Editor’s Introduction

Just days before this editor’s note was written, a Russian missile destroyed most of an apartment building in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. At the moment these words were being typed, the death toll stood at 40, but rescue workers held out no hope of finding any of the building’s missing residents – who numbered 34 – alive (Kramer and Specia 2013). Even in the constant throbbing of carnage that Russia has unleashed in Ukraine, the attack on Dnipro stood out, for its senselessness, its callousness, its utter inhumanity.

It is difficult, in the circumstances in which this essay is being written, to avoid emotion. Perhaps one ought not try. Whatever analytical distance the disciplines of social science may require of us, it requires no less humanity and empathy. Indeed, psychologists increasingly understand emotion and cognition as inherently inseparable (Pessoa 2008), while even negative emotions such as fear and anxiety have been shown actually to improve cognitive processing by increasing the amount of attention and effort people allocate to a problem (Eysenck et al 2007).

Our own emotional responses to events may also usefully compel us to pay more attention to the role that emotions themselves play in our fields of analysis. Thus, research has shown that the “rally ‘round the flag” that boosted Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 was first and foremost an emotional response, generated by a combination of media consumption and socialization (Greene and Robertson 2022). And data collected by the Levada Center show that support for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, begun nearly a year ago, has similarly been a heavily emotion-laden phenomenon, with supporters feeling a combination of pride, hope and happiness, and opponents feeling a combination of anger, shame, depression, fear, shock and anxiety (Greene 2022).

The role of emotion as both cause and effect is the focus of Ekaterina Melnikova, whose article in this issue of Russian Politics & Law explores the public memory of the siege of Leningrad in World War II. She writes:

Turning the past in general and the siege in particular into a moral category that allows people to assert or dispute moral principles emotionalizes the topic of the siege and creates an affective space for its discussion. It has now become impossible to speak about the siege without emotions. Regardless of the author’s intent, any statement becomes cause for strong feelings. In this situation, emotions are the key social mechanisms that separate society into people who feel shame, or pride, or pain, or guilt, or hatred, or other emotions about the siege. Even though all of these feelings naturally mix in everyday life, in relation to the siege they are viewed as mutually exclusive, as producing social hierarchies and structures. Feelings become the main markers of identity. … The totality of the emotionalization and the moralization of the siege discourse turns this very topic into a tool of social stratification that makes it possible to set ever stricter barriers between ‘mine’ and ‘yours,’ not in the past, but in the present.

One does not need to be a scholar of Russia to recognize the phenomenon that Melnikova is describing. Though Melnikova does not use the term, she is describing one impact of what sociologists often refer to as “emotion rules,” sets of expectations about how people should feel in a given context – sad at a funeral, say, or happy at a wedding – and the abrogation of which marks out an individual as transgressive. The work that it takes for individuals to play by these “emotion rules” has been shown to reinforce hierarchies of power in important, and often unobserved, ways (Hochschild 1979).

A case in point – at least from one analytical point of view – is TV Rain, the independent (or oppositional) online Russian broadcaster better known as Dozhd, which has fallen afoul of such emotion rules at least twice. The first instance came in January 2014, when the channel posted on its website a poll with the following question: “Should Leningrad have been surrendered [in World War II] in order to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people?” The poll was deleted mere minutes after being published, but it was up long enough to cause a scandal that evicted Dozhd from Russian cable networks very nearly led to the closure of the channel (RBK 2014).

The second instance came in December 2022, when a journalist discussing the war referred to Russian soldiers as “our troops” and suggested that viewers might be interested in helping to ease their plight. This, too, caused a squall of anger: it was not what was expected of a media outlet that ostensibly opposed the war, and whose journalists had sought – and received – refuge and financial support in the West. Authorities in Latvia, to where the channel had decamped after being chased out of Russia earlier in the year, responded by rescinding the channel’s broadcast license (Meduza 2022a). The parallel was not lost on the channel’s editor-in-chief, Tikhon Dziadko, who compared Latvia’s decision with the Kremlin’s behavior eight years earlier (Meduza 2022b).

While Dozhd was eventually able to get a new license in the Netherlands and will continue its work (Mingazov 2023), its plight evoked relatively little sympathy in the West – and even less in Ukraine – as critics argued both that the channel’s journalists ought to have known better, and that there was little room for tolerating the shortcomings of Russians at a time that Russians were systematically murdering Ukrainians. I raise this not to criticize one side or the other, but simply to illustrate the importance of understanding emotions, both as a practical reality, and as an analytical category.

**

I raise the entirety of the foregoing story in part to explain why the following piece of news may similarly evoke little sympathy: this will be the final issue of Russian Politics & Law. In truth, the journal has been dying a slow death for quite some time, beset by several ailments, including the increasing scarcity of high-quality Russian-language journals from which to source materials; the increasing propensity of the remaining high-quality journals to translate their own material into English; and the challenging economy of translation journals in the best of circumstances. As a result, Taylor & Francis have taken the difficult decision to shutter the journal, together with the rest of the Russian translation journals.

Whatever the reasons for their passing, however, I cannot help but wonder whether Russian Politics & Law and its sister journals will be much missed. As an academic and a public commentator, I frequently encounter people who feel that now is not the time to give a hearing to Russian voices. There will, undoubtedly, be a contingent of academic readers who will see the journals’ disappearance as a loss. Founded in 1962 as Soviet Law & Government, this particular journal has tried to bring to English-speaking readers important Russian texts in the fields of political science, international relations and law – even if those were texts with which very few English-speaking readers would agree. Indeed, while there was a period of its post-Soviet history in which the journal brought to readers genuinely exciting analytical voices that non-Russian audiences would never have encountered, the journal had in recent years reverted largely to its Soviet-era roots, providing a window into discourses with which Western readers would struggle to identify. Nonetheless, the journal’s editors, myself included, have always seen it as our mission not to help readers agree with Russia, but to help them understand how the world looks to influential Russian authors. I hope that the field of Russian studies will find another way of making that happen.

To illustrate why that mission is important, let us turn back the clock eight years, to the time of that first incident with Dozhd. The squall of public anger that Dozhd evoked with its January 2014 poll, and the ways in which that squall was weaponized by the Kremlin and its acolytes, helped instigate a special issue of the Russian-language journal Otechestvennye zapiski later that year, under the heading “Degree of insult: Sources of popular offense”. More broadly, however, the issue’s authors were concerned with understanding their country’s emotional reactions to events in Ukraine – both the negative emotional to the Euromaidan the previous year, and the positive emotional reaction to the annexation of Crimea and the initial invasion of eastern Ukraine. In his contribution, the political anthropologist Sergei Medvedev (2014) wrote:

This unhealthy fixation on a neighboring country bears witness to a deep post-imperial trauma. Ukrainians were too close, too similar, for Russia to simply let them go. For the entire 23 years of independence, Ukrainian independence has been seen as a misunderstanding, a joke – even the word was pronounced in Russia with an ironic subtext. Russians could calmly accept Moldovan, Tajik, even Belarusian independence, but not Ukrainian independence. And we are not talking about imperialists and ‘soil men’, but about broad swathes of the educated class, who saw Ukraine as a banana republic while harboring a deep sense of offense against their unreasonable ‘younger brother’, who so boldly rejected their blood relation.

Medvedev’s essay was, by any standard, a damning indictment not simply of the Kremlin, but of Russian society – including liberal society – as a whole. It was also, not incidentally, an indictment of several of his co-authors’ contributions to the same issue of Otechestvennye zapiski. Thus, the liberal commentator Alexander Baunov (2014) wrote:

In Ukraine many are writing in their columns and on social media: how disgusting your Dozhd’ is, Ekho [Moskvy] is a Kremlin doormat, [Alexei] Venediktov has sold out, Slon is amoral, Snob is fascist, Vedomosti is imperialist, [Alexei] Navalnyi is an occupier, [Mikhail] Khodorkovskii is an aggressor. Evgenii Kiselev, who has been a Ukrainian television anchor for seven years, is reminded that he is from Moscow, and thus unworthy of trust. A Ukrainian commentator on Dozhd conducts his dialogue in such a way as to attack Dozhd’s audience and anchor: you think you’re different, but you’re the same, and maybe even worse. You, Russians pretending to be people, are worse than Dmitrii Kiselev and [Igor] Strelkov-Girkin, and you march not for peace, but for parmesan. One of the most important things we have heard from Ukraine this year is this: for us, there is no difference between propagandists and honest people, between the authorities and you, between people prepared to talk and listen and those unprepared to do so. Those who have heard this are offended. The target has been reached. And what was the target? To impede communication. … We [Ukrainians] don’t need dialogue. We don’t need communication. We only want to hear ourselves.

Or take Konstanin Skorkin’s (2014) essay in the same issue:

From the social networks the language of hate seeps into everyday vocabulary and thence into the speech of public figures. In turn, the rhetoric of politicians and other public figures evokes a response among the masses. Notably, the rhetoric of hate poisons in particular the Russian-speaking space, shared by Russia and Ukraine, causing irreparable damage to intercultural dialogue. People speak the same language not in order to better understand one another, but in order to insult one another with greater sophistication.

All three of these essays, of course, were written with Russian-language audiences in mind. From its founding in 2001 until its closure in 2014 – the issue quoted above was the journal’s last, just as this is the last issue of Russian Politics & Law – Otechestvennye zapiski was an important and influential journal in Russian intellectual life. And yet Medvedev on the one side, and Baunov and Skorkin on the other, talked right past each other. Medvedev called on Russians, including his co-authors, to learn to listen not only to Ukrainians, but to the way that they themselves talked about Ukraine and Ukrainians. Baunov and Skorkin claimed to be listening, and indeed aimed as much or more criticism at their compatriots as at Ukrainians, but they repeated many of the same patterns of disdain that so vexed Medvedev.

What might English-speaking readers have taken from this exchange? For one thing, had we read it in 2014, we might better understand the history of Ukrainians’ grievances against Russian liberals, which have been present since Russia’s initial invasion in 2014, and perhaps earlier. But we might have also noticed that disparity and understood that even many of those Russians most implacably opposed to the Kremlin would have to travel some distance before they became implacably opposed to their country’s brutal invasion of its neighbor. To grasp that lesson – and others like it – we would need to be reading things that were not written for us.

**

The production cycle for this journal is such that the material for the final volume-and-a-bit of Russian Politics & Law was selected well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, and even further before I learned that these would be the final articles we would present to you. I can only apologize, then, that they might seem out of place in the present context. Nonetheless, they do provide a useful illustration of the utility of paying attention to material that is not written for an English-speaking audience, as well as fodder for analysts considering what the future may hold.

Thus, in the final issue (5-6) of Volume 58, we find authors cautiously poking holes in key Kremlin narratives. Anton Kazun and Anastasia Kazun conduct a systematic review of how the Russian media cover other G20 countries, and how other G20 countries cover Russia, and they find, more or less across the board, that Russia seems to matter least where it wants to matter most: both in the United States and, interestingly, in China. They write:

There have been attempts in the Russian news media in the past few years to construct an image of China as a key Asian partner and a potential ally in an adversarial relationship with the United States. The Russian press’s interest in China, however, has not proved to be mutual.

In the same issue, Pavel Gudev, a scholar of international law, presents a no-holds-barred, but very methodical and technical, dismantling of Russia’s legal position in an incident in the Kerch strait, in which the Russian Navy captured two Ukrainian cutters and imprisoned their crew – all without calling into question Russia’s claim on Crimea. He writes:

Regardless of the intrusion by the Ukrainian cutters, the facts that they were stopped, inspected, and detained with the use of weapons, and then that the cutters and a tugboat of the Ukrainian Navy were subsequently escorted to the port of Kerch and Ukrainian sailors were incarcerated, represent a clear breach of the norms of international law—both customary and treaty-based.

In the first issue (1-3) of Volume 59, the sociologist Ekaterina Slobodeniuk delves into Russia’s underclass, which she estimates at about a quarter of the population. This underclass, she writes, is characterized less by poverty, and more by disenfranchisement: three quarters of those in Russia’s lower classes have no post-secondary education, two thirds are unemployed, a quarter don’t have a high-school diploma, one fifth work in the shadow economy, and one tenth are forced to change employment annually. The result, she writes, is a large cohort of Russian citizens who, while not financially impoverished, are catastrophically deprived of “life choices” – a problem that the Kremlin’s social policies are powerless to resolve.

In the same issue, another sociologist, Marina Krasil’nikova, takes aim at the idea of what many Russia observers refer to as the “television-refrigerator dilemma”, which “pits against one another personal everyday experience and information flows that are also a daily background to the existence of every member of society.” This, she writes, is “hardly constructive”:

Half of the adult population thinks the country has been living in a never-ending economic crisis for decades. … We must take into account this ‘crisis-oriented’ mindset and the framework of perception of everyday life as we analyze the subjective assessments that people make of current events and phenomena. … We can assume that it brings about lower demands and expectations, a shorter horizon for forecasting the future not only of society as a whole, but also of one’s personal life, and simpler criteria for assessing the present. A society that is accustomed to living in extraordinarily adverse conditions is easily manipulated and ‘cheap’ to administer.

And in this final issue of the journal, in addition to Melnikova’s above-mentioned article on emotions and the siege of Leningrad, we have two articles that paint vignettes of a future that might have been. In one, Maksim Markin and Polina Chibiskova present an ethnography of residents of Saransk, the capital of the Republic of Mordovia and the smallest and most remote Russian city to host games in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. In a city with little exposure to the outside world, residents approached the World Cup with a great degree of anxiety about the disruption that foreigners would cause, and about the potential for conflict. In actuality, however, they write that, “the mutual interest in each other, the friendly attitude, and the absence of threats reduced the social distance between ‘us’ and ‘them.’”

Meanwhile, Viktor Shnirel’man investigates the history of the demise of the Russian March, once a high-profile right-wing event that seemed to point towards a nationalist future for Russia until it didn’t:

Why did the movement go into decline? First, to the surprise of Russian radicals, the government in the 2010s accepted many of their requests and put them into practice. … Second, having taken on this function, the government did not want to compete with the radicals, and many of their leaders ended up behind bars. … Third, a large number of the most active rightist oppositionists left to fight in the Donbas, and quite a few of them have died there, whereas many of those who managed to survive became permanently immune to war.

We now know, of course, that while the Russian March failed, many of its supporters have marched – with Russia as a whole – to war in Ukraine. Neither that article, nor any of the others published in the history of this journal, are likely to give us a definitive answer as to why and how Russia as a whole went to war. They might, however, prompt us to keep looking.

Samuel A. Greene

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