This lecture is co-sponsored by the UW–Madison Department of Political Science.
About the Lecture: The war in Ukraine appears to have significantly exacerbated tensions between civilian and military officials in Russia. On the one hand, Vladimir Putin was likely dissatisfied with the military’s lack of preparedness, which became evident in its failure to achieve the goal of a rapid victory over Ukraine. On the other hand, members of the armed forces have expressed both implicit and explicit dissatisfaction with the inadequate resources allocated to them and with key tactical decisions made by the political leadership.
One of the most visible manifestations of this tension has been the wave of purges within the Ministry of Defense that began in 2024, an unprecedented campaign of arrests of high-ranking officials in recent Russian history. This lecture examines how these military purges are perceived by the Russian public, which has traditionally shown strong support for the armed forces, often viewing them as more legitimate than many civilian institutions.
After a brief overview of civil–military relations in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, the lecture presents evidence from survey experiments conducted in Russia. The findings suggest that when these military purges are perceived as the result of a political conflict between civilian and military authorities, some citizens may sympathize with military officers even in the presence of criminal accusations. This pattern indicates that, despite decades of efforts by both the Soviet and Russian regimes to limit the political influence of the military, the armed forces can still retain public support during periods of crisis, and may even act as political kingmakers, as they did in 1953, 1991, and 1993.
About the Speaker: Ilia Nadporozhskii is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on the survival of contemporary authoritarian regimes, with particular attention to dictator–elite relations, the management of ruling coalitions, and politics in Russia and the broader Eurasian region.