Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 21 – Social science
research teaches that whenever a population experiences a shock, particularly
one with natural origins, it tends to rally round the leader at least in the short
term, Margarita Zavadskaya and Boris Sokolov say; but in the case of the
pandemic and Vladimir Putin, this did not happen.
Instead, the two Moscow analysts argue,
a new Public Opinion Poll shows that in response to the pandemic, Russians
focused on problems in their lives that they blamed on Putin’s policies and
therefore behaved in ways very different from the ones they might have been
expected to (ridl.io/ru/covid-19-i-politicheskie-nastroenija-rossijan/).
Many Russians blamed shortcomings of
the country’s medical infrastructure on Putin’s optimization campaign. Others
felt that his response to the crisis was inadequate because he so obviously
tried to shift responsibility to others. And still others were upset by his
failure to adequately inform the population about what has been going on.
As a result, the pandemic gave them
new reasons for turning away from Putin rather than turning toward him, Zavadskaya
and Sokolov say. But yet another reason for the leader’s low standing now is
that the pandemic has affected not only people’s health but their economic
prospects, adding to their fears and anger.
Many Russians, the survey suggests,
are even more worried about their economic prospects than their health; and in the
view of many of them, Putin has not addressed their concerns adequately,
failing to provide the support to them that the governments of other countries
have to their populations.
But even those Russians given to
conspiracy thinking now have reasons to turn away from Putin because they view
what the government has done as evidence that it believes in it. As a result, “the
greatest reputation losses” Putin has suffered are precisely “among the conservative
stratum of the population, where supporters of various conspiracy theories are
quite high.”
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