Fear spreads through everyday life, then becomes policy

Phenomena of – A special issue of Osteuropa explores how fear takes root in Russian society through institutions, propaganda, and a taboo on even naming it—turning uncertainty into obedience. The collection also looks at survival strategies in language and literature, and at

Lev Gudkov has been labeled a “foreign agent” by Russia’s Ministry of Justice in 2025. He does not, by his own choice, retreat into safety. The director of the Levada Centre polling institute—portrayed by Osteuropa’s editors as the “Galileo Galilei” of Russian sociology—refuses to self-censor or compromise his scientific standards.

In an issue devoted to “Phenomena of fear. ” Gudkov traces fear not as a mood that visits people now and then. but as something learned and built—absorbed by children at home. reinforced in schools. then deliberately heightened by propaganda. Fear. he argues. becomes “the horizon of the everyday. ” guiding how people relate to each other. to themselves. and to the state.

The mechanism is meant to be total. Fear moves through society like a system of “communicating vessels. ” shifting from one domain to another until it seems there is no clean boundary between public life and private thought. Arbitrary and limitless state power. Gudkov says. produces the impression that events cannot be understood rationally and that reality is unpredictable. Even small decisions, he notes, become loaded with anxiety. The future grows opaque.

What makes the fear especially powerful is not only what it does, but what it prevents people from doing. There is a taboo on expressing fear—or even thinking it through. Admitting fear of the state, even privately, becomes a “thought crime” that invites the consequences people dread. Over time. the result is a learned incapacity to interpret political reality rationally. paired with a constant fear that remains unnamed—“defies disenchantment.”.

When fear becomes unspeakable, it also has to be redirected. Citizens. Gudkov writes. often funnel it toward safer targets: “the struggle against external and internal enemies. ” “temporary difficulties and crises. ” and “an impending war.” Under those conditions. a “normal” life becomes dependent on a kind of reverence for a “numinous. ” all-powerful state—where “fear merges with awe for the leader’s greatness and power.”.

The issue reads like a map of how cultural habits can harden into political reflexes. That same question—how people survive when official life narrows their choices—threads into the collection’s other pieces.

In Soviet Kyiv in the 1970s. Mark Belorusez remembers a city that was “a sea of Russian. ” dotted with “archipelagos and islands of other languages and cultures. ” including Ukrainian. One such island was the Writers’ Union. filled with conformist writers who could produce “lifeless. stilted texts” for security and money. Another island was the Kyiv school of poetry: writers who lived on the margins. working in experimental form and unconventional subject matter outside the officially sanctioned boundaries of Ukrainian literature.

Their work was not published or reviewed. Instead, it circulated through samizdat—and many of those writers have not survived. For some, translation into Ukrainian became a “survival strategy,” creating a middle ground between the paths of conformism and security. Translation offered what authors often could not: literary freedom paired with social and economic exclusion.

Belorusez’s account insists that translators sometimes had more room than writers because authors faced “extremely strict political oversight. ” especially in Ukraine. The prestige of major figures such as Boccaccio or Goethe also gave translators latitude: they could use authentically Ukrainian words instead of Russian loanwords. and experiment with tone. imagery. and form while hiding behind fidelity to an original author. Translation, in other words, was not only a literary craft. It helped raise the status of Ukrainian, widening its expressive range and its cultural authority.

The issue points to hugely popular Ukrainian editions—works like the Decameron and the poetry of Apollinaire—as editions that “helped to increase the standing of Ukrainian-language literature among the predominantly Russian-speaking readership of Kiev.”

That attention to cultural authority and power—who gets to define reality. and at what cost—also shapes the issue’s political essays. Ina Rumiantseva argues that as the human rights situation in Belarus worsens and Moscow tightens its grip on Minsk. the EU must rethink its policy and adopt something more pragmatic. Sanctions, she says, have been “largely ineffective,” and may even have backfired: under increased pressure, the regime “reacts aggressively.”.

US negotiations, by contrast, have produced concrete results. Since summer 2024. they have led to the release of hundreds of political prisoners—an outcome Rumiantseva describes as a process in which the EU “played almost no role.” For her. the lesson is direct: “sanctions must be used as an active diplomatic instrument. not as a substitute for diplomacy.” The immediate priority should be the release of further political prisoners. followed by “improvements to mobility and an end to the migration crisis.”.

Rumiantseva connects the EU’s rigidity to multiple causes: frustration with earlier failures. a growing tendency to equate Belarus with Russia. and a refusal—grounded in principle—to negotiate with perpetrators of human rights abuses. But she warns that an all-or-nothing stance pushes Minsk further into Moscow’s embrace and “unwittingly legitimizes Moscow’s claim that Belarus is part of Russia’s ‘natural’ sphere of influence.”.

EU leaders, she argues, need to come down from an expectation of full democratization and justice in the short or medium term. A more realpolitik approach would focus on achievable, verifiable humanitarian steps and on conditional, phased lifting of sanctions tied to Minsk’s continued engagement.

Anna Gevorgyan shifts the lens to the South Caucasus. examining the strategic significance of the Armenia–Iran relationship as geopolitics reshapes the region. After Azerbaijan’s victory in the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Armenia and Iran share concerns about the growing alliance between Azerbaijan and Turkey. With Russia weakened by its war in Ukraine and Armenia’s borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey closed. Armenia is dependent on Iran for energy. regional connectivity. and security. and Yerevan wants to “exploit Tehran’s desire for a counterbalance to the Ankara–Baku axis.”.

Still, their priorities diverge. Armenia “champions the principle of self-determination for the ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. ” while Iran. wary of separatism among its own ethnic Azeris. “emphasizes the principle of territorial integrity.” Yerevan. meanwhile. tries to strengthen ties with the EU and the US—an effort Gevorgyan describes as a dangerous tightrope that risks alienating Iran.

Even connectivity projects reflect the tension. Tehran’s North–South transport route linking Iran to Russia clashes with the “Trump Route for Peace and Prosperity. ” which is set to run East–West from Turkey to Azerbaijan. Gevorgyan writes that Armenia is attempting a “balanced and balancing policy. ” but that the outcome could depend on whether Tehran continues a “recent pragmatic approach” to South Caucasus policy. and on developments beyond Yerevan’s control. Renewed escalation between Iran and Israel. or internal destabilization from separatists in northern Iran. could shift the regional balance in Azerbaijan’s favour.

Taken together. the collection keeps returning to the same human problem: how power reshapes language. and how silence becomes part of survival. In Gudkov’s account. fear cannot be named without punishment; in Belorusez’s. a writer’s fate can be softened only through the detours of translation. In Rumiantseva’s, policy choices can either loosen chains or tighten them further. In Gevorgyan’s, balancing acts—between sovereignty, alliance, and connectivity—decide who gets to set the terms of the future.

For readers, the issue’s most unnerving thread is also the simplest: when uncertainty is engineered, the practical question is not whether people will feel fear. It’s where they learn to put it—on enemies, on crises, on leaders—or whether they can build any space left for thinking clearly at all.

Lev Gudkov Levada Centre Osteuropa Phenomena of fear Russian sociology foreign agent 2025 Writers’ Union Kyiv school of poetry samizdat translation into Ukrainian Belarus EU sanctions political prisoners since summer 2024 Armenia Iran relations Nagorno-Karabakh war North–South transport route Trump Route for Peace and Prosperity