Vladimir Putin wants to lead Russians into a civilizational conflict with the West far larger than Ukraine. Will they follow him?

Aug. 6, 2023

Through towering pine forests and untouched meadows, the road to Lake Baikal in southern Siberia winds past cemeteries where bright plastic flowers mark the graves of Russians killed in Ukraine. Far from the Potemkin paradise of Moscow, the war is ever visible.

On the eastern shore of the lake, where white-winged gulls plunge into the steel-blue water, Yulia Rolikova, 35, runs an inn that doubles as a children’s summer camp. She is some 3,500 miles from the front, yet the war reverberates in her family and in her head.

“My ex-husband wanted to go fight — he claimed it was his duty,” she said. “I said, ‘No, you have an 8-year-old daughter, and it’s a much more important duty to be a father to her.’”

He finally understood and stayed, she told me, with a look that said: Mine is just another ordinary Russian life. That is to say the life of a single mother in a country with one of the highest divorce rates in the world, a nation plunged into an intractable war, fighting a neighboring state that President Vladimir V. Putin deemed a fiction, where tens of millions of Russians, like herself, have ties of family, culture and history.

I spent a month in Russia, a country almost as large as the United States and Canada combined, searching for clues that might explain its nationalist lurch into an unprovoked war and its mood more than 17 months into a conflict conceived as a lightning strike, only to become a lingering nightmare. The war, which has transformed the world as radically as 9/11 did, has now taken 200,000 lives since Feb. 24, 2022, roughly split between the two sides, American diplomats in Moscow estimate.

But I also heard ambivalent voices like Ms. Rolikova’s, along with a few raised in outright dissent, especially from young people in a country with a stark generational divide.

It was this restiveness, this impatience with the seeming incoherence of the war and with the insouciance of the privileged in Moscow and St. Petersburg, that formed the backdrop to the short-lived revolt led by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner group, in late June. It was not for nothing that he named his uprising the “march for justice.”

“That Prigozhin rebelled was symptomatic of many social problems, but the way he advanced toward Moscow unhindered also demonstrated nervousness about whether all army units would fight,” said Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “Putin clearly did not want to give an order to fire he was unsure would be implemented.”

Making a martyr of Mr. Prigozhin was too risky in the short term for other reasons, too. Wagner’s role in avoiding recourse to an unpopular draft, by recruiting many thousands of criminals to bear the brunt of much heavy fighting in Ukraine, has been crucial. If Mr. Putin, 70, did not blink, he certainly flinched.

Yet, after 23 years leading Russia, Mr. Putin’s hold on power is still firm as fighting intensifies in southern and eastern Ukraine. He learned long ago, indeed from the outset of his rule in 2000, that, as the author Masha Gessen has put it, “wars were almost as good as crackdowns because they discredited anyone who wanted to complicate things.”

He has always used war — in Chechnya, in Georgia and in Ukraine — to unite Russians in the simplistic myths of nationalism and to usher them to the simplistic conclusion that his increasingly repressive rule is so essential that it must be eternal.

Still, as far as possible, the war must be invisible, banished to places like Ulan-Ude, near Lake Baikal, not far from the Mongolian border. That is done, in part, by paying recruits about $2,500 a month, a huge sum in a region where a monthly salary of $500 is more typical.

“Money is the main reason people go to fight,” Ms. Rolikova said. “The contracts being offered volunteers are crazy by our standards.”

But all of the money that Mr. Putin showers on remotest Russia only brings the war into sharper relief. It is etched in the fearful faces of young recruits lining up at the airport for flights to Moscow, and from there overland to Rostov-on-Don and into Ukraine. It is in the freshly turned soil of cemeteries where young men are laid to rest. It is in the air, a pall of dread.

The life partner of Ms. Rolikova’s best friend was killed in Ukraine in February, leaving the friend with two young children. Her half brother has fled to Georgia. Her grandfather was from the Donetsk region of Ukraine, a family tie that compounds her anguish.

Ms. Rolikova gazed out at the vast shimmering lake that contains more than 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. The wind was suddenly up; the gulls beat their wings hard against it to hold still. She said she tried to derive wisdom from nature, finding in it a refuge from the turmoil of war.

For her daughter Valeriya’s sake, at least, Ms. Rolikova hopes the war will be over within two years. “We are told one truth, they are told another truth,” she said. “But why do we need to kill each other like in World War I?”

Moscow’s New Czar

In Moscow, a world away from Ulan-Ude, Western sanctions appear to have had little effect beyond stores like Dior that have signs saying, “Closed for technical reasons,” and the comical renaming of departed Western businesses, like “Stars,” for Starbucks.

The subway is spotless; restaurants offering a popular Japanese-Russian fusion cuisine overflow; people make contactless payments for most things using their phones; there is a ridiculous concentration of luxury cars; the internet functions impeccably, as it does in all of Russia.

The war is nowhere to be seen, other than in the billboards from the Ministry of Defense and, until recently, Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group (now of uncertain future) that try to lure recruits with slogans like, “Heroes are not born, they become heroes.”

These may be found next to a multitude of new high-rise developments with English names like “Trendy Towers” or “High Life.” For all of Mr. Putin’s efforts to vilify the West, it still lives in the Russian imagination as a chimera of cool.

I first visited Moscow four decades ago, when it was a city devoid of primary colors eking out existence in the penury of Communism. Gazing at Moscow today, it is possible to discern why Mr. Putin earned so much respect from his countrymen. He opened Russia, only to slam it shut to the West; he also modernized it, while leaving the thread to Russia’s past unbroken.

When I asked him how Russia proposed to pay for a prolonged war effort, he shot back: “We pay for it all from our sales of oil to Europe via India.”

This was bravado, but it had some truth to it. Russia has rapidly adjusted to the loss of European markets with oil sales to Asia — and India has sold some of it on to Europe in refined form.

“Our values are different,” Mr. Tolstoy said. “For Russians, freedom and economic factors are secondary to the integrity of our state and the safeguarding of the Russian world.”

Mr. Putin’s rule is all about the reconstitution of this imagined Russian world, or “Russkiy mir,” a revanchist myth built around the idea of an eternal Russian cultural and imperial sphere of which Ukraine — its decision to become an independent state never forgiven — is an integral part.

As for the future, Mr. Putin has very little to say, leaving people guessing.

Rarely in Moscow or elsewhere in Russia is Mr. Putin’s image visible, other than on television, even if he has ventured out a little more of late. He governs from the shadows, unlike Stalin, whose portrait was everywhere. There is no cult of the leader of the kind Fascist systems favored. Yet mystery has its own magnetism. The reach of Mr. Putin’s power touches all.

It is evident in the bodyguards bursting into upscale Moscow restaurants to make room for some capo or oligarch of a system where great wealth comes only at the price of unwavering loyalty to the president.

Above all, it is in the fear that causes people to lower voices and hesitate before uttering that treacherous word of Mr. Putin’s double-think — “war.”

The Kremlinology of the Cold War has been replaced by the equally arduous pursuit of trying to penetrate the utter opacity of the Kremlin to read the mind of a new czar, Mr. Putin, now in the autumn of his rule.

Repression has become fierce and the war Mr. Putin started in Ukraine has been waged with near total unconcern for the consequences of his decision, a human trait that John le Carré once described as “a primary qualification for psychopathy.”

An increasingly disarming phenomenon in Russia is that it looks familiar to an American or a European, yet it is not. It is “operating on a different software,” as Pierre Lévy, the French ambassador, put it to me. The definition of state secrets keeps shifting.

I was advised to accept no document, unless it was a menu, and even then, to use a QR code to order food whenever possible.

Putin’s True Believers

Five time zones away from Moscow, a dilapidated Soviet-era coal-burning power station belches smoke over the corrugated-iron roofs of modest wooden homes in Ulan-Ude. A bust of Lenin’s head, the world’s largest at 42 tons, still towers over the central square of this city of more than 400,000 people.

Now, this quiet capital of Russia’s Buryatia Republic, a center of aircraft and helicopter production that was closed to foreigners during the Cold War, finds itself enmeshed in another war against the West, whose roots lie in the breakup of Lenin’s Soviet Union.

Aleksandr Vasilyev, 59, an economist, was about to return to the distant front for a second tour, having signed one of those $2,500 contracts with the Ministry of Defense.

Last December, a Ukrainian shell killed his closest friend, Viktor Prilukov, near Soledar, in eastern Ukraine. Days later, Mr. Vasilyev was blown into the air by a grenade. “I am not a very good bird,” he said. He returned to Siberia with a shattered shoulder, now largely healed.

“I fight out of duty to the motherland,” he said. “Our grandfathers went all the way to Berlin in 1945 to ensure we not have an enemy country next door. We won’t allow America to install that.”

As Mr. Vasilyev spoke, a clock with the faces of Mr. Putin and his servile sometime stand-in, Dmitri A. Medvedev, stared down at him from the wall of his kitchen.

“My mother gave me the clock 10 years ago because she thought I criticized them too much!” he said. “You know, our usual Russian grumbling, taxes and corruption. We criticize — the czars, Stalin and his gulag, Yeltsin — and we accept.”

Others’ embrace of the war is still more ardent. Nikolai Vorodnikov, 44, invited me to his garage where he repairs and