By Murad Rakhimov | 2026-03-19

Russian state pollsters put President Vladimir Putin's approval rating at around 80%. His spokesman calls it a "phenomenal consolidation of society." Yet the same government is floating fines for young Russians it deems insufficiently patriotic -- a tension that independent researchers say exposes how much the numbers should be doubted.

A poll with an asterisk

On the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov painted a picture of a nation united behind its president.

"A phenomenal consolidation of society around the president has occurred. Perhaps a maturing of the public has taken place in terms of understanding our roots and realizing what is good and what is bad in the world and in international affairs," Peskov told TASS.

He has also said that Putin is popular across all age groups -- "from young to old." Asked about the rise in sales of merchandise featuring the president's image, Peskov said it was one of the manifestations of love for the national leader.

According to VCIOM, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, trust in the president stood at 76.9% as of late February, with 80% approving of his performance.

VCIOM was founded in 1987, during the Glasnost era, when Soviet officials felt pressure to track public opinion. By 2013, its leadership had acknowledged that the Kremlin and the ruling United Russia party were its primary clients.

Alisher Ilkhamov, director of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence, spent years running a social research center and conducting roughly 10 surveys annually. He told Kontur the figures reflect what researchers call "social desirability bias" -- respondents in authoritarian states giving safe, approving answers just in case.

"This phenomenon particularly characterizes countries with authoritarian, repressive regimes where freedom of speech does not exist. Under these conditions, many respondents tend to answer such questions in the spirit of 'approval,'" Ilkhamov said.

He estimated only about 20% of Russians are genuine nationalist-patriots; the rest are conformists who avoid public dissent. He drew a direct parallel to the late Soviet period.

"Consider the USSR on the eve of Perestroika. Respondents' answers then would have looked much the same. But the situation changed drastically when [Mikhail] Gorbachev came to power. Only Putin's arrival and his 'tightening of the screws' forced the population back into a shell of political self-isolation," Ilkhamov said.

Dmitry Dubrovsky of Charles University in Prague rejected the "consolidation" framing outright.

"True consolidation occurs when people support events through genuine action. What we see in Russia today, however, is 'support' at gunpoint and under threat of repression -- a system where authorities tell the population to either keep quiet or face the consequences," he told Kontur.

Political scientist Anvar Nazirov argued that public opinion poll data reveals an "aggressively obedient majority" in Russia.

"They truly do support Putin. They have nowhere else to go. They cannot leave because they lack the money. They do not want to protest or take risks. Devoid of any political will or political culture, they want for nothing and stand ready to simply accept their fate. This is typical of totalitarian states. Nothing here should come as a surprise," he told Kontur.

Fines for 'zoomers'

But perhaps no data point undermines the Kremlin's consolidation narrative more than its own panicked approach to youth policy. If 80% of Russians genuinely back their president, it is not clear why the government has spent two decades failing to win over the generation that grew up entirely under his rule.

Pro-government youth movements -- Walking Together, Nashi, Young Guard -- collapsed in the 2000s. Young Russians drove mass protests in the 2010s. Thousands fled after the full-scale invasion began, citing opposition to the war or fear of mobilization. In June 2023, a viral TikTok video showed young Muscovites overwhelmingly calling the war a disaster and wishing for a Ukrainian victory.

On February 20, Vitaly Borodin, head of the Federal Project on Security and Anti-Corruption, proposed fines for "zoomerism" -- a vague charge of historical and political illiteracy.

"Why not introduce accountability for a young person not knowing their roots, their heroes, and our state's trajectory?" he said in an interview with the Russian outlet Abzats. Without a legislative response, he warned, uneducated youth would skip elections and join unauthorized protests instead.

"Zoomers," or Generation Z, refers to those born roughly between 1995 and 2012 -- the first generation to grow up online, and the first to have spent their entire conscious lives under Putin. They have already sat through state-mandated "Conversations about Important Things" classes, propaganda curricula and rewritten history textbooks.

Dubrovsky said those policies are eroding the quality of education.

"The normal educational and pedagogical functions of schools and universities are being lost," he noted. The goal, he said, is ideological control aimed at producing "the proper Putinist man."

Russia has not reached the stage of mass-distributing collections of the leader's quotes, as China did under Mao Zedong. But Dubrovsky said the country is moving in roughly that direction.