A more joyous life Economist Will Pyle explains new research that shows satisfaction and economic optimism rising among Russians since the invasion of Ukraine
Despite massive military spending, tens of thousands of deaths, and a vast array of international sanctions, Russians’ sense of stability and life satisfaction has reached its highest level in the past decade, according to a new study by the Bank of Finland’s Institute for Emerging Economies. Researchers asked people two main questions: how satisfied they are with their lives today, and how satisfied they are with their current economic situation. The economists also asked whether respondents had made any major purchases in the past year, spent money on cultural or entertainment events, and whether they could maintain their lifestyle for several months if they lost their source of income.
Meduza spoke with one of the study’s co-authors — economist and Middlebury College Professor Will Pyle — about why Russians feel better about their lives now than they did before their government launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
— Let’s talk about the study’s main findings. Were there any surprises in the results?
— Well, it depends. We have a lot of findings. It’s a really interesting and rich data set. The best of its kind. It’s what’s called longitudinal data — when individuals and households are tracked over time by the people who are administering the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLSM).
We looked at data from 2013 to 2023. Every year, we’ve got these observations on these individuals and households. Some people have called the period from 2013 until the invasion in February 2022 “the lost decade.” The price of oil collapsed in the mid-2000s. There really wasn’t a lot of economic growth [for Russia] in that period or changes in per capita income.
Given the nature of the sanctions and just how comprehensive and quickly they were imposed (and of course they’re changing and being added to all the time), it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suspect, with the Russian economy not doing terribly well, that the sanctions would have pushed the economy down further. That we’d see it in responses to questions like “Are you satisfied with your economic conditions? Are you satisfied with life?”
The big-picture takeaway: When comparing the war years, where we have data (from February 2022 to December 2023), on average, Russians are feeling better than they did in the pre-war years, dating back to 2013. That’s true of both questions that ask about satisfaction with economic conditions and life satisfaction.
One result you might say is surprising is that the boost in subjective well-being is particularly apparent for ethnic Russians who make up about 80– 85 percent of the sample. So far, we haven’t been able to attribute that boost in life satisfaction and average satisfaction with economic conditions among ethnic Russians to anything that’s different materially about their lives. We do know from previous surveys that there has been a big increase — if you follow Levada polling over time — since 2014, with the annexation of Crimea. There was a big uptick in belief that “the country is headed in the right direction.” Levada Center data showed the same big uptick in the month after the February 2022 invasion.
For better or worse, there’s an element of the Russian population, I think, that just really gets a positive jolt out of these post-imperial expressions of aggression and aggressive foreign policy. That’s one preliminary interpretation.
One thing that we’re seeing is that there hasn’t been any uptick in the consumption of big, durable items like cars, refrigerators, washing machines, or color TVs. Consumption of the big, durable items has basically been suppressed since the mid-2000s. Russians are basically building up savings but not using those savings to turn them into purchases of big, durable items.
We do see that Russians are building up their savings a lot and are in a much more financially stable position. When we ask households: “Could you continue to spend at the same rates, given your savings, for at least several months?” The numbers saying, “Yes, we’re in a position to do that” have increased in the war years, relative to the 2013–2021 period.
There are some interesting questions that aren’t reported in the draft of the paper: Households were asked about “Will you be living better in 12 months? How confident are you that you’ll be able to meet basic economic needs in the next 12 months?” And what we see there is that there’s a little uncertainty in the first year of the war, looking out over the next 12 months, that things would get better. Maybe there was obvious fear about “Where is this war headed? Will it result in big changes in our material well-being?” We see a little bit of that, even at the same time that we see life satisfaction rising.
But by 2023, people became more optimistic. They started feeling not just more satisfied with their economic conditions and life, but more secure about the next 12 months. By 2023, there’s not only current stability, but there’s more prospective, forward-looking certainty about the future.
So, to the extent that the sanctions were implemented to impose pain on Russian citizens as a way to encourage them to rise up, to protest, and to express their dissatisfaction in a way that would get the ruling regime to reverse course — by late 2023, we’re not seeing much evidence for that in this very rich data set that’s following the same people over time. We’re not seeing those same people changing in terms of where they are mentally about their material conditions, both now and into the future. They’re not more dissatisfied. They’re not growing more uncertain about the future. They seem less likely, on average, to go out and protest just on the basis of their material well-being or their subjective well-being.
— How reliable is the Russian wartime data you used? Did you make any adjustments for the bias that likely affects any statistics coming out of Russia these days?
— None of these questions that we are looking at are as sensitive as, say, asking about a “special military operation” or asking directly about approval for Putin. When we ask, “Do you feel your savings will last you?” we don’t think anyone is being jailed for answering questions like that. Of course, Putin has made public opposition to the war a jailable offense. We feel that most of these questions are less sensitive. That said, yes, it’s wartime.
But even before the war, these people were dealing with the Longitudinal Monitoring Survey people. They’re used to it. Some of them drop out, but not a lot of them. [Researchers] are able to go back to the same people, even survey skeptics.
I was listening to a web seminar the other day by sociologist Jeremy Morris. He’s got a big social media presence, and he’s very skeptical of a lot of survey work. I asked a question during the Q&A, and he said, “Yeah, I’m very snarky in my public social media comments about survey work, particularly during wartime in Russia. But there are good surveys out there.” And then he mentioned RLMS as being one of the best, because they go back to the same people. They establish relationships with the same individuals and the same households over time.
And many of the questions that they’re asking are very anodyne: “Do you have a new refrigerator?” That’s some of the questions we’re asking: “What’s happening with your durable goods purchases? What’s happening with your savings?”
I think this is a really well-respected survey internationally. It’s been around for a long time. The people at the Higher School [of Economics] who are running it now are professional sociologists. They’re very sensitive to these sorts of biased questions. And they’re always asking themselves: How can we keep our sample representative of the Russian population? They’ve got young people, they’ve got old people. They’ve got people out in Primorsky Krai, they’ve got people in Rostov. They’ve got a representative sample of the population.
But your question is a very fair one. I think really good social science research doesn’t take just one source, one slice of evidence. You need to triangulate. You need to be talking to people on the ground. There are all these guerrilla efforts, I guess you’d call them, like the Public Sociology Laboratory. They’re sending people out there, planting people in Russian regions, and they’re they’re doing it anonymously. They’re out in the mix, talking to people, and they’re they’re doing a lot of really good work, but they’re only able to talk to some people and listen in on some conversations at the local coffee shop.
— Are these results connected to the fact that many anti-war people have left Russia? Or are there too few of them to affect the statistics?
— We’ve run the data in different ways. As I said, we can look at the same people. That’s a very big concern because, initially, a million or so Russians left. Some have gone back. If some of them were in the RLMS, they would have dropped out then, and the RLMS people would have tried to find replacements for them who were similar.
One way in which we’ve run the data is just looking at the people who are in the country, pre-war and post-war. So, apples to apples, and we see how their sentiments compare. It’s a model that’s called Individual Fixed Effects. We can say that at least for that group that’s been in Russia, before and after the invasion, we’re seeing that bump in subjective well-being after February 2022.
— Do the results differ across Russia’s regions?
— You don’t see these effects so much in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but you do see them in and around the regional capitals. Not all the regions are covered in the RLMS. Maybe about half the regions are covered, and you see this [perceived well-being] boost in their capitals, particularly in regions that specialize in military production, like Penza, Perm, Tula, Chelyabinsk, and Novosibirsk.
Natalia Zubarevich, one of Russia’s leading economic geographers, listed these centers in an article, and we found a bump in those regional capitals. But not so much in Moscow and St. Petersburg — that was less expected.
We don’t know quite what’s going on there. It’s not higher education levels — we control for variables like that, like education, gender, and marital status. That’s something that we’re still looking to unpack. But it’s not surprising: in the military-industrial centers, we see those boosts.
The only Russian region that’s covered by RLMS that’s on the Russian-Ukrainian border is Rostov. And we actually do see in the war years a big decline in satisfaction with life and economic conditions. So, there does seem to be some spillover effects. Maybe the extent to which Rostov is being used as a staging ground is disrupting the local economy. I don’t know enough about the situation on the ground in Rostov, but we do see what could be interpreted as a war effect in that region.
In the Far East, we thought maybe the reorientation of trade with China might be showing up in economic conditions there. We do see positive wartime effects, but they don’t rise to the level of statistically significant in places like Primorsky Krai and Khabarovsk.
— Do your results suggest that Russians care more about their subjective well-being than the deaths of loved ones and other risks in wartime?
I have a colleague at the Bank of Finland — not the co-author on this paper, Laura Salenko — who has looked at savings deposit data as a proxy for mobilization rates, examining regions with disproportionate spikes in savings deposits. It’s as if those bonuses are being paid out to families of recruits. So, we’re going to do more with that. Because, yes, we are surprised by not just the economic well-being.
We know the Russian economy is performing better than many thought it would under sanctions. Military spending, reorientation of trade flows, sanctions evasion, and perhaps wise macroeconomic management by folks at the Central Bank — all that has played into the Russian economy doing better these past couple of years than many had expected. All the Western investment has come out, trade sanctions and financial sanctions continue, and yet the Russian economy has done better.
But this “subjective well-being” is really interesting. Happiness at a time when a lot of your countrymen are dying. I’ve done earlier work with a colleague at Indiana University on patriotism, and I can only interpret it as Russians’ national attachment. It doesn’t cover the war years, but there is a survey carried out by the International Social Survey Program, and they had a particular module on national identity. Coming out of World War II, a lot of people recognized that patriotism can have two different types. There can be benign patriotism — “My country is a great place to live” — and there can be more of a malignant patriotism, a more aggressive, threatening-your-neighbors type of patriotism.
A lot of scholars coming out of World War II said that some of the countries that initiated World War II — the Nazis, the Japanese — had that malignant form of patriotism. And so we used the National Identity Module from the International Social Survey Program, where the questions about benign patriotism and malignant patriotism were asked in 1995, in 2003, and in 2013. (So, this was before [Russia’s] annexation of Crimea.) And if you compare Russians to all the other middle- and high-income countries that were part of every wave of those different surveys, Russians were right in the middle of the pack on the benign — “I’m proud of my country” — questions.
On the questions that [measured] malignant patriotic (what we call “blind and militant patriotism”), they asked for responses to the statements: “It’s best to follow your country even if you know your country is in the wrong,” and “Sometimes I recognize that when my country follows its own self-interest, it will have to be aggressive militarily with other countries.”
On these questions measuring blind and militant patriotism, Russians were far and away the most malignantly patriotic of any of the other 15 countries that were in each of those waves.
So, we argued that the blind and militant strain in the average Russian (not all Russians, mind you) was more blind and militant in their attachments to their country. It predates Vladimir Putin, but this common orientation made it easier for him to rule the country and take it into wars. We really think that Putin inherited a country that was easier, on average, to take to war than other populations. By the early 2000s, it was already highly illiberal, in large part because of what happened in the early 1990s.
The early experience with exiting Communism was so painful for Russia. It was painful not only because it was economically painful (other countries in the region, other post-Communist countries, also experienced economic pain). It was painful because it was the loss of the empire as well.
One thing we see with World Values Survey data is that democratic values declined in Russia between 1990 and 1995. Support for democratic values declined elsewhere in other post-Communist countries between 1990 and 1995, but in other post-Communist countries, they recovered when the economy recovered. That early shock had lasting effects and was a jolt to Russians’ pride, their post-imperial sense of being wronged by what had happened. And so support for democratic values didn’t bounce back. It remained low going into the 21st century.
That’s the country that Putin inherited.
Obviously, there are a lot of Russians who came out to protest in 2011 and 2012. They joined Alexey Navalny. Tens of thousands of people came out and were courageous then. A lot of people left the country, many for political and moral reasons. But Russia is a big country. It’s not a country of just tens of thousands. It’s a country of tens of millions. Unfortunately, the hand of history is very heavy. As economists, we’re interested in these big average sentiments across tens of millions of people.
There’s a big literature in political science on a phenomenon called the “rally-around-the-flag effect,” when your country enters a war that you think is just. There’s a jump to supporting the country, and that can spill over into subjective indicators and provide a positive boost to how you see your material situation as well.
We know that President George W. Bush’s popularity went through the roof after 9/11 in the United States. We were in what we saw as a just war against those who attacked us. And many Russians, I think, feel they’re in a just war. At least, certainly if they watch a lot of state television. Maybe they felt that way for a long time.
We know that since the early 1990s, the majority of Russians has viewed the breakup of the Soviet Union, which of course included Ukraine, as a tragedy. Long before Putin said it, they agreed that it was one of the great human tragedies of the 20th century.
— If the current negotiations lead to a temporary or permanent ceasefire in Ukraine and some of the sanctions on Russia are lifted, how might that affect Russians’ sense of well-being?
— That’s a great question. I don’t know. It’s hard to predict. If the war comes to an end, there will be a lot of efforts from the Kremlin through the state media to frame the peace in a way that’s very favorable:
We fought. We sacrificed. And look what we’ve achieved! We’ve given the West a black eye! And look, they’re coming around. President Trump is negotiating with us. He’s open to cutting deals and bringing back investment.
There are all sorts of ways the peace can be framed, but I imagine the subjective well-being will be a function of which media ecosystem individual Russians are in right now. Are they just watching state-owned TV? Do they just have Channel One on? Or are they getting their news from social media, from maybe a richer array of sources that frame the peace differently?
— One of Russia’s biggest problems is severe economic inequality. According to your research, since 2022, more money has been flowing into poorer regions than before. So, in a sense, is the war solving this problem? Will the government have enough money to sustain this redistribution?
— I think it’s short-term. I haven’t seen the latest estimates of interregional inequality, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve gone down. We know that there’s a very high correlation between per capita income and mobilization rates, whether you look at marriage rates, Mediazona’s data, or deposits in bank accounts.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an equalizing out that revives some of these decaying industrial regions, bringing them into military goods production, where Russia is going forward very quickly. If the war ended tomorrow (I don’t think it will), I think Russia would want to replenish its stocks and continue to pump money into those centers of military production.
I’ve seen this speculation that the old regions that were really hard hit in the 1990s — they’re the ones coming back now. They’re the ones getting the industrial production. So maybe. I’m open to that being a possibility.
Some of the shock of the early 1990s was seeing the tremendous inequality that opened up. And I think people seeing that inequality was one of the things that created a great deal of cynicism. “Oh, this is what the transition is all about? It’s about democracy? It’s somebody else getting to drive a Mercedes?” It lasts to this day.
I don’t think running the war is ultimately a solution to inequality in Russia. A better solution is generous public funding of education. Building housing. Making it easier for people to move to regions that are growing and seeing the expansion of industry. Ending corruption. A big source of inequality is people in office being able to turn their government powers into sources of private wealth.
There are a lot of better solutions to inequality, which is a problem in so many countries, mine included. Continuing the war effort would not be at the top of my list. If the Kremlin called me tomorrow and asked for a solution to inequality, I wouldn’t answer the phone, and I definitely wouldn’t say, “Continue the war!”
Interview by Mikita Kuchinski