Despite the atmosphere of fear, direct repression,
and professional purges in the education sector […],
civil society is still alive. It is not fighting for power;
it is putting up moral resistance,
as it did in the last decades of the Soviet Union.”
Andrei Kolesnikov
In The Closing of the Russian Mind: How Putin’s Ideology Took the Nation Hostage (Polity Press, 2026), Russian political analyst and journalist Andrei Kolesnikov portrays Vladimir Putin as “a man obsessed with ideology and in thrall to conspiracy theories and ideas about the special messianic role of his state and nation.”
For Kolesnikov, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was not merely a military decision or a geopolitical rupture. Nor can it be explained simply as a reaction to Western policies or NATO’s eastward enlargement. Rather, it represented the ultimate expression of an ideological framework patiently constructed by the regime over the years — one rooted in archaic and insufficiently modernized layers of Russian historical and sociocultural consciousness, shared by both the masses and the elites.
Drawing on elements deeply embedded in Russian and Soviet history — imperial nostalgia, anti-Western resentment, the cult of the state, the myth of a unique Russian path, the sacralization of power and the memory of the Great Patriotic War — Putinism has transformed war, isolation and repression into the pillars of a new political and moral order.
Kolesnikov also examines the social dimension of this process: consent, adaptation, conformism, fear and the search for stability as forms of passive participation in the system.
Writing from inside Russia, living under the restrictions imposed by the “foreign agent” designation, Kolesnikov also reflects on the condition of those who remain — independent authors, scholars and journalists striving to understand their country from within, despite mounting risks and constraints. Under these conditions, his book becomes both a brilliant diagnosis of Putinism and a valuable testimony to the enduring forms of intellectual and civic resistance that still continue to survive within Russian society.
To better understand the political, social and ideological landscape described in the book Ytali had a conversation with its author, an award-winning journalist, writer, and political analyst.
A former senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, Kolesnikov is currently a columnist for Novaya Gazeta (Moscow) and Newtimes.ru, and a senior associate research fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI). He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
Kolesnikov is a frequent contributor to Foreign Affairs and Neue Zurcher Zeitung. He has received several journalism and public-intellectual awards, including the 2021 Yegor Gaidar Award for outstanding contribution to the study of history. He is also the author of several books on late Soviet history, post-Soviet reforms and Russian political development, including works on the leading Russian reformers Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais.
In 2022, in our last conversation, you described Russia’s transition from authoritarianism to a form of hybrid totalitarianism — a diagnosis that your latest book – The Closing of the Russian Mind: How Putin’s Ideology Took the Nation Hostage – deepens and places within a broader historical, ideological and political trajectory.
Since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there has been considerable debate about the stability of the Russian system: whether the war, sanctions and repression have made the regime more fragile, or whether, on the contrary, they have strengthened it, binding society more tightly to a political order shaped by repression, mobilization and militarized patriotism.
In your book you suggest that Russia will begin to change only when the government changes — more precisely, when Putin is gone. You also write that “Putinism may outlive Putin, but it will probably be a milder version of him and there will likely be changes toward the normalization of the country. Of course, further lurches toward fascism and chaos cannot be ruled out, but historical precedents incline to a relatively optimistic scenario.”
Yet the recurrent return to authoritarian forms of rule in Russian history inevitably raises a difficult question. In your view, what is more likely after Putin: a further radicalization of the system, a limited normalization without real democratization, or a more substantial political opening? And which elements of Putinism are likely to survive Putin himself?
Putin’s regime is a personalistic autocracy. That is why so much in the country depends on the leader. If the leader changes, serious changes are possible — as in all dictatorships. After Stalin’s death, his closest associates did not simply begin fighting each other for power, they immediately began proposing various options for liberalization. The transitions from dictatorships in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Germany were very different, but they did take place. Of course, elements of Stalinism outlived Stalin, just as Salazarism outlived Salazar for a time. But a period of some “normalization” following Putin’s departure is a more likely scenario than the country’s descent into some unimaginable version of fascism. This could be a period of a softer, less militaristic, and more Western-friendly regime, where, during the transition, the old Putin-era elites and counter-elites will be mixed (as in Spain after Franco’s death). But this is unlikely to be a period of immediate transition to democracy — the hole into which Russia has now fallen is simply too deep.
The very title of your book suggests that Putinism has not only transformed institutions and political language but has also narrowed the moral and historical imagination through which Russia understands itself and the outside world. In your book, you show how the “Russian idea” has repeatedly been reshaped by the state — from Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality to today’s notion of Russia as a “state-civilization” following its own “special path”. How does this political construction relate to the older and more elusive notion of the “Russian soul”? Is the Russian soul still a cultural myth, or has it been transformed into an ideological resource for the regime?
Of course, these are all reinvented, fictional, mythological concepts. Although Russia’s imperial past and path of dependence hinder the country’s development, Russian society underwent a high degree of modernization during the transition to capitalism. The problem is that having become capitalist consumers, far from all Russians became responsible citizens for whom regular rotation of power and human rights are valued. Putin filled this vacuum of values with archaic traditional values, taking advantage of the population’s indifference to what happens at the top of the power pyramid. And he cemented them with a “special operation”, convincing the masses that this is not only his personal war, but the war of all of Russia. But the notorious 70–80% support for what the autocrat is doing is largely passive conformism, stemming from people’s inability to change anything or make sense of what has happened to the country and the world.
Let’s focus on the social contract between the Kremlin and Russian society, which has changed profoundly in recent years. As you underline in your book, after Putin announced the partial mobilization in September 2022, “there was a change to the prevailing social contract model (silence in exchange for social support from the state and the growing feeling of Russia’s greatness): it is now necessary to share responsibility for what the autocrat is doing and increasingly to raise one’s voice in favor of the dictator rather than simply remain silent”. But the tribute now demanded from citizens seems to go beyond passive loyalty or the public display of active consent. In today’s Putinist vision — increasingly messianic, imperial, and shaped by the glorification of sacrifice, violence and death — citizens appear to be asked for something more radical: the willingness to risk their own lives in exchange for money, social benefits, career opportunities or symbolic recognition.
In your view, is it possible to identify a breaking point beyond which Russian citizens – both les attentistes à la Russe and the active conformists – may no longer be willing to pay this tribute to the regime?
Although a canon of proper “patriotic” behavior has already taken shape and many have routinized the daily nightmare, people feel fatigue from the war, the looming economic hardships, and the endless restrictions. This does not mean they have stopped supporting Putin altogether – to them, he is more of a given, like the weather outside. But after the internet restrictions, irritation has been added to the fatigue. However, people have adapted to these restrictions as well, because there is nothing they can do. The elites, meanwhile, are simply paralyzed by fear and incapable of anything, not only just conspiracies — they cannot upset the dictator with unpleasant information. It is a bad equilibrium, but it holds for now, and the further descent down the staircase of problems is viewed as the new normal. At least for the moment.
In your book, you devote considerable attention to the 1990s. In particular, you describe a paradox at the heart of Putinism: the reforms of that decade — and, more broadly, the so-called “wild 1990s” — are publicly denounced as a time of chaos, weakness and national humiliation, yet Putin’s own system benefited from many of the institutional, economic and social foundations laid during those years. At the same time, discrediting the 1990s has been essential to the regime’s broader project of de-modernization and de-normalization: erasing the memory of Russia’s brief experiment with liberal democracy, pluralism and integration with the outside world. How important was the legacy of the 1990s for the consolidation of Putin’s rule?
Putin has portrayed and continues to portray the 1990s as a time of utter chaos and national humiliation. The villains are Gorbachev, who “destroyed” the Soviet Union, and Yeltsin. Yet without Yeltsin’s consent to Putin’s succession, there would have been no Putin at all. The mythology surrounding the 1990s has taken root in the public consciousness; new generations know no other interpretation. Yet this has little to do with current problems, and it is difficult to explain today’s difficulties solely as a legacy of the hardships of the “turbulent” 1990s.
You analyze the transition from Homo Sovieticus to Homo Putinus. You make clear that this is not simply the same anthropological type reproduced forty years later; at the same time, you suggest that similar external conditions have generated a strikingly similar pattern of adaptive behavior. What, in your view, are the essential differences between Homo Sovieticus and Homo Putinus? Are they mainly generational, social and technological, or do they concern a different relationship to ideology, the state and war?
Paradoxically, Homo Sovieticus was less tied to a specific leader. He was a man of the empire, but not of a collapsed empire, like Putin’s man, but of one that existed and appeared to be solid. Although elements of national-imperialism were present in official Marxism-Leninism as well, they were still restrained — now they are not. In short, Homo Putinus is more of a traditionalist and has more resentment. He possesses more negative identity than positive. The USSR launched Gagarin into space, Putin launches only drones and missiles.
In All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin, published by PublicAffairs in 2016, the journalist and writer Mikhail Zygar described the labyrinthine distribution of power within Putin’s court — siloviki, “silovarchs”, friends, family members, economists and lawyers from St. Petersburg, just to name a few — whose influence shifted over time, often in unpredictable ways.
A decade after the publication of All the Kremlin’s Men, and in light of the war against Ukraine and the ideological infrastructure Putin has built around it, how has this complex galaxy of elites evolved? Is it still possible to identify relatively coherent groups within the system, or has the war produced a further tightening of vertical power, reducing the space for autonomous factions and making loyalty — or fear — the main principle of political survival?
There are definitely no liberals in power now; at best, there are technocrats in the government’s financial and economic bloc. It is safe to say that the country is not ruled by the military — whose role is to demonstrate heroism — but by the security services: this became clearly evident in the internal elite friction over internet restrictions — the security services’ viewpoint, which insisted on major restrictions, prevailed over that of the civilian part of the administration. The oligarchic class, forced to be extremely cautious in the face of repression and nationalization, is compelled to support the regime, including financially. Lobbying groups and even the patron-client system have collapsed — no one wants to help anyone, and everyone is afraid — in any case, the numerous arrests of mostly regional bosses at various levels, the mysterious deaths of top companies executives, and the symbolic suicide of Transport Minister Starovoit last year have greatly frightened the elites. Small and medium-sized businesses are dissatisfied with the situation, but they have no lobbyists. Overall, as I said, the elites are paralyzed by fear and powerlessness and are simply trying to serve without revealing their true views.
But the most interesting part is yet to come — the reshuffling of the elite, driven by personnel who have undergone a “special operation” at both the highest and lowest levels of power: a major battle for positions of power is on the horizon. Putin, for his part, is merely encouraging this trenchocracy.
At the end of your book, you write very personally about the position of the “so-called remaining — those who, continuing to fulfill their research and journalistic duties, risk staying in Russia”, analyzing what is happening to the country “from the belly of the beast”. As someone who has been designated a “foreign agent” by the Russian authorities, and who therefore writes under significant legal, civic and professional restrictions, how do you think the role of independent authors, scholars and journalists working inside Russia has changed compared with the Soviet period? And, despite these pressures, what can still be understood from within the country that may be harder to grasp from exile?
The Soviet intelligentsia knew no other way of life and yet lived within a system of clear and understandable rules. Our generation has known a different way of life, and what is happening now seems like an absolute catastrophe; there are no rules, and those that do exist are constantly being tightened until they reach the point of absurdity. There are more people being persecuted for political reasons now than there were in the late Soviet Union. Nevertheless, if you decide to do something even from within today’s Russia, it works out —that’s how we operate at a banned newspaper Novaya Gazeta founded by Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov: we are blocked and visible via VPN, but we have a website, a Telegram channel, a YouTube channel, and even two print publications, not counting the books we’re trying to sell on our own. We see how our work — or my personal appearances on YouTube streams — are important and comforting to those living in Russia who disagree with Putin’s policies. For them, reading and watching us is a form of resistance. And from the inside, it’s clear that Russians are very diverse. Many of them are victims “occupied” by Putin’s regime, forced to remain silent, and sometimes even go to prison. From the outside, it’s not visible how many people here simply continue to “cultivate their gardens”, and how important this is for Russia to become a normal country after Putin.
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