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revenues, draws on the anti-oligarchs animus and Russian nationalism, without yet
going so far as to tilt the overall economic balance back toward state domination.
On the Second Chechen War, what with the fairly even split in opinion in 2003 04,
Post-postcommunist Russia 29
no policy would have won the approval of all. Of the two main options, fight or
talk, Putin favored the former, which happens to have had less mass support than
the latter, and had considerable success after the Beslan hostages catastrophe in
September 2004 in isolating the remnants of the anti-Moscow guerrilla forces and
grinding them down militarily. Even here, the president has made a gesture toward
negotiationist sentiment in Russia as a whole and locally in Chechnya by author-
izing the creation of indigenous, formally elected, and semi-autonomous political
institutions and of Grozny-controlled militias and death squads to prosecute the
crackdown on the rebels. In relations with the West, Putin s policy was more of a
cipher and the fit with popular opinion is more problematic. While pursuing adver-
sarial relations with the United States and the Western countries on some scores,
Russia s second president always balanced these actions with accommodative
responses on other scores and its third president is likely to do the same.
It would be useful to know whether Russians discrete opinions on the economy,
the oligarchs, Chechnya and internal order, and foreign relations are mutually
reinforcing or disconnected. It would be helpful also to see how opinion cleav-
ages relate to salient features of the country s changing social structure. Table 2,
based on the same opinion questions as Table 1, furnishes some evidence on both
those scores.
One message of the correlations reported in Table 2 is that there have indeed
been interconnections among Russians issue opinions, but only across some of the
issues, not all. The preference for a deepening of economic reform was associated
in 2003 04 with a relatively lenient line on the oligarchs. But economic reformism
had no connection whatever with opinions on Chechnya, and anti-oligarch
sentiment had only a minor connection. Pro-Western attitudes in foreign policy
were associated with economic reformism and with tolerance of the oligarchs, but
not in a powerful way.
Most interesting is the story vis-à-vis the two social-structural features included
in the analysis education, which can be used as a proxy for socioeconomic status,
and chronological age, which studies of Russian politics under Yeltsin found to be
Table 2 Correlation matrix for issue preferences, education, and age groupa
Variable Econ reform Oligarchs Chechnya West Education
Econ reform
Oligarchs .36*
Chechnya .00 .08*
West .07* .115* .12*
Education .30* .28* .00 .04
Age group .28* .23* .165* .05 .24*
Notes
* p .01
a Pearson s r. From the same survey as Table 1. Opinion indicators are the ordinal categories given in
the responses in Table 1, with Don t know cases excluded pair-wise. The educational categories
are none or elementary, incomplete secondary, secondary, secondary specialized, incomplete higher,
and higher. The age categories are 29 and younger, 30 to 39, 40 to 49, 50 to 59, 60 to 69, and 70
and older.
30 T.J. Colton
the most potent axis of cleavage within the mass public. As modernization theory
would predict, better-educated and higher-status citizens of Russia are apt to have
more progressive opinions on economic issues, and the more poorly educated
to have more statist and egalitarian opinions. As might have been predicted by
differing socialization and lifetime experiences within the population, a similar
association holds for the age variable: younger Russians tend to have more
market-oriented views on the economy and older Russians tend to have more
socialistic views. Toward Chechnya, however, we see no relationship between a
pro-negotiation stance and education level, and the relationship with biological
generation is exactly the reverse of what we observe on economic policy. That is,
the younger Russians were in 2003 04, the more likely they were to be hawks on
Chechnya, and the older they were, the more likely to be doves.2 When it comes
to foreign policy, there is no relationship to speak of between policy preference
and either education or age group.
The age variable is the more gripping of the two social variables, owing to
its longitudinal implications. Given natural turnover in the population and the
succession of human generations, the clock would seem to be working gradually
for acceptance of economic and socioeconomic change, against a more humane
settlement of the Chechnya and similar issues, and neither for nor against pursuing
accommodating relations with the countries of the West. It follows that, looking
across the full spectrum of issues, popular opinion in post-postcommunist Russia
cannot easily be mapped onto familiar liberal-conservative, left-right, or, if you
prefer, Westernizer-Slavophile continua. It is messier than that.
In making note of the fit between some aspects of state behavior and some
currents in public opinion, I do not mean to imply that government policy has been
motivated solely or even mostly by public opinion or the wish to appease it. It is
fair to say, though, that in certain regards public opinion in post-postcommunist
Russia continues to have varying degrees of autonomy from, and impact on, the
state. A recent example from domestic politics would be the inhospitable reaction
of pensioners to government attempts to monetize social-assistance payments in
the winter of 2004 05, a reaction that spilled over into the streets of Russian cities
and forced the government to modify its monetization plan. A good example from
the national-security realm would be popular sentiment on military manpower. To
accommodate mass and especially middle-class resistance to conscription, Putin
and his former defense minister Sergei Ivanov have decreed a reduction of the
draft term to twelve months by the year 2008. In some other essential regards
and Russia is hardly unique here governing elites take the lead in shaping public
preferences and exploiting them for political advantage. In doing so, a precondition
of success has been has been mass-media manipulation of, and in some instances
the outright manufacture of, critical events. Critical events since the rise of Putin
take in the acts of violence in and surrounding the North Caucasus, the arrest of
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and, outside the country, the attacks of September 11,
2001, and the American invasion of Iraq.
In thinking of Russia and the international environment in the near-term and
middle-term future, it is best to weigh leaders, bureaucrats, and the deep state
Post-postcommunist Russia 31
more heavily than the composition of preference at the social grassroots. In foreign
policy, mass opinion in Russia s managed democracy/soft authoritarianism figures
into elite calculations principally as a constraint on government initiative rather
than as a source of steady input. The constraint on policymakers from below is
looser here than it is in many realms of domestic policy, if for no other reason
than the mass public pays much less attention to international events and imputes
much less salience to foreign-policy issues than to domestic issues. Elite opinion
can be expected to make the most impact on policy outputs when it is reinforced
by mass opinion. In Russia, there is some spread between elite and mass prefer-
ences on foreign policy, as we shall see, but an anti-Western trend is noticeable
for both.
To penetrate beneath the surface of Russian attitudes either at the mass base
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