Not Just Dissidents

Social movement studies and research into civil society have tried to answer similar questions for several decades. The academic field has evolved through different perspectives, moving from a strong liberal bias that considers civil society to exist only in the form of organizations and associations, to considering more context-specific and dispersed forms of civic engagement and political participation.

Through these shifts, however, scholarship on civil society in Russia has often equated this focus with a study of dissident civil society (including my own work). It has revolved around different forms of grassroots opposition to Vladimir Putin’s now twenty-five-year-old regime, to the point that analyzing civil society has become almost synonymous with analyzing its oppositional wing.

Such an approach is rooted in the scholarly tradition of social movement studies, which has consistently focused on progressive movements since its emergence in the 1970s. While evolving into a rich and multifaceted field of academic inquiry, the epistemological base of social movement studies and studies on civil society often remains anchored to its origins.

In nondemocratic contexts, this often means observing liberal and progressive opposition to authoritarian governance. There is surely a rich body of exceptions to this rule. However, these have mostly focused on the organized centers of state-aligned civil society (state-backed organizations such as the patriotic youth movement Nashi and so on), rather than on the ordinary life of non-prominent individuals. Sometimes, in authoritarian contexts, this dynamic risks flattening the distinction between civil society and dissident civil society — giving disproportionate attention to the latter, while leaving the former largely unexplored.

While remaining rooted in the “experiential” dimension of political participation that the study of new social movements and collective action brought to the foreground, Morris has long sought to direct his exploration of political participation beyond a binary juxtaposition between “with the state” and “against the state.” He stands in line with a plethora of other researchers (whom he generously quotes in his book) that represent the freshest approach to the study of Russian society and politics of the last two decades. Morris grounds his analysis in political anthropology, insisting that nothing can be abstracted away from the bottom-up realities of everyday life, and that the political can’t be separated from the social.

So, for instance, to provide a tentative answer to the pressing question of Russians’ views and feelings about the invasion of Ukraine, Morris does not rely on protest analysis. Instead, he advances micropolitics as the lens through which to capture how the political takes shape in everyday life, and, in turn, how the everyday life of citizens responds to, resists, and influences Russian political life. So here the life arc of a young Russian man reveals a structured, state-organized prospectlessness. Similarly, an examination of informal socioeconomic networks also sheds light on the nature of the state-capital nexus in modern Russia.

Lived Experience

For Morris, the fine-grained, ethnographic approach is not only a methodological choice but a necessary correction to the top-heavy frameworks habitually favored by political science. Real political life under modern authoritarian-capitalist regimes isn’t found in official protests or in institutionalized milieus, but in the small, creative practices through which people continually remake their social worlds from below — from crafts and DIY as devices of political affirmation to the reorganization and constant reinvention of activism in the face of state repression.

While grand conceptual models of political science may offer a scaffolding for theorizing politics, they ultimately fall short of grasping what is actually happening on the ground. Only by staying rooted in the lived experiences of ordinary people, Morris argues, can we begin to understand the complexities of political life in Russia. That is necessary even when these lived experiences are inherently ambiguous and contradictory in their understanding and conceptualization of current events. But again: life exceeds categories, and this book is an exploration of what that looks like.

Morris is dissatisfied with the notion of a “depoliticization” of Russian civil society, which is a widespread take in the field. In fact, it is often claimed that the regime’s attitude toward civil society was to encourage detachment and alienation from politics and the political arenas rather than stir active engagement and support. This has largely contributed to citizens’ willingness to turn away from politics.

Instead, Morris advances the notion of “ressentiment”: a “sense of hurt about absent social potentiality,” a longing, a desire, and a strive for something that is painfully missing yet viscerally needed. People in Russia experience a “haunting feeling,” a “deep-seated social frustration when collective desires are blocked,” grounded in the vague perception of a necessity that remains unmet. Morris grounds this frustration in the neoliberal restructuring of post-Soviet, capitalist Russia.

While the state that emerged from 1991 inherited the machinery to reconstruct the security architecture (military, police, borders, etc.), the loss of the Communist Party meant the collapse of the service and developmental state — a gap that has never been closed. The Soviet system, at least in its core conception, was a collective, organic leap of modernity toward a utopian future. It promised to wipe away social competition and embraced a collective project in which individualism lost its meaning. With the capitalist transition and the neoliberal restructuring process, post-Soviet Russia lost both its orientation toward the future, and the collectiveness of its social and economic life.

The shift from the Soviet organization of social and economic life to the hegemony of the market and its discursive dominance marks the everyday experience of Russian citizens. The tension between the internalization of the new market order and a persistent yet vague need for kinship marks the everyday experience of Russian citizens.

Morris suggests that Russia is haunted by its Soviet past — yet in so doing also tackles the liberal tradition of social sciences that mistakenly sees Putin’s Russia as the direct heir of the Soviet period without tackling its neoliberal restructuring. Morris provides a different perspective: Soviet times haunt Russia not as a matter of collective memory or as the provider of repressive apparatuses but in the everyday ways people recognize the failures of neoliberal restructuring. This haunting bubbles up from below, surfacing in the countless frustrations and unmet needs that the market simply cannot resolve.

This is not a psychological aftershock (Morris rejects the pathologizing term “trauma” as a definition for the post-Soviet transition). Instead it is a structural contradiction that makes the Russian state inevitably incoherent. Russians’ ressentiment is not geopolitical in nature but rooted in projects of dispossession. The result is a system marked by fragmentation: powerful enough to coerce, too hollow to care, its incoherence is less an accident than the inevitable legacy of a society forced to abandon one model of collective life without ever fully building another.

This is not nostalgia; it is an unspoken critique that exposes just how far short the promises of the new order have fallen. It is in these fractured reminders, Morris argues, that the Soviet legacy lingers most powerfully: not as a myth to mourn or to blame but as a yardstick against which the present is constantly, if quietly, measured.

This perspective is original and insightful. Morris pushes back against macro-level explanations of resentment in Russia. He insists that ressentiment isn’t the product of top-down forces, whether social psychology or grand geopolitical narratives, but emerges from below, shaped by desire. People are “libidinally invested” in and naturally driven to building relationships and communities. However, neoliberal hierarchical systems turn our energies away from cooperation and toward competition and extraction.

An implication of this is that when the neoliberal state fails to meet citizens’ needs, resentment and frustration are directed toward other smoke-and-mirrors outlets — in this case, geopolitical aspirations based on historical revisionism.

Morris’s approach is resolutely anthropological and ethnographic: he doesn’t offer quantifiable indicators or generalizable patterns but instead draws from the lived experience of his interlocutors, whom he observed closely. The book alternates between theoretical conceptualization and captivating, novel-like accounts of his prolonged, immersive ethnographic fieldwork in Kaluga, near Moscow.

His interlocutors are mostly working-class, are not “prominent activists” (though public figures are also present), and belong to diverse social groups, including both antiwar and pro-war bubbles. In 2025, where fieldwork has been made increasingly inaccessible to social scientists because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the consequent harshening of internal repression and external control, this methodological commitment has an even higher value, even as it limits the theoretical reach of his analysis.

Less Exceptional Than It Seems

The book itself is wittily written, punctuated by frequent citations, though these are sometimes obscure and hardly accessible to a nonspecialist audience. Morris is an ethnographer behaving as a theorist. He puts a huge effort into creating a theoretical scaffolding that can sustain his anthropological methodology and often quotes sociologists, politologists, and philosophers from different periods. At times, Morris’s commitment to engaging with a broad range of theorists results in an overreliance on citation, which can occasionally feel redundant given the strength of his own ethnographic material.

However, the author’s constant engagement with these theoretical touchstones is better understood if we consider his broader body of research. Morris has consistently situated his work within the effort to frame Russian politics and society within the context of global neoliberal restructuring. By bringing a materialist perspective to social movement studies and research on civil society, he connects the Russian experience to the dynamics of transnational neoliberal governance, rather than treating it as a sui generis case sealed off from global trends.

Indeed, Morris has consistently shown that phenomena that are commonly seen as essentially “Russian,” such as the oligarchical system, are not rooted in place-specific path dependency as much as they are in the defining features of neoliberalism. Material dislocation, wealth concentration, welfare retrenchment, security logic, and similar shifts significantly paved the way to contemporary Russian authoritarianism. This approach helps move beyond the exceptionalist narratives that have long warped social science perspectives on Russia, instead offering a reading that foregrounds material conditions and the real, lived entanglements between Russian society and the shifting architectures of global capitalism.

Thanks to his and others’ contributions along the same line, we can start looking at Russia not as a relic chained to the past (as many readings of the “Soviet heritage” seem to suggest), but as the ideal laboratory for observing the most prominent traits of our present. Russia’s neoliberal restructuring exposes the embeddedness of neoliberal governance and authoritarian politics. In this sense, Russia is not stuck in the past. Rather, it is revealing of a possible future, amid the rise of global authoritarianism, the crisis of hegemony of liberal democracy, and the spiraling of neoliberal capitalism down its most violent and alienating forms.