Putin’s War in Ukraine Shatters an Illusion in Russia

The last time I was in Russia, the summer of 2015, I came face to face with a contradiction. What if a place was unfree, but also happy? How long could it stay that way?
Moscow had blossomed into a beautiful, European city, full of meticulously planted parks, bike lanes and parking spaces. Income for the average Russian had risen significantly over the course of the previous decade. At the same time, its political system was drifting ever closer to authoritarianism.
Fifteen years earlier, Boris Yeltsin had left power in shame, apologizing on national television “for having failed to justify the hopes of the people who believed that we would be able to make a leap from the gloomy and stagnant totalitarian past to a bright, prosperous and civilized future at just one go.”
the summer of 2015, his successor, President Vladimir Putin, had seemingly made Russia bright and prosperous. The political system he built was increasingly restrictive, but many had learned to live with it.
Many Russian liberals had gone to work for nonprofits and local governments, throwing themselves into community building — making their cities better places to live. A protest movement in 2011 and 2012 had failed, and people were looking for other ways to shape their country. Big politics were hopeless, the thinking went, but one could make a real difference in small acts.
There was another side to this bargain: Putin was seemingly constrained, as well. Political action may have been forbidden, but there was tolerance when it came to other things, for example religion, culture and many forms of expression. His own calculus for the system to run smoothly meant he had to make some room for society.
People walk in a park with a view of the St. Basil Cathedral in Moscow on Feb. 1, 2022. (The New York Times)
I lived in Russia for nine years, and began covering it for The New York Times in 2000, the year Putin was first elected. I spent lots of time telling people — in public writing and in my private life — that Russia might sometimes look bad but that it had a lot of wonderful qualities, too.
But in the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, I have felt like I am watching someone I love lose their mind. Many of the Russian liberals who had turned to “small acts” are feeling a sense of shock and horror, too, said Alexandra Arkhipova, a Russian anthropolog.
“I see lots of posts and conversations saying these small deeds, it was a big make,” she said. “People have a metaphor. They say, ‘We were trying to make some cosmetic changes to our faces, when the cancer was growing and growing in our stomachs.’”
I began to wonder whether Russia was always going to end up here, and we just failed to see it. So I called Yevgeniya Albats, a Russian journal who had warned of the dangers of a KGB resurgence as early as the 1990s. Albats kept staring into the glare of the idea that at certain points in hory, everything is at stake in political thought and action. She had long argued that any bargain with Putin was an illusion.
People who fled Russia gathered at a house in anbul, on March 12, 2022. (The New York Times)
She said 2008 was a turning point, the moment Putin divorced the West, even invaded another country, and the West barely noticed.
“For Putin, it was a clear sign,” she said telephone last month, “that he can do whatever he wants. And that’s exactly what he started doing. He behaved extremely rationally. He just realized that you don’t care.”
She was referring to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, which came shortly after President George W. Bush began to talk about NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. I covered that war, and spent the night with a Russian unit in the Georgian town of Gori and remember how invigorated the soldiers seemed, laughing, joking. The Soviet defeat in the Cold War had left a bitter sense of humiliation and loss. The invasion seemed to have renewed them.
“When Putin came, everything changed,” one officer told me. “We got some of our old strength back. People started to respect us again.”
A Russian soldier on a tank in Igoeti, Georgia, on Aug. 16, 2008. Russians long lived with an understanding: Stay away from politics, and live your life as you choose. The war in Ukraine in 2022 wrecked that idea. (The New York Times)
Albats sounded tired but determined. The day we talked, she had traveled to a Russian penal colony to be present for the sentencing of her friend Alexei Navalny, Russia’s popular opposition leader, who used his allotted time to give a speech against the war.
“We now understand that when Putin decided to go into war in Ukraine, he had to get rid of Navalny,” she said, because he is the only one with the courage to res.
Indeed, Navalny never accepted the turn away from direct confrontation and was building a nationwide opposition movement, leading people into the streets. He rejected the bargain and was willing to go to prison to defy it.
Arkhipova pointed out that her mantra, that the fight was not of good against evil but of good against neutral, was a direct challenge to the political passivity that Putin was demanding.
Many people I interviewed said the poisoning of Navalny in 2020 and the jailing of him in early 2021, after years of freedom, marked the end of the social contract and the beginning of Putin’s war. Like al-Qaida’s killing of Ahmed Shah Massoud on the eve of Sept. 11, 2001, Putin had to clear the field of opponents.
Greg Yudin, a professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, argues it was the political opposition’s success, which began to accelerate in 2018 and 2019, that tipped Putin toward war.
Yudin said it was inconceivable to Putin that there could be people inside Russia who wanted the best for their country yet were against him. So he looked for traitors and nursed an obsession with the idea that the West was after him.

“It’s a feature of this kind of regime,” Yudin said. “It recodes internal dissent into external threats.”
As for my 2015 question — how long can a place be unfree and also happy — perhaps we have lived into the answer. Many liberals have left. Many of those who have not left face fines or even jail. In the weeks after the invasion, police detained more than 15,000 people nationwide, according to OVD-Info, a human rights group, substantially higher than in the protests in 2012, when about 5,000 people were detained over 12 months, said Arkhipova, who studied that movement.
Now the bargain is broken, the illusion has shattered. And the country has been pitched into a new phase. But what is it? Yudin argues that Russia is moving out of authoritarianism — where political passivity and civic disengagement are key features — into totalitarianism, which relies on mass mobilization, terror and homogeneity of beliefs. He believes Putin is on the brink but may hesitate to make the shift.

“In a totalitarian system, you have to release free energy to start terror,” he said. Putin, he said, “is a control freak, used to micromanagement.”
However, if the Russian state starts to fail, either through a collapse of Russia’s economy or a complete military defeat in Ukraine, “unleashing terror will be the only way for him to save himself.”
Which is why the current situation is so dangerous, for Ukraine and for people in Russia opposed Putin.
“Putin is so convinced that he cannot afford to lose that he will escalate,” Yudin said. “He has staked everything on it.”