Don’t mention the war: Russia’s internal tensions

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. But and I don't know if you know this, people call me J Dog. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

What will happen in Britain this year? As part of our series forecasting the main themes and events of 2025, our political editor offers his predictions.

And employees have them, buildings have them, even whole businesses have them. It turns out that nicknames can work to the benefit of a brand, unless of course, the brand refers to itself by its nickname. That's not how it work. First up though, 25 years ago on New Year's Eve, Boris Yeltsin resigned as President of Russia. It came as a surprise to everyone. Even seemingly his hand picked successor, Prime.

Minister Putin, hurriedly cancelled plans to travel with his family to St. Petersburg, where he'd made arrangements to celebrate the New Year with relatives and friends. Instead, he's now moving into the President's quarters inside the Kremlin.

Two and a half decades on, Vladimir Putin is still in power as the war in Ukraine has played out. We've looked at his motivations on the show time and again and the analysis time and again has come out the same for him. This war is existential by the numbers he still has the support of much of the population. But what lies behind those numbers and how might they change?

When you look from the outside, you have this picture as though nobody is noticing what's happening.

Arkady Ostrovsky is our Russia editor.

People in Russia who very experienced since Soviet times in this doublethink, pretend nothing is happening, but actually you know what's happening. What's absolutely missing is for the majority of Russian people, a sense that this is morally wrong or understanding of what the aims of this war are. Nobody quite knows what is it that Putin is trying to achieve.

And so this view of Russia being split in some simplistic way between the pro war and the anti war camps, it's more subtle than that.

It is more subtle than that, but that's a very good question. I think what we've observed from the beginning is there is a strong anti war minority, those who came out in the streets in the first days of the war, before everybody got beaten up and a lot of people arrested and who remain very anti war. And there is a pro war camp, the zealots. Now, those two constituencies themselves have now splintered. Within the anti war camp, there are those who, mostly outside the country now, the exiles and some activists inside the country who embraced, if you like, the Ukrainian position, the Russia is guilty. They wish for Ukraine's victory on the battlefield. And there is another group of people which is clearer. They're pacifists, they want the war to stop and they're opposed to Putin, but they still live in Russia and it is still their country and they just try to survive without being necessarily super ideological. Very interestingly, on the opposite side in the pro war, there are those who support Putin and go with the mainstream Russian propaganda, those who are critical of Putin. They are the ones who are not part of the elite, if you like, but. But they want war. They're more radical. These are the minorities and the majority is. The majority is pacifist. On the whole, think that the war is a bad and scary thing, but remain loyal to Putin and comply with the regime.

But you're describing within these different groups what amounts to a majority of the country that would like things to be going differently, but that will not, even in the knowledge that majority exists, carry out what you would just call plain political dissent.

Absolutely. These are not the people who are going to start coming out on the streets even if economy continues to worsen. They feel the effect through galloping inflation. Right. Even that is not going to bring them out in the streets. Because I think the chances of Russia's total economic collapse with nothing to eat, as it were, like in the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the bread was not delivered on time. The chances of that are very low. Why then is this majority important? And why? What they think and what they feel is important? Because they create a consensus opinion, the public opinion. And if the consensus is, we want this war to end, we don't understand its goals, on the whole, people start asking, say, what was all this for? Then this majority forms a very fertile ground for somebody in the moment of crisis, somebody can come and tap that consensus. In a way, the parallel is not perfect. Historic parallels are not perfect. But it's exactly what happened in the 1980s when Gorbachev came to power. Because when Gorbachev came to power, he did not come as a revolutionary leader set out to destroy the Soviet Union and change the system. He came as somebody who recognized the general opinion of everybody else that the Communist Party is doing a rubbish job, that there is not enough food, there is not enough clothes, and all this stuff, all this confrontation with the west, the war in Afghanistan, the Cold War, is just stupid. And people don't, on the whole, want it. And if they get rid of all this ideology, then life will get normal. I talk to people in the elite, in businesses, in what they feel, and the sense is everybody's marking time and waiting. Everybody wants things to go back to normal. Nobody in the elite or amongst ordinary people have any sense of future is gone. People live day to day.

You seem to be describing a situation where any kind of organized opposition or a galvanizing leader could basically upend this balance. But that isn't in prospect, is it?

Jason? We're talking after events in Syria. The one thing we know about, and we've been saying it rather like a broken record, and our listeners will know, is that one thing about personal dictatorships is they are fragile and everything goes very slowly or not at all. And then everything happens very, very fast. When the Communist Party started collapsing in 1980s and in 1991, not a single person came out to defend the Communist Party. My sense is it's somewhat different now. There is this militant group which might want to continue the war, and the chances of violence in Russia are very, very high. Russia is now a country awash with arms and full of people who are angry, who are extremely aggressive, who had the taste of war, who've done some really terrible things, and they're going to come back. But even so, the chances that people will come out to defend Vladimir Putin, I think are close to zero.

Nearly three years into this war. How would you characterize its sort of sustainability of all of this?

I don't think that Putin can sustain it indefinitely. The question when does it break? Is the question everybody is asking themselves. And the question is not just to Russia, because it's not that others are doing that much better. It's not that Ukraine is doing brilliantly. It's the question of who breaks first. It's relative. So that thing that people want for war to go away and for life to return to normal is impossible. It's impossible because of the scale of changes that have occurred in Russian society and Russian economy in the world. So the war might freeze or the war might start fizzling out. Things inside Russia are not going to get better. If anything, things are going to get much more dramatic. And those things that will start inside the country will certainly not make it feel in any way normal.

Arkady, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you for having it. Jason.

Keir Starmer's tenure as Britain's Prime Minister began confidently.

Have no doubt that the work of change begins immediately. Have no doubt that we will rebuild Britain.

His Labour Party won a comfortable majority in the 2024 election with the chance to legislate pretty much as it wishes. Look a little closer, though, and Britain's political landscape is more volatile. As part of our World Ahead series, looking at 2025, we consider what might happen in the UK in the coming months.

The headline story of British politics in 2024 was the Labour Party returning to office with a huge landslide majority.

Matthew Hullhouse is our British political correspondent.

But the story in the country was something slightly different, which was a fragmentation of the British electorate, of voter support spreading out from the two main parties across smaller parties, the electorate breaking into smaller blocs, and an increasing mismatch between the result in Parliament and the way in which the electorate had behaved in the country. And 2025 will decide whether that fragmentation is reversed or whether it's going to become entrenched.

Labour would say that 2024 was a brilliant year. What does it have to do in 2025 to deal with the challenges that you present?

Labour is in a position of being both remarkably strong, but also remarkably vulnerable. It won 63% of the seats in parliament, but only on 34% of the popular vote. So it really needs to, if it wants to remain in power for a second term, hold onto as much as it can of that 34%. And it faces fragmentation on multiple fronts. Obviously, it needs to hold onto all those Conservative voters who switched to the Labour Party. They're also facing a challenge on the radical right from reform, this insurgent party, which came second to Labour in 89 constituencies. It's also facing an increasingly credible challenge from the Green Party, which, even though they only won four MPs this time, is second to Labour in 39 constituencies. So it really is facing challenges on all sides and it doesn't have the benefit of being the alternative to an unpopular Conservative government as it was in 2024.

And what will those challenges look like in practice? What will the actual tests be for the Labour government?

The view of the government really is that its job is simply to crack on with tackling the big challenges, which have made much of the British electorate pretty miserable. So that's about doing whatever it can to deliver some growth in disposable household incomes. It's about focusing on NHS waiting times, particularly the waits of people to get to a GP or to have operations that have been waiting for for a long time, and reducing immigration, which this Labour Party sees as fairly existential to their prospects in power. The risk is that if you continue to see their support in the country weakening, which it did throughout the second half of 2024, if you don't see an improvement in the of Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, who is not a popular figure compared to other Prime Ministers at this point in their tenure, that you'll start to see jitters creep in and the party will begin to fight itself. And that really would be a contradiction of the big advertisement that they made in the general election, that they could bring stability and discipline to government again.

And the Tories, of course, had a pretty catastrophic 2024. What are their priorities likely to be in the coming months?

The Tories really were the big loser from the fragmentation in 2024. So in terms of vote share and in the number of seats they actually won in Parliament, they had the worst result since 1832. And really the birth of the modern electoral system, they saw their support split between the Liberal Democrats, between the Labour Party and to reform. And the result of that is that if you add the result of the Labour Party and the Tories together, you get 57%, which is the lowest figure since at least 1918. So, effectively, these two historically dominant parties are together not that dominant anymore. And so Kemi Bednoch, the new Tory leader, really must reverse this fragmentation pretty quickly. She intends to focus on her right flank first. We saw towards the end of 24, she was making a big focus on immigration, saying the Tories got immigration wrong when they're in office.

During the last Conservative administration, we promised to bring numbers down.

We did not deliver that promise.

We ended free movement.

But the system that replaced it is not working.

And she faces a pretty big test in May, when we have local government elections in lots of rural areas of England, which have traditionally been pretty strong for the Tories. And that will really reveal whether she's been able to stop the rot or whether actually this fragmentation of Tory support still has distance to run.

This is more than just a challenge to individual party leaders, isn't it? I mean, Britain's political system is really set up for two parties. If this fragmentation is here to stay, what does that mean for British politics?

We could be in a really interesting place. Historically, as a rule, you've seen politics operate as something of a seesaw. So support for one party, the Labour Party or the Tory Party, goes down and their main rival goes up and power has sort of shifted between them like a pendulum. But it's possible that we could be in a place under this government where its support erodes, as support for all governments does over time. But you don't see a corresponding rise in support for the Conservative Party. That support simply leeches elsewhere to parties to the left or to the right of the Labour Party. And you'll certainly be seeing those parties, the Green Party, Liberal Democrats, reform, the Scottish National Party, all seeking to capitalise on the declining popularity of a Labour government. And that raises a really interesting question, actually, that if the first past opposed electoral system that we have increasingly is out of step with the behaviour of voters on the ground, do you see a serious campaign to change that system emerge? It's certainly the desire of the leaders of the smaller parties. It is an issue for some in the Labour Party, although nowhere near in the top 20 issues that most Labour MPs care about. But that is something to watch, whether you start to see a genuine movement in politics to change that system.

And what do you think? Is this the beginning of the end for the first past the post system?

I wouldn't bet on it happening, partly because we did have a referendum in the UK on changing the electoral system in 2011 and that was defeated. But it is an inescapable fact that the results that you're getting in general elections and the way that people in the country are voting are increasingly out of step.

Okay, so fragmentation of the British political system is a pretty big theme. Are there other themes that you think we're going to be talking about over the coming months.

One theme will be trust. One way of looking at this weakening of support for the two historically dominant parties is as a byproduct of a pretty pronounced fall amongst the electorate in trust in politicians. So people are looking to alternative parties because they are losing faith in the two historically dominant parties to deliver for them. Keir Starmer says that this is the challenge of our era. It's fair to say, based on his party's polling since he came to office and his personal polling, that he is struggling to really reverse that loss of trust. In short order at least.

Matthew, fascinating as ever to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

And every day this week we'll be looking at what else to expect in the coming year. Do check out the rest of our series on the World ahead.

Nicknames are not always flattering Andrew Palmer.

No Relation, writes Bartleby, our column on work and management, and is the host of our Boss Class podcast.

Take London's skyline where many of the buildings have nicknames, sometimes these names start out as criticism. The Shard, the city's tallest building was called a shard of glass through the heart of historic London by a heritage group. But in time they denote familiarity and often affection. The Gherkin, the Walkie Talkie. The Cheese Grater. There are good reasons why buildings acquire monikers. The bottle opener resonates more than the World Financial Centre Shanghai. The Lipstick Building is easier to remember than 885 Third Avenue, New York. Consumers give brands nicknames, too. BMW owners in Britain drive Bimas. If you're a high roller, you might say that you're wearing a rolly on your wrist. You probably would not shop at Target, an ironically Gaelic pronunciation of Target. Athletes nicknames can become brand like LeBron James, a basketball star, successfully opposed an attempt by a cruise liner to trademark King James. Brand nicknames are not always flattering, either. Neiman Marcus was once called needless markup, but usually they suggest that consumers feel a genuine connection to a product. In a recent paper, J. Jang of Western University in Canada and Vanessa Patrick of the University of Houston looked at how people react to the use of nicknames by other consumers. In one experiment, they showed some participants a review of a menu item from McDonald's, and the restaurant was called that. In another, they showed a review in which the chain was called Mickey D's. The chances that the review would be reported as fake were much lower when the nickname was used, and Mickey D's also made other people more likely to buy a product or to pass on the review. These benefits disappear, though, when a firm uses its own nickname in its own communications. Nicknames that seem to genuinely reflect consumers fondness for a brand can send a positive signal. Companies referring to themselves in this way feels inauthentic. Imagine someone called Jason saying that people call him J Dog and you get the picture. Nicknames are part and parcel of many workplaces, too. In another paper, Mr. Zhang and Shua Li Du of the University of New Hampshire found that 87% of the employees they surveyed had encountered nicknames at work. Some occupations are defined by banter. One guide to Australian building sites has a long list of common nicknames that includes the likes of Wheelbarrow only works when pushed, Broken Arrow doesn't Work but can't get fired and Deck Chair always folds under pressure. Workplace nicknames are sometimes unpleasant, but even if a nickname is meant as a mark of affection, it matters who coins them. The difference between monikers among friends and nicknames at work is that companies are hierarchies. In one experiment, Mr. Zhang and Ms. Du asked participants to imagine a scenario in which a worker refers to their boss as Panda because of a tendency to dress in black and white. Other participants were told to imagine a boss calling an employee by the same nickname. For the same reason, people associated the use of this nickname by the boss with a lower concern for employee welfare and less psychological safety. When the nickname was given to a manager, it was associated with a greater sense of well being among staff. For managers, the lessons ought to be apparent. Nicknaming is a natural habit. It can often be a positive one. But the best nicknames emerge from the bottom up. Brands should be careful about using them. Managers should stamp them out if they're causing distress, but otherwise steer well clear of the name game.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence we'll see you back here tomorrow.