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Despite its authoritarian character, the Russian government maintains an extensive system that allows the submission of appeals or complaints to the President, a modern form for a tradition that dates back hundreds of years. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Presidential Appeals system has been dominated by military-related appeals, the public discussion of which is suppressed. How has the war impacted the use of the appeals system by ordinary Russians and by the Russian government? Drawing on reports released by the Presidential Administration from 2021-2024, which summarize 969,563 appeals, this presentation assesses how the war reshaped public grievances.
Despite information controls that have encouraged Russians to ignore the war, military-related appeals surged following mass mobilization in September 2022 and continued to compromise nearly half of all appeals to Putin through 2024, reflecting the persistent Russian practice of “appealing to the tsar” in crisis. At the same time, these appeals rarely resolved grievances, instead redirecting them to the overwhelmed Ministry of Defense or regional governments, allowing the regime to deploy the blame-shifting strategy known as “good tsar, bad boyars”. Our findings demonstrate that when information control is successful, conflicts can bifurcate societies between those who remain distant from war and those experiencing direct impacts that challenge official narratives. Appeals data offers a real‑time indicator of bureaucratic capacity under pressure and illuminates an overlooked institutional cost of war.
Sasha de Vogel is a political scientist whose research focuses on authoritarian regimes, political control, and collective action in Russia and the post-Soviet region. She is Associate Director and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Authoritarian Politics Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Her work examines how autocratic regimes respond to societal demands for change. She studies how autocrats use concessions and repression in response to protest, and how these strategies affect mobilization and policy change. She also investigates how “responsive” institutions, which allow citizens to request assistance with grievances, function in autocracies. In a separate strand of research, she analyzes domestic factors that may have influenced Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
As an expert on contemporary Russian and post-Soviet politics, she has shared insights with U.S. and international media, NGOs, the U.S. State Department, and others. She has also served as an expert witness in asylum cases.
She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She holds an MA in Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Regional Studies and a BA in Slavic Studies, both from Columbia University. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation/Harriman Institute, among others.
