trying to find out, and are victim to the propaganda mill that keeps support for Putin above 80% and approval of his war not far behind.
But blaming this sort of collective delusion simply on a Very Bad Autocrat™ is too easy. The reality is that it can happen in democracies too, and it does.
On the eve of the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, I looked at a poll that showed 72% of the population approving of their government’s decision to launch a disastrous, unprovoked war.
But it wasn’t from Russia. It was from the US, and it was taken in 2003 to gauge popular support for the invasion of Iraq.
Say what you will about the failure of mainstream media to question the WMD narrative – and there is lots to say – but the US was, and is, a pluralistic paradise compared to today’s Russia.
But even so, it took four whole years of debacle in Iraq for a majority of Americans to finally decide that the invasion was a “bad decision.”
The emergence of social media in the years since has hardly helped. Nearly 20% of Americans today say pop star Taylor Swift was engaged in a Deep State psyop to sway the next election, while a third of Americans still think the last one was “stolen.” And as many as half of Hillary Clinton’s voters once believed Trump’s victory was the result of Russian tampering with vote tallies. None of the above is true.
The point is that you don’t actually have to live under the sway of a late-stage autocrat who controls the airwaves to believe bad, stupid, or crazy things.
A badly contaminated news environment can in some ways be as bad as a tightly controlled one.
2022: The trouble with autocrats
The three big international politics stories of this year – Russia’s war on Ukraine, the uprisings in Iran, and China’s bid to lockdown COVID – have something basic in common: All are the result of authoritarian leaders who’ve painted themselves into dangerous corners, and they all sit atop political systems that make these kinds of crises inevitable.
Putin’s war
Russia’s Vladimir Putin has isolated himself from dissenting voices in his country and within his government, and it appears that many senior state officials and military leaders were surprised when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine last February.
Then, Putin himself was surprised to learn that billions supposedly invested in military modernization in recent years had been stolen or wasted, leaving his armed forces entirely unfit for purpose.
And because the Russian state sharply restricts the flow of accurate information within the country and criminalizes dissent, anxious Russians are now prey to every new rumor of a pending mobilization that might send more young Russians into a military meat grinder.
The result: The lack of accurate information flowing up or down the Russian system allowed Putin to start a war he can’t finish – with resulting damage to Russia’s economy, military, and political standing that will last for decades. Yet, the world pays a heavy price with the loss of Ukrainian and Russian lives, with higher energy and food prices triggered by the war, and with money and resources devoted to the conflict that might have been invested in human potential.
Iran’s insurrection
Since the in-custody death of a young woman arrested by the Islamic Republic’s morality policefor wearing her headscarf improperly, nationwide anti-regime protests have spread. Iran’s clerical establishment, led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has responded to the protests mainly with brutal repression, including public executions.
Here’s a government that bases its right to rule on a revolution that an increasingly small minority of Iranians are old enough to remember. It’s a regime isolated from its own people, threatened by public dissent, and unwilling to offer citizens more than token concessions. The public unrest continues.
Xi’s lockdown
China’s Xi Jinping, who has amassed more personal power within China than any leader in half a century, insists the Chinese Communist Party has helped his country avoid the COVID carnage suffered in Western democracies. To do this, the state has sharply restricted the movement of hundreds of millions of people, compromised their privacy, and forced them into constant testing and sometimes quarantine. China’s economy has taken a severe hit, but far fewer people have died in China than have succumbed to COVID in America and Europe.
But the lockdown could never be sustained indefinitely, and it has now been abruptly relaxed – without a clear plan to manage the deadly fallout. Because Xi insists on the superiority of the Chinese system, his government remains unwilling to accept mRNA vaccines developed in the West that might better protect China’s people now that the lockdown policy has become unsustainable and the virus is suddenly freer to travel.
And because Xi’s power is built atop a perception of infallibility – “Xi Jinping thought” is now enshrined as a guiding principle in China’s constitution – it’s been impossible for the state to acknowledge the error and to reverse course in ways that limit post-lockdown damage from the virus.
Finally, as in Russia, tight state control of information creates fertile ground for dangerous rumormongering within China and undermines the Chinese government’s credibility abroad.
Looking ahead
The history of the world shows us that democratic governments are certainly capable of dumb decisions that inflict terrible harm on others, but 2022 reminds us that when dictatorships create crises, they tend to be much harder to resolve.
In Russia, Iran, and China, there is no credible opposition capable of calling these leaders to account, in some cases saving them and their people from their own bad decisions. In none of them is there a free press capable of giving leaders an accurate picture of conditions inside their country or even within their governments. There are no independent voices to provide accurate information to help citizens navigate a crisis. There are no checks in place to prevent these governments from making matters worse.
In 2023, unable to win his war or admit he’s made a mistake, Putin will make matters worse for Russia, Ukraine, and the entire global economy by continuing the conflict.
As an aging Supreme Leader brings Iran closer to a potentially dangerous political transition, Iran may face even bigger disruptions ahead.
Because there was never a credible exit strategy from Xi’s zero-COVID policy, the virus will probably infect large numbers of Chinese citizens, mutate an untold number of times, produce new variants, and then cross borders. Chinese hospitals, the global economy, and everyone infected with these variants, inside and outside China, will pay the price.
The combination of near-absolute power, demand for near-perfect political control, and the distortion of open information that goes with them will be with us through the new year and beyond.
Putin signs up for MBS' Masterclass
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