If you were exclusively on a mainstream Western media diet in recent weeks, you’d be excused for thinking that the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime now lies on its deathbed. Signs of “public discontent” are all over the place, you see. Silicon-lipped beauty blogger Viktoria Bonya attacked the government on YouTube. So did the notorious Kremlin propagandist Ilya Remeslo, fresh from a stint at a psychiatric ward. Meanwhile, the former defense minister Sergey Shoygu might be plotting a coup, according to CNN.
But if you talk to people inside Russia, as this author does on a daily basis, you’ll find them perplexed and doubting the West’s sanity upon hearing about this fresh bout of “Russia is finished” sentiments.
Pretty much all of my interlocutors are strongly anti-Putin and antiwar. In my intelligentsia circle, you need to walk miles to find anyone pro. People do complain about the ongoing economic slowdown, pointing to the closure of some of their favorite small businesses, like boutique fashion brands that had only recently emerged. They are aghast at the Russian government’s (so-far unsuccessful) attacks on popular messaging services and perturbed by mobile internet interruptions in the center of Moscow caused by the Ukrainian drone threat.
But unlike Ukrainians, who live in constant fear of Russian strikes and of press gangs roaming the streets in search of fresh recruits, people in Russia are still enjoying much the same kind of lives as before the war, with living standards comparable to poorer EU member countries (check IMF’s GDP PPP charts).
More than anything, Russians of all political convictions are flabbergasted by the onslaught of irrationally xenophobic and jingoistic pro-Ukrainian propaganda they subject themselves to whenever they turn on their VPNs and check feeds on X and Facebook. What Western government-backed online mobs like NAFO mostly achieve is confirming the Kremlin’s narratives about the West’s inherent hatred of Russia and intent to wipe it off the face of Earth.
Clearly, those Western politicians and opinion makers—like former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson—who believed that a proxy war against Russia (in Johnson’s own terminology) would upend Putin’s regime were badly wrong and succeeded only in pushing Ukraine under a Russian bulldozer.
So, what would it really take to change Russia for the better?
As an 18-year-old student in 1991, I took part in overthrowing a political regime in Russia. I joined the defense of the White House—the one in Moscow, not Washington, and the seat of Boris Yeltsin’s government at the time—against the coup by hardline Soviet civilian and military leaders.
Our victory resulted in the collapse of the communist system and subsequently of the USSR. The events were driven by public euphoria, particularly on the issue of independence movements in Soviet republics. To give an idea, one of the largest Moscow rallies of 1991—and arguably in the history of Russia—was in support of Baltic independence. As for Ukraine and Belarus, they appeared to us too stubbornly Soviet for refusing to go along with shock therapy reforms which Yeltsin’s government embarked on first thing after dissolving the USSR.
The mass uprisings and burst of optimism became possible for one reason: While Soviet people of 1991 had many realistic fears, including economic collapse, military dictatorship, and Yugoslav-styled civil war, the last thing they feared was the West. Opposite from terrifying, the West was a beacon of hope, if not a freshly adopted political religion.
This effect wasn’t achieved by the U.S. funding Osama bin Laden when he helped Afghan Mujahideen fight the Soviets, nor by the Iran-Contra affair, nor by propping up Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile or fighting Vietcong.
Rather, it was attained through soft power—music, films, quality goods, enviable lifestyles, and an effort by a myriad of Americans and Europeans, often on the left-wing and antiwar side of the aisle—to build bridges and friendships with us, Soviet people. What we saw through our rose-tinted glasses at the time was the West of “We Are the World,” of U2’s album The Joshua Tree, and of transcontinental U.S.-Soviet “TV bridges” hosted by Phil Donahue and Vladimir Pozner.
When the Soviet system collapsed, we definitely didn’t feel defeated, no matter what America’s Cold War hawks said at the time. Instead, there was a sense of victory, achieved jointly with the West.
That sentiment changed radically by the end of the 1990s when economic hardships and domestic security threats sobered people up, while the West had firmly adopted a policy of radical eastward expansion explicitly aimed at isolating and containing, rather than integrating, Russia (read Mary Sarote’s Not One Inch for details).
In 1999, NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslavia prompted Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov to write an op-ed which opened with the latest polling data: 64 percent of Russians now feared NATO and 70 percent believed the attack on Belgrade posed a direct security risk to Russia. Luzhkov, then seen as a presidential hopeful, pointed out that NATO’s expansion and its rising appetite for war were encouraging “sieged fortress” sentiments in Russian society that could lead to self-isolation. He called for social mobilization to overcome the deep economic crisis that dogged Russia throughout that decade and “to revive a strong Russia.”
Although his views at the time were moderately pro-Western, Luzhkov was pictured by Western and Russian media alike as a Communist revanche figure. He was eventually forced out of the race in favor of a little-known intelligence officer chosen as a successor by Boris Yeltsin’s family and preferred by the West—Vladimir Putin.
But Luzhkov’s words turned out to be prescient. The reason these warnings from him and a plethora of Western dignitaries, like U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, were ignored is a certain Western delusion best captured by a cover headline in the Atlantic from 2001, one year into Putin’s presidency: “Russia is finished.”
That arrogant sentiment informed many ill-fated decisions—Ukraine’s and Georgia’s invitation into NATO at the Bucharest summit in 2008, the endorsement of a forced removal of a democratically elected Ukrainian president at the end of Euromaidan revolution in 2014, and the aggressive crossing of Putin’s red lines in the run-up to Russia’s all-out invasion in Ukraine in 2022.
Fast forward to 2026 and Russia feels less “finished” than ever. Instead, it has evolved into a tech-savvy 21st-century autocracy with a highly modernized war economy. It has successfully adapted to a conflict in which it sees itself as an underdog confronting the mighty Western military industrial machine, which makes it not too concerned about inevitable setbacks. Most importantly, every alternative to Putin seems to pose risks of civil war and state collapse.
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To be sure, the country is going through what every Russian would admit to be a difficult period, but Putin’s Russia is showing far fewer “cracks in the regime” than the U.S.-led West, currently torn between Trump-style right-populism and Biden-style left-liberalism.
As the Atlantic’s “Russia is finished” cover turns 25 this month, there is a nagging feeling that it is the West’s own hostility and appetite for conflict which has been the main factor in the rise of Russia’s high-end, 21st-century authoritarianism. Conversely, it is a return to the era of detente and soft power which could reverse this trend and change Russia for the better. But how many Ukrainians and Russians need to die in a senseless and avoidable war to prove the obvious?
