Russia After Putin and Trump E-Book

Сергей Шелин

• Herausgeber: Freedom Letters
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 179

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

This gripping book by the prominent Russian journalist and analyst Sergey Shelin aims to explain why most Russians suddenly "understood" the need to attack Ukraine and Europe and are confident that their country is on the right path. Shelin, who was declared a "foreign agent" by the Putin regime and forced to leave Russia, argues that while most Russians now want a break from war, they are not going to apologize for the aggression and do not believe it stems from Vladimir Putin's actions. They have come to see Donald Trump as the only Western leader who understands and respects Russia and have embraced a kind of alternative West led by Trump and the European far right.

Leseprobe

№ 141

Sergey Shelin

Russia After Putin and Trump

Freedom LettersLondon2025

Preface

I wrote this book to answer the questions I have been asking myself throughout these three years of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Vladimir Putin has long wanted to conquer a neighboring country and has made no secret of it. However, most Russians were not eager to attack Ukraine. They could have stayed out of it. They could have simply stated that this war was the work of a dictator and that they themselves had nothing to do with it, and they would have had reason to do so. Instead, most of my fellow citizens almost immediately “understood” this war, began to approve of the attack, called it a defense, and showed no inclination to blame Putin for it. Why?

For decades, Russia has been westernizing all spheres of life. It seemed very successful. Then, suddenly, my compatriots started cursing the West and talking about "turning to the East." But they had no genuine interest in the real lives of China and other countries of the so-called East. Instead, they began to see Donald Trump as the only Western leader on Russia's side and fell in love with a kind of alternative West led by Trump and the European far-right. They began to view Trump as Putin's only real friend and even as an American version of him. Where do so many paradoxes come from?

Not a single Russian institution, not a single power structure, not a single officially recognized organization has ever openly stood up for its persecuted members. A person arrested for their views, declared “undesirable” or a “foreign agent,” could count on the support of friends but never on that of colleagues. I went through this experience myself and became deeply interested in trying to understand its causes.

For more than 30 years, the Russian economy has been ruled by so-called systemic liberals, who came from the intelligentsia and whom the intelligentsia considered their own. Yet, none of them have even hinted publicly that they condemn war and dictatorship. There were no demonstrative resignations. Instead, the former systemic liberals provided Putin with invaluable services — helping him overcome Western sanctions and ensuring uninterrupted funding for the war. Many of us in the non-systemic intelligentsia had expected them to act differently.

At first, all of this together seemed implausible to me. Then it demanded an explanation and, of course, an attempt to predict what Russia would be like after the war and where it would go when there is neither Putin nor Trump in the outside world.

Explaining and predicting is my job. Since 1990, I have been commenting on Russian events as a journalist and analyst. My assessments and conclusions may be subjective, but this is not always a disadvantage, especially now when the very notions of what is controversial and what is indisputable are debatable.

This book is based on articles published in English and Russian in Russia.Post [1] and The Moscow Times [2] between 2022 and 2025. I am deeply grateful to Keary Iarussi for the excellent English translations of these articles from the Russian originals. For this book, all previously published materials have been supplemented and updated. The information and figures provided, unless otherwise stated, are for early 2025. [3] I am very grateful to Greg Blake Miller for his valuable suggestions regarding the final version of this book.

I am sincerely grateful to everyone who helped me with their advice, discussions, contributions, and criticism. Most of them I cannot name because they are in Russia. With special appreciation, I thank those without whom this book would not exist — Maria Lipman, Kirill Kharatyan, and Georgy Urushadze. And, of course, my wife, Marina Koldobskaya, who illustrated this book with deep understanding.

1. Peaceful Russia: How Was It Ripe for War?

This section describes the predisposition of Russian society to war: the conspiracy and power-centered worldview of most Russians, the inherent weakness of the democratic opposition, the moral and ideological collapse of the liberal bureaucracy, and the failure by conservative opponents of the regime to break free from the rut.

At the same time,  ordinary Russians’ way of life in the pre-war years was improving in many areas. The last chapter of the section discusses the most impressive example of such improvement — the decline of drunkenness, which has historically been associated with Russia. The aggressive war reversed this, as well as other new trends in the softening of manners.

1.1. Russian Mass Ideology in the 21st Century: More Organic, More Viable and More Aggressive than the Soviet Doctrine

The main aspect of the ideological complex that prevails in Russia is not fear of the regime or belief in a dictator, but the basic values shared by both the lower and upper levels of society.

There is still no generally accepted explanation for the ease and quickness with which most Russians got used to the war against Ukraine.

After all, on the eve of this war, most loyalists did not seek it at all. It came as much of a surprise to them as it did to the majority of the opposition. The people were simply shown on TV how Putin single-handedly made the decision to invade. Even his inner circle was embarrassed and timidly whimpered before live cameras at the historic meeting of Russia’s Security Council. [4]

It would seem that it was easy and convenient for loyalists to shift responsibility onto the ruler and consider the “special military operation” as Vladimir Putin’s personal war. But nothing of the sort happened. The revolution in the minds of the loyalists took only a few weeks, and its direction was unexpected.

The sudden realization that it was meant to be this way

Almost all loyalists overcame their confusion and realized that the battle against the “Banderites,” “neo-Nazis,” and the “collective West” was exactly the existential one for which they had been preparing all their lives.

This in no way meant abandoning their usual way of life or familiar comforts. Few of the loyalists were willing to sacrifice themselves or their loved ones in this battle. Yet the perception of the invasion as something overdue and even natural spread quickly and widely. To explain this as merely the result of propaganda is to fail to see that Russians had been prepared to accept just such an interpretation of the war.

Conspiracy theories, xenophobic sentiments, and sovereignty myths became entwined in minds. This ideology and the practices accompanying it clearly prevailed over others. The war neatly fit into them.

The ideological complex prevailing in Russia should not be reduced to the fear of punishment and readiness for obedience, which are mistakenly considered to be inherent qualities of Russians. In Russia, far from every order from above is carried out, and far from every word from the boss is taken on faith.

A recent example of this is the failure of the vaccination campaign during the pandemic. The regime urged its subjects to be vaccinated and even threatened them, though not very resolutely, since the anti-vaxxers were almost all loyalists. At the peak of the campaign, in the summer of 2021, 55% of those polled by the Levada Center said they would not get vaccinated. There were also numerous acts of demonstrative disobedience.

Now, the same people are for the war. Vaccinations did not fit into their idea of what was acceptable, but the invasion of Ukraine did. Thus, loyalists did not need to reference Putin’s whims to explain the war to themselves – in their minds, the role that the leader plays is not always decisive.

The paradoxical nature of Putin's perception by loyalists was revealed in the insightful research conducted by the sociological service ExtremeScan in early 2025. He is seen by the masses not as a person or a politician, but as a symbol of state power in Russia outside the feedback loop. Therefore, although they often disagree with Putin's actions, loyalists continue to support him. There are many similar and paradoxical aspects in the perception of Trump by Russian loyalists. Trump occupies a unique place in their worldview; they see him as a Western analogue of Putin and the only foreign leader on whom the outcome of Russia's war with Ukraine truly depends. They regard Xi Jinping, China's leader and Putin's senior partner, as a much less significant figure and have little interest in him. However, only 20% of Russians trust Trump, while 74% do not.

Putin as a defender, not a teacher of the faith

At the height of the war, Russian Field asked Russians two questions seemingly thought to be clever:

1. “If Vladimir Putin announced a new attack on Kyiv tomorrow, would you support that decision?”

2. “If Vladimir Putin signed a peace deal tomorrow and stopped the military operation, would you support that decision?”

Fifty-nine percent of respondents said “yes” to the first question and 26% said “no,” while support for the second was 66% versus 24%. Most of those who said “yes” to war also said “yes” to peace.

This may seem duplicitous, but for many Russians, these two questions might have sounded like one. Namely: “Is Putin authorized to decide by himself whether to continue the war or end it?” And the majority answered that yes, he is. After all, he is the ruler. Meanwhile, recall that he is not considered the initiator of the war. Nor is he seen as the supreme ideologist of the regime.

Putin is not the author of sacred texts that are obligatory for study in Russia. He has nothing like Muammar Gaddafi’s The Green Book or the History of the All-Union Communist Party: Short Course inspired by Joseph Stalin.

At various times, Putin has published articles and even opinion columns, though they were read only by people who take an active interest in politics, and there are not many such people in Russia. Even his most important anti-Ukraine essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (2021), is still not studied either in schools or universities.

Moreover, some of Putin’s ideas, which are very important to him, remain his personal opinions, for example, hostility toward Vladimir Lenin and the early history of the Soviet empire.

In February 2022, addressing the nation on the eve of the invasion, Putin stated [5] that Ukraine “had arisen as a result of Bolshevik policy” and that it “could be called Lenin’s Ukraine,” and promised Ukrainians “real decommunization.” Yet just a little more than two months later, one of his closest associates, Sergei Kiriyenko, the actual head of the Presidential Administration, solemnly opened a monument in the freshly occupied Mariupol to “Babushka-Z” — in the form of an elderly lady with a Soviet flag — which supposedly symbolized the enthusiastic welcoming of Russian soldiers by Ukrainians.

Russian loyalists, and in many ways even career propagandists, see Putin as a defender of the ideas they profess, but not their author.

Myths contradicting, but hitting the same spot

The mass ideology prevailing in Russia is in tune with state propaganda and is constantly fed by it. But it has deep roots and could well exist even without support from above. In this sense, the current mass ideology is more organic and viable than the former Soviet official doctrine.

The old ideology, from Lenin to Brezhnev, knew the answers to all questions and gave a clear answer to each of them, disagreement with which was severely punished. It was expounded and defended by a numerous, vertically organized corps of propagandists, led by the Central Committee and its Agitprop.

The current ideology provides not one, but several answers to any question. Yet all these answers hit the same spot. It has a set of nonnegotiable values — from the worship of state power and imperial myths to the denial of Ukrainian statehood and belief in a Western conspiracy against Russia. Everyone can paint these values in their own colors — fascist or communist, left or right. Not only ordinary people, but also professional propagandists are given room to improvise widely. It is through ideological improvisation that the boundaries of rules and prohibitions are tested and established.

Elena Ivanitskaya, a researcher of military propaganda (“Z-propaganda”), [6] considers its most important feature to be the combination of contradictory and logically incompatible elements. Propagandists can praise both capitalism and socialism, call the war against Ukraine both defensive and aggressive, preach both racism and supposedly anti-Nazism. The main thing is that these different paths lead to one thing — to the justification of force and sovereignty. And these basic attitudes began to prevail in minds long before the invasion.

Surveys by FOM (“The Public Opinion Foundation”), done after the first campaign against Ukraine (2014) but before the current war, revealed the paradoxical nature of Russians’ views. On domestic issues, the positions of the majority were then quite critical and even anti-regime, but as soon as it turned to foreign affairs, the sovereignty mythology always prevailed, and respondents demonstrated emphatic loyalty, no matter what question was asked.

Relations between Russia and the West steadily worsened after the annexation of Crimea, but a four-fold majority (60% versus 15%) agreed that “recently, there have been more successes than failures in Russian foreign policy.” Meanwhile, Russians who believed that the partnership between Russia and the EU was more important for European countries than for Russia outnumbered those who thought it was the other way around by one and a half to two times. Back then, this question was abstract, but later, Putin was guided by the same myth about European dependence on Russia when he cut off gas supplies to Europe. He did not create this myth — he simply shares it with most of his own subjects.

Ideas about the past are even more peculiar than about the present. When asked by VTsIOM (“All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion”) to recall the names of prominent compatriots with whom they would like to “get to know and talk,” a Russian man most often named Stalin (in 20% of cases) and a Russian woman Peter the Great (in 17% of cases). Among the next 15 desirable interlocutors there is neither Sakharov nor Tolstoy. Most places in the list were taken by rulers, including such noteworthy tyrants as Ivan the Terrible (4%). The rest are generals and other strong personalities, as well as Alexander Pushkin (7%), an exception who probably got on the list not as a poet, but as a sovereignty symbol. This is how loyalists see the past of their country. Should we be surprised at the peculiarities of their vision of its present and future?

Patterns of behavior remain

The striking indifference on the part of the majority of Russians toward Ukrainian victims is a continuation of the long-ago-recorded insensitivity to any other people’s troubles, including the death of Russians.

In 2004, two Russian passenger planes were simultaneously blown up by terrorists. Interest in Russia toward this incident was minimal since it coincided with the 28th Olympic Games, which were enthusiastically followed on TV.

It was on that day, August 24, that the outstanding jumper Yelena Isinbayeva won the gold medal and, in the evening, to the delight of the public, appeared on Russian TV. One of the blown-up planes had been on its way to Volgograd, her hometown. A few hours later, Isinbayeva was wildly rejoicing, congratulating her fellow Volgograd residents on her victory without feeling the slightest embarrassment. However, the audience did not feel it either. She was not reproached. In subsequent years, Isinbayeva became one of the most odious praisers of Putin and all his deeds. Her entire biography drives home the point that insensitivity and cynicism are not seen as bad things in Russia.

Traveling abroad, tourists from Russia consistently stand out for their indifference to any events taking place in the countries where they are staying. After the tsunami that killed several thousand people in Thailand, Russians, who themselves survived only by luck, continued to have fun among the ruins and funeral teams, while thousands of new arrivals were “ready to go even to ruins” so as not to lose the money they paid for tours.

People who have gone through the school of Soviet and post-Soviet life did not see anything strange about this. And this is exactly the model of behavior that is seen today with the majority of Russians. They are trying to lead their usual life, with all its private joys and troubles, and they do not seem to notice the war.

True, in this usual life there is now more fear and more denunciations, though it cannot be said that this is new. The climate for all kinds of public denunciation has been exceptionally favorable for quite a long time. In late Soviet times, it was done quietly and was widely looked down upon in everyday life.

In 21st-century Russia, people have been denouncing each other for a decade, if not more, often proudly and demonstratively, meeting no mass disapproval.

Denunciations are needed by the authorities to test the boundaries of the permitted and to accustom the disloyal and latently disloyal to live in fear. Informers serve as a surrogate for Soviet-type ideological watchdogs, who are absent in today’s Russia, and are encouraged by the system. Before the invasion, the favorite subjects of denunciations were “insulting the feelings of believers,” “propaganda of homosexuality,” and “desecration of symbols of military glory.” Now, the main subject has become “discrediting the Russian army.”

Recently, one informer actually uncovered such “discrediting” in the performance of Cyrano de Bergerac by St.Petersburg’s Alexandrinsky Theater — based on the old play by Edmond Rostand (1897) — and the production was duly canceled. But otherwise, Russian theatrical life is now back in full swing, and intellectuals are packing the theaters. Which again brings to mind the memory of how in 2011 in Cairo, engulfed by revolution, Russian tourists fought their way through the myriad crowds of demonstrators to get to the museums, which were part of their tours.

Consensus ripens and immediately overripens

The language in which Putin's nomenklatura now speaks to each other and to the nation is consonant with grassroots loyalist mythology and reflects the ideological consensus that now dominates Russia, since all other voices are suppressed.

True, recently the authorities have begun to manipulate this consensus at their own discretion, which does not necessarily lend stability to the regime. Since 2023, they have been trying to unify the whole set of everyday conspiracy theories and xenophobic, sovereignty myths. Most state and semi-state structures engaged in the promotion of ideology have probably become powerful enough to provide themselves with a front of work to squeeze out more and more state money.

There is now an attempt to ideologize upbringing and education at all levels, from kindergartens to universities. Compulsory classes on ideology have been introduced for schoolchildren — “Conversations about Important Things” and “Lessons of Courage.” Thousands of schools are putting up “Desks of Heroes,” while “Faces of Heroes” appear on the facades. Beginning in autumn 2023, the course “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood” became mandatory for university students, the core of which is the so-called “pentabasis,” a set of little meaningful recitations on sovereign themes. Boredom and mediocrity emanate from all these costly administrative undertakings. Having a strong foundation in the form of widespread sovereignty myths, the regime is clearly struggling with what, until recently it did not try to do at all — constructing on that foundation some standard ideology set from above. Hastily devised unified rituals and texts intended for general memorization look like a parody of Soviet rituals and courses on “scientific communism.” Moving forward, state compulsion can only lead to the restoration of Soviet universal pretense.

Still, today the Putin regime’s ideological reserves are quite robust. It relies on stable core ideas shared by the majority of Russians and therefore has considerable scope for improvisation — it can continue the war with Ukraine or pause it, even for an extended period.

1.2. The Anti-Regime Democratic Opposition: The Path of Symbolic Victories and Real Defeats Has Reached Its End

Putin's opponents have been operating within the Kremlin's rules for decades. They have lacked a positive agenda and have been fixated on elections, which have long since become a meaningless ritual. Their belief that participating in elections is the only way to challenge the regime is paradoxical. However, this obsession with elections is not new — it dates back to the pre-Putin era.

In the memory of Russians alive today, power changed hands only once through elections, and even then it was on a de facto basis, not de jure: in June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was freely elected president of Russia, then still part of the Soviet Union, while the head of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, as a result of Yeltsin’s election, turned into figure No. 2.

A history of failures

All subsequent votes were rather manipulated and never led to a change at the top.

Such was the four-part national referendum on trust in Yeltsin and his policies in April 1993, which went down in history as the “yes-yes-no-yes” referendum. Such was the presidential election of 1996, when the incumbent Yeltsin beat the Communist Gennady Zyuganov.

Zyuganov and his party were neither democrats nor liberals, and if he had won, Putin’s current policies would have been implemented much earlier. But in 1996, what was fundamentally important was the predetermination of the election’s outcome. The incumbent president ultimately won more votes, but all the actions of the regime in the months leading up to the election indicated that Yeltsin had no intention of giving up power, no matter the result. The highest political figure now played by different rules.

Regional elections — to elect governors or local legislatures —