A grassroots conservatism? Taking a fine-grained view of conservative attitudes among Russians

ABSTRACT This article argues that interpreting Russia's conservatism exclusively as a top-down phenomenon has obscured the possibility that there might exist a grassroots conservatism founded on very different bases than the state narrative, and which predates the state's embrace of conservatism. It thus takes a fine-grained view of Russians' conservative values by looking at (1) the existence since the 1990s of a situational conservatism that preceded the state's “conservative turn”; (2) the fact that conservative attitudes are shared by almost all post-socialist countries; (3) the rise of moral conservatism and its limits; (4) attitudes toward the Church, which encapsulate the gap between discourse and practice; and (5) the polarisation of Russian society into conservative and non-conservative constituencies.