Richard Rose is a professor of politics at the University of Aberdeen and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy.  He studies responses to transformation across Central and East Europe and the former Soviet Union. 

Question: It is commonly believed that Russians feel their lives are getting better, a fact that American experts use to explain why Putin’s approval ratings have been so high.  In which areas do Russians find the most improvement and how much do they attribute to the Kremlin?

Rose: A lot of it has to do with Putin himself, he has filled a void that Boris Yeltsin left, which was respect for government.  Russians have always been proud of their society, but not always of their government.  People are much more positive about Putin than they are of the Russian government.  They think that the Russian government has not done so well in a lot of basic areas like education, health, housing and agricultural production.

Question: But nevertheless people do feel their lives are improving?

Rose: That’s something else again, because Russians have quickly adapted to the idea that they have to look after themselves, a lesson learned in the Soviet era.  That’s what you had to do, because the Soviet system was built on grinding the faces of the Kulaks and the Serfs and everybody who got in the way of the party state.  Their lives have gotten better.  They have more consumer goods.  The first thing they got was freedom.  Freedom to ignore the state, to ignore the party.  Freedom to window shop…

In Brezhnev’s time, shop windows were empty.  People had savings because there was nothing to spend money on. Whereas now, there are plenty of things to buy, the problem is, do you have enough money?  Not just to get the necessities, but also to buy things that make life pleasant, whether it’s a DVD, internet, or a car, which they would not have had before.

Question: You wrote an interesting piece talking about Russia’s vision of “normal.”  What do Russians today see as a normal society?  How does it differ from the Western concept?

Rose: It doesn’t differ much actually.  They think it’s a society where people can do what they like.  [A place] where they have enough to eat, where their children have opportunities to get a better job, where the state doesn’t mess them about a lot… Normal Russian people are not that different from people you might meet in Kansas or at an Iowa hog farm.  What makes some difference, of course, is the society they have been living in, which has had a lot of swings and ups and downs for the average 40-year-old Russian.

Question: Is the version of a normal society different today than it was, say, ten years ago?

Rose: No, it’s not different, what’s different is the society.  The society is different because you don’t have 100 percent inflation.  You don’t have the economy contracting, and all the great big dislocations that would occur when transformation has gone away.  After all, American who went out and settled the Wild West were not living in a normal society, were they? Only after women came out and schools got built and the railway came through, then it could be called that.  Well, Russians hadn’t been living in a normal society during Soviet times.  It took about 10 or 15 years to shake everything around.

Question: What have your recent public opinion surveys been telling you about the mood of the Russian people?  Have there been any fresh insights?

Rose: Yes, actually I have got on my desk at the moment a survey that was completed just after the presidential election in March done with the Levada centre.  What it shows is that in 1998 for example if you ask people: have you adapted to the big changes that have happened in society, do you think you will adapt in the near future, or would you say you can never adapt to a society turned upside down?  In 1998, the largest group said that they would never adapt.  Now, 2008, ten years later, 66 percent said that they have already adapted.  Some said they would adapt in the near future.  Only one in seven said they haven’t adapted.  These are most people who are old: they will die before they will adapt.

Question: I noticed that on one of the polls, it said that 55 percent of Russians say the country is going in the right direction, and 29 percent say that it’s going in the wrong direction.  What accounts for the differences in viewpoints? Does it depend on factors such as geographical location, income level, age, or something else entirely?

Rose: I think that up to a point, it is a question of political values.  On the market side, there are people who are liberals, like Kasparov the chess champion, who want a democratic Russia.  There are people who believe that the market ought to operate and that there is nothing wrong with letting foreign oil companies operate in Russia because they can extract oil more efficiently and more effectively than some of the companies are doing now.  On the other hand, there are some people who are still looking to the past.  They perhaps don’t like a lot of foreigners around.  They don’t like sex on television. They don’t like drugs.  They get nervous about crime.  They just want to roll back into the past where everything was quiet.

The strength of the Putin administration was that he has been able to put together a broad centrist coalition.  On the one hand, he has rebuilt a church that was torn down by Stalin.  On the other hand, he’s not a Communist, [but] he said that the Soviet Union was a great achievement of world society.  So, has appealed to all sorts while trying to marginalize critics.

Question: Is the way the public views Medvedev completely dependent on how they view Putin, or do you think he has an independent persona?

Rose:  It’s too early for Medvedev to be fully independent.  He starts out as having been a protégé of Putin.  He doesn’t have good connections with the military-industrial complex or with the siloviki, the security people.  He has to cultivate the powers of his office.  The people who work for Putin will still want to give orders and throw their weight around with Putin [being the] prime minister, and the people who work for the new president will want to throw their weight around.  It happens in Britain. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were at each others throats, and it was really their staffs who were engaging in the war.  So, I think in a year or two, you might start seeing signs of tension between the Prime Minister’s staff and the President’s staff.  In Washington, it’s all out in the open of course, because you have Congress and different parties.  Soon, Medvedev and his staff are going to feel that they don’t have to ring up somebody else to figure out what to do.

Question: How do Russians see their future?

Rose: The optimism is growing.  If you talk about the indefinite future, when things are getting better, you begin to have a turnover of generations. You have people who were of middle age when the system collapsed. You have people who were not set in their ways, now in their late-40s. You have young people for whom it is the only system they know.  Broadly speaking, there is a lot of optimism about the future.  Some of this is just a projection of what has been happening already.  It also means that [Russians] know the rules of the game have changed.  They know they are in a market society.  It might not be a market economy that would be recommended by Harvard economists, but money speaks and you can buy what you want, including influence in government.  There is still frustration about, and there is not much hope for change or for the party in power to lose office.  But ordinary people have space to breathe, to shop, to work, and to enjoy their freedoms.

Question: What have you found to be most interesting about studying Russian public opinion over the past 16 some years?

Rose: Well, I started out the first month of the Russian Federation.  When I started writing a questionnaire in the Soviet Union, I was sitting in Moscow, in a suburb.  The snow was falling, and so was the Soviet Union; we didn’t know what would be there when [the snow] melted.

So we had to ask people about “this country,” but we didn’t know what the country would be called and what its boundaries would be called.

What you had were two things: the recovery from the economic deterioration of the 1990s, which was squeezing a lot of junk out of the system.  This was bound to pay dividends.  It’s happened all over Central and Eastern Europe.  If you shrink the economy by eight percent a year, you get rid of junk and then it is much easier to grow fast.  Russians have benefited from the enormous escalation of world energy prices.  They haven’t made as much as they might have, in terms of economic efficiency.  Politically, of course, they are throwing their weight about and the government is showing that they are a little less concerned with developing alliances with other people and more with dominating the near-abroad, as with shutting off energy to Ukraine, putting troops in part of the Georgian state...  The government in some ways is playing a power game in Europe, not with arms, but with energy, and that is alright as long as the energy prices stay up; but if they go down, they are in trouble.

Question: What do you think American experts studying Russia most misunderstand about the attitudes of Russians today?

Rose: Well, Russians don’t care that much about the United States.  They care a lot more about Russia.  As one says, Washington is a small town, global in scope.  Well, Moscow is a big city, but within the Ring Road of Moscow, it is a small town.  The question is, is its view of the world much different from that of the United States?  It looks eastwards towards former parts of the Soviet Union in energy-rich Central Asia.  It has a big long land border with China.  If Americans can be concerned about immigrants from Latin America, the Russians can be concerned with immigrants from China.  It has a Muslim population; nobody knows how much, maybe 8-12 million. The Chechens are Muslim, so they are worried a little about terrorism.  It’s a world unto itself.  Only 14 percent of Russians currently say they know English, and that’s probably an overestimate.

The Russians live in a large continental universe.  They can have holidays on the Black Sea.  They can go skiing in Russia. They can surf the internet in Cyrillic.  So in that sense, it is much more self-contained.  What the next president of the United States does will be noticed in the Kremlin, and they will react, but basically just as American presidential candidates don’t care what non-voting foreigners think, Russians don’t care what Americans think.