When Russia launched its ‘Special Military Operation’ on 24 February, the world wondered whether Ukraine could possibly survive a blitzkrieg-style invasion from its larger and more powerful neighbour. Following some military setbacks, even humiliations, it began to seem questionable whether Russia could itself survive the war. Unprecedented international sanctions led researchers and experts to predict the imminent collapse of the Russian economy. At least initially, the war also proved to be unpopular among Russians, although mass protests were quickly repressed.

Three years on, Russia still has the upper hand on the battlefield, even though it has struggled to make territorial gains. The Russian economy is relatively stable. Despite Western sanctions, Russia has received consistently high revenues from energy exports (CEPR, 2024), enabling it to fund government stabilisation measures. The Central Bank and Ministry of Finance have so far prevented the collapse of the rouble, and have worked to stop bankruptcies, check inflation, and continue to fund strategic industries. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Trade and Investment was tasked with preparing import-substitution measures and reorienting trade towards the South and East, following the rupture with the West. These wartime Keynesian measures have led to economic growth in Russia, and have even contributed to the redistribution of national wealth to the benefit of the poor, including workers. Meanwhile, large corporations were able to acquire assets from the Western companies that left Russia in 2022 and 2023. However, the political stability of the regime depends on the loyalty of its citizens, in the form of passive or active support. If the war remains unpopular, will ordinary Russians renew their protests against the government? In this article I argue that, regardless of their views on the war and Putin’s regime, many Russians are currently embracing a new ‘soft’ patriotism that is distinct from the Kremlin’s militarism and official ideology. Despite this contrast, this new brand of patriotism has strengthened Putin’s regime in Russia, even in the face of the country’s fragile economic situation.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is still holding out, even if the tide of war is now flowing in the wrong direction. After horrific numbers of casualties, the destruction of much of the country’s infrastructure, and territorial losses, war-weariness and cynicism have begun to set in among the Ukrainian citizenry. As Volodmyr Ischenko and Peter Korotaev conclude, in another article that forms part of this project, ‘Ukraine is unable to fully mobilise its people, who are divided by a profound sociopolitical disconnect’. The authors also found that that ‘in many ways the attitude of Ukrainians towards the state reflects the same desire for normalisation felt by Russians, even if it is based on a more active and explicit patriotism, one rooted in civil society rather than official politics or support for the state’.

The Public Sociology Lab (PS Lab) has been conducting studies of social change in wartime Russia since 2022. In 2024, we began a large-scale project with the Alameda Institute, analysing the social consequences of revolutions and wars on civil society in four post-Soviet countries: Armenia, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. While we are still collecting qualitative data in these countries, this essay examines a trend that has become apparent during the initial research phase: namely, a shift in social consciousness in Russia, and also a parallel shift in Ukraine. 

Within Russia, perceptions of the Russia-Ukraine war, of the Russian authorities, and of Russia itself have transformed in a variety of social environments. Paradoxically, while polls and our own research show that an increasing number of Russians want peace at any cost (even if it meant that Russia would not win the war), a great number, including many of the same people, and also including those who initially condemned the war, have begun consciously and actively supporting the changes that have occurred in the country as a result of the war. They have begun to contribute to the production of a new social order that is emerging as a consequence. This is because, despite the war, Russia seems in the eyes of many to be becoming a more ‘normal country’, with economic growth, redistribution to the wider population, and everyday patriotism.

A similar process is taking place in Ukraine, where a new sense of pride and patriotism has emerged that explicitly defines itself as separate from the Ukrainian state and political class. This is tempered by the facts of war in Ukraine, where the effects are more brutal and direct, and the political situation for the government is far more precarious. But the trend in both countries is an important indicator of the future challenges that both countries will face if and when a peace deal is reached, as well as of the types of state and society that might emerge after the war. On the other hand, the same developments suggest that a swift end to the war may not be in Putin’s best interests after all.

The road to a ‘normal country’?   

The protracted post-Soviet crisis that followed the catastrophic neoliberal reforms of the 1990s resulted in a weak Russian state, in which the prospect of ever becoming a ‘normal country’ seemed almost utopian. Consequently, despite its image as a diminished but still ‘great’ power, Russia has been marginalised in the global economy, and the idea of mass patriotism in Russia has been questioned, mocked and scrutinised in recent decades. A well-known rock song contains the lines: ‘Motherland! I’m going to my homeland! People shout: “Ugly!” But we like our country, even if it is not beautiful.’ How does a patriotic song portray the motherland as ‘ugly’, yet loveable? This strange and even perverse attitude towards patriotism stems from an obsession with the idea of a ‘normal country’, an identity that neither Russia nor any other post-Soviet state or society has ever truly embodied. (It is no coincidence that the liberal movement in Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s was explicitly anti-patriotic and was sometimes caricatured as ‘pro-Western’.)

Post-Soviet revolutionary protests, including the massive ‘fair elections’ rallies of 2011-2012 and Alexei Navalny’s movement that emerged out of them, were part of a project that aimed to transform Russia into ‘a normal country’. The increasing unlikelihood of this vision becoming a reality has made this middle-class agenda seem like a form of petit-bourgeois vanity and delusion. However, the concept of ‘normality’ has become politicised within the anti-Putin democratic movement. Recently, I went over my analysis of PS Lab interviews with participants in the 2021 pro-Navalny rallies and noticed an interesting tendency: Those who were most prepared to be detained and arrested in order to overthrow Putin were the most ‘normal’ – middle-class people whose policy demands were moderate and well-meaning. There were no political utopias or dreams of radical societal restructuring, but rather a desire for a parliamentary regime and an end to corruption. The Russian protest movement, including Alexei Navalny’s movement, transformed the moderate demand for a normal, prosperous, bourgeois country into a heroic, revolutionary struggle against Putin’s regime. Interestingly, soon after these protests, the idea of Russia as a ‘normal country’, and a form of patriotism attaching to that, became popular among protest-minded urban youth, who seem no longer embarrassed to love their country, in the belief that they can improve it in this way. Thus, we observe a kind of political escalation of ‘normality’, which simultaneously fosters and disseminates the sentiment of ‘soft’ patriotism.

At the same time, Vladimir Putin’s political project of ‘stability’ – in contrast to the chaos and poverty of the 1990s – also aimed at transforming Russia into a ‘normal country’. Outside observers have declared Russia’s normalcy too: in a 2004 article, political scientist Daniel Treisman and economist Andrei Shleifer proclaimed that ‘Russia had become a normal country’. The presence of imperfect democratic institutions, economic growth, and improved social welfare were all signs of this ‘normalisation’ after the 1990s.

In this context, Putin’s regime viewed protest movements in Russia and colour revolutions in the former Soviet Union as destabilising factors that threatened its project of establishing normality, especially after the unprecedented 2011–12 protests, which the Kremlin saw as an attempted revolution. In response, the regime began to escalate its own political project of establishing normality. On the one hand, it countered the protests with a combination of radical-conservative propaganda and repression. Behind its façade of radical conservatism, Putinism developed its own interpretation of ‘normality’, which appears to have solidified in Russia today. Since 2013, the Kremlin has also sought to fulfil some of the protesters’ demands, not only with slogans but also in policy, with improvements to the quality of bureaucracy, living standards and technocratic beautification, as well as technological progress. The lack of an explicit political agenda – beyond  the ‘normal country’ utopianism of these projects – generated a political process in which the escalation of normality turned out to be both more radical (in terms of militarism) and more ‘normal’ (in terms of economic achievements) than the protest movement itself. Paradoxically, the peak of ‘normality’ as a Kremlin policy occurred after the invasion of Ukraine. While the effects of a brutal and bloody war shook Russian society, which did not understand the war’s goals, economic growth and the rise of everyday ‘soft’ patriotism nevertheless managed to persuade many Russians that the long-awaited promised land of ‘normality’ was getting nearer.

Normality amid war 

Behind the facade of neo-imperialist ideology and ongoing warfare, Putin’s project still aims to build a ‘normal’ state and society. In September 2023, while discussing the federal budget for 2024 and forecasts of 2.5-2.8% GDP growth, Putin declared:

The stage of recovery of the Russian economy has been completed. We have withstood absolutely unprecedented external pressure, the sanctions onslaught of some ruling elites in the so-called Western bloc – some ruling elites in certain countries that we call unfriendly. Russia’s GDP has reached the level of 2021, and now it is important to create conditions for further stable and long-term development. (Kremlin, 2023.) 

In the same speech, he also claimed the government could ‘guarantee a clear fulfilment of all social obligations of the state to the people’. Thus, not only was the economic situation turning around, but the state would now ensure sufficient social support for people adapting to the changed, post-war situation. This would include direct support for small and medium-sized businesses, which was lacking during the pandemic. In 2022, to ease the burden on the wider population, many tax payments were suspended, car-loan repayments were frozen, and social benefits, including the minimum wage, were increased in line with inflation. Special support was also given to ‘system-forming’ industries. While the government can claim to have delivered relative normality for the majority, a well-educated and well-paid minority working for Western companies in Russia has been disproportionately affected by the sanctions.

The ‘soft’ patriotism articulated by a large number of Russians today seems to have grown out of relative economic stability, and, at the same time, out of anxiety for the fate of the country, which is also experiencing the hardships of a war whose aims and causes most Russians do not understand.

One of our interviewees told us that, although she did not support the killing of Ukrainians nor understand the purpose of the war, she was beginning to think that Russians were becoming more patriotic, which she said was a good thing. She had started singing in the church choir herself, seeing this as a sign of her own patriotism. However, this was related to Orthodox Christianity rather than the war.

These new Russian patriots support several specific processes that are happening in parallel to the war: economic stability and economic development (in the face of sanctions), and more importantly the ‘economic sovereignty’ that Russia has achieved since the beginning of the war. This patriotism has led to a growth in ‘civil society’ participation, such as volunteering to help Ukrainian refugees who want to stay in Russia, as well as Russian refugees from Kursk Oblast, occupied by the Ukrainian army in 2024 and 2025.

While such people do not represent all of society – most likely not even a majority – they are an important group. Their social characteristics have yet to be precisely identified in our research, but we can already observe that many of them are middle-class individuals. Some have benefited economically and professionally, others have been negatively impacted by the new economic policies. They often talk about how their views and attitudes have changed, from scepticism about ‘what is happening’, to ‘understanding what is happening’. This ‘understanding’ has often developed as a result of participating in volunteer activities. At the same time, their ‘understanding’ almost never amounts to committed support for the war, the government, or Putin. These people do not typically see the government or Putin as their true political leaders or representatives. Instead, they view the government as providing economic stability and development from above, which, together with concerns about the future of the country at war, leads to the development of an everyday patriotism from below, which should be viewed as autonomous from the state.

The political economy of Russian patriotism

Our research has shown that many people in Russia would rather not think about the war in terms of its causes, objectives and consequences. Instead, they tend to talk about it in relation to economic stability in their country. In the words of one of our informants:

Well, even with what we have today, yes, I suppose it’s worse for me than three years ago, but I am grateful that things are more or less okay. I can’t even really say that things are worse for me. All the same, I… well maybe with some breakdowns here and there… but we still have electricity, gas, things are not blowing up around us. You watch what’s going on in Ukraine and think: ‘Thank God things are not like that’. Because it all could have been, in theory, much, much worse. (Woman, 47, civil servant.)

We have interviewed Russians who do not fully trust the state or support the war’s goals, but who are content with the economic situation. They express gratitude towards the state as a successful technocratic bureaucracy, rather than to the Putin regime itself. However, as can be seen from the above quote, these people are no longer talking about economic stability, but about economic development. Another informant stated: 

Electronics plants are being built, metallurgical plants are being built, new ones are being created from scratch, in general. Coke and chemical plants of all sorts… I see every year how our country is blossoming.

As for his patriotism, he claims: 

About the state – I doubt. But the motherland and family – yes, it is necessary to protect and love.  

Interestingly, although the Kremlin’s official imperialist and militarist ideology was not popular among our informants, certain ideas that form part of its official agenda resonate with them, in particular economic development and ‘economic sovereignty’, as well as the struggle against the West. But the latter is generally not articulated in terms of war, but rather in terms of economic and technological competition.

Everyday patriotism 

Our study has found that the new ‘soft’ patriotism is felt as a popular mood, which has developed in society, independently from the state. During the ethnographic fieldwork, one interlocutor, a nurse, complained that instead of ‘victory, coffins arrive every month, and not just once a month’. War, in her words, ‘is not a victory, it is a defeat in human terms – a person kills himself, a Russian person kills a Russian’. She meant that Ukrainians are also Russian, and therefore, in the context of the current war, ‘a Russian is killing a Russian’. We might see in this language the mark of imperial nationalism. However, the nurse immediately corrected herself, demanding: ‘Russia, well, withdraw all your troops completely, so that we can discover who is killing whom? Maybe they are just the ones knocking the shit out of each other? This is their war among themselves’. She unexpectedly voiced not only an anti-war call to withdraw troops from the territory of Ukraine, but also contrasted Russia with Ukraine as separate units. Moreover, she implied that the conflict between Kiev and Donbass is not a conflict between the Russian world and Ukraine, but an intra-Ukrainian conflict that should not concern Russia. She ended her monologue with the following: ‘Ukrainians are a separate people. What are we fighting for? Because Zelensky went fucking crazy? Why did Putin stick his nose in to defend here?’ (ethnographic diary, Cheremushkin, September 2023).

We encountered such narratives frequently. Our interlocutors constantly spoke about ‘Russia itself’, meaning Russia within its internationally recognised borders, which in their view should have been the state’s concern and focus, instead of its attempts to seize Ukrainian territories. It is this ‘Russia itself’ (and not Russian victory in a supposedly ‘patriotic’ imperialist war) that the new patriots are increasingly thinking about. Moreover, in our most recent interviews, patriotism often became explicit, beyond an everyday discourse of concern and care for the country – although it remains fundamentally non-imperial and non-militaristic. One of our interlocutors said that while she did not support the war, ‘the war has revealed that Russia has many enemies’. Another of our informants described her own patriotic turn as follows, when asked whether she would call herself a patriot:

I don’t know. I have a complicated relationship with this term, so I’m undecided, to be honest. I don’t know. Rather – yes. I used to be more like no, but now I am more like yes.

This informant explained that although she remained distant from politics and political ideologies, she was satisfied with economic stability and her improved economic situation in recent years, and that this was the cause of her increasing patriotic sentiments. Another of our interview subjects stated: 

I will not go with a flag or a banner. I won’t go to a mass gathering. However, a year ago I got involved at my daughter’s theatre studio. They asked me to help. And I have not met a more beautiful, bright, friendly, and wonderful atmosphere anywhere at all. Well, there are fierce patriots there in a good sense of the word. I mean, yes, they also weave some nets for soldiers there, send them to the frontline. It’s a very strange story to me. I’m not a part of it. But at the same time, they have such a sincere love for the town, for our history.

We see that this informant openly states that she does not sympathise with Putin’s nationalism but welcomes the growth of local patriotism and a sense of solidarity among fellow citizens. More importantly, the local patriotism she welcomes has developed organically within society, autonomously from the state. 

Volunteering to help refugees and soldiers – a new civil society? 

While the informant quoted above kept her own distance from volunteer efforts on behalf of the military, many others told us that they had changed their views or strengthened their patriotism precisely through the process of participating in volunteer movements to help refugees and the frontline troops. At the same time, even this form of participation often remains circumspect in its attitude to war and militarism. One of our interviewees told us about her brother: He signed up as a volunteer and started traveling to the front ‘to help people’. In conversations, he was horrified by the war crimes of Russian soldiers that he often heard about, but claimed that war crimes were not the main aspect of this war. The more important factor, according to him, was that the war made many people stop being indifferent; these people became volunteers, and began doing something to help their fellow citizens. Such sentiments are paradoxical; he condemned the war crimes of the Russian army and, at the same time, believed in ‘soft’ patriotism and wartime civil society as a driver of care and solidarity. This is the logic of affirming ‘normality’ in the midst of war. This emerging civil society, despite its direct contributions to the war against Ukraine, remained in the minds of many people something fundamentally separate from the state.

Social groups and milieus of ‘beneficiaries’ of the new economic reality are forming in Russia. With this development, it seems that Putin’s regime, in the absence of political democracy, might be in the process of achieving what many post-Soviet revolutionaries dreamed of: the transformation of a post-Soviet country into a ‘normal country’.

The Ukrainian case 

Our research in Ukraine shows a similar picture to that emerging in Russia. The 2014 Euromaidan was conceptualised by many Ukrainians as a path to ‘normality’, including through a break with Russia. The 2022 resistance to Russian aggression was seen as a continuation of the same fight. Political optimists among our Ukrainian informants describe a ‘normal country’ as the political goal of the 2014 revolution and of the war. In 2022, one of our informants stated: 

Everything should be fine. I hope that we will be friends with the civilised world, that is, with a world that is moving forward, that is producing and creating something. We will start to create something ourselves, and not just there, buying and selling only grain. We will have access to an open society, we will have access to technology, to information. This is the scenario I would like to see. 

It is interesting how similar these words of an optimistic Ukrainian are to those of the Russian beneficiaries of the new economic situation. Progress, technology and economic sovereignty are the goals and values that make up the image of a ‘normal country’. Just like our Russian informants, this informant, while insisting on his patriotism, at the same time emphasised its ‘unofficial’ character. He says that he does not trust politicians, and he refers to those whom he supports as not politicians but members of civil society who, together with ordinary people, can overcome the hardships of war. 

One apparent difference between our Ukrainian and Russian informants, in their shared desire for a ‘normal country’, was their attitude to their respective governmental authorities. Russian informants, speaking about the fact that the authorities of that country were disconnected from its society, often did not consider this a big problem in itself, as long as the authorities were able to cope with economic problems. Ukrainian informants, meanwhile, spoke about a crisis of representation as a problem in itself. For example, a restaurateur from Kiev, who was optimistic about the future in 2024 and had decided not to leave the country in order to contribute to its post-war development, said that one of Ukraine’s main problems was the ‘connection of the authorities to the society’, which he deemed insufficient. In his opinion, the authorities were trying to establish a connection with society, but not succeeding. Another informant remarked that: 

In Germany, it is considered not enough to elect the authorities, you have to constantly demand from them to fulfil their duties. And we have a problem – people do not demand, and then they start to accuse and make claims.

Recounting how she volunteered to help her country in the first months of the war, she complained that the state did not appreciate the efforts of ordinary citizens and true patriots: 

There was no recognition of the contribution. I didn’t expect it, because I did everything absolutely consciously. But, on the other hand, when I hear about those payments, those payments – and what about us? We have spent all our efforts, all our time here, and we don’t demand anything, and what, is it easy for us at all? There is a certain lack of recognition on the part of the state that you are also investing your role as a citizen. 

In her view, her contribution to the country’s defence, accompanied by a surge of patriotic feeling, was a factor in her subsequent disillusionment with the Ukrainian state. This dynamic is indicative of an ‘autonomous’, everyday patriotism that has emerged in both countries, developing in parallel to the official state and also at a distance from far-right versions of nationalism. 

Another interviewee, who was working as a psychologist and had experienced career growth and increased prosperity during the war, talked about her hopes for normalisation. According to her, normalisation was hindered by the disconnection of the authorities from society and also by the incompetence of officials: 

Frankly speaking, I really wish there was such an approach, where people who make critical decisions should also bear some responsibility. Because sometimes one step to the left, one step to the right. Let’s try this, let’s try that, let’s try that. And these are millions of fates. And we see that there is no money, prices are rising.

This informant’s patriotism, like that of many other optimistic informants from our Ukrainian sample, was explicit. She spoke not just of her satisfaction with the economic situation, but of the desire to contribute to the post-war development of the country. This optimism had collided with the common perception of the separation of power from society, a perception that here as elsewhere was articulated in a critique of the official nationalism of the authorities and of the far right. The Ukrainian ‘autonomous’ patriotism, though typically more demanding than its Russian equivalent, still reflects a crisis of state legitimacy.

Conclusions

The research we have conducted reveals several paradoxes. For example, in our analysis of the Russian case, we see that despite the success of the state-promoted ‘politics of normality’, it does not reflect, or necessarily contribute to, the growing hegemony of Putin’s ruling class. Our informants revealed that they viewed the state and politicians with distrust or suspicion. If they approved of Putin’s actions, it was not as a leader or representative, but as a manager who had been able to respond to economic difficulties. In other words, we can see the strengthening of a form of Bonapartism in Russia, based on a sense of order guaranteed by militarism and even repression, and the perceived effective management of the economy. At the same time, imperialist war and neo-imperialist official ideology are not accepted, even by those who welcome many of the changes in Russia in recent years. Instead of an imperialist ideology, our informants articulate a national patriotism, opposing it to the project of seizing other countries’ territory. This suggests that the Kremlin’s imperial war – alongside the success of its policy of economic nationalism – has led to conditions that could allow the formation of a new national project in Russia. If Russia were indeed to become a more ‘normal’ nation-state in the near future, it would not come as the result of a lost imperialist war, nor as the result of a war of national liberation, but as the result of a partially successful war, which pivoted from imperialist to nationalist in nature. However, if Russia’s economy enters into crisis, or stagnates after the end of the war, normality may be revealed to have been an illusion all along.

The Kremlin’s policy of normalisation is a product of the war, and a war economy that invests in civilian industries. ‘Soft’, everyday patriotism is the flip-side of official imperial nationalism. The public mood of ‘normality’ represents a psychological response to the abnormal and traumatic conditions of a war which has claimed at least hundreds of thousands of lives. Whether this ‘normalisation’ can continue after the war remains to be seen; it might be partly for this reason that Putin and his allies are in no rush to make peace with Ukraine.      

At the same time, the ‘autonomous’ patriotism of Ukrainian optimists, although more active and demanding, still reflects a crisis of legitimacy for the state, which, unlike the Russian government, is currently losing the war and cannot ensure economic development. This is particularly evident as the United States demands harsh economic concessions in return for continued support, while much of Ukraine’s wartime economic policy depends on the sale of its assets to foreign capital. The desire for normalisation in Ukraine is also held in fundamental opposition to the state and to the official nationalism of the authorities and of domestic far-right movements.