Are Russians Imperialists?

When Demokratizatsiya first began to publish in 1991, Russian society seemed firmly committed to democracy and strongly oriented toward the West. Russian attitudes about the market were more mixed, especially after the painful, partial, and long transition from the command economy to capitalism in the 1990s that caused most Russians to endure an economic depression far worse than that through which Americans and Europeans had suffered during the 1930s. The introduction of democracy in Russia at a time of economic turmoil undermined support for this new form of government. Yet even at the end of the 1990s, public surveys, including those conducted by Professor Timothy Colton and me, still revealed strong support for democratic ideas.¹ Attitudes toward the West fluctuated with external events—falling during NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999, for instance, and dropping even more sharply after Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008—but also dramatically improving during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras and again during the Reset years of the Obama-Medvedev era.²

Today, Russians' allegiance to democracy seems like ancient history. Russian voters have supported an autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin, for nearly two decades.³ Societal support for Putin has often increased when the Kremlin leader has taken bellicose actions against the West. Putin's popularity skyrocketed in 2014 when he invaded Crimea and annexed the peninsula from Ukraine.⁴ Russian support for Putin jumped again in February 2022, when he invaded Ukraine for the second time in a decade.⁵ Since then, Putin's anti-Western, pro-imperial rhetoric has become even more vitriolic, compelling many to speculate about Russian society's commitment to these same ideas. Putin blamed the West for supporting the "Nazi" regime in Ukraine and justified his invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territory as an effort to reunify the single Slavic nation and reclaim land that was once part of the Russian Empire. At a meeting with young entrepreneurs, engineers, and scholars in Moscow in June 2022, he even compared himself to Peter the Great, pledging to take back all lands previously taken away from Russia.⁶ Propagandists on state-controlled television now deliver even more imperial, illiberal, anti-Western screeds.⁷

What happened? How did Russian society apparently shift so dramatically regarding support for democracy and the West over the past three decades? Did we not properly understand Russians' preferences thirty years ago? Was that moment just a temporary aberration and what we see today is the "true" Russian orientation: anti-democratic, anti-Western, pro-imperial? After all, imperial autocrats have ruled Russians for hundreds of years. Or were Russians once genuinely supportive of pro-democratic, pro-liberal, pro-Western ideas and might therefore embrace them once again?

I do not know. For decades, whether writing in academic journals or penning opinion essays or providing advice to U.S. government officials, I have stressed the distinction between Putin and the Russian people. Russia's barbaric invasion of Ukraine, however, has compelled me to reinterrogate that hypothesis. Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine. Russian society did not pressure him to do so. But since the invasion was launched, large chunks of Russian society have supported this war, including exhibiting support for or indifference to the atrocities being committed by Russian soldiers against Ukrainian civilians. Putin personally is not killing Ukrainian grandmothers or kidnapping Ukrainian children, Russians are—and, as we now know from intercepting phone calls, they sometimes do so with the vocal support of their fathers, mothers, and girlfriends back home (or, even more grotesquely, while vacationing in Europe).⁸ Similar to other ruthless and imperialist regimes in the past, maybe we can no longer give Russian society a pass for the atrocities Russians are committing in Ukraine? It's not just Putin's war. It's Russia's war.

Without question, there is a fragment of Russian society deeply committed to Putin's dictatorship at home and firmly supportive of his imperial missions abroad. This segment of Russian society is probably comprised of the same people who lamented the collapse of the Soviet empire. Throughout the 1990s, these people most likely voted...