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Russia’s international standing collapsed within weeks of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions have swept across Russian banks, businesses and political elites, while Western companies have left the country en masse. For those living in Russia, it was the everyday, tangible changes that made this real.
Western goods disappeared from supermarket shelves, direct flights to Europe stopped and visas to travel abroad became more difficult. Russian athletes, artists and scholars, meanwhile, were excluded from international competitions, cultural platforms and academic events.
For Russians living elsewhere in Europe, the change was often more subtle. Questions about their citizenship and job applications, negative media coverage and offhand comments about Russia all contributed to a growing sense that Russian now means carrying a stigma. Russia’s changing international reputation had suddenly become personal.
I have seen this transformation in my own research on Russian masculinity, which involved interviews with Russian men living in Russia and abroad. When I first interviewed my 40 participants in 2013-14, most saw Russia positively and had a relatively secure sense of national identity.
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.
Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool
One of the questions I asked the participants in the second round of interviews was: “How would you define Russia’s role in the world today?” Their answers were striking.
My respondents described Russia as “just a pawn in a big game”, “a bully with a nuclear baton” and “a pariah country like North Korea”. One participant even compared Russia to Voldemort, the main villain from the Harry Potter book series.
Two others called Russia a “backslidden, defective, sick country” and “the state that uses violence to be loved”. Even those who supported Vladimir Putin’s regime and the war admitted that Russia’s standing in the world had deteriorated significantly since the full-scale invasion.
The intensity of the stigma—and, in some cases, the shame associated with being Russian—was palpable. Across the interviews, being Russian had become something that many felt they had to explain, defend, distance themselves from, or think about.
Managing the stigma
How my interviewees manage geopolitical stigma was deeply intertwined with ideas about masculinity, power and competition between world powers.
*Dmitry, a Russian man living in the UK, said: “I talk less about being Russian now.” He blamed the “incompetent” Russian authorities for the war and expressed sympathy for the Ukrainians, but still wanted Russia to win.
“Russia must win,” he said, because a victory would benefit Russian-general people around the world. “The winners are not judged – the winner writes the history, as we know.” He feared that a Russian defeat would leave the Russians as “outcasts” and argued that Russia would be able to “join the ranks of leading world powers such as the United States and Great Britain.”
Dmitry distanced himself from the Russian state and at the same time hoped that the status of Russia – and thus the status of the Russians – would be restored by the victory. His response focused on an idea of international power centered on strength, victory and the ability to gain respect.
Petr, who lived in Russia, handled the stigma differently. “I’m not a political scientist or a military expert,” he said, adding: “I don’t have plans for offensive military operations on my desk, I don’t know what’s really going on there. Maybe we’re victims of propaganda.” Giving up his agency helped him distance himself from the decisions of the Russian state.
But this distancing also became uncomfortable for his sense of himself as a man. He added: “I’m still a man. I’m still a father, a defender of my family.” For Petr, masculinity offered a way to navigate this uncomfortable position. He could say that he did not understand the war and was not responsible for it, while still claiming the identity of a man protecting his family.
Pavel, a respondent who was temporarily living in a Mediterranean country at the time I interviewed him, took yet another path. He was against the war and criticized the imperial violence of Russia. Pavel was particularly troubled by what he saw as Russia’s failure to acknowledge its past imperial crimes. He contrasted Russia with the “big guys” like Germany and Japan, who he argued had already “repented” of their imperial pasts.
Pavel rejected Russian imperialism. But he also compares Russia with other powerful states, which he considered more modern and civilized. By positioning Russia as an empire that had not learned from its past, he was able to distance himself from the stigma of Russianness and align himself with a supposedly more legitimate international order.
As UK-based researchers Imogen Tyler and Tom Slater have argued in their work, stigma is not simply a label attached to those seen as deviant or discredited. It is a mechanism for producing and stabilizing social hierarchies and unequal power relations.
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, civilizational hierarchy and inevitability of violence that underpinned imperial and male rule in the first place.
*The names of the interviewees have been changed to ensure their anonymity.
