Alexey Navalny – Do Russians want wars?

The question of whether the Russians support the criminal war that Putin unleashed out of the blue against Ukraine is of great political importance. It will largely determine Russia’s place in the history of the 21st century. It’s one thing if Putin killed civilians in Ukraine and destroyed infrastructure with the full support and approval of Russian citizens – even pro-government sociological centers are trying to convince us of this, and quite another if his bloody adventure is not based on the support of society. The answer to this question is also important from a practical point of view: is it worth trying to organize a protest against the war? Is it possible to hope that pressure on Putin from within Russia will be able to force him to curtail his aggression?

But how to measure it? The standard tool of the FBK sociological service is classic telephone polls based on a representative sample. This is a fairly reliable tool for researching public opinion (it has never let us down, say, during election campaigns), but it takes time. The survey lasts a week – in wartime, too much changes in a week. And, besides, the readiness of people to talk on the phone, especially to speak sincerely, is constantly decreasing in Russia, and even during the war, when the authorities scare with criminal terms for a “wrong” opinion – and even more so.

So we decided on a new approach for us: we conducted a series of four very short and fast Internet surveys. Each of these surveys involved 700 Internet users from Moscow; The sample was quota by sex and age. The data obtained, as it seems to us, are of great interest. See for yourself:

We see here a rapid change in the assessment of Russia’s role in the war. The proportion of those who consider Russia an aggressor has almost doubled; the proportion of those who consider Russia a “peacemaker” has halved.

Although many respondents still tend to blame the “West” for the war, the share of those who blame Ukraine has halved, while the share of those who blame Russia has increased from 14 to 36 percentage points, i.e. by 2.5 times.

During the first week of the war, the number of those who believe that the Russian economy is in for a catastrophe has also grown significantly. And those who believed that there would be no consequences were few on the first day of the war, and a week later there were even three times less.

To analyze these data, it is necessary to make a serious methodological explanation. As we have already explained, this is not a survey of all Russians – it is a survey of only Muscovites, only on the Internet, and only those who themselves agreed to take it by clicking on the appropriate questionnaire. We do not know and cannot even reasonably guess how these figures compare with the general population of all Russians; in peacetime, we would not do such a survey, because its results do not have much practical meaning. But by repeating the survey four times in a short time using the same method, we got a unique opportunity to look at the dynamics of public sentiment. In other words: if the first slide shows that the proportion of our survey participants who (rightly) consider Russia an aggressor has doubled, from 29% to 53%, this does not give us the right to say that the majority of Russians now think so. However, this is a very noticeable dynamic, and we have the right to believe that similar changes are taking place in other sectors of society. (Here you can also notice that in Moscow the share of Internet penetration is much higher than 80%, so that the Internet poll of Muscovites differs little from the telephone poll of Muscovites; and that in the elections to the State Duma, the ratings of parties in Moscow and the country as a whole differed much less than in previous years).

Therefore, having made all the necessary reservations about the insufficient accuracy of our research methods, we can still draw important conclusions.

1. Never in the entire period of work of the FBK sociological service have we seen such dynamics of public opinion. Within a few days of the war, the mood of the Russians underwent a dramatic change.

2. The vector of these changes looks absolutely unambiguous: people begin to quickly realize who is to blame for the unleashed war, why it is being waged and how it will end.

3. Of course, the Kremlin also cannot but see this dynamic; hence the nervousness and the desperate desire to end the war as quickly as possible.

4. Anti-war sentiments in society will only grow, the anti-war protest cannot be curtailed.

5. People are ready to change their position. But we must talk to them and convey the truth about the war.

Well, here is the answer to the question posed in the title of the post: no, they don’t want to. Even among those who are besotted with propaganda, who believe in nonsense about “Nazis and drug addicts”; even among those who support Putin, the majority do not have any bloody fangs, the majority are for negotiations, for peace, for an end to the fratricidal war.