The restless, crooked line showing the support for Vladimir Putin, whose function graph over the past 23 years can be followed on the Levada Centre website, is an interesting barometer of the Russian sentiment.
This line starts at 80%, falls to around 60% over the next decade, begins to rise in 2013 and reaches an impressive peak of almost 90% during the months of the Crimea invasion in 2014. Then everyday life begins to bite the society, enthusiasm wanes, the support drops to 60% or even less. In January 2022, when a full-scale war with Ukraine is in the air and only those who can’t imagine attacking a neighbouring state (i.e. certainly not the historically experienced Russians) hope that it won’t break out, the support rises cheerfully to 82% in two months after the “special military operation” is launched. Since then is has remained at similar levels, having dipped only once, when a partial mobilisation was announced in September 2022. The latest measurement, from June this year, shows 81%.
This line of support provides – so it would seem – a sufficiently clear answer to the question whether what is happening in Ukraine is “Putin’s war” or “the Russians’ war” however.
Whose war is it?
Since the beginning of the full-scale war many people in the East and the West have been trying to convince us that this war was actually unleashed by one person, it is therefore necessary to remove this person and things will go back to normal. This was best expressed by the American President Joe Biden who, speaking in Warsaw one month after the invasion, added an exclamation to his prepared text: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!”
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The entire evil done by the Russians would be embodied in this one person, just as the evil done before by the Germans would fall on Hitler, while the evil of the Gulag on Stalin. This construct appealed to a conviction, deeply rooted in healthy minds that it was unthinkable to approve of such crimes, that “ordinary people” couldn’t be responsible for the actions of the elite, all the more if they were “frantic”. For along with blaming Putin for the evil of this war people were eager to talk about his being psychologically unstable, and described his actions with terms such as “paranoid” and consciously not specifying, if they were referring to the popular, specialist or diagnostic meaning of the word. The idea was clear: the Russian state became appropriated by a mad paranoiac who has to be removed so that Russia could return to the international family.