In This Issue: Existential Dilemmas

Abstract

Kremlin politics may be as opaque today as in 1939, but the existential problems the regime confronts are not difficult to discern. This was true before February 24, 2022, and it is true today, but we can now begin to consider how Russia’s attempted conquest (or reconquest) of Ukraine might fit into that larger picture. It’s not only about NATO expansion or offended pride. Arguably, both situations have been made worse for Russia, at least in the near term. The same will almost certainly be true of the war’s effects on Russia’s domestic challenges: demographic decline, brain drain, economic stagnation, the solipsism of a personalist regime. These issues are discussed in the articles gathered in this issue of the Russian Social Science Review, all of which were written before the 2022 invasion but (with one exception) after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and backing of Donbas separatists. The longer-term course of events is beyond our ken, but the impact of the war on Russia’s demographic problems is unlikely to be unambiguously positive under any scenario other than the Kremlin’s initial best case of an easy decapitation and Ukrainian surrender to an army of liberators. Surely, the heavy losses of young men’s lives on both sides of the ongoing conflict will depress birth rates. The actual status of well over a million Ukrainian citizens transported to the Russian interior as well as those in occupied territory who are required to accept Russian identity documents or be excluded from aid distributions, will not be known for a very long time. However, the intention of adding those people, including hundreds of thousands of children, to the Russian population seems clear enough. The severe sanctions regime and export controls that cut off access to advanced technologies, services, replacement parts, investors, and markets will compound Russia’s economic problems and motivate an ongoing brain drain, at least in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, some Russian hawks have argued that the enlargement of Russia’s control over fuel and food RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW 2022, VOL. 63, NOS. 4–6, 213–215 https://doi.org/10.1080/10611428.2022.2134713