AP Lab doctoral candidate Bryce Hecht and Director Graeme Robertson, together with Sam Greene (Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London and Director of the Democratic Resilience Program at the CEPA) have released a new research brief at Russia.Post. In “Yes in my Name? The Problem of Agency In Russians’ Response to the War” They offer a new interpretation of Russians’ attitude to the war in Ukraine, suggesting that rather than asking whether Russians support the war, researchers should be asking whether Russians care.
“Despite the Kremlin’s formidable propaganda machine, research has shown throughout the war that ordinary Russians…are not inclined automatically to trust what the government tells them, whether that be about casualties or the state of the economy. The inertia of public opinion, meanwhile, suggests that Russians have broadly accommodated themselves to these tradeoffs [of the war]. However, little is known about how that accommodation takes place, or about whether all Russians deal with these tradeoffs in the same way. Our research aims to help shed light on those questions.”
Hecht, Robertson and Greene