Understanding the threat Putin poses requires understanding why he seems to have won the favor of the Russian people.
Understanding the threat Putin poses requires understanding why he seems to have won the favor of the Russian people.
‘I f there is Putin, there is Russia! No Putin, no Russia!” declared Vladimir Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, Vyacheslav Volodin. Crude flattery, of course — and quite profitable for Volodin, who two years later became the speaker of the Duma. But the truth is that much of today’s Russia is Putin. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that there is properly no history, only biography, encapsulates Russia’s history since 2000. Much of what has been written on the subject has focused narrowly on the Kremlin, with little, if any, attention to the underpinnings of the Putin regime. The resulting image is that of an autocracy supported solely by propaganda, bribery, political manipulation, and repression. This is a dangerous oversimplification because it vastly underestimates Putin’s ability to sway and mobilize his compatriots.
He has relentlessly molded national identity: how Russians see themselves, their country, and their history. He has refashioned and reawakened the country’s legitimizing mythology — and deployed it in ways that have proved gratifying to tens of millions of Russia’s citizens.
Why has he succeeded?
Four years of the brilliant moral wisdom of de-Stalinization under Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and of earnest but haphazard de-Bolshevization under Boris Yeltsin proved too brief to extirpate the centuries-old identification of national glory with imperial sway. An impeccable Soviet patriot, Putin sensed what pro-democracy revolutionaries of the late 1980s and early 1990s tended to disregard: the deep-seated and “widely recognized” trauma from the loss of what they believed was their country’s exceptional status — the forfeiture of its exalted place in the world.
Asked in a 2010 national survey whether “Russia must restore its status of a great empire,” 78 percent replied, “It must,” “Certainly,” or “More yes than no.” It was not the Communist regime they wanted back — dingy gray, with food queues, stern enforcers of the party line in books and movies, and impenetrable borders. It was its status as one of the world’s two superpowers, the moral as well as military counterweight to the United States. Putin tapped into that sentiment by advertising the recovery of this lofty station as the most important part of his foreign policy.
Recalling his native Trinidad, V. S. Naipaul wrote of “the shame of smallness.” Geography, of course, was not an issue for Russia; even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the country remained huge. But in the eyes of millions of Russians, Putin took on Russia’s post-Soviet geopolitical “smallness” to restore their country to the center of world politics, where the Soviet Union used to be. In 1999, only one in three Russians thought their country was a “great power” (velikaya derzhava). By 2019, after the annexation of Crimea and the sharpening confrontation with the West, seven in ten were convinced this was the case.
Putin both stoked and exploited the widespread indignity instilled by the Soviet Union’s collapse. He sounded sincere because he was. Putin and his closest circle were “overcome with feelings of humiliation and betrayal by the West,” contended a Kremlin insider. For Putin, Crimea was not about the territory: It was about the “redemption of one’s own humiliation,” reported another well-informed Russian commentator.
There is “pleasure” to be derived from “too vivid an awareness of one’s humiliation,” mused the hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. The Russians who, like Putin, felt humiliated by the disappearance of the Soviet Union and America’s “victory” in the Cold War may not have wallowed in their disgrace as did Dostoevsky’s unhinged protagonist, but humiliation can be both an addiction and a source of dark energy. It may fuel nefarious deeds. Those who “thrive on humiliation” may in turn seek to humiliate others to “avenge” the indignity they believe they suffered. If they gain power and tap into this sentiment among their followers, war and genocide may follow: Such was the case for Hitler, the Somali dictator Siad Barre, Slobodan Milosevic of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, and the Hutu extremist elite who instigated the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Putin both assuaged and used the post-Soviet trauma in yet another way. He insisted that the much-mourned Soviet Union — thought to have been finished off and buried by the Gorbachev–Yeltsin revolution and taking with it the best years of millions of Russians — was far from dead. What was the Soviet Union? Putin asked. Russia, of course, only under a different name! No one in the Kremlin had equated the two before. To the Communists, the tsarist empire, which Lenin called “a prison of peoples,” was deplorable and utterly incompatible with the Communist project, while the revolutionaries of the 1980s and 1990s did not want to be tainted by the crimes of the Soviet regime.
Putin had no such qualms. The Soviet Union was reborn in Putin’s state, not as a political entity but as a living legacy and an inspiration. There was also a warning there to the post-Soviet states: You were not the Soviet Union’s; you were Russia’s. And Russia is back.
A street urchin from the slums of post-war Leningrad, Putin also shared with millions of Russians another core element of the Soviet identity: equating respect with fear and self-assertion with aggression. Three months after the Crimea Anschluss, Lev Gudkov, then director of Russia’s only independent national polling firm, the Levada Center, noted that Putin was believed by many to have “restored the West’s respect for Russia.” He made Russia equal to the leading world powers, the other members of what had been the G-8, and “the people very much appreciate this.” The polls also revealed that almost nine in ten Russians believed their country was feared, and three in four thought it a good thing.
Putin also drew on a central component of the national tradition: the myth of Russia’s exclusivity. Referring to Rome, which fell to the Visigoths early in the fifth century, and Constantinople, conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the early 16th-century Pskov monk Philotheus declared the Orthodox Christian Moscow the heir to both: the third Rome, the only true Christian kingdom left in the world. “So know, pious king,” the monk wrote to Grand Prince Vasily III of Moscow, the father of Ivan the Terrible, “that all the Christian kingdoms came to an end and came together in a single kingdom of yours, two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there will be no fourth.”
Almost five centuries later, Russian sociologists heard respondents in focus groups readily acknowledging Russia’s “special path.” There was “satisfaction” from her “exclusivity,” her being incomparable and unmatched by the “others.” In a long article published in the run-up to his third presidency in 2012, Putin pronounced Russia not merely a country or a state but a state-civilization — and a “unique” one at that. Since then, the “thousand-year-old” Russia, distinct from “Europe” and the “West,” became one of the most frequent themes in his speeches.
He was effective here as well. In 1992, only slightly more than one in ten Russians believed they were “a great people with a special destiny in world history”; in 2017, more than six in ten thought so. The share of those who felt they were just like any other people went down from eight in ten to one in three. By 2021, 64 percent of Russians considered their country “non-European” — up from fewer than one in four in 2008.
The Soviet identity was recovered and promoted through confrontation and defiance. It may seem strange that millions would seek comfort in the reprise of anxiety and fears of the Cold War years. But one does not have to be a Freudian, much less have spent time on the couch, to know that we often repeat painful or destructive behaviors just because they are familiar.
Putin became a symbol of the resurrection of a besieged but proud and recovering power. By 2021, more than eight in ten Russians felt that the “enemies are all around.” Yet, like their president, the respondents in focus groups felt that the “more they pressure us, the greater we are.”
The identification with the alleged “greatness” of the Soviet Union, Russian sociologists suggested, was a “very important mechanism” of collective compensation for the powerlessness in the face of the authorities at every level. Such redress for oppression has been a centuries-old legitimation device of Russian rulers. As a character in a poem by the great Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov put it almost two centuries ago: Puskay ya rab / No rab tsarya vselennoy! “I may be a slave / But a slave to the tsar of the universe!”
There is a classic Soviet Cold War poster from 1948 with a Russian soldier admonishing Uncle Sam. The soldier is handsome, strong, and confident. On his cartoonishly broad chest is the Soviet Union’s highest military award, the gold star of the Hero of the Soviet Union, and in his hand is a book of World War II history. Uncle Sam holds a nuclear bomb and a torch, about to set the world on fire. His ugly face is contorted by impotent hatred. The caption, Ne balui!, can be loosely translated as “Don’t you fool around!” The implication is clear: Although the enemy is different, the outcome of a possible confrontation will be the same.
This is the national sensibility that Putin has resurrected, augmented, and made the cornerstone of his regime: enmity, danger, and fear — and glory and pride.
This essay is an excerpt from Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War (AEI Press).