In a work of exhaustive and scrupulous scholarship, Graeme Gill has established that in its first two decades of existence (1992–2012), post—Soviet Russia failed to develop a coherent narrative explaining the nature of the “new” Russia, its purposes, and above all its relationship to the Soviet past. Employing thick discourse analysis and a reading of public symbols, Gill examines four domains in his search for the ways in which Russians have chosen to represent postcommunist Russia: the presidential addresses of Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Dmitri Medvedev; the political system more broadly, especially parliament and political parties; the public sphere, that is, what counts for Russian “civil society”; and the urban development of Moscow.

In perhaps his most striking passages, Gill presents and compares Russians’ interpretation of the fraught legacy of Joseph Stalin: Few justify his Terror, more try to bound it in time and magnitude, while many struggle with the seemingly inextricable mixture of grandeur and horror. One A. V. Filippov, author of a widely used history guide for high school teachers, has embraced a structuralist interpretation long advanced by Theodore H. von Laue (1993), Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?. Beginning his guide in 1945 (thereby avoiding dealing with the mass political terror of the 1930s), Filippov argues that it was the logic of a Western-dominated international system that, historically, has compelled Russia to herculean efforts in defense of its security and even existence. Stalinism should thus not be personalized but rather placed in a much broader global political context.

Putin himself has sought to finesse the Stalin question. He refused to rename Volgograd “Stalingrad” but restored the latter rubric to the war memorial in the Alexander Garden in the Kremlin. In a manner typical of so many efforts that Gill analyzes, Putin has selected carefully from Soviet history to stress the positive aspects of Stalin’s rule, even while acknowledging the dictator’s massive violence against Soviet society: the Stalin who industrialized Russia, who won the war, and who made the Soviet Union a global power. Stalin’s crimes, Putin says, are real but less than those committed by the Americans in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Vietnam. At the same time, passages from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973) have been made compulsory reading in all of Russia’s high schools.

For Gill, such a pastiche or “symbolic syncretism,” one that refuses to address its history systematically, suffers from fundamental incoherence and cannot serve as the basis for anchoring the legitimacy of Russia’s post-Soviet system. Drawing from long-established approaches in political sociology (Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action, 1971), as well as the semiotic inquiries of Russian scholars (Yuri Lotman, The Semiotics of Russian Culture, 1984), Gill demonstrates convincingly that recent Russian efforts to appropriate the Soviet past are intellectually incoherent, politically selective, and dubious as history. But is this really the legitimacy problem for the Putin machine that Gill would have us believe?

In trying to explain why Russia has yet to come to terms with its Soviet past in earnest, Gill touches on an answer that also implies that the problem is likely much less severe than he avers. Russians cannot address the mass Terror in the Stalinist past because most Russians were implicated in it—either as perpetrators, collaborators, denunciators, passive observers or families of these, and as victims or families of victims. (Putin’s own family, unusually, seems to have belonged to none of these categories.) To bring the Terror front and center, to name names, all the names, risks splitting Russian society asunder. It also risks the reputation of the secret police, a central part of the “deep” Russian state that survived Soviet collapse and that forms the core of the regime of ex-KGB officer Putin (himself head of the post-KGB in 1997–98). Only Russia’s Westernized liberals, largely discredited inside Russia after the economically and socially disastrous 1990s, continue to call for a full accounting of Stalin’s crimes and all of their perpetrators, while a plurality of Russians continues to view Stalin’s historical role in a positive light (p. 166).

Most Russians appear content with this conspiracy of silence. And it seems to undermine the legitimacy of Putin’s political machine not at all, as Gill’s own evidence shows. In a 2010 poll conducted by the independent Levada organization, 47% of Russians agreed that the country did not function democratically, but only 8% saw this as a pressing problem (p. 130), while 84% viewed Putin’s personalistic political system positively. In findings that closely match those of electoral scholars Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Neil Munro (Popular Support for an Undemocratic Regime, 2011), significant majorities of Russians consistently say that they like democracy, but if forced to choose between democracy and “order,” order wins out by a ratio of 3:1 (typically 60% to 20%). At the same time, Russians have little trust in formal political institutions (the government—as distinct from Putin; parliament, and parties), as compared to the Russian Orthodox Church, the army, and state-controlled television, which regularly command large majorities of support from the Russian public. As of mid 2015, Putin’s popularity rating stands at an all-time high of 89%.

Putin’s historical pastiche, at the least, has not worked against his charismatic authority. Why not? Comparisons with Spain and the United States after their civil wars come to mind. Until very recently, in what amounted to a tacit agreement between Left and Right, Spaniards did not raise the question of mass terror from 1936 to 1939. The issue arose not at all during the delicate transition from Francoism in the 1970s and 1980s. Virtually all of Spain had taken sides in a traumatic fratricide. The legal fiction that the Civil War never happened allowed Spaniards to focus on their political transit out of the miasma of mid-twentieth-century mass violence.

With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, and continuing until at least the 1960s, the white North and South came to agree on a fairy tale of their own Civil War, one that emphasized the nobility of motives on both sides, in the process abandoning the cause of economic, social, and political emancipation of the recently enslaved. Never fully coherent, such a vision (e.g., Gone with the Wind, novel and film) nevertheless bound regional (but not racial) wounds and helped white Americans to remain relatively united on grounds of nationalism as the country made its great leap forward to industrial and global superpower status.

To an extent not grasped outside of Russia, Putin sees part of his political vocation as helping Russians to overcome the trauma inflicted by what amounted to a Great Russian civil war in the twentieth century, lasting from 1918 through 1953. In 2007, he brought together in impressive ritual the patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad for the first time since the Russian Revolution. Symbols from imperial and Soviet Russia and even the ill-fated Provisional Government of 1917 have been co-opted by Putin’s state, to evidently powerful political effect. In this way, Putin has been consolidating a postcommunist Russian “state-nation” whose popularity is as strong as it is mystifying to liberal observers in the Western world. Only Russia’s own liberals are left out of the equation, with little apparent impact on the grip of Putin’s system.

Since the publication of this book, the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia have only reinforced Putin’s legitimacy. In the interval, his government has attempted to introduce greater “coherence” to its national narrative, one that locates Russia’s troubles in maleficent designs by a Western world that is, paradoxically, both deeply decadent and deeply threatening to Russian culture and Russian power. One wonders whether greater coherence in national narrative will necessarily be more effective in sustaining the regime, especially if the price is a degree of isolation from the Western world that Putin himself has admitted was a chief cause of the Soviet failure.