Joshua Tucker: On June 12, 1990, Russian leaders declared the sovereignty of its laws over Soviet legislation, providing significant momentum to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A recent special issue of Post-Soviet Affairs looks at the attitudes of Russia’s high-ranking individuals across various sectors, using data from the Survey of Russian Elites (SRE) between 1993 and 2016. I asked the guest editors about the issue’s new insights on Russian views of the United States.
William Zimmerman: Several articles in the double issue, which was produced with funding from the National Science Foundation, look at how messages coming from the Kremlin shape Russia’s foreign policy positions.
For instance, in the article co-authored by Sharon Werning Rivera and James Bryan, they find that some aspects of background and philosophical orientation were reasonably predictive of Russian elites’ views of the U.S. during the Yeltsin period in the 1990s. Debates and diverse views about Western intentions toward Russia were robust at the time. But anti-American sentiment has become more uniform among high-ranking Russians in the Putin era — perhaps a reflection of the increasingly fervent anti-American narrative on state-controlled television.
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Another of our authors, Olesya Tkacheva, shows that high-ranking Russians who follow news online perceive the U.S. as less hostile and less of a security threat than those who rely on traditional media like television. It’s likely, then, that Russia’s top thinkers watch the Kremlin’s official narrative closely — if state-controlled television networks change their messaging, foreign policy attitudes might change as well.
JT: What did you learn from the research in the special issue that most surprised you?
Sharon Werning Rivera: Don’t miss Henry Hale’s investigation of how Russia’s relationship to the outside world affects expectations of leadership succession in Russia. He shows that elites who view Russia as a part of European civilization are more likely to believe that Putin’s United Russia Party will lose power in the next 10 years. This is because they envision a future for Russia that is more like that of European countries, with more democracy, political equality and electoral uncertainty.
And an article by Kirill Petrov and Vladimir Gel’man concludes that Russia’s elites generally rate their ability to influence foreign policy decisions as quite limited. But surprisingly, they show that representatives of subgroups with far less influence on foreign policy (such as the media and private business) are more confident about their ability to impact foreign policy decisions than are those from the military, security agencies and the executive branch, for instance. For Petrov and Gel’man, these findings highlight the personalist nature of Russia’s political system, as well as the weakness of formal institutions in foreign policy decision-making.
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JT: Do Russia’s elites have a different foreign policy outlook than the general population?
WZ: The available data, while limited, show some important differences, yes.
In my earlier book based on SRE data from the 1990s, I found that on balance elites are less isolationist and more internationally inclined than are mass publics. For instance, throughout the 1990s, foreign policy elites were markedly more likely than the general public to agree that Russia should send its troops to assist countries that were formerly part of the U.S.S.R. if they request military assistance. This was also true for sending troops to assist other foreign countries.
SR: We also see differences in outlook in Putin’s third presidential term beginning in 2012. In your contribution to the special issue, you and co-author Noah Buckley show that between 2004 and 2014, general Russian views about the U.S., Ukraine and the European Union more or less corresponded to those of Russian elites. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, however, the opinions of the two groups diverged. Since the incentive to conform to the Kremlin’s views had increased, elites — and especially the “core” elites who were close to the government — seem to have shifted their opinions to align more closely with official positions than did the public.
JT: How did the Survey of Russian Elites get started?
WZ: I started working with survey data as part of the Soviet Interview Project, a series of interviews with former Soviet citizens who had immigrated to the U.S. between 1979 and 1982. I later began working with Russian survey researcher Elena Bashkirova, and our partnership has produced the Survey of Russian Elites since 1993, which now extends to an eighth wave conducted in 2020.
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Elena’s firm has implemented all of the SRE surveys over the past 27 years. And Sharon took over as principal investigator of the project in 2016. Once the 2020 wave is added, the combined data set will include 1,909 interviews with high-ranking Russian individuals in seven sectors: the legislative branch, the executive branch, the military and security agencies, state-owned enterprises, private businesses, scientific and educational institutions with strong international connections, and the media. All along, Elena has tried to identify individuals connected in some way with foreign policy issues.
While this is not a panel study that re-interviews the same individuals over time, it is unique in that it is the only repeated cross-sectional survey of contemporary Russian foreign policy elites. Since the survey has asked many of the same questions repeatedly over more than two decades, this data set (archived at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) provides a unique window into how the attitudes of elites as a whole in Russia have changed over time.
JT: Where can our readers find the articles in the special issue, and how long will they be available?
SR: You can catch up on the entire collection of articles on the Post-Soviet Affairs website. This special issue also includes research by Kirill Kalinin, Danielle Lussier, and Kirill Zhirkov, as well as the team of Elena Bashkirova, Tamara Litikova, and Dina Smeltz.
Thanks to the efforts of the journal’s editor Timothy Frye, the entire issue is now ungated — available free — through the end of August 2020.