Les Russes veulent-ils la guerre ? War as a Means of Domestic Politics: A Critical Reading of Vera Grantseva’s Essay

Hermes Kalamos · Digital Academic Journal of the Instituto Symposium · ISSN 2938-0758

Critical and analytical monograph with excursuses

Les Russes veulent-ils la guerre ?

War as a Means of Domestic Politics: A Critical Reading of Vera Grantseva’s Essay

Daniel Martín Menjón

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-4854-3406

Co-Founder and Principal Researcher, Hermes Kalamos – Digital Academic Journal of the Instituto Symposium

English edition · August 2026 · 77 pp. · Translated from the Spanish by the author

Les Russes veulent-ils la guerre ? Un essai d’une Russe en temps de guerre, by Vera Grantseva, published by Éditions du Cerf on 5 October 2023, takes up the question the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko posed in 1961 and reformulates it afresh sixty years later. Originally written in Russian and translated into French by Sarah Gruszka and Eugène Priadko, it addresses a Western reader, and singularly the French intellectual elite, from within the Petersburg intellectual elite. The present monograph submits it to examination in three movements applied to each of its six chapters: a faithful reconstruction of the argument, a dialogue with the sources the author herself calls upon, and the commentator’s critical counterpoint, the whole checked against primary and scholarly sources. A two-voice protocol, stable and explicit, governs the entire text – the essay’s exposition rendered in indirect speech, with a clear verbal marker; the commentator’s contribution given under the heading ‘Critical Observation’ – so that the reader may at any moment distinguish the reconstruction from the judgement.

The thesis that gives the essay its backbone is that the war of 2022 is not an end but a means: the regime came to it for reasons of domestic politics, with no relation to the question of Ukrainian nationalism, which served only as a pretext; and since 2012 it had been seeking an external enemy, confrontation with whom would explain to Russians why they are deprived of their political rights and kept at a low standard of living. From that matrix derive both the ‘majority of non-resistance’, with which the author dismantles the reading of massive support, and the weight of the Soviet past she examines in her fifth chapter. From it derives, too, her rejection of cultural determinism – what looks like apathy would not be servility but lassitude, a historical weariness – which places her, without the essay making this explicit, on the side of the best anti-culturalist historiography and in tension with one of the sources she herself invokes.

The central finding of the collation is that the work withstands scrutiny. The systematic verification of its figures against the primary sources yields a mostly favourable result, and the chapter devoted to public opinion – which puts into circulation the fertile concept of the ‘majority of non-resistance’, drawn from the Chronicles study – proves to be the book’s best empirically anchored chapter. The qualifications the present study incorporates are of attribution, of metric or of date, and they are recorded without ever silently altering what the author writes. Their meaning must be declared with complete clarity: the verification answers to the scholarly requirement of this document, which examines the work by the same measure it would examine any other work, and not to any suspicion, nor to any wish to correct it. The verified datum that takes the place of another draws the same society and proves, often, just as harrowing; anyone who brandished these notes to discredit the essay would be reading it exactly against the grain of its purpose.

The most productive counterpoint of the study is not geopolitical but conceptual. ‘Cannibal neo-feudalism’, the author’s most personal contribution, is a powerful metaphor that competes at a disadvantage with sharper frameworks that the essay does not summon: Henry Hale’s patronal politics, Alena Ledeneva’s sistema, Levitsky and Way’s competitive authoritarianism and, in the Russian language, Simon Kordonsky’s estate society. To this is added a question of perimeter: the corpus, coherent and solid, leaves aside both the realist objection and the finest academic refutation of that school, so that the book does not enter into dialogue with its most obvious adversary. Neither of these two limits lies in what the work asserts: both lie in the conversations that, by essayistic economy and by choice of addressee, it chose not to open.

Seven excursuses extend the analysis where a critical observation would prove insufficient: Russian civil society between co-optation and repression, with its periodisation and its regional and ethnic counterpoint; the fracture of the coercive apparatus of the state in comparative series, from Petrograd in 1917 to London and Liverpool in 1919 and to Moscow in 2023; the ethics of the witness and the figure of the lucid individual, from Chekhov to Soviet punitive psychiatry; the literary genealogy of the power that feeds on its own, with Saltykov-Shchedrin, Gogol and Dostoevsky; the literary tradition of war and the lie, and the poem from which the title proceeds; the intellectual trajectory of the author, from soft power to sharp power; and, offered expressly as a commentary, the material genealogy that traces the convergence of symptoms between East and West back to the dismantling of the containment walls of the order of 1945. The study closes on three acknowledgements – that of method, that of the bias imposed by every locus of enunciation, inseparable from the courage of one who chose to name things aloud, and that which forbids employing the collation against the author – and on a colophon that returns the word to Anna Akhmatova. Its horizon is that of the work commented upon: a dated state of the question, falling between February 2022 and a point in 2023, judged here by the measure of what was then available and verifiable, and not of what would be known later.

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Keywords

Vera Grantseva; Putinism; war in Ukraine; public opinion and preference falsification; majority of non-resistance; Russian civil society; neo-feudalism; elite theory; soft power and sharp power; homo sovieticus; Saltykov-Shchedrin; Gogol; Dostoevsky; Akhmatova.

To cite this monograph

Martín Menjón, D. (2026). Les Russes veulent-ils la guerre ? War as a means of domestic politics: A critical reading of Vera Grantseva’s essay (Critical and analytical monograph with excursuses). Hermes Kalamos – Digital Academic Journal of the Instituto Symposium. https://www.hermes-kalamos.eu/les-russes-veulent-ils-la-guerre-war-as-a-means-of-domestic-politics-a-critical-reading-of-vera-grantsevas-essay