The interest in opinion polls especially for Russia in US media reporting seems to me like a deep failure, a clear case where reporters with nothing useful to say are filling airtime (column inches or acre-feet, whatever the print equivalent is)
Especially in thinking about societies that differ in pretty fundamental ways from ours, longer context pieces or informed analysis are so much better than soundbites, but of course there's no recipe how to find au=dience-tolerable informed raconteurs.
In conclusion, rural americans should just read the New Yorker and the small lefty web magazine where this great interview appears. Oh and Tooze of course.
Gessen is pessimistic about tactical nukes.
"Totalitarian societies depend on horizontal enforcement of behaviors"
It's certainly interesting how completely the fact that Amir Locke's execution was retaliation for the prosecution of Kim Potter has been eliminated as a possible topic of discussion, or even opinion. I don't think totalitarian societies necessarily have as much of an advantage at suppressing opinion as this commentator believes.
The suggestion of a breakup of Russia at the end is interesting. I remember Ryszard Kapucinski suggesting something similar in "Imperium" though I think even he stopped short of suggesting that Moscow and St Petersburg might end up in different countries.
I just can't see an outcome in which Russia isn't ruled by a revanchist autocrat. Whoever ends up in charge after Putin's gone will want to rearm and re-establish the empire, because that is what Russians want to happen! It's what they wanted in 1991 (see "Imperium" again) and it's what they still want. The war in Ukraine is actually popular.
I am more optimistic about tactical nuclear weapons - I can't see Putin launching one at Poland, because then even if NATO doesn't act he's at war with Poland and Ukraine, and he's having enough trouble with just Ukraine.
Yeah, the prediction of a breakup into city-states feels nifty to someone who thinks about history because it's a grand swing of the pendulum in the sort of unexpected direction history is known to take, but big metros and hinterlands kind of need each other and would do worse separate. (Unless she means Petersburg and Moscow will be independent and the rest of Russia will be dominated by Europe or China.)
because that is what Russians want to happen
There are a lot of obvious caveats about polling information from Russia, but "what Russians want to happen" really is a thing, and (contra lw) polls tell us something about that.
Gessen is pessimistic about tactical nukes.
My hope and belief is that Putin is pessimistic about tactical nukes.
4: don't get me wrong, I can definitely see bits of Russia breaking off. There's loads of tiny little republics in the Caucasus that might start feeling separatist and I have a vague memory from the 1990s of autonomous stirrings in the Khabarovsk Krai, take that grin off your face at the back there. But core European Russia is just so closely interlinked, economically and culturally. What the heck does the Independent Republic of Bryansk even do?
It's hard to work out Gessen's intent here, but I think she shares the misreading that she attributes to the Russians. She doesn't seem to have a proposal for how NATO could be more clear without a declaration of war.
We keep hearing on this side of the Atlantic that we don't want to be drawn into a shooting war with Russia. It's being heard loud and clear there, too, and it's being interpreted as basically shifting the goalpost further and further away from the Russian border.
NATO is acting clearly and consistently, and what NATO is saying is: NATO treats alliance members differently from non-members. It may all end badly for everybody, but all NATO can do is be clear about where the lines are.
5.1: Russians support the war (60% or so) and approve of Putin's leadership (70%)
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2022/03/17/what-do-ordinary-russians-really-think-about-the-war-in-ukraine/
Now, it's very likely that this is because consent has been manufactured, through the kind of technique Gessen is talking about, control of the media and so on. But that's missing the point. It's been manufactured and now it exists. If you prove that the Great Pyramid was in fact built by eccentric Frenchmen in the late 18th century, you may well be correct, but the Pyramid will still be there. And the only way that's going to change is that someone takes power who decides to dismantle that apparatus of consent-manufacturing.
Now, given Russia, as it is, as it has been for the last 300 years; how likely do you think that is?
What if someone starting shouting "Bread, land, peace" while Russia was losing a war and facing a ruined economy?
We did a book group about this and it didn't go well from an anti imperialist point of view.
It worked out very poorly for almost everyone involved, especially the old tsar.
RE: manufacture and dismantlement of consent, see the recent study about Fox watchers switching to CNN for a month. The good news is that significant deprogramming did happen; the bad news is that you still had 46% of the CNN watchers believing Biden is a pedophile or whatever.
8 isn't exactly responsive to Gessen, who's saying that "public opinion" in a totalitarian state is a category error, but it's nevertheless the case that Russians as a group have the mindset and world view that the state has told them to--they won't suddenly get exposed to the liberal world order and develop thoughtful opinions. The amount of Soviet nostalgia that has always been present post-'91 is all the evidence you need (the Russian economy got fucked up by Washington Consensus types, but there was always a plurality pining for the days of Brezhnev).
One other factor I'd mention is that Putin has layered additional forms of propaganda atop the baseline nostalgia for being a superpower. Even 40-yo Russians don't really have firsthand nostalgia for the USSR, but they do believe that decadent Westerners, with their uppity nonwhites and gay pride parades, are despicable. I mean, this is what Rupert Murdoch does as well, but the populace over there is starting from a much more authoritarian mindset, more broadly held.
FWIW, it appears that Masha Gessen uses they/them pronouns.
see the recent study about Fox watchers switching to CNN for a month. The good news is that significant deprogramming did happen; the bad news is that you still had 46% of the CNN watchers believing Biden is a pedophile or whatever.
Oh god, I missed this.
13: That makes me feel bad. Now I have to vote for Trump.
6: The wildcard here is that there's huge swathes of Russia that would in a lot of ways make more sense in China, see this image of the border. Of course since Russia has nukes that's not going to happen, but if this were the 18th century we'd be headed for a war where China takes over most of Siberia.
16: look at the map and imagine for a moment just how hellish the logistics of that campaign would be. And the PLA are even less experienced than the Russians, and every bit as corrupt.
Ooh, they worked on The Americans, so now I have no choice but to stan.
Presumably, in a world without nukes, was portions of the steppe would be ruled by Jeep-mounted nomads. And river-based nomads ruling where there are enough trees to stop a vehicle.
Imperial Japan really lusted after the resources of Siberia. Or at least the Army did.
20: sort of proves my point. Imperial Japan was amazingly shit at logistics.
14: https://twitter.com/dbroockman/status/1510607409294692352?s=20&t=M3Fid7huVM_zImi4wrTnQg
Huh. Has this site always auto-linked pasted URLs?
Huh. I think that is new. I've always done the thing with the brackets and 'ref' that so no one could see where the link was going unless they hovered first.
I think it's been adding hyperlinks for a while. When I'm commenting from my phone, I'll just paste the URL, and that has worked for a while.
16: Russian/Chinese conflict over the Amur was a whole big thing in the nineteenth century. The line went back and forth several times.
Come for the Homeric epithets, stay for the short version of Gessen's views of Putin:
(Brought to you by autolinking instead of handcrafted http.)
I did reduce my attention a bit when I got to this:
"That's on the table. If it's on the table, as Chekhov teaches us, it is going to strike sooner or later."
I really do doubt that the Russian regime wants an uncontrollable war: most signs are that they want the opposite; something clearly defined; a 'special operation'. To outsiders looking in, Ukraine looks desperate and unwinnable, but that surely wasn't the Russian position. They thought they'd sweep in and take over easily, and if you think that, you're not thinking that you're in an existential situation, or needing to take a last ditch action. Also, we are eight years in from the start of Russian aggression in Ukraine. They are capable of taking their time. I think the central scenario is not escalation but a bad faith ceasefire followed by attempts to re-arm with the intent of 'doing it properly' next time.
Thinking more, a better question might be: is Russia morally capable of using WMD, and the answer is pretty much yes. If you are capable of bombing a crowded railway station, you are capable of this. What they seem to want, however, is consequence-free use of WMD - something small scale that does not invite a response - hence the attention they seem to give to 'tactical' nukes. So I'd guess there is siginificant value in NATO et al. being very explicit about what is or is not a red line. And again, it points to a desire for control (in my mind, anyway).
29. Not sure about patience-- Russia is suffering both a definite brain drain and currently exports weapons to China, that second one is unlikely to last. Possibly they are thinking long-term, it's a point to consider.
30 seems right.
29.last seems pretty likely to me. The comment I saw the other day, about plenty of transnationals keeping their heads down for PR reasons but eager to dive back into Russia, makes me think that, once Putin finishes bashing his head against the wall, he'll do some sort of ceasefire, confident that the sanction regime won't last once the bombs stop falling.
That said, I don't tyihnk next time will go any better for Russia. Not because they're incapable of fixing the problems with this invasion--IMO the corruption is too deep for them to be a top notch military, but they can solve some of what went wrong--but because Ukraine, already a superior military force on a pound for pound basis, is only going to get stronger.
Probably they'll just go beat up on countries in the Caucuses for a while instead.
Ooh, they worked on The Americans, so now I have no choice but to stan.
Yeah I think they were a script consultant on Soviet-era-sounding Russian or something. I'm kind of a stan already. The Pussy Riot book was great, and the New Yorker piece about sex panics. They are wildly intelligent but come off as down to earth in interviews.
(I have a complicated thing I feel like I should cop to and deal with in this probably abandoned thread, where I feel a pang because as a lesbian, Gessen was someone I had a built in "on my team" place for in my heart/brain and as a gender neutral person the esprit de corp is less automatic because I think genderqueer people often don't feel it in my direction, so I don't assume. The support is obviously there, from me, but in my coming out days we used the term "family" and I don't know if that's the feeling now.)