Today, those oligarchs are long gone, but Putin remains. The Russia that he has created has, in many ways, changed unrecognisably over the last generation.
Boris Yeltsin stands with Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2000 (Photo: Itar Tass)
In other ways, though, Putin’s Russia is all too familiar to earlier, Soviet generations — and never more so than on the 9 May Victory Day. The 80th-anniversary celebrations of the USSR’s defeat of Nazism featured serried ranks of tanks and rockets, goose-stepping troops parading on Moscow’s Red Square, buildings draped in scarlet banners featuring Hero of the Soviet Union medals and great Soviet generals.
Under Yeltsin, Victory Day was a commemoration of victory over fascism in the Second World War, and a celebration of the wartime alliance that made that victory possible. Bill Clinton even attended in 1995. But today’s Victory Day is no longer solely about the past but rather stands as a symbol of Putin’s vision for the future.
Under Putin, Victory Day has become a display of unity among autocratic regimes, still loyal to their Communist heritage and bound by a shared defiance of the democratic Western world and its values.
Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missile system launchers roll during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9 (Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)Yet the Soviet Union, for all its social conservatism, was paradoxically founded on the embrace of the future. It was, ostensibly, a state that demanded sacrifices of its people in the name of a bright, collective, communist world to come.
Unlike China or the USSR, Russia has no highly developed government and party structure, no powerful and long-established state ideology of collective prosperity, and no towering achievements in space exploration or world-aweing urban and technological development to unite behind.
Putin greets participants of a military parade on Victory Day on May 9 (Photo: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/ Reuters)Modern Russians, like their grandparents, must watch what they say and face imprisonment for disagreeing with the Party line — for instance, by calling the Ukraine invasion a war instead of a “special military operation.”
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Do ordinary Russians truly believe the Kremlin’s messaging that Kyiv is run by liberal Fascists and that Putin is saving them from a hostile takeover by the West?
“It’s like a theatre … today’s Russian does what is expected of him. Sometimes he applauds, sometimes he wolf-whistles. But he is not required to actually believe.
Putin himself believes that he is the saviour of his country. Asked recently by the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg whether he had looked after Russia as Yeltsin had once exhorted him, Putin’s reply was defiant. “I have not only looked after Russia but rather we have pulled back from the brink of an abyss,” said Putin at his annual press conference last December. “We were heading to a total loss of sovereignty, and without sovereignty, Russia cannot exist as an independent state.”
A damaged apartment building following the drone attack in Moscow in March (Photo: Tatyana Makeyeva/AFP)Until, of course, Putin crashed those economic ties when he decided to try to effect regime change in Kyiv. And for the whole period of Putin’s ascendancy everything about Russia — from Putin’s rising great power fantasies to the famous stability of his regime — has been underpinned by high world oil prices, an economic factor that had nothing to do with the Kremlin and was entirely outside its control.
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Now, though, oil prices are falling back towards 1990s levels, and Russia’s war and sanctions-strained economy is starting to creak at the seams.
But there is no such thing as Putinism — only a chimerical mixture of religious ethno-nationalism, a paranoiac, millenarian fear of foreign interference, and kleptocracy. Not only will Putin leave no lasting ideological legacy, but any legacy of prosperity and stability that he may have created has been destroyed by his own decision to wage war on Ukraine.
Owen Matthews is Russia correspondent at the ‘Spectator’ magazine, former Moscow bureau chief at ‘Newsweek‘ and the author of ‘Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine‘
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