© Telegraph
While I knew that Navalny's internet celebrity hadn't spread to all Russians (even though internet penetration is growing rapidly in Russia, it's still barely past 50%), I figured that those people who had heard of him would tend view him very positively. This is because you would reasonably expect that people knowledgeable about Navalny would younger, more liberal, more opposed to Putin, and more attuned to social media and the internet than the average Russian. In short, I expected that popular attitudes towards Navalny would match the Western media narrative about him: a budding political celebrity who, while not quite ready for primetime, was successfully building substantial grassroots support (see here or here for standard Western media accounts of Navalny).
Well it turns out that's not at all true. Not even a little bit. Among Russians who have actually heard of him (about 47% of the population) Navalny is viewed negatively by almost twice as many people (31%) as view him positively (16%). Think about that for a second. The hero of the opposition, the man who is supposedly going to displace Putin in the very near future, can, right now, count on the support of something like 20% of the population. Meanwhile Vladimir Putin, supposedly a political has-been, is viewed positively by more than 70% of Russians.
Now Russia is a country of roughly 143 million people. 20% of a number that large is a lot of people, more than enough to get a very substantial turnout at protest marches. Navalny supporters are every bit as "Russian" as people who support Putin, and I am in no way arguing that the oppositionists are somehow inauthentic or any less "real:" they ought to have every opportunity to express their views and make their voices heard, and the police treatment of them has been nothing less than horrific. The fact that Putin is popular, of course, doesn't in any way justify the authorities' brutal conduct or the general sense of corruption and decay that surrounds the Russian government.
However, the Pew poll results pretty conclusively demonstrate three facts about Russia in mid 2012 that conflict with the emerging narrative:
1) Putin has a very strong level of public support
2) Navalny, the highest profile opposition leader, has a very limited level of public support
3) a movement for Putin's immediate resignation (one of the opposition's main demands) would be anti-democratic
That last one might sound a bit provocative, but how else could one characterize the departure of a political figure with 70% approval?
You could, perhaps, argue that people were intimidated and scared into saying they support Putin. But if Russians were totally unwilling to say what they "really" think about Putin why would they be so open with their frustrations with the judiciary, the police, the military, and a wide variety of political and economic institutions? Why would they voice support for the protests which Putin has so explicitly and colorfully condemned? Moreover, if public opinion polling in Russia is inherently impossible, if the country's repressive political institutions means that people simply will not speak their minds, why did Russians' "confidence" in Putin slip from 84% in 2007 to 69% in 2012? I would say that difference between Putin's 2007 and 2012 figures in the Pew polls is pretty easily explainable by the observable weakening of his political position, the 2008-09 recession, and the growth in the opposition movement. The alternate explanation is...well what, exactly, that this is an accident or a random bit of statistical noise?
One could argue (and I would agree!) that the long-term trends favor Navalny, or a Navalny-like figure, at the expense of Putin: structural changes in the economy, in education, and in urbanization all suggest that Russia will, in the long-term, become much more liberal than it is today. The Pew results show that Putin's support is disproportionally drawn from women, people without college education, and people from rural areas. None of these groups are growing, and in the years to come all of these groups can be expected to make up a reduced share of the population.*Russians are going to college more frequently, continuing to move to cities, and working age males are drinking themselves to death far less frequently.
Pew's results strongly suggest that support for Putin will continue to slowly wither in the months and years to come, but what they do not suggest is that the Kremlin is on the precipice of collapse and that US support for the opposition will result in the swift empowerment of a liberal opposition figure. Putin is going to be around for years to come: you can think this is good, bad, or anything in between, but we may as well get used to it and plan accordingly.
* The share of women in the population will decrease, marginally, because male life expectancy has been slowly recovering from the apocalyptic nose-dive it took during the 1990′s. Assuming Russia doesn't see another gargantuan spike in mortality overwhelmingly concentrated among working-age males, it's gender ratio (will still unbalanced) will be a bit closer to the norm.
As for the 'leaders' of the West, they are too busy wallowing in cesspools of ill-gotten wealth to command those not in the pigsty with them.