In Moscow's Shadows 243: Who Controls The Story In Russia?

Power doesn’t just seize territory. It seizes the story. I’m using a selection of 6 excellent new books to follow the narrative battlegrounds where modern Russia tries to control what people see as true, normal, and inevitable, and where society still finds ways to push back even when formal protest is risky, whether in framing Harry Potter, or surviving in the occupied Donbas.

The books in question are:

• Alexis Lerner, Post-Soviet Graffiti. Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025) - see also her Eurasian Knot podcast interview here.
• Michael Gorham, Networking Putinism. The rhetoric of power in the digital age (Cornell University Press, 2026)
• Eliot Borenstein,The Politics of Fantasy. Magic, Children’s Literature and Fandom in Putin's Russia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). 
• Greta Lynn Uehling, Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine  (Cornell University Press, 2023)
• David Lewis, Occupation. Russian Rule in Southeastern Ukraine (Hurst, 2025) 
• Martin Laryš, Rebel Militias in Eastern Ukraine, from leaderless groups to proxy armies (Routledge, 2025). 

Details of the Times event on 7 May I mentioned are here.

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Transcript

Narratives, Travel Notes, Admin

MG 0:00

Narratives of power matter. Whether we're talking about disputes over control of public spaces, whether it's a wall in your street, or whether it's the internet in Russia, or indeed whether we're talking about how you frame what happened in the Donbass and then the subsequent occupation regime which has been imposed in place. So let's dig into all of them. This podcast, of varying length, frequency, and format, yet always reassuringly low production values, is supported by generous and perspicacious patrons like you, and also by the Crisis Exercise software company Conductor. Hello and welcome to the shadows. Now, as you listen to this, I will probably be travelling. I'm essentially travelling for a couple of weeks, and therefore, well, there won't be an In Moscow Shadow next Sunday, and this one I'm actually recording on the morning of 2nd of April. So again, if something dramatic has just happened in the news and I'm not talking about it, that's why. I would mention, by the way, that paying patrons will be getting some bits and pieces in the next fortnight to make up for the absence of the usual programming. Oh, and by the way, if you are in London on the evening of Thursday, the 7th of May, I'm on a panel for a Times event. Can Europe Rearm in Time? NATO Defence and the Future of Security? My first question would actually be, in time for what? But anyway, that's being held at the Royal Geographical Society, and I'm there on the panel along with such luminaries as Mark Urban, the former diplomatic editor of Newsnight, Times Berlin correspondent Oliver Moody, and Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. It it's not cheap, I'll acknowledge, but if you're interested, I'll leave a link in the programme notes. Anyway, as befits something that is being recorded well in advance of time, what I thought I'd do is I'd use this as an opportunity to review some recent books and also to spin that out into what that says about modern Russia. And I'm going to start with three books on Russia, and then after the break, three books on Ukraine. And by the way, all of them, in their own ways, I wholeheartedly recommend. And just as a note on that, because I do sometimes get some queries, generally speaking, I don't think it's worth wasting your and my time talking about books that I don't particularly like. Sometimes I will because there's a particular aspect I want to dig into. And occasionally, yeah, I will want to put the boot in because there is a book that either I think is so wrong-headed or so potentially dangerous in giving a certain sense, or often both of the above, that I think that it's a um both a pleasure and a public duty to do so. But generally speaking, I'm gonna raise books because I want them to be on your radar, because I think they they say something. Sometimes these are, of course, published by the sort of academic presses whose eye-watering prices really mean that they're they're basically being written for the specialists and for the library, but nonetheless, at least I want to let you know about them. Anyway, the first ones are about, as I say, Russia and particularly narratives and representations of power. And I want to start with Alexis Lerner's excellent post-Soviet graffiti, title that clearly echoes John Bushnell's also really very good Moscow graffiti of an earlier age. And Alexis Lerner's book is subtitled Free Speech in Authoritarian States, and it comes out with, or came out rather, with University of Toronto Press last year, 2025. By the way, you'll note the plural authoritarian states. It's not just about Russia, but also tours countries across the region from Bielarus to Ukraine. And in that context, come to think of it, I also should direct you to an episode of the very good Eurasian Knot podcast, in back in January, as I recall, where Sean Gillery, the host, talks to a learner about her book. Again, I'll leave a note in the programme notes, a link rather, but nonetheless you can find it yourself. Anyway, so it covers a range of countries, but obviously I'll be focusing on the Russia dimension. Now, graffiti, street art in general, I find fascinating because precisely of the way that it can be commercialized and co-opted by the state, or indeed by corporations, but it always retains that that anarchic kind of edge. Even that piece of official art, after all, can be graffitied and defaced in turn or otherwise repurposed, whether it's from official representation to subversive caricature or very rarely the other way around. I mean I remember once, all this must have been in I'm guessing about 2018. Now, Moscow is obviously full of all sorts of official street art as well as some actually some quite good uh genuine graffiti. But I remember this is out in a southeastern sort of suburb, and there was a local and frankly not very good, piece of sort of official street art fating the quote unquote heroes of the Donbass, in which every single face had had a little Hitler moustache added. Now, on one level that's a very trivial kind of uh repurposing, but nonetheless, you know one could read it as actually giving quite a significant message. So again, this is the thing, it it not only does street art repurpose and redefine the cityscape, but it can in turn be repurposed itself. And this way public spaces become political ones, especially in times when when physical protests, when standing up with a placard or whatever, is unsafe or indeed virtually impossible. Because after all, this graffiti is generally anonymous, it's cheap, it's easy, you can do it in your own time, and it can give voice to the marginalized as well as the oppressed. Now for over a decade, Lerner has been sampling street art in various post-communist states, and she herself says that she views them like any texts, you know, that you read them through a variety of lenses, as much for how they are understood as how they are intended. Because remember that you know the image may well have been created with a particular goal in mind, but people will bring their own assumptions and expectations and prejudices and hopes to how they then read them. And she rightly says that graffiti does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it can be read as a narrative about a place, the people who live there, and the things that matter to them. But here's an interesting thing. You know, often the aesthetic of particularly graffiti, is much the same across the world. You know, whether it's in terms of just simple and rather sort of banal tagging, whether it's subbanksisms or whatever else. So the question is actually how how is it different in authoritarian states? And a lot of what she discusses is uplifting and encouraging. But what's the conclusion? Well it starts If Russian street art began with an illicit breakdancing video in the back room of a St. Petersburg cafe, with revolutionary aesthetics that challenged existing power structures and empowered the lay person to comment on the restrictions of contemporary life, it ends with the submissive whimper of constraint and co-optation. That's pretty depressing, although the degree to which corporate and state power also manifest here is unfortunately undeniable. And in many ways that actually is at odds with the very last line. In a world where voices are silenced and individual rights are threatened, graffiti stands as a resounding testament to the enduring resilience of human expression. Now, of course, yeah, expression is not always lovely. Sometimes it's racist, it's fascistic, it's xenophobic, it's anti Semitic, it's misogynistic, you name it. But it's all there sprayed and written and painted onto the public space. And in the struggle between let's see, between ideas, but also between what we could call the street and the state, it's the very vigour of that struggle that is arguably what counts. The fact that people still want to do that, because that demonstrates something. It demonstrates not just that kind of um anarchic, maybe even selfish, maybe even destructive strand of opinion, but also that willingness to put yourself out there and that hope that in your representation you can actually touch and influence someone else. And the struggle to actually influence other people is in many ways at the heart of Michael Gorham's networking Putinism, The Rhetoric of Power in the Digital Age, Cornell University Press 2026. If Lerner's book is about the struggle for the wall between state and society, Gorham looks at what we could think of as the virtual wall, the public space of the Internet, and the struggle to control the online narrative. Now the thing is, Putin himself is famously critical of the internet, describing it as an invention of the CIA and 50% full of porn. Well, okay, so he's half right. But just as Russia as a whole has actually been become rather strikingly e-connected, so too have Putin's people, if not he himself, proved determined and often actually you've got to recognise quite clever in trying to shape and dominate this rhetorical space. There's so much here in this book that is useful and important. Guaram does us all a great service, not least by wading through so many different online sites, telegram channels and the like. And I certainly could could talk quite a bit about, for example, his take on President then President Medvedev's vision of a sort of blogging bureaucracy. His attempts to heighten the internetedness of the system certainly failed to enthuse much of the government apparatus and frankly seems to have been sabotaged by Putin when Putin was his Prime Minister. Or else his discussion of Navalny as mediated opposition. I mean actually on that point, little sidebar, I was reminded by Goram of some of Navalny's great zingers. He really was very good at this. For example, it's a couple from around the time of the castling in 2011, when Mediev, infamous for his love of Apple gadgets, his iPad and so forth, handed the presidency back to Putin. So there was this sort of comment that the iPod has been replaced by the Android. Yeah, the Android, different operating system, but also it was a reference to the robotic nature of Russian bureaucracy. And then another one which is much more in really in the in the style of the classic Russian joke, the anecdote. The most popular cake in Moscow is now the Medvedev. Oh what kind of cake is it? It's like a Napoleon, only without eggs. Now Napoleon, the Napoleon being a very popular cake in Russia, and eggs being slang for testicles. But what again I I in in some ways if if I look at the bigger picture message, the book is fascinating in how it covers Prigozin, Evgeny Prigozin, and his transition from troll farmer to really something of a meme himself. But above all though, what I want to do is focus on the chapter which is called The Rhetoric of Trolling, which is led by a quote from Vladislav Surkov, everyone's favourite postmodern political technologist. Search engines and social networks are becoming the finest and most powerful instruments of manipulation. Due to its inertia, the state has been slow in mastering them. But when it does, a lot of interesting things will happen. Well, haven't they just? Goram explores the Russian internet culture's distinctions between Tonki and Tolsti trolling, thin versus thick, although he suggests really it's better thought of as nuanced versus crude. The latter, the crude form, is exactly the sort of heavy handed and aggressive provocateur. The former is a subtle, witty, elite troll. I mean it's fascinating. There is in some ways a class distinction even within the Russian notions of trolling. And in an age of expanding, decentralized, transnational, and notionally uncontrollable online discourse, the course the state was going to roll in. What you can't block, after all, you can swamp direct an influence. And you can, as Brigozhin's Internet Research Agency shows, outsource that to autocrats, you know, to various officials and also above all economic actors, people who really want to become political entrepreneurs, and they and their hordes of rather uninvolved but nonetheless paid helots working off a frankly often pretty clever set of programmes and taskings can begin to try to sort of reshape the online narrative. Now, of course, Navalny was in many ways a troll. He was certainly a provocateur. And here it's always very tempting to kind of frame this as a conflict between the thick, clumsy state versus the thin, playful opposition. And look, there's a lot of truth in that, in this situation at least. But it's more complex. The pro-vlast, pro-power forces could be clever, and the critics of the regime could be thuggish. And in some ways, the former, the the state's agencies, they wanted to anger the latter, the opposition, precisely to provoke them, to make them thicker, to make them more clumsy. Goram quotes Yeegor Khalmogorov, who's an interesting author and publicist on the distinctly nationalist end of the political spectrum, whom I mentioned in my episode a couple of weeks back about the act of kind of created ideology. Anyway, he said, I'm ashamed of my enemies, because they are my enemies. It means I am somehow guilty of their brutalization. So the Kremlin, while is using the internet, is also very keen to present it as a festering hellhole. The layer of not just trolls, but boars and betrayers, paphiles and provocateurs, spies and scammers. So in this race, what's interesting is the state at once wants to use the online space, but also to delegitimize it. Because after all, while Putin might want to wish this online space away, he can't. And digitally mediated communication remains this very highly contested battlefield. And rhetoric, turbocharged by memes and trolling, still matters. I mean, if we look at the current struggle with the state sort of trying to bear down on Telegram, whether or not it ever will actually sort of really try and pull the trigger and actually ban it or not, given the extent to which it is very, very widely used, not least by the state, remains to be seen. But again, you know, we have this constant tension between actually making the internet as inconvenient and unuseful as possible, and instead regarding it as an extraordinary way in which to try and reach out and influence people at home as well as abroad. But the point is to influence people, sure, you can either have the negative message, and this is again where I think the thick and thin angle comes in. The thick approach is just to basically try to delegitimise everything. Oh everybody lies, oh nobody knows, oh it's hopeless trying to actually gain any kind of meaningful message, so let's just look at memes of cats. And then the thin approach, which is actually try to try and win the narrative battle, to try and actually use it as an opportunity to push forward your messages. And that is, as I say, why actually discussion over ideas matters. But I mentioned that Putin might want to wish the internet away. Well, speaking of wishes, let me end this section with something of a palette cleanser, but it does still connect with what I've been talking about. Elliot Borenstein's lovely The Politics of Fantasy, Magic, Children's Literature and Fandom in Putin's Russia, University of Wisconsin Press 2025. Look, I'm a great fan of Elliot's writings, especially actually his Plots Against Russia, Conspiracy and Fantasy After Socialism. So I've mentioned, I believe, in a previous podcast a long time ago. And this book was absolutely no disappointment. Now, ostensibly, this is about the phenomenon of I was going to say Harry Potter, but you know, if we're talking about his his Russian incarnation, it's obviously Gary Potter. I always love this how H becomes G in translation. And speaking of translation, by the way, I mean, yes, it's that is part of what the book is about, the the various epic struggles over translation, the fact that seven individuals translated the first five books for two publishers, and in some cases padded the books out quite quite ruthlessly and dramatically. But also it's about the phenomenon of Gary Potter in fandom, in naked plagiarism and parody. I mean I loved the brazenness of the Tanya Grotta series. But on the other hand, the uh parodic Porigata, who's in his struggles against Mordivolt, he whose name is improper to use in polite company, does deserve something of an honourable mention. But, you know, of course, it's about a lot more than just simply what the Russians made of Harry Potter. Obviously, it's about escapism. It's about how Russian authors look for new ways to explain the world around them, but also to escape from it. In some ways, this, you know, this is this is this is something that in some I mean the state should, if it was smart, actually encourage. And in some ways it does, particularly when it comes to the sort of more muscular nationalist fantasy in science fiction, particularly these kind of time travellers' tales which you kind of talked about in the past, in which a modern person ends up finding themselves in whatever it is, World War II or the 17th century or whatever, and uses their knowledge or maybe tools that they have brought with them to change the face of history in support of Russia's manifest destiny. But you know, generally speaking, again, this is an area in which actually the Kremlin, in my opinion, tends to be more thick than thin. It's also about westernization versus patriotic fantasy. I mean, there are this gloriously terrible Russian work called Kids versus Wizards, in which Harry Potter is portrayed as once the villain, but also Hermione's transgender sibling, engaged in a plot to destroy Russian Orthodoxy, the Russian shield that has protected the country against Satanism. So there is this sense that actually any kind of mass take up of a Western fantasy is somehow subversive to Russian culture and therefore needs to be resisted. And in this respect, this is also about how moral panics emerge as Harry Potter becomes cast by some as some kind of transgender russophobic Satanist wizard. But also in the other direction, too. Again, remember, these are all contested narratives. So we also have the ones in which Voldemort is a representation for Putin, or indeed the president of the Russian Federation becomes cast as Dobby the bateed house elf. So even in this, actually, politics come in constantly intrudes itself in how you choose to reframe J.K. Rowling's work. It's about in that respect also fundamental expectations of the world. As Boronsin puts it. Thus, Harry Potter can be simultaneously inspiring, change for the better is possible, and slightly heartbreaking. Expecting change is naive. And in this respect, he concludes it is far easier to join Dumbledore's army, and my apologies, by the way, if you don't know nothing about Harry Potter, a lot of this will be fairly opaque, but hey, that's on you. Anyway, it is far easier to join Dumbledore's army when you live in a genre that presupposes. And I think that is really crucial. It's a point that I've long felt that actually the real ally of an authoritarian regime is not fear, despite the assumptions about the importance of terror and such like. It is apathy, it is hopelessness. What is the point of putting yourself out there and taking risks if you don't think it can lead to a better outcome? That is the two triumph of the despot. Anyway, in this respect, so we have a case in which literature, like rhetoric on the internet, like graffiti, is a battleground where everything can be reframed. I mean consider, for example, Kirill Eskov's actually rather good, The Last Ringbearer, which is the Lord of the Rings, but from an orcish perspective, that presents the whole struggle not as this kind of in some ways a little two dimensional good versus evil one, but instead as a struggle of a modern, industrial and rational Mordor versus the archaic, feudal, hypocritical elvish hegemony of the West. I mean again, I quite how far one should actually take that as meant seriously and how far it's just an interesting jeu d'esprit, a little intellectual game of playing around with the ideas, I don't know. But nonetheless, you know, i it it's clear that all these works can become politicized. Still, Lerner's book about the anarchic graffiti of the streets, Gorham's exploration of online rhetoric and Borenstein's exegesis of the Harry Potter phenomenon in Russia, they all manage to shine a light on subversiveness and dispute. Yet they all end up somewhat downbeat, in concluding with if not the death of hope, but perhaps its cautious suspension. I mean, are we going to next flip this frown upside down? Nah. Sorry, I'm afraid we're heading to the Donbass. Just the usual mid-episode reminder that you're listening to the In Moscow Shadows podcast. Its corporate partner and sponsor is Conductor, which provides software for crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counterterrorism, civil affairs and the like. But you can also support the podcast yourself by going to Patreon.com slash InMoscow Shadows. And remember that patrons get a variety of additional perks depending on their tier, as well as knowing that they're supporting this peerless source on all things Russian. And you can also follow me on Twitter at Mark Galliotti or on Facebook, MarkGalliotti on Russia. Now back to the episode. Okay, so yes. Hard to draw too much hope from the Donbass, but nonetheless, insight, let's hope I think so. I want to start with Everyday War, the conflict over Donbass, Ukraine. As opposed to, I don't know which other Donbass, by Greta Lynn Uhling. I've probably mispronounced your name, my apologies, which came out with Cornell University Press back in 2023, but I've only just, I'm afraid, got around to actually reading. And this is a book, not so much about the war, but about what essentially non-combatant civilians go through in war. It's not my usual kind of read, but it's an excellent anthropological ethnographic study based on field work in the Donbass and the rest of Ukraine 2015 to 2017, taking the reader from the Vets Hangout of Cafe Patriot, to civilians gathering donations for the front, and indeed ultimately the volunteers collecting bodies from the battlefield. And it develops this concept of everyday war, which she describes as the conscious and deliberate practices people use to participate in the conflict. She explains that the goal for most was not to destroy an enemy, but rather to preserve human connections and affirm national belonging. So it's not about the fighting so much as the mundane interpersonal activity meant to preserve the patterns of people's day-to-day lives, and the social connections around them, at a time when meaning in their lives seemed to be being scrambled and reframed. You know, family ties, friendships, marriages all under pressure from newly divided loyalties, and also the practical challenges of being in or near a war zone. And what emerges according to Urling is a set of practices intended to minimize conflict, and if necessary, blame that conflict on outsiders or outside forces. So you know you avoid particularly contentious topics in conversation, or indeed actually having any kind of interaction with people whom you know are going to have different views. Or you attribute their views not to a genuine difference of opinion, but to their sort of zombification. And on this last, there's I think a particularly brilliant chapter which discusses what's called practical orientalism, or everyday sci-fi, in which the ordinary becomes surreal. Again, a quote. People who left thinking they would soon be back, obsessing on what they left behind, which is also actually worth noting, very common amongst Russian emigres who fled Russia. Or even more strikingly, who come to see suddenly the world around them in totally different forms, as if they have been other themselves, or those of different views have changed. You know, loyalists, as I say, seeing rebel sympathizers as zombies or the like. In part, this is just a a turn of phrase, a way of describing people who seem to follow views that you can't possibly imagine anyone in their right mind would follow. But it is more than that. You know, I think we we have seen this, frankly, creeping dehumanization taking place on both sides of the front line. And the sense of dangerous unreality is not just a product of war zones. I mean actually, if we look at Russia, consider the rhetoric of the state. You know, from Putin's claim back in 2022, that the Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from the scum and the traitors, and just spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths, which I always find a particularly weird as well as rather distasteful parallel, as he called for this sort of necessary self-purification of society, to indeed the language of many opposition exiles, who have decided that so many Russians are bad Russians, and there is this talk of this uh Zed generation of fascistified death cultists and the like. But of course, yeah, people also have rather more malign goals. It's not just about how you maintain your sense of sort of social connectivity and a sense of care for others within war zones, which is very much what's the sort of framed at the centre of Uhling's book. There are people who have rather more malign goals from personal enrichment, especially through what uh the Russian sociologist Vadim Volkov called violent entrepreneurship, in other words, the conversion of the capacity and the will to use violence into money, to, well, just simply killing the enemy. And if I do have one criticism of this book, it is that it doesn't really dwell so much on this dark side of how people become socialized by the war. But again, that probably simply reflects that that's much more in line with my, shall we say, rather shadowy in Donbass's shadows, uh, interests. But the point is, look, in fairness, that's not what this book's goal is, and I suspect Erling is more comfortable discussing, to put it very crudely, woman's humanity to woman than man's inhumanity to man. Certainly my my critique does not in any way detract from what is a very impressively researched and empathically written book. So again, well worth considering. But of course, if you are interested in those inhumanities, well then David Lewis's occupation, Russian rule in southeastern Ukraine, Hearst 2025, will be much more up your rather dubious street. It's a detailed and disquieting study of quite how Moscow seeks to sort of subjugate and reshape the occupied territories using violence and economic coercion, but also this ideological fantasy of a new Russia. And Lewis describes this as cognitive occupation, intended really to sort of scrub away the Ukrainian past and create this new, you know, rather Orwellian novorosia has always been novorosia fiction, despite the actual real complexities of the history of all parts of Ukraine, quite frankly. But of course, by not teaching those that history and those complexities, not acknowledging that, by abolishing teaching in the Ukrainian language, by managing the media and communications, by opening up exhibitions and history parks that propagate the right vision, the state is seeking to scrub that out. In a way that it's worth noting we're not getting anywhere near as much within what we can call mainland Russia. And this is definitely something that is being done specially in the Donbass, and that I would suggest in itself belies the notion that the Donbass was just waiting for the moment to be returned to the bosom of the motherland. Some within it were. There's a lot of complexity here, which I'll come to in a moment, but clearly in the main not. And of course, meanwhile, massive profits can be made by the right people in the right place, through the expropriation of properties of those who fled, or through taking over businesses owned by the wrong people. And there's also careers to be made in the new administration. And in this respect, really what we're seeing is a kind of hybrid of the way that the Stalinist order was imposed on East Europe after World War II, and also the brutal sort of filtration campaign and the kadyrovization of Chechnya, two particularly depressing models to bring together. Now, as such, now for Lewis, this is a microcosm of the contemporary Russian Federation, reflecting its deepening militarisation and authoritarianism. Look, I as I say, I can see the parallels, but I do think this is pushed perhaps a little bit too far. Because what's happening in the occupied territories is orders of magnitude beyond the still relatively, and I've stressed that relatively light repression of Putin's regime at home. And magnitude does matter. It doesn't just simply mean that, well, where the occupied territories go, Russia itself is is bound to follow. But still, there is a particular model at work there, and in the Donbass, some have adapted to it, but most are afflicted by what Lewis calls the silent terror of constant surveillance, of a lack of independent media, of forced assimilation, you know, precisely because so many of them are either passively hostile to the new order of the occupation, or just simply feel that the promises of it have been betrayed. But the point is they face this mix of what Lewis calls infrastructural power, you know, the monitoring and managing of daily life, and the coercive power of just out and out violence or the threat thereof. So for me, this is the current book to beat when it comes to understanding what's going on in the occupied territories. Whatever my qualms about some of the sort of the wider framing, it is no question a detailed and magisterial study of what is still a strange amalgam of foreign occupation and intervention into a civil war. And yeah, look, I know using the term civil war is very controversial in this context. But the the Donbass conflict through to and beyond the 2022 invasion cannot be described as a civil war, but it did have some of the characteristics of a civil war. It was civil war-ish. There were, back in particularly 2014-2015, locals who genuinely feared marginalization or indeed Ukrainianization, shall we say, by the new Maidan government. And in some cases, you know a small minority of them, maybe, or but certainly a minority, small or large, wanted autonomy. And a small, definitely small subset of them wanted more than that. They wanted independence from Ukraine, or even, in the fewest cases of all, actually wanting to join Russia. This is very different from Crimea, where frankly, even though the referendum that was held was not genuine, was not free and fair, nonetheless, I think it is true that actually a majority would have voted for joining Russia. That's not the same as the situation in the Donbass. And look, just as many of these sort of militias, who yes, included a whole variety of imports, shall we say, from Russia, nonetheless, you know, were made up of locals who were worried about the Maidan. It's also worth remembering that many of the militias that at first resisted the Donbass risings at a time when basically the police and security forces of Kiv were in total disarray, well, they were made up of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. It's complex. And part of the reason for the extreme bitterness of this war is precisely its civil war-ish characteristics. From the fact that there are so many Russians who are still unable to understand why their Ukrainian cousins would, as they see it, as they see it, I would stress, turn on them, to the anger of Ukrainians on both sides of the line who feel betrayed by their compatriots. And this complexity, I think, comes out very clearly in the last book I'm going to cover today, Rebel Militias in Eastern Ukraine, from leaderless groups to proxy armies, by Martin Larish, which is a Routlich book, 2025. Larish draws on the principal agent model to explain how a powerful actor, the principal, in which case Russia, can encourage or coerce the agent, which in this case is local militias in the Donbass, to do its dirty work. And the idea is that there were multiple layers of delegation. And just as with the outsourcing of trolling, the Kremlin tasked ad hocrats to stirring up trouble in the Donbass. These were actors operating without formal sanction, and they, to preserve their own and Russia's plausible deniability and sort of generate the impression of a civil war, in turn tasked local people. People who often lacked, frankly, any great local legitimacy. So you end up with this weird collection of random figures, both from Russia and from the Donbass, emerging as leaders of these militias, usually without any meaningful social embeddedness. So in other words, they didn't have existing constituencies that they could draw on. Now, the Maidan, the revolution of dignity, was not necessarily especially popular in eastern, southeastern Ukraine. Remember, this is also the heartland of ousted President Yanukovych's party of the regions. But nor was there, as I've mentioned, much desire for independence, less yet Russian rule. So on the whole, this rebellion couldn't rely on local figures with existing political or economic authority. So the result is a deniable, but pretty underwhelming, fragmented array of ragbag militias that, yes, of course, could not actually put up a meaningful resistance once the combination of pro-Kiev militias and the security forces had got their act together. And so they ended up having to be bailed out by Russian regulars in face of this government counter-offensive. And really from summer of 2014, we can call this a Russian-dominated force. But there is that key period before this point. I do feel that this book goes a little bit too far in presenting the hand of Moscow being behind too much of the very initial phases of this rising. Look, it is clear that Putin was not especially enthusiastic at first about what was going on. And just because figures like Tsagrad founder Konstantin Malofeev and presidential adviser Sergei Glasieev were willing to put their hands into their own pockets to subsidise different elements of the rising in the early days, doesn't show in any way that they were tasked to do so by the Kremlin. Indeed, I must admit, I was surprised that Glasiev only gets two in-passing mentions in the book, and Malofiev just three. I mean, the it was actually really important that you had individuals for whom this was a very genuine personal cause, and who themselves were not only actually willing to subsidise and support people on the ground, they were also lobbying Putin. A Putin who at this point was, as I say, pretty lukewarm about the idea. You know, he went into Crimea because he thought Crimea was there and needed to be secured because of what was happening in in Kyiv. But he didn't have such a vision for the Donbass. And when the Novorossian forces were keen precisely to have to basically hand themselves over to Russia, it was Putin who was basically saying, Don't hold referenda on independence. We are not going to let you in. He had years in which he could have annexed these territories. It was only after the 2022 invasion that he does so. Nonetheless, this is a very good book with lots of detailed analyses of the politics and the operational formation of the rebel militias. Even if, as I say, some of the detail actually undermines Ludish's determination to portray this as a sort of an outsource invasion from the very, very first. I'd say this develops over time. And certainly by early summer, Putin has decided, again, I think in part a victim of the sunk cost fallacy, that he can't really let the rebels fall, and therefore he he needs to up the stakes and up the level of Russian intervention. I think perhaps Larish is just a little bit too eager to debunk Arel and Driskol's 2023 book, Ukraine's Unnamed War. And look, I I get that. I think that uh Arel and Driscoll lean way too heavily on the idea that this was just a civil war and that this was one caused largely by Kiev's prejudices and missteps. But there is always a danger in positioning your own work too directly as a mirror image of someone else's, especially when that other work is a bit of a straw man. Quibbles quibbles. But the interesting thing about, or one of the many interesting things rather, about Ladish's book is that it does illustrate for me the weaknesses of Kremlin decision making, which are much, much broader than just simply about the Donbass. First of all, you have this dragon's den vision of policy making, where a whole variety of different individuals and institutions are pitching ideas to the boss and hoping that he will back them, or at least give a tacit approval for them just to try how things work out, giving him the option to back them or denounce them in the future. And this is what we had here, because you know that there were those in Moscow who were saying, don't get involved with the Donbast, you really don't want to get involved in this. And then there were others who were saying, look, this is both a geopolitical opportunity as well as a moral duty to get involved, and eventually he gets won over by the latter camp. But meanwhile, you have a whole variety of independent, semi-legitimate actors doing their thing. So long as Putin has not made a decision one way or the other, they have a certain degree of implied consent that they can actually go out and test their theories on the ground. And this really highlights the degree to which Putin is a very reluctant decision maker when it comes to important things, and especially things which are potentially problematic, dangerous, complex, and have no clear best case scenarios there. He will put them off as long as possible, often far longer than he should. So in some ways, what happened in summer of 2014, I would say, is Putin, not as it were, finally making a grand strategic decision, but finding himself trapped that as a result of his giving tacit freedom to the various ad hocs to do their thing in the Donbass, he reached a point where he thought, well, if I let the rebellion fall now, it will be a blow, it'll be humiliating, and it'll anger these people, and therefore I feel I had no option but to send in some battalion tactical groups to ensure the rebellion doesn't fall. He still was trying to keep it at the minimum level of commitment. So this is this is Putin dragged along by events really because of his own his own reluctance to take an early position. And therefore he Ultimately, he was dragged in for negative reasons, in order to avoid a cost rather than actually to secure a gain, and because to be blunt, he was sold a line. He was told things about how the people of the Donbass were looking to him and how they all wanted to be supported by Russia, and none of them trusted this neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, blah blah blah, rather than actually what was really going on. So maybe I can, again, as you know, if you're a regular listener, I always like to end with some optimism because I think it's important to, in these, particularly in these times, actually lean forward on that. So maybe I can find something to be optimistic about here. This is a model which emerged and worked, insofar as it worked, generally for how Putin runs Russia and takes and doesn't take decisions, in the good times, when the money was plentiful, when his and his state's legitimacy was unquestioned, and when the dilemmas were actually, by the standards of the modern world, relatively straightforward. Today things are very, very different, and ironically it may well be in the Donbass, in the mishandling of the initial decision to engage, in the continued social resistance of those people who are under the shadow of Russian guns, and indeed in the uh the limitations, I would say, of the brutal occupation rule, that we really see how Putin's system in that respect embodies the reasons for its own downfall. I mean, it it seems rather silly to say poor decision making is really what's what the problem is, which is because poor decision making encompasses everything. But the point is it's not about the individual decisions. It's about the structures of thought behind them and the administrative structures whereby those decisions are made. And I would suggest that that, at a time when so much within the Putinist system actually is changing, whether we're talking about the technological and tactical adaptation of the forces at the front, or whether we see the state trying to kind of redevelop itself, whether it's our ideologies or its managerial approaches. At the very heart of it, the court of Tsar Putin, that isn't either looking for reform or I would suggest reformable. So these pathologies of decision making that we saw in the Donbass are still playing out today. And given that the times today are rather more testing, I think they are what is ensuring that this regime I'm not saying is going to collapse, but I don't think in essence will survive Vladimir Vladimirovic himself. And that counts as my moment of optimism. Thanks very much for listening this far. As I say, there will not be an In Moscow Shadows next week. There will be the week after, and paying patrons will get some bits and pieces in the interval. Thanks very much. Well, that's the end of another episode of the In Moscow Shadow Podcast. Just as a reminder, beyond this, you can follow my blog, also called In Moscow Shadows. Follow me on Twitter at MarkGaleotti or Facebook, MarkGaleotti on Russia. This podcast is made possible by generous and enlightened patrons, and you too can be one. Just go along to my Patreon page, that's patreon.com slash inMoscow Shadows, and decide which tier you want to join, getting access to exclusive materials and other perks. However, whether or not you contribute, thank you very much indeed for listening. Until next time, keep well.