Post-Mutiny: Trust in Prigozhin Below Margin of Error, Support for Peace Talk Grows

The swift rise of Prigozhin’s star on the Russian political scene didn’t last long, however, and, as Levada’s subsequent polls indicate, his decision to rebel holds most of the blame for that. A poll conducted during a period of several days [2] surrounding the June 23-24 mutiny revealed that only 2% of respondents had mentioned him when asked to name political figures they trusted. [3] It bears noting that Prigozhin’s result falls within the poll’s margin of error, which is 1.5%-3.4%. That the failed rebellion was the reason for Russians’ dramatic decline of trust in Prigozhin follows from separate polling the Levada Center conducted between June 28 and July 1. Some 36% of the respondents of that poll said their opinion of Prigozhin deteriorated after the mutiny, while 5% said their outlook on him had improved.

Levada is not the only Russian pollster to register a decline in positive views of Prigozhin. Russian Field, a private polling firm, conducted surveys on Russians’ views of Prigozhin shortly before and shortly after the mutiny. Between June 16-19, the pollster asked respondents about their views of Prigozhin’s role in the “military operation” in Ukraine, at which point 55% voiced approval and 14% disapproved. Asked the same question between June 26-30, those figures shifted to 29% and 39% respectively. [4]

In addition to asking respondents to name political figures they found trustworthy, in its June 28-July 1 poll Levada identified specific individuals and asked respondents to rate their trustworthiness in the aftermath of the mutiny.

Asked about Prigozhin, some 22% of the respondents said they trusted him, while 50% said they did not. Shoigu was trusted by 43%, but not by 45%, according to the poll. In contrast to these antagonists, Putin enjoyed a trust level of 76% following the mutiny, with only 20% expressing distrust. Moreover, a significant majority of Russians do not expect Putin’s grip on the country to weaken, the poll found. When asked about the consequences of the mutiny, 32% of the respondents said they expected the Russian state to consolidate and strengthen while 51% expected “everything to remain as before.”

Similarly, both pollsters found links between sources of information respondents relied on for updates about the mutiny and their views of Prigozhin, with both finding that negative views seemed most prominent among those who relied on TV news, and positive views tending to be more likely among social media users and YouTube watchers. An obvious explanation for this trend is the level of control Russian authorities retain over television news, and the relative difficulty containing messaging on user-generated content platforms. In an analysis of Levada’s survey results, this pollster’s director Denis Volkov said: “As one might expect, most Russians learned about the mutiny from television (44%), meaning it was immediately given an interpretation by the authorities. The older the person, the more likely they were to have turned to the television for news.”

If there is a silver lining in all this, it has to be the increase in the number of Russians who hope for a peaceful end to their country’s war of aggression against Ukraine. One, of course, needs to be aware of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, but we could not help noting that the share of Russians voicing support for peace talks had risen to 53% when Levada conducted its June 22-28 poll, as compared with 45% the month before. That’s a positive development, even if it turns out to be short-lived.

Footnotes

[1] That said, even at his peak in popularity, Prigozhin was still trusted 10 times less than his ex-patron Vladimir Putin (the latter of whom received 40% in April 2023 and 42% in May 2023). It bears noting that gauging public opinion in Russia is no simple task, particularly in wartime. Well-documented crackdowns on public criticisms of the war — including surging treason charges and the shuttering of independent media outlets — inevitably stifle expression of views. Studies have shown that Russians opposed to Putin are more afraid than their pro-Kremlin counterparts to express their opinions openly in public polling.

[2] The poll was conducted between June 22 and June 28, while the mutiny took place on June 23-24; thus some of these results were collected before the mutiny materialized, and before substantial information about its severity was available.

[3] If we were to compare popular trust in Prigozhin with that of opposition figure Alexei Navalny, it would become evident that such trust offers no protection from the Russian state. Navalny enjoyed the same level of trust in the months prior to his poisoning, allegedly by Russian security services, in August 2020 (4% in April 2020) as Prigozhin did one month before the June 2023 mutiny (4% in May 2023), but that did not stop Putin’s regime from allegedly poisoning him, and ultimately jailing him.

[4] These studies were conducted by telephone, among approximately 1,600 respondents each, from across Russia. According to the pollster, the margin of error does not exceed 2.45%.

Photo shared by Fargoh via Wikimedia Commons, under the Public Domain.