We believe that building an effective strategy of relations with Russia should begin with a reassessment of its identity. Over a quarter of a century, Vladimir Putin has created an image of Russia as a revisionist power “rising from its knees”; as its own kind of “civilization” obsessed with traditional values; as a society allegedly obsessed with the sole desire to serve the state that dominates it. These ideas are not new. They date back to the 19th century and are now being parroted in various combinations by Kremlin propagandists after Putin, but it seems to us that they hardly believe what they write and publish. Meanwhile, as the latest Russian authoritarian regime has been gaining momentum for years, its opponents have formed an alternative doctrine that portrays Russians as free people committed to Western ideals universal human rights, and therefore dreaming of a “beautiful Russia of the future,” molded according to liberal canons — but this image does not seem to inspire the majority of Russian citizens, many of whom hold rather conservative views and are afraid of abrupt changes. In order to launch social transformation, it is necessary to try to reach the majority of the country’s residents, no matter how fanciful this task may look.
In order to get your point across to millions of people, it is necessary to assess the pain points that will be exposed by the time the pendulum is likely to swing westwards. Th will not come tomorrow; it will probably not even happen before the current dictator leaves this world, but it is already clear that Putin’s legacy will define the list of Russians’ aspirations and their priorities. The most likely scenario of what Russia will look like by the mid-2030s, judging by the recent decades’ events, is that it will be a country lagging far behind Europe economically, dependent on its dwindling natural resources with their value gradually diminishing in the global market; a field of constant redistribution of property and power struggles even less free and less materially prosperous than it is today, permeated by a spirit of militarism and expectation of a new war. As Russian history shows, economically and psychologically exhausted societies do not aspire to great achievements, but to peace and well-being — and it is against this background that Europe may seem extremely attractive to Russians.
We may be wrong, but the strongest aspiration of the overwhelming majority of Russians in 5 to 10 years will be the desire for peace and rejection of militarism. The consequences of the war will be felt by all groups of the population in the coming years, and its human cost is yet to be assessed as the real scale of losses, the number of those missing and those returning physically or mentally disabled are realized. The image of Europe in this context will be linked to the continent’s inherent pacifism; the Europeans’ ability to build sustainable mechanisms of peaceful life among dozens of countries that have been at war with each other for centuries will inevitably become Europe’s most important positive feature in the eyes of Russians exhausted by the Kremlin’s militarism.
No less significant aspiration of Russian citizens by the end of the Putin era will be the desire for simple growth of material wealth. By that time, the country will have a generation that has never seen progress in this respect. By 2024, the average nominal wage in Russia, converted into dollars at the market exchange rate, had only managed to reach the level of 2013 (about $950/month), and there is no reason to believe that the trigger-happy authoritarian regime can change the situation for the better. The distance not only with Western Europe, but even with former Soviet satellites will be so stark that economic growth, decent wages and new jobs that provide sufficient income will be issues of the biggest concern for people in an era when the decline of the oil economy will become a part of the new reality.
By the mid-2030s, people who came into adulthood at the dawn of Putinism will have almost reached retirement and realized that their previous decades of work did not provide any decent pensions.
The decades of Putinism will also be perceived by Russians as an era of consistent loss of their basic rights — and it is not so much about democracy or freedom of speech but about sheer disenfranchisement in the face of power, wealth, or informal connections. Russia has long become a class society with established hierarchies, where each stratum has its own laws and where power, money, and status are easily converted into each other15. The country has suppressed trade unionism, cancelled plebiscites, essentially destroyed local self-government, and lacks an independent judiciary. The demand for lawfulness, security and justice in Russian society is not only of utmost significance — it surely exceeds the demand for democracy and minority rights, which Europeans traditionally appeal to in their dialog with Russians.
15 — On the conversion of different elite groups into each other in Russia, see: Inozemtsev, Vladislav. “Why it is too early to expect a renewal of the Russian elite” in: РБК, 2019, 15 January, p. 8.
During the years of war and the tightening of Putin’s regime, Russians have experienced a dramatic reduction in freedom of movement for reasons ranging from economic to organizational. Travelling abroad, which was becoming available to more and more people from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s, is now becoming progressively more prohibiting — both due to the bureaucratic hurdles imposed by the Russian authorities and falling living standards, as well as because of anti-Russian sanctions and the aggressor’s image that affects treatment of Russian citizens abroad. Europe in this regard — with its freedom of movement and long-abolished borders — is also an extremely attractive model.
Finally, there is little doubt that several decades of imposed imperialism and pressure on any form of national identity manifestation will generate a surge of nationalism, if not separatist sentiments. They are unlikely to bring about the disintegration of Russia expected by many concerned observers, but the demand for reforming the current pseudo-federalism, establishing national autonomies, the right to cultural self-expression, and rejection of the ethnic Russian people’s dominant role in its current forms will be very high. For various ethnic groups of Russia, Europe can become an ideal image of large and small peoples’ interests coexistence, mutual enrichment of cultures, overcoming the imperial past, and historical reconciliation between former empires and colonies.
Naturally, we can be wrong in our assessments of the Russians’ specific preferences and scale of values in the post-Putin era — but it is extremely likely that Russian people today and in the near future will think and act in a much more utilitarian way than, for instance, the Soviet citizens behaved during perestroika. Over recent decades, people have acquired property, which was virtually nonexistent in Soviet times and which has significantly changed the stereotypes of behavior, and not necessarily in the way it was once expected; expectations of benefits and social support from the state have decreased; the scale of individualism has increased significantly. For today’s Russians, poetic “beautiful impulses of the soul” and high expectations, which largely determined the emotional background of the last Soviet years, do not play a dominant role. The people of late-Putin Russia are very practical, if not cynical — and if they do perceive the European way of life as attractive, it will be for slightly different reasons than many of their Soviet predecessors.
All this means, in our view, that in a case of a radical transformation of the Russian political regime, the most important shift may not be the turn from unfreedom to freedom and from autocracy to democracy — it may very well turn out that the Putin era will be criticized primarily for the “national leader’s” failure to fulfil his stated goals, rather than for setting them incorrectly.
Russians have been and remain supportive of the legal order and security that the Kremlin promised from the very beginning of Putin’s rule — Russians are disappointed that order and security have not increased in recent decades, and that many of those who are formally supposed to enforce the law have become a major threat to the peace and lives of ordinary citizens. The same applies to economic issues: Russian society was indeed willing to trade freedom for the Russian proverbial sausage in the 2000s and would probably be happy to accept such an offer again; the problem is that by the 2030s the spike in prosperity that marked Putin’s first decade will be forgotten, and the lack of both freedom and rising living standards will determine the level of popular discontent. In this situation, focusing only on political freedoms, democracy, and human rights may be a losing bet, as it was in part 30 years ago.
Hence the main point that we suggest Europeans think about when building a strategy of relations with future Russia: this time it would be worthwhile to offer Russians prosperity and security once again — but not in exchange for personal freedoms, as Putin did, but for the political sovereignty of the state. For centuries, the state itself — and this is a historical fact — has been the main enemy for Russians; more Russian people have died on the state’s orders or as a result of its mistakes than from any attacks by enemies, and more material wealth has been destroyed or wasted than from any external forces’ actions. The slogan of “saving the people”16 (and we would add, “saving the national wealth”) was very popular with the Russians and should remain a major one; a potential European proposal could come down to helping with optimal organization of Russia’s economic, political and legal space for the sake of minimizing the negative effects that the Russian authoritarian and unaccountable state has brought for centuries. That could include guarantees of property rights and protection of workers’ interests; expansion of economic freedoms and social security; strict handling of violence, including domestic violence; creation of a common legal space with European states, not common lawless territory with Chechnya; projects aimed at property inequality reduction by increasing taxation of resource industries and reducing military expenditures; accountability of the bureaucracy and formation of effective instruments of control over budget spending; introduction and observance of European technical and ecological standards — all these measures may positively affect most Russians’ lives. The main point, again, is that Europeans can help introduce and enforce the norms already active in Europe, to which the Russian elites, alas, have never been committed.
16 — See: Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. “Saving the people is the highest of all our state tasks.” / Moskovskie novosti, 2006, 28 April.
To summarise this part, we would point out the main mistake made during the period of rapprochement between Russia and the West in the 1980s-1990s: the overemphasis on values at the expense of norms and on ideals at the expense of interests. It was assumed that Soviet/ Russian people were motivated primarily by the desire for freedom and to embrace the Western canons of democracy and liberalism; in fact, they were not prepared to pay the price of falling prosperity and a period of chaos. The experiment of the 1990s proved to be an extremely cruel and admittedly protracted test for Russian people. In the countries that historically belonged to the now united Europe, the values-inspired motivation was strong enough to pass the transitional period “in one breath,” but in Russia it was not. To believe that another attempt in today’s conditions can be more successful is self-deception. To incorporate Russia into Europe, Western politicians will now have to speak not with the elites but with society, and in the language of interests, not ideals. This, we should note, is a fundamentally new task for the Europeans, since all of the EEC/EU former expanding affairs have involved countries whose peoples clearly felt value unity with the rest of the European civilization, while the dialogue with Russians should be built on different grounds from the very beginning.