Do the Russians Want War?

In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, a song appeared in the Soviet Union whose title posed a question that still resonates today: Do the Russians want war? The answer the song offered was unambiguous. No, they did not. Its lyrics evoked not ideology or geopolitics, but memory: mass death, shattered families, children replacing fallen fathers and brothers in factories, and the deep exhaustion of a society that had paid an almost unimaginable price for victory in the Second World War. The song was not pacifist in the abstract sense. It was anti-war because war was known—intimately, bodily, demographically.

More than six decades later, as negotiations, ceasefire proposals, and armistice discussions once again circulate around Russia’s war against Ukraine, the same question returns to public discourse. It is repeated by Russian officials, echoed by sympathetic commentators in the West, and sometimes invoked even by critics of the Kremlin: do ordinary Russians really want this war?

The persistence of the question is telling … and misleading. It assumes that wars are primarily the result of popular desire or its absence, as if the central problem were psychological or moral. But history suggests that this framing obscures more than it reveals. The more uncomfortable possibility is this: Russians may not want war in any meaningful emotional sense, but the political and economic system in which they live increasingly requires war in order to function. The issue, then, is not desire—it is dependency.

Crucially, this anti-war longing coexisted with a state that glorified military sacrifice. This paradox suggests that memory does not always act as a restraint; it can also be a baseline. In the 1960s, memory served to say, ‘Never Again.’ Today, however, that same memory has been re-engineered. The coexistence of peace-longing and militarization provided the perfect foundation for a system that could eventually transition from a society that remembers war to a society that requires it.

The Soviet economy: mobilization as normality

The persistence of war memory alone does not explain the Soviet Union’s enduring militarization. For that, one must turn to political economy. The Soviet system was not merely capable of mobilizing for war; it was organized around permanent readiness. Defense production was not an emergency measure but a structural pillar of the economy.

Military and defense-related industries absorbed a disproportionate share of scientific talent, technological innovation, and industrial capacity. Entire regions depended on defense factories for employment and infrastructure. Secrecy functioned not only as a security measure but also as a governance tool, insulating large parts of the economy from public scrutiny and political accountability.

In this context, “peace” did not mean demilitarization. It meant deferred confrontation, managed tension, and continued preparedness. The system stabilized itself through mobilization, not despite it. War was not an exception to normality; it was its organizing horizon.

This matters because it complicates any simple opposition between anti-war sentiment and militarized structures. The Soviet Union managed to cultivate a genuine popular desire to avoid war while simultaneously embedding war readiness into its economic and institutional DNA.

Post-Soviet rupture and continuity

The collapse of the Soviet Union disrupted this system but did not fully dismantle it. The 1990s brought economic contraction, industrial decay, and social dislocation. Defense industries shrank, but they did not disappear. More importantly, no alternative economic model capable of absorbing surplus labor, stabilizing regions, and sustaining state authority fully replaced them.

By the 2000s, under Vladimir Putin, the Russian state began reconstructing a centralized system of control—politically, economically, and symbolically. Defense and security sectors regained prominence, not only as instruments of foreign policy but also as tools of domestic stabilization. Military production offered predictable funding streams, employment in politically sensitive regions, and a justification for expanding state control over industry.

After 2014, and especially after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, this trend accelerated dramatically. Sanctions constrained civilian sectors. Access to global markets narrowed. In response, the state increasingly oriented industrial policy around defense needs. Civilian factories were repurposed. Budgets prioritized military and security spending. War became a mechanism for absorbing economic shocks and redistributing resources.

War as economic glue

For policy observers, this has profound implications. War now performs several stabilizing functions within the Russian system. It absorbs labor that might otherwise become politically volatile. It channels investment into sectors insulated from international competition. It legitimizes repression by framing dissent as sabotage. And it provides a narrative framework that redirects economic hardship toward external hostility rather than internal failure.

In this context, peace is destabilizing. An end to large-scale military activity would immediately raise unresolved questions: what to do with demobilized soldiers, how to reorient an industrial base increasingly geared toward defense production, how to justify reduced social spending, and how to sustain regions whose economic lifelines now depend on military contracts. War, by contrast, postpones these questions indefinitely.

By the mid-2020s, this stabilizing role had become measurable. Defense and security spending consolidated at historically unprecedented levels, accounting for a large share of federal expenditures and an estimated 7–8 percent of GDP. But this was not merely a budgetary shift. It functioned as a system of redistribution in which the state became the primary source of income, demand, and social mobility. In poorer peripheral regions such as Tuva or Buryatia, military salaries and compensation payments injected more capital in a single year than decades of civilian employment had previously provided.

The consequences extended into the labor market. With unemployment at historic lows, civilian industries found themselves unable to compete with defense wages or state-backed security contracts. Labor, credit, and political loyalty were steadily drawn into the war economy, producing a ratchet effect: each additional month of mobilization deepened dependence on continued conflict. In such a system, peace ceased to represent a dividend. It became an economic shock.

This does not mean that war is cost-free or universally supported. It means that the system has evolved in such a way that alternatives appear riskier than continuation. Structural dependency replaces popular enthusiasm. Conflict is no longer merely a policy choice; it is the condition under which the system remains coherent.

A reasonable objection is whether such dependency requires active combat at all or merely permanent militarization—a “cold” war economy without fighting. In theory, sustained military spending and internal mobilization could preserve many of the system’s stabilizing functions. In practice, however, active war performs tasks that spending alone cannot. It legitimizes sacrifice, absorbs surplus labor through mobilization rather than reform, and continuously defers political and economic reckoning. A static militarized peace would stabilize expectations; a live war perpetually resets them. For a system that has exhausted civilian growth and institutional trust, kinetic conflict is not an anomaly but a mechanism of temporal control.

The Conversion Trap: Why the Kremlin Fears Peace

This structural dependency creates a strategic paralysis that Western policymakers often misinterpret as mere ideological stubbornness. As ceasefire proposals circulate in Western capitals, they collide with a fundamental reality that is frequently underestimated: the Russian economy can no longer meaningfully “turn back.” Unlike advanced Western economies, where defense spending represents a limited share of public expenditure, Russia has entered a condition in which roughly 40 percent of federal spending is now directed toward defense and security, according to official budget data and independent estimates. War is no longer a policy priority; it is the organizing principle of fiscal life.

The Kremlin leadership is acutely aware of the Soviet precedent. In the late 1980s, the USSR did not collapse solely because of falling oil prices or political liberalization but also because of the failure of konversiya—the attempt to convert vast military-industrial capacities toward civilian production. That transition proved disastrous. Military manufacturing, by its nature, is capital-intensive, inelastic, and poorly suited to competitive consumer markets. Conversion destroyed employment faster than it created alternatives, accelerating social and political disintegration.

Contemporary Russia faces a similar precipice. A sudden shift to “peace” would not generate a civilian boom; it would render large segments of the industrial base economically obsolete almost overnight. In a militarized autocracy, an idle tank factory is not a neutral economic fact—it is a political time bomb. Under these conditions, demobilization threatens not stabilization but regime survival.

From memory to reproduction: militarizing the next generation

Perhaps the most unsettling indicator of this transformation lies in education and youth socialization. During the Second World War, children worked in factories because society was fighting for survival. It was a tragic necessity imposed by circumstance. Today, Russian schoolchildren are encouraged, and sometimes required, to participate in activities that normalize military production and combat readiness, including the assembly of drones and other technologies used in the war against Ukraine.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan. Recent investigations and state television documentaries from 2024 and 2025 have lifted the veil on a sprawling facility where hundreds of students, some as young as 14 or 15, labor on assembly lines for the ‘Geran’ attack drones. This is not a voluntary after-school club; it is an industrialized ‘work-study’ program where vocational training is secondary to production quotas. By framing this labor as a manifestation of ‘patriotic DNA’ and binding families to the facility through financial penalties for expulsion, the state has moved beyond mere propaganda. It has created a system where the education of the child is collateral for the survival of the war machine.

This pedagogical shift mirrors the Central Bank’s struggle with ‘inflationary expectations.’ Just as the regulator fears that the public has ‘anchored’ its economic behavior to permanent price rises, the educational system is anchoring the next generation to a permanent state of mobilization. The transition from the 1961 ‘trauma of memory’ to the 2025 ‘curriculum of inevitability’ is complete: war is no longer an external catastrophe to be avoided but an internal organizing principle to be managed.

The difference is not merely moral; it is structural. War memory has shifted from trauma to curriculum. What was once an emergency response has become an institutionalized expectation. The purpose is no longer to survive a singular catastrophe but to reproduce a system that assumes ongoing conflict.

This marks a decisive break with the emotional core of the 1961 song. That song spoke for a generation that had endured war and wished to prevent its return. Contemporary militarized pedagogy, by contrast, prepares children for a future in which war is permanent background noise—inevitable, normal, and necessary.

Do Russians want war—or need it?

At this point, the original question can be revisited with greater clarity. Do Russians want war? Taken literally, the answer is likely still no. Surveys, anecdotal evidence, and everyday conversations point to widespread fatigue, anxiety, and quiet resentment. But focusing on desire misidentifies the problem.

The more consequential reality is that the Russian state, and increasingly the society it has reshaped, has become dependent on war to sustain economic coherence, political control, and symbolic legitimacy. Over time, this dependency erodes the political relevance of individual preferences. Wanting peace matters little when peace threatens systemic collapse.

This is not an argument about national character or collective psychology. It is an argument about structures, incentives, and historical trajectories. Societies can be drawn into patterns of behavior that few actively endorse, yet many passively sustain. In such conditions, war does not require popular enthusiasm. It requires only the absence of viable alternatives.

Conclusion: the wrong question

The enduring appeal of Do the Russians want war? lies in its moral clarity. It invites empathy and absolution. But as an analytical tool, it is insufficient. The more urgent question is whether a political system can survive without war once it has reorganized itself around permanent mobilization.

The tragedy is not that Russians secretly long for conflict. It is that decades of economic and institutional choices have made war functionally indispensable. In such conditions, peace is no longer simply a moral aspiration. It is a disruptive event.

This reality complicates contemporary diplomacy. A ceasefire may halt the fighting, but it does not dissolve the structures that now depend on continued mobilization for social stability and political control. Without a credible path out of war-centered economic organization, any pause in violence risks becoming merely an intermission. The lesson of the late Soviet collapse remains instructive: demobilization without conversion destabilizes faster than it pacifies.

Until this structural dependency is confronted economically, politically, and symbolically, the absence of popular desire for war will remain a weak safeguard against its continuation. History has shown, repeatedly, that societies do not need to want war in order to wage it; they only need to be unable to survive the peace.