How can we assess public opinion in Russia during wartime?

There’s a famous quote about Russia attributed to Winston Churchill:

For more than 80 years, that quote has been used — and overused — to indicate that it’s hard to understand Russia, its people and its government.

Ekaterina Schulmann, a Berlin-based political scientist with the Carnegie Center, rejects this notion.

“We Russians tend to see ourselves as very unique,” Schulmann said. “ But, we are a very banal personalized autocracy, the likes of which are spread over the face of the earth.”

Schulmann says a “personalized autocracy” is a very primitive form of government, where a single leader holds all the power.

“Ineffective, incompetent, unworthy governance. The governance that is not too clever or effective, manifestly corrupt, and invests all its resources to stay in power,” she said. “There’s nothing more ordinary than that.”

For the first time since the early stages of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin signaled on Monday that he’s open to direct peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Putin said he hopes Kyiv is also open to peace talks, though many political scientists and researchers question his seriousness.

It’s hard to know what exactly Russians think about Putin’s comments, or even about the war in Ukraine. One of the hallmarks of this kind of autocratic government is making it harder to gauge public opinion, especially with limited access to data that’s not generated by the government.

“We can still study Russia. Yes, we can,” according to Maria Lipman, a visiting researcher at George Washington University and an expert Russia analyst. “It is not impossible, but of course, there is no question that it has become a much more challenging task.”

Lipman said there’s been a debate around the study of public opinion in Russia, especially since the invasion, now that public dissent against Russia’s war can lead to criminal charges.

“The obvious objection — those who call such studies in question — say that, how do you expect a person give a sincere answer to the question of, do you support the Russian special military operation, of course the way the war is referred to in Russia, and how do you expect people to tell you the truth,” she said.

That concern is called “preference falsification,” and it’s a common problem that sociologists confront: when people publicly misrepresent what they think privately.

However, Lipman said dismissing all survey results representing Russian public opinion would be a mistake.

Margarita Zavadskaya, a senior researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, agrees.

“The problem now is that we’re basically forced to sort of develop alternative workarounds using digital methodologies to compensate for the lack of this firsthand experience,” Zavadskaya said.

For researchers outside Russia, much more work is done online than through in-person surveys and focus groups. Zavadskaya said that analysis becomes even more important when polling data from authoritarian countries.

“Since this data [is] generated from a non-democratic context, it has to be taken into account when one interprets the results,” she explained. “Interpretation is the key. So, how do we approach the very nature of political support in this country?”

For example, in a poll conducted last month by the Levada Center, a nongovernmental research organization in Russia, 79% of respondents said they “supported the actions of Russian military forces in Ukraine.”

At the same time, nearly 60% of respondents supported peace negotiations.

Ekaterina Schulmann said these results are significant, but certain aspects can’t be taken at face value.

“There is no such thing as support in a non-free society,” she said. “To support something, you have to be able to refuse something, and if you don’t have that option, your support means nothing.”

Schulmann said it’s still possible to glean a lot of information from studies that tell us about what she calls “demonstrative loyalty:” loyalty that shows what’s socially acceptable, but can fall apart very quickly.

“The degree [of] loyalty can be measured, and it is important because power stays in power, as long as people believe it is power. We have seen time and again in many autocracies how they collapse overnight because suddenly people understand that the power has weakened,” she said.

Pinpointing that exact moment is beyond what political scientists can do, according to Schulmann, but studying the Russian government, and its people — even from outside the country — is neither a riddle, nor a mystery nor an enigma.