Little is known about the processes affecting civil society in Russia since February 2022. Scholarly discussions of civil society in Russia have typically centered on protest activism. However, the wartime context reveals that civil society does not always manifest in oppositional forms. This article explores civic engagement in Russia that aligns with, rather than opposes, the state. The article adopts a framework of statism and anti-statism—not as doctrinal political ideologies, but as broader ideological formations in the Althusserian sense, embedded in everyday practices and identities. This article argues that statism, combined with dense grassroots networks, can foster active participation in the wartime economy, even among those who are politically disengaged. The analysis draws on ethnographic data collected by the author in the Republic of Buryatia in the fall of 2023. This fieldwork was conducted as part of a comparative qualitative study of three Russian regions organized by the Public Sociology Laboratory.
Violetta Alexandrova (Sun,) studied this question.