Foreign Affairs
Putins All the Way Down
How Russia Was Remade
Joshua Yaffa
November/December 2025
Published on October 21, 2025
JOSHUA YAFFA is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the inaugural Writer in Residence at Bard College Berlin. He is the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia.
More than 25 years ago, at the outset of Vladimir Putin’s rule, Russia’s political future felt undetermined, or at least full of contradiction. The state nurtured some freedoms but repressed others; it made a nod toward democracy yet kept its politics carefully managed. It flung open the doors to free-market capitalism but allowed those same markets to be preyed upon by oligarchs, insiders, and corrupt officials. And it tolerated a degree of feisty, muckraking journalism, even if it subjected reporters engaged in that work to pressure and threats. Above all, with rising oil prices and living standards and growing ties to the West, Russia seemed to offer its citizens a decent, even promising existence—on the condition that they stay out of politics, a dominion ceded to the state.
What the state lacked, and not by accident, was any particular ideological orientation. In part, this was a reflection of political reality. In the years after 1991, Russians were trained cynics, having lived through Soviet decline and collapse; forcing belief would be a difficult endeavor, with an unclear upside. They then entered the twenty-first century with conflicting ideas and views—Was communism a virtuous system or an idiotic one? Was the Soviet collapse a moment of freedom and opportunity or a hardship? So it seemed better to keep the tent big, to borrow from the world of American party politics, than to force a reckoning on what people should or should not believe.
But it was also a matter of law. Article 13 of Russia’s post-Soviet constitution formally recognized the state’s ideological diversity and prohibited the establishment of any single state ideology. Even Putin paid lip service to this principle. As the Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan observe in Our Dear Friends in Moscow, their colleagues interviewed Putin in 2000, in his first months in office, and asked him whether Russia needed a new ideology. He dismissed the idea out of hand. “It cannot be invented on purpose,” he said, adding that the country needed instead to “strengthen the state, the economy, and democratic institutions, including the free press.”
Today, that sounds like a long-forgotten fantasy. The Kremlin no longer holds to any democratic pretensions. Putin appears destined to rule indefinitely, and even far down the ballot, independent candidates are kept from running. The free press is gone, as are all manner of basic freedoms, however limited: a “like” on the wrong social media post or a donation to a foundation deemed illegal are enough to merit a lengthy prison sentence. The economy has been largely cut off from the West; travel to Europe is fraught, expensive, and complicated. Above all, the state has seized on ideology to justify itself to the public and provide an orienting narrative: imperialist and militaristic, conservative and anti-Western, undergirded with an atavistic sense of both grievance and righteousness.
Two new books trace the arc of this transformation, presenting the reemergence of ideology as a central question for both state and citizen in today’s Russia. In Our Dear Friends in Moscow, Soldatov and Borogan look to their own generation. They tell the story of a one-time group of friends and colleagues, young Russians who, over the course of the Putin years, steadily accommodate themselves to the ruling system, drift toward nationalist and illiberal ideas and justifications, and end up as supporters of Russia’s war in Ukraine. By centering their book on the shifting values of these friends, Soldatov and Borogan show how Putin’s deliberate strategy to “wall off Russia from the West,” as they put it, has been enabled and augmented by Russians themselves.
In Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime, the French historian and political scientist Marlene Laruelle demonstrates how the ever-shifting dynamic between state and society has been central to Putin’s power. Putin’s effort to construct a new national-imperial ideology, she suggests, relies not only on values imposed from above but also on exploiting ideas and strains of thought already circulating in society. Together, these books suggest that far from arbitrary or irrational, the ideas that have driven Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and broader conflict with the West have resulted from the long and evolving interplay between the Putin system and the people it rules.
TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS
In the opening scenes of Our Dear Friends in Moscow, Soldatov and Borogan have just been hired by the newspaper Izvestia, a former state mouthpiece that became an independent paper after the Soviet collapse. During the 1990s, Izvestia had gained a modicum of spunky, speak-truth-to-power freedom, and the authors quickly found themselves thrust into a spirited and ambitious circle of colleagues, friends, rivals, lovers, and intellectual sparring partners. At the center of this cohort was Petya Akopov, then a political correspondent for the paper, and Marina, his chain-smoking wife, who together hosted drinking bouts and philosophizing sessions in their handsome apartment overlooking Gogolevsky Boulevard, a stately, tree-lined thoroughfare in the center of the capital. As Soldatov and Borogan write, the Akopovs’ living room—“with its large sofa, a table with two chairs under a shiny chandelier dangling from the high ceiling, and a couch at the arched window”—was where notions of history, politics, and journalism were argued out, marking the beginning of a years-long conversation that evolved in rhythm with Russia’s transformation under Putin.
As early as Putin’s first years in office, allegiances among these Moscow friends began to shift. Soldatov and Borogan, reporters on Russia’s security services, were simultaneously traumatized and galvanized by the heavy-handed response of the FSB, Russia’s internal security service, to two horrific hostage crises—at the Nord-Ost theater in Moscow in 2002 and at a school in Beslan in 2004—both of which involved huge numbers of casualties and significant government cover-ups. They watched with confusion and dismay as a colleague at Izvestia started writing pieces fed to him by the FSB, and another friend took to making conspiracy-laden, anti-Western documentaries. All the while, Soldatov and Borogan took note, as if marking notches in the wall—“that year, two of our friends had moved to the other side.”
Before long, Izvestia’s short-lived period of relative independence came to a close, and Soldatov and Borogan’s path began to diverge from their more conformist colleagues. From the outside, resisting the emerging status quo looked pointless, or even foolish: there were careers to be made, not to mention money. One newspaper to which Soldatov and Borogan had contributed articles “mocked all forms of protest activity as a pastime for old losers who had failed to find a place in the new Russian reality.” As they bounced from one publication to the next, Soldatov and Borogan launched Agentura.ru, their own investigative website about Russia’s security services. “We were in our mid-thirties and felt out of step with our own generation,” they later reflected.
Still, for a while, it was unclear which way the country would go. In 2008, Putin declined to run again for president, as the constitution required, allowing a supposedly more liberal successor, Dmitry Medvedev, to be elected. But Putin did not step down so much as temporarily step aside into the role of prime minister; and when, in late 2011, he announced his plans to return to the presidency, and parliamentary elections were marred by widespread fraud, it sparked the largest protests in Russia’s post-Soviet history. Nonetheless, Putin returned to power amid new crackdowns, and most middle-class protesters retreated to their lives, careers, and families. Around this time, ideology began to raise its head from behind the parapets of the Kremlin’s walls: Putin was now the defender of an emerging set of, as he portrayed them, inherently “Russian” values, and those who opposed him were painted as degenerate, anti-Russian agents.
Putin speaking at a state rally in Moscow, March 2024
Reuters
As Russia’s politics curdled, so did the attitudes of Soldatov and Borogan’s friends. In the wake of the 2011 protests, Petya Akopov called for the assassination of Alexei Navalny, the protest movement’s most visible and charismatic leader (who was ultimately arrested and later died in a Russian prison in 2024). In a column praising Russia’s turn away from European civilization, Akopov also cheered the end of the country’s “liberal experiment.” In 2014, as Russia annexed Crimea and launched a proxy war in eastern Ukraine, Evgeny Krutikov, the political editor who had hired Soldatov and Borogan at Izvestia years earlier, went “full imperial,” as they put it, and began promoting “the return of state ideology to Russian foreign policy.”
By the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, Soldatov and Borogan had fled to London at the urging of security sources, who hinted they were in danger. But for many of their old friends, the war was an opportunity. Weeks after the invasion, Akopov wrote an ecstatic column for RIA, a Russian state news service, arguing that the “Ukraine question” had been solved. Another old journalist colleague and former liberal took his guitar and began entertaining Russian troops in occupied Ukraine. A doctor friend became an impassioned war supporter. Even more remarkable was the trajectory of Olga Lyubimova, the scion of a prominent Soviet theater and film family, whom Soldatov and Borogan had known in the early Putin years when she was a young TV host. By 2020, she had risen to become Putin’s minister of culture, and as the war unfolded, she wielded her vast propaganda apparatus in accordance with the needs of the state, censoring works deemed politically undesirable while lavishing state funding on patriotic narratives connected to the war effort.
As Soldatov and Borogan survey their former cohort, they realize how many of its “intelligent, well-informed, thoughtful” members have become instrumental to Russia’s war. Not only do many of them support the invasion; they also endorse the antiliberal and anti-Western ideology that has come with it. “They couldn’t feel deceived or misinformed by the Kremlin’s propaganda, because they were themselves a part—and a willing part—of the deception,” Soldatov and Borogan write.
At the end of Our Dear Friends in Moscow, the authors observe that their friends and the many millions of Russians like them seem to live as if they were passive observers of “storms and hurricanes one could only accept, but never challenge.” As with previous generations of Russians under autocratic rule, from tsarism to Soviet communism, there was no purpose in worrying about the causes of the storm. The only real choice was “whether to stay outside the regime—doomed to be a loser, a victim of inevitable repression” or to “stay inside and play a role.” As for their former circle, “all of them, ever ambitious, chose to stay in and play.”
FROM ABOVE AND BELOW
For Laruelle, the story of Soldatov and Borogan’s friends can be seen as an expression of the larger forces that have shaped the Putin era. “The regime’s relationship with Russian society is much more than simply authoritarian,” she writes. “It is cocreational, based on an implicit social contract” that must be “continuously renegotiated.” One thing, however, has remained constant: Putin’s belief in his mission to restore Russia’s status as a great power. Laruelle identifies this understanding as “a stable element of his geopolitical grammar.” What has changed are the means he has sought to achieve that project, namely the ideas that he and the state apparatus have propagated to justify and explain what the regime deems necessary or expedient.
Over time, the Putin state has borrowed from a number of doctrines that on the surface might seem contradictory: among others, Russian Orthodoxy, tsarism, the Soviet Union’s superpower legacy, populism, and Eurasianism—an early-twentieth-century dogma that sees Russia as neither European nor Asian but following a unique civilizational path. Since the 2022 invasion, these have been augmented by the militarism of the so-called Z bloggers and war correspondents. In drawing on these diverse strains of thought, Laruelle writes, the Putin system is driven by expediency and opportunism. Rather than basing its vision of Russia on a fixed set of political ideas, she writes, the regime has its own worldview and preferences and inclinations, and then seeks “intellectual soil and better articulated doctrine to justify and nurture itself.”
Within that overall dynamic, ideas can move from below as well as from above. Laruelle highlights the case of Ivan Ilyin, the early-twentieth-century reactionary philosopher who gave a moral, even metaphysical, veneer to autocracy and whom Putin took to quoting during his first decade in power. “The spreading of Ilyin’s works by his supporters is undoubtedly oriented ‘upward’ to the inner circle of elites around Putin, with very little time and energy spent trying to promote it ‘downward’ to a broader audience,” Laruelle writes. Although Putin is the ultimate arbiter and authority, he allows “entrepreneurs of influence,” as Laruelle calls them, to pitch their own ideas or pursue projects they think are in keeping with the Putin state. Take Konstantin Malofeev, known as the “Orthodox oligarch,” a self-proclaimed monarchist who has funded the creation of a conservative media empire, for example, or the far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin, who is less “Putin’s brain,” as he’s often mislabeled, than an opportunist whose ravings about Russia’s unique Eurasian historic mission are episodically useful to the Kremlin.
Laruelle describes how, following Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, the state’s ideological underpinnings became more formalized. Western-style modernization was pushed aside in favor of a revanchist doctrine that emphasized “Russia’s anti-Western and antiliberal stance, the country’s greatness, and the eternal infallibility of Russian/Soviet state leaders.” Laruelle masterfully explains how, over time, the geopolitical grievances of Putin and his security and military elite—whether over “color revolutions” in the former Soviet republics or the integration of eastern Europe into Western political and military structures—were sublimated into a new vision of the Russian state. As Laruelle writes, the Kremlin increasingly saw the Western-led liberal order as a “cover for U.S. imperialism and military hegemony” that sought to undermine Russia. These assumptions pushed Putin to become what Laruelle calls “an architect of destabilization and chaos.”
Putin watching a military parade in Moscow, May 2024
Dmitry Astakhov / Kremlin / Sputnik / Reuters
With time, as Putin and the political system he built aged, Russia’s outlook grew more rigid but also more prone to conspiracy and a sense of messianic fate. According to the Kremlin, it was the West that had betrayed its values, leaving Russia as the sole true, honest, and virtuous power left on the world stage. Laruelle calls this notion “Katechon” Russia—a concept drawn from Orthodox theology and repurposed by contemporary right-wing ideologues such as Dugin, according to which the country has a sacred purpose to project sovereign power and military force to serve as the “protector and restorer of order.” In such a worldview, military aggression may seem necessary or even virtuous, whether in Russia’s annexation of Crimea or its 2015 air war to prop up the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. As Laruelle notes, Russia began to combine “Orthodoxy as a spiritual shield and nuclear weapons as a material shield,” a combination that pushed Putin toward full-scale war in Ukraine and helped him build a powerful case for why it was necessary and legitimate.
The war in Ukraine, Laruelle writes, has consolidated the ideology of the Putin state. In addition to “reactivating” Russian imperialism, it has organized the disparate political ideas underpinning that state system into a struggle and a cause that are legible, even existential. Three motivations have seemingly become one, much to the Kremlin’s convenience: Russia’s success on the battlefield, or at least avoidance of outright defeat or humiliation; the safety and security of Russia’s citizens, who, regardless of their feelings on the conflict’s genesis, are fearful of losing the war; and the security of Putin’s power. Laruelle lays out the components of Russia’s new concept of empire: “state projection abroad, nation-building language, regime securitization, and Putin’s self-vision of a ruler whose historical role will not be questioned by the future leadership.”
Meanwhile, Russia has had some luck, both at home and in the global South, selling its war in Ukraine as precisely the opposite: a “liberation war” whose aim is actually decolonization. Countries such as Brazil, India, and South Africa can at once be repulsed by Russia’s actions, and as Laruelle notes, regard them as a “byproduct” of “Western domination.” The propagation of this framing by the Kremlin is certainly cynical and calculated, but it also expresses elements of a genuine worldview. “If Russia’s quest for status cannot be achieved through integration with the West on its own terms,” she writes, then “joining the non-Western world to transform the international order looks like the most promising strategy.”
Even as the war has led to a consolidated state with a clear ideological expression, that does not mean Putin or his ruling system is all powerful. Laruelle describes Putin’s rule as “consolidated personalistic authoritarianism”—a form of autocratic governance that is distinct from outright totalitarianism. On the whole, she writes, the Kremlin “does not believe that it can recalibrate the brains of its citizens.” Instead, it seeks simply to push aside “rival ideologies” and provide enormous loyalty incentives. Laruelle detects the beginnings of what she calls “fragmentary fascism”—the call among some Russians for total war and full militarization of the country. But even more Russians, she writes, do not want to be “dragged into the war” and want to keep the fighting separate from the civilian economy and the cultural sphere.
For now, that’s an advantage of the Putin system: it needs acquiescence, not ardor. As the war goes on, however, the Kremlin will need ever more people who are willing to fight—and even to sacrifice their bodies and lives—as is the case with the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 men who take huge signing bonuses to join the Russian army every month. So far, these people are mostly from poorer areas and the provinces who can be induced by material rewards. As Laruelle concludes, whether or not the authorities can continue “shielding the rest of society—especially the upper and middle classes from big cities—from the impact . . . will be critical to the long-term success or failure of state ideology.”
PRISONERS OF THEIR OWN DEVICE
Eventually, Russia’s war will end. But Laruelle is rightly pessimistic as to whether that could lead the country toward a second perestroika, a renewed flourishing of liberal thought. Across society, including among the elite, the romantic political ideal of the West as a model is gone and cannot be easily resurrected. War supporters clearly view the Western order—its military and geopolitical power and its embodiment of liberal values—with hostility; but even quiet war skeptics or outright opponents feel embittered and let down by the United States and its European allies, which look, from Russia’s vantage point, feckless and hypocritical. First, they failed to stop the war and its resulting suffering. Then they tried to punish and isolate the Russian government with sanctions and travel bans, leaving ordinary citizens, including those against the war, as collateral damage. Tellingly, in 2024, European countries spent more importing Russian energy than they provided in financial assistance to Ukraine. Russians may not like Putin or his war, but for many of them, his argument can feel convincing: the West is inherently anti-Russian and thus out to get you.
Soldatov and Borogan note the seeming paradox in their friends’ attitudes toward Europe and the United States. Despite their own affinities, these Russians now insist that they hate Western values. Soldatov and Borogan wonder if their friends’ closeness to the West, psychic if not temporal, was the very thing that made them “so emotional and angry” when they came to see that Russia had not been accepted into the liberal order on its own terms. Whatever the case, Soldatov and Borogan write, “they helped Putin isolate the country.” Ideology, after all, works both upward and downward.
In This Review
Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation
By Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov
Buy the Book
Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime
By Marlene Laruelle
Buy the Book
Topics & Regions: Russia Ukraine Politics & Society Ideology Public Opinion Security Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy War in Ukraine Vladimir Putin
JOSHUA YAFFA is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the inaugural Writer in Residence at Bard College Berlin. He is the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia.
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