Svetlana Erpyleva, Public Sociology Laboratory
Studying how ordinary Russians perceive the war against Ukraine means navigating a climate of fear and repression, as simply agreeing to speak with a researcher can feel like a risk. This piece traces how the Public Sociology Laboratory (PS Lab) learned, through trial and error, that in authoritarian wartime Russia, trust is not just a methodological nicety - but the crucial foundation on which qualitative fieldwork stands or falls.
How a Single Interview Became a Years-Long Project
On February 27, 2022, three days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I conducted my first in-depth interview (online) with a Russian man who was trying to explain his reaction to this shocking event. This marked the beginning of a large-scale project by the Public Sociology Laboratory (PS Lab) on Russian citizens’ perceptions of the Russo-Ukrainian war. During this first interview, I did not yet know that the project would last for several more years (and that the war would last even longer), that we would conduct more than 300 in-depth interviews with ordinary Russians and carry out multiple ethnographic fieldworks in various parts of Russia—or that we would be labelled as “foreign agents” by the Russian authorities for making the results of this research public. I ended up coordinating all four stages of the project—in-depth interviews in Spring 2022, in-depth interviews in Fall 2022, ethnography in three Russian regions in fall 2023, and ethnography in a borderland region in Fall 2024—and co-editing four book-length analytical reports (Public Sociology Laboratory 2022, 2023a, 2024, 2025a).
How (difficult it is) to gain trust
What became clear already during this very first interview was how difficult it would be to gain the trust of our research participants and to make them feel comfortable enough to freely share their thoughts, doubts, and dissatisfaction. With a number of repressive laws adopted already in March 2022 (for example, the law against “discreditation of Russian Army” which among other things, penalized publicly referring to the full-scale war as a “war,” and not a “special military operation”), making our interlocutors trust us and speak openly about war-related and other political issues became even harder. Many potential participants simply refused to give interviews—which had happened much more rarely before the war—because they did not believe in full anonymity and were afraid that, as one of them put it, “something might happen” (“как бы чего-то не случилось”).
Even when people did agree to participate by giving an anonymous interview, they often did not feel sufficiently comfortable or safe to speak openly about the war, their fears, and their regrets.The trust of research participants is a necessary condition for qualitative data to be of high quality: only when people trust researchers they are willing not merely to provide concise answers to questions (as would be sufficient for a survey), but to reflect on them, think aloud, and share personal experiences—in other words, to produce material that distinguishes the qualitative approach from the quantitative one. Over time, we developed our own ways of gaining the trust of interlocutors—which, to be fair, often worked, but sometimes failed.
Most opinion polls show that Russian society after the start of the full-scale war can be roughly divided into a minority of core supporters and core opponents of the war (together about 10–20 percent), with the majority falling somewhere in between (Chronicles 2023, 2025; Levada Center 2023; Volkov and Kolesnikov 2023). During the first stage of our qualitative data collection, core opponents were overrepresented among our interviewees, followed by core supporters and more apolitical people without a clear “position.” Because of this unequal distribution, in the later stages of data collection we deliberately focused on apolitical people “in the middle.” This “unrepresentative” distribution of the three groups among our first-stage interviewees can largely be explained by differences in who trusted us more and was more willing to agree to an interview.
How PS Lab built trust to conduct interviews on war perceptions
The easiest—paradoxically, yet at the same time predictably—group from whom to gain trust were critics of the regime and the war. They often had an additional political motivation for participating in research interviews: many could not risk expressing their views publicly and felt that articulating them anonymously in research setting at least made the existence of dissent visible. For many, the reputation of our research group, the Public Sociology Laboratory, was sufficient to establish full trust. With those who were unfamiliar with PS Lab, we soon learned a simple tactic: when the researcher shared her own critical stance toward the regime and the war, interlocutors tended to open up and speak more freely—openness for openness.
We also had little difficulty gaining the trust of politicized pro-regime interlocutors. In fact, they may not have needed to trust us in order to speak openly about their perceptions of the war and the authorities in power: they felt entitled to be right and were eager to communicate their perspective to others—especially since they could not be prosecuted for what they wanted to say.
The hardest group to establish trust with were so-called “ordinary,” non-politicized people—generally loyal to the regime, yet at the same time experiencing various forms of dissatisfaction with the authorities’ actions. These are people who are very cautious, who struggle to talk about “politics” as such, and who are often afraid of “saying something they shouldn’t.” They also constituted the majority of our interlocutors—and of Russians more broadly—and were the group whose reasoning interested us the most.
The first two out of four stages of the large-scale PS Lab project on Russians’ perceptions of the war (see the descriptions of the datasets and methodological details of the first three stages at Discuss Data platform: Public Sociology Laboratory 2023b, 2025b) were entirely based on in-depth interviews conducted both online and offline by PS Lab researchers and joined volunteers (all trained in social science). We used and developed a number of “tricks of the trade” to deal with the problem of trust during the interview process. For example, during online interviews we always asked whether our interlocutor would prefer the camera to be off or on. Many chose the “off” option, which made the whole interaction look a bit like a confession in a church and, surprisingly, made people on the other side of the black screen feel safer and more anonymous.
We also realized how crucial an interviewer’s ability to show empathy and a genuine desire to listen can be, expressed through nodding (in person or when the camera is on), sympathetic sighs, and other small gestures. Focusing the interview on personal experiences rather than “opinions” about political topics helped a lot as well: people usually feel like experts on their own lives and actions, and they do not perceive sharing their emotions and daily routines as dangerous. At the same time, this focus—through careful guidance from the interviewer—still led them to touch upon their perceptions of the ongoing war.
No universal recipes for building trust
However, despite many “successful” interviews, I personally also conducted some in which my interlocutors never opened up. So far, the only solution we have found is to take both the ability to establish trust—and the failure to do so—into account during the analysis.
It seems that when navigating fieldwork like this, there is no universal “recipe” for gaining the trust of research participants. The skills—and even personality traits—of each individual interviewer, and their ability to put people at ease, play a huge role in conducting a “successful” interview on politically sensitive topics in authoritarian Russia—apparently, a much bigger role than in similar fieldwork on non-sensitive topics or in non/less authoritarian countries.
The benefits of ethnographic fieldwork
And this is exactly why, during the last two stages of the project, we switched from conducting simple interviews to ethnographic fieldwork. Ethnography allows researchers to develop relationships with interlocutors first on a personal level and only later to talk with them about research topics—and often to do so informally, without creating explicit “research settings” or recording conversations. In other words, trust here becomes the very condition of the possibility of data collection.
For example, our researcher conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Kursk region (that boarders Ukraine and was partially controlled by the Ukrainian Armed forces between August 2024–March 2025), spent much of her time volunteering in humanitarian aid centers for refugees. She made new friends there among other volunteers, especially young women—they took smoking breaks together, the researcher listened to their problems, gave advice when asked, shared some things about her own life, and only after a close relationship had been established did she start asking them about their war experiences and their evaluations of what they had lived through. Even in this case, none of these conversations were conducted as formal interviews—with scheduled sit-downs and audio recording. Instead, the researcher chatted with the women informally and wrote anonymized fieldnotes afterward—precisely because in these informal, ethnographic settings young female volunteers were willing to open up to the researcher.
That is why informal conversations, or informal interviews, conducted during ethnographic fieldwork became one of our main methods of data collection in 2023–24.
Conclusion
In this way, gaining research participants’ trust—crucial for qualitative fieldwork—became especially challenging when we began studying politically sensitive topics in repressive, authoritarian wartime Russia. Various “tricks of the trade” commonly used in qualitative interviewing often helped, but the personal qualities of the interviewer as a skilled communicator seemed to play an even more decisive role.
What we found particularly useful, however, was conducting ethnographic research—not only to explore how people act and experience the war, but also to study their attitudes and reasoning about it. Even when people do not trust authorities or official institutions, and therefore do not trust unknown researchers, they often do trust those they come to know on a personal level and with whom they communicate informally. And when there is a trustworthy listener, they have a great deal to say.
About the author
Svetlana Erpyleva is a sociologist and a researcher with Public Sociology Laboratory. She received her PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki. Her past and present research focuses on collective action, political socialization, youth and children’s political participation, war perception in Russia, and various aspects of Russia’s wartime society. She curates protest-related datasets on Discuss Data.
Reading recommendations
Chronicles. 2023. A year of war as seen by Russians. Chronicles Project. URL: https://www.chronicles.report/en/chapter8
Chronicles. 2025. Results of the survey conducted by the Chronicles research project on the third anniversary of the war in Ukraine. Chronicles Project. URL: https://www.chronicles.report/en/chapter14
Levada Center. 2023a. Konflikt s Ukrainoi: Ocenki noyabrya 2023 goda. Levada Center. URL: https://www.levada.ru/2023/12/08/konflikt-s-ukrainoj-otsenki-noyabrya-2023-goda/
Public Sociology Laboratory (2022). The war near and far: How Russians perceive the military invasion of Ukraine [Dalekaya blizkaya voina: kak rossiyane vosprinimayut voennye deystviya v Ukraine]. Edited by S. Erpyleva and N. Savelyeva. Analytical report. https://publicsociologylab.com/reports/far-war.html
Public Sociology Laboratory (2023a). Resigning themselves to inevitability. How Russians justified the military invasion of Ukraine. Edited by S. Erpyleva and S. Kappinen. Analytical report. https://therussiaprogram.org/ps_lab_1.
Public Sociology Laboratory (2023b). How Russians perceive Russia's invasion of Ukraine, 2022 – A large collection of semi-structured interviews, v. 1.0, Discuss Data, https://doi.org/10.48320/74F76B12-9005-41A0-882D-E4D80105E121
Public Sociology Laboratory (2024). “We need to carry on:” Ethnography of Russian regions during wartime. Edited by S. Erpyleva and S. Kappinen. Analytical report. https://therussiaprogram.org/ps_lab_ethnography
Public Sociology Laboratory (2025a). Nothing foretold troubles. An ethnography of the “sudden” war in a border region. [Nichtshto ne predveshchalo. Etnografiya “vnezapnoy” voyny v prigranichnom regione]. Analytical report. https://publicsociologylab.com/reports/kursk.html
Public Sociology Laboratory (2025b). How Russians perceive Russia's invasion of Ukraine, 2023 – Ethnographic research in 3 Russian regions, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic diaries, v. 1.0, Discuss Data, https://doi.org/10.48320/0842A677-B5F9-4EAA-A48B-6D5EDE7A8DBB
Volkov, Denis, and Andrei Kolesnikov, 2023. Alternate reality: how Russian society learned to stop worrying about the war. Analytical report. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. URL: https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/28/alternate-reality-how-russian-society-learned-to-stop-worrying-about-war-pub-91118