What the West doesn’t still understand about Russia - Olga Lautman (Substack)

What the West doesn’t still understand about Russia

Olga Lautman

Substack, June 26, 3926

Over the past few months, Western media have been flooded with headlines speculating that Vladimir Putin is under growing pressure, that a coup may be brewing, or that his grip on power is finally beginning to weaken. As Ukraine continues raising the costs of Russia’s genocidal war, systematically exposing vulnerabilities the Kremlin spent decades trying to hide, many are once again asking the same familiar questions: Could the regime be approaching a breaking point? Who might eventually replace Putin? And what comes after him?

Every time another one of those headlines appears, or someone asks me those questions, I give the same response. After repeating it for years, I decided to sit down and explain it in detail because it remains one of the biggest misconceptions shaping how journalists, policymakers, and people who closely follow Russia think about the country. Far too much of the analysis coming out still views Russia through a Western lens, assuming its institutions function like ours or that changing the face of the Kremlin somehow changes the system.

One of the things I have been saying for years is that Putin did not create this system. He is a symptom of a system that created the likes of Stalin, Brezhnev, and others. Long before Putin entered politics, Russia’s security services had already spent generations perfecting repression, bloody imperial conquests, information warfare, active measures, assassinations, agents of influence, corruption as an instrument of statecraft, and the systematic elimination of anyone viewed as a threat to the state. Putin inherited those institutions, strengthened and modernized them, and adapted them for the twenty-first century, but he definitely did not invent them. To understand Russia, you have to stop looking only at the man sitting behind the desk inside the Kremlin and start looking at the system that has survived tsars, revolutions, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and every leader who came before him.

The continuity becomes difficult to ignore once you begin looking for it. Even before the Bolsheviks seized power, the Tsarist Okhrana—the Russian Empire's secret police established in the late 1800s—had already developed an extensive security apparatus built around surveillance, infiltration, informants, political repression, covert operations, counterintelligence, espionage, and crushing dissent. The Bolsheviks seized it and simply expanded it. Felix Dzerzhinsky's Cheka institutionalized terror inside the country on an unprecedented scale before evolving into the GPU, NKVD, KGB, and eventually today's FSB and SVR. The names and uniforms changed, but the governing principles remained the same.

The security services were never simply intelligence agencies. They were the backbone of the Russian state. Another point Western policymakers have consistently failed to understand is that Russia’s security services are not the equivalent of Western intelligence or law enforcement agencies because they perform a fundamentally different role within the Russian state.

Over the course of more than a century, they embedded themselves into virtually every aspect of Russian society, extending their influence far beyond intelligence collection into politics, the military, law enforcement, the judiciary, state corporations, strategic industries, banking, the private sector, organized crime, the media, academia, think tanks, culture, the Church, and countless other institutions.

The same continuity can even be seen in institutions that many people would never associate with intelligence services. Long before the Bolsheviks seized power, the Russian Orthodox Church had already become deeply intertwined with the Tsarist state, with the Okhrana using clergy, informants, and church networks to monitor dissent and reinforce loyalty to the empire. After the Revolution, that relationship was violently dismantled as the new regime massacred thousands of clergy, burned, looted, and demolished churches, confiscated church property, and waged one of history's largest campaigns of state-sponsored persecution.

Joseph Stalin, an atheist, continued that persecution for years before abruptly reversing course during World War II, not because he suddenly discovered faith, but because he recognized the Church's value as another instrument for mobilizing patriotism, strengthening national unity during wartime, and projecting Soviet influence. The Church was restored under the watchful eye of the NKGB and, later, the KGB, which placed it firmly under state control by recruiting clergy, cultivating loyal hierarchies, and using religious institutions for intelligence gathering, espionage, influence operations, and propaganda both at home and abroad.

That relationship did not disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It simply adapted once again. Today, the Moscow Patriarchate, led by Patriarch Kirill, who served the KGB during the Soviet era under the codename “Mikhailov,” remains one of the Kremlin's most effective tools of influence across Europe, the Balkans, the U.S., Africa, and beyond. Investigations in multiple countries have documented Russian Orthodox churches being used for espionage, influence operations, propaganda, and, in some cases, providing cover and logistical support for Russian intelligence officers.

The same pattern repeats itself throughout Russian history. Long before anyone had heard the phrase “hybrid warfare,” Soviet intelligence was cultivating agents of influence, financing front organizations, forging documents, interfering in democratic politics, manipulating foreign media, and conducting some of the largest disinformation operations. One example, decades before social media existed, was Operation INFEKTION, which falsely blamed the United States for creating AIDS. Today’s information warfare is not something Putin invented, but an evolution of methods that security services spent generations refining.

Soviet intelligence also supported many extremist movements and terrorist organizations across multiple continents while simultaneously portraying itself as a champion of “peace.” Even the methods of domestic repression have shown continuity. Under Stalin, then Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, Soviet authorities diagnosed dissidents with “sluggish schizophrenia” and put them into psychiatric hospitals because criticizing the state was treated as evidence of mental illness. Decades later, psychiatric detention has returned under Putin, alongside the imprisonment, poisoning, assassination, and persecution of political opponents and journalists.

Nowhere is this misunderstanding more blatant than in discussions about Ukraine. Every February, countless politicians, journalists, and pundits speak about "Russia's invasion of Ukraine" as though this began in 2022. The more informed correctly point out that the invasion and war actually began in 2014. Both perspectives miss the much larger historical reality that Russia has occupied, partitioned, colonized, and repeatedly attempted to erase Ukraine and the Ukrainian identity on and off for centuries. Stalin's Holodomor genocide deliberately starved upwards of five to seven million Ukrainians. This was decades before NATO even existed and long before the Kremlin could manufacture today's familiar justifications for its genocidal aggression.

The propaganda that Russia is responding to NATO expansion collapses under even the most basic understanding of Russian history because Moscow's imperial ambitions toward Ukraine predate Putin.

The same misunderstanding shaped Western thinking after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin was widely celebrated as the "democratic reformer" who had finally broken with Russia's repressive and imperial past. As the West celebrated what it believed was its victory in the Cold War, far less attention was paid to the fact that the security services survived largely intact. Furthermore, the First Chechen War demonstrated that Russia’s imperial ambitions had not disappeared.

The chaotic privatization of the 1990s gave rise to a new mafia state in which organized crime, corrupt state officials, and current and former KGB/FSB agents became so deeply intertwined that separating one from the other often became impossible. Protected by krysha (a roof) provided by security services and political connections, criminal networks, political insiders, and emerging business elites accumulated vast state assets, creating a new class of oligarchs whose fortunes ultimately depended not on the rule of law or free markets, but on their relationship with the state.

If the West misunderstood Yeltsin, it completely missed the boat on Putin. He was presented as a reformer and anti-corruption figure who would restore stability after the violent chaos of the 1990s. His rise to power came alongside an FSB-orchestrated series of terrorist attacks. The apartment building bombings killed hundreds of Russians and were immediately blamed on “Chechen terrorists.” This became the catalyst for launching the Second Chechen War, transforming the little-known former KGB agent and FSB director into a leader who promised to restore order and protect the nation.

The subsequent Ryazan incident, in which local authorities discovered FSB agents planting what appeared to be explosives in another apartment building, together with the revelations by FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, showed that the bombings had been orchestrated by Putin and then FSB director Nikolai Patrushev. After fleeing Russia, Litvinenko publicly accused the FSB of carrying out the attacks to help install Putin into power. In 2006, he was murdered in London with radioactive polonium-210 in an assassination that the British concluded was carried out by Russia. Whether through political assassinations, poisonings, covert operations, or campaigns of intimidation, the use of violence and fear as instruments also did not begin with Putin.

Long before Putin entered the Kremlin, Russia's security services had repeatedly relied on provocations, fabricated conspiracies, manipulated narratives, covert violence, and other forms of deception to justify repression, consolidate power, silence dissidents, and manufacture public support for state policies. Those tactics appeared under the Tsars, evolved under the Soviet Union, and continue to shape the Kremlin’s policies today.

Another misconception lies in the understanding that Russia’s oligarchs have some sort of control over Putin. The relationship works entirely in the opposite direction. Many amassed enormous fortunes through the privatization of state assets during the chaotic 1990s, but they kept those fortunes only with the Kremlin’s approval. Property rights in Russia have never truly belonged to the individual, and exist only as long as the state permits them to exist.

When Putin came to power, he replaced much of Yeltsin's elite with loyalists from his St. Petersburg criminal and KGB/FSB networks. Loyalty was rewarded with enormous wealth, but only for as long as it served the interests of the Kremlin. In return, Russia's wealthiest businessmen were expected to advance state interests, finance Kremlin priorities, use their international business, political, and financial networks whenever called upon, carry out malign influence operations, and perform any other operations demanded of them. Those who refused were stripped of their riches, prosecuted, imprisoned, or driven into exile. Anyone who mistakes immense wealth for political independence misunderstands how the Russian system operates. Russia's oligarchs are not above the state, but are another instrument of it. And when the Kremlin decides one of them has outlived his usefulness, become politically inconvenient, or simply possesses assets someone more loyal wants, yesterday's billionaire quickly becomes today's criminal—or, in Russia's fashion, another prominent businessman manages to fall out of a window before the state redistributes or simply seizes his assets.

While many in the West believed they had won the Cold War, Russia's hardliners never accepted defeat. Humiliated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, they blamed the West rather than the corruption, repression, and failures of the communist system. They retreated, regrouped, adapted to the new political and economic realities, and quietly began restoring the system many in the West believed had collapsed. The post-Soviet transition allowed the security services, their networks, and many of their methods to survive, evolve, and eventually reemerge.

One of the most revealing symbols of that continuity stands outside Russia's intelligence headquarters. When protesters pulled Felix Dzerzhinsky's statue down from Lubyanka Square in 1991, many celebrated it as the symbolic end of the Soviet security state. But it wasn't. More than three decades later, Russia unveiled a new statue of Dzerzhinsky outside the headquarters of the SVR, while Putin restored Dzerzhinsky's name to the FSB Academy. Instead of treating the Cheka's mass-murdering founder as one of the darkest figures in Russian history, the Kremlin openly celebrates him as part of its institutional heritage.

None of this is meant to suggest that Putin is not a central figure. He has undoubtedly shaped modern Russia, dramatically expanded its aggression against Ukraine, the West, and beyond, intensified global information warfare and political interference, and bears responsibility for countless crimes, war crimes, and genocide. But the mistake is believing that Putin created this system or that post-Putin Russia will somehow be fundamentally different. Long before Putin entered politics, Russia's security services had already embedded themselves into virtually every major institution of the state, perfected repression, political violence, information warfare, imperial conquest, and active measures, and survived every political transformation the country has undergone for centuries. Removing one man from the Kremlin does not dismantle the system that produced him.

That is precisely the analytical mistake the West made after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and one it cannot afford to repeat. Russia has changed tsars, general secretaries, presidents, flags, constitutions, and the names of its security services, yet the institutions, networks, underlying principles, and imperial worldview have shown remarkable continuity across generations. Until those institutions change, replacing Putin with another face in the Kremlin will not transform the Russian state.

The West has spent decades searching for Russia's next reformer while Russia's security services have spent those same decades ensuring the system survives whoever comes next. Until policymakers stop asking who comes after Putin and start asking whether the system that produced him has changed, they will continue repeating the same mistake.

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