For the fourth consecutive New Year’s Eve, Russians listened to Putin’s “victory speech”: the announcement of a triumph on the Ukrainian front, in a war that continues to drag on far beyond what he had foreseen and promised.
This speech came 26 years after Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had surprisingly announced his resignation in his end-of-year message: 26 years ago the first president of post-Soviet Russia handed over power at the start of the new millennium to a former secret service officer turned politician, who had only held the position of prime minister for a few months.
In a quarter of a century Putin devastated the breakaway republic of Chechnya, invaded Georgia, supported the carnage of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, until its fall. And of course it attacked and invaded Ukraine twice, in 2014 and early 2022.
But how has Putin transformed his Russia since the turn of the millennium? A severe assessment of the “descent into tyranny” is proposed by a great Russian expert in exile, who has an interesting biography. She is Nina Khrushcheva, professor of International Relations at the New School in New York, specializing in the politics and society of post-Soviet Russia. He is also the great-grandson of Nikita Khrushchev, who was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1964, a protagonist of de-Stalinization and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In addition to the scholar’s authority, this family legacy gives her writings a particular historical sensitivity in the comparison between the USSR and the Russia of Vladimir Putin.
Here I propose a summary of his essay which appears in the new issue of the magazine Foreign Affairs and is entitled «Russia’s descent into tyranny. How four years of war transformed society.”
Nina Khrushcheva describes the Russia of 2025 as a country that, since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has experienced an accelerated transformation towards a form of modern tyranny, not identical to Soviet totalitarianism but increasingly similar, in its daily effects, to the universe of dystopian novel «1984» by George Orwell. The sudden success of that novel in Russia, which has become an almost clandestine and symbolic object, is not a trivial detail: Russians read Orwell as a prophetic mirror of their present.
At the beginning of the war, the author recalls, the Kremlin did not yet have the tools for total repression. The initial strategy was therefore selective: to hit the most visible dissidents harshly, leaving the rest of the population with the illusion of possible normality in exchange for passivity. This phase produced a vast phenomenon of self-censorship. Many citizens stopped expressing themselves openly, while others sought indirect forms of dissent, often symbolic or cultural.
As the months passed, however, the State built a much more widespread repressive apparatus. “Foreign agent” laws have been transformed into a tool for the systematic criminalization of dissent. In just a few years, the number of individuals and organizations included in the official lists has quadrupled. Independent media, journalists, writers, artists, academics have been progressively expelled from public space.
One of the central concepts of the article is that of «dual reality». On the one hand, a Stalinist repression hits those who dare to leave the tracks imposed by the regime; on the other hand, for those who submit or pretend to do so, an apparently normal life is still possible: frequenting bookstores, museums, shopping centers, consuming Western cultural products, as long as without explicit political declarations.
This ambiguity generates a typically Russian condition, which Khrushcheva links to historical tradition of “doublethink”: say one thing and think another, live simultaneously in two incompatible worlds. It is a dynamic already experienced in the USSR, when propaganda described the country as a paradise while millions of people were deported to gulags.
Over time, however, the war stopped remaining in the background. Drone attacks, sabotage, explosions, closures of airports and railway lines, shortages of goods due to sanctions: all this has made conflict a constant presence in daily life. Prices increase, choices decreaseand more and more citizens seek psychological refuge in cultural spaces that simulate belonging to the West.
Khrushcheva insists on the contrast between the modernity of everyday life – travel, technology, service economy – and the ideology that the Kremlin tries to impose: a neo-traditionalist, religious and patriarchal vision, which exalts the nuclear family, the subordination of women, the refusal of civil rights and the total opposition to the West. Unlike Soviet ideology, which promised an egalitarian future, this narrative looks back to a pre-industrial past that is hardly credible for an urbanized and educated society.
Putin’s Russia, the author underlines, is not an ideologically mobilized society. It is a tired society, which accepts war more out of inertia and fear than out of conviction. Polls show a progressive decline in support for continuing the conflict and a growing demand for peace negotiations. The Kremlin knows this, and for now avoids total mobilization, preferring a “voluntary” recruitment system incentivized by high financial rewards and the cancellation of sentences for conscripted prisoners.
The result is a creeping militarization of society: wounded and maimed soldiers return to the cities, perceived not as heroes but as disturbing figures; the economic cost of war is growing; the state budget is increasingly unbalanced in favor of military spendingwhile other sectors decline.
One of the original aspects of Khrushcheva’s analysis is the attention to the “gray areas” of censorship. In Russia no one knows for sure what is allowed and what is not. This uncertainty is not a defect of the system, but its fundamental characteristic: it induces permanent self-control.
Books, plays, exhibitions, even classical statues are suddenly deemed “immoral” or “unpatriotic”. Terms like “freedom” or innocuous geographical references can become suspect. In this climate, citizens and institutions compete to demonstrate patriotic zeal, often anticipating official repression.
Echoing the historian Ian Kershaw, Khrushcheva describes a mechanism in which the leader indicates a vague and repressive direction, and society itself takes charge of “working in the direction of the leader”, producing complaints, informal rules, moralizing campaigns. Informing, which almost disappeared after the collapse of the USSR, has returned as a widespread and socially legitimized practice.
Ultranationalist groups openly collaborate with the police; ordinary citizens report neighbors, colleagues, teachers. Repression thus becomes a participatory phenomenon, not just imposed from above.
Despite everything, Khrushcheva concludes that the transformation is not yet complete. There are cracks in the system: journalists who continue to work, intellectuals who resist, small symbolic gestures of dissent that escape total control. But it is precisely this instability that pushes the regime to further tighten its grip, extending digital censorship, limiting access to the Internet and repressing even loyalists who show the slightest autonomy of judgement.
Russia entering 2026 is therefore suspended between two outcomes: a total war with general mobilization or a peace that would raise devastating questions for the regime. In both cases, the author concludes, the Kremlin believes absolute control of society is essential. It is this logic, even more than the war itself, that has dragged Russia into its current descent into tyranny.
January 1, 2026
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