Psychosocial Conditions in the capital regions of the Russian Federation

Psychosocial Conditions in the capital regions of the Russian Federation.

Our research suggests that President Putin rules through a combination of four mechanisms: fear, co-optation, learned helplessness or hopelessness, and weaponised resentment. Fear applies most strongly to those who challenge the state’s power, ideology, legitimacy, or territorial control, whether individuals such as Alexei Navalny or entire republics. Co-optation operates most visibly among urban residents who have adapted to the free-market conditions created by Putin’s restructuring of the federation’s economy over the past two decades.

Middle-aged Russians say that life today is better than it was before Putin. Their comparison is usually not with the Soviet period, but with the instability and social decline of the 1990s. Respondents often point to increased life expectancy, better-maintained public spaces, and access to material comforts that were once out of reach. A recurring theme is the unwillingness to risk even modest gains under Putin, especially as urban life has shifted from semi-socialist structures to market-based systems that do not benefit everyone equally. In Moscow, for example, the authorities began closing state-run hospitals and medical programmes, including the national oncology programme, while expanding private hospitals and clinics operating on market principles. In one year, 7,000 state-employed medical workers lost their jobs, and twenty-eight state medical institutions closed their doors. Doctors protested but found little public sympathy. Muscovites who cannot afford private care still depend on shrinking state services marked by medicine shortages and reduced surgical quotas. For those who can afford private care—at prices still relatively low by U.S. standards—this shift from socialism to capitalism is often interpreted as a normal part of modernisation.

Putin has tied his political survival to the preservation of every positive development Russia has experienced over the past two decades. Memories of pre-Putin economic and social hardship continue to drive support for the regime despite the costs of life in an authoritarian state. This large, and possibly majority, voting bloc in the federation’s western regions shows a marked reluctance to return to the post-Soviet conditions of the 1990s. It views political and social activists with a mixture of fear and resentment: fear that activism will disrupt their real or hoped-for upward mobility, and resentment that demands for social justice, democracy, or fairness will produce internal conflict better kept outside the federation than within it.

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“All that remains for those ashamed of the present and afraid of the future is pride in the past. When there’s no reason to love your country, life, hate your neighbours. If you are unable to improve your ruin someone else’s.” Political activist in exile.

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The prevailing attitude is that principled opposition figures, should they arise and survive, will confront the regime without their support. Unless individual ethnic Russians are personally affected in a profound way, most remain willing to keep their heads down, keep their opinions private, and accept a status quo that offers a better life than the one they remember. Those who openly resist, like Navalny, are swiftly removed from public life. Learned helplessness and weaponised resentment also appear closely linked in interviews. Respondents often describe family histories marked by repeated losses and humiliations, both major and minor, that still feel emotionally present. Yet they often see no legitimate target for their pain. To direct anger openly at the state, criminal groups, or oligarchic power structures invites retaliation. Silence also entails suffering. When the state offers a sanctioned target for resentment, however, it creates an outlet for years of accumulated frustration.

After the first and second Chechen wars, Muslim Chechens were cast as violent aggressors, and public opinion was mobilised against that republic’s attempt to secure independence. Before the escalation that led to the invasions of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea, Ukrainian families across Ukraine and Russia’s western oblasts often remained closely connected in communication and worldview. After the invasion, Ukrainians in Ukraine were increasingly recast through the slur khokhol, originally referring to a forelock of hair and associated with the notion of the “little Russian”. During the Kremlin’s information campaign preceding the broader invasion of Ukraine, the term transformed into a hostile pejorative with racist overtones, helping divide families and communities across the border.

Qualitative interviews about the war in Ukraine reveal deep anger projected onto Ukraine as the source of Russia’s problems. Survey data indicate that around 70 percent of residents in the federation’s western regions say they support Putin and his stated goals in defending Russia from the “West.” In the same surveys, however, 84 percent say Russia should focus on domestic affairs, more than half favour reconciliation with the West, and 63 percent support a peace treaty with Ukraine involving mutual concessions. Ninety-four percent report at least moderate pride in their Russian identity, even when they struggle to explain what that identity means beyond military power. A persistent sense of grievance runs through these responses: 62 percent believe Russia is treated unjustly on the world stage, and many express anxiety about the encroachment of Western values on what they regard as traditional Russian beliefs about patriarchy and sexual orthodoxy. A slight majority of residents in the western oblasts describe the war in Ukraine as a civilisational struggle between Russia and the West, and as a continuation of the earlier confrontation between the USSR and NATO. An even larger share agrees with the statement that “nothing depends on me, and by me nothing can be changed,” reflecting a pathology of learned helplessness.

Much of the survey data instead reveal a difficult-to-untangle cognitive dissonance. Respondents say they “hate the authorities” but also fear change. They feel “injustice” yet resent activists. They dislike “bureaucracy” but still “respond obediently” to state control. They fear the police and the FSB while also supporting the expansion of police powers. Many feel constantly deceived yet believe they must accept some version of what they hear on television. Respondents often admire the elite and the enormous wealth of politicians, businessmen, and bureaucrats as evidence of a “strong Russian” with whom they can identify vicariously. They take satisfaction in the idea that the wider world fears Russians, making their own lower economic status feel less humiliating. Russian media devote particular attention to the modest homes of European politicians, inviting viewers to mock their apparent poverty. Viewers are encouraged to take pride in the fact that “their” Russian elite possess larger houses, bigger yachts, and younger mistresses. As one interpretation suggests, this fleeting identification with the elite along national lines reinforces the myth of Russian importance and helps blunt the pain of personal humiliation. Such emotional patterns provide fertile ground for authoritarian rule, militarised nationalism, and revenge politics. Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center argues that a form of nationalist-imperial ideology has become the state’s approved worldview. In Blood and Iron: How Nationalist Imperialism Became Russia’s State Ideology, he writes that the “nationalist-imperialist worldview that the Putin regime is imposing on Russians is intended to feed on the past and exploit historical memories and concepts to reshape and manage” this constructed collective identity.

Instead of an overarching collective identity based on positive and creative forms of individual and group expression, this model rests on the “blood” of expendable soldiers and the “iron” of war-making. In practical terms, life in the federation’s western regions often unfolds within a deformed psychosocial reality. Residents seek escape in television, alcohol, drugs, and narratives of victimhood. The country’s mortality rate is among the highest in Europe. A third of the male population may never live long enough to claim a pension, and 8 percent live below the poverty line in a country that also contains 131 billionaires and 180,000 millionaires. For rural families, moving to regional or capital cities remains largely aspirational, especially as sanctions increasingly affect even the economies of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Politically active urban residents who were able to leave have mostly done so; most who remain are in hiding or in prison.

Among the first to be arrested were opposition figures who joined protests after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. My own summary of interview evidence is that many people now live in chronic uncertainty because they cannot fully believe anything they hear. They know the government is lying, yet they also struggle to accept that fragments of news penetrating the federation’s information barriers might be true. Often, they prefer them not to be. This sustained cognitive dissonance, produced by an environment saturated with information warfare, leaves many with a pervasive sense of hopelessness that now shapes everyday life in the federation.