I posted a piece recently in another thread about Russia’s Descent Into Tyranny (here is an archived version). It is one of the best, straight-to-the point articles about Russia’s societal and economic development under Putin in the four years of the his invasion of Ukraine I’ve ever read.

The author is Nina Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York City. She is the great-granddaughter of former leader of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev.

A paraphrased summary:

… To visit Russia over the past four years has been to observe the consolidation of a dictatorship in real time—to answer the question readers confront in 1984, wondering how Big Brother’s gaze became so penetrating and relentless. At the start of the invasion, the state lacked the means to quell all possible opposition, and so it suppressed selectively … But in the time since, Moscow has built a larger repressive apparatus. It has cultivated a climate of fear and uncertainty that encouraged many Russians to silence not just themselves but also one another. The accumulation of subtle changes on the part of both the state and society has led Russia deeper and deeper into tyranny—a cycle that seems unlikely to break as long as Putin’s regime pursues the kind of total control that until recently seemed only to exist in Russia’s communist past or in Orwell’s fiction.

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All over Russia, young men have been recruited to go to the front. Their families receive the equivalent of $2,000 to $20,000, or more, depending on the region. In three years, the government spent almost $38 billion, or 1.5 percent of Russia’s GDP, on these payments. The defense ministry said the army received almost 500,000 new recruits in 2024, and 450,000 in 2025. Some are coerced; some are criminals who would rather go to war than to prison. In addition to getting paid, they are absolved of their crimes … Putin has tried to fashion the campaign in Ukraine as a defensive war, putting it on par with World War II, in Russia known as the “Great Patriotic War”.

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In his 1993 article “Working Towards the Führer”, the British historian Ian Kershaw explained how authoritarianism takes over: through the use of ideology to justify individual and collective actions, through voluntary societal complicity, and through state repression. The leader outlines repressive requirements, then everyone else—starting with his entourage but extending to businesses, governmental and political organizations, schools and universities, and volunteer groups and individuals—make up the rules of behavior. The uber-patriotism of Putinism follows the same script. Ordinary citizens are not just passively complicit but co-authors of repression as they attempt to please their leader and police members of their communities. Officials eager to outdo each other become ever more aggressive in their crackdowns. The result is absurd spectacles as apparatchiks hone the craft of making the abnormal seem normal, and vice versa.

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The government has even turned against regime insiders. Since the summer, there have been daily detentions of once-trusted government officials, politicians, and high-ranking army officers, who now stand accused of corruption. June and July also witnessed the brutal arrests of journalists from the online news outlet Ura.ru and the Telegram channel Baza, both hyperpatriotic, pro-war publications that had been obediently hateful toward “the enemy”—Ukraine, foreign agents, Kremlin critics. In the fall, a few of the most faithful were labeled foreign agents, including Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political propagandist, and Roman Alekhin, a prominent pro-war blogger. The reasons are subject to speculation: Markov dared to offer Putin advice, or perhaps he was too cozy with Azerbaijan. Alekhin could be critical of the Russian battlefield situation. The highly militant Crimean-born blogger Tatiana Montyan skipped foreign agent status altogether and was labeled “terrorist and extremist”, apparently because she criticized certain Kremlin-connected patriots. Now, no independent evaluation of Russia’s actions is tolerated, even when it comes from the most loyal of followers.

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