Free Republic

Vladimir Putin clearly hoped that his invasion of Ukraine would solidify the sense of “’us versus them’ between Russia and the West that he has used to “perpetuate the legitimacy” of his regime by producing “a spirit of patriotism and unity in the face of foreign threats,” Gulnaz Sharafutdinova says. But the opposition to the war among Russians is now sufficiently widespread and strong that there is a very real risk that they will no longer accept the conflict in Ukraine as “Russia’s war” but instead see it as “Putin’s war,” with potentially devastating consequences to the Kremlin. The professor...

For almost three decades, Putin has been saying and many in Russia and the West have followed him in this that the Soviet Union came apart because the Bolsheviks set up union republics and gave them the right to leave, a right Moscow never expected them to claim but added in the hopes of eventually expanding the USSR to include other peoples as well. There is no doubt that that Leninist approach contributed to the way in which the USSR fell apart, but it does not explain fully why it did. That explanation lies in two other spheres, demography and...