Anna Biryukova is Head of Public Opinion Research at the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), Russia’s most significant opposition organization, founded by Alexey Navalny in 2011. Anna joined the team of the Russian opposition leader in 2013 during Navalny’s election campaign for Mayor of Moscow. Since then, Biryukova has run independent and unbiased surveys, nationwide polls, and focus groups, always under immense pressure from Putin’s regime. In 2019, she was forced to leave her country. Russian authorities considered her work—political polling—to be a terrorist and extremist activity. Living in exile in Lithuania, Biryukova has never stopped doing her research work. As ACF’s head of polling, she manages a team of interviewers and runs dozens of nationwide polls in Russia annually. The reliable data she receives is essential to the ACF’s strategic planning of its fight against Putin’s regime. This semester, Biryukova is a World Fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs.
Tell me about your early life in Russia.
In Russia, there are certain types of small towns that are closed. In a town like this, you cannot get inside. You have to have a special, written paper that says you are okay to go inside. It’s not a prison, it’s a normal city. But you cannot visit unless you have permission. I was born in that type of town in Siberia. It was weird and fascinating at the same time because it was relatively safe. After my elementary school, I moved to a bigger town between Moscow and St Petersburg. My biggest dream back then was to study in Moscow.
What was your first perception of Vladimir Putin?
I’m 33, and Putin has been in power for 24 years. My first political memory is Putin. Compared to Yeltsin—old, drinking problems, weird—I was like, wow, that’s my president. I’m sorry, but that was the truth back then.
All students in Russia got their education about the world by watching American movies. That’s one hundred percent true, and the one thing I understood about life was that you have to be extremely patriotic about your country. I watched American students pledging to their flag, and I was like, wow, okay my country is a different one, but I also have a flag and I have a president, and I have to be that committed. Luckily, this delusion did not last long, but I think that at age 12 or something, I used to have a couple of notebooks with Putin’s picture on them. Can you imagine? I was like that is my president. I have to be committed. Luckily, a little bit later, I educated myself. Now, I hate him so much. He is destroying Ukraine physically but at the same time, he is destroying the future of his very own country.
How did you manage to get past your unquestioning, patriotic perception of Putin?
There was a huge internet platform, LiveJournal, and I read a lot. I got my internet connection, and that was the window to the world for me. I remember one particular post when something really clicked. Putin used to like bragging a lot. On Google, you can find a picture of Putin scuba diving into the Black Sea. When he emerged on shore, he had in his hands two ancient vases. I guess that the vases were originally from some museum or something, but they staged the whole thing. I saw this, and I could not be fooled that much. I was young, but I could understand that this was staged. I think that was the first time I understood that this is all fake.
What was the general sentiment around you at the time? Your peers, how did they feel about him?
They were trying not to be involved. It was not for the younger generation. If you want to be a fashionable guy, you should care about your money and your future, not about being a part of society, not about the future of the country. This is why Alexei Navalny was very popular later. He made politics and activism the “new black.”
When you see your president taking nice pictures for the older audience because he wants women of age to admire him, you want to be as far from that thing as possible. It’s just weird. I don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to vote. I don’t want to think about politics in this country, please. I want to stay back. It is such a convenient thing for each and every dictator. It’s like we have an unwritten contract between the dictator and society: stay away, don’t be involved, be inactive. Live your life. We don’t interfere, you don’t interfere.
Politics is a dirty business. They used to say if you don’t want to get dirty, stay away. The most important thing is that the Russian political leaders are really weird. Think of many, many Trumps—not a single one, but lots of them—talking nonsense on state TV. You don’t want to watch TV shows because of this. This is just, what’s the word, cringe?
Do you think that at any point disengagement within Russian society turned into a regime of fear?
It began in 2014 when the war started. Unfortunately, the whole world did not perceive it as such. Back then, I took part in a huge street rally. Back then, it was possible. After the Crimea annexation, I held a sign with something like, “Crimea is Ukraine.” Nothing happened to me. I was not arrested. I didn’t get a fine. It happened step by step.
Now, if you post something, even if you are no one, click, that’s it, you’re in prison. Even if you repost something, even if it is not your own words, you are an easy target. You cannot be in a prisoner swap because no one knows you. They say that there are more than 1,000 political prisoners now. One hundred percent, there are many more than this number. No one knows them. Russia is a very big country.
What happened in 2019 for you to be put on the terrorist and extremist list?
I was put on the extremist list as a part of the ACF organization. I’m a terrorist because I was a part of one YouTube show talking about my work, and I said one sentence, “If you feel like setting fire to offices where they ask people to go to war, you should do it.”
Do you think Putin had some sort of switch? There were a lot of rumors when the war was starting that he had some sort of COVID meltdown.
He reads only folders created for him. and he believes that these folders are reality. So here on this laptop, it’s all fake news, but he believes his information is one hundred percent concrete. Just think about it. Day by day, your reality gradually differs from the real reality. It happened to him not because he was reading fake news on Twitter. He literally made it himself. And can you imagine, he has a whole whole room of Putin Pleasers. And they are like, what should I put in this new briefing for him? Should I upset him or not? Oh, no, of course not! I don’t want to upset him. It also happens with polls. Upsetting polls and upsetting numbers should not be in folders. That’s why there is no point in polling in general.
Within the Anti-corruption Foundation, we have two schools of thought. My school says that he’s just crazy. He wants to be a savior. It is a religious thing for him. He wanted to be in history. The other school is for a practical approach: he wants to steal even more. He wants to be in power. That’s why he needed this war.
What was it like working for Navalny during his Moscow mayoral campaign?
In 2013, Alexei was fighting against Sergei Sobyanin, the current mayor. Sobiyanin was so ambitious and so bold that he was like, “Okay, I want to fight Navalny and show everyone that he’s nothing, that he doesn’t have support.” A real fight like this had never happened before.
Everyone was interested in having some poll numbers and some data. I remember one particular research agency published Navalny’s approval rating at 2.5%. That was true at the time, but he worked so hard that, in two months, he was at 28%.
All the agencies that did a lot of polls tried to downgrade him. They said his approval rating was 5-7%. Our own in-house polls predicted his approval rating reached 27.5% The outcome, spoiler alert, was that Sobiyanin got 51% and Alexei got 27.5%. That is not 2.5%. They actually had to fake results a little just for him [Sobianyin] to get more than 50%.
Did Putin ever talk publicly about Navalny?
He never used his name. He used each and every option, just not Alexei Navalny: ‘that guy’, ‘that foreign agent’, ‘that American agent’, ‘that convicted felon’, but not his name. The first time he ever said Navalny was six months ago after he was murdered. That is why I said it was like religious fear, “He who must not be named.”
Did Navalny know he would be arrested in 2021?
That was one of the options. It is very important to understand that it happened before the full-scale invasion, and we definitely underestimated Putin back then. Did we understand that he would be capable of what he did later? No. We had this idea that it was too much for Putin to kill him in public, openly. After the full-scale invasion, after bombing cities and towns and villages, after what happened in Mariupol, come on. There were no red lines. Nothing was too much.
What was the response in Russia to the annexation of Crimea and Donbas and the revolution in Kyiv?
All the coverage was full of negativity. I was following it on the internet, of course. I think that, from that time, they started forming an alternative reality. This was the beginning of the end for the country.
The particular timing of the annexation was because of his low approval rating. We measured it every month, and it literally skyrocketed. It was fantastic, like plus 20% in one week.
Do his approvals always skyrocket after a war or annexation?
He was trying to repeat the skyrocketing with Syria, but in Syria, it was a total disaster. He could not sell the idea of why we should do it. This country was so, so far away. I’m not sure that an average Russian could explain where this country is geographically. That narrative was not easy. We have so many problems within the country. Why should we spend our money there? They did not have a decent answer to that.
Many Ukrainians have a negative view of Navalny, especially in light of some of his comments regarding Crimea and the Russian-Ukrainian “brotherhood”. What are your thoughts on this?
I knew him very closely. He was the most reasonable man and politician. Even in prison, he spoke. He was vocal about the war and I value it so much. There is a fantastic note he smuggled from prison, fifteen statements for Russia. It is on his website. It is mostly about the war and the consequences of it, and Russia being accountable. I believe everyone should read it just because there is pretty much no room to debate on it. Every reasonable Russian citizen and every reasonable Ukrainian citizen should agree on these fifteen statements because they are wise, they are reasonable, and they are doable.
Does the lack of consequences Putin faces originate from the lack of punishment for the crimes of Soviet leadership?
After Crimea, Putin had no consequences. It actually started back in the Soviet Union, all Soviet nomenklatura had no consequences; they worked as a party elite back then.
As a student aged 12 or 13, I read my history books about Stalin. Only one paragraph about the Gulag, that’s it. Ten paragraphs about Russia’s great economy. This is how I was shaped. Later, I understood that, actually, there is a common narrative to compare Stalin and Hitler. If you are a Russian student, you have no idea about this. It’s just not in the Russian school curriculum.
Now, in modern Russia, they’ve become politicians with no consequences, no self-reflection process, nothing.
Do you think, after Navalny’s death, there will be anyone who can replace him? Or is that now impossible until Putin’s gone?
We have Julia Navalnaya. She’s strong, she is amazing, she’s powerful, she’s educated. She’s very, very smart, and oh my god, she’s motivated. She’s motivated a lot. She works very hard now, and I believe in her as a leader. One hundred percent, she has all my support.
What is your outlook on the future of Russia?
Russia is a mess now. Our journey to a decent future is so vague, so challenging, and so complicated. I have so many insecurities, and I feel so unsafe about the whole journey of each and every Russian, especially those who are fooled by Putin’s propaganda. It would be a very painful process for them to understand all the consequences. I cannot imagine how painful it would be, but it should be, and it must be. And after that…after that, that would be a start.