Three interview commentaries: Schulmann, Zubarevich, Kagarlitsky

Three informed people on different things happening in Russian politics

The first interview with a political prison as an AI-avatar?

Sometimes I like to blog about what’s going on in Russian social media spaces abroad though it doesn’t seem to bring many readers here. That’s a shame because it’s a space that only indirectly gets attention by anglophones (notwithstanding Meduza’s almost lone attempts to correct this). It’s also pretty informative because some of the best journalists and experts have a big platform there. There is however, just too much material to keep track of. Here’s a rundown of three things I watched via YouTube in the last weeks: political observer Ekaterina Schulmann on how to parse conflicting public opinion indicators; economic geographer Natalia Zubarevich on whether military Keynesianism is paying off; and an interview from behind bars with political prisoner Boris Kagarlitsky.

Schulmann has a brutal schedule – doing public talks seemingly almost every day. At the end of October 2025 she talked to Vot Tak channel (based in Poland with a pretty large online audience). As usual, she covers a lot of minutiae about what’s going on in Russia. What stood out in this episode was her reading of recent polling by Levada about ‘mass perceptions about the influence of the Special Military Operation on society’. This part of the interview is a good example of how Schulmann has moved to a much more critical position about the meaning of polling in autocracies. She first talks about how Russian propaganda is not meant to be persuasive. It’s instead ‘the voice of force’. ‘Voice of the authorities’. This is why people pay attention to it in so far as it shows the strength and resources of the authorities.

Then she discusses the contradictions at the heart of polling questions: that support for the war appears high, yet, when polled, the majority agree with the statement that the war has mainly brought more ‘negatives’ than positives to Russia. Furthermore, attitudes towards veterans are quite informative: In answer to ‘what has the SMO done to participants in it?’, the main answer is (literally) ‘the war has crippled their souls’. Further, people see the mercenary choice a bit like they see the decision to take up a hazardous job in the Far North: sure, you can get money that way, and this is an ‘honest’ exchange (you know what you’re getting into), but preferential treatment/certain social benefits should not accrue to this mercenary choice.

And moreover, society should not be forced into elevating veterans’ social status or respecting this choice. Schulmann adds that this could be symptomatic of a distancing mechanism on the part of society. We could interpret as ‘infantile’. However, she wisely reserves her own interpretation. Later in the interview she talks more about the growing unhappiness at the government’s economic repression against ordinary people, and its unprecedented political repression against its own elite.

Natalia Zubarevich stayed in Russia after February 2022, teaching and researching in Moscow. She gave a lot of interviews from within Russia and was sometimes painfully careful in how she described the regional economic effects of the war. This interview with a journalist in Paris (November 2025) is therefore something a bit different. Not least because it’s nearly three hours long. I couldn’t sustain any notetaking for that period of time. It’s the usual thing she does, which is almost a self-parody now: barrage the viewer with statistics about employment, profitability, inflation and the like. Quite interesting here was a ‘meta’ moment where they discuss her teaching in Moscow and ‘whether scientific exchange’ between Russia and the West is possible (c.30m) and what economic geography in the UK has become: “spatial sociology” (in contrast to Russia where a more ‘traditional’ approach to geography remains). There are loads of moments of incredulity from the interviewer like this at juncture – which is always fun.

A limitation of Zubarevich is that she confines herself to official statistics, occasionally colouring her assessments with anecdotes – which can also be a bit of a problem given she works at a super elite institution and lives in central Moscow. However, she always says some things that go for and against the ‘common sense’ of the pundit sphere. To summarise, she talks about a significant number of economic losers because of the war while ‘two thirds’ have seen sustained wage increases over inflation. However, overall, this means competition between employers has been fierce (until recently). A wage spiral essentially is bad for a brittle and regionally-divided economy like Russia’s. She also talks about how the state trying to turn the tax screws on the population will backfire because people will resort to cash and hiding incomes. There’s some interesting stuff about financing and budgets in the occupied territories of E Ukraine. There’s also an explainer on regional inequality in Russia and how it’s misleading because of the phenomenon of labour migration (who bring their high wages out of the North).

More interesting than the interview was the divided reaction of the audience. A lot of viewers interpreted the interview as providing cover for the economic choices of the authorities – as painting too rosy, or too detached a picture. Some said that it was unhelpful to use official Russian statistics to argue that there’d been a big uplift to most incomes. For example, some pointed out how the ‘basis’ wage had indeed risen sharply in many jobs but this did not mean a real rise in wages because for many, the main part of paid income is not the ‘basis’, but the discretionary bonuses – the latter being harder to capture in official statistics. It has been very convenient in many sectors to boost the tiny ‘basis’ wage by even 200-300% while cutting or making the achievement of targets for the bonus much harder. Would you feel better off if your basis wage rose from 200 Euro a month to 600 Euro, while the ‘bonus’, which was previously 800 Euro, was now at the mercy of the foreman? You might get a bonus of 1000 Euro when a monthly or bimonthly target is reached, but many are not – or are being forced to overwork for what was previously a given. Especially in service or while-collar work where the concrete output is not a hard quantity of product.

There are good points in the interview about how unsustainable the military ‘juicing’ of the economy already is in 2025. Zubarevich makes it pretty clear she thinks this sugar high will come with a massive crash. People were unhappy to about her repeating policy aims as if they were realizable – like a plan for rehabilitation facilities for veterans all over Russia: pie in the sky, was a criticism from the chat. People really didn’t like her repeating a point that many make – that within the Russian government there are smart, competent and effective pockets of policy making.

The third interview (also November 2025) is something of a landmark. An interview between Andrei Rudoi – a well-known leftwing Youtuber, and Boris Kagarlitsky. Only, Kagarlitsky – roughly speaking, a Marxist historian and public intellectual – is in a prison colony for mildly critical remarks about the conduct of the war. The interview was therefore reconstructed using an AI avatar of Kagarlitsky who spoke the words from the letters, phone call transcripts and such like, of the actual person siting in Penal Colony No. 4, Torzhok, Tver Region. Even if one has no sympathy for the person of Kagarlitsky (and I certainly do), some of the interview feels poignant. Particularly since Kagarlitsky was also imprisoned by Soviet authorities in 1982 for ‘anti-Soviet’ activities.

Prison is not exactly the place where one improves one’s health, K notes at the beginning. Only it is a very healthy-looking, if a little uncanny avatar saying these words. You’re the first AI Foreign Agent (‘Inoagent’), remarks Rudoi.

What’s most interesting to the general audience is the first few minutes of the interview where K talks about the efforts to recruit soldiers from the penal colony. He’s too old and has a political sentence so is not a target of recruitment efforts. Prisoners are all forced out onto the football pitch to listen to the ‘recruiters’ tell them that even if they die, their relatives will get a good pay-out. Sometimes lectures about this are read and K has been present at them. K talks about the fluctuation in numbers recruited – there’s now few signing up. In 2023 there were hundreds, by May 2024 a few dozen a month. Now it’s less than a dozen a month at best. Recent recruitment was because of a false impression that one could sign up to get out of prison and that a ceasefire would be called. Even recruiters used this argument. K emphasises that ideological arguments are entirely absent – even antiwar people sign up, particularly if they have been jailed for desertion/avoiding mobilization (337^th article of the Criminal Code). There are pro-war prisoners in the colony, but not a single one has signed up. Therefore we should really take stock of the real motivations for signing up from prison.

Often those who have been in Ukraine seek to dissuade others from signing up. But they themselves then sign up themselves as a way of getting the punitive 337 label removed. One should not think that because someone went to fight that they are for the war, and that if someone refused to fight they are against.

K is asked why he didn’t leave Russia when he had the chance. He says he does not regret his (in)actions. Where you are doesn’t matter to how to speak about things. And at the same time there’s no shame for those who choose to leave. It’s solidarity that’s important. (full disclosure: I was on a discussion panel with K before he was arrested – he was quite confident he was safe from arrest).

Then the interview discusses the causes of the war from a leftist perspective – putting events into the context of the dead-end choices made by the elites since 2010 – the acceleration towards a form of authoritarianism away from managed democracy, and that most importantly this was a ‘choice’ supported by most liberal elites.

There’s a discussion of how the left can use the demand for Soviet nostalgia and quasi-nationalist figures’ big social media presence to get their own voices heard. But about how the biggest problem for left public presence in Russia was always the visceral hatred for progressive politics among the liberal journalist caste. This, however, is changing because younger people are less politically tribal. There’s interesting discussion about how the war forces leftists to think anew about their attitudes towards the USSR – a split between people who can assess the progressive aims of the Revolution, and those seduced by ‘Red Imperialism’. The latter invariably support the regime since 2022. At the same time, those liberal ‘fellow travellers’ of Putinism are also forced to confront some home truths, such as their cynicism and deep mistrust of democratic transformation.

At the end of the interview the speakers look forward to possible outcomes at the end of the conflict. It’s hard to imagine how weird this is – quite open political discussion coming from within a prison colony. One of the final metaphors K uses is a ship adrift in the Arctic sea with the officers on the bridge unable to even reach the captain let alone get him to make decisions. There’s an iceberg out there in the fog, but no one has time for it. Kagarlitsky reminds us that the great title of Alexei Yurchak’s book on the end of the USSR is still very relevant for today: ‘everything was forever, until it was no more’.