Covers the four language skills you need to use Russian as you learn to speak Russian, you will also learn to listen, read and write. Use all of the activities, tests, exercises and tools to improve all of your language abilities. Learn Russian with Rosetta Stone®. Learn to speak Russian with our language-learning software. It's a fun & fast way to learn Russian!
The Hack The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them. To hear more feature stories, or Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.
“I’ve been doing cybersecurity since I was 18, since I joined the army in 1982,” Minin told me after we’d ducked out into the hallway so as not to distract the young contestants. He wouldn’t say in which part of the army he’d done this work. “At the time, I signed a gag order,” he told me, smiling slyly. “Do you think anything has changed? And that I’d say it to a journalist?” Victor Minin, who has close ties to Russian intelligence, runs hacking competitions at universities all over Russia—his way, he says, of preparing future generations.
(Max Avdeev) After the army, Minin joined the KGB. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, he went to work in the Russian government’s cyber and surveillance division. In 2010, after he’d retired and gone into the private sector, he helped found ARSIB, which has connections to the Russian defense ministry, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the interior ministry.
From Our January/February 2018 Issue Subscribe to The Atlantic and support 160 years of independent journalism The hacking competitions are Minin’s way of preparing future generations, of “passing my accumulated knowledge on to the kiddies,” he told me. He said Russian tech firms regularly come to him to find talent. I asked whether government agencies, like the security services that conduct cyberoperations abroad, did the same. “It’s possible,” he demurred. “They also need these specialists.” When the Capture the Flag competition broke for lunch, Minin and I stepped into the brightness and the wind outside. The university, a complex of stark white buildings, sits atop a steep hill with the city and the Volga River below. Once, the river was blood, and the hill was shrapnel and pillboxes and bones.
Once, this was Stalingrad, a city made famous by the grueling battle fought here in the winter of 1942–43, when more than 1 million men died before the Germans lost the fight and a field marshal and the momentum of the war. Today, it is a haunted city.
“Have you been to Mamayev Kurgan yet?,” Minin asked me. He was referring to another hill, where the battle was so intense, it changed the hill’s shape. Now the Motherland Calls statue stands there, a 170-foot concrete woman raising a sword to summon her countrymen into battle. It’s where Nazi Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus was captured, Minin noted with reverence, and looked into the sunny distance.
“You know, it’s important to see how young people defended their homeland.” When we got to the cafeteria, I saw that it, too, was haunted by its Soviet past. Grouchy middle-aged women in hairnets dished out bland, greasy cuisine. If it weren’t for students tapping at their smartphones, it would have been hard to tell that the 21st century had ever arrived. I sat down at a table with a team from Astrakhan and told them I had been to their hometown once, a romantically shabby old city by the Caspian Sea. The students smirked. “Everyone wants to leave,” a third-year named Anton said. “There’s nothing to do there,” his teammate Sergei added.
“We did an amazing job creating the illusion that Putin controls everything in Russia Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to him. Anton was hoping that Minin could help him get his foot in the door at one of the state security services.
“It’s prestigious, they pay well, and the work is interesting,” he said. If he were accepted, he could hope for a salary of 50,000 rubles (less than $900) a month, which was almost double the average salary in Astrakhan. Was he motivated by any feelings of—“Patriotic conviction?,” Anton finished my sentence, and started to chuckle. “No,” he said.
“I don’t care what government I work for. If the French Foreign Legion takes me, I’ll go!”. Isn’t it sacrilege to say such things in a place like Volgograd?, I asked them. Sergei said the kind of patriotism being fostered in Russia these days was empty, even unhealthy. He’d been angered by restrictions of online behavior imposed after the prodemocracy protests of 2011–12, and by government monitoring of online speech, which he called unconstitutional. “And if you look at the state of our roads and our cities, and how people live in our city, you want to ask, why are they spending billions of rubles on storing people’s personal information in massive databases?” “They’re going to lock you up, Sergei,” a classmate said, stealing a glance at my phone. Sergei laughed.
“Keep chewing,” he said. Video: “How Russia Attacked U.S. O ver the past year, Russian hackers have become the stuff of legend in the United States. According to U.S.
Intelligence assessments and media investigations, they were responsible for breaching the servers of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They spread the information they filched through friendly outlets such as WikiLeaks, to devastating effect.
With President Vladimir Putin’s blessing, they probed the voting infrastructure of various U.S. They quietly bought divisive ads and organized political events on Facebook, acting as the bellows in America’s raging culture wars. None of these factors obviates the dangers Russia poses; rather, each gives them shape. Both Putin and his country are aging, declining—but the insecurities of decline present their own risks to America. The United States intelligence community is unanimous in its assessment not only that Russians interfered in the U.S. Election but that, in the words of former FBI Director James Comey, “they will be back.” It is a stunning escalation of hostilities for a troubled country whose elites still have only a tenuous grasp of American politics.
And it is classically Putin, and classically Russian: using daring aggression to mask weakness, to avenge deep resentments, and, at all costs, to survive. I’d come to Russia to try to answer two key questions. The more immediate is how the Kremlin, despite its limitations, pulled off one of the greatest acts of political sabotage in modern history, turning American democracy against itself.
And the more important—for Americans, anyway—is what might still be in store, and how far an emboldened Vladimir Putin is prepared to go in order to get what he wants. Jeff Elkins; Alexey Kurbatov and Muti “I t wasn’t a strategic operation,” says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist with deep sources in the security services, who about the Kremlin’s use of cybertechnology. “Given what everyone on the inside has told me,” he says, hacking the U.S. Political system “was a very emotional, tactical decision. People were very upset about the Panama Papers.”.
In the spring of 2016, an international consortium of journalists began publishing revelations from belonging to a Panamanian law firm that specialized in helping its wealthy foreign clients move money, some of it ill-gotten, out of their home countries and away from the prying eyes of tax collectors. (The firm has denied any wrongdoing.) The that Putin’s old friend Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and the godfather to Putin’s elder daughter, had his name on funds worth some $2 billion. It was an implausible fortune for a little-known musician, and the journalists showed that these funds were likely a piggy bank for Putin’s inner circle. Roldugin has denied any wrongdoing, but the Kremlin was furious about the revelation.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, whose wife was also implicated, angrily ascribed the reporting to “many former State Department and CIA employees” and to an effort to “destabilize” Russia ahead of its September 2016 parliamentary elections. The argument was cynical, but it revealed a certain logic: The financial privacy of Russia’s leaders was on par with the sovereignty of Russia’s elections.
“The Panama Papers were a personal slight to Putin,” says John Sipher, a former deputy of the CIA’s Russia desk. “They think we did it.” Putin’s inner circle, Soldatov says, felt “they had to respond somehow.” According to Soldatov’s reporting, on April 8, 2016, Putin convened an urgent meeting of his national-security council; all but two of the eight people there were veterans of the KGB. Given the secrecy and timing of this meeting, Soldatov believes it was then that Putin gave the signal to retaliate. The original aim was to embarrass and damage Hillary Clinton, to sow dissension, and to show that American democracy is just as corrupt as Russia’s, if not worse.
“No one believed in Trump, not even a little bit,” Soldatov says. “It was a series of tactical operations. At each moment, the people who were doing this were filled with excitement over how well it was going, and that success pushed them to go even further.” “A lot of what they’ve done was very opportunistic,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russian-born co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which first discovered the Russian interference after the company was hired to investigate the hack of the Democratic National Committee servers in May 2016. “They cast a wide net without knowing in advance what the benefit might be.” The Russian hackers were very skilled, Alperovitch says, but “we shouldn’t try to make them out to be eight feet tall” and able to “elect whomever they want.
They tried in Ukraine, and it didn’t work.” Nor did it work in the French elections of 2017. Alperovitch and his team saw that there had been two groups of hackers, which they believed came from two different Russian security agencies. They gave them two different monikers: Fancy Bear, from military intelligence, and Cozy Bear, from either foreign intelligence or the FSB. But neither bear seemed at all aware of what the other was doing, or even of the other’s presence.
“We observed the two Russian espionage groups compromise the same systems and engage separately in the theft of identical credentials,” Alperovitch at the time. Western intelligence agencies, he noted, almost never go after the same target without coordinating, “for fear of compromising each other’s operations.” But “in Russia this is not an uncommon scenario.”. It was almost like one of Minin’s hacking competitions, but with higher stakes.
The hackers are not always guys in military-intelligence uniforms, Soldatov told me; in some cases they’re mercenary freelancers willing to work for the highest bidder—or cybercriminals who have been caught and blackmailed into working for the government. (Putin has denied “state level” involvement in election meddling, but plausible deniability is the point of working through unofficial hackers.) American officials noticed the same messy and amorphous behavior as the summer of 2016 wore on.
A former staffer in Barack Obama’s administration says that intercepted communications between FSB and military-intelligence officers revealed arguing and a lack of organization. “It was ad hoc,” a senior Obama-administration official who saw the intelligence in real time told me.
“They were kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would stick.” Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama at the G20 Summit in September 2016. Obama warned Putin against election meddling, but did not sanction Russia before Election Day—Hillary Clinton, he believed, would handle Putin after she won. (Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik / AP) This chaos was, ironically, one reason the Russians ended up being successful in 2016. The bickering, opportunism, and lack of cooperation seemed to the Obama administration, at least initially, like the same old story. Published in January 2017 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessing Russian involvement in the election noted that in 2008, a ring of 10 Russian spies, the most famous of whom was the fiery-haired Anna Chapman, had been in the U.S.
In part to monitor the presidential election. But from 2010 paints a picture that is more The Pink Panther than The Americans. The spies, dubbed “The Illegals,” went to think-tank events and summarized press coverage for Moscow; Chapman registered a burner phone with the address 99 Fake Street. (Chapman was arrested in 2010, and she and her compatriots were deported in a dramatic spy exchange.) The Obama administration seemed to be expecting something similar early in 2016.
“They’ve nibbled on the edges of our elections” in the past, the former Obama-administration staffer told me. In 2008, the Illegals “had been trying to cultivate think-tank people who might go into the administration.” But Russia hadn’t tried “to affect the result of the election until this time.”. When the Obama administration began to realize, in the summer, that the Russians were up to something more wide-ranging than what they’d done before, the White House worried about only half the problem. At that point, the most alarming development was Russian probing of states’ voting systems. The dumps of hacked data and the churn of false stories about Clinton seemed less troubling, and also harder to combat without looking political. In September, Obama approached Putin on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China, and told him to “cut it out.” That fall, National-Security Adviser Susan Rice hand-delivered a warning to the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak.
The White House tasked the Treasury and State Departments with exploring new sanctions against Russia, as well as the publication of information about Putin’s personal wealth, but decided that such moves might backfire. If the White House pushed too hard, the Russians might dump even more stolen documents. Who knew what else they had? Nevertheless, with just a month to go until the election, the Obama administration took the extraordinary step of alerting the public. On October 7, 2016, from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said, “The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails” from U.S.
Political organizations. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. Election process.”. A forgery, a couple of groups of hackers, and a drip of well-timed leaks were all it took to throw American politics into chaos.
Whether and to what extent the Trump campaign was complicit in the Russian efforts is the subject of active inquiries today. Regardless, Putin pulled off a spectacular geopolitical heist on a shoestring budget—about $200 million, according to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. This point is lost on many Americans: The subversion of the election was as much a product of improvisation and entropy as it was of long-range vision. What makes Putin effective, what makes him dangerous, is not strategic brilliance but a tactical flexibility and adaptability—a willingness to experiment, to disrupt, and to take big risks.
“They do plan,” said a senior Obama-administration official. “They’re not stupid at all.
But the idea that they have this all perfectly planned and that Putin is an amazing chess player—that’s not quite it. He knows where he wants to end up, he plans the first few moves, and then he figures out the rest later. People ask if he plays chess or checkers. It’s neither: He plays blackjack. He has a higher acceptance of risk. Think about it.
The election interference—that was pretty risky, what he did. If Hillary Clinton had won, there would’ve been hell to pay.” Even the manner of the Russian attack was risky.
The fact that the Russians didn’t really bother hiding their fingerprints is a testament to the change in Russia’s intent toward the U.S., Robert Hannigan, a former head of the Government Communications Headquarters, the British analogue to the National Security Agency, said at the Aspen Forum. “The brazen recklessness of it the fact that they don’t seem to care that it’s attributed to them very publicly, is the biggest change.”. That recklessness nonetheless has clear precursors—both in Putin’s evolving worldview and in his changing domestic circumstances. For more than a decade, America’s strategic carelessness with regard to Russia has stoked Putin’s fears of being deposed by the U.S., and pushed him toward ever higher levels of antagonism. So has his political situation—the need to take ever larger foreign risks to shore up support at home, as the economy has struggled. These pressures have not abated; if anything, they have accelerated in recent years.
The History When it is snowing, as it was on this spring afternoon, the gray crags of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations blend into the low-slung, steely sky. This is where the Soviet state once minted its diplomats and spies. Here they mastered the nuances of the world before stepping out into it.
Today, the university’s role is much the same, although it has been watered down by corruption: The wealthy often buy their children admission. I had been invited to listen to a lecture by one of the institute’s most prominent faculty members, Andranik Migranyan, who himself graduated from the school in 1972. Migranyan spent much of the past decade in New York, where he ran the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, a Russian think tank reported to have ties to the Russian foreign ministry. Among his old classmates is Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, whom he still counts as a friend. This afternoon, Migranyan was lecturing on, a speech that seems to be Russia’s sole post-Soviet ideological document—and key to understanding how the relationship between Russia and the U.S.
Reached today’s nadir. Putin, still a painfully awkward speaker at the time, was seven years into his now nearly two-decade reign. Eighteen years prior, in 1989, he had been a KGB officer stationed in Dresden, East Germany, shoveling sensitive documents into a furnace as protesters gathered outside and the Berlin Wall crumbled. Not long after that, the Soviet Union was dead and buried, and the world seemed to have come to a consensus: The Soviet approach to politics—violent, undemocratic—was wrong, even evil. The Western liberal order was a better and more moral form of government. Vladimir Putin, speaking at the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy, where he dissented sharply from the post–Cold War ideological order.
(Oliver Lang / AFP / Getty) For a while, Putin had tried to find a role for Russia within that Western order. When Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet president, named him his successor in 1999, Russia was waging war against Islamist separatists in Chechnya. On 9/11, Putin was the first foreign leader to call President George W. Bush, hoping to impress on him that they were now allies in the struggle against terrorism.
He tried to be helpful in Afghanistan. But in 2003, Bush ignored his objections to the invasion of Iraq, going around the United Nations Security Council, where Russia has veto power. It was a humiliating reminder that in the eyes of the West, Russia was irrelevant, that “Russian objections carried no weight,” as Migranyan told his students.
But to Putin, it was something more: Under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights, Washington had returned to its Cold War–era policy of deposing and installing foreign leaders. Even the open use of military force was now fair game. In 2007, speaking to the representatives and defenders of the Western order, Putin officially registered his dissent. “Only two decades ago, the world was ideologically and economically split, and its security was provided by the massive strategic potential of two superpowers,” Putin declaimed sullenly. But that order had been replaced by a “unipolar world” dominated only by America. “It is the world of one master, one sovereign.” A world order controlled by a single country “has nothing in common with democracy,” he noted pointedly.
The current order was both “unacceptable” and ineffective. “Unilateral, illegitimate action” only created “new human tragedies and centers of conflict.” He was referring to Iraq, which by that point had descended into sectarian warfare. The time had come, he said, “to rethink the entire architecture of global security.” This was the protest of a losing side that wanted to renegotiate the terms of surrender, 16 years after the fact.
Nonetheless, Putin has spent the decade since that speech making sure that the United States can never again unilaterally maneuver without encountering friction—and, most important, that it can never, ever depose him. “You should have seen the faces of John McCain and Joe Lieberman,” a delighted Migranyan told his students, who appeared to be barely listening. The hawkish American senators who attended Putin’s speech “were gobsmacked. Russia had been written off! And Putin committed a mortal sin in Munich: He told the truth.”.
The year that followed, Migranyan said, “was the year of deed and action.” Russia went to war with neighboring Georgia in 2008, a move that Migranyan described as a sort of comeuppance for nato, which had expanded to include other former Soviet republics. But Western encroachment on Russia’s periphery was not the Kremlin’s central grievance.
The U.S., Migranyan complained, had also been meddling directly in Russian politics. American consultants had engineered painful post-Soviet market reforms, enriching themselves all the while, and had helped elect the enfeebled and unpopular Yeltsin to a second term in 1996. Government directly funded both Russian and American nongovernmental organizations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, to promote democracy and civil society in Russia.
Some of those same NGOs had ties to the so-called color revolutions, which toppled governments in former Soviet republics and replaced them with democratic regimes friendly to the West. The Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan—“Russia looks at this with understandable mistrust,” Migranyan told his students. He pointed out that the United States, by its own admission, had spent $5 billion in Ukraine to promote democracy—that is, to expand the liberal Western order.
Through this prism, it is not irrational to believe that the U.S. Might be coming for Moscow—and Putin—next.
This is why, in 2012, Russia kicked out USAID. It is why Russia banned the National Endowment for Democracy in 2015, under a new law that shuttered “undesirable” organizations. Putin is said to have watched the video of Qaddafi’s lynching over and over, obsessively.
He feared the Americans would come for him next. Putin’s Munich doctrine has a corollary: Americans may think they’re promoting democracy, but they’re really spreading chaos. “Look at what happened in Egypt,” Migranyan said, beginning a litany of failed American-backed revolutions. In 2011, the Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak stepped down following protests the U.S. Had supported, Migranyan contended.
But after “radical Islamists” won power democratically, the U.S. Turned a blind eye to a military coup that deposed the new leaders. Then there was Libya.
“You toppled the most successful government in North Africa,” Migranyan said, looking in my direction. “In the end, we got a ruined government, a brutally murdered American ambassador, chaos, and Islamic radicals.”. “If we count all the American failures, maybe it’s time you start listening to Russia?,” Migranyan said, growing increasingly agitated. “If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has to go, then who comes in, in place of Assad? Don’t destroy regimes if you don’t know what comes after!” Putin had always been suspicious of democracy promotion, but two moments convinced him that America was coming for him under its guise. The first was the 2011 nato intervention in Libya, which led, ultimately, to the ousting and gruesome lynching of the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Afterward, many people who interacted with Putin noticed how deeply Qaddafi’s death troubled him.
He is said to have watched the video of the killing over and over. “The way Qaddafi died made a profound impact on him,” says Jake Sullivan, a former senior State Department official who met repeatedly with senior Russian officials around that time. Another former senior Obama-administration official describes Putin as “obsessed” with Qaddafi’s death. (The official concedes, “I think we did overreach” in Libya.) The second moment was in November 2013, when young Ukrainians came out onto the Maidan—Independence Square—in the capital, Kiev, to protest then-President Viktor Yanukovych pulling out of an economic agreement with the European Union under pressure from Putin.
The demonstrators stayed all winter, until the police opened fire on them, killing some 100 people. The next day, February 21, 2014, Yanukovych signed a political-reconciliation plan, brokered by Russia, America, and the EU, but that night he fled the capital. To Putin, it was clear what had happened: America had toppled his closest ally, in a country he regarded as an extension of Russia itself. All that money America had spent on prodemocracy NGOs in Ukraine had paid off. The presence of Victoria Nuland, a State Department assistant secretary, handing out snacks on the Maidan during the protests, only cemented his worst fears.
“The Maidan shifted a gear,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications, told me. “Putin had always been an antagonist, and aggressive. But he went on offense after the Maidan. The gloves were off, in a way. To Putin, Ukraine was such a part of Russia that he took it as an assault on him.” (A source close to the Kremlin confirmed this account.) Putin and Lavrov were known within the Obama administration for their long tirades, chastising the American president for all the disrespect shown to Russia since 1991—like the time in 2014 that Obama listed Russia and Ebola as global threats in the same speech. Yanukovych’s fall made these tirades far more intense. “For two years afterwards, there wasn’t a phone call in which Putin wouldn’t mention it,” accusing the U.S.
Of supporting regime change in Ukraine, Rhodes recalled. Regime change in Libya and Ukraine led to Russia propping up Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
“Not one more” is how Jon Finer, former Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff, characterizes Putin’s approach in Syria. It also led inexorably to Russian meddling in the U.S.
Election: Russia would show the U.S. That there was more than one regime-change racket in town. The Player For Russia, a country relentlessly focused on its history, 2017 was a big year. November marked 100 years since the Bolsheviks, a radical minority faction of socialists, brought guns into a fledgling parliament and wrested Russia onto an equally radical path. That bloody experiment itself ended in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union; December 2016 marked its 25th anniversary. Both anniversaries were largely ignored by the Kremlin-controlled media, because they are uncomfortable for Putin.
Bolsheviks were revolutionaries and Putin, a statist to his core, loathes revolutions. But he was also raised to be a person of the Soviet state, to admire its many achievements, which is why he famously referred to the fall of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”. Putin governs with the twin collapses of 1917 and 1991 at the forefront of his thinking. He fears for himself when another collapse comes—because collapse always comes, because it has already come twice in 100 years. He is constantly trying to avoid it. The exiled oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky has publicly spoken of deposing Putin, and until recently did not eschew violent means.
People like Alexey Navalny, the opposition leader, openly talk about putting Putin and his closest associates on trial. The Russian opposition gleefully waits for Putin to fall, to resign, to die. Every misstep, every dip in oil prices, is to them just another sign of his coming personal apocalypse. The hungry anticipation is mirrored in the West, especially in the United States.
Alexey Navalny, a Russian anti-corruption crusader and presidential candidate, meeting with staff (Max Avdeev) For the most part, the Kremlin is focused not on any positive development program, but on staving off that fate—and on taking full advantage of its power before the state’s inevitable demise. That’s one reason corruption among the ruling elite is so breathtakingly brazen: A Russian businessman who works with government clients describes the approach as the “last day of Pompeii,” repeated over and over. Another businessman, who had just left the highest echelons of a big state-run bank out of frustration at its corruption and mismanagement, told me, “Russia always rises from the ashes, time and time again. But I have a feeling that we’re about to go through a time of ashes again.”. Fear of collapse is also why Russian propaganda is intent on highlighting the bloody aftermath of revolutions the world over. Things may not be great in Russia now—the country has struggled mightily since 2012—but, the country’s news programs suggest, things can always get worse.
That’s what Russians are told happened in the 1990s, in the nine frenetic years between the Soviet Union’s collapse and Putin’s ascent to power. “When you have two governmental collapses in 100 years, people are scared of them,” Migranyan told me. Many Russians remember the last one personally. But the number who do is shrinking.
One in four Russian men dies before the age of 55. Putin turned 65 in October, and is surrounded by people who are as old as he is, if not older. Russia is now “in an autumnal autocracy,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist in Moscow, says. “The more it tries to seem young and energetic, the more it obviously fails.” As Aleksey Chesnakov, a former Kremlin insider, told me, in Russia “the most active voters”—the people who buy in most fully to what Putin’s selling—“are the pensioners.” T o Putin’s supporters, his regime isn’t an autocracy, exactly.
“It can be described as demophilia,” Migranyan explained. “It is not a democracy, but it is in the name of the people, and for the people. Putin’s main constituency is the people. All of his power comes from his rating with the people, and therefore it’s important that he gives them the fruits of his rule.” The Kremlin calls it “managed democracy.”. This, too, is crucial to understanding why Putin acts as he does, and how he is likely to think about new campaigns against the United States. The Kremlin’s direction of the press, the close eye it keeps on polls and approval numbers, and especially its foreign policy—they all exist to buttress Putin’s legitimacy, to curry favor with his 144 million subjects.
It’s a complicated, hiccuping feedback loop designed to guarantee that Putin’s authoritarian rule remains popular and unthreatened. This is why Putin insists on having elections, even if the result is always predictable. “Without renewing the mandate, the system can’t survive,” Chesnakov said. “According to polls, two-thirds of Russians don’t want a monarchy. They want a democracy.
But they have a different sense of it than Americans and Europeans.” Putin’s third presidential term is up in the spring of 2018. He didn’t bother to declare that he’d run for reelection until December 6 (the election is in March) and he likely won’t campaign. This is Putin’s carefully cultivated image at home: the phlegmatic leader who hovers coolly above the fray as it churns on beneath him. But in the past year or so, the fray has given him reason to worry. On a chilly afternoon this spring, I watched college students standing on the steps of a nondescript building off Volgograd’s central square, waiting to meet with Alexey Navalny. The opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader has captured the imagination of many young Russians, as well as that of Westerners who see him as a potential rival of, or even replacement for, Putin.
Navalny has declared that he is running for president in the upcoming election. Police had blocked off the street in front of the building, which housed Navalny’s local campaign office. They stood groggily watching as Cossacks, members of a southern Russian tribe who have historically acted as the state’s vigilante enforcers, strolled up and down the block, casually swinging their black-leather whips. Angry-looking young men in track pants and sneakers—the other fists-for-hire preferred by the Kremlin—paced around the students, eyeing them menacingly.
Young women in vertiginous heels—plainclothes cops—milled around. Every few minutes, they took out identical camcorders tagged with numbered yellow stickers and filmed the students standing on the steps, zooming in on their faces.
Navalny had recently been attacked by progovernment thugs who splashed “Brilliant Green,” a Soviet-era antiseptic, on his face. His supporters subsequently posted an image of The Motherland Calls, the giant statue commemorating the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, with its face Photoshopped green, to publicize his rally in Volgograd. The image touched a nerve in a country where the government fetishizes World War II. Within hours, pro-Kremlin social-media accounts were using the image to fuel local outrage.
By the time Navalny arrived in Volgograd, from Moscow, the youth wing of Putin’s party was waiting with a protest. Navalny being arrested during a rally in Moscow on March 26, 2017 (Evgeny Feldman) The students standing on the steps of the campaign office found the manufactured outrage funny. They were at an age when most things were funny, even when the state was clearly watching them.
The FSB had recently sent a summons to the home of Vlad, a fourth-year student at Volgograd State University who had previously picketed in support of Navalny’s Progress Party. Roman, a bespectacled third-year student in veterinary science, had been called into the dean’s office for participating in a protest. “The dean said, ‘Don’t go to Navalny’s protests. His political position is wrong,’ ” Roman told me, shrugging and shoving his hands into the pockets of his puffy red jacket.
These young men would soon graduate into an economy that had only recently started to grow again after a five-year malaise. But the growth is barely perceptible, while prices for basic goods have soared. Some of their neighbors and family acquaintances hadn’t been paid in months, they said. “Our parents say things have gotten worse,” Roman told me. But their parents also knew the potential cost of openly opposing the government, and weren’t happy that their sons were at the rally that day.
They also believed, from watching state TV, that Navalny was an American agent. The young men laughed at this, too. Navalny had begun to build his base about a decade earlier, with a blog on LiveJournal that carefully documented how government officials supposedly carved thick slices off the state budget and stashed the money in Moscow mansions or real estate abroad. A few years ago, Navalny launched a YouTube channel where he posts slickly produced videos describing alleged government corruption schemes. On another YouTube channel, Navalny Live, he and his team at the Anti-Corruption Foundation host talk shows about politics, the kind of programming that would never be allowed on state-controlled television. Together, the channels.