Things in Russia are not as bad as in the old Soviet times. They are worse’.

It has become commonplace to perceive Vladimir Putin Like a throwback to Soviet ways.

So it seemed natural to me that, shortly after the reporter of The Wall Street Journal, Evan Gershkovich, was arrested in Russia, when he met a woman he had known in Moscow in Soviet times, he regretted that things were more and more like those bad days.

“No,” he told me, “they’re worse.”

She had been a rebel and had left Moscow as soon as possible, so I was surprised by her response.

But I also heard it from other Russians, both inside and outside the country.

And the more I remember my days as a journalist in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, the longer the terrible massacre of Ukrainethe more I understand what they mean.

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In light of what your country is inflicting on Ukraine, it’s hard to talk about the Russians as victims.

This, in fact, may be one of the main reasons why many respectable Russians feel that Putin’s Russia, their Russia, is worse than the Soviet state whose demise they mourn.

They thought their nation had rid itself of the horrible tyranny of its past, and Putin is not only reliving it, but also bringing shame and alienation to your country.

The Soviet Union these Russians trace back to is their later years, not hell Joseph Stalin.

In its day, the 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviet Union was still a repressive police state who maintained a jealous and iron grip on information, art, business, and nearly every other human enterprise.

It was a far more intrusive level of repression than Putin and his security apparatus could ever have replicated, given the reach of the Internet and the continued ability of Russians to travel abroad.

No old Soviet dissident would deny that the physical quality of life in Russia is far superior to that of those Spartan times.

Yet the years after Stalin, and especially the last decades of the Soviet regime, oppressive as they were, seemed at least to be moving towards something better.

The random terror of the Stalin era had given way to a more coordinated system of control: still brutally repressive, but more predictable and less arbitrary.

Stalin’s highly personalized dictatorship was replaced by a more collegiate system of government.

Charles Kupchan, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me a Soviet leader probably would he would not have survived to a decision as disastrous as the invasion of Ukraine.

And as the Soviet old guard died out in the 1980s, the need for change was clearly felt, and it finally came with Mikhail Gorbachev.

For those who were there, it is impossible to forget the thrill of watching people explore long-forbidden ideas, arts, freedoms and pleasures.

“We make a distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies, but there is also a distinction between ‘openings’ and ‘closings’,” says Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist and one of the leading chroniclers of the collapse of the Soviet Union. empire, he told me.

“The Soviet generation of the 70s and 80s lived in a closed society that was opening up, discovering that things that were previously impossible were becoming possible.

Putin’s is a period of radical closures.

People are lose things who believed they were finally granted.

The openings have led to hope; this system leads to despair”.

Putin may not have the same influence as his Soviet predecessors.

The globally connected, commercialized society that evolved in Russia in the three decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union cannot go back into the bottle.

Putin does not have the utopian ideology which allowed Soviet leaders to claim they were working for the betterment of humanity, yet invented a kind of national narrative based on Russian and Soviet history and mythology and their dislike of the West.

Instead, what he has done is create a system in which everything – the government, the political police, the legislature, the military – it depends personally of the.

If the most common charge used to imprison dissidents in the final decades of Soviet rule was “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation,” an omnibus law that at least made it clear that the crime was against the Soviet regime, then

Putin lashes out at his opponents with random weapons, whether it be the apparent poisoning of Alexei Navalny by his government or the sentence of Vladimir Kara-Murza to 25 years in prison for treason.

Accusing Gershkovich of espionage may have been motivated, at least in part, by anger that someone of Russian descent would dare report the truth about Russia.

The crackdown has intensified since the invasion of Ukraine, making it difficult to gauge the level of resistance.

Ten days after the invasion, the police arrested more than 4,600 protesters in Russia, and hundreds of thousands of Russian men fled the country to avoid being drafted into the military.

But those who resist and those who leave are not greeted with the respect that was shown to Soviet dissidents.

Back then, non-Russian ethnic groups might have identified the Soviet yoke with Russia, but communist ideology was universalist, and Russians who opposed it saw themselves as allies of other oppressed nationalities and the West in their struggle.

Russians arriving in New York, Tel Aviv or Berlin felt free from the stain of collusion; and since there were many writers, poets, musicians and artists in the ranks of the dissidents, Russian culture shared the glow of liberation.

Putin’s rule and his invasion of Ukraine changed everything.

This is a war waged by Russia against Ukraine in the name of Russia’s imperial claim, and it is difficult for any Russian person or thing – language, culture, background – to fully escape the stigma.

It is especially galling for conscientious Russians to hear Putin use the anti-fascist language of World War II – the only feat in Soviet history of which all its people are proud – in an effort to destroy Ukraine.

The impact is largely evident.

Russian restaurants, including those that have reconfigured their menus, are struggling to stay open.

Stolichnaya vodka was renamed Stoli.

A bottle of limited edition It carries a tag in the blue and yellow colors of Ukraine, with the inscription #LIBERATEUKRAINE.

The New York Metropolitan Opera has renounced its Russian diva, Anna Netrebko, for not giving up on Putin.

I have heard scholars express regret about the Russian focus in post-Soviet studies.

The list goes on and it’s hard to argue against cancellations.

“Russians may say this is not my regime, but they cannot say this is not my country,” Krastev said.

It is too early to predict how the Ukrainian war will end.

What is clear is that Putin, in the name of ephemeral Russian greatness, has done great and lasting damage to his people and culture.

c.2023 The New York Times Society