Talk at Elliott School - Can Russia Change? A Case for Historical Mindfulness

Below is the text I prepared for my talk delivered at the Elliott School of International Affairs on 18 November 2025, at the invitation of the George Washington University Russia Program. I decided to publish it because the debate over whether Russia is capable of change – and what such change might look like – is today one of the most important conversations in global politics. I take the view that Russia is not doomed to eternal oppression, violence and aggression. But I also know that any transformation requires time, experience and a catalyst. This is why it is worth returning to history to see where and how such catalysts have appeared before – because it is precisely there that we find both clues and warnings for the future, something I refer to as historical mindfulness.

I am a historian, and as a historian I would like to begin with a few broad observations about how change has taken place in Russia and where new ideas have been forged over the last two hundred years. I promise not to go into excessive detail – this will not be a flight from the vantage point of the Ural Mountains, but rather a pass from orbit. All this is simply to explore what the past may tell us about the present. I do not hold that history repeats itself, nor do I ascribe any prophetic qualities to it; instead, I have in mind what I call historical mindfulness – an awareness that the past contains the early seeds of many possible futures.

The first point: if we look at these 200 years of Russian history – and this year marks the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist uprising – we can see a certain pattern. Any change that has taken place in Russia, or that someone tried to bring about, was almost always the result of being captivated by, or fascinated with, ideas coming from outside Russia. This is not a new thesis, but it is worth underlining.

Very often it was Russians themselves who wanted to bring about this change back home – those who lived in emigration or had encountered the West. We can go even further back in history: the partitions of Poland and the incorporation of large parts of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth into the Russian Empire meant that Polish traditions – including liberal ones – also seeped into Russia. It was, after all, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski who tried to persuade Alexander I to carry out liberal reforms, which ultimately never materialised.

The same goes for the Decembrists – fascinated by Napoleonic and European ideas, they carried them back from Western battlefields and salons.

Almost one hundred years later, the ideas that led to the 1917 revolutions were being shaped in the cafés of Switzerland, Germany, Britain and France, but also on the territories of former Poland. Lenin met with Stalin in Kraków as well – which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Even after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, many of the concepts for a “new Russia” were born in Western exile – in the circles of artists, intellectuals and dissidents who, literally the next day after the Soviet Union disintegrated, began to take part in the debate about its future. Solzhenitsyn’s text How to Rebuild Russia was published virtually immediately after the fall of the USSR. The milieus gathered around Radio Svoboda, Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, dissident communities – the list is long. Even if Russian émigrés in 1945 could not imagine ever returning to Russia, forty-six years later some of their ideas came back.

It is also worth remembering that even the ideas Vladimir Putin draws on today – as I wrote recently for Nationalities Papers – were to a large extent forged in the West, in émigré, intellectual and media circles.

Today we do not know how long the current system will last. But what we are discussing here, in the West, may in a few decades have a very real impact on Russia’s future. If I were to draw a lesson from the last 250 years of Russian history, I would say that there is a certain pattern of reimagining Russia outside Russia. That’s the positive note. On the negative side, not all of those ideas were good ideas – which is also worth remembering.

That is why the debate about ideas for a new Russia – even if it is sometimes treated with a grain of salt today – is, in my view, important and should not be dismissed.

The second point: how Russia has changed in recent years. This war is exceptional. In my view, it is the first war in Russian history in which the state does not seek to persuade society primarily through repression, fear or grand ideological slogans (though those also exist), but above all through the promise of huge amounts of money.

For ordinary Russians, this is a war on which one can earn more than ever before. An unprecedented war rent has emerged – a kind of wealth that Russia has not seen on this scale for centuries. But this rent is coming to an end. The authorities are already preparing tax increases in 2026, including a higher VAT rate, in order to plug the budgetary gap.

At the same time, the war has shown that capitalism in Russia is thriving. It has sunk deep roots, together with individualism, consumerism and the attitude of “I look after myself.” Moscow, as the only region whose real incomes are consistently rising, is the key pillar stabilising the system.

This individualism is exploited by the authorities – the state pays for the willingness to risk one’s life. But it is also a source of anxiety for the elites, especially with regard to Generation Z. Hence the huge investments in indoctrination: textbooks, a new school curriculum, classes in “patriotic education.” The authorities behave as if they feared that within this new generation, raised in a capitalist society, some idea might emerge that would pose a threat to them. What idea exactly? None of us has a crystal ball – myself included – but from the state’s perspective it could be any idea capable of undermining the Putin system; hence such large-scale investments in state propaganda.

Within the elite there is an emerging way of thinking about life after Putin. A symbolic signal was the speech by one of the leaders of United Russia, published alongside a speech by Dmitry Medvedev, in which he stated quite openly that “life after Putin exists” and that the party must prepare for it. This was Andrei Isayev’s speech at the United Russia Congress delivered on 19th September 2024.

The authorities continue to act as if they believed that a full-scale mobilisation and a complete transition to a wartime regime – which I understand as limiting freedom of movement and, above all, consumption and prosperity in Russia’s largest cities – would endanger the system’s stability. I do not know whether this is a conscious lesson drawn from the past, but the behaviour of today’s authorities evokes strong associations with the state of Petrograd in 1915. Already after barely half a year of war, people in Petrograd were standing in breadlines. Paradoxically, grain existed in Russia at that time, but the railway system was mismanaged and unable to fill the gaps. Today, Putin has done his best to avoid such a situation from occurring. On the other hand, we can still see certain analogies in the Ukrainian strikes on refineries and the resulting fuel queues.

And now: what are the prospects for change that could allow new ideas to germinate? I hold that the key is a Ukrainian victory – understood not as a purely territorial question, but as the failure of Putin’s strategic goal of politically subjugating Ukraine. If he does not achieve this and a feeling of failure dominates the mood in the Kremlin and in society, a fundamental problem will arise: how to explain the massive financial and human losses? This will have to trigger some form of change – a change that, of course, is precisely what interests us here.

Secondly, ideas of change are being developed both in exile and within Russia itself. The Russian elite is closely watching China – its model may become an inspiration for a future Russian leader who may emerge from within the current elite.

Thirdly, the West must remember the lesson of 1991: at that time, Russia was integrated into the international system almost unconditionally. The consequences of this are visible today, not least in the context of the Budapest Memorandum - the document that offered paper assurances of Ukraine’s security in exchange for surrendering its nuclear arsenal. In my view, if today a process of democratisation in Russia were to begin – let us assume, for example, that 1991 repeats itself – the entire West would be far more cautious and conditional in its acceptance of Russia. In other words, it is Russia and Russians who would have to demonstrate their credibility. The declarations “we are Europeans” are hardly sufficient, although I assume that for a handful of people they will be enough.

Fourthly – practice. If democracy in Russia is to exist, it must also have a technical dimension: concrete, and admittedly rather boring, reforms written down on paper, dealing with issues as crucial as the structure of the state, politics of memory, attitudes towards Russians who took part in the war against Ukraine, the sphere of education and national minorities. All that is being forged today – here and in exile – may, just as after 1945, play its part in shaping a new Russia in 10, 20, 30 or 40 years’ time.