Russians’ search histories contradict official polling on pro-war sentiment

Listen to Russian pollsters and it would seem Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was a domestic triumph, supported wholeheartedly by his people. Levada, a major Russian polling agency, claims 72% of Russians support action in Ukraine.

Which is weird, because what Russians type into search engines suggests nowhere near that level of support.

That’s the finding of a new study by academics at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., who have been listening in on search engine sentiment—the secrets that ordinary people share with the search bar when they think no one else is looking.

By analyzing Google Trends results every day from the last decade within Russia, and data from Russian language search engine Yandex for the last year, researcher Roberto Foa and his colleagues found that Russians were worried about their future and wellbeing.

“You can’t really trust the main Russian public opinion sources,” says Foa. “I think we all know the main reasons for that. There’s a lot of response bias: People are afraid to voice their opinions, and there may be some manipulation of survey results.”

Up until the eve of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, search engine sentiment pretty closely tracked Levada polling sentiment. But when Russian boots hit the ground in Ukraine, the two measures of public attitudes drastically diverged: Levada reported a 15% increase in life satisfaction in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine, while the search engine queries showed wellbeing-related searches flatlined.

Searches for anti-war and anti-conscription messages spiked on search engines in the initial months of the invasion as the Russian army began forcibly conscripting men of military age, causing them to flee the country, sharing tips on escape routes through Telegram.

Search terms, however, are like the 21st-century confession booth, showing the neuroses, hopes, fears and concerns of everyday people without worrying about how what they say will be interpreted or fed back to the government. Foa and his team looked at how frequently Russians searched Yandex for mental -health-related terms like depression, self-diagnosis, anxiety, insomnia, and alcoholism.

“If you believe the official polls, there’s been a big rally, and the Russians are pretty happy,” says Foa. “But if you go by the online data, then it’s very much a different trend in that actually, in terms of actual general sentiment, happiness, or subjective wellbeing, it’s all really steadily declined since the start of the war.”

Foa says the data provide a useful tonic to a common misconception about the Russian populace, born out of a lack of reliable data about public opinion in Russia: that all Russians are unthinking supporters of the country’s presidents and his actions. “That’s probably not true,” says Foa. “Russia is an educated society, with still reasonably good access to information. What this suggests to us is that Russian attitudes are a little more critical and skeptical of what’s going on than the official polling would have you believe.”

“I definitely see using digital trace data, especially that not from social media—as there people might be afraid of repression and refrain from posting anti-war stuff—but from more private activities, such as web search, as a great option to study what’s going on in Russia or other authoritarian regimes, and this paper seems to do this in a clever way,” says Aleksandra Urman, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in search engines at the University of Zurich.

One area where the search data and official polling data didn’t diverge? Household finances. “Our data on financial satisfaction was kind of in line with the official data, actually,” says Foa. That’s supported by the fact that Russia’s economy hasn’t buckled in response to financial sanctions as was expected—a likely result of the failure of international sanctions, and canny ways they’re being subverted by redirected imports through neighboring countries not subject to sanctions.