Reforging the Russian World: Gorbachev, Putin, and Russian Nationalism

For centuries, the internal workings of successive Russian states have been a mystery to the West. The Russian Empire was seen as a strange place, an “other.” The Soviet Union was so opaque that Ameri­can intelligence agencies were reduced to analyzing who was standing next to whom in photos to determine proximity to power. The Russian Federation has been no exception, as many Western leaders were blind­sided by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale inva­sion of Ukraine in February 2022.

While the West’s prior confusion may have resulted from literally not being able to penetrate Russia’s icy winters, today’s confusion comes from another place: a fundamental misunderstanding of Russia’s governing system and of the two most significant Russian rulers during the last fifty years, Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin. Two recent books, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, by Vladislav M. Zubok, and Putin, by Philip Short, illuminate what the West missed about both men. Both works, deeply researched and complex tomes, tell different parts of the same story, and together provide a clearer understanding of recent Russian history. Unfortunately, their insights arrived too late.

Nationalists and Oligarchs

Gorbachev, who died in 2022, was seen in the West as the man who brought freedom and democracy and the end of the Cold War. But in reality, he was a diehard communist who only pursued the course he did because he believed that, in the end, communism would prevail. The failure of his beliefs and the collapse of the Soviet empire destroyed the very concept of ideological leadership in Russia—until Vladimir Putin came along.

Since coming to power on the last day of the second millennium, Putin has been misunderstood by Western officials. Some have held that he is interested only in wealth, using nationalist language as a fig leaf to distract his people while he enjoys his palaces. Others have portrayed him as a twenty-first-century Hitler who desires to conquer all that he can. Both views are wrong. Putin is no more and no less than a deeply believing nationalist who sees himself as a modern czar. His goals are specific, not infinite, but will be pursued relentlessly.

The West has failed to understand these men, and the reality of internal Russian politics, in part because many scholars have tried to paint with too broad, and too ideological, a brush. Some “realists,” like John Mearsheimer, have argued that Russia, by defending its periphery, is simply acting as any state would.¹ Liberal internationalists like former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul have concluded that Putin is simply in it for authoritarian glory and wealth.²

But a close inspection of the workings of the Russian Federation reveals that its foreign policy emanates from two distinct internal gov­ernmental groupings. These comprise Russia’s top levels of governing officials and its unofficial governors, the oligarchs. To understand why the Russian Federation has acted as it has, special attention must be paid to these two—sometimes allied, sometimes opposed—groups.

The first of these is the “Russian nationalists.” “Nationalism” is a broad term which colloquially can mean anything from deep love of country to a desire for ethnic purity to a longing for expansionary conquest. Thus, the phrase “I am a nationalist” can conjure up images of Margaret Thatcher as well as Adolf Hitler.

In relation to Russia, nationalism becomes even trickier to define. The Russian language has two words for being Russian: rossisski (российски) and russkiy (русский). Both are translated into English as “Russian” but mean very different things. The former indicates that one is a citizen of the Russian state, while the latter refers to the Russian ethnic group. The difficulty of this dichotomy has played out for centu­ries, as Russian leaders have attempted to maintain control over what they considered the “Russian world” (Russkiy mir), which is loosely comprised of the Slavic states around Russia, namely Ukraine and Belarus.³

Therefore, one can be a Russian nationalist in the sense of believing that the Russian state must be strong, have control over its near abroad, and should put its interests first. But one can also be a Russian nationalist in the sense of believing that Russia exists for the Russian ethnicity.⁴ There have always been and still are plenty of the latter in Russia, but ethnic-focused nationalists have not generally held real power in the Russian Federation. Therefore, for the purposes of this analysis, “Rus­sian nationalism” as a phrase will refer to the former view: that Russia should be the defender of the Russkiy mir.

The second powerful grouping in Russian government, the “oli­garchs” and other less wealthy but influential governing officials—representing what I will call “Russian subsistentialism”—is a new concept. In the early 1990s, the Russian Federation had effectively no raison d’être. It was too weak to control the Russkiy mir; communism was dead; many Russians found themselves without a motivating philosophy as well as without bread and other necessities.

The Russian state, at this time, came to be run by people with no real governing ideology: democrats cheated and oligarchs robbed the country blind. Presidential staffers down to local police officers solicited bribes. By the mid-1990s, the goal for Russian leadership was no longer the promotion of an ideological principle or protection of a historic area; life became, for leaders and average citizens alike, centered around extracting resources from the state. Russian subsistentialism, therefore, can be imagined as the attitude of a bureaucrat or ordinary person who seeks only to subsist off the state. In general, this means taking what one can, but without pushing too hard or rocking the boat too much, which could undermine the whole lucrative system.

For much of its existence since 1991, the Russian Federation government has been composed almost entirely of subsistentialists, with very few nationalists. In general, ideological commitments among the Russian leadership class had been decimated by Gorbachev’s failures. Nevertheless, a few nationalists, from the beginning, sought to carry out their central ambition: to ensure that Russia reclaimed hegemony over the Russkiy mir. But the subsistentialist leaders just wanted to be left alone: they enjoyed their dachas and their bribes and being wooed at international galas. Crucially, however, there were certain red lines that even subsistentialists, who still needed to oversee a viable Russian state, could not allow the West to cross.

When one nationalist, Vladimir Putin, managed to get into the presidency of the Russian Federation—somewhat by accident—he was still unable to carry out his vision. In part, this was because Russia was weak. But more importantly, Putin was unable to convince the subsistentialists to jeopardize their cushy lives for the sake of pursuing nationalist objectives. Due to actions taken by the West, however, Putin and his relatively small bloc of nationalists have managed, over time, to convince the subsistentialists to join their side.

It is unfortunate that Western observers have failed to understand the internal politics of the Russian Federation. Westerners have typically seen Russian ideological divides solely through the lens of liberalism versus authoritarianism. Or they saw a state that was simply too weak to act. While material weakness played a large role in Russia’s acquiescence to Western foreign policy decisions in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was also a matter of will, with the nationalists unable to convince the subsistentialists of their cause. Had the West recognized the divide within the Russian government, however, different choices might have been made, and perhaps the current, dismal state of Russo-Western relations could have been avoided. Instead, Putin was able to bridge the internal Russian divide before the West realized it even existed.

Gorbachev’s USSR:
From Nationalism to Subsistentialism

Mikhail Gorbachev is remembered in the West as a democratizing liberator: the only Soviet leader who understood that his country needed freedom and change. When he passed away in 2022, eulogies poured in from Western leaders around the world, praising his diplomacy with Ronald Reagan and his reforms to the Soviet economy. But in Russia, Gorbachev is reviled as the man who destroyed the country’s economy and ended its time as a great power.

Western liberal internationalists misunderstand the Russian revulsion toward Gorbachev for two reasons. First, they misunderstand the man himself. Gorbachev was not a liberal anti-communist. He was a true Leninist who believed that communism would one day engulf the entire planet. He differed from his predecessors only in his choice of tactics, believing that communism would spread peacefully.

This feeds into the second reason underlying Western confusion: namely, the West generally misunderstands the cause of Soviet collapse. The traditional view is that the Cold War was won by containing and ultimately outspending the Soviet Union. But Russia views the end differently. Zubok expounds upon this subject at length in Collapse. His central thesis is that the factors that brought down the Soviet Union were a “perfect storm, unleashed by the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev.”⁵ While Zubok does not completely deny the role of the West, he ultimately argues that collapse was mainly a result of Gorbachev’s own actions.

When he came to power in 1985, Gorbachev inherited a bevy of problems, some of which had concerned Russian leaders for centuries, others which were relatively new. To begin with, Gorbachev was not a “Russian” leader. While the West frequently (and, frankly, understandably) used “Soviet Union” and “Russia” interchangeably, the two were fundamentally different.

Multiethnic empires maintain authority over disparate ethnicities through unifying national myths or through force. This is a problem Russian states have wrestled with for centuries. The Russian Empire’s approach was relatively straightforward: the czar is chosen by God to defend the Russian people and the empire which they have conquered—in short, the Russkiy mir.⁶ The czarist state also saw itself as the protec­tor of the Slavs; while they did not demand control of all Slavic lands, Russia did react harshly when non-Slavs attempted to conquer Slavic lands.

But while the Soviet Union’s borders were similar to the Russian Empire’s, its raison d’être was fundamentally different. The Bolsheviks had turned the machinery of state to a new goal: rather than protecting the Russkiy mir and focusing on hegemony over nearby areas, the state would be an engine for communist domination of the world.⁷

They also restructured how the entity the rest of the world called “Russia” was organized. USSR stood for Union of Soviet Socialist Re­publics, and that was not merely symbolic nomenclature: the system was a union of fifteen republics, overseen by the Soviet government in Moscow. Russia, in the form of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, was only one of those fifteen. While it was by far the largest, ethnic Russians in 1989 made up just slightly over half of the population of the Soviet Union, 145 million out of 289 million.⁸

When times were good in the Soviet Union—or, when they had leaders willing to massacre millions to keep dissidence to a minimum—this system worked fine. But Moscow had to keep the outlying poorer republics happy. This involved significant amounts of economic aid, which often came from the Russian republic, over time fueling a simmering feeling among Russians that they were being taken advantage of.

Externally, things were no less complex. Often in history, the Russian state has created what can be called a “buffer zone of influence” between itself and Europe proper, separate from the Russkiy mir. This zone encompassed eastern and sometimes central Europe, and it differed from a traditional “buffer zone” in that Russia did not just see it as a gigantic moat. It also saw in this area the chance for economic domination and, perhaps most importantly, a way to protect the Russkiy mir.

But under the USSR during the post–World War II period, this meant that the mode of “influence” in the buffer zone was communism. If an Eastern Bloc government ever felt like going a different way, it could threaten the entire chain. This is why the Soviet Union reacted so harshly in 1956, when Hungary attempted to overthrow the system, and in 1968, when Czechoslovakia attempted to create a slightly more relaxed communist system.

When Gorbachev came onto the scene, cracks were already beginning to show in the Soviet order. The previous two leaders, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, were both aged; each barely lasted a year in office.⁹ Economic issues were beginning to cause production problems and food scarcity. “We can’t go on living like this,” Gorbachev said to his wife at the funeral of his predecessor, Chernenko. At the time, “Russian nationalism” could not be straightforwardly articulated by the leader of the USSR, as it was fundamentally different from communist ideology. But if one defines nationalism as pride in one’s country, Gorbachev was a true nationalist: a deeply proud and committed Soviet.

Gorbachev was determined to fix, not end, the Soviet system. He believed that with devolution—giving some of his power to the repub­lics and allowing for free elections—and by going forward with glasnost (openness) and perestroika (rebuilding), there would be a burst of dis­cussion and creativity centered around how to fix communism.

There was indeed a burst of discussion. But it was centered around how terrible the system was. Newspapers began to criticize the regime. He also allowed the creation of films like Zerograd (in which a Soviet bureaucrat becomes lost in an increasingly strange and eerie city), which would have gotten their creators shot just decades prior.

By the late 1980s, Gorbachev’s devolution of powers had allowed opponents to rise. The most popular was Boris Yeltsin, who had dramatically left the Communist Party and became the head of the Russian Republic in 1990. While Gorbachev was still in charge of the USSR, Yeltsin, as leader of its largest republic, was immediately vaulted into international fame.

Zubok records that Yeltsin, on a trip to the United States, was driving back to the Dallas airport and passed a Randall’s discount supermarket. On a whim, he stopped in and was amazed at the variety of products. More than anything else, though, he was angry; average Americans could eat foods that middle-class Russians could never acquire.¹⁰

When Gorbachev loosened travel rules, millions of Soviet citizens had similar experiences, and each experience slowly ate away at what­ever pride in communism may have remained. But Gorbachev, blinded by his belief that communism would win in the end, was unable to see the growing disaster. He continued to privatize, but along the way continually ran into problems. His privatization was making people poorer via inflation and a lack of food, and therefore angrier; and his allowance of more political freedom let people channel their anger into votes for those opposed to him.

To the rest of the world, Gorbachev seemed like a hero. By 1990, he had ended the Cold War, tore down the Berlin Wall, and ended Soviet interference in the postwar buffer zone of influence. But the West misunderstood why he did these things. The Soviets unilaterally agreed to end the Cold War mainly because they could not keep up with American spending.¹¹ When the Berlin Wall fell, it was an accident: a confused East German official on TV misspoke and said travel to the West would be allowed. And when Gorbachev declared that the Soviet Union would not interfere in the internal affairs of Communist Bloc states, he did so not out of a desire to end communism there, but because he viewed the Eastern European states as a liability for his reforms.¹² The Eastern Bloc took large amounts of money from the USSR in subsidies. Gorbachev, an idealogue, believed that communism would one day triumph. So who cared if, temporarily, those states went their own way? Gorbachev got a verbal agreement from the West that they would not expand NATO into these newly freed areas. He—out of naïveté or out of necessity—accepted, because he was badly in need of Western financial aid.

Needless to say, nationalists and the security services were not thrilled with these reforms. In August 1991, some attempted a halfhearted Stalinist coup. But it failed: the coup plotters were noncommittal and hundreds of thousands of Muscovites came out to protest. Most famous­ly, Yeltsin climbed atop a tank and, with news cameras rolling, urged soldiers to stand down.

Others in the security services were simply paralyzed. In the late 1980s, KGB cells in East Germany had been pleading with Moscow for help and for guidance on how to react to the political changes.¹³ Should they infiltrate the protests? Knock them back? Moscow was indecisive. At one point, a crowd threateningly came up to the local KGB building. A corporal desperately radioed Moscow for help, but there was no response. Alone, he went out to the protestors and had to bluff. That corporal, a completely unknown official by the name of Vladimir Putin, never forgot Moscow’s moment of weakness.

Nor must he have forgotten how the West was reacting to the slow collapse of the Soviet empire. While then president George H. W. Bush and his people were very polite, they essentially did nothing to stop the collapse. Some in Bush’s administration, notably Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, wished to see the Soviet Union thrown onto the ash heap of history. Others, like Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, were concerned that a collapse could lead to widespread violence and preferred a weaker yet still cohesive USSR.¹⁴ Gorbachev was reduced to pleading, both for restraint on the side of the West and for money. But the West was hesitant. Gorbachev, as a proud Soviet, was refusing to free the Baltic states and opposed Ukrainian independence. While Bush was not especially hawkish on these issues, dreading post-Soviet chaos, sending billions to Gorbachev would have been politically difficult when an election was coming up in 1992. Instead, the West demanded full privatization from Gorbachev before serious money could go to the Soviets. This was impossible; sudden privatization would mean prices would rise to their real levels (instead of the artificially low Soviet levels), which would increase scarcity.¹⁵ The West, on the cusp of finally defeating the enemy, failed to see the long-term potential for catastrophe.

When the Soviet Union finally disappeared on Christmas Day 1991, it did so with a whimper. The republics, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia among them, simply left. In his six years in power, Gorbachev had sought to save the Soviet Union by involving its people more in decision-making and removing power from the dreaded Communist Party bureaucrats. But in taking these steps, he drained support for the ideology he so loved and allowed political enemies to rise. By the end of his reign, communism was no longer the ideology of the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union did not exist. Russia had lost the control of its buffer zone of influence and, for the moment, had lost control of the Russkiy mir.

The newly independent Russian Federation, under Boris Yeltsin, started in a brutal spot. They still had all the economic troubles of the Soviet Union, but the state was essentially powerless. Yeltsin engaged in “shock therapy,” which was designed to rapidly convert the system to private enterprise, but it quickly resulted in even more material scarcity. This, in turn, sparked a near instantaneous realization among many of the Russian elite in the early to mid-1990s: Russia’s time as a major world power was finished. The new Russian Federation was a husk of what past Russian state structures had been. Its resources, however, were still plentiful. As a result, instead of dedicating themselves to fixing the state, many officials simply robbed it of its parts, becoming filthy rich. Those who stayed in government and did not manage to steal a large slice of the pie still made a living off bribery. This spread through society; it soon became impossible to get basic things done without a bribe. The overwhelming majority of upper-level Russian governing officials thus adopted subsistentialist attitudes.

While there were still some Russians in government who believed in democracy, their ranks were quickly thinning. Even Yeltsin, who had first appeared as a democratic reformer, cheated to win his reelection in 1996, managing to achieve victory with only a 10 percent approval rating.¹⁶ After “winning” reelection, Yeltsin told a group of supporters that Russia had no motivating ideology and that it should consider getting a new one—but he soon lost interest in doing so.¹⁷

By the end of the decade, the country was practically falling apart. Externally, things were no better. While the West had verbally promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into Russia’s former buffer zone of influence, the alliance quickly moved into the region: by 2000, Czechia, Hungary, and Poland would all come under America’s nuclear umbrella. By 2004, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Baltics would do the same. Yugoslavia had fallen to pieces, resulting in war and genocide. While Russia attempted to interfere, it was at the time too weak, able to only sit and watch.¹⁸

Gorbachev’s commitment to communist ideology had destroyed everything previous Russian leaders had built for hundreds of years, and by the end of the 1990s, the aftereffects of his failure had destroyed Russians’ belief in themselves. Yeltsin was failing too. A bloated alco­holic, he had suffered from multiple heart attacks and did not feel he would survive through the end of his term in 2002. Thus, he shocked Russia on New Year’s Eve, 1999, by announcing his resignation from the presidency. His young prime minister would take the reins.

Who Is Vladimir Putin?

Vladimir Putin’s ascent presented the world with a mystery. He remains an enigma nearly a quarter-century after coming to power, and Westerners are still debating exactly what he believes.

For a long time, Western leaders seemed to view Putin as just another subsistentialist; a pragmatic, corrupt official who enjoyed living in luxury and could be dealt with accordingly. They met him at meetings, shook hands, and signed off on oil pipeline deals. Even as late as 2012, former U.S. officials were claiming that Putin’s use of nationalist rhetoric was just for show.¹⁹ When he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they were shocked.²⁰

Some Westerners viewed him in a sharply different light. These individuals argue that Putin, or as they often call him online, “Putler”—a portmanteau of Putin and Hitler—wants to conquer everything. To these individuals, Putin is not a rational actor but a genocidal madman. In America, this is a bipartisan view. In a press conference, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy directly compared Putin’s actions to Hitler’s in the 1930s. And when President Joe Biden exclaimed, “By God, this man cannot be allowed to remain in power” at a speech in Poland, he was not just affirming a desire for regime change; he was indicating that, for many, Putin is a unique evil who must be removed. The only thing stopping “Putler,” in their eyes, from attempting to conquer all of Europe is fear of America’s nuclear arsenal. Therefore, America must constantly be watchful and should do all in its power to see him removed from the Kremlin.²¹

Other commentators, instead of arguing that Putin has no ideology, have attempted to create one called “Putinism.” Sometimes the meaning is vague: in an article published at the beginning of 2023 titled “Is This the End of Putinism?,” McFaul names but never defines this personal ideology.²² Anne Applebaum, another liberal internationalist, offered a more detailed exposition of Putinism: to her, Putin’s ideology is an attempt at popular legitimacy so that he can cover up his stolen wealth and bring back the USSR.²³

That last accusation—that Putin, the KGB agent, desperately wishes for a return of the lost communist empire—is echoed by others such as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and former world chess champion turned Russian opposition politician Garry Kasparov.²⁴ But this is unlikely, as Putin has regularly made clear his disdain for the Bolsheviks. In the early 1990s, Putin lamented the fact that the Bolsheviks had ended the Russian Empire. Later, he remarked, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart, whoever wants it back has no brain.”²⁵ He has gone further in his various speeches since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, repeatedly attacking Bolshevism for hacking up the Russian Empire into what he views as fake, artificial states.²⁶ Those who wish to see Putin as a harbinger of a new USSR will likely respond with his famous 2005 speech in which he called the fall of the USSR a “geopolitical disaster” of the twentieth century. But these commentators often neglect to mention the sentences which followed: “As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and com­patriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.”²⁷ His most blistering attack on the communists came in “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” an essay which argued that Ukraine was a fictional country created by Vladimir Lenin.²⁸ No, Putin and the other nationalists do not wish to restore the USSR—they simply wish to undo the effects of its collapse.

Applebaum has also argued that Putin does “not seriously fear Western military attacks,” a striking sentence considering it goes against the entire history of Putin’s public-facing statements and, indeed, the entire history of the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the Russian Federation’s foreign policy.²⁹ His real fear, she argues, is his people finding out how much money he has stolen.

This is not to pick on Applebaum; many of Putin’s liberal critics would say he is merely interested in procuring palaces and keeping his people weakened and unable to overthrow him. Putin does indeed like palaces, and the ones he has procured have often been built with money stolen from the state. But this does not mean that he has no ideology or does not care about his country.³⁰

So, what does Putin believe? In one of the most recent additions to the canon, Putin author Philip Short addresses that question at length. Short contends that Putin is a Russian nationalist today, but that he was not always one.³¹ Short argues that Putin, angry at what he saw as his country’s mistreatment at the hands of Western powers in the early 1990s, then developed some nationalistic views, which he later modified or temporarily abandoned, only to return to them as president.³²

Short’s work is a tour de force, and a tremendous addition to the literature on Russia’s reclusive leader. But the notion that Putin ever abandoned his nationalism flies in the face of his own words and deeds. Consider what he said to consular ministers at an off-the-record meeting in 1993. At the time, he was working in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office; one of his duties was interacting with foreign representatives. At one meeting, known today only because a French consul general sent a record to Paris, Short records that Putin unloaded on his foreign guests, complaining that Russia had lost Crimea, Kazakhstan, and the Baltic states, and that Russia had been humiliated since 1991. But perhaps most tellingly, he ended his rant by pointing out that “[Yeltin’s] foreign policy did not conform to Russia’s true interests.”³³ In 1995, while still an unknown, he expressed anger at a British representative that NATO was already planning to expand into coun­tries they had previously sworn off.³⁴

Four years later, however, Putin would suddenly become very known to the West. In March 1999, Putin—by then Yeltsin’s prime minister—took his first action to forestall what he had previously only critiqued in private conversations: the expansion of Western influence and what he perceived as a desire to enforce unipolar hegemony on the world.

Serbia at the time was, the West believed, preparing for a genocidal campaign in Kosovo. The West acted, with NATO bombing Serbian positions. The Serbs probably were about to commit genocide, but NATO had always presented itself as a defensive organization. Neither Russia nor anyone else had anything to fear if it expanded—so went the argument—since NATO existed only for defense. The problem was that Kosovo was not a member state; it was not even recognized as a country. NATO had essentially decided to switch from being a purely defensive organization to becoming a “policeman of the world.”

The Russians, even the subsistentialists, were rattled. If NATO had decided it could bomb Serbia, something which was supposedly outside its purview, what stopped it from bombing Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave in Europe? But the nationalists, like Putin, were not rattled—they were furious. Serbia had long been on the fringes of the Russkiy mir; after all, Austria-Hungary’s invasion of the country had begun World War I. As prime minister, Putin ordered Russian troops to seize a key Serbian airport before NATO troops got there. Though Russia eventually nego­tiated a withdrawal with NATO, Putin would bring up the bombing of Serbia for decades to come.

Intervening in a NATO bombing campaign against a separate country, lamenting the loss of Kazakhstan, ripping into the Bolsheviks: these are not the statements of a man who just wants to live in luxury, nor are they the statements of one who misses the Soviet Union.

For a description of how Putin sees himself, we therefore need not create new terminology like Putinism. With his entire history considered, a fitting description seems obvious: czar. This is not meant as an insult, nor is it intended as a term of praise. It is recognition that Putin sees himself at the top of the Russian state, that he is entitled to the rewards of his position, and that it is his job to promote Russia’s interests. As an ardent nationalist, he includes in that list hegemony over the Russkiy mir and, if possible, the recreation of a buffer zone of influence between Russia and the West.

“But he does not care about the people,” his liberal critics would state. And this is likely true at some level; many Russians still live in terrible squalor, and the billions Putin stole to build his palaces could surely have helped them. But the circle can easily be squared. Like most (successful) czars before him, Putin quickly saw that so long as his people had bread and stable living, they would tolerate him living with a czar’s luxury; he also, aware of the subsistentialism which had taken hold in Russia in the 1990s, realized that he could use the power of the state to provide the people with those things. This was the so-called social contract that he offered his citizenry in the early 2000s: though it was never explicitly stated, it could essentially be described as Putin saying, “I will make sure the mafia cannot run rampant in the streets, secure essential state functions, and will provide you with a basic standard of living and a job with the state, if need be. You will look the other way as I build my palaces and help my rich friends.”³⁵

So far, he has (mostly) held up his side of that bargain. The Russian state is very good at creating jobs which do not need to exist, and the economy is mostly plodding along. Russians can go watch movies, and unlike in the early 1990s, their grocery stores are full of the goods which so shocked Yeltsin in Dallas. As Putin has attempted to conquer territo­ry in pursuit of nationalist ambitions, Western sanctions have made it harder for average Russians, but not that much harder. They can no longer watch Marvel movies in theaters, and French wine has been replaced with Belarussian wine. But Putin, who likely always planned on getting back Ukraine and knew that the West would respond harshly, spent much of the last decade “sanction-proofing” the Russian economy—an effort which has for the most part paid off. The economy has not imploded after two years of war. Being unable to see Spider Man will not foment a second Russian revolution.

Critics of this theory may argue that, if Putin truly saw himself as a nationalistic czar, responsible for returning Russia to a state of greatness, then he would have simply pushed the subsistentialists out of his government immediately. Why the slow going? Why allow any protests at all?

It is likely because Putin knows his Russian history. The autocratic regime of the Romanovs engendered anger against their rule. As auto­crats, they were responsible for everything that went wrong; even when Russia was briefly a constitutional monarchy, it was not as if Nicholas II could blame his relatively weak prime ministers for every problem. By playing things “legally”—as in ensuring that his controlled parliament passes amendments allowing him to run instead of just ignoring the constitution—he can present a veneer of legitimacy.

As for working so closely with the subsistentialists? History is replete with kings having courtiers with whom they did not always agree. Sometimes it is due to a shared history; sometimes it is because it would be more difficult to remove them than it would be to allow them to remain. As with past czars, Putin has not tolerated too much inde­pendence or disrespect from those with whom he disagrees—but for much of his rule he did not require them to be in lockstep.

The West did not make Putin who he is. He was always a nationalist, and as president he has always seen himself in the role of a czar. These are realities that the West cannot be blamed for. But it can be blamed for failing to understand these realities. This is not to say that the West should have agreed with his actions and desires. It is simply to say that, for its own good, the West should have recognized that those desires existed. But instead, by increasingly pushing Russia, the West created the conditions which allowed Putin to convert the subsistentialists into nationalists, or to make them irrelevant, in order to launch a war which threatens to destroy the entire post–Cold War international order.

Putin’s Russia: From Subsistentialism to Nationalism

In 2011, Russia was three years into what became known as “tandem­ocracy.” By 2008, Putin had brought the oligarchs to heel, shut down revolution in Chechnya, and established himself as the man in charge. But 2008 also saw him reach his term limit, and as a result he switched places with his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, with whom he had worked in various positions since the early 1990s. Medvedev was significantly younger, and foreign leaders, including Barack Obama, felt that he was a liberal breath of fresh air. They were, however, always uncertain as to who was really in charge, though most suspected that Putin pulled the strings.

Both hunches were true. There is no evidence that Medvedev was faking his openness to new ideas or to forward thinking. Likewise, there is ample evidence that Putin was by and large pulling the strings.³⁶ There was, however, one clear moment in which Medvedev displayed inde­pendence. It would also be the last.

During the 2011 Libyan Civil War, NATO desired to enforce a no-fly zone against Muammar Gaddafi, which required a UN Security Council resolution, meaning Russian approval. Medvedev gave it by way of abstaining. Putin was mortified, saying publicly that the reso­lution resembled “medieval calls for crusades.”³⁷ Medvedev, in a rare public rebuke, called Putin’s comments “unacceptable.”

But events in Libya soon spiraled out of control. The NATO airstrikes intensified, and Gaddafi was hunted down and brutally killed by rebels. Putin was said to have watched the gruesome video of his death on repeat. A year later, Medvedev’s term expired—and so too did the tandemocracy. Putin returned to the presidency seemingly convinced that the West should be given no second chances.

Earlier in Medvedev’s term, a lawyer and member of the opposition named Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death in a Russian prison. West­ern governments were horrified. In 2012, Congress passed legislation that allowed the U.S. government to sanction Russians involved in his death.

The passage of the act has been seen in the West as unambiguously good policy, an important moral stand. But Short argues otherwise: in Russia, it was a demonstration that, no matter how much Russians felt they were working with the West, their interlocutors would always demand more. They also felt that America, with its torture and Guantanamo Bay detainees, was being hypocritical.

There is something to be said for the former complaint. Medvedev had been as liberal as one could get in Putin’s Russia, and had trusted the West on Libya. The West responded by killing Gaddafi (or at least establishing the conditions for his death) and sanctioning Medvedev’s government.³⁸

This was followed by the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, in which protestors overthrew incumbent president Viktor Yanukovych when he decided to move toward Russia instead of the European Union. Putin was incensed, seeing America’s hand at work. While Maidan was not stirred up by America (it was stirred up by Yanukovych’s use of force against protestors), the U.S. did not help dispel conspiracy theories. After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the then director of the CIA, John Brennan, flew to Kyiv for undeclared reasons. A phone call involv­ing the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine discussing who should be in the new Ukrainian government would also leak, bolstering theories that it was all an American plot.

During the chaos, Putin quickly called a meeting of his Security Council—the top decisionmakers in the Russian government—and revealed to those assembled that he planned to take Crimea. The penin­sula had been given to Ukraine as a sign of goodwill by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s; as Ukraine was in the USSR, it was akin to Michigan giving Wisconsin the upper peninsula.

After the USSR’s collapse, however, Crimea had always been a sticking point, with Russian strategists concerned about losing the peninsula. When Ukraine became independent in 1991, a deal allowing Russia to use the peninsula, and its crucial port, was negotiated. But Russians were still worried. In the mid-1990s, Yeltsin had warned President Clinton that the Communists, if they won the 1996 election, would seek to recapture it; but he too had expressed concern over Crimea’s loss. So when Yanukovych was deposed and Ukraine suddenly lurched toward the West, it should have surprised no one that Russia would act. But the West seems to have misunderstood or ignored Russian security concerns.

Short points out that Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu* had been hesitant to endorse the 2014 invasion at the Security Council meeting. It is not hard to guess why: Shoigu was a subsistentialist. His predecessor had tried to reform the Russian military but upset too many generals and bureaucrats who liked the easier, old ways, and was pushed aside. When Shoigu became defense minister in 2012, he was not think­ing like a nationalist and did not envision the Russian armed forces undertaking offensive maneuvers. He saw an army which would keep Russia, and him, secure. As a result, he never made risky reforms. Since 1992, this subsistentialist process—get into position, discover issues, cover up issues, get rich, keep position—was repeated ad nauseum across the Russian Federation.

But if Shoigu was concerned at the Security Council meeting, it was without merit. In weeks, Russia had seized Crimea and supported rebels in the industry-heavy Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. The Russo-Ukrainian War had begun. The Kremlin likely believed that this would grind Ukraine’s movement to the West (including its movement into NATO) to a halt. While the West responded with sanctions on Russia in 2014, temporarily harming the economy, they did not fully unleash economic devastation on the country. This was for a mix of reasons: Europe had made itself dependent on cheap Russian gas and did not want to change things. Some, including President Obama, likewise did not think it wise to refocus America’s foreign policy on Russia when China loomed as a much more significant threat.³⁹ Besides, Russia taking Crimea “made sense” from a realist, amoral perspective; would the West really go to war over it?

But Putin was not acting like a realist, focused only on a strategic naval port; he was acting like a nationalistic czar seeking to rebuild his fractured empire. The West failed to recognize this, but their moment of reckoning came quickly. In early 2019, the pro-Western Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko (Yanukovych’s successor) seemed likely to lose reelection to populist comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy. To help his flagging numbers, he rammed constitutional amendments through the parliament which put the goal of joining NATO into Ukraine’s consti­tution. Zelenskyy won the election but left the amendments in place, as it would have been political suicide to repeal them.

Putin waited. Zelenskyy was not the favorite of the most ardently pro-Western Ukrainians, and perhaps Putin thought there might be a chance for a deal. But by early 2021, it became clear that Zelenskyy was unwilling or unable to bend Ukraine’s establishment to the degree which would have allowed him to come to an arrangement with Putin. At the same time, his government had announced charges against Viktor Medvechuk, the leader of the pro-Russia bloc in Ukraine’s parliament and a friend of Putin’s.

Putin likely did not wish to engage in a massive war which would result in his country being cut off from the world. But at this point, he likely felt—from his nationalist perspective—that he had no other choice. Again and again, Putin made clear that Ukraine leaving the Russkiy mir and entering the Western fold was simply not an option for him. From that perspective, until around 2021, no bombs needed to be dropped, because Ukraine was still somewhat ensconced in the Russkiy mir.

But during 2021 it was obvious that this would not be the case for long. In response, over the course of that year, Russia began to build up its troops along the border of Ukraine. Once more, much of the West—including Ukraine’s own government—was in denial. Ukraine seemed unable to imagine that Putin was such a nationalist that he would make war on the entire country. The Europeans who had dealt with Putin for two decades and shaken hands with him in nice conference rooms could not imagine it either.

Some subsistentialist Russians at home seemed unable to believe it as well. But by 2021, there were significantly fewer subsistentialists than there had been at the beginning of the decade. The most notable convert from subsistentialism to nationalism, and the most prominent example of how the West made unnecessary enemies, was Medvedev. The once liberal-ish president, burned by his Libya experience and still clearly incensed over the Magnitsky Act, had over the years become an angry nationalist, insisting that Russia must be respected in the world.⁴⁰

On February 21, 2022, the subsistentialist-nationalist divide came to a head. On that day, Vladimir Putin convened a Security Council meet­ing, which was broadcast live. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to gather the views of the individual council members on whether to recognize the independence of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics from Ukraine, which would mean Russia would then defend them, bringing full-scale war. Council members were to share their opinions on whether recognition should go forward or if diplomacy should be given more time.

The subsistentialists on the council—chiefly Sergey Lavrov, Shoigu, and Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service—all hedged their bets. Lavrov and Shoigu made noncommittal statements, with the former suggesting that diplomacy be given a chance. Naryshkin misspoke repeatedly and stuttered so badly through his statement that Putin angrily told him to sit down. The nationalists, such as Medvedev and Nikolai Patrushev, a close Putin ally, were belli­cose, urging Putin to recognize independence. Lavrov and Shoigu, clearly reading the room, both spoke again near the end and changed their tune, declaring that actually they believed recognition was the only way forward.

The subsistentialist hold over the Russian Federation was thus broken in real-time. But the effects of their work, or lack thereof, over the past decades remained. And this was Putin’s only major blind spot. As Putin prepared to give the order to invade Ukraine, he thought he had a ready army and therefore failed to consider just how much the system had incentivized the subsistentialists to cover up any problems. And Shoigu never thought he would have to use his unprepared army to fight a major conflict, not fully appreciating the nationalist impulse to restore Russian greatness.

This divide in subsistentialist-nationalist thinking, and the strange dichotomy of a mostly subsistentialist governing structure being led by a nationalist, finally came to a boil when Russia invaded. Though failing to take Kyiv, as of this writing, Russia is in possession of the so-called Crimea corridor, a strip of land connecting the Crimean Peninsula to Russia proper, Luhansk, Donetsk, and much of the south. Together, it constitutes about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory.

“History Is Not a Sequence of Inevitability”

Before the conflict expanded in February 2022, some realists argued that Russia would not launch a full-scale attack on Ukraine because it fell outside of Russia’s national interest.⁴¹ To keep Ukraine out of NATO, the argument went, Russia simply had to keep a simmering conflict going in the country’s east. After the full-scale attack started, those same realists and desperate diplomats suggested off-ramps for Russia, ways to disincentivize further attacks on Ukraine and to bring an end to the conflict. But these suggestions ignore Putin’s view of this conflict as a battle for the Russkiy mir against the West and miss the fact that the pendulum of Russian domestic politics has finally swung away from the subsistentialists and toward the nationalists. No offer to release sanc­tions can dissuade Putin; this is a man who once argued that, in the event of nuclear war, the Russian people would go to paradise as martyrs.⁴²

Liberal internationalists like McFaul believe the solution involves calling for the fall of Putin’s government. This too is wrong. Democracy is not going to cause Russia to simply drop all pretensions to irredentism, nor will it remove the inherent nationalistic impulse to be the leader of the Russkiy mir. If Russia feels threatened by the loss of former imperial territories it traditionally views as “theirs,” or by NATO’s advance, the ballot box will make little difference. Democracies are fiercely protective of their peripheries. The first ever American presidential doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine, demanded Europe stay away from the entirety of the Americas. If Western leaders assume the lack of democracy is to blame for Russia’s actions and decide to simply wait for free elections (or to create them), they will be doing so in vain; even the subsistentialists had security risks they were not prepared to take. Furthermore, there is no telling what might happen should the entire system come crumbling down.

None of this is, of course, to suggest that Putin’s regime is desirable, or that the United States should somehow coax Russia into an alliance. Putin himself is a despot who has killed opposition figures with impunity and stolen hordes of wealth from his people. His Russian nationalist ideology will accept any amount of death (so long as the amount of death does not threaten the power of Russian nationalism) to retake the Russkiy mir, an area in which millions who do not necessarily want to be a part of a greater Russia are living. But evil men rule in many places; acceptance that they rule does not mean that one condones their rule. It merely means accepting the reality of the situation.

The West viewed the end of the Soviet Union as its handiwork, proof that the arc of history bent away from dictatorship. In his refutation of this belief, Zubok presciently writes, “History is not a sequence of inevitability.”⁴³ There are occasional, seismic leaders—democratic and dictatorial alike—who seize their chance to reshape their homelands in their own ideological image.

Russia has had two such men in the last fifty years, both of which were fundamentally misunderstood by their global opponents. Mikhail Gorbachev, the ardent communist wrongly seen as a determined privatizer, sought to remake his country but instead unmade it—and hundreds of years of Russian imperial successes—in the process. The second, Vladimir Putin, a czar dressed in presidential clothing, is now seeking to reverse the failures of his predecessor, and of his predecessor’s state, to once again reunite the Russkiy mir.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 2 (Summer 2024): 185–207.

Notes