10 July 2025
by Vic Peterson
Vic Peterson reviews by Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance by Jeremy Morris, Bloomsbury Academic, March 2025, 258 pp, hardcover £65, ISBN 9781350509337.
Written for specialists in political anthropology and adjacent academic disciplines, Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance by Jeremy Morris offers a unique view into the political lives of ordinary people in Russia.
According to Morris, a majority of contemporary academic study and journalism receives and propagates an understanding of political behavior based on near-exclusive reliance on surveys. Surveys shoehorn beliefs into contrived categories; they are by nature inadequate to understanding the actual practice of political behavior. Morris proposes leaving off reliance on surveys and other traditional instruments of journalism and the social sciences in favor of intimate, experiential “field work” among ordinary people in common situations. Here, they might express themselves more authentically politically: at the dinner table, in family gatherings, and in community events and activities among other situations. These places are the realm in which “ordinary” political thought and actions are expressed, and most truthfully apprehended.
Small interpersonal acts and styles of communication among family, neighbors and close community are the bedrock of political study for Morris. Starting with the war in Ukraine, Morris discusses how ordinary people reacted to the invasion, proposing that rather than buying in wholesale to an ideological position, the ordinary reaction manifests in “defensive consolidation,” that is, gathering around a mood of bewilderment and frustration at a war that has little immediate national purpose. This mood develops into a large sense of resentment in the public, especially at the geopolitical level. While nothing is cut-and-dry, and opinions flip-flop or evolve, the fluid play of political belief among ordinary people provides insight into the human condition.
Morris discards the notion that this public mood can be characterized as nostalgia for the grandeur of the imperial Soviet past and the painful loss of great power status. Vladimir Putin uses this supposed feeling for propagandistic purposes, but, according to Morris, it does not correspond with nostalgia common people feel. Rather, their longing is not for the material conditions or imperial culture of the Soviets, but the feeling of working together toward a common purpose. Whether the common effort was ever realized seems to be less important than the sense that since 1991 and continuing under Putin, despair and hopelessness persist. It is everyone for themselves. Neoliberalism, of which Putin is an extension, Morris says, has smothered a natural altruism that was given at least some expression during the Russian socialist era.
A curious optimism underwrites Morris’s analysis. As Morris states in his conclusion:
“What links people in this book is a sense of striving: purposive desire and imagination—a social instinct made more acute by the experience of the communist experience but one we would uncover in any place.”
Morris is pragmatic and his larger political observations cohere with positions typically taken in the West: Putin is a greedy tyrant, the war in Ukraine is unjust, etc. Perhaps his most salient observation is that change cannot happen from the top down. It is from the groundswell of acts of good faith expressed in everyday behavior that resistance emerges, resistance that, if not subsumed by neoliberal “realist” capitalism, can flourish.
The route Morris takes to arrive at his intriguing insights is certainly not the beaten path, and the result is mixed, at least for a lay reader. We are never clear whether the sense of common striving under the Soviets is a fundamental or relative measurement for Morris. Or simply an object of wishful thinking. After all, Soviet political prisoners and dissidents worked for a common purpose too, but in chains or in exile. This is a tough book for anyone not steeped in the jargon of contemporary academic discourse, especially in the continental philosophical tradition. This feature of the writing will, unfortunately, restrict access to the insights for a wider readership including journalists, policy makers and other non-academic readers that are a target of concern. Specialists may feel otherwise.
If you would like to review a book for our website, please contact Charlotte by email at this address: charlotte (at) rightsinrussia (dot) org
