Four years after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — and twelve since the annexation of Crimea — the nature of the conflict has shifted from a geopolitical maneuver to an existential project. In the Russian media landscape, the decimation of Ukrainian infrastructure and the death of civilians are no longer collateral damage to be excused; they are objectives to be celebrated. This shift reflects a deeper transformation within the Russian social fabric, where the genocidal rhetoric of the state has found a permanent home.
Observers often categorize Russian society into two camps: the state-sanctioned image of a nation united in sacrifice, and the dissident view of a populace silenced by fear. The former suggests a monolithic will, while the latter posits a society of hidden objectors waiting for a thaw. However, these binaries may no longer capture the nuance of the moment. The reality is not found in a middle ground or a statistical average of dissent, but in a psychological fusion — one that demands a different analytical framework altogether.
The Performer Becomes the Role
The concept is not new. Václav Havel, writing about Czechoslovakia under Soviet occupation, described how citizens who displayed regime slogans in shop windows did not necessarily believe in them — but the act of display itself sustained the system's architecture of compliance. Over time, the distinction between participation and belief became operationally irrelevant. The greengrocer did not need to be a communist; he needed only to behave as one, and the regime endured regardless.
Russia's trajectory follows a similar logic but with a critical difference of scale and duration. The prolonged performance of loyalty has fundamentally altered the performer. In a society where survival depends on the public mimicry of state ideology — where teachers recite approved narratives about the war, where neighbors monitor neighbors, where even private messaging carries legal risk — the distinction between the mask and the face eventually disappears. What began as strategic adaptation to authoritarianism has, through time and repetition, solidified into something closer to a new national identity.
Social psychology has long documented this mechanism. Cognitive dissonance theory holds that individuals who repeatedly act in contradiction to their private beliefs will, over time, adjust those beliefs to match their behavior. The discomfort of sustained hypocrisy resolves not through rebellion but through internalization. When the performance lasts months, the mask chafes. When it lasts years, the mask grafts onto the skin. When it lasts a decade, there may be no meaningful face beneath it.
This is the condition that now confronts analysts attempting to gauge Russian public opinion. Polling in authoritarian states is inherently unreliable — respondents calibrate answers to perceived safety, not to truth. But the deeper problem is that the question itself may have lost coherence. Asking whether Russians "truly" support the war presupposes a stable private self that exists apart from the public one. After twelve years of escalating conformity, that presupposition is increasingly difficult to sustain.
The War as Identity Engine
Wars of this duration do not merely consume resources; they reorganize the societies that wage them. The mobilization of economy, media, education, and civic life around a single martial purpose creates feedback loops that are difficult to reverse even when the original strategic rationale fades. The war becomes self-justifying — not because its goals are achieved, but because the social order has been rebuilt around its continuation.
Historical parallels are instructive, if imperfect. Imperial Japan's militarization in the 1930s and 1940s produced a society in which dissent was not merely punished but rendered psychologically implausible for large segments of the population. The post-war reckoning required not just regime change but a wholesale reconstruction of civic meaning. The question of whether ordinary Japanese citizens "supported" the war proved, in retrospect, far less important than the structural reality that the war had become the organizing principle of daily life.
Russia now faces a version of this condition. The tragedy of the current era is not just the war itself, but the way it has rewritten the internal logic of the society that wages it. The apparatus of coercion remains real — prison sentences for dissent, surveillance of digital communications, the chilling effect of public denunciations. Yet coercion alone no longer fully explains the social landscape. Something has calcified.
The analytical challenge, then, is not to determine what percentage of Russians are sincere believers versus reluctant conformists. It is to recognize that the prolonged fusion of state and self may have rendered that distinction obsolete. Whether the mask can ever be separated from the face again — and what would be required to make that possible — remains the central unanswered question of Russia's political future.
With reporting from Liberties Journal.
Source · Liberties Journal
