{"id":2005,"date":"2026-10-13T15:11:16","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T15:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/10\/13\/how-the-geopolitical-stigma-associated-with-putins-russia-is-affecting-ordinary-russians\/"},"modified":"2026-10-13T15:11:16","modified_gmt":"2026-10-13T15:11:16","slug":"how-the-geopolitical-stigma-associated-with-putins-russia-is-affecting-ordinary-russians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/10\/13\/how-the-geopolitical-stigma-associated-with-putins-russia-is-affecting-ordinary-russians\/","title":{"rendered":"How the \u2018geopolitical stigma\u2019 associated with Putin\u2019s Russia is affecting ordinary Russians"},"content":{"rendered":"
People go about their daily life in the Russian capital, Moscow, in 2023.<\/span> Arnold O. A. Pinto \/ Shutterstock<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Russia\u2019s international standing collapsed within weeks of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions swept across Russian banks, businesses and political elites, while western companies exited the country en masse. For those living inside Russia, it was the everyday, tangible shifts that made this feel real. <\/p>\n

Western goods disappeared from supermarket shelves, direct flights to Europe stopped and getting visas to travel abroad became more difficult. Russian<\/a> athletes, artists and scholars, meanwhile, were excluded from international competitions, cultural platforms and academic events. <\/p>\n

For Russians living elsewhere in Europe, the change was often more subtle. Questions about their nationality in job applications, negative media coverage and offhand comments about Russia all contributed to a growing sense that being Russian now meant carrying a stigma<\/a>. Russia\u2019s changing international reputation had suddenly become personal<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I have seen this transformation in my own research<\/a> on Russian masculinities, which has involved interviewing Russian men living in Russia and abroad. When I first interviewed my 40 participants in 2013-14, most viewed Russia positively and had a relatively secure sense of national identity. <\/p>\n

When I returned to interview 27 of them between 2022 and 2023, this picture had changed dramatically. Only two of the men still described Russia in unambiguously positive terms.<\/p>\n

One of the questions I asked participants in the second round of interviews was: \u201cHow would you define Russia\u2019s role in the world today?\u201d Their answers were striking. <\/p>\n

My respondents described Russia as \u201conly a pawn in a big game\u201d, \u201ca bully with the nuclear baton\u201d and \u201ca pariah country like North Korea\u201d. One participant even likened Russia to Voldemort, the main villain from the Harry Potter book series. <\/p>\n

Two others called Russia a \u201cbackward, defective, sick country\u201d, and \u201cthe state that uses violence to be loved\u201d. Even those who supported Vladimir Putin\u2019s regime and the war admitted that Russia\u2019s standing in the world had deteriorated significantly since the full-scale invasion. <\/p>\n

The intensity of the stigma \u2013 and, in some cases, the shame associated with being Russian \u2013 was palpable. Across the interviews, being Russian had become something that many felt they had to explain, defend, distance themselves from or rethink. <\/p>\n

Managing the stigma<\/h2>\n

How my interviewees managed the geopolitical stigma was deeply entangled with ideas about masculinity, power and competition between world powers. <\/p>\n

*Dmitry, a Russian man living in the UK, said: \u201cI talk less about being Russian now.\u201d He blamed the \u201cincompetent\u201d Russian authorities for the war and expressed sympathy for Ukrainians, yet still wanted Russia to win. <\/p>\n

\u201cRussia needs to win,\u201d he said, because a victory would benefit Russian-speaking people around the world. \u201cThe victors are not judged \u2013 the winner writes history, as we know.\u201d He feared that a Russian defeat would leave Russians as \u201coutcasts\u201d and argued that Russia should be able to \u201cjoin the ranks of leading world powers like the US and Britain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dmitry was distancing himself from the Russian state while simultaneously hoping that Russia\u2019s status \u2013 and, with it, the status of Russians \u2013 would be restored through victory. His response drew on an idea of international power centred on strength, victory and the ability to command respect.<\/p>\n

Petr, who was living in Russia, managed the stigma differently. \u201cI\u2019m not a political scientist or a military expert,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cI don\u2019t have any plans for offensive military operations on my desk, I don\u2019t know what\u2019s really going on there. Maybe we\u2019re victims of propaganda.\u201d Disclaiming his agency helped him distance himself from the decisions of the Russian state. <\/p>\n

But that distancing also became uncomfortable for his sense of himself as a man. He added: \u201cI\u2019m still a man. I am still a father, a defender of my family.\u201d For Petr, masculinity offered a way to navigate this uncomfortable position. He could say he did not understand the war and was not responsible for it, while still claiming the identity of a man who protects his family.<\/p>\n

Pavel, a respondent temporarily residing in a Mediterranean country at the time I interviewed him, took yet another route. He opposed the war and criticised Russia\u2019s imperial violence. Pavel was particularly troubled by what he saw as Russia\u2019s failure to acknowledge its past imperial crimes. He contrasted Russia with the \u201cbig guys\u201d such as Germany and Japan, which he argued had already \u201crepented\u201d their imperial pasts.<\/p>\n

Pavel was rejecting Russia\u2019s imperialism. But he was also comparing Russia with other powerful states that he regarded as having become more modern and civilised. By positioning Russia as an empire that had failed to learn from its past, he could distance himself from the stigma of Russianness and align himself with a supposedly more legitimate international order. <\/p>\n

As UK-based researchers Imogen Tyler and Tom Slater have argued<\/a> in their work, stigma is not simply a label attached to those who are seen as deviant or discredited. It is a mechanism for producing and stabilising social hierarchies and unequal relations of power.<\/p>\n

The men I interviewed did not simply accept the geopolitical stigma. They distanced themselves from it, challenged it or tried to overcome it. But in doing so, they often drew on the very ideas of power, victory, civilisational hierarchy and inevitability of violence that underpin imperial and masculine domination in the first place.<\/p>\n

*The names of the interviewees have been changed to ensure their anonymity.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Marina Yusupova-Ryder received financial support from Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) to support the costs of conducting the empirical research discussed in this article. She is a Visiting Lecturer at ENU and holds a full-time research position at the University of Helsinki. Her research is currently supported by a grant from the Kone Foundation.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People go about their daily life in the Russian capital, Moscow, in 2023. Arnold O. A. Pinto \/ Shutterstock Russia\u2019s international standing collapsed within weeks of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions swept across Russian banks, businesses and political elites, while western companies exited the country en masse. For those living inside Russia, it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}