Russians Today More Satisfied by Their Lot Primarily Because Kremlin has Given Them Way to Channel Internal Aggression, Gudkov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 26 – Surveys show that over the past few years, Russians have become more satisfied with their lot, the result, Lev Gudkov argues, primarily of the Kremlin’s skill in giving them a way to channel their internal aggression by attacking minorities at home and Ukraine abroad and thus allowing them to recover the sense that Russia is a great power.

            The Levada Center pollster says that as a result, the dominant attitude among Russians has changed from one that reflected the view that “it is difficult to life but it is possible to hold on” between 1994 and 2019 to “everything isn’t so bad; it is possible to live” (urbietorbi.online/contents/9 reposted at levada.ru/2025/11/26/paradoksy-massovoj-udovletvorennosti-mneniya-i-nastroeniya/).

            As that more positive assessment has become dominant, the formerly dominant one of despair has declined precipitously. In 1998-1999, 61 percent of Russians said that it was not possible to continue to live as they were doing. Today, Gudkov argues, the share of Russians who feel that way is down to five percent.

            He points to five changes which explain this: a decline in poverty, price increases for raw materials, the rejection of the heightened expectations many had in the 1990s for improvement overnight and “the stabilization of live under conditions of a new and authoritarian regime” which has allowed Russians to express their anger and feel themselves to be a great power.

            According to Gudkov, “the collapse of the basic system-forming institutions of Soviet totalitarianism … did not affect other crucial institutions of this system, including the political police, the army, the courts and education and thus did not lead to the liberalization of mass consciousness.”

            As a result, most Russians have retained “an authoritarian structure of consciousness,” with people expecting although not demanding from the state “primarily an improvement in their standard of living, protection from arbitrary actions by the bottom of the bureaucracy and criminals, but not seek freedom and political rights.”

            Over the last decade, he continues, “the return to great power rhetoric, to the struggle with ‘color revolutions’ and against ‘a fifth column,’ confrontation with the West after the Baltic republics joined the EU and NATO were thus greeted by ‘society’ with understanding, relief and approval.”

            This popular response helps to explain the return of authoritarianism. It is not just about the actions of Putin and his regime but about the response of the still authoritarian Russian people to what he is doing and approval of both a more aggressive foreign policy abroad as in Ukraine and a more repressive one at home against migrants and other minorities.