Imagine a debate between Alexander Filippov (a Russian sociologist, philosopher and translator) who would talk about the sociology of space and say: what do you expect, this is an empire. Sitting opposite him might be Alexander Auzan, who would speak about economics and culture and say: no, it is path dependence. And they would argue over whether there exists some large regenerating structure, very old – at least 500 years old – that constantly reproduces a certain type of power (vlast’). Next to them would be two Western experts. One, like Fiona Hill, would say that Putin is a matryoshka doll because the whole deal is that he was a KGB agent. Across from her would be another expert who would say: no, it is because Putin is a kleptocrat. They sometimes change positions – the imperialist starts arguing with the person who talks about Putin as a KGB agent – but basically there are no other positions.

Within this quadrangle, a feeling arises that the war was inevitable. Many conclusions follow from this. First, that we were naïve idiots because we did not see it coming. Second, that you cannot identify the moment when it became predetermined – essentially, you can take any fragment of Russian history, cut it out and apply it to Crimea, any piece will do. It turns into pure Laplace determinism. Third, a strange contradiction emerges: after all, these 30 years of Russian history did happen. They were different. Russia was somehow different.

How was this possible?

Let’s assume that the war is reversion to the mean. Then why was there such a strange deviation from this mean?

The list of such contradictions could go on. This quadrangle seems very comfortable until you start asking questions – including personal, biographical ones. How could you have been such an idiot? When should you have left – before you were born?

In this sense Adam Tooze’s book, The Wages of Destruction, is crucial. He places Hitler in the economic context of his era and demonstrates that it is actually possible to take Hitler as a factor and analyze how different interests instilled different ideas into Hitler, how coalitions emerged to plant one idea or another in his mind. With this approach, the current war and the preceding annexation of Crimea cease to be invariant. I tried to descend to that level and from there see what I know.

What moments should I take to understand how things could have been different? This brings to mind Gleb Pavlovsky, who said that the phrase “there was no other way” (inogo ne dano) is repugnant in both history and politics. In what sense was there no other way?

This is where my methodological solution arose. As Pavlovsky said, we need to break apart the alloy of what has come to pass and understand how things could have been different. But neither he nor his teacher [Mikhail] Gefter left behind any methodology to do that... So I tried to find one.

You write that the turning point in the history of Russian autocracy was the 2008 global financial crisis, when the Russian elite’s faith in the West’s power was undermined and a powerful resentment arose. What happened in 2008 to trigger such a reversal? Surely it is impossible to say that the West deliberately orchestrated the crisis to harm Russia.

In the early 2000s, the elite consensus was that Russia needed Western money and technology. Russia was perceived as a developing country – with a special political status but also economically developing. At the same time, for those for whom this mattered, it also meant that Russia had lost the Cold War and must now ask the victors for money to finance a normal recovery.

Here I cite a study by Ronald Inglehart, who asks why the Russian elite suddenly became anti-American. His answer is that they believed the West should help and concluded that the West had not helped. So if they are the victors, what are they doing? They rule the world. But they owe us – they were the ones who destroyed the Soviet Union.

Recall that after the 1999 transition, when Putin’s team came to power in Russia, it consisted of people who had no idea how the Soviet Union had actually been governed. And they began attributing to the West things that were completely unnecessary.

Like omnipotence?

Omnipotence. The idea that the capitalist economy is not cyclical, that everything there is controlled. If a war breaks out somewhere, it means someone needed the war, someone is making money from it and so on. There are countless such theories, from the Rothschilds to reptilians.

Ilya Yablokov’s book Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World is very helpful here. It emphasizes that conspiracy theories are the weapon of the defeated. Having lost, the defeated begin to invent a conspiracy that explains why they lost.

So, foreign policy was going in a certain way, and contacts with the US in a certain way. Sure, Putin said some things, spoke, appeared, there was the Munich [Security Conference] speech but no one imagined that Russia could afford to exit global markets. That was impossible. Did anyone in the mid-2000s think that we would gather strength and strike back? I do not remember that.

The Medvedev team’s conceit was that they had Obama, we had Medvedev and that we were equals who decided everything together. The idea of eliminating ourselves from the global system was so far away. There was no revanchism at that point.
Then the crisis happened. It turned out that you could lose vast sums even if you played by the rules. Why play by the rules at all if you could lose anyway? They had to spend $200 billion on a “managed devaluation” of the ruble – letting it fall by 30 or 50 kopecks a day. Fear arose. Then anger. Then grievance. Suddenly what is called ressentiment awakened inside.

But that is like being angry at the cosmic ocean or an earthquake.

That is how we see it. But they had explained the world through conspiracy back in the late Soviet era – even before the defeat. Remember films like TASS Is Authorized to Declare.

We say that this is a huge global economy, a process of unimaginable scale and perhaps not even a single process. And they say: no, someone wants to seize mineral resources in Nagonia.

Then the Dostoevsky moment inevitably comes: if there is no God, then what kind of captain am I? If there is no God, then everything is permitted. If it is possible to behave like that, then why cannot I behave like that, too?

This is how a false picture of the world emerges, in which chaos ceases to be a property of the universe and becomes something that must either be resisted or actively produced.

All this crystallized in 2008.

You could add psychoanalysis and say it happened because Putin’s presidential security detail was removed. The prime minister is not as protected as the president; he cannot call in an air-defense system to his dacha; he is not entitled to a cruiser to keep US ships away from him.

But none of this was predetermined. If this crisis had happened earlier or taken a different form, if three consecutive Fed chairs had not pursued pro-cyclical policies, would Russia have become revanchist? No, not necessarily. The elites might have become revanchist; they would have aged and new elites might have emerged – perhaps revanchist in a different way.

In Iran, they have managed to reach the point where even young progressives, according to accounts, sit around saying: no, we are 3,000 years old, we need a nuclear bomb. But even there, this did not have to become state policy.
The crisis just happened.

In your book, you show how it all came to pass that Ukraine was invaded: Russian relations with Ukraine, the 2008 turning point, the way the structure of Putin’s majority changed over the years, then the structure of the ruling class and finally the transformation of Russia into a citadel, as you put it. Reading the book, we learn a great deal about the structure of our autocracy, but we have absolutely no way of saying when it will end.

Putin is president for life – that is the concept. Nazism and fascism were experiments with forms of autocratic rule, but they ended badly, so he is called president, not führer. Then the Arab format of lifelong presidency emerged. It reached Azerbaijan. Putin is now heading in the same direction.