Everyday Politics in Russia - by Jeremy Morris (Hardcover)

About the Book

A landmark insight into the everyday political lives of ordinary Russians and their attitudes towards the war in Ukraine, their government and their lives since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Book Synopsis

What do Russians really want? Do they want authoritarianism and are they prepared to go along with a war of conquest and destruction? Or do they want something else?

A landmark contribution to the field, Morris is the only social researcher to have carried out fieldwork in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, engaging with communities in Moscow, regional cities, as well as rural areas to bring perspectives on Russian everyday lives that are now entirely inaccessible to the West. Everyday Politics in Russiauses the lens of micropolitics, defined not as politics in miniature but instead as taking seriously the political content of people's normal lives revealed in their practices, interactions and discussions. Based on decades-long interactions with people from a diverse cross-section of society in Russia - from security service officers to factory workers, from unemployed young men to citizen journalists and activists, this is the most comprehensive insight to date into the complexity of Russian attitudes toward war, their government and the post-1991 political trajectory.

Review Quotes

Morris offers a unique perspective on contemporary Russia, coming from a stranger who lives in the country and studies it without prejudice. If you are looking for a single account of life in wartime Russia, read Everyday Politics in Russia. It meticulously conveys a rich and sobering story of what happens when politics dies, yet a glimmer of the political remains.
Greg Yudin, Princeton University, USA

This ambitious book explores the forms of political life in contemporary Russia through a close anthropological gaze. Focusing on "ordinary people" deprived of political power and the capacity for collective organization, the book brilliantly demonstrates that their lives can be intensely political, even if this politics may be invisible to dominant theories and research methods ... By showing that the political exists in forms and places that transcend not only state institutions and systems of hierarchical subordination, but also romanticized forms of resistance and "weapons of the weak," this study expands the vocabulary of political anthropology.
Alexei Yurchak, author of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation

This exceptional dive into Russian society is an exemplary demonstration that cultural anthropology has become crucial to capture the nuances, ambivalences, and the cocreational nature of the relationship between state and society in Russia. A must-read for those who want to comprehend Russia from the inside, and in war time.
Marlene Laruelle, author of Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime

About the Author

Jeremy Morris is Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of Varieties of Russian Activism: State-Society Contestation in Everyday Life (2023), Everyday Postsocialism: Working-class communities in the Russian Margins (2016), and co-editor of New Media in New Eurasia (2015); The Informal Postsocialist Economy: Embedded Practices and Livelihoods (2014), Identity and Nation Building in Everyday Post-Socialist Life (2017). His article entitled 'Beyond Coping? Alternatives to Consumption within Russian Worker Networks', in Ethnography, was shortlisted for the BBC's 'Thinking Allowed' prize for ethnography in 2014.