Putinism

• 1. Introduction

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  Putinism, wrote the Hoover Institution's Arnold Beichman in The Washington Times in February 2007, had become "as significant a watchword as Stalinism was in the 20th century." That comparison sets the terms for everything that follows. Who actually runs a system that earns comparison to Stalin's Soviet Union, and what do its own members call themselves? Does it deserve comparison to the fascism of the 1930s, or to the communism it replaced? And why have politicians thousands of miles from Moscow, on both the political left and the right, chosen to defend it? The search for answers starts with the men who surround Vladimir Putin, many of them carrying a Soviet-era title: silovik.

• 2. Government By Chekist

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  Twenty-two separate governmental enforcement agencies supply the men and women Russians call siloviki, people "with shoulder marks." Most of them come from the Federal Security Service, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the armed forces, or the National Guard.

  A sociological study conducted in 2004 by Olga Kryshtanovskaya measured how far their reach extended. She put siloviki at 25 percent of the entire Russian political elite. Inside Putin's inner circle, a group of roughly 20 people, that share rose to 58 percent. It fell to 18-20 percent in Parliament and 34 percent in the government.

  Kryshtanovskaya dated the process to 1996, during Boris Yeltsin's second term. She said the whole political class, not Yeltsin alone, wanted the revolutionary period of the 1990s stopped. Putin's appointment as prime minister in 1999 accelerated it further. Kryshtanovskaya argued the elite had simply been searching for "a strong arm" capable of imposing order. Counting officials who had merely worked in agencies affiliated with the KGB and FSB, such as the Soviet foreign ministry, she raised her estimate to 77 percent of the ruling structure.

  Nikolai Patrushev, Putin's chief national security adviser, believed the West had waged an undeclared war against Russia for years. He helped shape the national security strategy Russia published in May 2021, which stated the country might use "forceful methods" to "thwart or avert unfriendly actions" against its sovereignty. Within a year of that strategy's release, Russians would vote on constitutional changes that critics said pushed the country further still.

• 3. Sovereign Democracy

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  Political scientists Mikhail Urnov and Valeria Kasamara concluded that Russia's system showed "direct signs of departure from the basic principles of competition policy." Commentators describe a personality cult built around Putin as a "national hero," amplified through state media, alongside presidential powers stronger than those Boris Yeltsin ever held.

  Analysts use the phrase "sovereign democracy" for an arrangement in which oligarchs created by the market chaos of the 1990s offer Putin "absolute fealty" in return for protection. The cooperative known as Ozero supplies critics with their standard example of nepotism inside the system. Observers summarize the selective application of law with a blunt formula: "Everything is for the friends, the law is for the enemies."

  Analysts also describe a "manual control" style of governance. Formal government carries little real weight in this picture, while decisions form backstage, hidden from public view. The system positions itself against what it calls Western "decadence," including "same-sex marriage, radical feminism, homosexuality, mass immigration." Eurasianism, meanwhile, holds that Russian civilization belongs to neither Europe nor Asia but to a standalone geopolitical space called Eurasia. In foreign affairs, commentators note nostalgia for the Soviet Union's Cold War standing against the United States, backed by so-called "pipeline diplomacy," the use of energy exports as a political tool.

  Following a referendum, Putin signed an executive order on the 3rd of July 2020 inserting constitutional amendments that took effect the very next day. Russian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov and Soviet dissident Alexander Podrabinek argued the amendments pushed Russia toward totalitarianism, seizing control of public and private life while criminalizing dissent. Western politicians, responding later to the Russo-Ukrainian war, summarized the whole system in three words: authoritarianism, imperialism, ethno-nationalism.

• 4. Naming The System

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  Andrey Piontkovsky coined the word Putinism itself, in an article Sovetskaya Rossiya published on the 11th of January 2000, the same day the Yabloko party posted it online. He called it "the highest and final stage of bandit capitalism in Russia," a war of "consolidation" built on ethnic hatred, censorship, and isolation from the outside world.

  Former Securitate general Ion Mihai Pacepa offered a starker comparison of ratios. The Soviet Union kept one KGB officer for every 428 citizens, he wrote, while Putin's Russia keeps one FSB officer for every 297. Pacepa noted these officers still control 6,000 nuclear weapons and the strategic oil industry Putin renationalized, along with the power to monitor citizens, search homes, and run prisons.

  Politologist Julie Anderson called the result an "FSB State" whose closest partners are organized criminals, a danger she linked to transnational terrorism's use of any available means. Former KGB officer Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy answered the question of how many Russians work for the FSB with one word: "Whole country," adding that the agency owns the army and "even own Church." Intelligence expert Reuel Marc Gerecht argued that not even fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union were "as top-heavy with intelligence talent" as Putin's Russia.

  Andrei Illarionov, once an adviser to Putin, described a "Corporation of Intelligence Service Collaborators" that seized the Tax Service, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Parliament, and state media. Members follow an omerta-like code and receive "perks" such as the right to carry weapons. A former KGB general said marriages between siloviki clans are actively encouraged, since "a good KGB heritage" is highly valued.

  Politician Boris Nemtsov and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza defined the system in 2004 as one-party rule with censorship, a puppet parliament, and no independent judiciary. Piontkovsky argued Russia is not merely corrupt, since its businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats are "the same people" who privatized the country's wealth. Journalist Masha Gessen called the result a "mafia state." Former CIA director James Woolsey illustrated the overlap with a hypothetical Russian executive in Gucci loafers who might be a businessman, an intelligence officer, and an organized criminal all at once, with no contradiction between the three. Political analyst Dmitri Glinski compared the state to a "stationary bandit" imposing order after the "roving bandits" of the 1990s, and pointed to April 2006, when privatized customs revenue reportedly left Putin himself furious that officials and businessmen had "merged in ecstasy."

  Andrey Kolesnikov, describing the years since Putin's third term, would later fold every one of these labels into a single ideological current.

• 5. Nationalism And Empire

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  Andrey Kolesnikov describes Putin's rule since his third term as a melding of nationalist imperialism, conservative Orthodoxy, and authoritarian echoes of Stalinism. Politologist Irina Pavlova argued the Chekists pursue long-standing goals beyond money, including transforming Moscow into the "Third Rome" and containing the United States. Columnist George Will called Putinism "a toxic brew of nationalism directed against neighboring nations," paired with populist resentment of private wealth, and "national socialism without the demonic element of its pioneer." Illarionov named the Chekist ideology Nashism, or "ours-ism," built on the selective application of rights.

  In February 2021, Putin linked his own thinking to theorist Lev Gumilyov's concept of "passionarity," the rise and fall of civilizations. He described Russia as a nation that "has not yet attained its highest point" and possesses an "infinite genetic code." Michael Hirsh of Foreign Policy relayed Russia experts' warning against reading Putin as simply an ex-KGB officer angry at NATO's post-Cold War expansion. In a speech on the 21st of February, Putin disavowed the Soviet legacy itself, criticizing Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin for granting Ukraine partial autonomy. He called the idea of a separate, democratic Ukrainian nation "comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us," framing himself instead as a messianic nationalist invoking Kievan Rus.

  Ethnic nationalists, meanwhile, criticize Putin's own immigration policy for allowing large-scale migration from Central Asia and the Caucasus into Russia's Slavic regions. On television in 2003, Putin dismissed the slogan "Russia for Russians" as the work of "either idiots or provocateurs" seeking to weaken a country he called multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. A 2002 anti-extremism law nonetheless closed nationalist groups, including the Movement Against Illegal Immigration and the Slavic Union. Robert Horvath of La Trobe University traced the pattern to the 1990s, when waves of racist violence gave Putin's government, after 2000, a rationale for anti-extremism laws that were also turned against pro-democracy and left-wing activists. On the 25th of December 2022, Putin stated on television, apparently for the first time, that Russia's goal was territorially to "unite the Russian people" as an ethnic group.

  That declaration of ethnic purpose is exactly the kind of evidence historians reach for when they debate whether Putinism has crossed into outright fascism.

• 6. Fascism Debate

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  Most experts studying Putin's Russia conclude it is not fascist, despite sharing traits like revanchism and what some call "hypermasculine authority." Historian Stanley G. Payne argued the system revives Tsar Nicholas I's 19th century creed of "Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality," rather than the revolutionary, modernizing drive of Hitler or Mussolini. Sheri Berman contrasted Hitler and Mussolini's rise through mass movements with Putin, who "came up as an apparatchik" and prefers a demobilized public, often pictured "sitting alone at the end of the table." Oxford historian Roger Griffin compared Putin's Russia to World War Two era Japan, a state that "emulated fascism in many ways, but was not fascist."

  Others argue the opposite. Historian Timothy Snyder points to Putin's repeated quotations of Ivan Ilyin, a pro-fascist white emigre philosopher Snyder calls a major ideological inspiration. Aleksandr Dugin, once a marginal Eurasianist, became a semi-official philosopher of the regime, and in 2023 headed the newly established Ivan Ilyin Higher School of Politics. Journalist Andrei Malgin compared Putin's drive to restore a "lost" empire, backed by the church and "traditional values," to Benito Mussolini's Italy. Piontkovsky likened the ideology of Rashism to German Nazism.

  Dutch scholar Marcel Van Herpen detailed parallels with Weimar Germany and Mussolini's Italy, but concluded the result is a hybrid he calls "Fascism-lite," tempered by echoes of Napoleon III's Bonapartism and Silvio Berlusconi's populism. American historian Peter Sucia argued in 2010 that fascism, as an anti-Marxist strain of socialism, fit Putin better than any diehard Marxist label. A true Marxist leader, Sucia wrote, "wouldn't get on a plane" to lobby for hosting the Olympics in his own hometown.

  The Olympic bid Sucia cited was itself a distraction from a harder question: whether Putinism, for all its nationalism, still secretly answers to Soviet ideas.

• 7. Soviet Ghosts

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  In December 2018, Putin declared that "restoration of socialism in Russia is impossible," though he allowed that "certain elements of socialization" remained possible. In October 2021, he compared the modern West's agenda to the Bolsheviks', accusing both of using "so-called social progress" to destroy "age-old values, religion and relations between people." He warned Western nations to "beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go, not only communalising chickens, but also communalising women." Political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov nonetheless argued Putin's regime clings to Soviet tradition. He called its "missionary ideology of world domination" a descendant of Marxist world revolution, and even likened it to Trotskyism.

  In May 2000, The Guardian reported that former Soviet dissidents who had warned of "modernised Stalinism" under Putin were being dismissed as "hysterical prophets of doom," before his early actions gave their warning new resonance. Lionel Beehner, formerly of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in 2007 that nostalgia for Stalin had grown even among young Russians. Radio host Yevgeniya Albats pushed back on a listener who called the country Stalinist, saying "there is no Stalinism, no concentration camps, thankfully," while still warning that uncritical calls for the "tsar to stay on" could lead somewhere dark.

  As FSB director, Putin took his first controversial step in June 1999, restoring a memorial plaque to former KGB chief Yuri Andropov. By late 2000, he had persuaded the State Duma to readopt the melody of the old Soviet national anthem, paired with new lyrics from the same author who had written the original. In September 2003, Putin called the Soviet Union "a very complicated page" that was "heroic and constructive, and also tragic," but insisted "the boat has sailed." By February 2004, his language had hardened. He called the Soviet collapse a "national tragedy" that left ordinary citizens with nothing, noting that Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev had opposed the breakup outright. In his April 2005 address to Parliament, Putin called the Soviet collapse "a major geopolitical disaster of the century" that left tens of millions of compatriots stranded outside Russian territory.

  In a December 2007 interview with Time, he framed Russian patriotism as "love for the Motherland," a trait he said Americans share "to a significant extent." In August 2008, The Economist described a Russia run by "the KGB elite," complete with a Soviet anthem and a new textbook calling the USSR "an example for millions of people... of the best and fairest society." Three months later, the International Herald Tribune reported that archives on Soviet-era killings were growing "increasingly off-limits." Putin maintained an amicable relationship with Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, and journalist Roger Boyes judged him closer to Leonid Brezhnev than to Stalin. In August 2014, Putin rejected Vladimir Zhirinovsky's proposal to restore the Imperial flag and anthem. On the 30th of October 2017, he opened the Wall of Grief, Russia's first memorial to victims of Stalinist repression.

  Harvard's Fredrik Logevall has said simply that "history is what drives him," while Oliver Bullough of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting identifies two goals behind it: restoring stability and returning Russia to great power status. In a November 2023 speech, Putin argued that submitting to the Mongol Golden Horde had once preserved "the Russian people," after Alexander Nevsky obtained a khan's permission, a jarlyk, to rule as prince and resist the West instead. On the 9th of June 2022, marking the 350th anniversary of Peter the Great's birth, Putin described land Peter had seized from Sweden in the Great Northern War as territory now simply being returned to Russia. A 2014 paper in the Journal of Eurasian Studies compared Putin directly to Emperor Nicholas I, arguing both used patriotism, power, and statism to justify centralized, authoritarian rule.

  Putin has called the Soviet collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" in 2005, "a disintegration of historical Russia" in a 2021 documentary, and simply the "collapse of the historical Russia" in his 2022 speech on Ukraine. He has also said that "anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart," adding that "anyone who wants it restored has no brains." He has repeatedly blamed Vladimir Lenin's policies toward national minorities for destabilizing the union, going so far in 2022 as to say that "modern Ukraine was entirely created by... Bolshevik, Communist Russia." President Joe Biden read this as proof Putin "wants to... reestablish the former Soviet Union," a claim historian Mario Kessler disputed. Kessler argued Putin pursues tsarist imperial ambitions incompatible with Lenin's internationalism. Cihan Tugal of the University of California, Berkeley described Putin's view of history as one where only Russia is "real and natural" and other former Soviet nations are mere "communist artefacts." Naomi Klein traced part of his motivation to the lingering shame of the economic shock therapy Russia endured after the Cold War.

  That same shock therapy era, critics on both the American left and the European right would later argue, is precisely why so many of them, thousands of miles from Moscow, chose to defend the Kremlin rather than confront it.

• 8. Western Sympathizers

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  Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements, called Russian anti-Americanism after the Russo-Georgian War ironic. "We are anti-American because we want to be exactly like America," he said. Levada-Center polling nonetheless found Russians viewing the United States more favorably by August 2018, following a Russia-U.S. summit held in Helsinki in July 2018. The Pew Research Center measured a generational split, with 57 percent of Russians aged 18 to 29 seeing the U.S. favorably against just 15 percent of those 50 and older. Dmitri Trenin of the Moscow Carnegie Center described anti-Americanism becoming the basis of official patriotism, as Moscow stopped pretending to share Western values on democracy, human rights, and family, and built alliances with anti-American governments in China and Iran instead.

  Far-right politicians including France's Marine Le Pen, Italy's Matteo Salvini, and parts of Germany's Alternative for Germany have all drawn links to Putin, though some populists distanced themselves after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Richard Shorten of the University of Birmingham said Putin appeals beyond extreme "manosphere" white supremacists to "mainstream" Western reactionaries drawn to unapologetic social conservatism. Yale's Jason Stanley called him the self-styled "leader of Russian Christian nationalism."

  The National Post reported that hardline Western socialists, lacking a socialist state to rally around since the Soviet collapse, redirected their opposition to the United States into support for Putin's Russia, citing Canadian Green Party eco-socialist Dimitri Lascaris as one example. French politician Jean-Luc Melenchon faced accusations of Kremlin sympathy from journalist Nicolas Henin and author Cecile Vaissie, though Melenchon insisted he was "absolutely fighting" Putin's policy and backed the imprisoned Sergey Udaltsov of the Russian Left Front instead.

  German politician Sahra Wagenknecht defended Russia before the war, arguing Moscow had "no interest in marching into Ukraine." She admitted her judgment had been wrong after the invasion began on the 24th of February 2022. She still opposed sanctions, telling a September 2022 rally that Germany, once supplied with over half its gas from Russia, was waging "an unprecedented economic war against our most important energy supplier." On the 10th of February 2023, Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer launched a peace petition that gathered 700,000 signatures within weeks. Slovakia's Smer party, Russophilic and Eurosceptic while still backing EU and NATO membership, has blamed the Russo-Ukrainian war on a proxy conflict it says was provoked by the "extermination of citizens of Russian nationality by Ukrainian fascists" in 2014.

  The rally Wagenknecht and Schwarzer held on the 25th of February 2023 drew far-right groups alongside their own supporters, a crowd German observers described at the time as appealing to the Querfront, the cross-front where the political extremes meet.