Things in Russia are not as bad as they were in the old Soviet days. They are worse’.

It has become commonplace to perceive Vladimir Putin as a return to Soviet ways.

So it seemed natural to me that shortly after The Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia, when I met a woman I had known in Moscow in Soviet times, she was sorry that things were getting More like those bad days.

“No,” he told me, “they are worse.”

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Tajik President Emomali Rahmon take part in a wreath-laying ceremony with occasion of Victory Day, which marks the 78th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, next to the Kremlin wall, in Moscow EFE/EPA/ALEXEY MAISHEV / SPUTNIK / KREMLIN pool

She had been a rebel and had left Moscow as soon as she could, so I was surprised by her response.

But I’ve also heard it from other Russians, both inside and outside the country.

And the more I look back on my days as a reporter in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, and the longer the terrible carnage in Ukraine lasts, the more I understand what they mean.

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In light of what your country is inflicting on Ukraine, it’s hard to talk about the Russians as victims.

That, in fact, may be one of the main reasons why many decent Russians feel that Putin’s Russia—their Russia—is worse than the Soviet state whose demise they lament.

They thought their nation was rid of the horrible tyranny of its past, and Putin is not only reliving that, but also bringing shame and alienation to their nation.

The Soviet Union to which these Russians hark back is that of their later years, not the hell of Josef Stalin.

In its day, the 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviet Union was still a repressive police state that maintained a zealous, iron-fisted control over information, art, business, and almost every other human endeavour.

It was a level of repression far more intrusive than Putin and his security apparatus could ever replicate, given the reach of the Internet and the continued ability of Russians to travel abroad.

No old Soviet dissident would deny that the physical quality of life in Russia is far superior to that of those Spartan times.

Yet the years after Stalin, and especially the last decades of the Soviet regime, oppressive as they were, at least seemed to be moving towards something better.

The random terror of the Stalin era had given way to a more coordinated system of control: still brutally repressive, but more predictable and less arbitrary.

Stalin’s highly personalized dictatorship was replaced by a more collegiate system of government.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on a display during a military parade on Victory Day. Photo Alexander Avilov / Moscow NewsAgency)

Charles Kupchan, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that a Soviet leader probably would not have survived a disastrous decision like the invasion of Ukraine.

And as the old Soviet guard died off in the 1980s, the need for change was clearly felt, and it finally came with Mikhail Gorbachev.

For those who were there, it’s impossible to forget the thrill of watching people explore long-forbidden ideas, arts, freedoms, and pleasures.

“We make a distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies, but there is also a distinction between ‘openings’ and ‘closings,'” Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist and one of the leading chroniclers of the collapse of the Soviet empire, told me.

“The generation of Soviets of the 1970s and 1980s lived in a closed society that was opening up, discovering that things that had been impossible were becoming possible.

Putin’s is a period of radical closures.

People are losing things they thought were finally given to them.

The openings led to hope; this system leads to hopelessness”.

Putin may not have the same leverage as his Soviet predecessors.

The commercialized and globally connected society that has evolved in Russia in the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union cannot go back into the bottle.

Nor does Putin have the utopian ideology that allowed Soviet leaders to claim they were working for the betterment of humanity, although he has invented a kind of national narrative based on Russian and Soviet history and mythology and his dislike of the West.

Instead, what he has done is create a system in which everything – the government, the political police, the legislature, the army – is personally dependent on him.

If the most common charge used to imprison dissidents in the last decades of Soviet rule was “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation,” an omnibus law that at least made it clear that the crime was opposing the Soviet regime, then

Putin lashes out at his opponents with random weapons, whether it’s the apparent poisoning of Alexei Navalny by his government or the sentencing of Vladimir Kara-Murza to 25 years in prison for treason.

Accusing Gershkovich of espionage may have been motivated, at least in part, by anger that someone of Russian origin would dare to report the truth about Russia.

The repression has intensified since the invasion of Ukraine, making it difficult to gauge the level of resistance.

Ten days after the invasion, police detained more than 4,600 protesters in Russia, and hundreds of thousands of Russian men have fled the country to avoid being drafted into the army.

But those who resist and those who leave are not met with the respect that was met with for Soviet dissidents.

Back then, non-Russian ethnic groups might have identified the Soviet yoke with Russia, but communist ideology was universalist, and Russians who opposed it saw themselves as allies of other oppressed nationalities, and of the West, in their struggle.

Russians arriving in New York, Tel Aviv, or Berlin felt free of the taint of collusion; and since in the ranks of the dissidents there were many writers, poets, musicians and artists, Russian culture shared the glow of liberation.

Putin’s government and its invasion of Ukraine have changed all that.

This is a war waged by Russia against Ukraine in the name of Russian imperial vindication, and it is difficult for any Russian person or thing – language, culture, background – to fully escape the stigma.

It is especially galling for conscientious Russians to hear Putin use the anti-fascist language of World War II – the one feat of Soviet history of which all his people are proud – in the effort to destroy the Ukraine.

The impact is widely evident.

Russian restaurants, including those that have reconfigured their menus, are struggling to stay open.

Stolichnaya vodka has been renamed Stoli.

A limited-edition bottle is labeled in the blue and yellow colors of Ukraine, stamped #LIBERATEUKRAINE.

The New York Metropolitan Opera dispensed with its Russian diva, Anna Netrebko, for not giving up on Putin.

I have heard scholars express regret at the Russian focus in post-Soviet studies.

The list goes on, and it’s hard to argue against cancellations.

“The Russians can say that this is not my regime, but they cannot say that this is not my nation,” Krastev said.

It is too early to predict how the Ukrainian war will end.

What is clear is that Putin, in the name of ephemeral Russian greatness, has done great and lasting damage to his people and their culture.

c.2023 The New York Times Company

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