On its face, the reëlection of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s President seems a superfluous oddity, a ritual devoid of substance. Putin has ruled the country for nearly a quarter century, just a few years shy of Stalin’s epoch-spanning grip on the Soviet Union. No genuine opposition candidates have been allowed on the Presidential ballot in two decades. Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, Putin’s authoritarian drift has accelerated into something resembling a full-blown military dictatorship. This February, the one credible outsider politician with a genuine, nationwide following, Alexei Navalny, died in a prison in the Russian Arctic.
Still, the latest election, which concludes on Sunday, provides an occasion to assess the state of Putin’s rule and how it has weathered two years of war. For much of its existence, the Putin system depended upon a disengaged citizenry. People stayed out of politics, and, unless you were one of the few people foolish enough to challenge the state directly, politics stayed out of your life. The war, in theory, could have been a pretext to galvanize Russian society. According to Western estimates, around three hundred and fifty thousand Russian troops have been killed or wounded in Ukraine. In September, 2022, Putin launched what he called “partial mobilization”—a military draft that, so far, has called up some three hundred thousand Russian men. Meanwhile, a series of repressive laws criminalized not only publicly criticizing the war but speaking truthfully about the invasion. Sanctions left the Russian economy isolated. In the wake of the invasion, the ruble crashed, inflation spiked, and real wages fell.
Yet, two years into the war, Russia’s position in Ukraine looks as advantageous as it’s ever been, and Putin’s hold on power feels, at least for the moment, entirely assured. A member of the country’s political élite told me that, during the Ukrainian Army’s counter-offensive last year, Putin was worried. “He couldn’t be sure that the front wouldn’t collapse like it did in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions,” the person said, referring to Ukraine’s retaking of its territory in the summer and early fall of 2022. But, in 2023, the Russian lines largely held, and Putin came to the conclusion that, given wobbly Western support, Ukraine was unlikely to achieve more on the battlefield in the near future. “He’s in a great mood,” the member of the élite said of Putin. “He’s waiting for the moment when the West says, ‘That’s enough, let’s stop this war,’ but he believes there’s no rush. Every month, the situation will get worse for Ukraine.”
In Russia, the shock of the invasion has long passed. Konstantin Remchukov, a newspaper publisher close to the Kremlin, told me that “there’s no more wavering” among the country’s ruling class: “Everyone understood it’s better to do as you’re told.” After the West sanctioned scores of prominent businessmen and severed economic ties with Russian companies, the country’s business élite saw their overseas prospects shrink, or disappear entirely. In Russia, however, the war effort created new money-making opportunities: assets as diverse as auto plants, formerly owned by Toyota and Renault, and Starbucks and IKEA franchises have been either seized outright or forcibly sold at steep discounts and parcelled out to loyal insiders. “Putin was clever,” one influential Russian businessman told me. “His message was, ‘See, they don’t accept you, but you’re welcome here.’ ” The businessman went on, “Many in my circle tell themselves, ‘If we’re going to be outcasts, better to be victorious outcasts than losers.’ ”
The response to the war among the Russian élite may not be all that remarkable—“This is not a very reflective class of people,” Remchukov said—but the evolution of the wider public’s attitude has been more complicated and surprising. A research project run by a group called the Public Sociology Laboratory has tracked public sentiment since the start of the war. One report asked respondents—educated, professional Russians from big cities—if they were troubled by the invasion. “I believed that we were making a terrible mistake, that we were evil,” a Russian I.T. specialist said, describing her emotions in the days after the war began. But, speaking eight months later, she said, “I see it as something inevitable, and very painful, a very difficult decision, but inevitable.” She justified Russia’s invasion as just the latest in a long line of human conflicts: “It turns out that there is always war, it always exists somewhere on the planet.”
A female business owner initially said that she tried to avoid news from Ukraine. “If I had the opportunity to somehow influence the situation, if something depended on me, of course I would do everything to stop it,” she said. “But tying yourself in knots, watching everything, discussing it with everyone—I don’t want to do that either. What’s the point? My duty is very simple—take care of myself, my family, and my close circle.” Half a year later, her views had hardened. “I get the feeling that my country is being unfairly bullied,” she said. “Now I am even more patriotic than ever.”
Russia’s G.D.P. grew more than the global average last year, even as an outsized portion of its economic activity was directed toward the war: in 2024, it is estimated that the state will spend more than eight per cent of its G.D.P. on the military and on national security, more than double the percentage of G.D.P. that the U.S. had allocated to defense during the Iraq War. At the same time, a bonanza of state spending has created a large-scale redistribution of resources which has strengthened Putin’s base of support among the poorer and more peripheral sectors of society. These groups have benefitted from populist measures, such as increased subsidies and other payments to families, and the expansion of wartime industry. In its dependence on state largesse, this rising middle class is distinct from the one that appeared during the past decade, which tended to be more educated, more urban, more likely to work in the private sector, and, it turned out, more mobile—its members were overrepresented among the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left the country after the invasion. (Putin may have had such a process in mind when, in March of 2022, he spoke of a “self-cleansing” of Russian society.)
For an upcoming paper, Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser to Russia’s Central Bank, calculated that, since the start of the war, the average monthly salary for a welder in a manufacturing plant has risen from twenty-five thousand rubles—around two hundred and seventy U.S. dollars—to a hundred thousand rubles today. Those working similar jobs in Russian-occupied Ukraine can earn three hundred thousand rubles a month. “These people have never seen such money in their lives,” Prokopenko told me. She added that the Kremlin can only afford to maintain such an economic policy for another year or so, at which point it will face some hard choices: will the state bring down wages for those in the military and the security services, or will it reduce shifts at factories that are working overtime to produce arms and equipment for the war? “That’s impossible to imagine politically,” Prokopenko told me. “But, in the long term, economic imbalances will only grow, as will the prospect of a real crisis.”
But for now, as Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent polling agency, told me, survey data suggest that Russians have a more positive outlook for their country than in any previous period of Putin’s Presidency. The share of Russians who report being able to make discretionary purchases, such as televisions and household appliances, is growing. The portion of respondents who think Russia’s economic prospects will continue to improve in the next five years has risen by some thirty-five percentage points since 2022. Even the number of those who said that the distribution of wealth has become more equitable rose by a record percentage. “If you look at the data,” Volkov said, “you’re left with the feeling that people believe they’ve never lived so well.”
The darker aspects of the war, including the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers, are largely kept private, dealt with individually, out of the public sphere. The Kremlin has promised to send payments of five million rubles, around fifty-five thousand U.S. dollars, to the families of those killed in action—a significant sum, especially in the poorer regions from which most of Russia’s recruits are drawn. In a stage-managed meeting with mothers of Russian soldiers, Putin revealed his own attitude toward the country’s war dead. “Some people die of vodka, and their lives go unnoticed,” he told a woman whose son was killed in Luhansk. “But your son really lived and achieved his goal. He didn’t die in vain.”
Putin, for his part, sees himself not as an autocrat holding the country hostage but as a steward of Russia’s historical destiny. After decades in power, Putin’s logic functions as a tautology, a closed loop in which he never has to question or doubt the virtue of his political choices. As he sees it, he acts in the nation’s interests and therefore has the nation’s support; he has the right to rule however he wants because, in fact, he is serving and protecting the state. “Of course, that’s a very convenient position for Putin,” Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Putin who is now a Putin critic, told me. “Seeing as that, by this point, he is the state.”
Still, in the past few months, Russia has seen two mass-scale, unscripted political events and, tellingly, neither was in support of Putin or the war. The first came in January, when lines of people spontaneously appeared across the country to provide their signatures in support of the candidacy of Boris Nadezhdin, a milquetoast, unthreatening, and unknown liberal politician. Nadezhdin made ending the “special military operation” the centerpiece of his campaign and called for freeing political prisoners. The Kremlin ultimately refused to put him on the Presidential ballot—a sign that it was rattled by images of people standing in the freezing cold to register their support for an alternative to Putin. According to reporting by Meduza, a Russian news outlet based abroad, internal Kremlin metrics forecast that Nadezhdin would have won as much as ten per cent of the vote. That would have clashed with Putin’s rhetoric of a unified country. A source close to the Kremlin told Meduza that such an outcome would “suddenly give the impression that a sizable share of the population is eager for the special military operation to end.”
The second event was Navalny’s funeral. Navalny was not necessarily popular in an electoral sense. His approval rating in Russia peaked at twenty per cent, in 2021, shortly after he was poisoned by Kremlin agents. But he had a powerful resonance in Russian society. With his plainspoken criticism of official corruption, his sense of humor, and his remarkable lack of fear, he became an avatar for an alternative, more optimistic future. He built a nationwide network of field offices and consistently drew thousands to protests across the country. “Autocracies like Russia’s don’t like the idea of progress,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist based in Berlin, told me. “They are intently focussed on the past, maintain a cult of history, and use these ideas to try and keep the present forever.” Navalny represented the opposite, which made his existence unbearable to the state. “His entire stance centered on how tomorrow can be different from today if only we all follow some consistent action,” Schulmann said.
On March 1st, crowds lined a street in Moscow as the hearse carrying Navalny’s body drove past. Thousands more flocked to Borisovsky Cemetery, where they covered Navalny’s grave in a bulging mound of flowers. People chanted “Russia without Putin,” “No to war,” and even “Ukrainians are good people”—a remarkable display of civic courage given that, during the past two years, police have arrested people holding posters with asterisks in place of the words “No war,” and even those with blank posters with no words at all. Analysis of the Moscow metro system by Mediazona, an independent news site, showed a surge of twenty-seven thousand passengers to the station nearest to the cemetery. I spoke to a friend who had attended. “We hadn’t been among so many people who think like us in years,” the friend said. “The occasion was terrible, but the mood felt energized.”
The Russian investigative site Proekt, which the Russian state has labelled “undesirable,” recently tallied the number of people who have faced criminal prosecution in politically motivated cases in the course of Putin’s current six-year Presidential term. It was more than ten thousand, surpassing the comparable figures under the Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. “In addition to the widely discussed repression of oppositionists and anti-war activists, Russia has a system of social pressure where citizens are severely punished for the most insignificant misdemeanors,” the Proekt report said. Still, the current repressions are tough enough for everyone to get the message, but not so tough that they infringe on the public’s sense of normalcy. Aleksei Miniailo, an activist and co-founder of a sociological research project called Chronicles, who has chosen to remain in Moscow, told me, “If these were really Stalinist times, I would have been shot a year ago.” He went on, “This regime relies on one per cent repressions, ninety-nine per cent propaganda.”
One should not confuse the absence of dissent with heartfelt support. The Kremlin cannot fill stadiums with rabid, committed supporters. (It can bus them in or otherwise twist the arms of state employees, but genuine passion is exceedingly hard to muster.) Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, referenced Putin’s annual state-of-the-nation address from late February, during which he spoke of people who “send letters and parcels, warm clothes, and camouflage nets to the front; they donate money from their savings.” Putin, she said, needs to see the war not as something he alone launched—as is the case—but as an endeavor supported and demanded by the people. Stanovaya quoted the Soviet battle hymn, “Sacred War,” known for its opening line: “Arise great country!” But now, Stanovaya said, “The country doesn’t feel like rising.”
Last fall, in a moment of rare candor, Valery Fedorov, the head of a state-run polling agency, admitted that the so-called party of war—hawks who advocate for victory at any price—represents only ten to fifteen per cent of society. “The majority of Russians do not demand to take Kyiv or Odesa,” he said. “They don’t enjoy the fighting. If it were up to them, they would not have started a military operation, but since the situation has already developed this way, then we must win.” This is not quite opposition to the war, but it’s certainly something far less than enthusiasm for it.
Putin has largely accepted this reality. His government has set out to rewrite school history textbooks to portray Russia as perpetually defending itself against outside enemies and to link the war in Ukraine to the Soviet Union’s victory in the Second World War. Now Russian troops are fighting for “goodness and truth” just like their grandfathers. But, on the whole, as Volkov, of the Levada Center, put it, “The state lets people live as they want.” Putin has attempted to calm fears of another mass-mobilization order. “There is no such need,” he said last summer. If people are so moved, as he noted, to sew camouflage nets for the soldiers at the front, the state will celebrate their efforts. But if people want to busy themselves with children’s playgroups and Moscow restaurants—Remchukov, the newspaper publisher, spoke of new supply chains that provide exquisite crab legs and sea urchins from Murmansk, on the Barents Sea—that’s fine, too.
There is no great strategy or vision; unlike the ideology of the Soviet period, Putinism offers no sweeping values against which particular actions or policies can be measured. This fact, along with Putin’s disinterest in the nitty-gritty of governance, means there is ever more room for improvisation and freelancing at all levels of the state apparatus. Many high-profile arrests and criminal cases are launched without Putin’s direct awareness—the F.S.B. long ago received carte blanche to act as it pleases. Last fall, Putin ended up in a mildly awkward position when regional governments moved to restrict abortion rights and Putin, aware of the general discomfort in society with such restrictions, stepped in to block them.
But, when the system faces a real crisis, the state’s institutions and would-be protectors go silent. Such was the case, for example, last June, during the short-lived mutiny led by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries. Many officials in regional government and the security services froze and watched as Prigozhin and his men sped toward Moscow. A similar dynamic played out last October, when an antisemitic mob ran wild through an airport in Dagestan, and it took hours to chase them off the tarmac. In such situations, no one wants to claim responsibility or rush to the regime’s defense. “How can you claim to have total control,” the member of the élite said, “and yet look so powerless.”
To the extent that wartime Putinism has an identifiable doctrine, it’s that Russia is engaged in a protracted struggle with the West. In Putin’s address in February, he said, “The so-called West, with its colonial practices and penchant for inciting ethnic conflicts around the world, not only seeks to impede our progress but also envisions a Russia that is a dependent, declining, and dying space where they can do as they please.” Remchukov told me, “He’s made up his mind. If earlier on in the conflict there were different scenarios and time lines for how things might be resolved, now we see a qualitative change: he’s decided the confrontation between Russia and the West is here for a while—several decades at least.” Now, Remchukov went on, the state has to explain to the public the ways in which Russia is not the West, thus the emphasis on traditional values and Putin’s increasing interest in culture-war topics such as gay marriage and trans rights.
Schulmann, the political scientist, told me, “We see a picture of the world in which the West hates Russia and always attacks it because their values are incompatible.” She went on, “And those values are innate and unchanging. The West will never stop attacking. Russia will never be defeated. Confrontation is eternal.” Conveniently for Putin, unlike a “special military operation,” this kind of struggle has no end. It continues forever, meaning his rule must, too.
Putin will surely be inaugurated for a fifth term in the spring. But is he popular? And does it even matter? Recent Levada Center polling shows his approval rating is above eighty per cent. But Miniailo, of the Chronicles project, cautioned against taking such figures too seriously. “It makes little sense to try to understand what people want solely by asking which candidate they will vote for,” he said. “Politics simply doesn’t exist in Russia, so this question has little relevance.”
Miniailo relayed the results of a recent survey that his group conducted which showed a growing disparity between which policies people would like to see (more spending on social programs) and which policies they expect Putin to enact (more spending on the military). The same was true for the question of reaching a truce with Ukraine, for example, or restoring relations with the West; some twenty per cent more respondents favor these policies for Russia’s future than expect Putin to carry them out. For now, these data suggest only a latent, passive dissatisfaction that may or may not turn into something larger.
The continued stability of Putin’s rule rests not on his popularity but, rather, on the lack of mechanisms people have to act on their malaise, discontent, and frustrations. In the past two decades, the Kremlin has dismantled those instruments: there is no longer a muckraking independent media to hold the state accountable; there are no credible opposition parties to channel dissatisfaction into real politics; and there is no judicial system capable of acting as a check on power. And, so, if feelings of resistance have no credible outlet, then the feelings themselves are repressed. “I always hear at my talks in the West: if people aren’t happy, then there should be crowds in the streets,” Greg Yudin, a Russian political philosopher at Princeton, told me. “But what are these crowds going to do?”
Yudin mentioned Navalny’s funeral and the crowds that keep coming, day after day, to lay flowers. “Of course, in a country of a hundred and forty million there are plenty of brave people,” he said. “But that was never the problem. The more relevant point is that it’s entirely unclear what to do with this bravery, where to direct it, and for what end.” People are neither foolish nor suicidal, he noted; moreover, this is not an exclusively Russian condition.
The future of the Putin system, then, in large measure depends on the appearance—or continued absence—of instruments or avenues to challenge it in any meaningful way. “It’s not that you change your attitude and then take action,” Yudin said. “If you see an opportunity for action, then you might rethink your attitude.” Yudin and I discussed the idea, widely accepted by most Russian sociologists and political scientists, that the Russian public would react with relief, even joy, if Putin declared tomorrow that he was ending the war. (The member of the élite noted that Putin could do so rather easily: “He will say we gained four new territories, secured a land bridge to Crimea, and defeated NATO. It’s easy to sell.”) But if Putin were to appear on television to announce, say, that the West left him no choice but to launch nuclear warheads aimed at Washington, London, and Berlin, “People would also take this in stride,” Yudin said. A CNN report revealed that, in the summer of 2022, the Biden Administration was “preparing rigorously” for a Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine.
Since then, the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine has greatly improved for Russia. Putin now believes that Ukraine’s leaders—or, really, its Western backers—should have come to their senses and effectively capitulated long ago. But that’s not happening, and likely won’t, regardless of the exact composition of future aid packages from the U.S. and Europe. “Putin believes that Russia outplayed the West in Ukraine,” Stanovaya said. “And now there should be a threshold after which they begin to act sensibly.” Instead, as Putin sees it, Western capitals are choosing escalation. “This is an escalation he doesn’t want but one he feels he has to respond to,” Stanovaya said. For an autocratic regime such as Putin’s, the President’s strength depends on everyone’s belief in that strength. In the absence of strong public opinion, elections—even those of a thoroughly undemocratic nature—provide an image of cohesion and unquestioned power. “He needs a certification of this world view,” Stanovaya told me. “Proof he can hold up and say, yet again, ‘The country is behind me.’ ” ♦
