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Russia’s last independent pollster tells me how Putin does it
How does Vladimir Putin manage to keep this up? For all the destruction he’s visited on Ukraine, his invasion has also inflicted so much damage on Russia.
There are the financial and economic costs. There’s the diplomatic isolation. There’s the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians who’d rather bet on a future abroad than support Putin’s war for the past at home.
But above all, there are the dead. The Kremlin doesn’t announce casualty figures, but a running tally by the BBC and the independent Russian outlet Mediazona estimates that at least 45,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine.
To put that in perspective, it’s triple the number of Soviets killed in the USSR’s decade-long invasion of Afghanistan, often described as the “Kremlin’s Vietnam.”
In fact, it surpasses the number of Soviet and Russian troops killed in the entire period between 1945 and 2022, a period that also includes the Kremlin’s hamfisted and initially disastrous bid to suppress Chechen separatists and jihadists in the 1990s. To put it in American terms, those 45,000 dead would amount to 100,000 flag-draped caskets in the United States.
And yet, there’s hardly been a peep from Russian society.
To find out why, I sent a note to Lev Gudkov in Moscow. Gudkov is the academic director of the Levada Center, Russia’s last remaining independent pollster. I last saw him in person in 2018, at his messy office on Nikolskaya Street – a ritzy pedestrian boulevard – that’s just a five-minute walk from the Kremlin, which has long considered Levada a “foreign agent.”
At 77, Lev has the weary, knowing demeanor of a man who has spent his life asking questions in a society that is increasingly wary of answering them.
The Kremlin has pressured Levada over the years but always seemed to allow it to continue its work. Even autocrats, after all, need to know what their people are comfortable saying to strangers.
“The people don’t know how many are dead and wounded,” he told me. More than 60% of Russians get their news primarily from state-controlled TV, which will shout at you about neo-Nazis in Kyiv, perverts who run Europe, or cats thrown from Russian trains – but will not tell you about the bodybags coming home from Ukraine.
People who do speak out about casualties are arrested, harassed or, on occasion, driven to suicide, which is what happened this week to a hawkish military blogger who suggested Russia had lost 16,000 troops in its recent campaign for a single Ukrainian town.
Another problem, to adapt a Vietnam-era protest line, is that the Russians dying in Ukraine “ain’t no Gazprom executive’s son.”
“The funerals are held by individual families,” says Gudkov, “and its overwhelmingly conscripts from marginalized social groups who don’t have the power to mobilize.”
A look at the casualty map bears this out. Young men in remote and relatively poor Russian provinces like Tuva or Buryatia, for example, are up to 45 times as likely to die as their counterparts in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
All of this makes perfect sense. Russians don’t know about the casualties, face huge consequences for trying to find out, and are victim to the propaganda mill that keeps support for Putin above 80% and approval of his war not far behind.
But blaming this sort of collective delusion simply on a Very Bad Autocrat™ is too easy. The reality is that it can happen in democracies too, and it does.
On the eve of the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, I looked at a poll that showed 72% of the population approving of their government’s decision to launch a disastrous, unprovoked war.
But it wasn’t from Russia. It was from the US, and it was taken in 2003 to gauge popular support for the invasion of Iraq.
Say what you will about the failure of mainstream media to question the WMD narrative – and there is lots to say – but the US was, and is, a pluralistic paradise compared to today’s Russia.
But even so, it took four whole years of debacle in Iraq for a majority of Americans to finally decide that the invasion was a “bad decision.”
The emergence of social media in the years since has hardly helped. Nearly 20% of Americans today say pop star Taylor Swift was engaged in a Deep State psyop to sway the next election, while a third of Americans still think the last one was “stolen.” And as many as half of Hillary Clinton’s voters once believed Trump’s victory was the result of Russian tampering with vote tallies. None of the above is true.
The point is that you don’t actually have to live under the sway of a late-stage autocrat who controls the airwaves to believe bad, stupid, or crazy things.
A badly contaminated news environment can in some ways be as bad as a tightly controlled one.
2024 is the ‘Voldemort’ of election years, says Ian Bremmer
Critical elections are occurring across the globe this year, with a record number of people — roughly half the global population — set to head to the polls in dozens of countries.
During a Global Stage panel at the Munich Security Conference, Eurasia Group Founder and President Ian Bremmer described 2024 as the “Voldemort of election years.”
“Voldemort is the name that should not be spoken in the ‘Harry Potter’ series … This is the year that people have been very concerned about but have kind of hoped that they could push off,” says Bremmer. This is not just because there are so many elections occurring amid historic levels of distrust in key institutions, but also because the United States — the most powerful country in the world — is also “one of the most politically dysfunctional,” he explains.
Bremmer says the 2024 US presidential election is “maximally distrust-laden,” adding that this is “driving a level of concern that borders on panic from American allies all over the world.”
The conversation was part of the Global Stage series, produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft. These discussions convene heads of state, business leaders, technology experts from around the world for critical debate about the geopolitical and technology trends shaping our world.
Watch the full conversation here: How to protect elections in the age of AI
We're in a new era of naked power politics, says Yascha Mounk, author of The Great Experiment
Confidence in democracy is declining in the West at the same time authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have become more transparent about their demands and lack of respect for democracy, Johns Hopkins University professor Yascha Mounk tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Mounk, author of a new book, "The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure," explains why authoritarians are on the rise. The new era of naked power politics is illustrated by the way Putin is transforming Russia into a repressive regime, no longer caring what people think about his ambitions. Putin believes the West is decadent while he views himself as a strong leader with traditional values.
Mounk cites tribalism and extreme partisanship as the biggest threats for democracy in the 21st century. In his view, democracy in diverse nations has particular challenges – for example, racism and disparities in wealth in the US -- but Mounk does offer some reasons for hope for the future.
Authoritarians having a moment
After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, much of the world may be running away from Vladimir Putin right now — but they’re not running toward the US, Ian Bremmer explains on GZERO World.
In fact, the greatest export from Russia and China is something that can’t be stopped by sanctions: authoritarianism and disillusionment with Western political systems.
From Belarus to Nicaragua to the Philippines, dictators are having a moment. Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump have promoted myths of election fraud to undermine confidence in government.
Add that to mounting inequality, disinformation on social media, and a growing belief that elected officials don’t care about you, the average voter.
While the war in Ukraine has unified the West, the liberal world order still has a long way to go to prevent the decline of democracy.
Watch the GZERO World episode: Authoritarians gone wild
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Authoritarians gone wild
Political scientist Yascha Mounk says we're in a new era of naked power politics.
That means Vladimir Putin doesn’t care what you think anymore about his blind ambition. And he really doesn’t have to because authoritarians like him are on the rise.
On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer talks to Mounk, who explains why confidence in democracy is declining in the West at the same time authoritarian leaders like Putin and Xi Jinping have become more honest about their demands and lack of respect for democracy.
Mounk also offers some reasons for hope in America's experiment with democracy in a diverse nation. He identifies tribalism and extreme partisanship as the biggest threats for democracy in the 21st century.
Also: a look at Ukrainians in the tech industry, who are still coding away even as Russian bombs fall on their cities.
Click here to watch the video.
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