An in-depth study of the spine signal of Medusa assesses the true extent of the population’s support for the war. The differences between ‘the majority of Russians’ and the sample of respondents in the polls make them increasingly less credible. Surveys as a tool of “manipulation” and “information.” The example of the “average Russian male”, amplifier of patriotic slogans.
One of the most striking dimensions of Russia’s great war against the entire world is the population’s support for the imperial instincts of the caste in the Kremlin, something difficult to understand and decidedly impossible to accept: is it possible that the only ones who Are they opposed to state violence are only a few dispersed dissidents, subjected to harsh repression to the point of death in a concentration camp, in the face of the total indifference of the majority of Russians?
The spine signal of Medusa addressed this issue by trying to go beyond certain stereotypes about the apathy and passivity of the inhabitants of Russia today and always. If official polls are to be believed, 70% of Russians enthusiastically support the need for military parades in Red Square, 56% are against any social and economic changes, and this mythological “majority” is They attribute all kinds of negative or absurd feelings, from allergies to medical tests, including the approval of the death penalty. And the majority profess the Orthodox faith, although they only go to church to have their Easter cakes blessed.
Obviously, pro-government sociologists claim that the vast majority of Russians approve of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, but the litany of official surveys on the population’s thinking is quite perplexing. The more widely shared opinions crystallize, the more they contradict those heard expressed in everyday life by family and friends, on the streets and in homes, which leads to the suspicion that, beyond the propaganda of senior leaders and the repression of the marginalized, there is extensive manipulation of what is called “the majority” of the Russian people.
As the authors of signal, “when you talk about the majority of Russians you have to understand the majority of those interviewed in the surveys, and there is a big difference between them.” Even the plebiscitary majority of the vote in the presidential elections for the consecration of Vladimir Putin is actually quite doubtful, both due to the actual number of the turnout and the number of votes cast. When it is said that Russians are against young people consuming energy drinks, it only refers to the users of the site SuperJob, and Easter pancakes for blessing in church are not made by all Russians, but above all by customers of the “Local Cuisine” chain found in many cities. The journalists who comment on the surveys extrapolate data and responses in a very arbitrary way, just as happens in any other country.
It is an inflexible rule of any type of propaganda that if the “majority opinion” is not reported, no one will read the article or report on the topic at hand. Surveys are becoming less and less credible despite being supported by increasingly sophisticated algorithms and analysis criteria: respondents do not say what they think, but rather what they consider necessary to say publicly, and this self-censorship is usually more effective than any repression. “Public opinion” is something very different from the opinions of people, in a world in which each statement is subject to a dimension in which “public” means “alienated”, given over to the possession of other areas and other areas. structures, whether of power and monopoly, or more generally, of hierarchy of social interests. Obviously in times of war this mechanism of distrust and distancing becomes dominant: only what is necessary is said to avoid being involved.
Pollsters know well how widespread the refusal to respond is: on average, to obtain a thousand responses you have to go through the refusal of twenty thousand people. In Russia, at most 5-6% of people participate in surveys, slightly more than those who attend Orthodox liturgies, and with such low percentages it is almost inevitable that those who respond will be mostly those who are expected to have a opinion consistent with the objectives of the research. People avoid expressing what they think for fear of the consequences or for complete disinterest in politics, and this is undoubtedly a global trend and not just a Russian one: no one believes in the possibility of influencing situations based on opinions. Russia’s main sociological centers operate under the strict control of the Kremlin. The most famous, Levada-Centr, has been included in the register of “foreign agents” since 2016, and has little freedom of maneuver to confirm its analysis capacity on the ground. In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko solved the problem radically by banning any kind of survey, even on the Internet, after the 2020 uprisings, and in 2021 only allowed one large “official survey” declaring that his level of consensus in the population was 66.5%; the independent and more or less clandestine spoke of 24.1%.
In sociological research, the methodology with which the questions are formulated has a lot of weight, which often refer to the opinions of others rather than those of the person being interviewed, to avoid compromising them. If you want to ask an opinion on torture, the question is not asked directly, but rather whether it is acceptable to torture those who kidnap children or commit serious attacks. This leaves a lot of room for manipulation, which is why polls are not used in principle to find out the opinions of those interviewed, but rather to inform them about issues that perhaps had never been raised. Ask “did you know that candidate X has problems with Justice?” is a way to reduce X’s chances of being elected, not to mention comments summarizing the “poll results.” An opinion is asked about the parades in Red Square, not about war or sanctions, inflation or repression; People are pushed to respond according to parameters already known at a social level, and, more than an expression of thought, the survey becomes “ideological training”, as defined signal. If you ask a Russian “what do most Russians think?”, he will hardly say anything that distinguishes him from the thinking of most Russians.
Manipulating public opinion is easier than it seems: they know it well in Russia and throughout the world, regardless of the regime that is in power or the more or less autocratic or democratic system, as demonstrated by the wave of blind anti-Semitism that It grows in all latitudes in the context of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. “Confidential surveys” on the willingness of Russians to sacrifice themselves for victory in Ukraine allow Putin to triumphantly confirm that “the absolute majority of Russians put their belonging to Russian society, to the State, before their own ethnic ancestry.” , as he explained again in recent days to counteract the autonomist tendencies of smaller towns. Or he states that “I observe above all an unprecedented support of our people; the vast majority of the citizens of our country are moved by a clear patriotic ideal”, as he told the restricted Council of the Ministry of Defense, one of the phrases that repeats since the invasion of Ukraine began even without needing to cite statistics and sociological analysis.
No statistics, furthermore, confirm another refrain of propaganda according to which “the absolute majority of those who have lived in Ukraine, and even more so of those who have lived in Russia, consider it to be the same country”, relying perhaps on reminiscences. Soviet ideas of ideal communality, recycled in the mythology of current events. The news agency Rbk published in 2017 the “average portrait” of an inhabitant of Russia, with the “statistical” name of Elena Smirnova, 40, and the Tinkoff Žurnal recently took up this example, changing the model of the “average citizen” to that of a man, Aleksandr Ivanov, 37-38 years old, a driver by profession and loyal to the government, with an average income and some savings, who “loves his homeland and does not trusts the Americans”, and only listens to Russian singers. These conventional figures, increasingly resembling puppets created by new applications of artificial intelligence, do not represent real Russians but are only useful puppets for the caste in power.
A perfect example of the “average Russian male”, an amplifier of cheap patriotic slogans, is the reconfirmed Minister of Culture, Valerij Fal’kov, 46, former rector of Tyumen University in Siberia, who replaced Vladimir Medinsky in 2020 and He is now an advisor to Putin and the author of the “revised” manuals of Russian history. The “Siberian male” is the model preferred by the Kremlin (also to summarize the different ethnicities brought together in the Russian), like Moscow mayor Sergej Sobyanin, also imported from Tyumen in 2010, the year of Putin’s authoritarian and military turn. While still a student in 2003, Fal’kov wrote in his thesis that “the agitatsija [propaganda] “It is an ideological tool of totalitarian regimes, to cultivate the values that best suit them and control society.” And today he is the minister of agitatsija of State.
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