Who Actually Supports This War: The Politics of Passive Complicity
There is a question that recurs in every honest conversation about this war, and it is almost never answered honestly: how many Russians actually support it? The number matters, because so much else hangs from it — questions of guilt, of resistance, of what kind of country will remain when the killing stops. But the number is also a trap, and the way people reach for it usually says more about what they want to believe than about what is true. Some want the figure to be near zero, so that the war can be blamed on one man and his clique, and the rest of the population absolved. Others want it to be the whole hundred and forty million, so that an entire people can be condemned and the bookkeeping of conscience closed for good. Neither of these is the truth, and the truth, when you look at it squarely, is more uncomfortable than either, because it refuses to let anyone off the hook and it refuses to let everyone be hanged together. ...