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‘Russia ends nowhere,’ they say Sociologist Grigory Yudin discusses a year of
war and what comes next
9:07 pm, February 24, 2023 · Source: Meduza
Interview by Margarita Liutova. Abridged translation by Emily Laskin.

Sociologist Grigory Yudin was one of just a few Russian experts who believed in February
2022 that a military clash between Russia and Ukraine was inevitable. In an article published
just two days before the invasion, Yudin predicted that a major war loomed in the near future,
that Russians would follow the Kremlin in blaming the West, and that sanctions would do
nothing to stop Putin — all of which came true. In February 2023, Meduza special
correspondent Margarita Liutova spoke to Yudin about why Putin needs a “forever war,” and
what might ensure the emergence of a broad anti-war movement in Russia.

There’s a widespread view about contemporary Russian politics that says war
is an endless process for Putin, and Putin himself seemed to confirm the idea
in his recent Federal Assembly address: He said nothing about how Russia
will win and what will happen after that. Do you think that Putin’s plan is
really eternal war?

Yes, of course, the war is now forever. It has no goals that can be achieved and lead to
its end. It continues simply because [in Putin’s imagination], they are enemies and they
want to kill us, and we want to kill them. For Putin, it’s an existential clash with an
enemy set on destroying him. 

There should be no illusions: while Putin is in the Kremlin, the war will not end. It will
only expand. The size of the Russian army is increasing rapidly, the economy is
reorienting toward guns, and education is turning into a propaganda tool and war
preparation. They’re preparing the country for a long and difficult war.

And then it’s obviously impossible for Putin to win?

It’s absolutely impossible. No one has set any goal [for the war] or offered any
definition of victory.

So, can we consider the point to be the preservation of Vladimir Putin’s

authority?

They’re almost the same thing. He thinks of his rule as constant war. Putin and the
people who surround him told us long ago that there’s a war against us. Some preferred
not to mark their words, but they seriously think that they’ve been at war for a long
time. It’s just that now this war has entered such an aggressive phase, and there’s
obviously no exit. War itself is normal, in their worldview. Stop thinking that peace is
the natural state, and you’ll see the situation through their eyes. As the governor of
Khanty-Mansi [Natalya Komarova] said, “War is a friend.”

On February 22, 2022, you published an article on openDemocracy, in which

you described an upcoming major war and Putin’s dismissive attitude toward
the sanctions that Western countries imposed in response. In the second half
of the article, you argued that “the war with Ukraine will be the most
senseless of all the wars in our history.” Do you think Russian society has
started to realize this over the past year?

No, in my view, it hasn’t. It was clear to many, many people from the very beginning,
but since then that category has barely grown. In Russia today, you find this powerful
feeling, and it’s one of those rare occasions when Vladimir Putin connects with a
significant part of society. It’s far from everyone who shares his wild theories, but he
does connect with people. Even more importantly, he produces this emotion himself.
And that emotion is resentment — monstrous, endless resentment. Nothing can mollify
this resentment. It’s impossible to imagine what could compensate for it. It doesn’t
allow people to think about establishing any kind of productive relationships with
other countries.

You know, it’s like a young child who gets deeply offended and then hurts those around
him. The harm grows greater and greater, and at some point, he seriously begins
destroying others’ lives, as well as his own. But the child isn’t thinking about that; he
isn’t thinking that he somehow needs to build relationships.

I think that the feeling of resentment, which has been overflowing lately in Russia, is
supported at a very high level, and we haven’t yet reached the point where someone
might realize that we [Russians] have normal, legitimate interests, and we need to reach
them by building relationships with other countries in the right way.

There’s a good saying in Russia: “Water is borne on the shoulders of the offended,”
[meaning, roughly, that a grudge is a heavy burden]. At some point, we’ll understand
that this resentment works against us, that we’re harming ourselves because of it. But
at the moment, too many of us want to be offended.

MORE ON THE RESENTMENT THAT JUSTIFIES THE WAR

 Feeling around for something human  Why do Russians support the war
against Ukraine? Shura Burtin investigates.
10 months ago

Whom do Vladimir Putin and Russian society resent? The whole world? The
West? The U.S.?

[They resent] a world order that seems unfair, and, accordingly, whoever takes
responsibility for being “superior” in this world order, meaning the United States of
America. 

I always remember something Putin said in mid-2021. He said, completely

unprovoked, that there’s no happiness in life. It’s a strong statement for a political
leader, who of course doesn’t have to bring people into heaven but should in theory
make their lives better. 

But it’s as if he says: “There’s no happiness in life. The world is a bad, unjust, difficult
place, where the only way to exist is to struggle constantly, to fight, and, at the outer
limit, kill.” 

Resentment of the outside world is deeply rooted in Russia, and it gets projected onto
the U.S., which seems responsible for the world. At some point, the United States
really did take responsibility for the world — not completely successfully. And we see
that the resentment I’m talking about is definitely not only in Russia (where it of course
exists in a catastrophic, horrible form).

A significant part of the world has well-founded complaints about the current world
order, and against the U.S., which took responsibility, became a hegemon, and has
benefited from the world order in many ways. We see that parts of the world that are
engulfed by this resentment are more understanding toward Vladimir Putin. 

I wouldn’t say that this understanding becomes support, simply because Putin offers
nothing [to the world]. Putin wants to do the same things for which he criticizes the
United States. So, supporting him is difficult, but many want to join in the resentment.

Is resentment rooted in Russian society from before Putin, in the nineties? Or

has it been cultivated under Putin?

There are some grounds for resentment [in Russian society]. It’s related to the
instructive role that the U.S. and some parts of Western Europe took on. Ideologically,
[that role] was framed in terms of modernization theory, which said that there are
developed countries and developing countries, and the developed countries — kindly
and supportively — will teach the developing ones: “Guys, you should be arranged like
so.” Generally speaking, no one likes to be lectured. Especially a big country that has
its own imperial past.

In fact, the situation that developed in the 1990s was much more complicated. [After
the collapse of the USSR,] Russia was invited to join a whole host of key international
clubs, and Russia influenced decisions on key global questions. But that instructive
tone [in relation to Russia] was there. It was the result of a profound ideological
mistake: In the conditions of the socialist project’s collapse, it seemed [to many] that
there was only one correct path, the famous “end of history.” So, there were
preconditions for resentment, but there were also preconditions for other emotions.

There were [also] many competing narratives [about the meaning of the USSR’s
collapse for its citizens]. One held that it was a people’s revolution, a glorious moment
in Russian history and the history of other nations, because they managed to take
control of a hateful, tyrannical regime. That conception, of course, doesn’t lead to
resentment.

But Putin chose resentment. In part, probably, because of his own personal qualities.
And resentment is contagious. It’s a convenient emotion: you always feel, first of all, in
the right, and second, you feel undeservedly trampled on.

RESENTMENT AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

‘We can do it again’ The invention and reinvention of an ‘antifascist-fascist’ slogan

You’ve said more than once that Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. What exactly do
you anticipate? Moldova, the Baltic states, a self-destructive war with the
U.S.?

His worldview sees no borders. This formula has become a practically official line:
Russia ends nowhere. This is the standard definition of an empire because an empire
recognizes no borders. 

I’ll remind everyone of [Putin’s] ultimatum [to the U.S. and NATO] in December of
2021 — it’s crystal clear, it says in plain text that all of Eastern Europe is Vladimir
Putin’s sphere of influence. How that will be worked out, whether it means a formal
loss of sovereignty or not, what difference does it make? And this zone without a doubt
includes East Germany, just because Putin has personal memories of it. It’s really hard
for me to imagine that he truly thinks of that territory as not his. Putin definitely
intends to restore the Warsaw Pact zone [the former Eastern Bloc countries under
Soviet influence].

EXPANDING RUSSIA’S BORDERS

 Territorial claims Putin has recognized the breakaway ‘republics’ in
eastern Ukraine. But what does Moscow consider their ‘borders’?
a year ago

I often hear, “It’s irrational. It’s senseless. There’s no possibility of this happening!” Not
long ago, people said exactly the same thing about Ukraine. They said the same thing
even more recently about Moldova, and now we’re hearing that the leadership of
Moldova, Ukraine, and the U.S. believe that Moldova is in grave danger. We’ve already
seen that Moldova was figured into the plans of the current military operation; it just
hasn’t gotten there yet.

Russia’s general strategy is something like this: let’s bite off a piece, then that piece will
be recognized as legitimate, and in the next phase, on the basis of that recognition, we
can take something else.

[In this strategy’s logic,] we’ll bite off, roughly, eastern Ukraine, with the help of some
kind of truce. Soon, we’ll start to hear voices from Europe, saying, “Well, it was their
land, after all. Everyone agreed, it’s fine.” Well, wait a minute. If it’s “their” land —
Russian land — because people there speak Russian, then what about eastern Estonia?
You might say, “But Estonia is in NATO!” But will NATO fight for Estonia? Putin is
absolutely sure that if the durability of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty [the article
ensuring collective defense] is tested at the right moment, NATO will fall apart.

To be clear, I don’t see what I’m talking about as the likeliest possibility. I’m describing
Putin’s strategy, but Putin doesn’t rule the world. He’ll get as much as he’s allowed to
get. But a scenario like that isn’t impossible to imagine. 

It’s easy to imagine that Putin and his team held such views on, say, February
24, 2022. But a year has passed, and the West has not collapsed and in fact is
providing Ukraine with appreciable support. Could this year’s events,
including the results of the Russian military campaign, have influenced the
perceptions you just described?

They could, and they definitely did. The whole year showed [Putin] that, since the West
has seized onto Ukraine, it clearly indicates that it’s a key region and [the West] was
planning an attack on him precisely from there. Apart from that, [in Putin’s view] it’s
good that this year’s problems came to light before the real war, which Russian
leadership considers inevitable. It would be much worse [according to their logic] to
take such an army into a [future] big war. So, everything that happens strengthens
Putin, in his own eyes.
They’ve been preparing this war for many years. It would be strange if they went into it
with only one plan. [Putin’s logic is like this:] “Yeah, things didn’t all work out according
to the best scenario — no problem, we’ll press on. We’re prepared to shed as much
blood as necessary on this, and they’re not.”

I’m not saying that such tactics will be successful. In fact, I think that Putin’s logic
dooms him to defeat, and that he subconsciously wants to lose. The question is how
many people will die before that happens. But if we want to make predictions, we have
to understand the logic that [people in power in Russia] are operating under.

Do you think anything could make Putin doubt his own perceptions about the
world?

No. Nothing. 

When we discussed the topic of this conversation before the interview, you
commented on the current state of Russian society, its atomization and
blocked collective action, and you noted that a conversation like this can
actually strengthen the feeling of learned helplessness, which you didn’t want
to do. Are there ways to talk to society that don’t feed this sense of
helplessness?

If the main emotion in Russia is resentment, then the main affect, on which everything
is built now, is fear. It’s existential fear — fear of a specific person’s wrath, or fear of war,
or an abstract fear of chaos. 

Fear is beaten out by hope. That’s the opposite affect. People need to be given hope. In
this sense, the absolutely understandable, well-founded accusations [against the people
of Russia] are politically shortsighted. Again: they’re understandable, well-founded,
and legitimate, but they’re politically shortsighted. 

The question is how to give people hope in this situation. Hope is related to a
demonstration that everything can be different, that Russia can be organized
differently. The truth is that, until [Russians] realize they’re at a dead end, there’s not
much motivation to listen to such things, because they’re scary. It’s connected to a
challenge to the status quo. And that’s threatening enough to convince people not to
get involved.

In Russia, any normative discourse has been snuffed out. It’s been difficult for a very
long time to ask how society should be organized, how to do it fairly, honestly, and well.
A few years ago, respondents [to a sociological survey I ran] responded, “In Russia?
There’s no way.” This is the suppression of normative discourse, but there will be a
demand for it, inevitably, when people realize they’re at a dead end. In this situation,
it’s important that people have hope.
 DISSATISFACTION, IF NOT DISSENT, IN RUSSIA

Make peace, not war The Kremlin’s internal polling shows that more than
half of Russians now favor negotiations with Ukraine, while only a quarter
want to continue the invasion
3 months ago

You’ve presented the discourse that is most often heard regarding Russian
culture right now: that it’s imperial, that it birthed and nurtured a slave
mentality…

I think that Russian culture has a large imperial element, and the time has come to deal
with it. The collapse of an empire is a good moment to do that. Will it extinguish
Russian culture? No. It might not even extinguish the works of any given author. Can
you find imperial ideas in a given author’s work? You can, and you must. Why the need
either to reject completely or accept completely? You’re not marrying anybody and
pledging a vow of unconditional love.

Culture develops through reworking itself, including through criticizing itself. But the
criticism can’t be a complete rejection. 

Culture itself provides the positions from which to criticize it. There’s nothing
demeaning in this; there’s no problem in seeing [imperial ideas] in Russian culture,
isolating it, and examining how it’s related to other elements. 
Can you give an example of a recipe for wisdom and hope from within
Russian culture?

Well, the classic critic of imperialism in the history of political thought is Vladimir
Lenin. It was Lenin who spoke about “Great Russian chauvinism” in relation to
Ukraine, and he attacked imperialism in other countries. Today, in universities all over
the world, the study of imperialism begins with Lenin.

Russia also gave global political thought the ability to think beyond the state: Mikhail
Bakunin, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, and in some regards also Lenin. The list goes
on. Russia has not given rise to one significant statist or centralist thinker. All ideas
about centralization in Russia are imported. Ideas about freedom, mutual aid, and
dignity run in the other direction. 

What do you think about the divide between those who have left Russia and
those who have stayed?

It seems to me that all of us, and our country, are in trouble. It would be good if
everyone who’s now outside of Russia thought about how to help those who are in
Russia. And if everyone in Russia thought about how to help those who are suffering
far away. We’ll get through it, but we can only get through it together. Only together.

Interview by Margarita Liutova

Abridged translation by Emily Laskin

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