Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny is fond of a phrase, “the wonderful Russia of the future,” his shorthand for a country without President Vladimir Putin.
But in the year that has passed since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has gone back to a dark, repressive past.
Over the last 12 months, Putin’s government has crushed the remnants of Russia’s civil society and presided over his country’s first military mobilization since World War II. Political opponents such as Navalny are in prison or out of the country. And Putin has made it clear that he seeks to reassert Russia as an empire in which Ukraine has no place as an independent state.
The war in Ukraine drew a bright line under the period of High Putinism, a decade that began with Putin’s controversial return to the presidency in 2012. That era, in hindsight, was a prelude to the current war: Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and backed armed separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region, while Putin’s technocrats worked on sanction-proofing the Russian economy.
Since last February’s invasion, Putin has shrugged off protests and international sanctions. Independent media and human rights groups have been branded as foreign agents or shut down entirely.
Russia is now in an uncertain new phase, and it’s clear there will be no rewind, no return to the status quo ante, for ordinary citizens.
So is Putin’s grip on power unchallenged? Rumors are now flying inside the country about another wave of mobilization. And in Moscow, signs of elite competition are beginning to emerge, even as some Russians are seeing through the cracks in the wall of state propaganda.
The distorted lens of history
On February 2, Putin paid a visit to the southern Russian city of Volgograd to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory at what was then called Stalingrad, a crucial turning point in what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War.
In his speech at a gala concert in Volgograd, Putin made a direct link between the Battle of Stalingrad – the moment when the momentum shifted on the Eastern Front against Nazi Germany – and the war in Ukraine, warning that Russia faced a similar threat from a “collective West” bent on its destruction.
“Those who draw the European countries, including Germany, into a new war with Russia – and all the more irresponsibly declare this as a fait accompli – those who expect to win a victory over Russia on the battlefield, apparently do not understand that a modern war with Russia will be completely different for them,” he warned.
Invoking Stalingrad was a response to Germany’s decision to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, something Putin complained was “unbelievable, but true.” But the President’s visit to Volgograd had an element of what well-known Russian political scientist Kirill Rogov described as the “cosplay” – costume play – that Russia’s ruling class uses to drape their policies in the garments of a heroic past.
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