Russia’s international standing collapsed within weeks of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions swept across Russian banks, businesses and political elites, while western companies exited the country en masse. For those living inside Russia, it was the everyday, tangible shifts that made this feel real.
Western goods disappeared from supermarket shelves, direct flights to Europe stopped and getting 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 nationality in job applications, negative media coverage and offhand comments about Russia all contributed to a growing sense that being Russian now meant carrying a stigma. Russia’s changing international reputation had suddenly become personal.
I have seen this transformation in my own research on Russian masculinities, which has involved interviewing Russian men living in Russia and abroad. When I first interviewed my 40 participants in 2013-14, most viewed 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.
One of the questions I asked 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 “only a pawn in a big game”, “a bully with the nuclear baton” and “a pariah country like North Korea”. One participant even likened Russia to Voldemort, the main villain from the Harry Potter book series.
Two others called Russia a “backward, 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 rethink.
Managing the stigma
How my interviewees managed the geopolitical stigma was deeply entangled 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 Ukrainians, yet still wanted Russia to win.
“Russia needs to win,” he said, because a victory would benefit Russian-speaking people around the world. “The victors are not judged – the winner writes history, as we know.” He feared that a Russian defeat would leave Russians as “outcasts” and argued that Russia should be able to “join the ranks of leading world powers like the US and Britain.”
Dmitry was distancing himself from the Russian state while simultaneously hoping that Russia’s status – and, with it, the status of Russians – would be restored through victory. His response drew on an idea of international power centred on strength, victory and the ability to command respect.
Petr, who was living in Russia, managed the stigma differently. “I’m not a political scientist or a military expert,” he said, adding: “I don’t have any plans for offensive military operations on my desk, I don’t know what’s really going on there. Maybe we’re victims of propaganda.” Disclaiming his agency helped him distance himself from the decisions of the Russian state.
But that distancing also became uncomfortable for his sense of himself as a man. He added: “I’m still a man. I am still a father, a defender of my family.” For Petr, masculinity offered a way to navigate this uncomfortable position. He could say he did not understand the war and was not responsible for it, while still claiming the identity of a man who protects his family.
Pavel, a respondent temporarily residing in a Mediterranean country at the time I interviewed him, took yet another route. He opposed the war and criticised Russia’s imperial violence. 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” such as Germany and Japan, which he argued had already “repented” their imperial pasts.
Pavel was rejecting Russia’s imperialism. But he was also comparing Russia with other powerful states that he regarded as having become more modern and civilised. By positioning Russia as an empire that had failed to learn from its past, he could 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 who are seen as deviant or discredited. It is a mechanism for producing and stabilising social hierarchies and unequal relations of power.
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, civilisational hierarchy and inevitability of violence that underpin imperial and masculine domination in the first place.
*The names of the interviewees have been changed to ensure their anonymity.
Marina Yusupova-Ryder received financial support from Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) to support the costs of conducting the empirical research discussed in this article. She is a Visiting Lecturer at ENU and holds a full-time research position at the University of Helsinki. Her research is currently supported by a grant from the Kone Foundation.
