How responsible is the average Russian for Putin’s war?

Do average Russians bear guilt for the war against Ukraine? How about responsibility? Or do they get off the moral hook?

A recent report by two Russian experts affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggests that the answer lies somewhere between the first two possibilities.

The report, titled “Alternate Reality: How Russian Society Learned to Stop Worrying About the War,” makes for sad reading.

“In the nearly two years since Russia launched its ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian society has gotten used to living against the backdrop of a brutal armed conflict,” write co-authors Denis Volkov and Andrei Kolesnikov. No surprise there: Even Ukrainians, physically living amid the violence, have become used to the war.

Some Russians actively oppose the war and the regime. Some, the “turbo-patriots,” “earnestly and aggressively support” Russia’s illegitimate president and strongman, Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, write the authors, “the vast majority is apathetic, and simply passively and automatically ‘mostly supports’ what the regime is doing while waiting for all this’ to end.”

Their support of Putin’s criminal regime is bad enough. Far worse is that “this part of the population has chosen to become apathetic: Their condition can be referred to as ‘learned indifference.’ Putin is a legitimate leader in such people’s eyes, so his ‘special military operation’ must be, too.”

The key word in this passage is “chosen.” When you choose, you are aware of the alternatives and consciously, deliberately express preference for one over the others. Ignorant persons who believe X didn’t choose to believe X. It’s just part of their mental makeup.

So, when Russians choose to be indifferent to the atrocities being carried out in their name in Ukraine, they are fully aware of those crimes yet still prefer to support Putin and his war.

Note that it’s not a question of active opposition. Given the deeply repressive nature of the Putin regime and the enormity of the sanctions it imposes on even minor expressions of dissent, it’s understandable, even forgivable, that Russians avoid taking to the streets at the risk of losing everything.

But the Russians who chose to be indifferent did so in public opinion surveys, not in demonstrations. They would have risked little to nothing in answering the questions with “don’t know” or “I can’t tell.” Instead, they chose to support Putin and the war, just as they chose not to express their opposition to or neutrality about the conflict. In a word, they chose to be either guilty or responsible or both. At the very least, it’s clear that the “one-fifth of the Russian population [who] are active and uncompromising supporters of the war” definitely bear guilt for the atrocities being perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine.

Tragically, only about 20 percent oppose the war, according to Volkov and Kolesnikov’s study and bear no guilt or responsibility. Like it or not, everybody else does.

When three-quarters or more of a population endorse war and genocide, we are in a realm that goes beyond public opinion surveys and involves culture. Russians are not savages. But they do appear to be all too ready to accept the legitimacy and authority of savage rulers: the bloodthirsty, cruel and arrogant tyrants who, with but a few exceptions, have lorded over first Muscovy and then the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

Russians have rebelled throughout history, and so Volkov and Kolesnikov’s assumption that they never will against the Putin regime is belied by the past. But the norm has been subservience, while demands for freedom, however anarchic, have been deviations from that.

As a career officer of the KGB, Putin knew this when he assumed power in 1999. And he appreciated that requiring his propaganda apparatus to draw on this cultural legacy would only enhance the believability of his message — that Russia would be great again and that Putin was the man to do it — and thereby strengthen his rule.

The result is that, as many Russians and Ukrainians put it, “we have what we have”: a servile population that prefers criminality to justice but that just might, if the circumstances favor it, lash out at its overlords and burn and pillage their estates. In that sense, Volkov and Kolesnikov’s study will hearten the Kremlin — but only up to a point. Putin and his entourage know quite well that they, like so many of their predecessors, are vulnerable to mad outbursts of popular rage.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”