The image of wartime "normality" that the Kremlin spent four years constructing is coming apart, and with it the basis of Russian public support for the regime, Dr Ilya Matveev of the Public Sociology Laboratory argued in Russian Election Monitor on September 15.

His central point is one that a lot of Western commentary still misses: support for Vladimir Putin was never the same thing as support for the war. It rested on two much more prosaic things - that most Russians were insulated from the fighting, and that they were getting richer. Matveev argues that both protections are weakening.

"What we are witnessing in Russia right now is indeed Huntington's 'performance dilemma' in action," Matveev writes, invoking Samuel Huntington's argument that autocracies which buy consent with economic results rather than ideology lose it quickly when the results stop coming.

United Russia remains the dominant party ahead of this month's Duma vote, but Matveev argues that public frustration is growing.

The war was never popular

Matveev starts by taking apart the headline polling number. Levada's question about support for "the actions of the Russian military forces in Ukraine" has run in the 70s, easing into the 60s recently. But the Chronicles agency, asking about "Russia's military operation on Ukrainian territory", has recorded support of around 50-55% during the war, according to Matveev.

Matveev interprets the gap as a distinction between support for soldiers and support for the policy; comparisons between different polls cannot isolate question wording alone.

Levada's own data points the same way. As of August 2026, 33% of respondents wanted the fighting to continue and 58% wanted peace talks. And among the pro-war minority, only a small share give ideological reasons - crushing "fascism, Nazism and banderites", or recovering "ancestral lands". The majority pick the vaguer option: finish what we started.

"Wartime support for the regime does not stem from enthusiastic support for the war itself, nor from widespread imperialist attitudes in Russian society," Matveev writes.

He also deals briskly with the objection that all Russian polling is worthless under repression. Subsequent research, he says, found no dramatic increase in bias, and response rates stayed broadly similar to pre-war levels. That is a useful corrective in both directions: the numbers are usable, which means the declining ones are usable too.

What support was actually built on

If not the war, then what? Matveev, drawing on his work with Oleg Zhuravlev at the Public Sociology Laboratory, identifies "normality" with two components: insulation from the direct effects of the war, and rising living standards.

Both were delivered. As recently as August 2026, 37% of Russians said the war had not affected them at all, against 19% who said it had affected them strongly. Between 2022 and 2025, real incomes rose by as much as 30% on the back of wartime economic mobilisation and full employment.

That is the military Keynesianism story, and for three years it worked. Approval of the government's handling of the economy in particular ran high, and the laboratory's qualitative work - interviews, focus groups, ethnographic observation - found the same pattern.

2026: the year the insulation failed

Matveev's account of this year is an accumulation rather than a single shock.

The economy has stalled. GDP grew 1% in 2025 and just 0.6% in the first half of 2026, and behind that average is a sharper split: resources keep flowing to the military while the civilian economy has been contracting, on some calculations for over 18 months.

The war has stopped staying abroad. Levada found 68% of Russians had problems with mobile internet in August 2026, 63% with messenger apps and 65% with fuel shortages and closed filling stations - with 32% saying the fuel shortages made life "significantly more difficult".

IntelliNews has reported on mobile internet shutdowns running close to record levels through the first half, and a fuel crisis that spread out of filling-station queues into freight, agriculture and retail over the summer. What the sociology adds is the finding that voters now experience these as the war arriving at home.

Then there are the Ukrainian long-range strikes that destroyed hundreds of billions of roubles of goods in Wildberries and Ozon warehouses - the deliberate targeting of the civilian economy on both sides.

And there is the mobilisation question. Since 2026 conscription procedures have run all year round, although dispatch to units remains seasonal, the process has been digitised with new penalties for draft dodgers, and men are increasingly being called to military commissariats to "update the records". The authorities deny any new mobilisation is coming; the summonses do not help them. A surge in Russian border crossings into Georgia at the end of August suggests a good number of Russians are not waiting to find out.

The consumer sentiment index fell from 117 in June 2025 to 99 in August 2026, roughly pre-war levels, and Levada's headline "right track/wrong direction" indicator has given up its wartime premium entirely. Putin's own approval has slipped from the mid-80s of 2022-2025 to the low 70s.

Matveev argues that the gains from military Keynesianism were temporary and that the economic optimism of 2023-2025 has largely disappeared.

Manageable, for now

Matveev is careful not to overclaim. A decline is not a crisis, and he says explicitly that the situation "remains manageable for the regime". Putin in the low 70s is still a number most democratic leaders would take.

He also expects the elections themselves to be contained. Frustration has crystallised around the September Duma vote, he argues, and around the sudden popularity of Yabloko and its slogan "For peace and freedom" - but any threat from that direction could be crushed with a combination of repression and fraud.

His account omits an earlier development. Russia's Supreme Court struck Yabloko's federal list off the ballot on August 10, removing the only party campaigning to end the war, after a complaint from the nationalist Rodina party. Matveev's article does not mention the ban.

The Kremlin did not risk letting a pro-peace option stay on the ballot at a moment when 58% of respondents want talks - and it did not get a clean result for the trouble. United Russia dropped four points to 33% in the first poll taken after Yabloko was struck off, and in the final days before voting the Kremlin's two loyal pollsters are telling contradictory stories about how the party is doing.

The war dilemma

The most interesting part of Matveev's argument is what he adds to Huntington's performance dilemma: a second trap he calls the "war dilemma".

The war is increasingly unpopular, but many Russians are still reluctant to criticise the leadership while the country is fighting. That reluctance is holding the numbers up. It also expires the moment the fighting stops.

"When the war ends, questions will inevitably arise: What was it for? What was the point of our sacrifice?" Matveev writes. Putin, he argues, would be held accountable for a war that the public sees as inextricably his - and there is very little he could present as a Russian victory.

The alternative is to keep fighting in the hope of extracting terms from Ukraine good enough to be sold as one, at the cost of more of the everyday frustration that is eroding support in the first place.

"The regime is boxed in, with few good options available," is his conclusion.

That is a bleaker reading of the Kremlin's position than the stability-at-any-cost narrative usually allows, and it cuts against the Western assumption that a ceasefire would be politically comfortable for Putin. On Matveev's account, peace is the more dangerous option for him domestically, which is not an encouraging thought for anyone hoping for a negotiated end.

The qualification, as always with this kind of work, is that none of it forecasts a timeline. Regimes can sit inside a box for a very long time. What the data supports is narrower and still significant: the specific bargain that held Russian society together since 2022 - you stay out of it, we keep your living standards rising - is no longer being honoured, and there is no obvious replacement for it.