What do Russians think about the risks associated with the coronavirus, and about how the authorities handled the epidemic? The government keeps tirelessly talking about unprecedented support measures — but did citizens actually see that support, and did they find it sufficient? How badly have people in our country been affected by the coronavirus? We tried to answer all of these questions in a May study conducted by ACF’s sociological service. In order to carry out a high-quality survey during the epidemic, a great deal had to be reworked in the sociologists’ methods, and the survey took much longer than usual, but now we are ready to share its results.
Let’s start with the last question: exactly half of those surveyed said that their families’ financial situation had suffered because of the epidemic. Nearly a third said that their economic situation had not just “changed,” but “changed significantly.” In this context, what did our respondents think the government should have done?
Obviously, it should have provided people with direct financial assistance. Eighty-seven percent of respondents agree. That was also the main demand of the “5 Steps” program.
Russian voters also tend to agree with the other provisions of the “5 Steps” program: overall, 72% of respondents support our program:
But, as you know, of our five demands, Putin and the Russian government fulfilled only one (a payment of 10,000 rubles per child), and even that in a reduced form.
And there is no need to think that people failed to notice this. Despite nonstop propaganda, the assessment of the authorities’ effectiveness was highly unflattering for Putin and Mishustin:
Only one in six respondents considers the support measures actually implemented to be sufficient. More than half of voters say that these measures were too limited (and they are absolutely right, of course).
So, the government’s economic policy did not win public support. But what do people think about protecting their lives and health, about fighting the epidemic itself, rather than its economic consequences? Here the picture is much more complicated. So much more complicated, in fact, that respondents’ answers may even seem logically contradictory.
For example, on the one hand, more than two-thirds of respondents believe that the president and the government generally have the situation under control. In other words, they think the authorities are managing to cope with the epidemic. But on the other hand, these same respondents are twice as likely to say that the epidemiological measures are insufficient as to say that they are excessive:
How can these two things coexist? It seems that the reason is the Kremlin’s contradictory information policy (which, as we remember, began with claims that the coronavirus was some kind of “miracle of miracles” and basically just an ordinary viral respiratory infection). It simply confused a huge number of people. As a result, a third of respondents — now, two months after the start of the epidemic, when the death toll has long since reached many thousands — still remain active “COVID dissidents.”
And this is probably one of the most alarming figures in the entire survey. Clearly, there can be no talk of an effective fight against the epidemic if one in three people believes the threat is nonexistent, made up — and is therefore unwilling to follow doctors’ recommendations and safety measures. COVID dissidents and COVID deniers exist, unfortunately, in almost every country, but almost everywhere they make up a fringe minority. A third is an enormous number; and these tens of millions of COVID dissidents were raised largely by Russian propaganda, which throughout January, February, and March kept insisting that the coronavirus was nothing to fear — all in order to save at any cost Putin’s April 22 vote on the constitutional amendments. In the end, they failed to save the vote, lost control of the epidemic, and still cannot cope with it — because too many people bought into the propaganda and do not believe there is any epidemic at all.
In general, it is well known that the countries that managed to defeat the coronavirus effectively were those with a high level of trust between the authorities and society. In those countries, governments told people: stay home, trust us, we know what needs to be done, and we will give you money and provide all the support you need so that you can get through quarantine without undue hardship. In Russia, there is no such trust between the authorities and society, and that comes through very clearly in the answer to the following question:
Half of those surveyed do not trust the official statistics. Despite round-the-clock propaganda, despite endless “fake news fines.” It did not help even that Maria Zakharova and Senator Pushkov mocked The New York Times and categorically denied the Financial Times report on the real state of affairs in the country. And yet: half of Russians know that the authorities are lying. That is the result of 20 years of Putin-era propaganda, and of the hundreds of billions of rubles funneled through Kiselyov, Solovyov, and Margarita Simonyan. From the standpoint of fighting the epidemic, this is a very bleak outcome, because if there is no trust in official information from the authorities, then there can be no trust in the decisions the authorities make on the basis of that information. But from the standpoint of the Beautiful Russia of the Future, perhaps it is not such a bad result: people are not fools, and they can tell when they are being lied to outright. The power of propaganda is far from limitless.
And finally, two slides with approval ratings:
Fifty-seven percent of respondents view Vladimir Putin positively or somewhat positively; 12% feel the same about me.
Vladimir Putin’s disapproval rating is 18%; mine is 25%. What is important to understand about these numbers, and what is unusual about them?
At first glance, it may seem entirely discouraging: Putin’s rating appears to be holding up well despite all the failures of recent months, despite the epidemic, the resetting of presidential term limits, and the refusal to help people, despite respondents’ distrust of official coronavirus information and their low assessment of the authorities’ effectiveness.
However, first, Putin’s rating has never been this low in our measurements. (VTsIOM, in a similar survey, got 69%, and now we know for certain that this is simply a lie.) Second, and even more importantly, the disapproval rating has never been this high. It seems reasonable to add to the 18% who were not afraid to admit in a phone survey that they feel negatively toward the president a significant share of the 24% who described their attitude as “neutral” (this is indirectly suggested by the fact that in previous surveys we had never seen such a large share of “neutral” responses) — they cannot bring themselves to express support, but are afraid to state a negative view. Yes, Putin remains a fairly popular politician, but his popularity is declining and approaching 50%, while his disapproval rating has become very substantial.
So substantial, in fact, that it has almost caught up with my own disapproval rating — a figure that the entire vast machine of Kremlin propaganda has been working around the clock for years to inflate. It has been working… and has produced a 25% disapproval rating, and that number has been falling rapidly in recent months and years. Meanwhile, the base of supporters is growing. A 12% approval rating, if extrapolated to all Russian voters, means nearly 15 million people who follow our work and support us (which roughly corresponds to the monthly audience of the Navalny and Navalny LIVE YouTube channels in 2020).
So things are actually not bad at all. The first polling before the 2013 Moscow mayoral election gave Sobyanin about 75% and me about 3%. After two months of campaigning, let us recall, Sobyanin avoided a runoff only through falsification, receiving 51% (the Moscow City Election Commission credited me with 28%). The political landscape has changed dramatically since then — in fact, that is precisely why I am no longer allowed to run in elections. We will keep working: the 27% who “do not know who he is” are still waiting.