In February 2000, I met my friend and mentor, the anthropologist Vladimir Arsenyev, for a beer in a musty St. Petersburg University cafeteria. We were talking politics, and we fell into a conversation about the upcoming presidential election, which Vladimir Putin was obviously bound to win. Putin had succeeded Boris Yeltsin after the latter’s resignation and was seeking his first full term in power.

Arsenyev, then in his early 50s, was a fiery postcolonial leftist who hated the Soviet Union, but considered the emerging Russian mix of imperialism and capitalism to be even worse. He was not popular among his colleagues and was also disliked by some of his students who saw him as a kind of anti-corporate maverick.

My political orientation was rather different. I was decades younger than Arsenyev, and my whole childhood had been colored by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because I had experienced chaos, I believed in a strong hand. I regretted that Russia was no longer a superpower and thought that my country deserved a bigger role in world politics. I suppose you could say I wanted to make Russia great again.

Arsenyev put down his beer and said (in Russian, of course): “This man, Putin, will bring this country to hell. I know this for sure. It is the worst thing that could ever happen to us.”

“Why?” I asked.

“He is a Chekist,” he said, meaning an agent of the secret police. “Once a Chekist, always a Chekist. He is pure evil.”

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I didn’t argue; I just changed the topic. The secret service meant Lavrentiy Beria and Nikolai Yezhov for Arsenyev, and James Bond for me. I respected Arsenyev immensely, but I saw him as a relic. And I was bewitched by Putin’s cold, metallic charisma, that way he had of suggesting that he knew more than he said. I was definitely not alone in my admiration: Putin won the election—one of the very few fair elections we’ve ever had in Russia—with 53.4 percent of the vote.

Despite my patriotism, like many Russians of my generation I was