I was 19 when Vladimir Putin became president of Russia and restored the Soviet national anthem. I was 24 when he called the fall of the U.S.S.R. the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Now I’m 44, and I know he will continue the war against Ukraine. He does not want any peace deal—not because he hopes to re-create the Soviet Union, but because war and propaganda are the tools that keep him in power.
I knew countless people crushed and hollowed out by the fall of the Soviet Union. They were impoverished; their world had imploded. My uncle, a People’s Artist of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic and soloist of the Ashgabat Opera, was forced to abandon all his possessions and flee with his family—just to survive. The former first secretary of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan had turned into a mad dictator, banned opera, and repressed all the artists. Until the end of his life, my uncle made ends meet by singing in a church choir in a small town in central Russia. It wasn’t just the material foundations of many people’s lives that were destroyed—everything they believed in, had been raised on, and lived for was annihilated.
In recent years, in my work as a journalist, I’ve consistently interviewed all kinds of people whose conscious lives and careers had peaked during the Soviet era. Many of them appeared to me as miserable, old people whose lives had lost their meaning—shattered by the disintegration of the empire they had devoted themselves to. And then, before my eyes, they started to change. It was as if they grew younger and spread their wings, their eyes filled with joy. Russia’s occupation of Crimea, Putin’s new foreign policy—this gave them confidence and hope that their struggles hadn’t been in vain.
For example, in 2011, Oleg Baklanov, the former curator of the Soviet military-industrial complex and a member of the GKChP (the State Committee on the State of Emergency, a group of hard-line Soviet officials), wept in front of me as he remembered the lost chance of 1991, when the Soviet Union fell after the failure of the GKChP’s coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and the breakup of the Communist system. But by 2018, he was happy and proud. By then, his strongest feeling had become hatred toward America. “An American sticks a finger up his ass and thinks he’s winding up a gramophone,” he said, laughing heartily as he commented on U.S. foreign policy.
During the last 10 years, the history of the Soviet collapse itself, or at least how it’s told in Russia, has been transformed: winners and losers have swapped places. From today’s perspective, it seems the victors weren’t the democrats after all. Gorbachev—the last president of the Soviet Union, who presided over the reforms that ultimately led to its dissolution—didn’t manage to prevent a bloody civil war, and the Soviet conservatives now appear to be the true winners.
Putin had no intention of restoring the Soviet Union. He had no need for the old Soviet ideology—no interest in the democratic values of justice, freedom, or equality. Instead, he merged elements of American-style capitalism with Russian nationalism. As for the nature of this hybrid system, it differs fundamentally from the U.S. model in its political function: in Russia, capitalism has been reshaped to serve the state, reward loyalty, and reinforce authoritarian power. The ideologists of the Prague Spring of 1968 dreamed of “socialism with a human face,” but Putin found a different formula: “Capitalism without a human face.” No human rights, no democracy—just cynicism and brutality.
Among the losers of the Putin era are not only his dissidents but also those pragmatic young reformers who had rallied around Boris Yeltsin—the first elected president of the newly formed Russian Federation, in the 1990s—hoping to reshape the country.
In 2021, I found myself at a celebration organized by Gennady Burbulis, Yeltsin’s first secretary of state and effectively his number two during the early reform years, to mark the 30th anniversary of Yeltsin’s election as president. Almost all surviving members of Yeltsin’s first reformist government were present. The gathering felt more like a clandestine meeting of aging members of a banned organization than a reunion of the nation’s founding fathers. Burbulis gave a speech, and the crowd listened to recordings of 60s-era dissident ballads, drank vodka, and ate cake before dispersing with quiet sorrow.
Also on the losing side is Russia’s younger generation—those who grew up believing in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Many can’t reconcile themselves with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and were forced to leave Russia. Their peers—a generation of Ukrainians raised with the same values—were forced to fight and die for their country.
The people now in power in Russia are the last Soviet generation—those who absorbed Soviet culture but not Soviet faith. They admired the Cold War, viewed dissidents as traitors, and took pleasure in grandiose talk of their own greatness. Yet, at the same time, they always craved American jeans, cigarettes, and alcohol.
The psychological traumas they suffered during the collapse of the U.S.S.R. continue to shape Russia’s future. They carry their cynical disbelief in democracy and human rights like a banner. They boldly call tyranny “freedom” and election fraud “voting.” They are convinced that democracy is obsolete. They speak of “conservatism,” “traditional values,” and “greatness.”
The Soviet Union fell when belief in Communism ran dry. The state no longer had the money or strength to continue spreading its ideology—either in the minds of its own children or across the world. Has the same thing begun to happen to liberal democracy? Has a new ideology emerged in its place, this time originating from Russia—cynicism?
Thirty years ago, many Russians lost faith in everything and concluded that the simplest solution was not to believe in anything. If nothing matters, everything is allowed, and nothing is truly frightening. Russian cynics love to suggest that the U.S. is destined to meet the same fate as the Soviet Union because even many Americans—especially their leaders today—seem more drawn to pragmatic cynicism than to liberal democracy.
Mikhail Zygar is a Russian-born journalist, writer, filmmaker, and the founding editor of the Russian news channel TV Rain
